Right and Self

Spinoza's assertion, in II, 23, of Political Treatise, that "nature offers nothing that cannot be called this man's rather than another's, . . . under nature everything belongs to all", seems plainly false in one type of case.  For, every part of Nature has a natural privileged relation to one part of Nature--itself.  So, that relation is sufficiently distinctive to ground a concept of Individual Natural Right, comprising both one qua agent, and one qua the object of its own actions.  Such a Right does not preclude coordination with some social distributive principle, one which respects the former, e. g. as one of its necessary conditions.  The superiority of grounding Individual Natural Right on Selfhood, rather than on Divine Right, as Spinoza proposes, is that it concretely manifests the essential structure of the concept of Right--irreducible inaccessibility from without, as the phrase 'one's own' connotes.