PART B
HISTORICAL DEVELOPMENT OF NATURAL LAW
PLATO
1. Write an essay in which you critically evaluate the
basic ideological underpinnings of Plato’s natural law
theory. (10)
- The understanding of Plato's views on natural law, justice and law in the state
demands a brief exposition of his ontology(nature of being).
- He advanced the concept of ideas existing independent of human thought.
- His own theory about ideas and the human soul at the point where Socrates
left off.
- Theory of “ideas” and the doctrine of the “soul” based on Pythagorean
teaching that there is an eternal reality transcending our senses and secondly
that the soul is a fallen god imprisoned in the body, divine, immortal, and pre-
existent, which can realise its divinity and return after death to its proper
place by contemplating eternal numerical truth.
- A world of eternal realities, ideas or forms, exist entirely separately from the
world our senses perceive, and this world is knowable only by pure intellect.
- Plato’s theory implies that there is an idea corresponding to every “universal”
or general idea (which includes both physical and ethical concepts) of which
we can think - an “idea of mud”, an “idea of bed”, an “idea of justice” and so
on.
- Plato’s doctrine of the soul is inseparably connected to the doctrine of ideas,
the universal unchanging objects of true knowledge.
- Plato identified the ideas with the natural order. He described this order of
intelligible entities as existing “by nature” or “in nature”.
- According to Plato, the soul is a complex and composite structure of three parts
: first, reason as the rightful ruler of the whole, second, higher emotions such
as love of fame or just anger and third, the lower carnal lusts and desires.
- Unifying force is Eros (“desire”) which is the motive force behind all human
thought and action.
- How is the knowledge obtained to be obtained?
- Both the ideas and the soul belong to a divine, transcendent world, utterly
remote and alien from the shadow world, the flow of appearances, which is
the world that we perceive with our senses.
- It is, therefore, impossible for Plato to believe that the soul acquires any sort of
knowledge of the ideas through bodily senses except through Philosopher
Kings.
- The idea of universal norms, valid per se, man can know the norms of natural
law with his reason and natural law serves as a measure to test positive law.
- Epistemology is thus a priori.
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, - Plato’s ideology was descriptive, negative and positive.
- Plato’s moral theory is eudemonistic, in the sense that it is directed towards
the attainment of the highest good, in the possession of which true happiness
resides.
- The highest good of man may be said to be the true development of man’s
personality as a rational and moral being.
- Plato on the function and nature of law : organised society (the city-state) is a
“natural” institution and the human is essentially a social animal.
- Imperative to determine the true nature and function of the state..
- Plato’s hostility to law - In The Republic (Plato’s vision of a Republic) Plato finds
no place in it for law.
- But the omission is, of course, perfectly logical. If the rulers are qualified by
their superior knowledge, it would be foolish to bind their hands with rules of
law.
- The Statesman and the Laws : Plato’s readmission of law - In the Republic, he
develops a sort of philosophy of history.
- Later in his works he favours constitutional government, that is, a government
in which law is supreme, even over the ruler. Plato’s progression from an ideal
state with the philosopher-king to another type of state, in which the
discretion of the rulers was limited by law.
- The role of the state in dispensing justice according to the natural law model of
Plato.
- The state of the Laws, is to be held together by the “golden cord of law” which
implies that its ethical principle of organisation is different from that in the
Republic.
- The law is now the surrogate for that reason that Plato had sought to make
supreme in the ideal state and that he still regarded as the supreme force in
nature.
- The chief virtue in the ideal state was accordingly justice, the division of labour
and the specialisation of functions that put every man in his proper place and
give him “his due” in the sense.
- For Plato, in short, “justice itself” and “natural justice” mean the same thing;
natural justice is the idea of justice, the paradigm to be followed by the
legislator and the statesman. Complexity of the relationships between natural
law, justice, the state, and the individual : a divine ordering of the cosmos
would tend to instil the sentiment of world citizenship as much as the
sentiment of membership in the political community.
- As Kaerst has pointed out, there breathes through all of Plato’s political theory
a yearning for a higher kind of community, for which the earthly city is only an
imperfect substitute.
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