|This article is reprinted from the Spring 1996 issue of FIDELIO Magazine.
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Thomas Hobbes: Fascist Exponent of Enlightement Science
by Brian Lantz
In his May 10, 1982 speech to the British Foreign service assembled at the Royal Institute of International Affairs Chatham House, Henry Kissinger lauded the Hobbesian premise of British foreign policy. That Kissinger was correct in identifying the axiomatics of British foreign policy as Hobbesian, should alert the reader to the significance of the doctrines of Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679), to the events unfolding now, three hundred and fifty years later, as Current History.
Over the past century, for geopolitical purposes, the British oligarchy has orchestrated a true Hobbesian war of each against all, bringing about two world wars and innumerable regional conflicts including, most recently, the horrors of Cambodia, Somalia, Rwanda, and Bosnia. The literally fascist legislative agenda of Conservative Revolutionaries Newt Gingrich and Sen. Phil Gramm, under the sponsorship of various Mont Perlin Society-connected thinktanks, underscores the significance of Sir Kissingers Hobbesian remark for domestic politics within the United States itself.
Like his homosexual lover Francis Bacon and fellow British empiricist John Locke, Thomas Hobbes was deployed by the then Venice-centered oligarchy against the ideas of the Golden Renaissance, which had been set in motion under the influence of Nicolaus of Cusa at the 1439 Council of Florence. He is most notorious nowadays for the views expressed in his Leviathan, or, The Matter, Form, and Power of a Commonwealth Ecclesiastical and Civil, published in 1651, during the consolidation of Oliver Cromwells rule. There, Hobbes laid out a justification for oligarchic dictatorship, or fascism, based upon the need to restrain the uncontrollable violence inherent in mans nature. He wrote:
[D]uring the time men live without a common power to keep them all in awe, they are in that condition which is 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 fighting, but in a tract of time where in the will to contend by battle is sufficiently known; and therefore the notion of time is to be considered in the nature of war ... .
What is not so well known is that Thomas Hobbes derived his concepts of moral and civil philosophy from what passes today as modern classroom mathematicsthat is, from the neo-Aristotelian, algebraic method that was promoted to counter the influence of Renaissance Christian Platonism. In a comment on his De Cive (1642), Hobbes stated what his intellectual plan of action had been:
I was studying philosophy for my minds sake, and I had gathered together its first elements in all kinds; I thought to have written them, so as in the first I would have treated of body and its general properties; in the second of man and his special faculties and affections; in the third, of civil government and the duties of subjects. Wherefore the first section would have contained the first philosophy, and certain elements of physic; in it we would have considered the reasons of time, place, cause, power, relation, proportion, quantity, figure, and motion. In the second, we would have been conversant about imagination, memory, intellect, ratiocination, appetite, will, good and evil, honest and dishonest, and the like. ... It so happened in the interim, that my country, some few years before the civil wars did rage, was boiling hot with questions concerning the rights of dominion and the obedience due from subjects, the true forerunners of an approaching war; and was the cause which all those other matters deferred, ripened and plucked from me this third part. Therefore it happens, that what was last in order, is yet come forth first in time.
Hobbes, a wild-eyed materialist for whom the ultimate explanation of any action in nature, or as an expression of human nature, lay only in terms of material bodies and the motion of those bodies, stated his extreme views so outrageously, that they are useful in awakening us to the danger inherent in the common way of thinking today.
Hobbes set out to crudely recast philosophy, which up to the Seventeenth-century, philosophy was still considered the interrelated study of all profound scientific, civil, and moral questions. Thus, in his Elementa Philosophiae Secto Prima de Corpore (Elements of Philosophy, Section I Of Body, hereafter De Corpore), completed prior to the publication of his infamous Leviathan, Hobbes declared philosophy to be only such knowledge of effects or appearances, as we acquire by true ratiocination from the knowledge we have first of their causes or generation: And again, of such causes or generations as may be from knowing first their effects.
We must not therefore think that computation, that is ratiocination, has place only in numbers, as if man were distinguished from other living creatures (which is said to have been the opinion of Pythagoras) by nothing but the faculty of numbering; for magnitude, body, time, degrees of quality, action, conception of proportion, speech, and names (in which all the kinds of philosophy consist) are capable of addition and substraction. ... [E]ffects and the appearances of things to sense, are faculties or powers of bodies. (De Corpore)
How many of these hard bodies are there? An infinity says Hobbes, adding that the concept of infinity is incomprehensible to manfor, since mans nature is finite, we must settle for that which we can understand by means of our senses.
But, if the infinite is incomprehensible to man, how can he act in the image of an infinite Creator God?
Hobbes, Sarpi, and Galileo
Lyndon LaRouche has made the point that Hobbes obsessively developed his arguments based on the axiomatics of the mathematics of the infamous Venetian agent Paolo Sarpi (1551-1623), and his pathetic student Galileo Galilei (1564-1462). Owing to the principles embedded hereditarily in the method of Sarpi, Galileo, et al., modern classroom mathematics would, by rigorous implication, necessarily be consistent with only one form of political economy: the fascist state. And Hobbes proves exactly this, by deriving his fascist political theories from these very axiomatics.
It was the Venetian friar Paolo Sarpi who personally oversaw the assault on Renaissance science and statecraft engendered at the Council of Florence. Sarpi was the head of Venetian intelligence, an intelligence capability known and feared for its efficiency, and utter depravity. Born of an old Venetian oligarchic family, Sarpi became Theological counselor to the Venetian Doge and Senate, from which position he orchestrated the religious conflict between Protestant northern Europe and the Catholic south, to the benefit of Venetian finance and political control.
Sarpi gained profound influence in London beginning the reign of James I, based upon the notoriety accorded him by the Vatican. By 1607, he became sole Consultore to the Venetian Senate; when a Papal Interdict had been issued against Venice in 1606, in which Venice was pitted against the Pope over the issue of sovereignty, Sarpis writings flooded England, sponsored by the printer to King James. Father Paul was widely quoted in Anglican sermons and religious treatises. Praised by Francis Bacon, King James I, and others, Sarpis direct role in England was not limited only to his influence on Hobbes through Galileo, the Abbé Mersenne, and others of that scientific network, but was also promoted by the Rosicrucian networks of Bacon and Fludd, who controlled the court of James I.
The Fifteenth-century Renaissance had overthrown the chains of illusion of Aristotelian Scholasticism, including the deliberately cultivated superstition of a fixed, earth-centered universe. The feudal order was being eclipsed rapidly by a revolution in the physical sciences, brought forth most notably by Cusa (1401-1464), Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1519), and Johannes Kepler (1571-1630). Their work yielded fruit in the breakthroughs in astronomy accompanying the mastery of the navigation of the globe, and in the harnessing of new sources of power for waterworks, transportation, and machine design. That the principles of natural science had been made intelligible, and creative reason itself was becoming intelligible to men and women through the emergence of the republican nation-state, doomed the oligarchical system.
Paolo Sarpis intent, for which he utilized Galileo, Hobbes, Descartes, and others, was to bury Cusas Platonic, constructive geometric approach in the sciences, according to which man attempts to ever more perfectly, and nobly, comprehend the reason behind phenomena. In its place, Sarpi called for setting down the rules of fixed, pair-wise, Euclidian, relationships, whose inferred pair-wise interactions were set against a dead backdrop of nothingness. This formal geometry could then be utilized to account for bodies and their motion in space. And to this end, Sarpi created his scientist Galileo Galilei.
There can be no question as to Sarpis role in promoting Galileo, as Galileo himself acknowledged the powerful Venetian as Il mio padre e maestro (my father and my master), adding that [i]t can be said without exaggeration, that no one in Europe surpasses Master Paolo Sarpi in the knowledge of the science of mathematics. Galileos insistence on the existence of the perfect vacuum, as the pure context in which to frame objective laws governing the motion of falling bodies, for instance, was driven by Sarpis effort to wipe out the scientific understanding that an intelligible, transfinite generating principle must bound apparent Euclidian space.
It was upon the axioms of Sarpi and Galileos mathematical physics, that Hobbes would pursue his moral philosophy,
in which we are to consider the motions of the mind, namely, appetite, aversion, love, benevolence, hope, fear, anger, emulation, envy, etc; what cause they have and of what they be causes. And the reason why these are to be considered after physics is, that they have their causes in sense and imagination, which are the subject of physical contemplation. (De Corpore)
Hobbes natural philosophy led directly to his notorious view of man in civil society, as Newt Gingrich and Phil Gramm express it today. And because his moral philosophy reduced human beings to individual personalities engaged in atomized behavior, Hobbes asserted that greed and fear were the true qualities of human society.
If we examine Paolo Sarpis writings, we will find present already the political theory of Hobbes Leviathan. Hobbes view of man-as-a-born-criminal, is nothing but an amplification of Fra Sarpis radical-positivist viewsfor Sarpi himself had already written that man was an animal, and the most imperfect one at that. Sarpi claimed that there existed in every individual what he called the libido dominandia claim for which he might be called the father of the Freudian id. For Sarpi, the libido inevitably dominates the individual personality and his actions:
It happens with everything good and well instituted, that human malice progressively devises methods of operating abusively and of rendering insupportable what was established to a good end and with the highest principles.
Sarpi further argued, in an extensive correspondence with scientists, theologians, and royal households throughout Europe, that philosophymeaning the scientific method of Plato, St. Augustine, Cusa, and Keplerwould only destroy mans instinctive ability to act to meet the problems of the here and now. Rather than its representing the spark of divinity in human nature, he said that Augustinian Platonic philosophy was a symptom of corruption. Against the backdrop of Venetian-orchestrated betrayal, wars, destabilizations, and assassinations, Sarpi argued that the essential condition for human knowledge, was experience; but by experience, he meant merely the literal sense-perception of physical objects. Hence, Sarpi doubted the existenceat least as an object of knowledgeof any non-material thing, and held universal concepts such as love, beauty, or truth, to be useless metaphysics. Knowledge was to be measured for its utility; after all, said Sarpi, Venetians despise knowledge of things of which we have no need.
To the end of promoting the oligarchical order, Sarpi advocated a method of systematic thinking guaranteed to abort new ideas:
There are four modes of philosophizing: the first with reason alone, the second with sense alone, the third with reason first and then sense, the fourth beginning with sense and ending with reason. The first is the worst, because from it we know what we would like to be, not what is. The third is bad because we many times distort what is into what we would like, rather than adjusting what we would like to what is. The second is true but crude, permitting us to know little, and that rather of things than of their causes. The fourth is the best we can have in this miserable life.
It is but a brief distance from the miserable life of the materialist Sarpi, to the oft-quoted assessment of Hobbes Leviathan, that the life of man is nasty, brutish, and short. On the eve of the Venetian-orchestrated Thirty Years War (1618-1648), Sarpi was to tell his correspondents that God himself acts without discoursethat is, without reason. In what should have been taken as expressing Venices intent towards all of Europe, Father Sarpi wrote that he believed uncertainty and instability to be the only universal principles.
Utility versus Truth
What Thomas Hobbes wrote, he wrote as a partisan for the emerging, newly London-centered Venetian Party of transplanted Venetian finance. The Levant Company had, with the aide of Venice, become dominant in the Middle East trade, dominating the Mediterranean; the British East India Company was further enriching the new financial oligarchy, centered in the autonomous City of London. It is on their behalf that Hobbes baldly asserted that the utility of his method had been proven already by the breakthroughs of Western Civilization, namely, of measuring matter and of making instruments for all uses; of calculating of celestial motions ... .
The average reader today would probably be buffaloed by this assertion of Hobbes. Nowadays, the algebraic, or statistical, method is applied to all fields of philosophy, including the sciences, economics, and social behavior. But if the truth be told, had Thomas Hobbes ratiocination actually been the premise of science and statecraft in the Fifteenth, Sixteenth, and Seventeenth centuries, we would not be alive today. In fact, the leading scientists, statesmen, and theologians of the late-Fifteenth and Sixteenth centuries, would have considered Hobbes scribbling to be the product of a mentally disturbed individual.
For example, as Lyndon LaRouche has emphasized, the discoveries in science and technology that arose in the Renaissance, and continue down to this day, are based upon the fundamental philosophical contribution of Nicolaus of Cusa, and it is upon the work of Cusa that the possibility of a comprehensible mathematical physics depends. Cusas profound contribution was later advanced by the indispensable discoveries, and hard work, of such individuals as Leonardo da Vinci and Johannes Kepler.
What you see is, emphatically, not what exists. For example, Cusa discovered why it was impossible to square the circle through algebraic methods, thereby discovering what we know today as the transcendental numbers. Why? Because a linear approximation of curvature is never curvature; circular action is not reducible to straight-line action. We might imagine that a regular polygon with a million sides would, for all practical purposes, be a circle; but that would be to ignore the truth. The paradoxthat increasing the number of the polygons sides would widen, rather than close, the gulf between the rectilnear figure and the circleset the stage for a truthseeking Nicolaus of Cusa to recognize how circular action represented a higher order of function than linear action in the universe. Further, Cusa grasped that the characteristics of change in the universe must be coherent with that very creative power of the human mind which allowed him to discover a type of numberπwhich transcends the power of algebraic methods. Whole families of non-algebraic curves, such as the cycloid, catenary, and tractrix, was found to exist in the physical universe, and they were subsequently investigated by such scientists as Blaise Pascal, Christiaan Huygens, G.W. Leibniz, (See Box on Leibniz Below) and Jean Bernoulli. Action in the universe is non-linear, non-algebraic. As LaRouche writes:
Hobbes, however, rejected Cusas intelligible method of hypothesis, and its implications for the ordering of the universe, because he had no interest in the why and how of Gods laws. He was prepared to literally explain away any effect. Of the equivalence of the circle to a series of inscribed polygons, Hobbes wrote:
We know, therefore, that from such generation proceeds a figure, from whose one middle point all the extreme points are reached unto by equal radii. And in like manner, by knowing first what figure is set before us, we may come by ratiocination to some generation of the same, though perhaps not that by which it was made, yet that by which it might have been made; for he that knows that a circle has the property above declared, will easily know whether a body carried about, as is said, will generate a circle or no.
Hobbes and Galileo
All of Hobbes significant writings followed his third trip to Europe, in 1635, when he met with Galileo Galilei and many others in the extensive network created by the deceased Paolo Sarpi. Galileo himself was in his early seventies at the time Hobbes visited him in Italy. Hobbes was forty-seven years old, and had published almost nothing, only a translation of Thucydides. His main role at that time was as a retainer and tutor of the Cavendish estate, including of the Duke of Newcastle, closely allied to Englands King Charles I. It was on the strength of these connectionsparticularly Charles Cavendish, who provided Hobbes with crucial introductions, including to Sarpi intimate Abbé Mersennethat Hobbes met with Galileo.
By the time of his return to England in 1636, Hobbes had been accepted (as he proudly states in his Autobiography) as numbered among the philosophers. In 1644, Hobbes Tractatus Opticus appeared in Paris; in 1647, his Elementa Philosophica de Cive in Amsterdam (London, 1651). In 1650, De Corpore Politicio (Elements of Law) appeared in London, followed by the infamous Leviathan in 1651, and Elementa Philosophiae Secto Pima de Corpore in 1655.
Galileo Galileis works had begun to be introduced into England in the first decade of the 1600s. His little book, Sidereus Nuncius (Starry Messenger), was published in Venice in March 1610, as part of Sarpis strategic intervention into European science. Galileo was then forty-six years old, having held the chair of mathematics at the University of Padua for eighteen years. Galileo had earlier broken off all correspondence with Johannes Kepler, after the publication of Keplers revolutionary Mysterium Cosmographicum in 1597; until his death, Galileo would deny Keplers discovery that the planetary orbits were elliptical.
In the Starry Messenger, Galileo revealed to an incredulous Europe the discovery of the four moons of Jupiter, and the appearance of the surface of the moon as seen through a telescope. These and other empirical findings were credited to Galileos work with the new spyglassa telescope provided to Galileo by none other than Paolo Sarpi himself. It was the circulation throughout Europe of the Starry Messenger that made Galileo famous. His other works, following upon the success of Starry Messenger, were means for Paolo Sarpi to promote the outlook by which he intended to takeover of science from the inside, including in England.
Galileos scientific method was the same as that later adopted by Hobbes. In 1624, for example, Galileo published his much-heralded scientific manifesto, The Assayer, and it met with immense publishing success, circulating throughout Europe, including England, just as the Thirty Years War was engulfing the Continent. In it he wrote:
[W]henever I conceive any material or corporeal substance, I immediately feel the need to think of it as bounded, and as having this or that shape; as being large or small in relation to other things, and in some specific place at any given time; as being in motion or at rest; as touching or not touching some other body; and as being one in number, or few, or many. From these conditions I cannot separate such a substance by any stretch of my imagination. But that it must be white or red, bitter or sweet, noisy or silent, and of sweet or foul odor, my mind does not feel compelled to bring in as necessary accompaniments. ...
For Galileo, only bodies and their motion existand the numbers for counting and measuring them! These bodies are all composed of a prima materia (prime matter), itself made up of infinitely small, indivisible constituents. These infinitely small bodies allowed Galileo to asymptotically approximate a description of any phenomena, without considering that the phenomena was, causally, a different species of existent. Just make the bodies smaller, and imagine enough of them, and you can, as the expression goes, cover all the bases. At the same time, holding to the existence of absolutely indivisible atoms allowed Galileo to describe all things as built up of other hard-ball things. Given that the universe it completely composed of Galileos prima materia, fundamental change, that is, development, cannot occuronly change of place.
Similarly, hear what Galileo had to say about the issue of squaring the circle, from his First Book of Dialogues Concerning Two New Sciences:
Salvadore:: If now the change which takes place when you bend a line at angles so as to form now a square, now an octagon, now a polygon of forty, a hundred, or a thousand angles, is sufficient to bring into actuality the four, eight, forty, hundred, and thousand parts which, according to you, existed at first only potentially in the straight line, may I not say with equal right, that, when I have bent the straight line into a polygon having an infinite number of sides, i.e., into a circle, I have reduced to actuality that infinite number of parts which you claimed, while it was straight, were contained in it only potentially?
Galileo insisted, through his character Salvadore, that the circle was commensurable with the straight line. Despite Nicolaus of Cusas discovery, eighty-odd years earlier, that circular action was of a different species than that of straight-line, linear action, and superior thereto, Galileo insisted, Paolo Sarpi insisted, that a circle could be equated to an infinitely sided polygon. That the mode of generating a circle and a polygon are qualitatively different is to be ignored; for these neo-Aristotelians, hypotheses are not required.
Hobbes betrayed England to Venice, according to Paolo Sarpis design. And Hobbes did it arguing, in De Cive as well as in the Leviathan, that Englands bloody tumult, actually orchestrated from the outside by Venetian intelligence, was proof that Englands civil order must be replaced by an oligarchic dictatorship modeled on that of Venice. The evil Hobbes claimed that the Tudor impulse for statecraft, which had been based on the practice of the French nation in the reign of Louis XI, was proven to be a failure by the middle of the Seventeenth century, because such champions of the nation-state commonwealth as Erasmus, Thomas More, and Jean Bodin had premised their republican policies on a false, idealistic view of man.
The end of the Sixteenth century, through the Seventeenth, was disastrous for England, embracing the downfall of the reactionary Stuarts, Oliver Cromwells misnomered Commonwealth, and the Glorious Revolutionthat final coup detat which brought Venices House of Orange to the English throne. Thomas Hobbes, who lived for nearly a century, was there through much of it, to organize for the cold-blooded application to ethics and civil philosophy of the New Sciences of Galileo Galilei.
Hobbes did not live to see the Glorious Revolution of 1688. John Locke, however, did. Locke, the son of Puritans and a likely personal witness of the beheading of Charles II, took the ideas of Hobbes Leviathan, and elaborated those principles for the purposes of the new and evil British empire. Long before he authored his philosophical Treatises, he had writtten the constitution for Lord Shaftesburys slave colony of South Carolina.
While Sarpi, Hobbes, and Locke were successful in England in suppressing the ideas of Renaissance statecraft and science which were based upon the humanist conception of man in the image of God, those ideas were successfully exported to create the American Republic. Worldwide, humanity has increased its numbers to over five billion souls. Although humanity today may be truly threatened with an Hobbesian nightmare, mans God-given power of creative reason, and the nature of Gods laws, is the means by which we defeat the evil of algebraic classroom mathematics.
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