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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 man and his place in nature

January 4, 2011 in Body, Hobbes, Individual | No comments

Henrik Lohe handelsman i Stockholm Johan Assman 1640

“Man, being the servant and interpreter of Nature, can do and understand so much and so much only as he has observed in fact or in thought of the course of nature. Beyond this he neither knows anything nor can do anything.”
F. Bacon, Novum Organum, I, 1 (1620)

The insertion of man in nature also implied the extension to it of the means to account for other bodies. The metaphors of natural philosophy were unfolded, including the naturalization of man by identifying with most characteristics and processes affecting bodies. In his most ambitious project, his Elementa Philosophiae, including three sections, De Corpore, De Homine and De Cive, Hobbes responded to the metaphysical treatises of the schoolmen, still popular in his days, tracing a comprehensive continuum encompassing physics and morals. By a law of inclusiveness the sole constituents of the universe, -bodies-, could be unraveled and, following an ascending and progressively exclusive scale, we would arrive finally to the citizen as moral being; thus embracing the behavior and movement of all objects, up to the most complex, which does not only respond to physical alterations, impacts and movements, but also to apparently subtle inclinations and affects, passions and endeavors.

The aforesaid importance of the senses to acquire experience is manifest in the relevance attained in De Homine, last treatise composed from the trilogy. Here special attention was placed to the theory of vision, the empirical counterpart of our psychology, relating perception to the existence of external bodies, using the proper method of natural science, geometry. Among the range of phenomena encompassing the pure physical stimulus, the object, and the member of the commonwealth, the subject, the composition of stimuli was being researched in order to attain a citizen, -a man educated in the laws of the state.

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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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