Blitz Rad Hist and NR

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A Symposium on Natural Right and Natural Law

Radical Historicism and theMeaning of Natural Right

Mark Blitz

TO UNDERSTAND FULLY the problem ofnatural right we must consider both itsclassical and modern varieties, and thearguments that challenge its existencealtogether. In modern times thesearguments develop in terms of thediscovery of historical changeability. Thisdiscovery is evident in Rousseau and K ant,

who still defend a form of natural right inpolitics; and a teaching about historyanimates Hegel and Marx. But we find inthe so-called radical historicists-thinkerssuch as Nietzsche and Heidegger-themost uncompromising of the historicalarguments that question natural right. Inwhat follows, I will delineate briefly theways in which historicism challengesnatural right. By doing this I hope todeepen our understanding of natural

right’s intelligibility and possibility-itsmeaning.

I

“NATURAL” RIGHT or natural justice is thejustice that iseverywhere and always. For“historicism,” however, no justice iseverywhere and always: legal codes, andopinions about right and wrong, vary withtime and place; no action is correct in

every circumstance; and no one can proveconclusively to a recalcitrant man or mobthat anything isalways just.

One replies: even if these facts are true,

they do not demonstrate that naturaljustice isimpossible, but only that it ishardto recognize.

In reply to this, an historicist may thenattempt to show that there can never benatural justice because justice must berelative to time and place. J ustice appearsto be “comprehensive” only because it

orders activities that history shows to bein fact incomplete; it appears to be “ab-solute” only by ignoring the true unfoldingo the dialectic of equality and inequality;it seems to be intelligible only by beingconcerned with necessarily transient mat-ters.’

The historicist’s foe then points out thatthese arguments presume after all to tellus what must be true about justice inevery circumstance. It may be con-

ceivable that the only permanent truthsabout justice are its necessary in-completeness, relativity, and transient in-telligibility. But it is always unclear in con-crete descriptions and analyses howjustice can indeed offer itself in preciselythis set of permanent limitations, but inthese alone. The result is perplexing: todisprove the possibility of a justice that iseverywhere and always one must sayquite a few things about justice’s unchang-

ing characteristics.The argument often remains in this

perplexity. But one asks: why should thequestion of everywhere and always be so

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vital? Why does the question that thediscovery of natural justice would

guide to political action-need to beanswered by discovering what iseverywhere and always? Why is “time” sosignificant?

One is tempted to say that if justice isnot everywhere and always then today’sjust action would be tomorrow’s crime.Such “justice” could hardly guide or forma community, or any man.

But what if justice remained unchangingover a “lifetime” or “unchanging” for apeople within a given “period”? What ifjustice were unchanging up to now, even

if we could not speak of “always”?If

oneof these possibilities is true, would we nothave satisfied the practical reasons whywe seek to show that justice is unchang-ing?

The connection between time and con-cepts such as justice, the manner in whichtime is or is thought to be linked tojustice’s power and intelligibility, s centralin the thought of radical historicists suchas Nietzsche and Heidegger. Their

thought cannot be dismissed because we“know” that justice must be eternal. Onthe contrary, it is only by confrontingthem that we can understand what itmeans to search for and be guided by ajustice that attracts men who live and diebut cannot itself live or die.

answer-the question of the authoritative

I INATURAL JUSTICE is the justice that iseverywhere and always. Not only does anhistoricist say that justice is not, cannot, orneed not be everywhere and always. He

What is justice, however it is temporally;and why should its being be its “nature”?In everyday talk the “natural” isthe spon-taneous as opposed to the artificial.Almost in contradiction, for everyday talkthe “natural” isalso the ordinary or usual

as opposed to the outlandish or peculiar. Ifwe think these ordinary meaningsthrough to their extremes, we discover

may also say: justice cannot be natural.

that the most fully spontaneous iswhat it

is apart from other factors or causes, andthe most ordinary is the most wholly orcomprehensively regular. “Natural”justice would be that element of justice inwhat we call just things that most com-prehensively covers all just things at thesame time that it can be most separate andapart from anything else.2

This analysis does not tell us what issubstantively natural in either sense ofnatural. Nor does it guarantee that what isuniversal among just things is also spon-taneous or independent, or even that“universal” is unambiguous. Locke’snatural ‘‘laws,’’ or example,donot clearlydistinguish men from other animals; nor is

their comprehensiveness the same as thatof, say, Platonic wholes. Indeed, the basicdifferences among political philosophersare their differences about these veryissues.

Now, an historicist may dispute theclaims of the natural in natural right by de-nying the full intelligibility of one or bothof its meanings; by denying the possibilityof substance for one or both of thesemeanings; or simply by pointing out that

no one has yet discovered substantivelywhat natural justice is. One might, for ex-ample, claim that nothing can be isolatedfrom the stream of events or the horizonof creation, and that even the belief in thepossibility of simple spontaneity or orderis therefore ultimately illusory, howeveruseful; that nothing in particular could benatural, even if the natural is not in princi-ple illusory; or simply that no one has yetshown us a truly natural thing. Thesearguments range in profundity fromshallow relativism to the reflections onmeaning and intelligibility of Nietzscheand Heidegger.

There isa further question here. Naturaljustice is the justice that is everywhereand always. But even if nature has mean-ing and substance, why is natural justicewhat justice is? Why is the most spon-taneous and orderly the most in being?

The connection is apparent between thecharacteristics of natural justice and thepossibility of a justice that is everywhereand always. But that these characteristics

244 Spr i ng/ Sur nr ner I984



confer or define being is less apparent,though hardly arbitrary. Does not thequestion of natural justice point back tothe question of being and what this ques-tion takes for granted?

The historicist may then suggest thatthis question of “being” is more radicallyposed by Nietzsche and, especially, byHeidegger, than by the proponents ofnatural right, and that this greaterradicalism signals the validity of their“historicist” conclusions.

This signal is hardly sufficient, however,because the radical possibilities of naturalright are always faced by natural rightthinkers themselves, especially the

classical ones. To read Plato (and Aristot-le) is to see that he examines issues o in-telligibility, simplicity, wholeness, and “be-ing” precisely by searching for what isnatural, and, most of all, by searching fornatural justice. In theRepublic, for exam-ple, both the illusions embodied in opin-ions about justice and what these opinionstake for granted are ultimately connectedto the discovery of what justice by natureis. Radical historicists are in fact not more

radical and therefore not more likely to becorrect. Indeed, if one puts the burden ofargument on the radical historicists, onewonders how they can be intelligible atallwithout assuming some version of the con-nection between nature and being thatthey deny. This isan obvious difficulty inNietzsche.

I l l

NATURAL JUSTICE is the justice that iseverywhere and always. The historicistchallenges not only the possibility ofnature and eternity, but also the possibilitythat something so broad as justice couldaccount intelligibly for all the human ac-tivities to which it is supposed to givemeaning. “J ustice” is the good that formsa community: it isthe principle or doctrineby which benefits and burdens aredistributed; it is the goal a communityseeks to reach. In a word, it is the chiefcharacteristic that shapes separate entitiesinto a political whole. But justice is also a

characteristic that may “alienate” a goodman from specific arrangements in eventhe best of political communities, forjustice is righteousness. Righteousness isfirst of all an attempt to deal more perfect-

ly with everyday matters than can themerely law-abiding man or even the pru-dent statesman. But righteousness is notonly this attempt. For it turns inward fromeveryday political concerns toward theperfection of the individual who is dealingwith them. Righteousness points to thepurity of the individual himself, to the“morality” of his intentions, to his possiblesalvation, indeed, to his intellectual ex-cellence.

How can justice at once designate thecommon good of a political community,the righteousness of a moral man, and thepurity of a soul displaced from the every-day to the transcendence of faith orthought? It would seem that the moral, theutilitarian, the practical, the holy, and thetrue are too disparate to be yoked under asingle concept, or made intelligible by asingle aspiration-to be just.

Indeed, it is possible to argue that they

can be brought together under a singleconcept only by reducing politics, thetheoretical life, and faith to a ground wellbelow the height implied by “justice.”

We see such reductionism among someof Nietzsche’s followers. And we see anapotheosis of distinctions among humanactivities or “traditions” or “worlds”among some of Heidegger’s. Radicalhistoricism challenges the possibility ofnatural justice of denying or severely

questioning the possibility of comprehen-sive guiding unities of the sort that justiceis intended to be. Where we do not findsimple reductionism, unity is located inmore remote and less substantive placesthan the territory justice is meant to oc-cupy-unity is located in, say, “will topower.”

But does this questioning successfullydebunk the possibility of justice? After all,Heidegger’s and Nietzsche’s discussions ofthe unity and separation among humanactivities and ways of life are hardlytransparent. They are not simply or ob-

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viously correct, though they may be cor-rect. The effect of the historicists' direct orindirect questioning o the possibility ofjustice is in fact not to eliminate the issueof natural justice. Rather, the effect oftheir challenge is to free from traditionaltorpor the very question of the meaning ofand connections among political goods, in-dividual perfection, and the status as ahuman effort of the attempt to know.

IV

HISTORICISMLLOWS us to see afresh the

question of the unity of human activity,just as it allows us to see afresh the issuesof time and the unchanging, and natureand being. Indeed, the historicist argu-ment allows us to see these issues as theyinspire the thinkers who most thoroughlyconsidered the question of natural right.We need not accept historicist teachings,and we must not accept the ultimatepolitical implications of historicist opinionsin order to acknowledge that thehistoricist challenge to natural rightenables us to grasp more clearly what is atstake in controversy about it.

'T hese replies do not clearly belong to an historicism itsef ahistorical? *See Mark Blitz, "ANoteon the Meaningof Nature and Natural J ustice,"ERA, 1977.

historicism that differs from the relativistic andnihilistic arguments that the ancients discuss. Is

"It is better to be narrow-minded than tohave no mind, to hold limited and rigidprinciples than none at all. . . . There arestill things which are worth fightingagainst."

- velyn Waugh

246 Spring/Sumrner 1984

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