Methodology

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Rousseau on the state of nature

January 4, 2012 in Individual, Methodology, Nature, Rousseau | No comments

“I had a dismal Prospect of my Condition, for as I was not cast away upon that Island without being driven, as is said, by a violent Storm quite out of the Course of our intended Voyage, and a great Way, viz. some Hundreds of Leagues out of the ordinary Course of the Trade of Mankind, I had great Reason to consider it as a Determination of Heaven, that in this desolate Place, and in this desolate Manner I should end my Life; the Tears would run plentifully down my Face when I made these Reflections, and sometimes I would expostulate with my self, Why Providence should thus compleatly ruine its Creatures, and render them so absolutely miserable, so without Help abandon’d, so entirely depress’d, that it could hardly be rational to be thankful for such a Life.”
D. Defoe, The Life and Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, VI (1719)

Robinson Crusoe described the fable of a civilized man left in a desert island, far from all commodities and tools, -away from civilization-, having to develop, in his solitude, primitive modes of subsistence and technologies to assure his survival. Daniel Defoe’s book did not only propose a self-centred individual and the fundamental traits of the homo oeconomicus, -an accounting of utilities and preferences according to a scale of profitability. He incarnated the real story of a Scottish sailor, named Alexander Selkirk, who decided toleave the company with whom he was travelling and was abandoned on an island in the coast of nowadays Chile.

His adventures served as a mental experiment on the possibilities of a man procuring his subsistence with the sole fruit of nature and his labour, without any mediation, in the absence of social institutions. An individual left to his own devices on an island, isolated. Solitude became a central aspect of Rousseau’s life and work, amplifying the classical individual, providing with the possibility of criticizing the world of appearances, of stepping back from the societal ties to obtain a wider picture of human nature.

Crusoe’s example had to serve the purpose of educating an adolescent. It was the book that Émile had to be acquainted with in order to develop his capacities, it showed him all the abilities required to subsist on his own. “Le plus sûr moyen de s’élever au-dessus des préjugés et d’ordonner ses jugements sur les vrais rapports des choses, est de se mettre à la place d’un homme isolé, et de juger de tout comme cet homme en doit juger lui-même, eu égard de sa propre utilité.”(1) Utility had to be taught as the measure of one’s actions, it provided with an appropriate guide to one’s endeavours.

Robinson’s island took the legacy of utopian thought to which Rousseau somehow adhered. Unfortunately, the outcome of his constitutional project for the Corsicans had a similar result to Plato’s renovation plans for Syracuse. Jean-Jacques’ utopian project did not adhere yo a non-existing tópos but was related to a hypothetical time, to a golden age when men were naturally good. This conjectural recession in time implied not only a phylogenesis of society but also an ontogenesis of the individual. Not only did primitive virtues excel modern morals, also the development of man made explicit the close link with his immanent origin: nature. Once more no transcendental or external time was proposed, like in Christian accounts, but a mere recoil into a hypothesised past, into pre-civilization.

(1) Émile III [Seuil III, p. 130].

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Hobbes on Bodin’s concept of sovereignty

April 26, 2011 in Hobbes, Methodology, Representation, Sovereignty | No comments

Jean Bodin

In Jean Bodin’s Six Livres de la République (1576) the foundations of the principle of sovereignty had been already established, propounding a justification for the French monarch. Hobbes abode Bodin’s characteristics of sovereignty, yet he did not adopt the underlying context on which Bodin developed them. Bodin still bounded the supreme power of the sovereign to divine and natural law. Laws had to contain a certain value, had to bare natural justice. In Hobbes natural law only acted igniting the sparkle of an order that, after being instituted, became independent. In Bodin, the fragmentation of power was maintained by insisting in the divine character of power, there was no actual human institution but a heavenly prerogative.

Bodin’s method also differed substantially from Hobbes’s deductivism. He sustained a humanist historical-comparative approach, accepting a naturalist stance of authority by which the source of power was an imitatio divina, evincing its godlike character. To Hobbes rather than a resemblance with God’s lordship because of the same model of submission, the analogy resided in the institution of a covenant, of a conventional agreement. Hobbes rejected both traditional political theology(1) and naturalism. The constitution of the commonwealth followed, according to Bodin, the aggregation of families, social unities, to the agrandissement and constitution of a state. In the same vein as Aristotle, the state was but the enlargement, a reproduction, of the family system, it appeared thus as natural. Within Hobbes’s system sovereignty was instituted, the state only surged after the convention among people wishing to escape the natural state, -it was artificial. Moreover, in the very state of nature, -a mental construct-, the actors are men, solitary wanderers;(2) nevertheless, Hobbes still retained most of the basic properties of majestas set by Bodin.(3)

Sovereignty was deemed to be perpetual; it ought to be eternal, but their constituents, men and assemblies of men are mortal. This essential fragility supposed the relapse into the state of nature unless a system of succession was proposed. The one provided by monarchy, based on the decision of a single man, was the more feasible and apt to prevent the dissolution of majestas. For when the spirit decays, the body tumbles extenuated.(4) The main cause of mortality was the disintegration motivated by individual passions and dissidence. The preference for absolute sovereignty to aristocracy precluded the danger of factions entangled in an argument reverting in civil war.(5) Thus the sovereign afforded and represented the endless disposition of the commonwealth and was necessary for the subsistence of the represented, both being interlocked.(6)

(1) L. Borot, “Le vocabulaire du contrat, du pacte et de l’alliance: quelques enjeux lexicaux”, Y.-Ch. Zarka (ed.), op. cit., p. 205.
(2) “…indem er die Monarchie zur blossen Erscheinungsform eines staatlichen Legalitätssystems machte, vernichtete er alle ihre traditionellen und legitimen Fundamente göttlichen Rechts. Er konnte seinen monarchistischen Glauben nur dadurch retten, daß er in einen grundsätzlichen Agnostizismus zurückzog.” C. Schmitt, op. cit., p. 126.
(3) J. Bodin, Les Six Livres de la République, VIII. It has also been argued some direct precedents of a theory of sovereignty in other state theoreticians. According to A. Black, Monarchy and Community. Political Ideas in the Later Conciliar Controversy 1430-1450, Cambridge, 1970, “Turrecremata thus to some extent anticipated what has been regarded as the specific achievement of Bodin, namely the elaboration of an abstract notion of sovereignty as necessary for all societies and as the only legitimate source of power,” p. 84.
(4) “The sovereignty is the soul of the commonwealth; which once departed from the body, the members do no more receive their motion from it.” Leviathan II, 21, 21.
(5) This is Hobbes’ dictum, “the greatest inconvenience that can happen to a commonwealth, is the aptitude to dissolve into civil war, and to this are monarchies much less subject, than any other governments.” Elements of Law II, 24, 8.
(6) “L’originalité des définitions données par Hobbes consiste ainsi à suggérer que le souverain est une sorte de tenancier perpétuel, indispensable pour la survie du propriétaire!” L. Jaume, “Le vocabulaire de la représentation politique de Hobbes a Kant”, Y.-Ch. Zarka (ed.), op. cit., p 237.

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Hobbes on the naturalness of society

March 15, 2011 in Hobbes, Methodology, Society | No comments

Cornelis de Man 002

Society was not natural, no good in itself, it stood as a rational instrument, a medium to protect the basic good: life; opening a free space to a further deflection, an aberration, of those two concepts in the noetic space, -society and nature-, mediated by the individual. The possibility of death was the ultimate reason for the establishment of society. Death cleared to Christians the door to salvation, for Hobbes it was the ultimate evil of a nature composed of matter, and its effects, bodily pain and loss of power. The Gospel preached not to fear the one that could kill your body,(1) now there is no extremer penalty.

To attain a describing model of the causes of society a mental experiment was devised.(2) This was achieved by decomposing any occurrence in its most simple components and observing them without any attachment. Especially in the case of human affairs one had, according to his geometrical treatise on politics, De Cive, “to look at men, as if they were mushrooms…”

In the state of nature, which is both sequentially and conjecturally prior to the civil state, there is no resemblance of God’s presence. No golden age preceded the actual state of affairs. The past is terror, the present is order. The organized conception of Aquinas was replaced by a natural disorder and the need of an artificial device, a man-tailored artifactum, to prevent chaos. The constitution of the world became intrinsically feeble.

(1) Elements of Law I,14, 4.
(2) “Mathematical reasoning combined with well-chosen experiments may, it seems, do more than dispel the air of improbability initially surrounding a scientific proposition and establish it empirically…” J.W.N. Watkins, Hobbes’s System of Thought, London, 1973, p. 39.

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Hobbes on sociability in an immanent order

March 13, 2011 in Hobbes, Methodology, Society | No comments

Adriaen Van Ostade - Scène de taverne

Hobbes departed from a necessarily conflictive vision composed of individuals, where men predate each other mutually, and assembled them as pieces combining to the production of a higher entity. The constituents were described both as founders and members of the commonwealth.(1) By approaching the issue in this manner, the traditional conceptions based on a given order, spitting image of a transcendental divine arrangement, became obsolete. The transcendental order was sustained by universal ends and principles that kept the pieces into a meaningful whole. An immanent order with no transcendental counterpart was to be constituted solely of bodies, without any extramundane aspiration, but attached to their self-created goals and ideas.

The implementation of the compositive-resolutive method was prefaced by an outlook into human nature as building block of political life. Once its premises analysed, the following step had to be the attunement of these pieces into the machinery of the body political. Hobbes did not admit, like his contemporary Grotius, a certain predisposition of man to live together with other fellow men, a certain sociabilitas, this aptitude for society had to be learned rather than being innate, -the individual ontology extended to his political philosophy.(2) Sociablitas was instilled in the classical conception of man proceeding from Aristotle’s notion of political animal. This turned out untenable in a context dominated by the tension between private and common goals, in a world populated by individuals, in the disintegration of classical values.

(1) Cf. De Cive, William Devonshire.
(2) Cf. footnote 1 in De Cive I, 1.

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Hobbes on deductive science

November 11, 2010 in Methodology | No comments

Hobbes’s classical training had set him in contact with the idea of a scientia civilis, with classical eloquence.(1) But the craft of persuasion and eloquence produced no definitive or unquestionable results. It was supported by the use of certain stratagems to convince and move the audience.(2) This probably did not appease Hobbes. Following a wider array of influences like the optical experiments carried by the Charles Cavendish, -family to which Hobbes served-, or the fluid contacts with Marinne Mersenne, Hobbes assayed to apply the model of natural philosophy: geometry.
The contagion of Galileo’s more geometrico(3) could be tracked down to his famous revelation when, according to his biographer, Aubrey, Hobbes had the chance of reading Euclides’ Elements for the first time in his stage in Paris in 1629. The capacity of achieving astonishing results with the use of a limited number of axioms and principles, the wonder of deductive science had a definite grip on him. This style was also recreated, embedded, in his political work, in the definition of the diverse concepts in the Element of Laws, as well as in the logical construction of De Cive. (4)
Geometry provided the genuine framework for a study based on quantity and extension, but was able to attain qualitative assertions; qualitative identity in geometry was based on quantitative grounds, in the sense that two parallelograms with same surface were rendered equal. Hobbes’s relation with deductive sciences was not only theoretical; he also dealt with the nova scientia in his major tract on natural philosophy, De Corpore, and in a series of minor works concerning geometry, like his De principiis et racinatione geometrarum (1666). Hobbes insisted in geometry as the proper method for philosophy.(5) The new science was also apt to provide with an explanation of human behaviour like geometry was able to describe the movement of bodies. The extension of the mechanistic metaphor and the geometric method thus produced profound consequences and reverberations in the plane of construction.

Hobbes on Pythagoras

Hobbes discovers geometry: the ‘Pythagoras’ proposition from Isaac Barrow’s edition of Euclid (London 1659) via http://www.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/bodley/about/exhibitions/online/aubrey/mathematics

(1) Cf. Q. Skinner, op. cit., Part I ‘Classical Eloquence in England’. V. Kahn, “Hobbes a Rhetoric of Logic”, Rhetoric, Prudence and Skepticism in the Renaissance, New York, 1985.
(2) “An orator can never hope to prove or demonstrate his conclusions beyond doubt (demonstrare); he can only hope to discuss and debate the rival merits of different points of view (dissere).” Q. Skinner, op. cit., p. 103. His early translation of Thucydides already pointed out at the possibility of recovering history as maestra, in the vein of Renaissance. Inductivism related to history as a source of lessons like in Bodin or Machiavelli, but it produces a doxography and no necessary illation between antecedents and effects, it is vacuous in the sense that it does not purvey with any legal assertion of necessity or regularity, it was not scientific.
(3) A few years after Hobbes’s major works, Spinoza, a Jewish optician in Amsterdam, formulated a complete philosophical system more geometrico.
(4) Also the self-reference within the text, a usual device in geometrical treatises, is elaborated to clarify quod eram demonstrandum. There are several examples of this e.g. “…as has been manifested above in the 5. Article of the 8. Chapter.” De Cive, X, 5. This method used in physical treatise An example of his method: “Definitur majus esse cujus pars est aequalis alteri toti; si jam ponatur totum aliquod A et pars ejus B, quoniam totum B est aequale sibi ipsi, et pars totius A est ipsum B, erit pars ipsius A aequalis toti B; quare per definitionem majoris, A est majus quam B; quod erat probandum.” De Corpore, VIII, 25.
(5) “For where the nature of humane Actions as distinctly knowne, as the nature of Quantity in Geometricall Figures, the strength of Avarice and Ambition, which is sustained by the erroneous opinions of the Vulgar, as touching the nature of Right and Wrong, would presently faint and languish; And Mankinde should enjoy such and Inmortall Peace, that (unlesse it were for habitation, on supposition that the Earth should grow too narrow for her Inhabitants) there would hardly be left any pretence for war.” De Cive, W. Devonshire.

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Hobbes rhetoric and nova scientia

November 9, 2010 in Methodology, Noetic space | No comments

“Je veux donc faire entendre ce que c’est que démonstration par le exemple de celles de géométrie, qui est presque la seule des sciences humaines qui en produise d’infaillibles, parce qu’elle seule observe la véritable méthode, au lieu que toutes les autres sont par une nécessité naturelle dans quelque sorte de confusion que les seuls géomètres savent extrêmement reconnaître. ”

B. Pascal, De l’esprit géométrique et de l’art de persuader (1657-58)

Pascal addressed in his tract two diverse currents that could also be identified in the work of Hobbes. Two streams that acted on a plain of consistence marked by the emergence and the centrality of a new approach to nature and a persisting substratum on which it necessary dwelt. On the one hand, the geometric spirit, the more geometrico, supported the new scientific inquiries; on the other, the art of persuasion, the ars rhetorica, stemmed from Renaissance Humanism and was taught as part of the academic curriculum in arts.

Both approaches had their antecedents in Antiquity, in Euclides and Aristotle. They remained mostly unaltered, what suffered an important mutation in the noetic space was their insistence in setting a proper modality of achieving new and indubitable knowledge, -their exigency of a method that could restore a stable link between man and world-, compensating the fatal consequences of the annihilatio mundi. The importance assigned to method, as the proper way to achieve an explanation and understanding,(1) was a common feature of the plane of construction developed also through Descartes, Leibniz, or Spinoza. According to the mechanistic conception, complex systems had to be reduced to smaller subsystems until arriving to the more simple elements –resolution- and then being rearranged to their original disposition –composition-, attaining complexity by means of reduction. Hobbes extended the two moments of this modus operandi, analytic and synthetic, to achieve the foundation of moral science.

Reason became an instrument rather than an essential constituent of man or a hypostasiation like the Cartesian res cogitans, its role was reduced to being purely methodological. Hobbes criticized the abundance of different opinions among his fellow men. He saw in the various pullulating convictions the seeds of the uncertainty and absence of power of his time. If experience was individual, how could it be assessed the righteousness of ideas? How could opinion be discerned from knowledge?

Rhetorica

Rhetorica from Margarita Philosophia, Basel 1508

(1) De Corpore, IV, 1.

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Deleuze and virtual continuum

August 4, 2010 in Epistemology, Methodology, Representation | No comments

Found at The Topology of Deleuze’s Spatium by Louise Burchill

One of Gilles Deleuze’s major ontological categories is that of a virtual continuum which, much like Spinoza’s substance, presents two sides-pure extension and thought-or, rather, two powers: the power of being and the power of thinking. This virtual continuum receives a variety of designations throughout Deleuze’s corpus: “intensive spatium” in Difference and Repetition, “ideal or metaphysical surface” in The Logic of Sense, “plane of consistency” in A Thousand Plateaus (written with Félix Guattari) and “plane of immanence” in What is Philosophy? (equally coauthored with Guattari). While these diverse terms may be argued to accentuate different aspects of the continuum so designated, Deleuze’s characterization of the latter remains, nevertheless, fundamentally constant-such that, as one commentator puts it, the various “objects” in question (spatium, surface, plane of immanence or, again, hyperspace) are all rigorously homothetic. Such a continuum is, accordingly, consistently described as a pre-extensive, non-qualified “milieu” or “space-stratum” enveloping complexes of differential relations, pure intensities and singularities, with Deleuze seeking to determine in this way an impersonal and pre-individual transcendental field that, assembling the conditions of real-and not merely possible-experience, would neither resemble the corresponding empirical fields (with their correlation of a consciousness and its objects) nor amount to an undifferentiated “depth” or groundlessness (sans-fond indifférencié) identified as pure chaos.

Although I refer to the concepts ‘plain of consistency’ and ‘plane of immanence’, here they acquire a different signification. ‘Plain of consistency’ depicts the actual instantiations that are possible and performed within the given linguistic-cultural material; it refers to the language in its socially grounded form, used by any speaker of a given community. ‘Plane of immanence’, on the other hand, refers to the logic that allow the connections and linkages between the elements found at the plain, it is, in this sense, to ex-plain. These elements are the outcome of different arrangements, configurations, and sedimentation phases: the plane of immanence constitutes the condition of possibility of these configurations.

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Orography and conceptual strata

April 1, 2010 in concepts, Methodology | No comments

We could briefly sketch the phases in the evolution of a supposedly, isolated, single concept’s ‘influenza’. Firstly we could refer to its existence, its brute inception, its appearance as an orographic accident, as a rearrangement of elements, without a clear configuration yet, molded according to the given setting of ideas, emerging within a plane of construction. Its success depends on them being embedded in, or adapted to, larger theories or systems of thought in which they gain consistence, assuming nodal points on a plain of consistence. Otherwise they remain distant provinces in the orography and their absence of centrality limits its implementation and spread. This integration is accomplished by a plane of construction laid out by the several intersecting writings, authors and ideas. If successful, after a period of dominance, of general approbation, other accidents might start this process, being encroached on other plains, assuming new or previously distant provinces, elevated on different slopes, without resting directly on preexisting elements of the orography, these concepts start losing approbation, being eroded, enervated, from the existing plain. Novel notions start gaining primacy, commencing the resistance of the concept, its resistance in the orography of knowledge, but not founding any conspicuous plain of consistence. Finally, after its ideal coerciveness and preponderance has become thinner, the noetic space is altered by other concepts offering new forms of consistency, until becoming an obsolete residue of a debunked world view after suffering an erosion by which its only role left to play is to exert mere insistence, becoming pure archaism, a historical substratum, an archeological rather than geological rest, the orography on which it proudly rested, entombed, buried, forgotten.(1) Still a later renaissance of the concept and certain elements of the plain of consistence can trigger this extractive process in an accelerated manner.

Striation

(1) The total disappearance of concepts is not common, but examples of their complete suppression abound, just to give an example, phlogiston in science. Still in natural sciences is easier to find cases for their theories are empirically discarded. Still we can refer to historical concepts that do not have any referent anymore in our societies like polis, or chalk scores to accounts of debt. In most cases they are resumed but in a novel

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Being and Becoming – Geology

March 25, 2010 in Epistemology, Methodology | No comments

The problem of being and becoming could be modelled within a geological frame, exposing the layering of diverse groups of elements that are incorporated by deposition. Thus a new orography, consonant with continuity, is being shaped, but also the erosion and debasing of previous forms or their marginalization: their absence of participation in the novel layers, their insularity. In this model, there is not a direct contact between the plane of construction and the orography, the former is only supported by certain bumps, elevations, uneven accidents, producing deposition in the space between them and the conformation of plateaus: plains of consistence. Still the orography suffers changes by means of acclivities emerging as a product of an arrangement of elements producing a bump. What a plain of consistence assures is the swift transition from one area to the other, the appearance of order and meaning, the experience of roaming on a surface. It is the plane of construction that frames the noetic space making it conceptually coherent, the attitudes comprehensible, embodied.

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Literary Organism

March 23, 2010 in Methodology | No comments

Stefanie Posavec has a project in which he depicts language as an organism.

Another case is her depiction of the different editions of Darwin’s ‘The Origin of Species’

A noetic space gathers different levels of linguistic-cognitive organisms that entangle and connect in different transitions and branches.

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