Beastly
Brute
Bettered?
By
Hobbes-nailed boots!
Thomas Hobbes registers off the scale on the ‘smirk-o-meter’ .. where his greatest contribution to Western philosophy is a typical self-imploding set of contradictions. In an era where Gutenberg had made it possible for anyone who could read to become a blogger (not difficult, ‘mass’ circulation in those days excluded the illiterate masses) Hobbes, finding himself at loose ends, decided he would become a Western philosopher or ‘confidence man’ (the better description.) The recipe is simple; fill a 900 liter bag with verbiage-verbosity (like Bernard-Henry Lévy), slanted as to so incredibly complicate a subject (à la James Joyce), resulting in generations of those less endowed with gifts of BS spending endless semesters wrestling a ‘Leviathan‘, whilst attempting sense of nonsense.
Distilled from Hobbes’ inordinately complex, attempted order of things, his points may be summed up so: In our natural state or in raw ‘nature’, mankind is an inestimable beast prone to every savage act where:
“the life of man [is] solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short”
And in the same moment, without Man’s ‘natural’ understanding, God’s inspirations cannot be known:
“we shouldn’t renounce our senses and experience, or our natural reason, which is the undoubted word of God”
Do you suppose Hobbes actually meant to insinuate understanding derived from a ‘naturally endowed’ beastly nature inspires one to deeper knowledge of God’s message? Is he acknowledging ‘God’s image, man’ is quite naturally possessed of the violence we have seen Englishmen visit upon every culture deemed inferior to their own? Certainly not. If Hobbes were of a proclivity to be honest, he wouldn’t have to bury the contradictions of his culture in a massive circumlocution that can serve no other purpose than to conceal the facts. What we are actually looking at is, the phenomena of Western philosophers burying contradictions in complications, so those contradictions never have to be faced. Hobbes is a master of this common (but patently dishonest) philosophical method.
The result is no surprise, a culturally self-justified, rationalization for an unquestioned, unlimited State authority to rule over men; Hobbes would not only be a supporter of the Divine Right of Kings & colonialism but in today’s world, a modern police state. Hobbes provides apparatus of state with philosophical avenue to know empathy for the Robert Mugabe and Kim Jong-uns’ of this world (as easily, a Barack Obama or his sycophant David Cameron.) They’re all cut from a similar philosophical cloth.
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Ronald Thomas West 