Thomas Hobbes: Fascist Exponent Of
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Thomas Hobbes Click hereforFullIssueofFidelioVolume5,Number1,Spring1996 k r k o r o Y Y w e w e N , N n , o n i t o i c t e c l l e l o l o C C r e r g e n g a n r a r G G e h e h T T Fascist Exponent of © 1996 Schiller Institute, Inc. All Rights Reserved. Reproduction inwhole orinpart without permission strictly prohibited. Enlightenment Science by Brian Lantz n his May 10, 1982 speech to the British Foreign Ser- the horrors of Cambodia, Somalia, Rwanda, and Bosnia. vice assembled at the Royal Institute of International The literally fascist legislative agenda of Conservative IAffairs’ Chatham House, Henry Kissinger lauded Revolutionaries Newt Gingrich and Phil Gramm, under the “Hobbesian” premise of British foreign policy. That the sponsorship of various Mont Pelerin Society-connect- Kissinger was correct in identifying the axiomatics of ed thinktanks, underscores the significance of “Sir” British foreign policy as “Hobbesian,” should alert the Kissinger’s Hobbesian remark for domestic politics with- reader to the significance of the doctrines of Thomas in the United States itself. Hobbes (1588-1679), to the events unfolding now, three Like his homosexual lover Francis Bacon and fellow hundred and fifty years later, as Current History. British empiricist John Locke, Thomas Hobbes was Over the past century, for geopolitical purposes, the deployed by the then-Venice-centered oligarchy against British oligarchy has orchestrated a true Hobbesian “war __________ of each against all,” bringing about two world wars and Thomas Hobbes (center), Paolo Sarpi (left), Galileo Galilei (right). innumerable regional conflicts including, most recently, (Photo: The Bettmann Archive) 31 the ideas of the Golden Renaissance, which had been set some few years before the civil wars did rage, was boiling in motion under the influence of Cardinal Nicolaus of hot with questions concerning the rights of dominion and Cusa at the 1439 Council of Florence. He is most notori- the obedience due from subjects, the true forerunners of an ous nowadays for the views expressed in his Leviathan, or, approaching war; and was the cause which all those other The Matter, Form, and Power of a Commonwealth Ecclesi- matters deferred, ripened and plucked from me this third astical and Civil, published in 1651, during the consolida- part. Therefore it happens, that what was last in order, is yet come forth first in time. tion of Oliver Cromwell’s rule. There, Hobbes laid out a justification for oligarchic dictatorship, or fascism, based Hobbes, a wild-eyed materialist for whom the ulti- upon the need to restrain the uncontrollable violence mate explanation of any action in nature, or as an inherent in man’s nature. He wrote: expression of human nature, lay only in terms of mater- ial bodies and the motion of those bodies, stated his [D]uring the time men live without a common power to extreme views so outrageously, that they are useful in keep them all in awe, they are in that condition which is awakening us to the danger inherent in the common called war, and such a war as is of every man against every man. For war consists not in battle only, or the act of fight- way of thinking today. ing, but in a tract of time wherein the will to contend by Hobbes set out to crudely recast philosophy, which, up battle is sufficiently known; and therefore the notion of to the Seventeenth century, was still considered the inter- time is to be considered in the nature of war . related study of all profound scientific, civil, and moral Let him therefore consider with himself—when taking questions. Thus, in his Elementa Philosophiae Sectio Prima a journey he arms himself and seeks to go well accompa- de Corpore (Elements of Philosophy, Section I, Of Body, nied, when going to sleep he locks his doors, when even in hereafter De Corpore), completed prior to the publication his house he locks his chests, and this when he knows there of his infamous Leviathan, Hobbes declared philosophy be laws and public officers, armed to revenge all injuries to be only “such knowledge of effects or appearances, as shall be done him—what opinion he has of his fellow sub- we acquire by true ratiocination from the knowledge we jects when he rides armed, of his fellow citizens when he have first of their causes or generation: And again, of locks his doors, and of his children and servants when he such causes or generations as may be from knowing first locks his chests. Does he not there as much accuse mankind by his actions as I do by my words? But neither of us accuse their effects.” man’s nature in it. The desires and other passions of man By ratiocination, Hobbes emphatically did not mean are in themselves no sin. No more are the actions that pro- reason, but instead a process akin to arithmetic “addition ceed from those passions till they know a law that forbids and subtraction” [SEE Box, p. 33]. As if attuned to Ameri- them . (Leviathan, Part I, Chapter 13) ca’s movie-going public, Hobbes argued that all per- ceived effects are literally attributed to “hard bodies” and What is not so well known is that Thomas Hobbes their perceived motions. We could graph these hard bod- derived his concepts of moral and civil philosophy from ies and their motions, and develop algebraic equations for what passes today as modern “classroom mathematics”— them. He writes: that is, from the neo-Aristotelean, algebraic method that was promoted to counter the influence of Renaissance We must not therefore think that computation, that is Christian Platonism. In a comment on his De Cive (1642), ratiocination, has place only in numbers, as if man were distinguished from other living creatures (which is said Hobbes stated what his intellectual plan of action had to have been the opinion of Pythagoras) by nothing but been: the faculty of numbering; for magnitude, body, time, I was studying philosophy for my mind’s sake, and I had degrees of quality, action, conception of proportion, speech, gathered together its first elements in all kinds; I thought to and names (in which all the kinds of philosophy consist) have written them, so as in the first I would have treated of are capable of addition and subtraction. [E]ffects body and its general properties; in the second of man and his and the appearances of things to sense, are faculties or special faculties and affections; in the third, of civil govern- powers of bodies. (De Corpore) ment and the duties of subjects. Wherefore the first section would have contained the first philosophy, and certain ele- How many of these “hard bodies” are there? An infin- ments of physic; in it we would have considered the reasons ity says Hobbes, adding that the concept of infinity is of time, place, cause, power, relation, proportion, quantity, fig- incomprehensible to man—for, since man’s nature is ure, and motion. In the second, we would have been conver- finite, we must settle for that which we can understand sant about imagination, memory, intellect, ratiocination, by means of our senses. appetite, will, good and evil, honest and dishonest, and the But, if the infinite is incomprehensible to man, how like. It so happened in the interim, that my country, can he act as in the image of an infinite Creator God? 32 Hobbes, Sarpi, and Galileo Lyndon LaRouche has made the point that Hobbes Hobbes Outlaws Metaphor obsessively developed his arguments based on the axiomatics of the mathematics of the infamous Venetian n supplying the axiomatic basis for his fascist agent Paolo Sarpi (1551-1623), and his pathetic student Ipolitical theory, Thomas Hobbes claimed that Galileo Galilei (1564-1642). Owing to the principles there were no such things as universals, but only embedded hereditarily in the method of Sarpi, Galileo, et names; and that truth and falsehood were merely al., modern classroom mathematics would, by rigorous the attributes of names, and not things. He present- implication, necessarily be consistent with only one form ed reason as a kind of arithmetic: As he wrote in of political economy: the fascist state. And Hobbes proves Leviathan, “Reason is nothing but the reckoning exactly this, by deriving his fascist political theories from these (that is, Adding and Subtracting) of the conse- very axiomatics. quences of general names agreed on.” Error is It was the Venetian friar Paolo Sarpi who personally caused by the inconsistent or absurd use of names, oversaw the assault on the Renaissance science and state- he writes, and common causes of error include the craft that had been engendered at the Council of Flo- confusion of categories, inconsistent definitions, rence. Sarpi was the head of Venetian intelligence, an and metaphor, which he classifies as the sixth of the intelligence capability known and feared for its efficiency, seven common “causes of absurdity” amongst and utter depravity. Born of an old Venetian oligarchic mankind. (Leviathan, chap. 4) family, Sarpi became “Theological counselor” to the Hobbes went on to claim that metaphor was one Venetian Doge and Senate, from which position he of the gravest threats to that science which is the orchestrated the religious conflict between Protestant basis of his social theories: northern Europe and the Catholic south, to the benefit of To conclude, the light of human minds is perspicu- Venetian finance and political control. ous words, but by exact definitions first snuffed, and Sarpi gained profound influence in London beginning purged from ambiguity; reason is the pace; increase of the reign of James I, based upon the notoriety accorded science, the way; and the benefit of mankind, the end.