plane of construction

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Hobbes on the legitimation of natural law

March 26, 2011 in Hobbes, Law | No comments

Bartolomé Esteban Perez Murillo 017

On the one hand, Hobbes could not resort totally to the existence of a natural law for this avowed to the acceptance of a transcendental principle and its superiority to any possible human arrangement. Contrarily, he had to depart from the status quo of the given legal situation and political scene. Thus obligation required from an extra-systematic legitimation but it had to be the completely incorporated to the civil system.

The necessity of a commonwealth was justified in natural law. This general right of nature encompassed a series of laws whose axiom comes down to the conservation of life, “… a man is forbidden to do, that, which is destructive of his life…”(1) Life is to be preserved, a relapse into immanence stemming from a purporte metaphysical principle. The transcendental order necessitated the safeguard of life, but only as a principle, not as a foundation. Next, an instrument was required to eradicate the bellium omnis ad omnia from the state of nature, to surpass this morbid condition, whose cause is to be found in the aius ad omnia. The bulimia of desire had to be tempered, every member of a commonwealth had to “…lay down this right to all things…”(2) Men had to renounce to their absolute right, to their extreme capacity. They had to transfer part of their natural liberty to an external entity with the faculty to enforce its compliance in case of disobedience. The remission of the transcendental to the immanent is reached, and thus the plane of construction rendered entirely immanent, consistent with the resurrection of the body and God’s insertion in nature. In the last resource, the conservation of life became the point of departure and no further fundament was necessitated. Life was to be the foundation of politics.

(1) Leviathan I, 14, 3.
(2) Leviathan I, 14, 5.

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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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