NATURE AND CONVENTION LAW CUSTOM AND CIVILIZATION

Monday, April 10, 2017

NATURE AND CONVENTION LAW CUSTOM AND CIVILIZATION

For the early Greeks, law and custom, both nomoi, were not sharply or clearly distinguished.

 

If they were identified with the gods' laws, they were in effect laws by nature, physis, to which human law and custom, written and unwritten, conformed.

 

With the distinction and opposition between the concepts of nature and convention, in the Enlightenment Age, the distinction between written and unwritten laws took on different senses, which I have referred to elsewhere here.

 

Human laws and orders, as in the case of Antigone, could be viewed as opposed to ancient custom, unwritten, the gods', law. 

 

Unwritten law could be viewed as better, as well as more just, rather than unjust, than written law or orders of the king. Divine law came to be seen as capable of contradicting laws and orders made by man.

 

The point I want to make here is that there were elements of distinctive customs within a cultural tradition in the establishment of written laws for a place, including the concept of a constitution.

 

In spite of what most Western intellectuals have been brought up to think, within their own generalizing, Western culture, post Enlightenment, tradition, written laws, and associated rights and responsibilities, travel much less well across civilizational lines than they would like.