Ontology

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Hobbes depiction of man

March 10, 2011 in Hobbes, Individual, Ontology, Society | No comments

Rembrandt aged51

Hobbes thus depicted a novel foundation of man. A simple body, material, assembly of corpusculae that conveyed life in their movement; a man devoid of any quality, of any transcendental form. A man that has eluded all bounds to finality and achieved a new liberty, a rationality of the appetites, a relation of means to particular ends. A man that attains his experience from his representation of the world, personal and unique, private, -resting on his constitution and the precipitate of sensations. A man that does not cling to earlier natural incardination in social groups and that does not require from others, functioning in complete isolation of other mechanisms.

A man that is artificer of his conditions of existence, preservation and perseverance –conatus-, defined not in relation to the classical anthropos politikon zoon, but in absolute terms, independent of any claim about his existence and the values contained in it, modern man, without any epithet, -the individual. Will, as the outcome of the application of a calculus of drives, is thus interwoven in a model presupposing reason. Cogito comprised the standing towards one’s life, and thus already involved an intense sense of individuality in which the subject reflected on his condition. In this sense, it departed from the previously given, from the previous strata, containing a soul imposed externally and thus shaped by tradition, to become its own manufacturer. A self-conception is not just reshaped, it is adumbrated, forged. This self-conception is not only relating to man but stemming from him, affirming his subjectivity. Understanding thus took the protestant path and became mediated necessarily by self-understanding, coalescing with the novel imprint of natural philosophy that discerned individual existent bodily beings.

This test on the conditions of society draws the manner in which men would behave in the absence of a commonwealth. In the same vein as his theory of signs, Hobbes equated the state of nature to an arbitrary situation. The civil state, on the other hand, is conventional, it is established by the agreement of the individuals,(1) the self-conception that makes men apt to alienate their rights and to contract in their own interest.

(1) The difference between classical pagan authors and Hobbes is not the simple acknowledgement of its self-centred character, but its insertion in the constitution of the commonwealth rather than its repression. For Aristotle “love of self is a feeling implanted by nature and not given in vain, although selfishness is rightly censured,” Politics, II, V (1263a).

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Hobbes on the principle of composition and liberty

December 8, 2010 in Body, Hobbes, Ontology | No comments

Bodies were conformed by other bodies, Hobbes stated thus the principle of composition, in a similar vein to his atomist friend, Pierre Gassendi, providing with the reduction of all substance to matter, and accidents to internal movements. The counterpart of solid bodies was motion, explaining change and the influence things wielded on our senses. Bodies were defined by their magnitude and extension, by physical, -immanent to space-, earthly, properties. They were convertible to quantities and thus operated by reason, excluding any qualitative operation. The notion of inertia, according to which objects kept on moving until obstructed by another object, was also propounded.(1) The possibility to move unimpeded had to yield the necessity of movement; rest is not given but a limit state. This overlapped with his conception of human affairs: liberty is an absence of impediments, of resistance, and life is about restless motion without a determinate end, without a given position in an ordered cosmos.

Descartes' vortex

Descartes' vortex

(1) Cf. De Corpore, IX, 7.

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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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Hobbes on bodies and the universe

December 6, 2010 in concepts, Hobbes, Ontology | No comments

An action was necessary if it was impossible for it not to take place;(1) possibility described necessity.In this sense, final causes are deemed to be reduced to efficient causes in all mechanistic science(2) for nothing served any end beyond itself.

The new physics based the existence of the manifold effects we observe in nature on two single causes: bodies and motion. The ancient problem of change was reduced to local movement, all changes were caused by motion, sometimes at a very small scale.(3) The interpretation given by Aristotle of change as the result of a potency becoming act was banished. Local action produced diverse effects due to the existence of a plenum; the universe was the collection of all existing bodies, it was corporeal and included all objects, all the stuff, -it was voidless, all space being occupied. To study nature we have to analyze the universe in the diverse number of bodies that compose it, an ennumeration of objects sufficed to give a complete account of nature.

The word body, in the most general acceptation, signifieth that which filleth, or occupieth some certain room, or imagined placed; and dependeth nor on the imagination, but is a real part of what we call the universe. For the universe, being the aggregate of all bodies, there is no real part thereof is not also body, that is not also part of (that aggregate of all bodies) the universe.(4)

Bosch- Creation

Bosch- Creation

(1) De Corpore, X, 5.
(2) De Corpore, X, 7.
(3) De Corpore, IX, 9. It is interesting to trace a relation between the appearance of new devices to observe both the distant –astronomy- and the petite –microscopy-, and the resolutive-compositive method. The resolution was possible due to a change of scale. Change is always the by-product of movement, but this movement is often imperceptible. It is the stance acquired by the appearance of scales, also linked to geometry that could integrate the diverse types of change devised by Aristotle into local movement.
(4) Leviathan, III, 34, 2.

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Sovereignty criticisms (and III)

July 21, 2010 in Ontology, Power, Sovereignty | No comments

The rejection of sovereignty also implied a certain denial of a unified geometry from whose center power emanated uniformly. Foucault opted to investigate the particular disciplines and discourses that display a polimorphous, distributed, institutionalized power. Thus sovereignty as a classical concept, maintaing the form of a unique instance, had to be tempered by a local analysis of certain concrete practices. Governance also refers to a plurality of activities, procedures and instances in charge of attaining political results. The idea of governance without government also hints at this transformation of power without sovereignty, subjectivity without individual.(1)

A brilliant analysis of the standing of sovereignty is offered in Mairet’s work, Le Principe de Souvereinété. To him sovereignty has exhausted all its potential and thus only remains as a residue. It does not convey any horizon of future, but will decay for its revolutionary hallmark has already vanished; its functionality achieved. The absence of novel projects, new possible planes of construction, leaves it half-dead, only waiting for future configurations, to definetly transform, erode it. It only remains, according to our definition, as an insisting concept; it cannot evolve.(2) Sovereignty is also related to the decline of the individual conceptualized as a locus of will.(3) Auschwitz implied the crucifixion of the idea of individual, both the moral subject and the massification of torture and death, Hiroshima the forclusion of sovereignty and the ultimatum of the late medieval superior non recognoscens, sovereignty had to cede when external power can annihilate all prospect of life.

(1) We could trace certain dyadic relations between man and state, subject and power, and the one that will be analyzed, sovereignty and individual.
(2) “Notre siècle qui s’achève est celui de l’achèvement de la souveraineté; avec lui la souveraineté prend fin car elle s’accomplit.” G. Mairet, Le principe de souverainteté. Histoire et fondements du pouvoir moderne, Paris, 1997, p. 162.
(3) “Si donc la moralité de mon action procède de sa possible universalité, il faut que l’individu cesse d’être individuel, en quelque sorte.”Ibid., p. 177.

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Plains and Plane

April 22, 2010 in Noetic space, Ontology | No comments

The mirage of philosophical systems is to exhaust the whole plain of consistence. There always exist diverse modes of arrangement among its elements, of establishing planes on the ground of a given orography. It is the illusion of a static order, of a definitive instalment, undisturbed by other areas of knowledge, by other processes of sedimentation and erosion that amount to general changes in the noetic space. Systems act as if their central concepts would remain identical, not modifiable. All elements acquire a stable link, mediated by the central concepts, by the highest elevations that are the last ones to be completely coffined, buried, or erosioned, and achieve a compacity, a solidity, that impedes further restructuration, modulation, or morphogenesis.

The madman might be too early there, might probably be nowhere, his statography devoid of any solid soil, of any plateau or riff on which to rest, on the abyss. No order of elements affords this incorporation. What distinguishes him from the actual transformation of ideas is that these suppose a rather stable grounding in the actual noetic space and their connection with certain elements that make it recognizable but that are redistributed and combined also with peripheric areas of knowledge, provinces suddenly suffering an approachment, a reacroachment. Thus these novel combinations do not occur in the preexisting plain but require from a construction to be rendered coherent. They compose novel distributions, concentrations and dispositions that authors aim at rendering consistent and thus appear as novatores, they are but mutations, anomalies, aberrations, their conditions of possibilty, already present. Otherwise they remain illusionists, charlatans or simple fools, constructing remote planes, vain systems, castles in the air. Not only do ideas spread in a memetical sense, with a certain level of degradation, of noise, but they install a system of connections and references to other, apparently alien, areas of knowledge. It is the general incorporation of the system what allows criss-cross references and an activity in the plane of construction.

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Alain Badiou ‘Logiques des Mondes’

April 3, 2010 in Epistemology, Ontology | No comments

“There are only bodies and languages”

Alain Badiou

Methodology and Purpose

May 7, 2009 in Methodology, Ontology | No comments

Hobbes, Rousseau and Schmitt stand at three important moments concerning the forging of the notion of sovereignty; the myth of Leviathan, the articulation of the general will, and the conception of a total state. Their writings instantiate relevant nuances in political philosophy, the transforming definition of sovereignty and their accompanying practices. They also developed parallel and coalescent conceptions of man in the sense of individual, sometimes implicitly, without a specific reference to it, but also recurrent in the base of their writings. We could pinpoint at the relation between those two concepts and how they were co-constructed. How the notions of man and power in society were configured along their conception of nature and knowledge in general, resorting to the peculiar relation between a particular metaphysics, an ontology, an anthropology, and a political analysis.(1)

Bourgeois- Sevenina BedBourgeois- Sevenina Bed

The rooting of their conceptions with the given notions as datum, the discourses, part of the plain of consistence in which they grow, would also be briefly sketched. Some sample of contiguous affirmations, related in a similar vein to the topics analyzed, will give us an impression, of the actual dispersion in the way these topics were addressed, sustaining an uneven but still coherent, commonly shaped, plane of construction.(2) Their coexistence and consistence affected the way people could possibly think about the matters discussed, and thus both limited and extended, contracted and dilated, the ways of knowing and saying. They presented political and social conceptions that eventually became entrenched in the practices, styles, and discourses, and reshaped both linguistic practices and assumed ontologies. In this sense, ideas became belief and were common ground in any possible discussion or understanding of man, society, and nature. Their configuration and insertion in these particular authors also reminds us how they were contrived by the way things could be thought up to them.(3)

 

(1) Concerning our first author cf. M. A. Bertman and M. Malherbe, Thomas Hobbes de la métaphysique à la politique, Paris, 1989. Y. C. Zarka and J. Bernhardt, Thomas Hobbes: philosophie première, théorie de la science et politique, Paris, 1990. On Hobbes’s modernity cf. D. Coli, La modernità di Thomas Hobbes, Bologna, 1995. M. Diesselhorst, Ursprünge des modernen Systemdenkens bei Hobbes, Stuttgart, 1968. P. Hoffman, The quest for power: Hobbes, Descartes, and the emergence of modernity, New Jersey, 1996. R. P. Kraynak, History and modernity in the thought of Thomas Hobbes, Ithaca, 1990.
(2) Quentin Skinner has thought this relation in terms of text/context, the reconstruction of the context being required to attain a proper understanding of the aims conveyed in the text, its uses. But intentions, like attitudes, always remain on a plain of consistence. What matters to authors is the construction and this analysis implies a coordinated activity that exceeds singular intentions. The references to the context are highlighted here not in terms of any intentionality but rather as means, as the elements used coetaneously. Cf. the monumental Q. Skinner, The Foundations of Modern Political Thought 2 vols., Cambridge, 1978. Q. Skinner, “The State”, T. Ball et al. (eds.), Political Innovation and Conceptual Change, Cambridge, 1989, pp. 90-131.
(3) Rather than an itinerary of judgment ours will be, as Kavanagh points out, an itinerary of comprehension. T.M. Kavanagh, Writing the Truth. Authority and Desire in Rousseau, Berkeley, 1987.