Pursuit of Truth: Nature & Reason
‘True law is right reason in agreement with nature,’ wrote Cicero in 51 BC.
This statement sounds so simple, almost self-evident, yet it tends to push back against such. Not merely a claim that nature guides us in how to live, but it suggests that law itself has no legitimacy unless it conforms to nature’s order.
For Cicero, nature is perfection, standing beyond any human invention. It is the bulwark against which manmade laws are tested, and often found wanting. He writes:
‘To this passion for discovering truth there is added a hungering, as it were, for independence, so that a mind well-moulded by Nature is unwilling to be subject to anybody save one who gives rules of conduct or is a teacher of truth or who, for the general good, rules according to justice and law. From this attitude come greatness of soul and a sense of superiority to worldly conditions.’
He further describes that Nature’s application is universal and unchanging, binding upon all peoples across all times. It carries its own warning signal to help us avert wrongdoing, aptly captured in the following words:
‘We cannot be freed from its obligations by senate or people, and we need not look outside ourselves for an expounder or interpreter of it. And there will not be different laws at Rome and at Athens, or different laws now and in the future, but one eternal and unchangeable law will be valid for all nations and all times, and there will be one master and ruler, that is, God, over us all, for he is the author of this law, its promulgator, and its enforcing judge.’
Cicero argues that the pursuit of truth belongs to mankind alone, but my purpose for this image is as a reminder of the wider world in which we live and how all of Nature’s lifeforms support us in our aid to appreciating the beauty we are surrounded with. An original photograph by my daughter, Jade Hoogland.
These words may be sourced from two thousand years ago, yet they are newly urgent. They remind each of us to continually speak up against overreaching governments that appear more interested in accumulating wealth and power for themselves while being indifferent to the needs of citizens. Across the western world, democracies increasingly bend toward soft tyranny, with leaders legislating beyond the proper bounds of democratic authority while emboldened to the point of claiming a mandate to do so.
Cicero insists that the pursuit of truth is peculiar to man alone. Only humanity possesses a feeling for order, propriety, and moderation in word and deed. This sense of beauty and harmony, he argues, moves from earthly experience toward something spiritual, where Nature and Reason together forge a moral goodness unique to mankind.