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Hobbes and the Papacy question

May 24, 2011 in Power, Religion, Sovereignty | No comments

Matthias of Trakai

The aimed unity of sovereignty supposed no interference of external elements in the administration of the commonwealth. A decisive historical issue in this regard had been the question concerning the relation between Papacy and King. In this regard the plane of construction used elements already present in Marsilius of Padua, distinguishing both state and Church, not only to maintain their difference, but to utter the submission of the ecclesiastical authority to the civil. For Marsilius, the Church was guilty of disturbing the peace of civil regimes, spreading unrest and malaise. The present stress on the terrestrial character of life and immanence, -the attachment to earthly matters as sufficient condition to the stabilization of the social system-, buttressed the intentions of the Defensor Pacis.(1)

How did Hobbes’s moral subject, under the law of the Gospel and the civil law, surmounted the logical impossibility of obeying two different and possibly contradictory masters? Self-conscience was not a possible way out, since the Protestant Reformation every man could sustain different ideas concerning the content of the natural law. The solution was again based on immanence: the monarch´s dictates had to be adhered.(2) As long as the sovereign himself was a Christian there shall not be any discrepancy between the conscience of the Christian and divine law. Furthermore, laws only compelled action but not the subject’s conscience.(3) The king was God’s vicar on earth and therefore no controversy between his mandate and the Christian doctrine could stand. King was sovereign by covenant, like God established his sovereignty on the Jews.

(1) “It is precisely this opposition and distinction between ‘lay’ and ‘ecclesiastical’ which Marsilus refuses to accept and it was the very distinction of spiritual and temporal jurisdictions which Marsilus saw as the fundamental evil of his times. He will try to show that there is no such thing as spiritual jurisdiction because the very meaning of jurisdiction is the capacity to establish laws which coerce the non-compliant, and this capacity may only be legitimately actualized by the corporate will of the citizen body of any city or ‘state’. Therefore his solution, as we shall see, is to reverse the papal hierocratic theory of absolute jurisdiction and incorporate the church into the state,” J. Coleman, A History of Political Thought. From the Middle Ages to the Renaissance, Oxford, 2000, p. 136.
(2) “…in all things not contrary to the moral law, (that is to say, the law of nature,) all subjects are bound to obey that for divine law, which is declared to be so, by the laws of the commonwealth.” Leviathan II, 26, 40.
(3) “These things considered it will easily appear: that under the sovereign power of a Christian commonwealth, there is no danger of damnation from simple obedience to human laws; for in that the sovereign alloweth Christianity, no man is compelled to renounce that faith which is enough for his salvation; that is to say, the fundamental points,” Elements of Law II, 25, 11.

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Hobbes on the stability of peace and the necessity of a king

April 24, 2011 in Hobbes, Power, Sovereignty | No comments

'Gaius Mucius Scaevola Confronting King Porsenna', oil on copper painting by Bernardo Cavallino

Meanwhile peace was being settled on the continent, England was suffering the precariousness of a king dethroned and executed. The causes of this anarchy were to be found, according to Hobbes, in the manifold of religious doctrines and opinions baiting dissent and endangering the political stasis stemming from the feudal constitution granted by the Carta Magna (1215). The division of sovereign power with the Parliament, following the mixed-government theory, and the impossibility of its dissolution without its own consent since 1641 precipitated the removal of the constitutional principles established and showed the necessity of a justification for a a novel balance of power. Hobbes wagered for a compact authority without any impediments, free, extending his idea of human liberty, -minimal and absolute-.(1) Despite his proclaimed monarchism, the theory of political obligation also helped backing up Cromwell’s revolutionary order. It promoted all kinds of institution consistent with the plane of construction deployed. Hobbes’s return to England in 1651, after finishing Leviathan, appears to some as a gesture moving away from the Royalist cause. His Erastianism, his dismal view on the effects of religious dissent, could have superseded his Royalist agenda, just a particular, discrete, form of institution.(2)

The first maneuver to relieve his country’s agony was to discredit the opinions that enfeebled the position of the king and his command. Suarez and his doctrine concerning the righteousness of tyrannicide, of a monarch’s deposition based on a moral judgment, was still common. But who was able to draw an inference about the bounty of the instituted sovereign? Following a basic emotivism and the incapacity to ascertain any content of truth in moral judgments, a ‘tyrant’ was only an estimation that did not contain any objectivity, it was a mere personal, individual, evaluation that could endanger the first law of nature: peace.

(1) In this double character can be traced back both traditions that interpret Hobbes as a defender of a liberal state and the total state.
(2) “…Hobbes’s religious thought eventually became the determinant of his allegiance, that his Erastian ecclesiology finally tramped other considerations and drew him away from the Stuart cause.” J.R. Collins, The Allegiance of Thomas Hobbes, New York, 2005, p. 8.

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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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Power, Epistemology, and Ontology: the individual

June 4, 2010 in Epistemology, Individual, Power | No comments

The increasing importance of biography in relation to individuality is an indicator of difference and the assertion thereof. In this context, Luckmann highlights the augmenting number of roles men play daily but their simultaneous anonymity, their impersonal character.(1) Maffesoli vindicates the person and their roles, submerged in sentiments and feelings, as a post-modern category in relation to the mechanical, functional, individual.(2) In this sense, tribalism is marked by the sharing of common sentiments, their ephemeral character, the externality to the self, partaker in order to ‘be with’ rather than in the search for any project or ideal. Only an aesthetics of emotion redounds in an ethical connection and increases networks based on intensity, on a passionate rather than on a traditional, mechanical, social or political order.

The intersection of social conceptions and epistemology suppose both an individual that is subject of knowledge, and a series of individual objects that can be known. Their existence is verified by the application of the principle of manipulation and production. Individual is a way of being constituted as well as a way of understanding, of referring to the world. A definition of individualism implies not only an ontology, but also an epistemology.(3) The relation between individualism as a social conception and a certain outlook on nature can be tracked down to the beginnings of modernity and its resilient orography.

Friedenthal shows the coalescence of natural science and the conceptions of man and society. The various interrelations between social theory and natural philosophy stood at the base of the prevalence of Newton’s system in front of Leibniz’s ideas.(4) The congruence of both social and natural thought, their consistent configuration in a plane of construction, the common metaphors, based on philosophical assumptions, paved the way to their ultimate acceptance. Prejudices and beliefs, inserted in theoretical constructs, philosophical concepts that underlie diverse disciplines, do not only influence their elaboration but determine their ultimate acceptance and composition within the society’s tissue of credence, the roaming on a plain of consistence producing the conditions of possibility of a judgement, the acknowledgement by others of their righteousness, producing attitudes towards concepts and sustaining forms of power.

(1) T. Luckmann, “Persönliche Identität und Lebenslauf -gesellschaftliche Voraussetzungen”, H.G. Bruse and B. Hildenbrand (eds.) Vom Ende des Individuums zur Individualität ohne Ende, Opladen, 1988.
(2) “The rational era is built on the principle of individuation and of separation, whereas the empathetic period is marked by the lack of differentiation, the ‘loss’ in a collective subject, in other words what I shall call neo-tribalism…” M. Maffesoli, The Time of the Tribes. The Decline of Individualism in Mass Society, London, 1996. In this sense the individual loses his autonomy. “Each social actor is less acting than acted upon,” p. 145.
(3) Cf. D. Shanahan, Towards a Genealogy of Individualism, Massachusetts, 1992 defines thus the concept of individuality he traces historically. “For the purposes of this study, we will consider individualism as that system of beliefs in which the individual is not only given direct status and value but become the final arbiter of truth,” p. 20. An interactive understanding of consciousness could produce a final criticism to the notion of individual.
(4) G. Friedenthal, Atom und Individuum im Zeitalter Newtons. Zur Genese der mechanistischen Natur- und Sozialphilosophie, Frankfurt, 1982. The author stresses the influence of the English philosophia prima in Newton’s concept of absolute space and the necessity of the existence of particles in the void. Actually Leibniz’s and Newton’s systems were equally apt theories, the latter’s accommodation to society grounded its ulterior success. “Es handelt sich also nicht kaum, dass ein naturphilosophischer Untersuchungsgegenstand einer sozialphilosophischen ‘Denkform’ entsprechend modelliert worden wäre, sondern darum, dass in beiden Bereichen die gleiche Untersuchungsmethode angewendet wurde, der derselbe philosophische Grundsatz über das Verhältnis von Element und System zugrundelag.” p. 313. Cf. T.A. Spragens, “The politics of inertia and gravitation- The functions of exemplar paradigms in social thought”, Polity 5, 1972-3, pp. 288-310. Cf. S. Shapin and S. Schaffer, Leviathan and the Air Pump: Hobbes, Boyle and the Experimental Life, Princeton, 1986. The relation between a conception of nature and our place in it and their multifaceted implications is not only a question for anthropological or historical study, but also penetrates certain highly influential scientific topics. Thus if we understand nature as a self-regulating organism we become part of the larger enterprise of sustaining life on earth. M. Migdgley, “Individualism and the Concept of Gaia”, Review of International Studies 26, 2000, pp. 29-44. Cf. J.E. Lovelock, Gaia. A new outlook on nature, Oxford, 1979. Cf. I. Prigogine and I. Stengers, La nouvelle alliance. Métamorphoses de la science, Paris, 1979. On the other hand, some insist in the importance of selection and stress the competition among genes to persevere and become dominant in a population, R. Dawkins, op. cit.

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Cogency and attitudes

March 29, 2010 in Individual, Power | No comments

Cogency, as a measure of the embodiment of a set of ideas, is reflected in the attitudes individuals display. Both, the conceptual cogency and attitudes, compose the noetic space in its cogency and consistency. Cogency might delay the loss of centrality and coherence, the required enervation, of the conceptual net on which a certain concept rests, but incoherence in other neighbouring areas, modulations in the conceptual system, also foster cognitive dissonance and a successive fading of cogency, thus implicating each other. Power is socially distributed for the plain of consistence allows different vectors and diverse subsystems that might overlap only partially. The madman, the judge, the doctor roam in different directions but their judgements remain globally consistent though locally segregated and often opaque.

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Political power and concepts

March 26, 2010 in Power | No comments

Political power supposes a socially distributed attitude to concepts. Concepts conform the entire domain of knowledge and, unless a plane of construction deployed, remain replications, often partial or inaccurate, on a plain of consistence. Attitudes introduce the mind back to the realm of mindless replications, of langue, by relating these concepts to physiological and emotional reactions.(1) The power of a concept like ‘nation’ does not consist only in being a central node whose inervation would require from a profound shift in the adjacent regulations and implications among concepts, but in its attachment to a series of sentiments, arousals, emotions, that allows it to produce and reinforce the otherwise casual, abstract, general but detached, plain of consistence. This character operates as a localized adhesive to the purely eidetical, disembodied, logical system.

(1)This system of implication is isomorph to a neural network. The centrality of concepts to a reinforced associative net of neurons, the cogency to its activation of areas related to motor, physiological, emotional, response that coney a certain automaticity but that also purvey with the actual feeling of an embodied mind. The noetic space implies both aspects of this system: consistence and cogency, the grounds of power. By power potestas is alluded rather than mere force, vis.

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