love

Aquinas had maintained the superiority of common good, to him “bonum commune est maius et divinius quam bonum unius.”(1) On the other hand, the refurbishing ot the noetic space resulted in an individual that would follow bonum sibi; actions are all licit for there is no order, no given social arrangement. This mutual rivalry is an all against all struggle;(2) it is the end of industry, culture, and every work that defines man’s incorporation to society, undermining the ability to prosper. Society was not a stable, static, dimension of human life, but product of an empowered man rather than a natural state granted by God’s design.

Hobbes presented an epidermology, a science about the contact of concealed bodies with each other, in which the only viable access to the other required from a formulation of the self.(3) This approach established a split with the accepted Christian creed, “thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself” (Mark 12-30) that became, after a process of erosion, “that every man do help and endeavour to accommodate each other, as far as may be without danger of their persons, and loss of their means, to maintain and defend themselves.”(4) A dislocation of the concept of love takes place consistently, “…desire and love are the same thing; save that by desire, we always signify the absence of the object; by love, most commonly the presence of the same.”(5) Love is equaled to desire, to the restless struggle of appetite. Also the appreciation of the other suffered a striation operated by the concept of liberty, that shifted from an active attitude, ‘love’, to a passive solipsistic ‘accommodation’ with the caution required by self-preservation. The other is only recognized in the sense that his lack of recognition would disturb peace. It did not entail an absolute axiom, like in Christian thought, but rather a means, an instrument, to the proper state of welfare: peace.(6) “The passions that incline men to peace, are fear of death; desire of such things as are necessary to commodious living; and a hope by their industry to obtain them.”(7)

(1) Following Aristotle’s preference for the whole to the part, “the state is by nature clearly prior to the family and to the individual, since the whole is of necessity prior to the part,” Politics I, 2 (1252 a).
(2) Leviathan I, 13, 8-9. “…and the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.”
(3) “And though by men’s actions we do discover their design sometimes; yet to do it without comparing them with our own, and distinguishing all circumstances; by which the case may come to be altered, is to decipher without a key…”, Leviathan Introduction, 3.
(4) Elements of Law II, 16, 8 (italics mine).
(5) Leviathan I, 6, 3.
(6) “…so also is it of the second table of the divine law, Matth. 22, 39, 4o: Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself. On these two laws depend the whole law and the prophets; which is not so to be understood, as that a man should study so much his neighbour’s profit as his own, or that he should divide his goods amongst his neighbours; but that he should esteem his neighbour worthy all rights and privileges that he himself enjoyeth;” Elements of Law I 18, 6.
(7) Leviathan I, 13, 14.