Current Seminar:
• Voegelin’s Anamnesis
09/09/2006
Part II, chap. 4 – What Is Right by Nature?
Joanne Tetlow
Voegelin states the problematic in the first paragraph that the term “right by nature” taken from Plato and Aristotle has been
deformed into the idea of natural law. It is a deformation because the natural law is understood as “a body of norms with the claim of
eternal and immutable validity” but “separated as it is from the experience containing its meaning.” (55) This occurred when the Stoics
universalized “right by nature” into “natural law” and Voegelin sees that the underlying experiences which gave rise to “right by nature” were
lost in this transition. They have yet to be recovered.
After discussing Aristotle’s use the physei dikaion (right by nature) and its relation to his Politics and
Ethics as justice, or what is right for the polis, Voegelin observes that “right by nature” is not some fixed, eternal immutable
law standing alone, but it has a dialectic within it that means it is kineton, or also changeable according to concrete political
life. Right by nature is not positive law but essential law. There is a tension, a theme throughout Voegelin’s work, between the two poles of
existence: the immutable and mutable, the universal and particular. Right by nature is not a set of theoretical propositions as it is
generally understood, but a symbol of the tension of noetic existence. The fact that natural law is accepted as a theoretical, universal
set of laws, the same everywhere reveals how much the underlying experiences have been detached from its meaning. The concrete nature of
experience has been lost deforming the true meaning of “right by nature” in political science.
Aristotle’s practice virtue of phronesis, what the ruler in a polis needs, reveals that what matters is not correct
principles, “but the changeability, the kineton itself, and the methods to lift it to the reality of truth. The truth of existence
is attained where it becomes concrete, i.e., in action.” (63) Voegelin uses the term “ontology of ethics” to capture the existential nature
of this virtue of phronesis or practical wisdom. In fact, Voegelin calls it an existential virtue which Aristotle did not. The point is that
ontology precedes ethics. Knowledge of ethics is the result of a movement of being towards the divine pull. It is truth in concrete things.
Thus, the one who can judge rightly, knowing what is “right by nature” is the man who is spoudaios, “the openness of man for the
divine; the openness in its turn is not a proposition about something given but an event, and ethics is, therefore, not a body of
propositions but an event of being that provides the word for a statement about itself.” (65) What was lost in the natural law was the
concrete existential political life where the divine measure was and still is manifested.
Part II, chap. 5 - What Is Nature?
Voegelin’s main point is to distinguish between philosophy and metaphysics. Aristotle’s form-matter paradigm does not adequately
express the comprehensive philosophical conception of nature which needs a symbol of being not merely form-matter. Aristotle did not
experience the differentiation between the divine and human that came with the Christian revelation. There is a “coming-to-be” that is not
represented by the form-matter or body-soul distinction in Aristotle’s metaphysics. The symbols of “myth” and “philosophy” cannot be
separated. Stated differently, the “whole of existence” including the cosmos must be understood as a human participation in the divine
order of being. Parmenides insight that “thinking and being” cannot be separated captures the nature of the whole which cannot be restricted
by metaphysics. Noetic existence arises from “the knowledge that man’s being has not its ground in itself. The knowledge that being is
not grounded in itself implies the question of the origin, and in this question being is revealed as coming-to-be, albeit not as a
coming-to-be in the world of existing things but a coming-to-be from the ground of being.” (86) The myth of the demiurge helps explain
how the noetic experience transcends metaphysics leading us to the ground of being itself. Originating in pre-philosophical cosmology,
the arche, or origin of things, requires myth, not the anti-mythical metaphysics. In short, reality is a movement of being and flow
of existence which cannot be restricted by metaphysical categories of causation, form-matter, and so on.
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