The Perspective of Love. R. J. Snell

The Perspective of Love - R. J. Snell


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our souls or minds. The “in” language corresponds to the body-language of “out there,” since objectivity for common sense is usually thought of as getting what is “out there” somehow in the “in here” of mind.74 The law, then, is objective because it exists independent of our perceptions and wishes, but fortunately we already know the law, it’s just part of our mental structure and framework; we just have it “in here” even though its objectivity is modeled after the “already out there now real.”

      I’ll save the question of the innateness of natural law for later, although clearly I doubt innateness as pictured by common sense. But this pattern of “in” and “out” pervades common sense 3, with natural law thought to reside in things, but by this they mean nature as the physical world. Natural law is modeled after the properties innate in physical reality, and natural law is the ordo naturae.

      Law in Nature, Enchanted or Disenchanted

      Concluding Thoughts

      I opened this chapter referring to J. Budziszewski’s explanation that all versions of natural law, whatever their differences, hold that law is somehow “embedded into the structure of creation, especially human nature. . . .” No doubt this is true, but much depends on the little word “into.” The history of natural law, including current proponents, includes common sense readings of “into,” and, in fact, includes several different types of common sense readings: (1) natural law as found in inclinations, (2) natural law as found in the intuitive meanings of intersubjective community, and (3) natural law as in nature. Each expression operates within the common sense mode of meaning which (1) begins with and is largely limited to non-theoretical, albeit still intelligent, descriptions of very powerful experiences, (2) codified and shared within community and its educational forms, often through proverbs and authority articulating successful ways of living and acting, and (3) viewing the real in a common sense grasp of the bodies, or the “already out there now real,” known through a kind of objectivity which grasps ordering principles of the real. For each type of common sense natural law, “nature” corresponds to a certain pattern of interest or care, emerging as the heuristic in keeping with that same pattern of care. Nature, for common sense, is the ordering pattern of that which is most real to us, as experienced by us, whether in our passions, or our community, or our religion, and even in our attempts to articulate the grounds of being. Law, for such meaning, is the order found in nature, an order which we do not create or constitute but rather find always already operative, not of our own devising; law is the order of nature, the ordo naturae.

      Already, though, certain tensions and patterns emerge prompting the transition to a new differentiation of


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