Rust Cohle: We are creatures that should not exist by natural law.
“Premodern political thought—particularly that informed by an Aristotelian understanding of natural science—understood the human creature as part of a comprehensive natural order. Humans were understood to have a telos, a fixed end, given by nature and unalterable. Human nature was continuous with the order of the natural world, and thus humanity was required to conform both to its own nature and, in a broader sense, to the natural order of which it was a part. Human beings could freely act against their own nature and the natural order, but such actions deformed them and harmed the good of human beings and the world. Aristotle’s Ethics and Aquinas’s Summa Theologiae are alike efforts to delineate the limits that nature—natural law—places upon human beings. Each seeks to educate man about how best to live within those limits through the practice of virtues, to achieve a condition of human flourishing.” — Patrick Deneen, Why Liberalism Failed (2018)
"When he attempts to define the political being of humanity, Aristotle has recourse to the natural world and the human relationship to it. Early on in the Politics, he provides the most well-known definition of the role of politics in human existence. Aristotle writes, “Man is by nature a political animal.” The problem with Aristotle’s formulation is that the political being of subjects, as he understands it, is the direct result of their position within the natural world rather than their alienation from it. Even though Aristotle sees our political being as exceptional in relation to other animals (and thus as a source of human privilege), he fails to see the fundamental role that alienation plays in constituting the political being of the subject. In this way, Aristotle naturalizes the speaking subject’s political being. This interpretation has the ideological effect of dulling the contradictions that emerge within the social order and within subjectivity itself, contradictions that Plato’s human exceptionalism preserves. Aristotle’s vision of politics is not one of antagonistic struggle but of coming together for the sake of general wellbeing. He identifies no antagonism between master and slave or between man and woman. This permits the oppression of the latter figures to function unimpeded in his political philosophy. There is a direct throughline from Aristotle’s belief in the natural status of humanity to his philosophical decision to keep slaves and women in their secondary place. The insistence on continuity with the natural world rather than the subject’s thoroughgoing break from it gives Aristotle cover to naturalize and justify relations of inequality within politics. Just as there is inequality in the natural world, there is inequality in the human world. Rather than uprooting itself from any natural being, juridical law, for Aristotle, functions like natural law. It defines relations that already exist. […] The human rights that modern society espouses count only for those who belong to this society. Those on the outside don’t count. They are nothing but a symbolic identity that has no status within the social order. [...] For Kierkegaard, the name Christendom signifies the form that Christianity takes when it becomes a community, a development that he denounces at every turn. He opposes the subject that has faith to the person who adopts a Christian identity within the community and thereby tries to escape the questions of existence." — Embracing Alienation: Why We Shouldn't Try To Find Ourselves (2024)
"Psychoanalysis does not merely describe the structure of one culture or socioeconomic formation (such as patriarchy or capitalism); it instead insists on a fundamental validity across cultural and socioeconomic boundaries. It also insists on this validity across different historical epochs. It is, in short, a universal theory concerning the relationship between the individual subject and society. ... The challenge for the psychoanalytic theorist is discovering the universality in Freud’s discoveries, but it is this universality that presents an obstacle for any political project. If the antagonism between the subject and the social order is irreducible, then the stumbling block is not just capitalism or patriarchy but human society itself." — Enjoying What We Don't Have: The Political Project of Psychoanalysis (2013)
"Whenever a crisis occurs in the world, we witness the universality that always exists become visible through the struggle of people to help. People rush to send supplies, donate blood, or even go in person to the crisis area to provide aid. The crisis is never just a crisis for particulars but a universal crisis, except for those who reject universality and believe that only particulars exist. These right-wing particularists hunker down and try to protect themselves from the crisis. But for everyone else, crisis represents a moment when solidarity reveals itself as a universal value, not as a bond restricted to only those who share our identity. Universal solidarity doesn’t leave anyone out because it takes those who don’t belong as its starting point." — Universality and Identity Politics (2020)
— Todd McGowan
“But, whereas pre-modern rationalism had sought a ground for morality in an order of things that was independent of humankind – in Aristotle’s metaphysical biology and cosmology, in Plato’s conception of the timeless and changeless Forms, in Aquinas’s theistic restatement of the Aristotelian conception of natural law – the project of the Enlightenment was the bolder, and more hubristic one of founding a reconstructed morality on autonomous human reasoning alone. […] What empirical inquiry – anthropological, historical, sociological – discloses is an irreducible diversity of cultural forms, in which both the contents of morality, and the conception of morality itself, vary widely. And, contrary to the claims of Enlightenment thinkers to this day, there is no form of reasoning whereby this manifest diversity of moral cultures can be corralled within the ring-fence of a single universal civilization.” — Enlightenment’s Wake: Politics and culture at the close of the modern age (1995)
“Aristotle and Aquinas held to a teleological view of the world that modern science has rendered obsolete. Each viewed the cosmos as a system in which everything has a purpose. Since Darwin, this view of the natural world has ceased to be available. Nature is ruled by chance and necessity, and natural laws are regularities rather than prescriptions for the good life. If there is a realm of value beyond the physical world it cannot be reached by human reason.” — Black Mass (2007)
“According to Aristotle, the best sort of human being was one like himself – male, slave-owning and Greek – who was devoted to intellectual inquiry. Apart from justifying the local prejudices of his time – a practice nearly universal among philosophers – this view has a more radical defect. It assumes that the best life for humans is the same, at least in principle, for everybody. True, most cannot achieve it, but this only shows their inferiority to those that can. The possibility that human beings might flourish in many different ways, which cannot be ranked in any scale of value, did not occur to Aristotle.” — Feline Philosophy: Cats and the Meaning of Life (2020)
— John N. Gray
“Drawing heavily on the thought of Aristotle, Aquinas develops a robust metaphysical system grounded in the distinction between essence and existence. He argues that all beings possess an essence, which defines their nature or whatness, and an existence, which determines their actuality or existence. ... In addition to his contributions to metaphysics, Aquinas develops a comprehensive ethical theory grounded in the concept of natural law. Aquinas argues that human beings possess an innate sense of right and wrong, derived from their rational nature and inherent moral capacities. This natural law, he contends, is accessible to human reason and provides a basis for discerning moral truths and guiding human conduct. Aquinas’ ethical theory emphasizes the importance of virtues, or moral habits, in cultivating a life of moral excellence and flourishing. He identifies four cardinal virtues—prudence, justice, fortitude, and temperance—that serve as the foundation for a virtuous life. Aquinas also acknowledges the importance of theological virtues—faith, hope, and charity—in orienting human beings towards their ultimate end, which is union with God.” — cliffsnotes | Thomas Aquinas Bridging Faith and Reason in Scholastic Philosophy (2024)
“Tarot cards offend ‘common sense’, that is, the image of the world we hold in common, which is usually the image taught to us by society. We can call this image ‘scientific’, though only in the strict historical sense of that word as meaning the view propagated by officially recognized scientists (excluding, for instance, astrologers and yogis) since the seventeenth century. Ironically, the natural sciences themselves, particularly physics, are moving away from a strict mechanistic universe. However, culture lag ensures that most people still think of science in nineteenth-century terms. […] Modern Western science began as a consciously ideological movement, deliberately opposing the religious world-view of its time. Its early practitioners and theoreticians, such as Francis Bacon, saw themselves as revolutionaries, proposing a whole new relation to nature, one that would do more than increase knowledge. Science, they preached, would create a new world. […] How then do we characterize this ‘common’ (shared, ordinary) sense? Primarily it insists that only one kind of relationship can exist between events, objects, or patterns. This is the relationship of direct physical cause. If I push something it falls over. That makes sense. Does it make sense if I think about something and it falls over? Or if I push a toy model of it and it falls over? The common-sense person says no, if events turn out that way it is coincidence, a word meaning that two or more things have a relationship in time; they have coincided, but have no other relationship. Causality remains restricted to observable physical action. But science, even in its most mechanistic period during the last two centuries, had to extend this concept to dubious limits in order to explain the observable world. The earth and the other planets move around the sun. This is a demonstrable fact. We can calculate the mathematical relationships of these moving bodies to such a degree that we can discover new bodies by an irregular movement in those already known (Neptune and Pluto were discovered this way). But the facts do not explain how this happens. No giant hands push or pull the earth around the sun. Yet the regularity of the movement prevents us calling it coincidence. Therefore, scientists invented such concepts as ‘natural laws’ and ‘force fields’. The same person who will say that it ‘makes no sense’ for someone to knock over a chair by thinking about it will find it perfectly sensible that ‘gravity’ makes the earth go round the sun (in the twentieth century Einstein’s ‘general relativity’ produce a more complex explanation for the movements of large bodies such as planets, but most people still will invoke the ‘natural law’ of gravity). What then of the earlier view – that of ‘correspondence’, where the relationship between objects and events is that of similarity? […] The fact is, the correspondence worldview can tend to mechanistic attitudes as much as the natural law view does. Both beg the question of God, or first causes. Just as neither explains how the mechanism came into being, the natural laws or the patterns of the zodiac, so neither really requires us to worry about it. God may have set it all in motion, but now it works by itself. Though a good astrologer uses intuition to interpret a horoscope, the chart itself can be constructed by anyone with a little training. The Tarot, however, is dynamic rather than determinist. No fixed rule governs how a person will shuffle the cards. And they can always be shuffled again.” — Rachel Pollack, Seventy-Eight Degrees of Wisdom (1980/2019)
I seem to be a non-monotheist particularist. I'm more convinced by John Gray than Todd McGowan on the topic of universalism. On the other hand I appreciate their shared not being Marxist without falling into the position of the religious right. Human rights are an especially fraught realm of contention.
