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Firstly I'd like to ask you to clarify the suggestion that you've made in brackets
I assume you mean this one?
(especially granted that what is human is often considered to be at odds with what is natural)
If that's the case. . . Groups like Amnesty International claim that everyone is entitled to their "human" rights. Now, I do not know a great deal about Amnesty, so please don't take this as being about them per se. The problem is that there does not seem to be an identified source for those human rights. It's clearly not the government that the group is often fighting (e.g. in cases of genocide or ethnic cleansing). So the rights are largely assumed, it seems, to be naturally ordained (whether this is divine or otherwise is moot; for Spinoza Nature and God were pretty much the same thing). However, according to a great deal of the thought that leads up to the Enlightenment, if not the Enlightenment itself, the human and the natural are largely opposed to one another. I am largely stealing this argument from Bruno Latour's excellent book We Have Never Been Modern. According to Latour, modernity is heavily involved in producing hybrids of nature (the natural) and culture (the province of humans). His example is the air pump that Robert Boyle used for certain experiments at the time of the scientific revolution. A more contemporary example is the hole in the ozone layer. It is caused by culture (humans), but is in part a "natural" phenomenon. (I realize that this is really reductive, but I am just presenting the argument for now). So this is a hybrid. The flip side of this is the movement against these hybrids, which Latour calls "purification," an attempt to render these hybrids as belonging to either one sphere or the other, to nature or to culture. Thus people will argue that human needs trump natural needs, and therefore if we cause th hole in the ozone layer so what? Conversely, we might argue that the hole is purely natural, so why should we worry about it. It's not our fault. In either case, the human is understood to be separate from nature. Of course this is entirely wrong, IMHO, but it is one of the prevailing arguments of modern thought. Also see Cartesianism, which understands the mind (which is associated with culture) to be opposite the body (which is associated with nature) in terms of importance for defining what is a human subject. I hope that helps. This is a rather long argument, and I have had to shorthand it quite a bit so I can get back to the point of the thread.
Thus, if human and natural are often understood to be in opposition (even if they are not actually, as I would contend), how can anyone claim that human rights are natural rights, or even imply it?
that, i guess, is why spinoza called his book 'ethics'... i take an ethic to be a reasoned creed on 'how' to live, where a 'moral' is a prescriptive on 'why' to live that way... i must re-read 'ethics' again... anyone doing it now in their studies?
I think that is exactly right. The "how" is really tricky. It seems that every political question ultimately begs the question, "how do we proceed?" or "how are we to do this?" or "how are to we to know right from wrong?" Morality attempts to tell us, but is often too rigid in its instantiations. It seems to me, astrojax69, that you're pretty much right on in interpreting Spinoza. One of the interesting things that he does with his ethics is that he describes it in terms of materiality, specifically the materiality of bodies. Thus the question of one's natural right to fly, or to eat arsenic, or to walk with one's ears, is entirely appropriate. We can't do any of those things because they would be unethical. Material ethics is unimpeachable. No one can question the rights that such an ethics describes. Unfortunately, these ethics and these natural rights do not readily lend themselves to an understanding of human rights (a concept that I take to be far more metaphysical). (I wrote a lot more about Spinoza in relation to Deleuze and Guattari here.)
Am I dealing with Spinoza in the right way here? I'm worried I'm taking the theory out of context.
I think that you are. Spinoza is all about expanding our capacities, expanding out natural rights. This sounds quite a bit like fascism, as in "might makes right," but in fact Spinoza was a fierce believer in democracy (even if he was more than a bit of a misogynist). The question you're raising is an important one. While no one can force us into a right we do not possess (no one can make me fly), society can take away our rights. It is a democratic society if those rights are negotiated between the multitude and the state. It is totalitarian if the state dictates the terms absolutely. Spinoza was in favor of the first, more or less. Someone like Thomas Hobbes was more in favor of the second. (Hobbes hated the multitude, which is a heterogeneous mass of people. He preferred "the people", which is more like the folks living in a fascist state, all marching in lockstep.)
The question of human and natural rights, I think, comes down to (or is heavily involved in) this democratic negotiation. When the negotiation succeeds, I think, then natural rights are preserved whole, modified, or done away with according to the multitude and the kind of society it wants to have. (This discussion overlaps with the Watched vs. Unwatched thread.) This preservation, modification, elimination thus transforms natural rights into human rights (or, we might say, juridical rights). It is important to understand humanity and nature being much more closely related than some aspects of modernity would have us believe, however.
Sorry, I'm beginning to ramble a bit because this thread has really helped my thinking on this subject quite a bit. I shall need to do some more thinking and clarify my arguments. Thanks all. I'll be back. |
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