Understanding law: Its relation to time, violence, and the United States Constitution

This dissertation is an attempt to set forth the ontological foundations of making sense in European culture. Making sense appears to require having a single constitutive condition define the actuality of the world. The constitutive conditions of the two dominant senses, the Aristotelian and the Newtonian, are respectively, place and law. In the law of gravity, Newton provides one relatively simple rule which applied equally and independently to every particle of matter in the universe and which, by itself, explained the motions of the planets and the comets, the fall of objects to the earth, and the tides. Calling this a law is a neologistic usage which changes the concept of law from the rule of a superior, as commanded or actively ordered, to an unagented or natural condition. This articulation promotes law to the constitutive condition which underlies the possibility that both an ordered world and an ordered society arise from atomized corpuscles of matter and atomized individuals and provides a foundation for the Lockean individual self and a Lockean polity, such as the United States, which conceives of itself as formed from atomized individuals. Newton accomplishes this by making sense of time, in significant part through calculus, which effects the transformation between flow and moment. With this achievement time is no longer the sphere of irrationality but becomes the default ordering of experience. Newton's making sense, by an explanation in which law is the actuality of the world, makes it appear that law has an objective existence and allows the Framers of the United States Constitution to believe that such a law provided a foundation for the Constitution. The belief in an objectively existing law is as sound as the belief that the earth is the center of the universe and that the heavens revolve around it, which is to say it is a ridiculous belief and that, in a certain sense, you can live your life by it, or could have, for a time.