Modern Age - Winter 2018 - 81

Natural Law and Human Motives

In the movements of his body or of his soul, how can we discern
the part played by habit, by reflexes, by automatic responses, by
just going along, "doing nothing"?
Command indicates immediately that one has broken with
passivity, with the inertia of immanent life, that the present is
not enough, that one cannot merely continue or prolong, that
a future must be opened up, and that an action begins. Aristotle
emphasizes that only he who commands needs all the virtues of
the acting person. (This is so at least of the person who means to
command well, but then one who does not know how to command does not truly command.) He needs especially the virtue
that orders and crowns practical life, the virtue of prudence, which
is the virtue proper to him who commands, whereas he who obeys
can be satisfied with what Aristotle calls right opinion, which tells
him whom and how he should obey. In the good regime of the
Greek city, that is, in the well-constituted democracy, every citizen
commands and obeys in turn: either he commands, or he obeys-
tertium non datur.
Among those who know what it means to command and to
obey, no one would dream of claiming that he obeys himself or
that he commands himself, a fetishistic formula and a paralogism
dear to the adepts of "autonomy." These reflexive and reversible
propositions have no meaning in practical life, since they presuppose that it is possible to erase the qualitative difference between
the commanding agent and the commanded agent, between
the disposition of one who commands and the disposition of one
who is commanded-in brief they presuppose that the same
agent can contain simultaneously the two opposing dispositions
of practical life. In the real city, which is inhabited and animated
by actors and not reflective thinkers, the citizen can be said to
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Modern Age - Winter 2018

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