Modernity

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Hobbes on the grounds of sociability

March 12, 2011 in Hobbes, Modernity, Society | No comments

Sandrart (attributed), Troppa (attr.) - Laomedon Refusing Payment to Poseidon and Apollo - 17th c

“However much the natural state allures by the name of freedom and immunity from all subjection, still, until men have united into communities, it has many added disadvantages, whether we imagine all men as existing singly in that state, or consider the situation of the scattered patriarchs. For if you conceive a man who even in adult age is left alone in this world, and without any of the comforts and supports with which the ingenuity of men has made life more civilized and less hard, you will see an animal, naked, dumb, needy, driving away his hunger as best he can by roots and herbs, his thirst by any water he chances upon, the severity of the weather by caves, an animal exposed to the wild beasts, and alarmed when he meets any of them. A life somewhat more civilized was possible among those who lived in scattered families, –a life, however, which could not be compared in any way with civil life, not so much on account of want, which the household, with its limited desires, seems fairly well able to banish, as because security is not fully provided for there. And, to be brief, in the natural state each man is protected by his own powers only, in the community by those of all. In the former no one has a certain reward of his industry; in the latter all have it. In the one there is the rule of passion, war, fear, poverty, ugliness, solitude, barbarism, ignorance, savagery; in the other the rule of reason, peace, security, riches, beauty, society, refinement, knowledge, good will.”

S. Pufendorf, The two books on the duty of man and citizen according to the natural law, II, 1 (1673)

The inauguration of political science, the science about the constitution of aggregate bodies, had to cling on two characteristics. Firstly, it had to dwell with the assembly of individuals, for its object is an aggregate, a synthesis. Secondly, it had to research the illation of causes and consequences, like natural philosophy did. The construction of a science of politics would extend the success of the geometrical method to political science and appease the plain of consistence. Despite the appeal of natural philosophy, Hobbes thought political science had to be preferred to natural philosophy due to the amount and degree in which people were involved in it. He disagreed with Descartes about following common sense on moral matters.(1) Human affairs required of a proper foundation, they could not remain as a province alien to the restructuring suffered in the plane of construction. There was also a pragmatic justification to favour political science for it fertilized the soil on which knowledge and industry were deemed to grow as human inventions.(2) Finally, Hobbes endeavored to articulate a philosophy more geometrico of the just. The ends of moral philosophy suffered a transformation. The question about the good was raised since the foundation of the polis: a query limiting the extent and circumstances of moral evaluation acceptable and justifiable among others. Every man, after understanding the definition of good, its essence, would also act accordingly. There was no fracture between knowing and acting, for they were congruent in a reasonable being. This conception entrenched the possibility of grasping an objective content in reality, it implied an onto-logical order and the insertion of man in it. The grounds of modern moral philosophy afforded a slide of the question towards a prescription of the action that was not necessarily accompanied by a rational account of its moral value; value and action were disjoint, for values could not be apprehended any more, according to a primitive emotivism. A chasm extended between the world and our capacity to understand so that deontology, a theory about duty and obligation, became paradigmatic regarding human action. The faith in a rational order faded. Modernity imposed the disconnection of man from any metaphysical being and a relinquishment was only attainable through obligation. The classical conception of man was also thereby altered. Man had been placed in the junction between world and reason, ontology and logic, able to grasp the rational design of the cosmos, either by reason or by revelation. Rational prudence, as a virtue, was substituted by irrational obedience. Law was not the disposition of the order of things, de rerum natura, but a compulsory mandate.

(1) Cf. R. Descartes, Principes de la Philosophie (1644) he did not extend his doubt on moral affairs (I, 4) and reduced the possible moral certitude in front of scientific certitude (IV, 206).
(2) “Ils font obstacle à l’usage correct de la raison en ce qu’ils se opposent au Bien véritable en agissant en faveur d’un bien apparent et immédiat qui (à bien penser tous les tenants et les aboutissants) se trouve le plus souvent être le Mal.” De Homine XII, 1. Still the negative classical appraisal of sentiments stems from being defined as perturbations, blurring the rational and moral disposition. Decision and reason become two juxtaposed elements in the plain on construction.

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Hobbes on man’s faculties

January 5, 2011 in Epistemology, Individual, Modernity | No comments

Franciscus Gysbrechts Vanitas

Following Hobbes’s empiricism, all that is learned is acquired by the senses, these provide us with the means to all possible knowledge. Avoiding error is a question of subtlety and finesse, placing the sight as the paradigm of accession of stimuli to our reason.(1) Transposing objects into perceptions cleared up the way to absolute skepticism in its two most important shades: ontological, in idealism, following the logical consequences of the annihilatio mundi in Berkeley, and epistemological, the absence of necessity in nature, as stated by Hume, both consistent with the delineation of the plane of construction.

Man, like any other existent, was defined in relation to the concept of body. The special features that distinguished him from other beings were not any sort of form or essence, but his faculties. The specific nature of man was described immanently, as an assembly of faculties that bestowed him with his particular character, rather than as the union of body and soul, according to Christians.(2) Man’s faculties included his physical strength, experience, reason and passion.(3)

These faculties supplanted the formal aspect of man, his essence, the soul. Hobbes knew his assail on the distinction between body and soul, a central tenet of orthodox Catholicism and of its noetic substratum, would be hardly criticized and mostly rejected.(4) Still this conception achieved a coherence that allowed the emergence, despite resistance, of a new and more comprehensive plateau that could include the foregoing striations of the given plain occasioned by the advent of the nova scientia and the manifestation of a novel approach to knowledge. Natural philosophy and anthropology boosted each other in the construction of an immanent political science, granting the due stability to power, rejecting the out-worldly elements that weakened the government of the earthly affairs and the prevention of conflicts, insecurity and death as the precipitate of the grossly frail human nature.

(1) Hobbes accentuated in several moments the primacy of seeing over other senses, for instance discussing the error induced by incantations he stated “…they would have men to believe an alteration of nature that is not, contrary to the testimony of man’s sight, and all the rest of his senses,” Leviathan, IV, 44, 11.
(2) Elements of Law I, 1, 4.
(3) De Cive, I, 1.
(4) “But if there be no immaterial spirit, or any possession of men’s bodies by any spirit corporeal, it may again be asked, why our Savior and his apostles did not teach the people so; and in such clear words, as they might no more doubt thereof. But such questions as these, are more curious, than necessary for a Christian man’s salvation,” Leviathan IV, 45, 8. The rise of rhetoric elements of the previous strata is still evident in his reappraisal of the theme of salvation that had been obfuscated by his insistence in immanence.

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Hobbes on the finality of natural philosophy

December 10, 2010 in Epistemology, Hobbes, Modernity | No comments

Any finality or utility was previously absent in natural philosophy, the sole concern was with truth. With the disappearance of the homology between language and reality the idea of truth, of an isomorphy between understanding and world, fainted. This absence of finality in nature was balanced by a purpose in science. Both the classical pagan and Christian tradition, especially in its Thomist-Aristotelian articulation, unveiled an intention within the ontological order, the modern conception lacked this finality in nature. There is no natural order in the sense of finis, the end was not in nature but in science, -in the artificial image rendered by man. Man was not connected to reality but to his representation of it. The idea of progress appeared as the theistic and immanent scion of this fundamental alteration.

The finalist character of science is thus stressed.(1) Science, like reason, was not pure speculation, but a means to attain certain ends, an instrumental mean. It subserved human desires rather than being opposed to appetite itself, as a purely eidetical arrangement, “reason is the pace; increase of science, the way; and the benefit of mankind, the end.”

Francis Bacon

Francis Bacon

(1) Science is the knowledge of consequences, and dependence of one fact upon another: by which, out of that we can presently do, we know how to do something else when we will, or the like, another time….” Leviathan, I, 5, 17.

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Hobbes on the ends of science

December 9, 2010 in Hobbes, Modernity | No comments

In 1620 Bacon’s Novum Organum was published exposing the ends of natural philosophy: the welfare of men and experimentation, both the practical and theoretical aspects of science in a manipulative rather than speculative fashion. Knowledge called upon a practical content, this praxiological edge dispensed with the only possible assertion of the real existence of the world, favoring a practical solution to the annihilatio mundi, to the cloaking of reality by the senses. Manipulation verified both theories and their relation with reality, it furnished the nuance between a replied epistemology and a vanishing ontology.

Moreover, science had to be productive in direct criticism to the sterile discussions common in academic circles; philosophy had to serve society. Hobbes reprised his mentor in his later work and put forward his motto, “nam scire est posse”.(1) Thus, the sciences did not convey as much power as arts, engineering or crafts.(2) In his later work an aestheticism of artifice was proposed in which beauty was reduced to utility, “in artibus inventa nova, si utilia, pulchra…”(3)

Francis Bacon- New Atlantis

Francis Bacon- New Atlantis

(1) De Homine, XI, 13.
(2) Leviathan, I, 10, 14-15.
(3) De Homine, XI, 13.

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Hobbes on bodies as substance

December 7, 2010 in Body, Hobbes, Modernity, Ontology | No comments

Instead of maintaining the Aristotelian conception grounded on the idea of substance, Hobbes extended the new scientific approach, based on the existence of singular bodies, independent of our thought and coextensive with some part of space.(1) All metaphysical residues were dispelled and the existence of incorporeal bodies denied.(2) These bodies’ alterations, reducible to finitely petite internal motions, were the proper extensions of the predicate ‘substance’, “…subject, to various accidents…”(3)

The topic of natural philosophy, its matter, was the existence of bodies. Rather than the Aristotelian first philosophy engaged with substances, composed of matter and form, Hobbes will circumscribe it to bodies. A materialist outlook to nature was propounded, giving place to a nature composed solely of these bodies. Philosophy was deemed to cope only with them, their causes and their properties.(4) It had to be disociated from other types of knowledge like theology, history, or revelation, as well as other unfounded doctrines related to worship, because no evidence, no state of affairs, could inform us about them. The philosophia prima acted as a buffer towards theology; the existence of individual bodies was a saveguard in relation to the overarching power of mysterious doctrines. These lost their indefinite, encompassing, character by their decomposition into individual beings. They were to be verified by the ultimate constituents of reality, -bodies in movement. The centrality of the body extended to the thinking substance and Hobbes criticized severely the philosophers that attempted to grasp thought without attending to the body from where it loomed,(5) the philosophy of Descartes was here the target of his reprobation:

But this is the very thing which is customarily called body on account of its extension; self-subsistent on account of its independence from our thought; existent because it subsists outside us; and finally supposit or subject because it seems to support and underlie imaginary space, so that it is not by the senses, but only by reason that we understand that something is there. So the definition of body is something like this: Body is whatever coincides or is coextensive with a part of space, and does not depend on our thought.(6)

Huygens- Force

Huygens- Force

(1) De Corpore, VIII, 1.
(2) “…there is, or hath been created, any permanent thing (understood by the name of spirit or angel,) that hath no quantity; and that may not be, by the understanding divided; that is to say, considered in parts…” Leviathan, III, 34, 23.
(3) Leviathan, III, 34, 2. “And according to this acceptance of the word, substance and body signify the same thing…” ibid.
(4) De Corpore, I, 8.
(5) De Corpore, III, 4.
(6) De Corpore, VIII, 1. Body is here opposed to accident in the same vein as in the Aristotelian system it was countered by substance. In this dyad it has been only the name that changed. Only the definition offered by Hobbes, exhibits his different approach.

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Post-modernism v Anti-modernism

September 13, 2010 in Epistemology, Modernity, Noetic space | No comments

Still the post-modern lack of a political agenda has been deeply criticized from the left side of the political arena.(1) Eagleton has insisted in the relation between an epistemological breach and the contemporary political crisis. Post-modern contradictions include both a radical and conservative approach; again post-modernism is regarded as a transitional period. In the same vein as Jameson, Harvey has canvassed the close link between a cultural form and an economic system, namely capitalism, under a general contraction of the time-space axis, implosing into superimposed spaces, producing text intersections.(2) Postmodernity coalesces with the shift from a productive model based on Fordism to a system of flexible accumulation.

A critical analysis of the social theory of the concepts of individual and sovereignty, in the sense of their recapitulation, and their intrinsic modern character, can help us assessing the extent of the postmodern question, of new planes of construction being implemented, founded on the erosion of the existing strata and configuring a new noetic space, a new conceptual scheme. In which sense have those two concepts been tied together and how do the alteration in their interplay conveys a novel configuration or a simple phase of development, a novel plane of construction or a simple process of sedimentation? Therefore we have to analyze the transitions of these concepts. The decomposition into two modern elements can reconstruct the range of modulations that still were referred as individual and sovereign and, most importantly, how these notions could be assembled and rendered coherent.

(1) F. Jameson , Postmodernism, or The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, 1984. T. Eagleton, The Illusions of Postmodernism, Cambridge, 1997.
(2) D. Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity. An Enquiry into the origins of cultural change, Oxford, 1995.

Network, post-modernity, post-industrial, globalization, are categories that might be transforming the tissue, the cording, of thought, instituting a new plane of construction. Have they dislocated the relation among elements so that both classical sovereignty and the individual have become obsolete, due to the striation of the given plain of consistence? Are they insisting or have they already proceeded to resist in our noetic space? Where they forged in an implication that conveys their simultaneous rejection or demise, do they belong to the same plain of consistence on which our thought still roams? Where they elements in the central configuration of the plane of construction put forward by a period we call specifically modern?

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Plateaus of Modernity

August 12, 2010 in Modernity | No comments

Modernity could be regarded in terms of a plateau coalescing with the idea of absolute sovereignty as developed by Bodin, and a conception of the individual, concealed, simple, as depicted by Leibniz:(1) a monad, only affected by mechanical inputs from a clearly segregated exterior from the interior. Individuals result as a tear off smaller societies, affording the shaping of society and the unity of power, thus remaining coherent. A conceptualization of power and man both refer to a common mold and configure relations of interaction.

The tendencies of cultural post-modernism and post-industrial socety ought to be superimposed, appertaining to a continuous plain of consistence. Post-industrialism stands for knowledge superseding a ware oriented system of production.(2) To Bell the ‘post-’ prefix encapsulates its transitory aspect. In such an economic system the main role is given to interpersonal relations rather than the industrial link between worker and object. Still, to Bell post-industrial only refers to a social structure rather than any cultural or political transformation; a shift in the relations of production from land (traditional society), to ware (industrial society) to people (post-industrial). In this sense could be grasped Habermas’s stress on communication as a rational means, displacing the philosophies of subjectivity to an interactive arena, privileging understanding as commonality rather than consciousness as an individual, classically industrial, attribute.(3)

(1) For a clarification of Leibniz as a central modern stance and the relation between individuality and subjectivity cf. A. Renaut, L’ère de l’individu. Contribution à une histoire de la subjectivité, Paris, 1989. He states the complementarity of individual wills and an abstract, general, reason, embracing the latter and conforming a plane of construction.

(2) D. Bell, The Coming of the Postindustrial Society. A Venture in Social Forecasting, Harmondsworth, 1973. A. Touraine, La société post industrielle. Naissance d’une société, Paris, 1969.

(3) J. Habermas, Der philosophische Diskurs der Moderne. Zwölf Vorlesungen, Frankfurt, 1985.

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Epoché, Épos, Époque

August 2, 2010 in Epistemology, Modernity | No comments

Absolute narratives, universal accounts and genres vest particular tendencies. They convey discourses of legitimation, they resort to a plain of consistence, according to post-modern claims. A certain absence of judgement, conditioned by a plain of consistence, an anthropological distance, is required to unveil the apparently neutral belief systems and practices. This attitude precludes a naturalist, objective, comprehension of texts and makes room for an inflexion, but it is also related to a de-doxiphication, an end of meta-narratives and an accentuation of difference.(1)

If post-modernism supposes a certain fundamental transformation of the discourses and categories, of the noetic space, making the world intelligible. We would have to investigate the basic orography that shaped a stratum of thought configuring both our experience and our self-understanding, our embedment on a certain plain of consistence. Both in a geological and textual analysis we are faced with superimposition, a multi-layered structure, of disparate stages of sedimentation.

One of the phenomena related to postmodernism is globalization. Globalization as a general process can be traced to the roots of modernity and especially to the enlargement of the globe started by the discovery of the new continent and the techniques developed in Western Renaissance. Following a cumulative direction, modernity would encompass a quantitative process of augmenting exchange and a linear expansion, on the other hand, interconnectedness and other network attributes are also used to highlight the current character of globalization.(2)

(1) L. Hutcheson, The Politics of Postmodernism (2nd ed.), London, 2002. H.F. Harber, Beyond postmodern politics. Lyotard, Rorty, Foucault, New York, 1994.
(2)D. Held et al., Global Transformations. Politics, Economics and Culture, Cambridge, 1999.

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