The Perspective of Love. R. J. Snell

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The Perspective of Love - R. J. Snell


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others develop or stretch the tradition in new directions. This is to be expected, for challenges to a tradition cause crisis, irrational and wooden traditions either capitulating or refusing to engage while more supple and reasonable traditions ask new questions, pose new answers, transpose old answers, and articulate themselves in new and productive directions.46

      This is not the first time that natural law has developed in response to a crisis presented by some theoretical or social challenge, so we should not be surprised to find it developing previously. And in each of these moments of challenge, I suggest, the crisis has been occasioned by the meaning of “nature.” What is so natural about the natural law; what is nature?

      Intentional Differences

      In the Introduction I claimed that “nature” functioned as a heuristic, which is to say that its meaning comes from what we seek to know, the unknown x, or from what we intend. Since what humans seek to know differs quite radically across cultures, times, places, and tasks, there are consequently many “natures.” This is not an unknowable chaos, however, since paying attention to how our conscious operations work—noetic exegesis—allows us to explain the origin and development of the many “natures” by adverting to the disparate ways or exigences of how humans direct consciousness. Consequently, we can distinguish the multiple meanings of nature, including the historical development of those meanings and the various crises which have emerged in that history, by adverting to the different functions of consciousness.

      Denying any universal set of propositions and definitions may seem surprising for a proponent of natural law, but note as well his affirmation of a basic, universal, and innate tendency—the pure question—to which we pay attention as a clue.

      The pure question is innate and universal, but the exigences of the pure question are disparate, with the plurality of “natures” tied to the plurality of patterns in which questions can develop. We should not be surprised to find within the natural law tradition serious differences of articulation and meaning, then; nor should this pose any threat to the coherence of the tradition and its claims of universal legitimacy, for any theory which claims to be inextricably caught up in human reason is thereby inextricably historical. Further, as tied to reason, which has its grounding in the pure question and the dynamic desire to know, we can investigate differences within the tradition as understandable because of the patterns and exigencies of questions.

      Common Sense as Meaning


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