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Hobbes on relations and community

February 27, 2011 in Hobbes, Individual, Society | No comments

Adriaen Brouwer - Youth Making a Face

An acute interpretation of the Bible reduced the orthodox and classical premises of common life from brotherly love to permission: “But to love our neighbor as our selves, is nothing else, but to grant him all we desire to have granted our selves.”(1) The other is a mirror image of the self defined according to his personal wishes and cravings. The Christian sense of community is scoured, the wording suffers a dramatic alteration; according to the given rearrangement of elements, the fourth principle of nature is “that every man render himself usefull unto others…”(2) Help and assistance are exchanged by utility and commodity. The call for fellow men is an aftermath of egoism, -man requires from the looking glass provided by the other to recognize his excellence and glory.(3) Besides vainglory is acknoweldged, everything can be achieved by man alone without any collaboration, man is self-sufficient, autarchic.(4)

By departing from an egoistic individual Hobbes incurred in a move in the appreciation of the other: not as a brother with common ascendance and common savior, belonging to the same ‘holy nation’, but facing an unknown and opaque being; in order not to harm the other one has to put his own measure, “Quod tibi fieri non vis, alteri ne feceris.” Hobbes is inserted in a plane that already contained the elements that preformulated the categoric imperative.(5) The quintessence of formal justice apt to provide security in severe cases of disintegration of common values and ends. It also incorporated the elements for the mandate of handling people as ends in themselves, but to Hobbes a contrary stance is at hand, all are instruments to attain private ends.(6) Man was or could always be alone. According to King, Hobbes’s individual is characterized by his ‘psychological self-containment’, his self-centeredness, that gives its particular taste to the state of nature and, simultaneously, shows a necessary way out.(7)

(1) De Cive IV, 12.
(2) De Cive III, 9.
(3) “We doe not therefore by nature seek Society for its own sake, but that we may receive some Honour of Profit from it…”, De Cive I, 2. “…all free congress ariseth either from mutual poverty, or form vain glory…” Ibid.
(4) Ibid.
(5) “But that man is to be accounted just, who doth just things because the Law commands it, unjust things only by reason of his infirmity…” De Cive III, 5.
(6) “That which takes away the reputation of love, is the being detected of private ends: as when the belief they require of others, conduceth or seemeth to conduce to the acquiring of dominion, riches, dignity, or secure pleasure, to themselves only, or specially. For that which men reap benefit to themselves, they are thought to do for their own sakes, and not for love of others,” Leviathan I, 12, 27.
(7) “Hobbes’s analysis does not begin as a study of men leading an ordered life in society, nor does it begin as a study of men leading a disordered life outside society; it begins as a study of the individual…” P. King, op. cit., p. 187. On the ncessary entailment of anthropology and state cf. W. Bartuschat, “Anthropologie und Politik bei Thomas Hobbes”, O. Höffe (ed.), Thomas Hobbes: Anthropologie und Staatsphilosophie, Freiburg, 1981. On the ncessary entailment of anthropology and state he indicates: “Mit der Preisgabe der Hobbesschen Anthropologie fällt der Hobbessche Staat.. Damit fällt aber nicht die Einsicht des Hobbes in der Ort der Politik im Ganzen der philosophischen Erörterung menschlicher Existenz.” p. 38. On the concept of man and politics and their interwoven character, Höffe shows the consistence between the anthropological vision and the statal conception.

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Hobbes on the possibility of a common good

February 12, 2011 in Hobbes, Individual, Sovereignty | No comments

Theotokópoulos, Doménikos - Allegory with a Boy Lighting a Candle in the Company of an Ape and a Fool (Fábula) - c. 1600

Aquinas had maintained the superiority of common good, to him “bonum commune est maius et divinius quam bonum unius.”(1) On the other hand, the refurbishing ot the noetic space resulted in an individual that would follow bonum sibi; actions are all licit for there is no order, no given social arrangement. This mutual rivalry is an all against all struggle;(2) it is the end of industry, culture, and every work that defines man’s incorporation to society, undermining the ability to prosper. Society was not a stable, static, dimension of human life, but product of an empowered man rather than a natural state granted by God’s design.

Hobbes presented an epidermology, a science about the contact of concealed bodies with each other, in which the only viable access to the other required from a formulation of the self.(3) This approach established a split with the accepted Christian creed, “thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself” (Mark 12-30) that became, after a process of erosion, “that every man do help and endeavour to accommodate each other, as far as may be without danger of their persons, and loss of their means, to maintain and defend themselves.”(4) A dislocation of the concept of love takes place consistently, “…desire and love are the same thing; save that by desire, we always signify the absence of the object; by love, most commonly the presence of the same.”(5) Love is equaled to desire, to the restless struggle of appetite. Also the appreciation of the other suffered a striation operated by the concept of liberty, that shifted from an active attitude, ‘love’, to a passive solipsistic ‘accommodation’ with the caution required by self-preservation. The other is only recognized in the sense that his lack of recognition would disturb peace. It did not entail an absolute axiom, like in Christian thought, but rather a means, an instrument, to the proper state of welfare: peace.(6) “The passions that incline men to peace, are fear of death; desire of such things as are necessary to commodious living; and a hope by their industry to obtain them.”(7)

(1) Following Aristotle’s preference for the whole to the part, “the state is by nature clearly prior to the family and to the individual, since the whole is of necessity prior to the part,” Politics I, 2 (1252 a).
(2) Leviathan I, 13, 8-9. “…and the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.”
(3) “And though by men’s actions we do discover their design sometimes; yet to do it without comparing them with our own, and distinguishing all circumstances; by which the case may come to be altered, is to decipher without a key…”, Leviathan Introduction, 3.
(4) Elements of Law II, 16, 8 (italics mine).
(5) Leviathan I, 6, 3.
(6) “…so also is it of the second table of the divine law, Matth. 22, 39, 4o: Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself. On these two laws depend the whole law and the prophets; which is not so to be understood, as that a man should study so much his neighbour’s profit as his own, or that he should divide his goods amongst his neighbours; but that he should esteem his neighbour worthy all rights and privileges that he himself enjoyeth;” Elements of Law I 18, 6.
(7) Leviathan I, 13, 14.

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Hobbes on fear

February 11, 2011 in Hobbes, Individual, Society | No comments

Le Caravage - Judith et Holopherne

Fear became the motor of existence, carving, in the face of nature, the individual. A potentially dangerous external world as representation produced the withdrawal of the individual, a crease that finished up sedimenting previous strata based on trust and submission and on the communion of God’s people, united by their baptism and the birth to faith. Despite his admission of three basic passions arising from internal honor: love, hope, and fear,(1) Hobbes saw fear as the motivation to build up a society, clinging to power, rather than goodness or love, as foundations of Christian society, of an ethical community.

This apprehension included self-awareness and distance from a potentially frightening and dangerous environment and sharpened men’s sensitivity and his self-consciousness; his sense of alienation with everything he touched and saw, within a world populated with individuals like him, with unknown intentions. The absence of a universal canon of righteousness obfuscated the identification of inclinations. Concealment, retraction and convolution were the protection to the awareness of this state of affairs. Fear was the very product of an outlook on human nature that should be avoided, “for nothing but fear can justify the taking away of another’s life”.(2) War was the final result of an original equality combined with a desire sine lime,

…since men by natural passion are divers ways offensive one to another, every man thinking well of himself, and hating to see the same in others, they must needs provoke one another by words, and other signs of contempt and hatred, which are incident to all comparison: till at last they must determine the pre-eminence by strength and force of body.(3)

(1) “From internal honour, consisting in the opinion of power and goodness, arise three passions; love, which hath reference to goodness; and hope, and fear, that relate to power…”Leviathan, II, 31, 9.
(2) Elements of Law II, 19, 2.
(3) Elements of Law I, 14, 4.

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Hobbes on the state of nature

February 9, 2011 in Hobbes, Individual, Society | No comments

Callot- Hanging Tree from The Myseries of War series 1629-33

Callot- Hanging Tree from The Myseries of War series 1629-33

This amalgamation of men, disjoint union of bodies, -fruit of Hobbes’s mental experiment-, eliminated all circumstances present in a stratum supporting a socialized human nature. Man is divested of the habits involved in the presumption of society, procuring with an experiment that abstracted the basic traits of this novel enclave of man within the noetic space and reproduced, in the vein of Galileo’s free fall exercise, an eventual state of nature. This natural condition entailed a state of disgrace in which the desiring nature of man caused a continuous struggle, nothing was certain, life was always in danger. The state of nature conveys the greatest menace to human integrity, it remained as a modality of war, the worst of all strives, -founded on the ius in omnia, the imperishable craving-, the ius belli omnes ad omnia. In this natural state nothing could be just, “force and fraud are the two cardinal virtues.”(1)

Individual actions were always prevented from success by insecurity. The state of nature did not provide with any sort of social organization beyond the random interactions between individual bodies, -tumult was its name. This fictive setting excluded the ideas already present at the time in Suarez and Grotius, supposing sociabilitas and stating the primitive character of democracy. This reformulation was only coherent within the extension of the institutions of the philosophia prima and the consequent subvertion, deposition, of values and discourses.

In the state of nature reigned the principle of scarcity plus the invincible desire of every man.(2) Competition arose as the first cause of quarrel among men together with diffidence and glory. In the interaction with people we strive for our own satisfaction, determined by our particular inclinations. Moral thinking was expurgated from the classical ideas of community and the necessity of fellow men; man was incepted alone.(3)

(1) Leviathan I, 13, 13.
(2) From this equality of ability, ariseth equality of hope in the attaining of our ends. And therefore if any two men desire the same thing, which nevertheless they cannot both enjoy, they become enemies…” Leviathan I, 13, 3. Cf. De Cive, I, 6.
(3) “Furthermore, since the combate of Wits is the fiercest, the greates discords which are, must necessarily arise from this Contention…” De Cive I, 5. The other is a function of the self and has lost his autonomy in front of the self-sufficient subject. To Esfeld, there lies Hobbes’s mistake, in his opposition of individual consciencousness and otherness. “Hobbes geht davon aus, daß jeder Handelnde sich selbst als Individuum im Unterschied zu anderen Individuen versteht.” M. Esfeld, op. cit., p. 260 italics mine

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Hobbes on the dangers of equality

February 7, 2011 in Hobbes, Individual, Society | No comments

Cain kill his brother Abel

The corporeal conception of man devised by Hobbes also implied a basic equality among them, an equivalence between human bodies endowed with their respective faculties. Physical differences among men were not qualitative but, according to his vision, merely quantitative. The basic uncertainty present in the state of nature is introduced by the fact that this simple juxtaposition permitted anyone defeating any other man, for

…the difference between man, and man is not so considerable, as that one man can thereupon claim to himself any benefit, to which another may not pretend, as well as he. For as to the strength of the body, the weakest has strength enough to kill the strongest, either by secret machination, or by confederacy with others, that are in the same danger with himself.(1)

This equal-quality made all vulnerable to all. Parity in an ever-desiring being produced diffidence and the reign of terror, instability and anxiety. Mutual fear among people in this state of uncertainty came both from this fundamental sameness between men, and the will to hurt each other, Hobbes refers to as a constituent feature of human nature.(2) Danger stemmed from the equality of different men’s forces, every man following his wish can carry off any other man.(3)

(1) Leviathan I, 13, 1.
(2) De Cive I, 3.
(3) Elements of Law I, 14, 13.

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Homo homini lupus

February 6, 2011 in Hobbes, Individual, Society | No comments

“The name of self-love is not sufficient to make us know its nature, since we may love ourselves diverse ways. We must add other qualities to form a true idea of it. These qualities are, that man does not only love himself, but he loves himself without limits, and without measure; loves only himself, and refers all to himself. He covers all sort of riches, humours, pleasures, and desires, only for or in relation to himself. He makes himself the center of all; he would lord over it, and would have it that all creatures were only employed to content him, to praise him, and to admire him. This tyrannical disposition being stamped in the bottom of all men’s hearts, renders them violent, unjust, cruel, ambitious, flatterers, envious, insolent, and quarrelous. In a word, it includes all seeds of all the crimes, and of all misdemeanors of men, from the smallest to the most detestable ones.”

P. Nicole, Of Charity and Self-Love (1674)

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Hobbes on action and necessity

January 21, 2011 in Hobbes, Individual | No comments

Adriaen Brouwer 001

Action was constrained by the inclinations of man and it was therefore necessary. It was man’s volition that determined his action in so far as his will was followed and internally consented. So even being free to choose, without any impediment, man was determined by his will, “…liberty is to choose what we will, not to choose our will…”(1) Determinism is introduced also in morality and the philosophia prima extrapolated to the realm of human conduct.

Necessity, about the appetite, and liberty, about the means to fulfil it, are complementary in a deterministic nature. Everything is being caused by something, “…nothing is determined by itself…”(2) This cause could be searched, in the last resource, in a first cause that was necessarily God.(3) Possibility equals liberty and this implies a minimal but absolute conception of liberty, “…the absence of external impediments…”(4) Minimal, for it was based on the causality at the physical level and the inexistence of chance or free will, absolute, for man is able to determine the means to accomplish his will without any restraint.

The profound importance of an immanent self-maintenance of life, -actual reason for the constitution of the commonwealth-, could be interpreted as a certain inversion of trascendental theology. To Esfeld, rather than in a negative conception of subsistence, the individual is involved in a move to self-assertion and empowerment, rather than in the mere maintainance of life, in his constant craving, his pleonexy.(5) In this latter sense, this peculiar body found in nature called man can be both a predator to other beings in his sole consideration, or be tempered by laws to achieve a higher corpus and the establishment of a divine earthly arrangement. In this intersection a new form of understanding man can be disentangled, a novel definition of a being in society rather than a social being; “homo homini Deus, & Homo homini lupus”.(6)

(1) The Questions Concerning Liberty, Necessity and Chance, Animadversions upon Bishop’s reply n. XI, p. 113.
(2) The Questions Concerning Liberty, Necessity and Chance, Animadversions upon Bishop’s reply n. XX, p. 293. “For nothing operateth by its own original power, but God himself. Man operateh not but by special power, (I say special power, not special influence), derived from God,” Ibid., Animadversions XXIV, p. 340.
(3) Leviathan, II, 21, 4.
(4) Leviathan, I, 14, 2. Ibid. II, 21, 1, “LIBERTY, or FREEDOM, signifieth (properly) the absence of opposition (by opposition, I mean external impediments of motion;)…” Motion is the expression of the capacity of a body and any restrain is an obstacle to his liberty, to the attaining of his will. Cf. De Cive, IX, 9.
(5) M. Esfeld, Mechanismus und Subjektivität in der Philosophie von Thomas Hobbes, Stuttgart, 1995.
(6) De Cive, from the dedicatory to William Devonshire. Aristotle’s prescription resound in his saying, “But he who is unable to live in society, or who has no need because he is sufficient for himself, must be either a beast or a god: he is no part of a state… For man, when perfected, is the best of animals, but, when separated from law and justice, he is the worst of all,” Politics, I, 2 (1253a).

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Hobbes on will

January 19, 2011 in Hobbes, Individual | No comments

Bartolomé Esteban Perez Murillo - Trauben- und Melonenesser

This yearning is to be understood as the mechanistic counterpart to will, the unavailable appetite. “When people have an appetite towards something, it is certainly possible for their action to be free, but not their appetition.”(1) Hobbes sustained a controversy with Dr. Brahmall, Bishop of Derry, concerning human liberty and the content of will. The cleric backed the inherited Christian schoolmen tradition on the capacity for man to decide. Hobbes countered him by admitting that man was free to act, but not free to will. Tuned in with his natural philosophy, if the natural world is ruled by the law of cause and effect, all human actions had to be determined by an antecedent cause that could not be deemed to be internal, for only God is his own cause. Natural determinism was applied to man in his incardination in the physical realm; man only had the capacity to choose how not what.

Inclinations underlie all movements, thus intentional activity appeared to be central to man’s description. Among the basic emotions account appetite and aversion, pleasure and displeasure with an external, real or imagined, object around which deliberation took place. What was done departing from these basic emotions was voluntary but not the emotions themselves. In this scheme, fear stands for the avoidance of future displeasure. Deliberation gave a unique direction to these disperse inclinations, adding, substracting, multiplying them by means of reason a result was achieved, the result was a determinate will. Both reason and will handled motivations. In this sense, will was also enchained to a deterministic mechanism by resorting to the level of explanation of motives as an aggregate.(2) Thus man did what he willed, but his will was not up to him, it was induced by external circumstances.

He thinks (Dr. Brahmall), therefore, to will is to have dominion over his own actions, and actually to determine his own will. But no man can determine his own will, for the will is appetite…(…) When a man is hungry, it is in his choice to eat or not to eat; this is the liberty of the man; but to be hungry or not hungry, which is that which I hold to proceed from necessity, is not in his choice.3

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Hobbes on desire

January 17, 2011 in Hobbes, Individual | No comments

Procaccini, Carlo Antonio - Flora - 17th century

An utter modification in relation to Christian ideals is conveyed. Meanwhile desire had been previously related to sin and was opposed to the end of life, -salvation-, the formality and generality of ends reorganized desire in the noetic space, “the desires and other passions of man, are in themselves no sin.”(1) Desire is naturalized and deemed consubstantial to life, and life the only measure of goodness in an immanent world, “…to have no desire, is to be dead.”(2) Desire is the living force behind the continuous struggle for power embedded in existence, enchaining us and only discontinued by death. It drives us without our intention, it determines us, but it is not chosen.

For there is no such finis ultimus, (utmost aim,) no summum bonum, (greatest good,) as is spoken of in the books of the old moral philosophers. Nor can a man any more live, whose desires are at an end, than he, whose senses and imaginations are at a stand. Felicity is a continual progress of the desire, from one object to another; the attaining of the former being still but the way to the latter. The cause whereof is, that the object of man’s desire, is not to enjoy once only, and for one instant of time; but to assure for ever, the way of his future desire.(3)

(1) Leviathan I, 13, 10.
(2) Leviathan I, 8, 16.
(3) Leviathan I, 11, 1.

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Hobbes on man’s reason and his ends

January 15, 2011 in Hobbes, Individual, Noetic space | No comments

Samuel van Hoogstraten - Self-Portrait

Hobbes reacted against Descartes’ innatism and the pre-existence of the ideas of God and soul, all was experience and experience was about matter and movement. The mind could not have a different composition, it was rather integrated within the metaphoric system offered by the nova scientia. It became a coherent part of the new system, becoming incorporated in the plane of construction and thus allowing an easy roaming on the surface of the plain of consistence.

The cacophony of sensations adumbrated the turn from the Peripathetic influence in the vision of man’s end. For Aristotle, man as a rational creature had a certain télos or direction. The christianization of the Stagirite transferred the aim of man to God, to salvation. In Hobbes’s terms, there is no end in man’s action, life is a struggle without completion or finality: “Negotium, bonum: etenim vitae motus est. Itaque nisi sit quod agas, ambulatio pro negotio est.”(1) This absence of a terminus is rooted in desire.(2) At last, life is only movement, and it could not be accomplished in a straight line, it was done through a circular movement intended at the increase of activity and power in which desire was ineluctable.

Man had to follow his appetite to achieve his personal ends, for finality like desire was private and the possible frame of interpretation of actions, “Respice finem; that is to say, in all your actions, look often upon what you would have, as the thing that directs all your thoughts in the way to attain it.”(3) The formal character of reason had to provide with the means of achieving an always particular end, founding individuality morally. Individuality is not only a feature of the given ontology and epistemology but also extended to the realm of human activity.

(1) De Homine XI, 11. The semantic shifts and equation of negotio and ambulatio, absence of otium and movement.
(2) “Quant au bien principal, c’est le progrès le plus libre vers des fins toujours plus lonitaines. La jouissance même de l’objet désiré, au moment où nous joissons, est inclination; c’esta sans doute le mouvement de l’âme qui jouit à travers les éléments de l’objet de jouissance.” De Homine XI, 15.
(3) Leviathan I, 3, 4 in fine.

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