When probing into the chances and limitations of appeals to nature as a normative principle in ethics and political theory, we should also look at what the history of philosophy can tell us. The ancient philosophical school of the Stoics affirmed, more than any other comparable movement, the concept of nature as a guiding principle in practical philosophy. Stoic practical philosophy shows us in an exemplary way how appeals to nature work and also, perhaps more importantly, how ambivalent and indeterminate such appeals are. Stoic appeals to nature took as their vantage point a rhetoric in which nature was divinized and thus dignified. Taking nature as a normative guideline meant for the Stoics to search for what we might call a ‘moral’ natural law. Knowing the natural law and thus following nature was perceived of as a radical transformation of one’s outlook, but the consequences of that transformation in terms of ethical and political standpoints remained contested and resulted in ambivalent ethical and political stances. While some Stoics emphasized the potential of appeals to nature for demoting the social and institutional contexts of political action, others laboured hard to re-insert sufficient acknowledgement of social and institutional ties. However, even where a principle of Stoic natural law, like the cosmopolitan fellowship of mankind, was generally recognized, the precise implications of this principle remained contested and the Stoics may even have acknowledged themselves that divergent implications could be drawn from the shared principle.
