The Perspective of Love. R. J. Snell
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“our” language to convey “our” beliefs about how “we” live, and perhaps even “our” thoughts about how “they” live.
The reason for this unconcern is that common sense rests on how things of the world relate to us, and while persons of common sense very often think that how things relate and appear to them is self-evidently the way things are in themselves, common sense has no methodology by which to demonstrate this, nor would it be interested. In epistemological terms, as I discussed in the Introduction, common sense confines itself to description in relation to us, not an explanation of data in relation to other data. So the water is hot, the man is tall, the car moves fast relative to us, as opposed to the relationship of data to data in degrees, mass, or velocity. The perspective of data relative to us is not unintelligent, of course, but it is a limiting of concern, a particular stance towards the world under a certain description and use, and the world appears under the guise of concern and interest. The person of common sense approaches the world from a certain domain of interests, and whatever does not fit that domain of love and cares does not, in a certain sense, exist at all for them. It is meaningless and thus ignored or censored out: “It clings to the immediate and practical, the concrete and particular. It remains within the familiar world of things for us. Rockets and space platforms are superfluous if you intend to remain on this earth.”58
Nor is this bigotry or provincialism. Most of us spend most of our time in the world of common sense, existing in a world of bodies “out there” as sources of pleasure, pain, use, comfort. When we drive our car or fix a meal, play a game or teach our children how to ride a bike, use a fork, or treat the neighbors justly, we are most often in the world of common sense. Common sense is not unintelligent, but a mode of intelligence by which we organize the concrete world in such a way that is predictable, manageable, and coherent: “the man of common sense wants a nucleus such that with the minimum of further insights he will be able to deal with any concrete situations that arise in his living.”59 As such, common sense tends to arise within multiple individuals and communities: “Far more than the sciences, common sense is divided into specialized departments. For every difference of geography, for every difference of occupation, for every difference of social arrangements, there is an appropriate variation of common sense.”60 The way “we” do it may work very well for the conditions of life we tend to find “here,” which is why “they” seem like bumblers when “they” use the accumulated insights of their community “here” and also why we feel such vertigo when we are “there.”
Common Sense as Law
Since common sense is intelligent, its accumulated insights are very often coherent and reasonable, but that which is coherent and reasonable has a claim to be true, even binding—“this is the way that we organize and do things here, and it is the way you ought to do it as well.” Still, the way that common sense obliges or demands is peculiar to the mode of common sense; in the following sections I explain three variations of how common sense expresses natural law.
Natural Law as Inclination
Insofar as common sense confronts the world relative to our own perspectives, projects, interests, and concerns, it carries a latent possibility of reductionism whereby the being of the world is what it is insofar as it serves or frustrates my projects and concerns. The world, after all, is not given to us except through the mediation of our own awareness, an awareness which we govern through our own mode of concern:
Both the sensations and the bodily movements are subject to an organizing control . . . there is, immanent in experience, a factor variously named conation, interest, attention, purpose. We speak of consciousness as a stream, but the stream involves not only the temporal succession of different contents, but also direction, striving, effort. Moreover, this direction of the stream is variable.61
We do not inhabit the world as passive receptors, but rather as active organizers and censors, with our conation or attention the principle by which the world is organized. Of course, we can attend the world in a variety of ways.62 Conation, or patterns of care, function as organizing principles which, in a sense, command consciousness and make the world. If “nature,” in its plurality, is the whatness of the objects of our intention, and our intention can be governed by the interests of common sense—as biological, or aesthetic, or dramatic—then nature can be viewed as whatever our inclinations intend.
Plato gives us several characters who serve as symbols of this understanding of nature. Consider Thrasymachus from the Republic, for whom it is by nature right and just to seek the advantage of the stronger but unnatural to curtail and curb such advantage.63 Similar views are expressed by Polus and Callicles in Gorgias, with Callicles particularly apt as an example. He enters by asking if Socrates is joking, then rebukes him for claiming to pursue truth but actually dragging “us into these tiresome popular fallacies, looking to what is fine and noble, not by nature, but by convention.”64
Nature herself makes it plain that it is right for the better to have the advantage over the worse, the more able over the less. . . . But if a man arises endowed with a nature sufficiently strong, he will, I believe, shake off all these controls, burst his fetters and break loose. And trampling upon our scraps of paper, our spells and incantations, and all our unnatural conventions, he rises up and reveals himself our master who was once our slave, and there shines forth nature’s true justice.65
As Eric Voegelin interprets this scene, the dispute is over what form of love is to master and obligate our lives, either the Good (Socrates) or nature understood as “the stronger or weaker physis” (Callicles).66 In the end, what occurs is an existential re-ordering by Socrates, for whom pleasure is not identical to the good, and for whom eros is the proper governing love, and thus for whom the “ordered universe,” or nature, is a different world entirely.67 Multiple natures, corresponding to the objectives of distinct loves, are at stake, but it is the existential ordering of loves—the therapy of desire—determining which nature prevails.
In a more contemporary context, the ambiguity of “nature” is observed in the moral and legal disputes about sexuality. On the one hand, homosexual acts are described by some as unnatural acts; on the other, the prevalence of same-sex sexual activity in animals is used to articulate the naturalness of homosexuality, as is the experience of same-sex attraction within humans. Some animals, and some persons, have sexual inclinations or desires for members of the same sex, and it is thus natural for them, while others find such desires alien and thus unnatural.
The unifying thread between Callicles and contemporary sexual politics is the role of inclination and desire in interpreting and defining nature. When we say of a person’s behavior, “It’s only natural,” are we appealing to the statistically common inclination, or the inclination of this particular person whether statistically usual or unusual? In either event, nature is defined in reference to patterns of inclination, perhaps biological, but also aesthetic or dramatic. It’s quite easy to find judgments on the naturalness or unnaturalness of a desire, a food, a behavior, even of religion, art, and architecture which seem to express the common sense understandings of how “we” or “they” organize and control our judgments.
Natural Law as Proverb
Common sense interprets data relative to us, and it was that aspect I stressed in natural law as inclination, but already by the conclusion of that section emerged the intersubjective or communal aspect of common sense. We don’t have inclinations as individuals solely since inclinations are formed, educated, and interpreted