Kahekümne minuti Hobbes

Vestlesin õega, kes õpib Tallina Tehnikaülikoolis. Ta osutas tavalisele seminarist puudumise kriteeriumile: kirjutada viiesaja sõnaline essee. Ta märkis ka, kuidas tudengid selle üle bitšivad. Mistõttu võtsin vastu otsuse karistus omaks võtta ja kirjutada 500 sõna Thomas Hobbes'ist, ilma ettevalmistuse ja mõtteta, ja vaadata, kui kaua läheb. Aega kulus ca 30 minutit, ja välja tuli järgmine:


Thomas Hobbes and Political Philosophy

There is a paradox about Hobbes, that famous originator of the modern state and the inventor of the commonwealth, that system of government that we still live under. That contradiction or paradox is: the unscientific, violent presumption of the nature of human beings.

The unscientific premise of the nature of human beings is retained to this very day, and upheld through governmental institutions, all in spite of its unscientific nature. It is the premise of the war against all, superimposed on a traditionally Cartesian premise of the separation between society and nature.

Above all, the Cartesianism of Hobbes needs to be explicated. The Hobbesian idea of society as a defense against the gruesome struggle characteristic of „pure“ nature always already presumes the fundamental distinction between nature and society, since it assumes a nature or an essence for two entirely separate domains: nature and society. The latter is there for the purpose of overcoming the nature of the former. Thus society is not a particular configuration of the lived world of species-specific relationships, or governance of their own ways of living, but rather a systematic confrontation, contradiction, and overcoming of the base surface of mere nature. The Hobbesian state is not a species-specific way of life, but rather an overcoming of what nature is, in its presumed true essence: not a reconfiguration of the lived environment by a particular organism, but an overcoming of that environment by a species that is fundamentally distinct from nature, and who thus has its own destiny for which nature is but a stage, all there for him to step to the front-stage and to declare a Wagnerian triumph of the will over brutes. The Hobbesian state, even though cast in the framework of a struggle, presumes an underlying „pure struggle“ as juxtaposed, and thus overcome, by that other struggle, that of overcoming of essence, of submission to nature.

The reason for the unscientificity of this argument is its (understandable, since pre-Darwinian) separation of the living world into the human and the non-human, and the hierarchical presentation of the same. Put simply, in light of contemporary understanding of the living world, there is no such (essential) division of existence into two spheres, one of nature, and one of transcendental human culture. The species Homo sapiens, just like all the other species, is equally enmeshed in that diversity that we call life, and its culture, or its society, and represents but another way of life, of adaption, that a species can take. The narrative of the overcoming of nature by way of culture or society is a consoling but unscientific fable of a pre-scientific imagination.

Hobbes is well out of line with contemporary scientific understanding of the workings of the world. But since, as was initially pointed out, the idea of the commonwealth – of the current structure of society – is the premise and foundation of modern societies, rethinking Hobbes is paramount: the question to be asked is, simply, what are the entailments of the fact that our understanding of human societies, our premises of doing politics, are fundamentally out of alignment with scientific knowledge of both nature and of human beings.