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C HAP T E R 8 Concerning Singular Given Natures “There exists a true law, it is that of right reason, which conforms to nature, is prevalent in all humans, and is subject neither to change nor to perishing. This law calls us to fulfill that which is fitting, and by its interdictions it turns us from offense. . . . To this law no amendment is permitted, it is not lawful to abrogate this law either totally or partially. Neither the senate nor the people can dispense us from obeying it, and there is no need at all to search for a Sextus Aelius to explain or interpret it. This law is not one thing in Athens, another in Rome, one thing today, and another tomorrow. It is always one and the same law, eternal and immutable, which rules all peoples and in all times . . . Whosoever does not obey this law flies from himself, having mistook human nature.” —Republic, III, 22, 23 Do not these lines read as a paraphrase of Antigone justifying herself before Creon? She had invoked the “unwritten and unshakable laws of the gods.” It is all there—immutability , eternity, and the intelligibility of the true law; also a quasi-religious fear, seeing that it would be contrary to the fas to abolish or reinstate the application of the law; and again the limit of the law traced through its interdictions; and there is its obviousness as well: the law in question is none other than the recta ratio itself. Among the similarities one finds there is the impossibility of a conflict with human decrees, for neither the Senate nor the people, no more than Creon, can strike a blow against this law. These lines of Cicero seem to show admirably well the unity of ancient—Greek and Latin—philosophy as well as the univocity of nature making the law. And yet. To turn away from the unwritten law here is to misunderstand human nature—law and nature as being equally universal. Cicero adds a feature to the description of Antigone that Sophocles omitted: the congruence between the true law and our nature, by which it is now necessary to understand the rational constitution of man. How does this rational constitution legislate? The Latin ratio means something other than the Greek phren. To stick to the words for a moment, the latter dealt with “sense” or with the “heart”; the former, however, dealt above all with an “account” that one demands and one gives. Right reason is that which gives a fair account. In myself, right reason takes account of the other forces or instincts; and with respect to what it tells me to do, it takes account of the totality of the civitas communis hominum et deorum.21 The principle of continuity between well-ordered man and the human genus is the reckoning of right reason. The tendency toward ends is right, and it is right that I should watch over the finality in the economy of my own forces as well as of those in the city and the species. Such is the 206 PART TWO: THE LATIN HEGEMONIC FANTASM nature inscribed in us: a principle of exact reckoning, of dosage, of telic adjustment; a principle of maximized amplitude which is beyond all phenomenal regions. Hence, a norma (‘levelingʼ). Now, this is the new conceptual strategy that reorients the totality of argumentation —this principle obliges us to take account of the singular “I” as was never done in Greece. Roman pragmatism reckons with the natural individual to the same extent as it counts on universal nature. We portray our own proper manner of being. A Greek would never have been able to entitle a book Pathways toward Myself (Eis heauton, Marcus Aurelius). How does right reason conjoin the singular and the universal? It conjoins them “as is proper”—proper to what?—to my nature, which, no sooner had the Roman Stoics denied it than, driven away, it always returned at a gallop. Is this simply a bit of good sense? In any case, it can only annul this law of laws according to which nothing could be more natural than the reason in me, homologated by successive cross-checkings with all that is reasonable and rational outside of me. The ultimate normative leveling twists itself to conform to me. Let us consider this matter more closely. On the nature that returns The singular and the deadly torsion it introduces into the system of nature can...

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