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Nature’s integrity and its signs

December 25, 2011 in Nature, Rousseau | No comments

Being part of nature it was difficult to segregate its components into parts, there was rather an all-embracing wholeness that did not admit distinction. An identification with nature as a totality occured.(1) Nevertheless the individual creature became also the sign that encapsulated experience and conveyed the reverie. “La fleur desséchée est le ‘signe accidentel’ qui réveille le paysage, la journée, la lumière, la bienheureuse solitude de la promenade où elle fut cueillie. Elle est le signe qui permet au bonheur révolu de redevenir un sentiment immédiat.”(2) Emotional memory encompassed Jean Jacques’ joy and happiness, his relatedness to nature, the freedom to savour the pleasures and cupidity of nature. Feelings were kindred to those accidental signs, they were recorded and contained in its utmost purity in those receptacles. Nature became a place of inner peace and renewed confidence.

Rousseau also professed a deep trust in nature’s healing capabilities rather than in any sort of medicine or curing. No important disease ever happened to him during his sojourns to the countryside. Whenever he might be in his last trance, close to expiring, he should be put under the shadow of an oak and he would recover.(3) Health was not produced by any human practice or art, but appeared rather as a certain primordial harmony with nature that could be restored and refreshed.(4) Therefore any practical application of nature regarding healing, preparation of unguents and ointments, and, in last resource, any sort of instrumentation of nature, had to be despised by the amateur botanist, who saw in his practice an end in itself.

(1) “Cependant cet univers visible est matière, matière éparse et morte, qui n’a rien dans son tout de l’union, de l’organisation, du sentiment commun des parties d’un corps animé, puisqu’il est certain que nous qui sommes parties ne nous sentons nullement dans le tout.” Émile IV (Foi du vicaire savoyard) [Seuil III, p. 190]. 389 “Il faut quelque circonstance particulière resserre ses idées et circonscrire son imagination pour qu’il puisse observer par parties cet univers qu’il s’efforçait d’embrasser.” Rêveries du Promeneur Solitaire VII [Seuil I, p. 529].

(2) J. Starobinski, op. cit., p. 197. “Rousseau, lui, voit dans la plante, dans la fleur, comme le rayon venu d’un soleil lointain, comme le reflet d’un monde perdu, la réminiscence de quelque chose qui fut une fois, dans une autrre vie, en un temps d’avant le temps, où la nature était la création et où tou encore sortait des mains de Dieu,” M. Raymond, “Rousseau et la rêverie” VV.AA., op. cit., p. 162. For a contemporary homomorphism between man and plant cf. J.O. de La Mettrie, L’Homme Plante, Postdam, 1748.

(3) Confessions VI [Seuil I, p. 210].

(4) “Quinze ans d’expérience m’ont instruit à mes dépens; rentré maintenant sous les seules lois de la nature, j’ai
repris par elles ma première santé. ” Rêveries du Promeneur Solitaire VII [Seuil I, p. 530].

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Hobbes’ simultaneous constitution of individual and sovereign

March 22, 2011 in Hobbes, Individual, Sovereignty | No comments

Velazquez The Forge of Vulcan

A double contract is issued, horizontal among individuals, and vertical with the sovereign, transforming the former into subject and citizen. Still the simple dissolution of one of the contract’s extremes did not imply the resolution of the other. The sovereign could not be deposed by the people, he remained absolute; the institution was irrevocable. The moment of the covenant was conceived subtly enough not to admit any real constitution of the aggregate of men as a persona, as an actual body, impeding the conformation of an incipient democracy. The transfer of rights had to be done en masse. The two axis were constituted simultaneously, the individuals (horizontal), and the sovereign (vertical). After the vertical institution the gathering of individuals disappeared and became a tumult, there was no constitutive body, no way back.

The individual was incarnated in relation to other men that did not belong any more to his kinship or family, to any common lord or fiefdom, but that agreed with each other, by means if their express will, for their personal interest as independent moral actors. The individual was created ex suppositio, tacitly, preceding the pattern of the sovereign’s institution.

The foundation of the state, apparently a simple device in the administration of power, entailed the causation of two personae, “and he that carrieth this person, is called SOVEREIGN, and said to have sovereign power; and every one besides, his SUBJECT.”(1) The institution of the state was the relational composition of a sovereign and a concrete socialized being that was subjected to this novel power and took part in the establishment of a new social arrangement where all men, independently from their rank, position, or wealth, recognized each other both as apt members and founders of a social agreement, of a commonwealth.

(1) Leviathan II, 17, 14.

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Hobbes and the concept of soul

January 6, 2011 in Body, Hobbes, Individual | No comments

Rembrandt- Anatomy Lesson of Doctor Tulp

Rembrandt- Anatomy Lesson of Doctor Tulp

The ancient discussion about the character of the soul as a singular or universal substance, -the disputed interpretation left open by Aristotle’s De Anima, used to justify diverse creeds-, had entered in bankrupt after the Nominalist attack of the fourteenth century and became eroded by the sole acceptance of material bodies: singular, individual. The insight of Vesalius or Harvey on the biological constitution of man, the new picture rendered of its functioning, also focused on the simple individual and converged with other elements of the noetic space, method, mechanism, matter and movement, and the precise observation of the body.

Soul became in Hobbes the specific qualification or property of a living body, its animating principle, yet no independent substance at all. “The soul in Scripture, signifieth always, either the life, or the living creature, and the body and soul jointly, the body alive.”(1) Thus, resurrection implied the restoration of that living principle in the body or, according to the Biblical symbolism, the allowance to eat freely again from the tree of life, the revivification of his earthly and unique complexion. There was an individual conception of man after death; resurrected he could keep his individuated, material, condition.(2) Foul matter had been classically the individuating principle, basis on which form was imposed to obtain a substance. After the eviction of form from the plane as a vacuous concept, matter is per se individual, spatially circumscribed, corporeal. The soul forfeited his status of reality, like all other residues of immaterial instances swept away by a radical Nominalism, becoming attribute or defining principle of life, the condition of possibility of an analysis of life and organism rather than a derivate of animism. No innate content was to be found in man understood as a tabula rasa. Differences among men stem from different passions and these affect us depending on diverse corporal constitutions and experiences, acceding to the idea of temperament; a bodily constitution according to which we perceive external activity.

(1) Leviathan IV, 44, 15.
(2) After resurrection “…they shall neither marry nor be given in marriage, nor eat and drink, as they did in their natural bodies; but live for ever in their individual persons…” Leviathan IV, 44, 27.

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Sovereignty criticisms (II)

July 14, 2010 in Sovereignty | No comments

Tantamount happens with the individuals that face anonymous relations, the debilitation of the state tends to an occlusion of its sovereignty. Both psychological and sociological aspects debouch in the analysis of bureaucracies and international relations, canvassing a distributed system of governance, marking the displacement of executive functions and, in the particular case of the EU, also legislative ones, to supra-statal institutions. On the specific challenge set by the European Union on sovereignty,(1) Sorensen has highlighted the possibility of a post-modern, empirical, statehood that really imposes a horizon of transformation to the classical concept of sovereignty.(2)

Especially contended in the basic definition of sovereign state, knitting together the elements of people, authority, and territory, is the latter aspect. Rather than denying sovereignty the question has been directed towards its localization, its emplacement. In an apparent opposition but in a consistent manner appears the debate on globalization as an erosion, a dissolution or a transformation.(3) Transformation or whithering away, has to be assessed according to sovereignty’s interaction with those other contents that provided with our canonical understanding, conforming its conditions of existence, configuring a plain of consistency.(4)

The relation between the questioning of sovereignty and post-modernity is widespread in the literature.(5) In this sense, it is often referred to the will, to the capacity of action of the state rather than the assertion of power.(6) Sovereignty thus becomes a relevant discourse in the processes of construction and deconstruction of social representations.(7) Sovereignty is thus assessed as a discursive praxis privileging certain understandings, values and interests.

(1) Cf. N. MacCormick, Questioning Sovereignty. Law, State and Nation in the European Commonwealth, Oxford, 2001. M. Wind, Sovereignty and European Integration. Towards a post-Hobbesian order, Houndmills, 2001. J. Habermas, “The European Nation-State -Its Achievements and its Limits”, Gopal Balakrishnan (ed.), Mapping the nation, New York, 1996. J. Habermas, “The European Nation-State and the Pressures of Globalization”, New Left Review 235, 1999, pp. 46-59. N. Walker, Sovereignty in Transition, Oxford, 2003.

(2) G. Sorensen, “Sovereignty: Change and continuity in a fundamental institution”, Cf. R. Jackson (ed.), Sovereignty at the Millenium, Massachusetts, 1999. Sorensen distinguishes between a constitutive aspect of sovereignty, based on the central tenets of territory, people and government, that has not suffered any alteration, and a regulative aspect, with an ample content, among which he refers to non-intervention and reciprocity, that has been modified, and an empirical statehood that is experiencing profound shifts in economic relations, the polity’s structure and the redefinition of nationhood.
(3) J.A. Camilleri and J. Falk, The End of Sovereignty? The politics of a shrinking and fragmenting world, Aldershot, 1992. For a grasp at possible future alternatives cf. D.J. Elkins, Beyond Sovereignty. Territorial and Political Economy in the Twenty-First Century, Toronto, 1995. “What I see is the beginning of the unbundling of sovereignty as we have known it for many centuries -but not always. Scholars examining changes in mentalities or social epistemologies have remarked that significant, epochal change frequently could not be grasped by contemporaries: the vocabularies, categories, master images available to them were unable to capture fundamental change. Suffering from the same limitations, all we see is the collapse of sovereignty as we know it. But it seems to me rather than sovereignty eroding as a consequence of globalization and supranational organizations, it is being transformed.” S. Saasen, Losing Control? Sovereignty in an age of globalization, New York, 1996, pp. 29-30.
(4) “…associated with the concept of state sovereignty, although only fully articulated by Hobbes, is the idea of the undifferentiated individual as the basic social entity facing the power and majesty of the state as embodied in the monarch.” R.E. Dowse and J.A. Hughes, Political Sociology, Chichester, 1986, p. 98. R. Lapidoth, “Sovereignty in Transition”, Journal of International Affairs 45(2), 1992, pp. 326-346. G.H. Von Wright, “The crisis of social science and the whithering away of the nation state”, Associations 1, 1997, pp. 49-52. W.G. Werner and J.H De Wilde, “The Endurance of Sovereignty”, European Journal of International Relations 7(3), 2001, pp. 283-313. D. Philpott, “Usurping the Sovereignty of Sovereignty?” World Politics 53(2), 2001, pp. 297-324. D. Philpott, “Sovereignty: An Introduction and Brief History”, Journal of International Affairs 48, 1995, pp. 353-68.

(5) Cf. R. Jackson (ed.), op. cit. J.A. Camilleri and J. Falk, op. cit.

(6) “Though the state will continue to perform important administrative and other functions, the theory of sovereignty will seem strangely out of place in a world characterized by shifting allegiances, new forms of identity and overlapping tiers of jurisdiction.”J.A. Camilleri and J. Falk, op. cit., p. 256.

(7) T.J. Biersteker and C. Weber “The social construction of state sovereignty”, T.J. Biersteker and C. Weber (eds.), State Sovereignty as a Social Construct, Cambridge, 1996. J. Bartelson, A Genealogy of Sovereignty, Cambridge, 1995.

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Sovereignty and the state – Individual and man

June 14, 2010 in Representation, Sovereignty, Uncategorized | No comments

My focus on the concept of sovereignty remains centered on the modern rational-legal form of authority. Sovereignty soon became the attribute of all acknowledged states and thus provided with a fundamental idea to the constitution, to the valid assertion, of political power. In certain occasion the arguments would also involve the state, in the sense that a modern plane of construction has combined these two concepts. State and sovereignty thus become interchangeable,(1) but sovereignty is a concrete figure belonging to the history of ideas, meanwhile the state refers to a wider array of features and historical events. Still the development of the idea of sovereignty affects profoundly to the content of state, sovereignty is deemed to rest as the foundation of the modern state.(2) The palpable crisis of sovereignty has been attributed to the crisis of state. The idea and the institution it supports enter in bankrupt simultaneously, demonstrating once more the importance of ideas in shaping the conditions of existence and these producing forms of legitimation, of general acceptance and attachment, attitudes.

We could recognize the state and sovereignty in the same relation as man and individual. State and man refer to wider spheres of knowledge, they are objects investigated by a multitude of disciplines (theory of administration, sociology of state, international relations; biology, economics, anthropology). On the other hand, both individual and sovereignty can be circumscribed to the history of ideas. They also shape our understanding of both man and state and they spread in the particular disciplines suffering certain mutations, but still their appearance is purely eidetical and their deployment textually traceable despite their inscription in practices.

(1) J. Hoffman, Sovereignty, Buckingham, 1998. N.G. Onuf, “Sovereignty: Outline of a Conceptual History”, Alternatives (16), 1991, pp. 425-46.
(2) “L’État moderne est un système juridique… Posé de cette manière, le problème de la date de naissance de l’État moderne n’est autre que le problème de la formation et de l’acceptation finale du concept de souveraineté.”A. Passerin d’Entrèves, La notion de l’État, Paris, 1969, p.123.

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