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Philosophical Thought
Reference:

Thomas Hobbes and the Paradoxes of Early Modern Thinking

Maslakov Andrei Sergeevich

PhD in Philosophy

Associate Professor, Department of Philosophy, Moscow Pedagogical University

119991, Russia, g. Moscow, ul. Malaya Pirogovskaya, 1, of. 1

as.maslakov@m.mpgu.edu
Other publications by this author
 

 
Kondrat'eva Svetlana Borisovna

PhD in Philosophy

Associate Professor, Department of Philosophy, Moscow Pedagogical State University

119991, Russia, Moscow, Malaya Pirogovskaya str., 1, office 1

sb.kondrateva@mpgu.su

DOI:

10.25136/2409-8728.2023.3.39882

EDN:

FMVJNL

Received:

02-03-2023


Published:

21-03-2023


Abstract: The object of this work is the philosophy of T. Hobbes in its integrity and unity of its main parts, including logic, the so-called "first philosophy", physics, the doctrine of man, the doctrine of morality, politics and law. The subject is the internal connection of the concept of the Leviathan state with the theory of cognition and ontology in the context of a number of problems of modern epistemology, philosophy and the history of science and the history of philosophy of Modern times. Methodologically, the work is based on a comparative historical approach, hermeneutic analysis of sources, as well as general scientific methods of analogy, generalization, abstraction, systematization, and others.  Results of the study: 1) T. Hobbes is not so much an experimental theorist as a popularizer of science, confident that such popularization in itself can both lead a person to the truth and help solve a number of socio-political problems; 2) Hobbes' attitude radically breaks with a number of provisions of both the philosophy of nature and socio-in the political philosophy of Antiquity, translating the aporicity of the latter into paradoxicity and, as a consequence, antinomianism; 3) T. Hobbes discovers the logically abstract world of science as an analytical-synthetic transformation of the everyday world given in sensation, while the first necessarily generates something third - a world that exists by itself, an unknowable world; this makes him to strictly approach the definitions of the boundaries of knowledge — God, soul, morality and law; 4) the concept of Leviathan solves the problem of the mutual transition of the universal and the individual in a very typical way for early Modern times — through the fundamental paradox of the interaction of the abstract scientific world of science and the "objective" world itself opposed to it; this paradox is one of essential features of philosophy and science of early modern times.


Keywords:

Hobbes, Galileo, Descartes, paradox, antinomy, universal, singular, abstract, concrete, sovereign

This article is automatically translated. You can find original text of the article here.

1. How to make nature speak?The English philosopher of the XVII century Thomas Hobbes does not belong to the characters deprived of research attention.

The flow of publications about him in both domestic and foreign literature has not decreased to this day (see: [1],[2]), his works have been published, reprinted many times and parsed into quotations. Moreover, T. Hobbes is one of those whose philosophical doctrine has long been studied in the framework of educational courses on philosophy as a characteristic example of sensualism and empiricism, mechanismism and materialism, scientism and nominalism of early Modern times.

What new can be said today about this powerful representative of the philosophical thought of the first century of Modern times? And is he so powerful in the context of his era? An empiricist, but only a follower of F. Bacon, who tried to follow both the analytical—deductive and synthetic-inductivist methods, without making a final choice in favor of one or the other. A sensualist-nominalist — but an inconsistent sensualist who has created a completely non-sensualist picture of the world and has not advanced too far in his sensualism, as well as in attempts to build a strictly nominalist system — although in the latter, if desired, one can even see some anticipation of X's ideas. Wolf. The creator of the general idea of the cosmos as a complex body, mechanism — but even here the achievements of T. Hobbes pale against the background of the works of G. Galileo or P. Gassendi, and in the context of the achievements of I. Newton or R. Boyle generally look very sad, representing not so much a new science as traditional natural philosophy. Finally, in the deductive method, to which T. Hobbes, having read the Euclidean "Principles", attached quite great importance, in mathematics, which T. Hobbes greatly respected and which he even tried to study professionally, Hobbes' achievements were almost completely obscured by the powerful figures of R. Descartes and B. Pascal; moreover, some of these achievements and discoveries turned out to be directly disavowed during the subsequent discussions of T. Hobbes with J. Wallace and other members of the Royal Society.

But — the knowledgeable reader will say — there is still his teaching about man, justifying the socio-political and moral theory, there remains the great "Leviathan". Well, indeed, "Leviathan" immortalized both the name of its author and the biblical monster whose name gave it its name — if it were not for the Hobbesian treatise, the Leviathan image would have remained, perhaps, only in the field of research by biblical scholars and theologians [3]. But didn't they write about the social contract before T. Hobbes, starting at least with Cicero? Did not the sophists, Epicurus, and then the contemporary of T. Hobbes, P. Gassendi, who followed the latter, speak about the primacy of the rights of individuals in relation to the law of the state, about the primacy of natural law in relation to public law? Didn 't Zh . talk about the totality and universality of public state power ? Boden, and about the system of treaties as the basis for the prevention of wars and the basis of state and international law - G. Grotius? Or did T. Hobbes become famous only thanks to a brilliantly chosen sonorous metaphor, and this despite the fact that T. Hobbes himself treated metaphors in scientific texts extremely negatively, calling them "abuses of speech" [4, p. 23]?

On the one hand, in the concept of T. Hobbes, many parts, fragments, theses of the concepts of his predecessors really merged together — which caused both his brilliant insights and no less remarkable failures. The whole science of the XVII century stood "on the shoulders of giants", had a transitional form, like the epoch itself, inheriting from previous times a variety of elements and fragments of a variety of theories. On the other hand, T. Hobbes partially transforms these theses and fragments, and partially brings them together in a very special way. Deep traces of individualism can be found in the extant works of sophists or Epicureans — but none of them brought individualism to the consistent confrontation of man against man in the war of all against all. The idea of a social contract was not invented by T. Hobbes — but before him it was mainly used to limit absolutism, and not for its foundation. Finally, the concept of state sovereignty, although it had a very venerable history, was almost always used for the divine justification of power, and not, to use the words of M. Weber, for its total "disenchantment".

This "disenchantment" of both the natural world and the world of politics and morality is of particular interest today. The fact is that the whole, if it can be called that, system of T. Hobbes with all its internal logic and system of evidence describes the reality surrounding a person as reality, a) excluding certain moments, for example, any supernatural; b) absolutely transparent to the human mind. There is no place in the world for something that has a different nature than the world itself. There is nothing in the world but bodies, and spirits are also bodies, only very, very "thin" and permeable (like Aristotelian ether). As for God, it is impossible to talk about Him at all, He can only be named, denoting, however, not Himself, but His incomprehensible nature. Any mention of God thus becomes not a description of some bodily ("really existing") object, but an expression of man's reverence for His power and incomprehensibility. God acts as the limit of cognizability, as the limit of the possibility of reason-reason, as something that you just need to believe in, and not subject to deductive-analytical decomposition or reflection. God is the limit (or rather, one of the limits) at which all questions end. Everything that is within these limits — everything can be known, disclosed and described extremely, simply, clearly and logically. This is how T. Hobbes himself tries to build his system.

This is a fundamental feature of Hobbesian philosophy — and it also acts as one of the common points of early Modern philosophy. The world is transparent to the mind, the world is knowable — this is one of the key attitudes of the era. This idea is already proclaimed by G. Galilei in a number of his works. However, behind the clarity and distinctness there are some paradoxical entities, "paradoxes of understanding", which grew into Kantian antinomies by the middle of the next century (see: [5]). But inside these paradoxes, before the collision with them, the world turns out to be completely knowable and even transformable from the world of motion of bodies ("projectile flight") into the world of simple trajectories of this movement ("conical sections"), from the world of impulses and forces - into the world of functions and formulas, from the world of sensory reality, into a system of synthetic judgments ("laws of nature").

In T. Hobbes, we see the same mechanical world of interaction of moving bodies, passing into the world of geometric constructions (the second and third sections "About the body"), and then the sensory-tangible reality, understood as the self-manifestation of the specified kinetic-geometric scheme (the fourth section "About the body"). This world closes in a gap within its own infinite finiteness and God, understood as the limits of reason, or rather, the boundaries of language (the first section "About the body"). We cannot say (think over) whether the world has boundaries, whether it is infinite in essence (for T. Hobbes, it is infinite as many times exceeding the cognitive capabilities of man), we cannot say that beyond the world, we cannot judge the divine essence, miracles or providence (although we can judge other people's opinions on this matter). All questions end here [6, pp. 208-209].

But why, according to T. Hobbes, should the question of the limits of the possibility of human cognition be raised again? What are the results of past eras? What are the achievements of science before the era of the "great restoration of sciences" (F. Bacon)? T. Hobbes characterizes Greek "science" as "fraudulent and unscrupulous" [6, p. 68]. Christianity took a lot from this "science" and created a kind of hybrid of one and the other (scholasticism arose, compared by T. Hobbes with the famous Empusa-Empusa). So the fantasy, uncertainty and inconsistency of antiquity entered into the teaching about truth and God and mixed with it. It is this, T. Hobbes believes, that gave rise to unprecedented religious strife and disputes, religious wars, including those of which T. Hobbes was a contemporary, and the English Revolution with the Civil War, which, as is known, had a strong religious basis.

What exactly happened? The fact that useless metaphysics, which represents delusions and absurd fantasies about the world order, turned out to be mixed with religion, that is, faith in the supernatural, faith in God. Religion began to talk about nature, and the doctrine of nature brought discussions into the truths of faith, where there should be no discussions at all. Thus, the removal of everything supernatural from nature is the first and most important task of the new science.

Such a suspension, of course, is not enough — it is necessary to rebuild science itself, in fact, to create it anew. Only then will science be able — within its capabilities — to express knowledge about nature and its laws. This is how T. Hobbes sees his task as a representative of the scientific community of his time. Actually, the Hobbesian system is aimed at solving precisely this task — to find out the boundaries of the known world and the possibility of knowing the truth. This is the rational world of a rational person, in which a person can know everything. Since this world has a limitation of being (not objectively, but subjectively), there is always a place for God — although outside of this world. Therefore, even the most reasonable person cannot but believe in God, rigidly separating, however, God from the world where rational laws prevail. These laws, discovered by man, however, are only general statements about nature, they are conditional in their content and can be challenged in the course of discussion by the same rational subjects-researchers. God is the first absolutely transcendent to the world. The first, but certainly not the only one.

Within these boundaries, the scientist acts as a speaker on behalf of nature, on behalf of things. The voice of a scientist sounds within these boundaries, the voice of science sounds within these boundaries. Giving things a voice is the implicit attitude of the science of the new era. More precisely, a scientist, through certain rational procedures, including training, must speak on behalf of nature itself, become an exponent of its truth. I do not speak on my own behalf, but nature speaks through me — any natural scientist of the XVII century could have said after T. Hobbes (see [7]). A scientist becomes a representative of nature, expressing the truth on her behalf (knowledge is true if it corresponds to reality — knowledge (utterance) is true if it is carried out on behalf of nature, and not a scientist (a scientist as a representative of nature, speaking on her behalf). In the scientist, nature sees the translation of truth into human language, and since it is a human language, nature here acts as a silent subject, although it is able to act contrary to the representative.

Thus, a scientist must learn to speak not on behalf of man, but on behalf of nature, and his speech must be natural speech. True, the question remains what exactly happens in this case with nature itself and what exactly it turns into, but that's another question.  And if G. Galileo and others put physics and the science of nature on their feet, then T. Hobbes strives to put the science of morality, the state and law on their feet [6, pp. 68-69].

So, our thinking has boundaries — as well as the cognizable world in all its manifestations. The boundaries of thinking for T. Hobbes are closely related to the boundaries and possibilities of language. Beyond these boundaries, all questions of the cognizable subject end. Another such boundary for T. Hobbes is the Leviathan state, to which a person should also have no questions. There is no point in asking what is supernatural. There is no point in asking why this or that law is established. There is no place for knowledge and reasoning here, and human behavior is completely determined by the external, at first glance, will of the sovereign.

T. Hobbes proves this extremely consistently, rationally logically. But for whom does he cite these proofs? Who needs to understand the boundaries of the world in order to be able to know it within these boundaries? For those, says T. Hobbes, who like to ask questions.  the fairness of government. The question is asked both about the world order and about the structure of the state. Many people consider themselves entitled to judge whether the state is properly managed or not. Yes, the state is based on fear — but this fear is quite rational, this fear serves as an additional limitation of the mind. That is why there is no place for the supernatural in the Hobbesian world, that is why the state should carry out education and fight against superstitions — after all, as L. Strauss noted, the fear of invisible forces is stronger than the fear of violent death, as long as people believe in these invisible forces [8, p. 190].

Let's answer the question once again, who is this person asking questions, poking his nose into the affairs of public administration, forcing rulers to justify themselves? This is a contemporary of Hobbes, a man of a rational mindset, a man experienced in the sciences and aware of their successes, in short, a man who loves knowledge, aspires to the truth and wants to find it in all areas of reality, including morality and politics. It is this man who makes rulers justify themselves, not rule. It is this person who makes necessary the very fact of the appearance of "Leviphan" and the rest of T. Hobbes' works on the same topic. It is he who needs to explain the rational foundations of subordination to the sovereign — fortunately, he no longer believes in spirits and divine messengers, he critically perceives religious dogmas, he wants to reach everything with his mind, he tries to measure everything with the power of his critical analytical-sitetic mind, which has reached such heights in the natural sciences.

T. Hobbes confronts such a person with a contradiction (to want to remain in a natural state with all rights and die in a war of all against all or to live), which cannot be resolved logically: you want to live, but you can only get out of the natural state by refusing (transferring) rights, that is. the creation of Leviathan, that is, the denial of oneself. Here we have one of the beginnings of Hobbesian paradoxes.

 

2. Who are you, Mr. Hobbes?In the literature about T. Hobbes, two trends can be distinguished — either we have a single system in front of us, passing a red line in all texts (an example of such a position is K.

Skinner [9]), or the complete autonomy of political philosophy in relation to natural philosophy (here L. Strauss [8] can be taken as an example); moreover, both positions are very well justified by direct references to the texts of Hobbes himself, [10],[11, pp. 30-31]. Within the framework of these positions, the paradox of Hobbesian theory actually disappears. In order to assess the correctness of the adherents of certain positions, it is necessary to evaluate the very figure of T. Hobbes and the place of his works in the general system of philosophy and science of the first half of the XVII century.

Of course, we will not find Galilean and Cartesian heights in the works of T. Hobbes — T. Hobbes is a sufficiently superficial physicist and mathematician and a smart enough person to, knowing his knowledge in these areas, not go deep into them. Hobbes uses the mathematical method and Galilean calculations not so much for new discoveries as for creating a whole picture of the world. T. Hobbes is not a research scientist, like G. Galileo, R. Boyle or I. Newton - he is a teacher and popularizer. We know a lot about the work of his mentor, for example, the young Cavedish or, later, Prince Charles of Wales, but nothing is known about his own observations and experiments. We know about his social circle, which included P. Gassendi, R. Descartes and, occasionally, even G. Galileo, but we do not know the independent scientific research of T. Hobbes, his experiments and observations, as well as works on this topic. T. Hobbes is a philosopher, a metaphysician in the full sense of the word (as, for example, in the following century k . Wolf), and not a scientist. The successes of metaphysics against the background of the successes of natural science of that period do not always look as impressive [12, p. 90-97].

The task of T. Hobbes is to systematize and generalize the array of knowledge already available at that time in the field of both natural sciences and in the field of politics and ethics. This systematization — and T. Hobbes does not hide this — is scientific [13]. T. Hobbes explains it this way: "Since, however, teaching means nothing more than leading the mind of the learner along the path traversed by the learner himself in the process of research to the knowledge of what he found, then the method of proof will not differ from the method of research, except that the first part of this method, namely the logical operation by which we ascend from the sensory perceptions of things to general principles, should be discarded" [6, 129]. T. Hobbes does not show the path of scientific discovery itself [14, p. 187] and only occasionally demonstrates in this T. Hobbes shows the result that science had already achieved by that time.

So, the way of T. Hobbes is the way of systematization and systematic presentation of scientific knowledge. This systematization is carried out by means of reason and is carried out in such a way that after it there should be no questions and no blank spaces. T. Hobbes himself reconstructs his own methodology of systematization as follows: the beginning is the simplest definitions, intuitively self-evident to the mind, from which deductively (according to T. Hobbes — synthetically) all the rest of the content is deduced. We see an example of such deduction in the work "About the Body": space-time (as everything external to the subject), the body (as the content of the external space-time (as "taking place" or "extension")), the body itself as a quantity (something that does not change relative to the subject), movement and its diversity. At the same time, T. Hobbes almost does not follow the analytical method, which he also described in great detail, which made it possible for some researchers to refuse to use it at all [15, p. 63]. This is quite understandable — the analytical method is necessary, according to Hobbes, at the initial stage of research, but not at the stage of formulating results and, moreover, transferring knowledge. Although Hobbes, I must say, still demonstrates the work of analytics - in particular, when the variety of properties and accidents of the whole body decomposes both into the movements of the body itself and its constituent and surrounding space particles.

As befits an educated person who travels a lot and has a wide range of intellectual communication, T. Hobbes was aware of all the novelties of modern natural science. But here the main work on the creation of new knowledge has already been done — in astronomy by N. Copernicus, in physics by G. Galileo, in physiology and anatomy by W. Harvey. For himself, T. Hobbes sees the field of activity in, as we would say today, socio—humanitarian knowledge - in ethics, jurisprudence, political sociology. However, it is impossible to build a science of society as a system without including it in the system of all the basic sciences. By the forties of the XVII century, the scientific community here had quite a consensus. On the other hand, T. Hobbes, as a teacher, could not help but think not only about the system-integral, but also about the methodological aspect of his general course.

The goal of T. Hobbes is to build such a system of knowledge about nature, man, society, and morality in order to stop all possible disputes on these topics. On the other hand, T. Hobbes constantly makes a reservation that he is ready to listen to objections, is ready for discussions and does not pretend to the ultimate truth. This move is completely logical — T. Hobbes is not trying to prove anything to anyone and is not going to prove anything — the truth itself must appear to every inquisitive mind that reads his works impartially. Why? By virtue of complete clarity and evidence. The author, who has stated the truths according to the specified requirements, no longer has to provide evidence — his work will do everything for him and say his work in its clear logical form. "Let your thinking (if you want to work seriously on philosophy) rise above the chaotic abyss of your reasoning and experiments. Everything chaotic should be decomposed into its component parts, and the latter should be distinguished from each other, and each part, having received its corresponding designation, should take its firm place. In other words, a method corresponding to the order of creation of things themselves is needed. [4, c. 71]»

So, T. Hobbes came to put everything on the shelves [4, c 471], to expand the full picture of science in clear and understandable definitions and constructions. True, T. Hobbes does not suspect (at least, in the 1730s-1740s) that the scientific revolution taking place before his eyes has not so much already taken place (in the person of G. Galileo and R. Descartes) as it is taking place — and it will end only in the next century after the creation and substantiation of the Newtonian theory and the Newtonian paradigm based on it. But T. Hobbes is ready to admit such openness and incompleteness only for the science of morality and politics — here he sees a space for his own creativity - however, for natural science, complete completeness must come when all the foundations of science are stated clearly, logically, systematically, in other words, until they become the content not of discussions, but of textbooks in which all discussions have already been completed and are present at best in a filmed form.

T. Hobbes addresses the topic of the state, law and justice in at least three published works known to us — "On the Political Body" (1640, published in 1650 together with "Human Nature"), "On the Citizen" (1642) and "Leviathan" (1651). At the same time, textual and even the semantic differences between the texts are not too significant, which allows us to conclude that Hobbes originally thought out the whole concept at the time of its formation, that is, by the beginning of the 1740s.

On the other hand, this textual and semantic closeness between all these works cannot but cause surprise: why create new works on the same topic, which do not differ, in general, from those already published? Moreover, the difference between the release of the second (Amsterdam) edition of "On the Citizen" (1647) and the writing and publication of "Leviathan" (1651) is literally several years, which also accounts for Hobbes' serious illness, which almost cost him his life [16]. Hobbes himself notes that for the sake of Leviathan, he had to postpone work on the fundamental treatise "On the Body", which is the first — onto-epistemological part of his entire philosophical system [4, pp. 544-545]. What's the rush? What is the need for this?

"Leviathan" is written by Hobbes conditionally in 1649-1651. This is the time of the proclamation of the English Republic, called in the original "Commonwealth of England". Similarly, the Commonwealth (in Russian translation — the state) — Hobbes calls his Leviathan. By 1651, the civil war had effectively ended, and the closest claims to the throne of Charles II were finally buried in the Battle of Wurster. In the same year, 1651, an amnesty was declared. In this context, Hobbes' work comes out, designed, by the way, for the mass English reader and for this reason published in English. This is no longer a work "About a Citizen", released in a small edition for a narrow circle of near-Mersenne intellectuals. But who, then, was this mass reader of T. Hobbes? Of course, the independent who emerged victorious from the events of the "Great Rebellion", embodied as much as possible in the person of the future Lord Protector O. Cromwell, otherwise the former teacher of the legitimate heir to the throne would hardly have opened up so easily even under the conditions of the declared amnesty. The word "Leviathan" on the cover seemed to be a kind of marker, a sign easily read by a mass reader brought up to read the Bible. The logic and rigor of the presentation was the guarantee that the truths contained in the treatise would reach their addressees — enlightened minds of their time and just smart people reading. At the same time, the central image of Hobbesian philosophy is still interpreted with the same grounds as religious [17],[18] and completely atheistic [19, pp. 7-20].

Like the later works "On the Body" and "On Man", as well as the earlier ones "On Citizenship" and "Human Nature", "Leviathan" was supposed to serve the main task of T. Hobbes: the eradication of disputes and strife in morality, politics, religion at the expense of clarity, logic and simplicity of presentation. Such disputes, as mentioned above, according to T. Hobbes, are something that should be avoided categorically. "In general, we can talk about two kinds of disputes. The first concerns spiritual questions, that is, questions of faith, which are questions about the nature and mission of Christ, about rewards and punishments in the future life, about the resurrection, about the nature and functions of angels, about the sacraments, about an external cult, etc. The second concerns questions of human knowledge, the truth of which is established with the help of natural reason by syllogisms, based on agreements established by people, and definitions, that is, based on values accepted in practice with general agreement; these are all questions of law and philosophy " [6, pp. 489-490]. Where our mind has its limit, there is a place of faith and only faith. It is necessary to accept without any doubt, as has been said, what is written in Scripture [6, ss. 496, 554-555]. In the same place where Scripture is silent (or directly indicates this silence) — it is necessary to obey the sovereign, if it concerns issues of morality, justice and law.

Question — why can't we know anything about morality and law? How not to fall into the absurd in the study of such a serious area? And is it possible to investigate it? T. Hobbes' answer is that there is nothing to explore here. Our business is not to judge religion, morality, law, but to trust the Holy Scripture (as good advice) and the sovereign (as law)! However, T. Hobbes, of course, is not limited to a simple statement of this fact. Yes, we cannot know these areas — but we can, and even are obliged (!) to philosophically substantiate the reason for this impossibility. And here the question rests on the question of price. In the field of natural sciences, the price of error is simply absurdity or ignorance (if we ultimately reject all science and remain at the level of ordinary knowledge), but in the field of law and morality, the price of error and absurdity is war. T. Hobbes does not claim that the sovereign knows how to govern and where to lead the state, here, as in the case of Scripture, it makes no sense to ask questions [6, p. 503]. But to say that this is the limit of our knowledge is not enough — we need to explain it, justify it, show it.

At the same time, T. Hobbes justifies another thesis — the thesis of the autonomy of religion and politics. A Christian can be free even in a non-Christian state, because for a Christian the most important thing is faith, a faith that, in the face of endless disputes and intellectual temptations, it is impossible to keep pure, it is impossible not to mix with metaphysics, giving rise to the notorious "Empusa". On the other hand, T. Hobbes insists that the Kingdom of God is a fundamentally different reality, which is fundamentally not here and not now, so transcendent an sich that it makes no sense to compare it with our bodily world at all [10]. However, I will leave this problem out of the brackets, as far as possible — the issues of religion are not the main ones in this study.

So, the system of T. Hobbes is logical, clear, transparent, convincing — so convincing that the work "About the Citizen" has already caused P. Gassendi's delight. However, in the field of natural science and science in general, the Hobbesian system has a serious rival — and this is no longer Aristotle (in Hobbes' eyes defeated by N. Copernicus and G. Galileo), but none other than R. Descartes. The polemic of T. Hobbes with R. Descartes (1640-1641) over objections to "Reflections ..." is a special case here. Hobbes consciously seeks to build a system of knowledge not on Cartesian grounds, but on principles directly opposite to them. It is within the framework of this polemic, which preceded the first serious works of Hobbes ("On the Citizen" will be written in about a year), that Hobbes' so-called materialism is born and perfected.

 

3. The tradition of antiquityFor a better understanding of T. Hobbes' innovation in socio—humanitarian issues in the context of the science of his time, it is necessary to recall the tradition against which T. Hobbes and all New European science are most actively opposed - the tradition of Antiquity, most vividly represented by the works of Plato and Aristotle.

Of particular interest here is that the ethico-political concept here (as with T. Hobbes) is built as part of the ontological concept, and ontology and epistemology directly turn into politics and ethics. The main question here is what exactly makes people unite into a single policy organization, why is a person a "social animal", how exactly is a person defined within this organization?

Paradoxically, the problem itself is realized here in a similar concrete historical situation - in the conditions of the crisis of one system of public relations (polis democracy) and the formation of the foundations of a new system (Hellenistic monarchy). The crisis in society, as it often happens, overlapped with the intellectual crisis associated with the problem of understanding the existence of a single object in the context of general laws. The pre-Socratic epoch did not radically raise the question of the status of the universal, solving it substantively and ontologically. The appearance of sophists, who posed this question with an edge, marked the beginning of a new understanding of it. The sophistic attitude destroyed every universal as much as possible in favor of a single, concrete, individual person. In those cases when she did not destroy it, she radically questioned it. Socrates was one of the first to recognize the danger of such an installation. Plato and Aristotle continued the work of Socrates. The main question here is formulated approximately as follows: if a person is really "the measure of all things", then what is the ontological status of what unites people into one whole, that is, the state and its laws? At the same time, the issue, being resolved at the level of politics, always reveals itself in ontology ("Timaeus"), and vice versa — revealing itself in an ontological context ("Metaphysics", "Physics") inevitably leads to the sphere of interaction of people at the level of a systemic organization.

In the Platonic state, the unification of people takes place on the basis of their "essences", those mythical "metals" that are "mixed" into people during their emergence from clay. Essence is an internal property of a person that defines him entirely throughout his life, but is usually unknown to the person himself. This is the subject of the last myth set forth in the last, tenth, book of the "State" - the so—called myth of the Pamphlet Era, a myth that tells about the choice of souls of their earthly destinies - that is, in fact, about the task of a certain essence of man (man is always soul and body taken in unity, and not just the soul), after birth subjected to oblivion (Lete). Actually, the task of a person becomes the memory of this essence, which is actually what the famous "know yourself" boils down to. But a person is able to do this only among other people — no seclusion, no isolation will not only help in this, they will completely close the desired path. Socrates worked on this with mayeutics, irony and dialogue. Plato continues to work on this with dialectics.

The beginning of the Platonic dialogue "The State" (all references to [20]) is well known to everyone — we are talking about the possibility of a just and happy life, more precisely, about a life where both attributes would be harmoniously combined (329 c-e). Then Socrates turns the conversation to the polis state, explaining that it is easier to consider these issues on the example of the state (the systemic unity of citizens existing on the basis of the law) (as if "with an increase") than on the example of a single person. The reason for this lies in the fact that each specific individual person is destined by "nature" for one thing, for one particular occupation, in which he can succeed. By doing many things at once, a person risks not succeeding anywhere, but getting lost in this diversity. Thus, each person needs many and the number of these "many" is determined initially by the number of needs: each need requires a specific master who satisfies it. Then the problem of guardians and rulers of philosophers arises and a three-part social structure is justified, which, of course, is not class in the modern sense, since social statuses are not inherited here. Having finished talking about the foundations of the state and its structure, Plato talks about the problem of the destruction of the state (after all, everything created by man is not eternal and mortal), which is associated with a violation in the order of procreation. But how does the disrupted order of childbearing lead to degradation from the "right state", in which everyone is happy, to tyranny, in which no one is happy, even the tyrant?

The fact is that not only a strictly defined process of procreation (that is, the process, in fact, of purely material and bodily reproduction) allows you to keep under control the structure of the policy that was so carefully built earlier. In addition, the most important function of rulers (and in fact, another aspect of the same function) is to determine for each person a place in the general system of social groups, in the general space of the policy, depending, as you know, initially on certain talents and talents, on the appointment of a person, on his essence. Another function of rulers (and the state as a whole) is the education of citizens, that is, training in the use of the abilities of the soul ("essence") for good, and not for evil. Plato, however, speaks in this context only about rulers and guardians as the most important groups-estates in functional terms, but, as you know, the third layer, characterized by the predominance of the sensual principle (that is, there is no bright mind or will here), in general, Plato is of little interest. In the case of the third layer, deviations are not as dangerous as in the case of the guardians, and violations of the guardians are not as fatal as those of the rulers. Thus, the destruction of the state does not begin with the predominance of an excess of the population among merchants and artisans, but due to the fact that due to the violation of the order of childbearing, an excess of the guardian class arises, and because of this excess in the guardian class, the ruler suddenly turns out to be not the ruler, but the guardian. This is how timocracy begins and everything that follows it. With each new round of disintegration, more and more citizens are losing their places. Tyranny is a total loss of places by everyone, it is a total forgetting of themselves, their fate, their topos — the very one whose essence is so figuratively explained in that very final myth about the Era.

Thus, the state acts as a system of places where all citizens of the policy are distributed (of course, we are not talking about non-citizens as unreasonable beings). Everyone becomes himself only in his own place, because only in this way does he not only understand and know his pre—conceived essence at birth, but also realizes it in full - through social practice aimed at the good. In this sense, an individual person a) is initially part of the whole through his essence, which always implies incompleteness and insufficiency, and, therefore, the need for another; b) realizes himself in this whole and only through this whole, revealing universal being through his singular existence — that is, realizes himself as truth. This is the essence of justice — in a person's agreement with himself and with others, whereas injustice is in the exact opposite (352 a—c). The task of a politician-philosopher, once again, is to build a system capable of giving everyone his place in accordance with his essence and educating him accordingly. The childbearing crisis here is only a symbol of human imperfection — nothing more.

Another mythological and metaphorical image of the state is offered in "Politics", where the politician as the head of state is likened to a weaver spinning weft and warp (i.e., threads of different quality, different essence) in a certain order that ensures the strength and quality of the fabric. Of course, there can be no question of a contract or any artificiality here - people are woven into a single whole on the basis of a natural law, their own essence, and not someone's opinion.

In Aristotle's "Politics" of this kind of Platonic constructions we will not find, which is no wonder: Aristotle, within the framework of his methodology, tries not to take the universal for granted, not to tear it away from the individual within the framework of a special reality "beyond the cave", but to describe it as present here and now, in a world accessible to everyone. The Aristotelian polis is not in the smart world, but inside each really existing state-community, manifesting itself in one way or another. However, Aristotle also insists that the state, by its being basis, is primary in relation to the family or settlement and differs from them in that the law that distributes civil rights and duties in it plays not an accidental, but an essential role. Only within the space of the law does a citizen become a full-fledged person, that is, a rational being.

Both Plato and Aristotle, thus, man appears as a being originally social. A person attains ontological completeness only in the society of his own kind. Even the presence of reason only makes it possible for an anthropoid being to be a man (a man in potency), but does not guarantee his being in re (an actual person). Tyranny, on the other hand, as the least perfect way of polis organization, acquires special significance in this sense as a society in which no one can take their own place, since everyone takes someone else's.

E. Gilson writes about understanding the essence of man in this way  Plato and Aristotle " With their (Plato and Aristotle — auth.) from the point of view, an isolated act, good or bad, is of no interest to a moralist if it does not correlate with some permanent quality of the subject, with a stable disposition, which, by virtue of its very stability, has a lasting effect on him and should rightfully be included in his definition" [21, pp. 438-439].

However, the problem here is not limited only to the topic of human-society interaction. As I have already had the opportunity to point out above, it is logically projected into ontology and epistemology, becoming one of the core themes of philosophical creativity in general. This is most clearly manifested in the problem of movement, elaborated in detail by Aristotle as part of his continuation and overcoming of Platonism. The theory of "place" occupies a very important position in Aristotelian dynamics as the basis of the theory of motion in general. Dynamics in Aristotle actually acts as one of the foundations not only of cosmology, but also of ontology in general. I will briefly note its main points, widely described in the research literature (e.g.: [14, pp. 213-215],[22]).

Firstly, the movement can be perfect (eternal) and imperfect (temporary), and the first will necessarily be circular (as an eternal return to the same point from which it begins), and the second — rectilinear, having a beginning and an end. The first movement is the movement of the Sun and planets around the Earth, but in fact, only the second movement can be called a real movement, because the perfect movement in a circle does not represent any changes, being only an endless repetition of the same. Perfection has no sense to move — and therefore the Aristotelian Cosmos as a whole, as well as the Mind-Prime Mover, which is actually identical to it, is motionless.

Secondly, the movement can be natural (having a cause in itself) and violent. Natural motion is, for example, the already mentioned motion of the planets. But especially interesting is the movement to the so-called "natural place", for example, the fall of a stone from a height (as the movement of the "earth", of which the stone is a part, to the "place of the earth", that is, the center of the Earth), which stops when this "natural place" is reached. A violent movement is a movement in which an object leaves a "natural place", for example, when throwing a stone up. A special role in natural and violent movements is played by the environment that supports the second and, relatively speaking, makes way for the first. In the void, movement, by itself, is impossible.

Thirdly, movement is carried out in the world ontologically strictly defined both in terms of completeness and in terms of the rootedness of all objects of this world in their places. The cosmos is something absolutely oriented according to the "top-center-bottom" scheme. This orientation presupposes an absolute system of places for everything that exists and sets the very nature of movement — natural or unnatural, circular or rectilinear, infinite or finite, ending when the being reaches its own place (essence).

We are interested in the above-mentioned "natural places", after reaching which the body or object stops moving. The space of the universe, therefore, is not so much a space for movement in various directions, as an absolutely infinite continuum in which each body is assigned a place determined by its essence, understood in this context quite broadly. The cosmos is arranged in such a way that the body cannot but occupy its own place in it corresponding to its essence-usia. The body moves, on the one hand, it itself (the essence), on the other hand, the environment of the Cosmos. How every body strives to occupy its own (and only its own, singular!) a place in the Aristotelian universe, and this aspiration is set by the very structure of this universe, in which any individual is already initially included in the universal, and a person in the Aristotelian-Platonic state occupies his own place, determined by his essence (soul) in accordance with his rights and obligations under the law.

The method itself in the latter case — whether it is Platonic distribution of citizens by rulers within a polis organization, whether it is Aristotelian self—determination of citizens in the conditions of polis self-organization - does not matter in principle. It is important that the essence of a person is determined by his social position within the policy, and this position acts as an important moment of the essence itself, allowing you to identify the latter, and, therefore, make a person happy. After all, happiness is nothing else than to live your own life, your own essence, to be yourself — and, therefore, to be in the truth. Justice does indeed become something that is "fit for power" (339c), but only if this power is also true in itself — that is, it is in its own place. The whole universal becomes a condition for the phenomenon of the individual.

 

4. The world in which Leviathan livesThe scientific revolution of the beginning of the XVII century began to build a new world on the ruins of the picture of the world of previous eras, although borrowing some elements of the construction of the old world. T. Hobbes already thinks quite within the framework of this new world.

He is not its builder, he is rather the compiler of a guide to its brilliant halls and grand staircases, or even the author of the operating instructions (as befits a teacher, as I discussed in detail above).

Ontology and epistemology in one form or another are present in all the expositions of T. Hobbes' political concept, except, perhaps, the work "On the Citizen", due to the fact that it itself was conceived as the third, final, part of the vast "Foundations of Philosophy". Even in Leviathan, despite the reservation that "to understand the issues treated in this book, knowledge of the natural cause of sensation (that is, the device of objective reality — auth.) is not very necessary... in order to develop each part of my present system, I will briefly outline [it] here" [4, p. 9].

For T. Hobbes, as an empirical sensualist, the source of all ideas (or thoughts, that is, the content of thinking) for him is experience, reduced to sensations. As for all subsequent empiricists, up to D. Hume, for him, in principle, there can be nothing in the representation that once would not have been in one form or another in sensations. However, his experience is not yet a direct source of knowledge — experience is rather a source of prudence, what today could be called the "experience of everyday life", which is also characteristic of animals, allowing them to navigate more or less tolerably in the world around them. Knowledge is based not so much on experience as on reasoning, and on strict and correct reasoning. Thus, in Hobbesian epistemology we find the decisive role of the sign-symbolic system and logic, which is also well known — T. Hobbes is traditionally characterized as a nominalist [23, pp. 670-673].

Here we overcame an important point of everything considered in the work of T. Hobbes. The fact is that for the English thinker there is a very clear, although not always so clearly defined division of the human world into the world of sensually-given, everyday-everyday and the world in a certain way rationally-organized. These worlds are connected to each other, but they do not pass into each other. It is one thing for an ordinary person to perceive surrounding objects, use them in his practice, designate them in one way or another, reproduce them in memory or report them to another person. Another thing is a person who approaches the world from the standpoint of science, sees the world in the light of the provisions of science, describes it according to the requirements of science. Despite the fact that reasoning and reflection (i.e., deducing other judgments from some judgments) is inherent in almost every person, not every person is able to see the world in a different light, in a different quality — this requires training and special internal discipline.

The rational-rational world of science differs from the world of everyday life, first of all, by order and, consequently, by the presence of certain rules. T. Hobbes begins the presentation of the scientific picture of the world with logic, quite, by the way, in the spirit of Aristotle, interpreting it as a set of rules and laws of operations with words (names), judgments and conclusions. Here, as the overwhelming majority of commentators and interpreters rightly point out, T. Hobbes actually leaves the soil of empiricism and argues as a consistent rationalist. Hobbes' logic, according to him, ignites the "light of reason" [6, p. 71]. But what exactly is this light?

The logic of T. Hobbes does not contain any fundamental differences from the logic of Aristotle [24, pp. 121, 134, 138], except, perhaps, that its basic unit is not a judgment, but a name, which can also be positive and negative. The law of contradiction thus turns out to be contained in the very act of naming. This fully corresponds to the spirit of T. Hobbes' logic, which recognizes the existence of an individual language (labels) on a par with intersubjective language (signs). However, the rest of Hobbes' logic looks quite traditional — the ignition of the "light of reason" here is not so much in some fundamental innovations (which is rather rare for T. Hobbes at the level of ontology), as in a special discipline of reason. It is not enough to use words to enhance the possibilities of memory and imagination — it is necessary to use them in accordance with their inner essence, immanent rules. The rules are autonomous in relation to the world (i.e., the content of judgments) — as any language is autonomous in relation to the world, which T. Hobbes emphasizes repeatedly.

In the same way — strictly according to the rules! — T. Hobbes begins to build further a general picture of the world, starting with the laws of motion: space-time, bodies with extension and motion, rectilinear and circular motion, etc. This is how the world of science appears before us — created by rules and described according to rules, and therefore accessible to any mind that knows these rules and is ready to observe these rules in its reasoning.

The world of science or the rational-rational "scientific world" is the world of classical mechanics — the world of bodies moving in space along geometric trajectories, acting on each other. This world is different from the world given in sensations. Firstly, bodies objectively have only two accidents — magnitude and motion, subjectively perceived as extension and time; all other qualities are subjective, generated by our sense organs. Secondly, in the world of science, bodies move in empty space, whereas in the ordinary sensible world (partially described by T. Hobbes in the section "Physics") there is no emptiness [6, pp. 210-211]. Finally, thirdly, the whole in sensations is more primary than the parts, whereas in science the causes as parts of the whole manifest themselves before the whole [6, pp. 119-120]. Paradoxicity is already beginning to be seen here — but so far only in the form of aporicity, which was abundantly enough in antiquity — when the world of thought is opposed to the external, doxic world, even if directly given in sensations.

Sensations, therefore, initially represent a chaos of perceptions, images, thoughts, memories, foresight. The language itself is a chaos of names, sentences, conclusions. The thoughts that follow directly after the sensations are the elements and chaos. In order to think the world "scientifically" and express it in the same orderly and correct way, thoughts and language must rise above chaos, be cleansed of spontaneity. But can we put in order the chaos of sensations and images that endlessly replace each other, overshadow and strengthen? Spontaneously, such a world is possible when thinking is captured by some passion. But passion is only an external, accidental goal — the scientific approach assumes a rationally conscious embedding of the "scientific world", its ordering, its preservation from chaos and disorder.

T. Hobbes specifically speaks about the emergence of the "scientific world" in the sixth chapter of the work "On the Body", devoted to methodology — nowhere else does he dwell on these issues in such detail in the works of the 40-50s. The method of T. Hobbes is a synthesis of analytical and synthetic methods. The analytical method works to create the foundation of the scientific world, to radically transform the world of sensations, the purpose of which is to identify simple undifferentiated elements from all the diversity of sensually-given reality, the definitions of which become the basis of the new world, while the synthetic method serves as a kind of rule for the construction of walls, ceilings and roofs on the already laid foundation. This point is extremely important, because it becomes a guarantee of the truth of the scientific picture of the world and the correctness of its construction — by analogy with geometry, where the demonstrative clarity of axioms and initial definitions acts as such a guarantee.

The world of science, therefore, initially has its foundations in itself, whereas the world of sensations appears, on the one hand, as a secondary world generated by an external force to us, and therefore "we extract from them [sensations] only particular, not general judgments; it is impossible to deduce theorems from them" [6, p. 192]. On the other hand, it is sensations that give us "knowledge of fact", which, according to T. Hobbes, is absolute, unlike scientific knowledge, "knowledge of causes", which is always conditional and is built according to the scheme "if ... then ...". Here the Hobbesian train of thought resembles the reasoning of G. Galileo, with whose works (at least, with the "Dialogue on the Two most Important Systems of the World") T. Hobbes was quite familiar.

Many researchers [5, pp. 220-221],[14, pp. 220-225] have repeatedly emphasized the fact that the Galilean methodology defines the methodological role of experience in a very peculiar way. A consistent empiricist in his works is rather an opponent of Galilean ideas — the peripatetic Simplicio, who constantly makes references to sensory experience as a witness in favor of the truth of a particular concept (in this case, Aristotelian). For G. Galileo, it is important to show that the experience itself (for example, the experience with the fall of a stone from a height) cannot testify to anything at all — for such a testimony, the experience must be radically changed, transformed, reformatted virtually beyond recognition. G. Galileo is absolutely right in this case — the singular in itself is by no means Thus, it can neither testify in favor of the universal law, nor oppose it simply because of its uniqueness, which, by the way, Plato already spoke about in a different context. In order for the individual to be able to fulfill this function, it is necessary to consider the individual in the context of the universal — in the context of a particular picture of the world as such. G. Galileo poses the question as follows — what exactly should we see if the system of N. Copernicus, and not Aristotle, is true? What kind of picture should appear before our eyes if we see not a single fact in itself, but the whole overall picture as a whole [5, pp. 226-227] [25, 148-150]? At the same time, this picture must be given and unfolded in a certain way — unfolded in an endless chain of thought experiments, unfolded in thought, unfolded in word. It cannot be said that this picture is an abstraction opposed to reality — this is reality itself, but reality is not spontaneously given, not accidentally found, but discovered in a certain discursive rational way as some initial "obvious" unity of reason and its content.

Approximately the same course of reasoning we find in T. Hobbes, though not in such a detailed form: T. Hobbes is still not an experimental scientist. The world of sensory perceptions is a world that is given to us directly, but which cannot be unequivocally trusted, while T. Hobbes categorically refuses to blame nature for this deception. It is not nature that deceives, which gives information in sensations, but a person who makes incorrect conclusions from it and incorrectly fixes his thoughts in sentences is deceived. Therefore, the world of immediate reality, the world of sensation, as already mentioned above, needs a fairly rigorous verification procedure and analytical reformulation — during which, ideally, it should move into the rational world of science. It is in this "world of science" that both the Hobbesian Leviathan-sovereign and the person who generates it, equal to another person, live.

Now let's return to the problem of language. T. Hobbes insists that initially the world given and described in the word and the world given directly in sensations are autonomous. The word expresses nothing in the thing — it only represents it, replaces it, points to it, nothing more. Such a word cannot have any ontological status, although the use of the word, in order to avoid absurdity, should be carefully oriented with its meaning. On the other hand, the word serves primarily as a means of transmitting information, a means of communication, which also imposes a certain restriction on the arbitrary use of words — I must express myself in such a way as to be understood by others.

Another point directly related to Hobbesian nominalism. The fact is that there are (in the simplest sense of the word) only single objects given in sensation. However, everyone knows that verbal descriptions, even the most elementary ones, cannot but use general concepts. Thus, at first glance, it turns out to be complete nonsense: the world of science, the very true world that we build in the word, not only does not exist, but its truth also turns out to be problematic, built on itself and logically closed to itself. This is another aspect of the interaction of the individual and the universal. It cannot be said that T. Hobbes solves this problem in a detailed and consistent manner, but there is a solution in his system, because without the latter, it all begins to visibly crack at the seams.

The fact is that the connection between language and things is natural in itself — inside a person's daily practice, being organically woven into this practice. A person initially used language not at all to create a scientific picture of the world, but for communication and exchange of information in the process of joint life activity, as well as more effective preservation of information accumulated in the process of the same life activity. Hobbes explains this in a well-known fragment of Leviathan (chapter 4) something like this: for a person who does not speak, every sensually given triangle will act as a new figure, and even if a ratio of the sum of angles equal to two right angles was found for one such triangle, then for each new triangle this ratio will have to be confirmed again. On the other hand, a person who does not know how to count will perceive each stroke of the clock as the same stroke, without distinguishing it from the previous one.  In the word and the account, thus, both the identity of objects within a particular quality (universal in the singular) and the sequence of a number of identical objects (singular in the universal) are fixed: "the sequence found in one particular case is registered and remembered as a universal rule ... and also transforms what we found to be true here and now, to the eternal and universal truth" [4, pp. 24-25].

This indication, however, needs to be supplemented, which T. Hobbes does only in one work — the early work "Human Nature". Without this addition, the truth (like the correctness of the connection of names in sentences and conclusions in syllogisms) does not mean anything, it is meaningless. This important addition is what T. Hobbes calls evidence, that is, "the correspondence of human representation to words", "evidence, consisting in accompanying our words with corresponding representations, is the life of truth" [6, p. 532],[24, p. 111]. Knowledge, thus, turns out to be a certain probabilistic scheme of the real world, different from it, and at the same time revealing it to the cognizing mind, just as in G. Galileo mathematics, being the "language of the book of nature", acted as a phenomenon of nature itself, and the sphere in the real world and the world of mathematical descriptions turned out to be the same sphere.

Evidence presupposes a kind of primary connection of the given in sensation with the word, and in the world of science this evidence becomes not so much sensual as rational. This rationality takes the concrete sensual content out of brackets, leaving room only for the general sensual (geometric) form, which easily translates the flight of the projectile into a parabola, and the parabola into a conical section, from which it is already close to a mathematical formula, as R. Descartes already said in Geometry. But the relationship of T. Hobbes and R. Descartes should be highlighted.

 

5. What was Hobbes arguing about with R. Descartes?As you know, R. Descartes before the publication of "Reflections on the First Philosophy" sent copies of the manuscript to prominent scientists and theologians of his time, which included Arnaud, Bourdain, Gassendi.

Among the addressees was T. Hobbes. Answers of R. Descartes and the counter-arguments of R. Descartes himself are also widely known and published a long time ago. However, in the context of the topic of this work, it makes sense to revisit this long-standing correspondence discussion.

It is known that in "Reflections ..." R. Descartes stated only the principles of his teaching, but did not state the conclusions and consequences [15, p. 189]. This, in turn, is in good agreement with the approach to the construction of the system of T. Hobbes himself. It has already been said that T. Hobbes recommends starting the construction of the system with the analytical identification of the basic definitions and principles underlying its foundations [4, pp. 122-124]. These principles should be extremely clear to the mind, and the definitions should be as obvious as possible, so obvious that no one could fail to accept them, even with a strong desire [4, pp. 129-132]. This is especially important, T. Hobbes emphasizes, for the learning process: if the student does not understand the definition, then either it is wrong — the correct truths are clear by themselves (for any thinking mind), or the student consciously resists the teacher due to laziness.

T. Hobbes and R. Descartes have a lot in common in the field of physics, in particular, the understanding of matter as extension, etc. Moreover, T. Hobbes actually solidifies with the Cartesian understanding of will and reason (although partially, without referring to R. Descartes and not in any way solidifying with him) — reason as comprehending the ideas of things, R. Descartes said that delusion is a consequence of our taking the false for the truth and the true for the false, that is, it is not just a property of judgment, but a property of our attitude to it. In this sense, a person has the freedom to accept or reject. If I would accept everything, I would not be mistaken. We see a similar picture in T. Hobbes. True, in T. Hobbes, the mind is transformed into a rational calculating machine, and the will will become just the last decision on the way of "thinking over" this or that choice — but some general content can still be traced here.

However, the evidence in T. Hobbes appears not only as an indissoluble coherence in the mind of ideas and words.  After all, the word is arbitrary by nature, so even following strictly the rules of logic can easily get into a mess when it comes to extreme abstractions. From the Hobbesian point of view, however, everything is just the opposite — the simpler the beginnings we reveal in the process of deductive-analytical stage, the simpler our definitions, the clearer simple objects-objects are distinguished (from objects of complex, sensory data) - the easier it is for us to understand the world, and it is easier for another person to understand us. Speaking about the truth, T. Hobbes, as mentioned above, notes that one of its main properties is simplicity in transmission from teacher to student, so that the student could not fail to understand his teacher. This is also the case in science, when the goal of two debating scientists is the search for truth, and their discussion has the task of discovering this truth. If scientists argue based on other goals, then this topic is no longer ontological, but related to the central issues of Leviathan.

So — the evidence is the key to understanding Hobbesian physics and philosophy in general. It was the evidence that became the cornerstone in the controversy with R. Descartes. At the same time, T. Hobbes already states the following in the first objection: "If we followed the indications of our senses, we could reasonably doubt the existence of anything… But since Plato and other philosophers of antiquity reasoned about this unreliability of sensual and sensual things, and the difficulty of distinguishing between the waking state and dreams is a common place, I would not like to think that an outstanding author of new speculations decided to re-publish these old thoughts" [26, p. 135]. This remark speaks directly about the expectations of T. Hobbes — he counted on the fact that the work of R. Descartes would put an end to the question of evidence and self-evidence, which so occupied T. Hobbes, it seems, since the time of acquaintance with Descartes' "Experiments ...".

The main line of the dispute between the two thinkers that interests us in the context of the topic is the problem of substantiating the existence of the external world, a problem originating from the same time depths as philosophy itself. The discussion of the two geniuses unfolds against the background of the general attitude of the epoch, partly dating back to G. Galileo and accepted by both unconditionally — question everything. Having questioned authorities (like Plato and Aristotle), tradition (associated with the church and its universities), God (who does not reveal himself in our world in any way), the inquisitive mind of a scientist inevitably rested on the question — does the world and I exist in this world? Or is it a dream? Or is it an appearance? Or is it a game of sensations? If we consider that this question has survived quite safely to the present day, without losing its sharpness and only enriched with various interesting components, such as concepts about simulacra and simulation or virtual reality, it is easy to understand how relevant all this was for a scientist at the dawn of Modern Times, when the old picture of the world collapsed, and the new one only gained some general contours.

If we ultimately get all the knowledge about the world from sensations, then where is the guarantee that these sensations give us information about something external? Moreover, in T. Hobbes, the very process of perception and transmission of information is absolutely reduced to the movement (collision) of the bodies that make up our body and sensory organs? T. Hobbes answers this question several times. In the first case, when he speaks about the difference between the perception of reality and dreams: "in a dream, I do not often and constantly think about the same persons, places, objects and actions that I think about in reality, and that I do not recall in a dream such a long series of related thoughts as at other times, and also because the fact that in the waking state I often notice the absurdity of my dreams, but I never think in a dream about the absurdity of my thoughts in reality"[6, p. 14], that is, the criterion is very vague. For the second time — in discussions about the difference between the names of bodies and the names of "images and spirits": "since spirits, sensually perceived images, shadow, light, color, sound, space appear to us in a dream as well as in reality, they cannot be objects existing outside of us" [4, p. 115].

The same question about sleep and reality arises in a polemic with R. Descartes. T. Hobbes, commenting on Descartes' statement that the difference between sleep and reality is the inability of memory to match "dream visions with all the rest of life," argues as follows: "Either atheists cannot conclude on the basis of memory of their past life that they are awake, or one of them may know that he is awake, and without comprehending the true God," to which R. Descartes, however, answers: "An atheist can conclude on the basis of the memory of his past life that he is awake; but he cannot know whether this sign is enough to be sure of his rightness if he does not know that he was created by God, who is not capable of deceit" [26, pp. 153-154].

It should be recalled that T. Hobbes, from the very beginning of his objections, says something like this: the statement "I am a thinking thing" is not equivalent to the statement "I am thinking (I am thought)". The fact that I think does not make me a thought, but makes me a subject of thinking. "It may well be that a thinking thing is a subject of thought, reason or intellect, and therefore something corporeal...  we cannot perceive any act outside of the corresponding subject, just as it is impossible to jump without jumping, to know without knowing, to think without thinking… The subjects of any act, it seems, can be comprehended only in bodily form, in other words, they can be imagined only in the form of matter," therefore, "a thinking thing should rather be considered not immaterial, but material" [26, pp. 136-137].

Both T. Hobbes and R. Descartes recognize that the real world is given to us in sensations. Both T. Hobbes and R. Descartes agree that sensations can deceive us. This does not mean that the truth is being hidden or hidden from us — it only means that its search must be approached with extreme caution and attention. But then radical differences begin. R. Descartes asserts that one can be sure of the existence of the external world with absolute certainty, because God inspires it, and God is not a deceiver. T. Hobbes asserts something else — the external world exists with necessity, because otherwise we would not be able to think at all.

From these positions follow other positions of T. Hobbes and R. Descartes, further diverging from each other. R. Descartes — thinking autonomously. T. Hobbes — thinking (right thinking!) it always depends on the outside world. R. Descartes — thinking can rely on itself. T. Hobbes — thinking cannot but rely on sensory marks and signs. However, having established the initial autonomy of the mind, R. Descartes inevitably faced the problem of the content of our thinking and, more broadly, of all cognition. To save the content of thinking, he elegantly discovered innate ideas in the mind, including the idea of God as absolute perfection, embedded in the mind (imperfection) by God himself. For T. Hobbes, everything is different — it is not the content of cognition that is innate for him (albeit reduced to several basic principles as conditions for us to know anything at all), but only the ability to know, conditioned, in turn, by the inclusion of a person in the general mechanism of nature and making up a single whole with him. And this inclusiveness is characteristic of any person — be it a scientist or a simple man not experienced in the sciences.

The general meaning of Hobbes' objection, however, is not so radical — it simply shows that alternative interpretations are possible in this case, as well as on all points of his objections [27],[28]. Actually, Descartes also points to this, commenting on the difference in the definition of the concept of "idea": "images of material things imprinted in bodily fantasy" or "everything that is directly perceived by the mind" [26, p. 142]. Like R. Descartes, Hobbesian apodecticity is based on fundamental principles — if R. Descartes has the cogito principle and the concept of "not lying God" following it, then T. Hobbes has the general inertia of all bodies that do not change, begin or complete movement by themselves. If we have a feeling, then for T. Hobbes this in itself is proof of the existence of the material world. Plus, Hobbes, although not as an argument, constantly talks about the presence of sensations in animals that do not doubt the existence of the object these sensations cause.

In general, all Hobbesian objections to R. Descartes boil down, in my opinion, to a general conclusion — what R. Descartes is talking about has neither distinctness, nor clarity, nor necessity, since in each case criticized, alternative options can be allowed without any contradictions: the world exists because God cannot deceive the world exists because otherwise we could not think at all. No one argues with the original thesis: "if we followed the indications of our senses without additional reasoning, we could reasonably doubt the existence of anything" [26, p. 135].

Thus, for T. Hobbes, the position that recognizes as self-evident a certain datum (self-awareness) of the external world, an external object, an external body is more obvious.  At the same time, the thinking subject himself is also material, because otherwise a Cartesian psychophysical problem inevitably arises. "A thinking thing is something corporeal; after all, the subjects of any act, as it seems, can be comprehended only in bodily form, in other words, they can be imagined only in the form of matter" [26, p. 136]. This position for T. Hobbes is far from accidental — it is of key importance for understanding his entire philosophical system, including the concept of the state.

So, once again, the subject is rather material (or, externally, extended), since we think of it as a kind of place of thought or act of thinking, that is, as extended. The material, thus, in T. Hobbes is derived from the representable, and the representable, as he himself writes, is initially given only in sensation — the differential or logarithm can be understood, but it is impossible to imagine. Thinking, therefore, since it cannot be separated from thinking matter, becomes in T. Hobbes only an accident of matter, one of its many effects occurring inside a complex human body. Similarly, we can think rationally about the soul without having its idea, representation, image: "we do not have any idea of the soul at all: we only rationally conclude that there is something intrinsic to the human body and communicating to it a vital movement, thanks to which it feels and moves; whatever this something is, we call it the soul, without possessing its idea" [26, p. 144]. However, I will return to the soul at the end of this chapter.

We are faced with no more than one of the solutions to the problem — an option that is quite independent, self-sufficient and allows us to cope with a number of significant heuristic tasks. When it comes to cognition, we are dealing only with representations, thoughts and images. Are these representations independent? Why not — can't I think of something as imaginary by me, and something as existing outside my mind? True, this does not mean that it really exists there — but it does, in particular, make my ideas more weighty and contrast fantasy with real experience. For T. Hobbes, however, this is an important methodological principle, which he emphasizes in all his works on this topic — it is not for nothing that he almost never ignores the topic of dreams and their differences.

So, our knowledge is impossible without experience, which is reduced to sensory sensations. But T. Hobbes, once again, is not so unambiguous about the experience itself. On the one hand, experience really gives the possibility of primary orientation in the world, it doesn't even matter — the real world or the fantasy world, as long as both obey the laws. Experience allows you to build a causal relationship, experience allows you to get and accumulate primary information in memory. In experience, the fact is given as something absolutely clear. Prudence (prudentia) is just accumulated experience.  All this, once again, makes a person related to the animal world. On the other hand, we may be deceived by experience. Sensations are indistinct, because my bodily movement (in the organs of sensation), plus my life rhythm, is mixed with the movement of bodies. When I say "The sun is a disk with a diameter of two centimeters", this is not a deception of the senses — it is a deception of thinking: I took the representation of my mind for a real object. At the same time, the very fact of experience, the very fact of sensations to which experience is reduced, remains opaque, accepted simply as a fact. "The very fact of the existence of phenomena is amazing ... that is, the fact that of the bodies that exist in nature, some have representations of almost all things, while others do not have any" [4, p. 192].

Having established the existence of external bodies as the initial principle of thinking, T. Hobbes continues to develop it, building a general scientific picture of the world, that is, universal laws and rules. The criteria of clarity and distinctness are logic and its rules and laws. What can we know clearly and distinctly — what is in us or what is outside of us? But according to T. Hobbes, there is no difference at all — in the "scientific world" there are both moving bodies. Moreover, it turns out to be easier to model what is outside of me — by analogy with the sensory world. Internal movements are harder to catch (in fact, impossible) — and here we have to stay in the realm of hypotheses.

The key word has already sounded here — "simulate". The fact is that, postulating the existence of an external world, an external body, an external object as something self—evident and self-fundamental for the existence of thinking, T. Hobbes practically has nothing to do with this external world - everything that T. Hobbes describes in his works, including the legendary "Leviathan", is only models, only a world of representations, only the world expressed in words, connected with these ideas in one way or another. There is a possible parallel between G. Galileo and T. Hobbes. G. Galileo — there is no difference between the world above the moon and the world below the moon! T. Hobbes — there is no difference (for us) between what is outside the mind (the movement of bodies) and what is in the mind (bodies and their movements as a source of ideas).

Here the question arises, which will rise to its full height in the time of I. Kant: how are our theoretical descriptions and deductive conclusions filled with the appropriate content, or, otherwise, how are the individual data of experience generalized in synthetic judgments of the mind?

The course of T. Hobbes' reasoning is known (part two "On the body"). We mentally remove all bodies, as if the entire external world surrounding us has disappeared. What remains outside of me if there are no bodies, there is nothing external, there is no world? There remains pure space as something outside of me, as a collection of places that do not enter the boundaries of my body. I cannot admit that there is nothing outside of me at all, because my body has boundaries. And since these places differ depending on my intentions — I can focus on one and then on the other — such a shift of attention already gives us the simplest image of change or movement, which directly leads to the idea of time. Space and time, it would seem, appear figuratively in front of us here, but this is not so — we cannot imagine pure space in any way. Therefore, we have, firstly, not an image, but only a discursive description, and secondly, something universal, not a single one. The body is something qualitatively different — one simultaneously combines both the universal (as something that exists independently of us and outside of us) and the individual, as befits an existing body by itself. In general, everything that exists outside of us is singular, but in our ideas, in the discursive description, it is paradoxically dialectically defined as universal, as a body in general, as the world in general. Thought unfolds all definitions through itself. But it should be remembered that initially they are all derived from the simplest ideas or ideas, that is, analytically derived "simple objects".

Space and time form a peculiar scheme of mathematics — since a unit is space-time in relation to another space-time, any number is obtained by adding a new unit to a unit (one place (space) to another), or by separating one from the other in case of their sequential consideration [6, pp. 141-142]. In the same way, the whole, parts, unity and unity, continuous, contiguous, infinity are formed, while the fact that we can neither think nor reason about the actually infinite is clarified and justified. However, Hobbes recognizes infinite division that, like the relation to actual infinity, partially (but only partially!) he is related to Aristotle [Gaidenko, IGF].

Thus, the world unfolds before the consciousness of the scientist in two planes — the world as existing in itself and the world as given, revealed and fixed in descriptions and judgments, deployed in a system of conclusions. Experience fills the latter with content, but experience is just a certain phenomenon, as mentioned above, because experience itself does not say anything — it is a person who makes certain conclusions, builds certain judgments. Experience only provides information, to use which in one way or another is a human matter (it is not difficult, by the way, to notice that in R. Descartes, as shown above, this problem arose and was resolved in the context of the problem of will and reason, not experience). It is in the critique of experience that the idea of the world itself arises, which in the process of analytical and deductive work becomes one of the basic principles of Hobbes' philosophy, starting with his early works.

Here it is necessary to note one more feature — the discrepancy of the object of knowledge with itself "The subject of the Galilean experiment becomes an object brought "to mind" in the crucible of Galilean experience, that is, an object that conceals a discrepancy of itself (as a fragment of the infinite astronomical world) (external mind — auth..) with oneself (as an "actual universal, actual infinite" object) (the inner mind — auth.)... without such a discrepancy with itself, the object cannot get out of the experimental tests" [5, p. 249]. At the entrance — the object as a representative of the whole (the mind is concerned with the visibility of the object as necessary within this whole (as a possible whole among others)); at the exit — the whole, revealing itself in its representative (The imaginary infinite whole must be imagined, must be embodied in sensuality, in the drawing (!); i.e., the mind is concerned its own infinity, expressed in a special conceivable object — as possible). How can this possible whole world be extracted from sensory experience? How can he be embodied in sensory experience, reveal himself not from the point of view of knowledge, but from the point of view of being?

Let's return to our reasoning in paragraph 1 of this study. So, our reflections should thus end, being exhausted a) on God (since God is just the name of our cognitive inability, the name of knowledge and truth exceeding our capabilities, when we talk about Him we only indicate that height in knowledge and understanding of reality that we will never reach); b) on the world as a whole; c) on justice (since there is nothing to talk about here — what is stated in the law is fair!). In the natural science world, the universal, the universal law, is present as some residual imprint of empirical reality in the human mind, an imprint that is constantly reproduced in the process of practice and is found in it during any attempts to think of the world as an ordered mechanism (i.e., the dynamic-kinematic world, the world of geometric constructions flowing into each other (turning into algebraic formulas) and force interactions (projectile flight — conic sections)). And in morality, ethics, politics?

Here the universal, announced by us (the scientist, the cognizing subject), must find a correlate within its boundaries in the physical world, the world of signs and symbols must pass into the world of sensations and corporeality — or at least indicate this path. And this way is a Leviathan state, which excludes any reasoning about universal rules of morality and justice outside of state laws, excluding all freedom of speech and the press. The latter is something that J. Milton cannot accept, I. Kant cannot accept. I. Kant directly says that only in this way (through a public judgment about existing laws and rules) does a person achieve himself as a goal and realize himself accordingly. But for T. Hobbes, no realization is required here, because realization occurs through sovereign representation, because the sovereign and Leviathan become the force that, being an "artificial body", directly implements this cognitive boundary with its being.

Such a figure of the universal should embody a sovereign — not the philosopher of Plato, not the sovereign N. Machiavelli, but a person who represents the will of all citizens, the universal will. It is from the point of view of this representation that the sovereign is particularly interesting.

 

6. The singular and universal in the social contract.Thus, the scientist speaks on behalf of nature and represents its laws in his speech, the scientist acts as the very aggregate that is able to translate the abstract universal into the meaningful singular, and express the unique and inimitable singular in the universal language of the law.

A scientist gets this right only if his words and judgments are strictly tied to the natural content — that is, they are correlated with an external object in its clearest and simplest manifestation to the mind.

Of course, it should be remembered that a scientist does not speak on behalf of the absolute truth. In science and its systems of reasoning, no one can give any guarantees of truth, correctness, infallibility — after all, it is natural for a person to make mistakes in his reasoning, and at absolutely any moment — however, an error, once it is discovered, can always be corrected with due attention (both by the scientist himself and his colleagues or students) and diligence. In extreme cases, if it comes to disputes and discussions, you can trust the opinion of the arbitrator (the seventeenth and eighteenth natural laws). Everything, however, changes when it comes to a person not in the space of knowledge and truth, but in the continuum of social relations. This is where the main well-known theme of "Leviathan" begins, here we immediately recall the famous aphorism of T. Hobbes that if geometry affected the interests of people, the world would see bonfires from books on geometry (about geometry in T. Hobbes, see for example: [13],[17, p. 282]).

In order to understand how the individual (man) is realized in the universal (state) and realizes this universal through himself, it is necessary to briefly indicate what kind of person T. Hobbes considers and analyzes. Of course, this is not a person directly given to us in our everyday experience — T. Hobbes, although he gives many examples from everyday experience, does not use them, of course, as evidence, because, as mentioned above, experience here cannot testify to anyone's rightness at all. In itself, the presence of wars, clashes, disputes, discord and confrontations in society (of which in the time of Aristotle and Plato, I think, there were no less than in the time of Hobbes; one Peloponnesian war, well known to T. Hobbes, is worth something) does not say anything at all. Hobbesian man is an abstract model that describes a person as a special kind of two—contour being: intelligent and passionate (this model is present in Hobbes in his early works). The man of "Leviathan" lives in the world of science — and the entire first part of the work under consideration just shows us the experience of constructing such a "resident" of the world of moving bodies and their interactions.

What is this person like? It is, first of all, corporeal, i.e., it represents a body among other bodies. His body has the ability to sense, preserve and combine images — in this regard, he is no different from animals. He can accumulate experience and optimize his practice accordingly. He differs from animals in his reasonableness-reasonableness, which allows him to give names, build judgments and arguments of a universal nature, formulate the laws of nature, raising the question of the causes and consequences of certain phenomena and facts. The discovery of universal and necessary connections enables a person to act with greater efficiency, revealing these cause-and-effect relationships in nature and using them in their practical activities. Actually, the knowledge of the world for a person is just a reflection of external reality in its universal form - and the further translation of this universal knowledge into concrete practical relations. By itself, the idea of a causal relationship is deduced by a person from a completely practical correlation of the goal (effect) and the ways to achieve it (cause). A thought captured by a goal is a thought more organized and directed than any random reflection on the world and its laws, subject to spontaneous attenuation, loss of attention, weakening of interest.

The other side of a person's being is his passion, that is, attraction or aversion to something— or from something that seems useful or harmful to a person. These passions turn out to be what can be described as the "inner essence of a person." Actually, this essence of T. Hobbes lies in its absence — the essence of a person is only a bundle of drives-aversions, likes-dislikes, which, in the presence of a certain resource, is realized in the process of human activity, or in the absence of a resource is not realized. The whole life of a person appears as an endless run for the satisfaction of more and more new, stronger and stronger desires, as an endless translation of the desired into reality, as an endless self-realization [29, pp. 4-63, 71-72], which stops only with death.

The concrete totality of these drives and desires in a particular person at a particular moment of his being is something purely singular — as individual ideas about justice, good, evil, etc. are singular in this case. For the nominalist T. Hobbes in this respect there is nothing universal in itself, unlike Plato and Aristotle., Thomas or R. Bellarmine. This, T. Hobbes believes, is their main problem, this is the source of confusion and absurdity. This is how T. Hobbes reads his predecessors. "Aristotle and other pagan philosophers make the attraction of people the criterion of good and evil. And this is perfectly correct, as long as we assume people living in a state in which everyone is governed by their own law. For in a state where people have no laws other than their own drives, there can be no general rule regarding good and evil deeds. However, such a measure is wrong in the state. For here the measure is not the attraction of individuals, but the law, which is the will and aspiration of the state" [6, ss. 520, 511-512].

The problem of the Hobbesian man is that his singularity in the sense of certainty is very conditional — if a person appears to be an endless change of passions and moods, then this singularity will change at every moment of time. Having become the arena of the struggle of passions and drives, a person not only cannot find his place in the cosmos in any way (as it was with Plato and Aristotle), he does not have such a place in principle, since a) there is no "essence" that would require a "place"; b) there is no world as a system of places — the world has already been revealed to infinity, in any case, the world of science.

So, a person, attracted by passions, strives from one goal to another, striving to satisfy his desires. At the same time, a person wants not only to achieve the goal, but also to acquire a resource, without which it is impossible to achieve this goal. Such a resource can be, for example, force, power or authority — something that allows you to give orders to others and demand their execution, i.e., alienate the will of others in your favor. Scientific knowledge for this person is exactly the same resource that can multiply his strength.

T. Hobbes here, in his understanding of man, quite stands on the shoulders of giants. The fact is that before us is a man who strongly resembles a man already modeled long before in his unique singularity, trying in the same singularity from the same singularity to unfold a very peculiar infinite universality [30, pp. 164-170]. We are talking about a man described by N. Machiavelli. However, in N. Machiavelli, this person acted as a self—sufficient individual in himself and for himself, able to see inside the world elements (including within the movement of crowds or masses of people) the moment in which the action performed has the maximum chance of success. In fact, the world of N. Machiavelli occupies an intermediate position between the ancient world, with its absolutely marked topos of entities, and the world of Modern times, a world open to any influence, although not at any point — these points still need to be able to see, and this is one of the components of the Virtu of a genuine sovereign. As L. Strauss wrote, "Machiavelli, the great Columbus who discovered the continent on which Hobbes was able to erect his structure" [8, p. 170].

But if the Machiavellian sovereign was a unique personality, then the Hobbesian man acts as a mass personality. All Hobbes' people are arranged the same way. Reading yourself, you can read others — and even the human race as a whole, as Hobbes states in the preface to Leviathan [4, p. 9-10], as well as [6, p. 125]. The other, therefore, is inevitably present in me — just as the natural mind, capable of understanding and reasoning, is immanently present in every person. Apparently, this is where Hobbes sees the possibility of people understanding each other, as well as the possibility of language in general.

In the natural state, people are perfect [8, p. 176] — as far as a single person can be perfect at all, having many limitations in his being. However, each of these perfect people not only does not need another person — he sees in him a source of danger, a threat to his completeness, a threat to his perfection. To correct this condition requires not God's grace, but Leviathan. However, some authors [31, p. 192] distinguish from the natural state the state preceding the state as a special transitional period. That is, a man of a natural state is a man of war, a man who enters into a contract (with all the controversy of its further observance) is already taking a step towards turning this war into peace.

The natural state itself is the result of a thought experiment. T. Hobbes speaks critically about the "empirical" experiment (within the framework of the polemic with R. Boyle) in the sense that the experiment itself does not say anything, says the person who draws conclusions from this experiment. However, Hobbes uses the Galilean thought experiment: after all, what is a natural state if not the Galilean "absence of any environment"? What is a "man to man wolf" as a non-bracketed social environment (according to Aristotle, the social essence of a person, which is for a person an analogue of the natural environment for a moving body)?. In a real person, there will always be a moral consciousness and traces of moral and legal education. But in a person of a natural state — all this remains out of brackets, as the resistance of the surface, the medium or the shape of a moving body remain out of brackets in G. Galileo.

At this point, the first collision of the individual and the universal takes place. The fact is that T. Hobbes — it seems, following G. Galileo — feels well the problem of the interaction of the world of science and the world of everyday life, the world of reason and the world of immediate reality of sensations. These worlds should not only mutually ground each other, but also give birth to each other, cross into each other, and even describe each other. In G. Galileo, this collision of worlds was expressed in so-called paradoxes or "monsters of understanding" like the infinite divisibility of a finite quantity, a point expanded into a line, a finite thing as a composite of an infinite number of indivisible, a polygon with infinite sides turning into a circle or circle of infinite radius, turning into a straight line, etc. [5],[14],[32, pp. 130-143],[33]. In G. Hobbes — in the open closeness of the other in relation to my thinking.

"Do not do to another what you do not wish for yourself" - this is the original principle of ethics, shared by T. Hobbes. This is very simple and, as T. Hobbes shows, very difficult. This principle can be easily accessible to any reasonable being in any situation — but at the same time it can be (and should be, since the being is rationally reasonable!) rationally justified, which is much more difficult. It would seem that I have to put myself in the other's place. This is not so, because I have to become different and look at the world through his eyes, not my own. It's easy to say, but how to do it? In which case do I truly become different? To do this, you need to create a Leviathan mechanism. What is Leviathan? This is the sovereign (in the limit — one person), representing all other people in such a way that everyone perceives his command (expression of his will) as his own.

As you know, in the Hobbesian state of nature, all people are equal, and everyone has the right to everything. In other words, the ego has the right to call everything its own — that is, to express the universality of the world through its uniqueness, individuality, although taken initially in an abstract form. I can want anything I want. I have the right to whatever I want. I have the right not only to the final object of my lust. This means that I have the right to the life of any other person — but he has exactly the same right. The universality of law is inherently contradictory, as is the singularity, which, through universality, tries to discover its own content here.

This is reminiscent of another scheme of T. Hobbes, described in detail in the second part of the work "On the Body", but similar ideas are expressed by T. Hobbes in his early works. There T. Hobbes builds a rational-scientific picture of the world, starting with the installation that even if the world disappears, human thinking continues to work thanks to memory and imagination. Further, in this thinking Hobbes discovers subjective (space-time) and objective (body) content. The necessity of an objectively existing external body has already been mentioned above, but I consider it necessary to point out again the importance of this attitude - since the body appears here as a kind of external boundary of cognition, as a paradoxical knowable unknowable, empty filled, infinite finiteness, etc. Exactly the same external body turns out to be another person in the scheme of the "natural state". I say "It's mine!", he says "It's mine!". Where is the truth? In both statements (from the point of view of logic, everything is perfect here).

True, we can say that the law of contradiction works here, because the other can be designated as not-I. But in the world of new science, such a trick does not work — because at its critical points, points of paradoxes, the law of contradiction does not work. I am the not-I, as in G. Galileo, the finite is the infinite — moreover, the real, not the potential. According to Aristotle, the world is either divisible or indivisible, we divide infinitely or to a certain limit. In G. Galileo, as mentioned above, the disjunction is replaced by the conjunction — "or" turns into "and". The same thing, as we see, happens with T. Hobbes.  I have the right to everything and I have no right to anything. The inverted world of the "natural state" requires observing the natural law, but within this state, observing this law is impossible. We need a new world — a world where there will be a place for both the law and the one who can proclaim it on his own behalf.

The way out of the situation of the natural state is either war, or an agreement, a contract. But from the point of view of T. Hobbes, the contract itself is unstable ("... agreements without a sword are just words that cannot guarantee a person's safety" [4, p. 129]) and needs some kind of "force" capable of forcing compliance with it. No one is obliged to comply with the contract by itself, despite the obligations assumed. At this point, the same important feature of the Hobbesian model of man and the world, indicated just above, is again revealed — people are opaque to each other, as the objective (external) is opaque to thought the world is on its own. In other words, it is impossible to say what is on a person's mind, whether he will comply with the contract or not, if there is no external compulsion.

In a real situation, we can always refer to a long acquaintance with another person, family ties, circumstances, etc., but in the "scientific world" such a thing should be justified not empirically-accidentally, but strictly rationally. As for the abstractness of the rational construct of the Hobbesian man, this "reasonable man", guided only by reason and logic, should conclude that it is necessary to observe the contract, so everyone is obliged to strive for peace, but perhaps it is not necessary, since another can violate it at any moment, etc. The probability is fifty-fifty: it is necessary and not necessary. There is no "or" exception here. The very formulation of the first natural law of T. Hobbes contains an insoluble paradox: it is necessary to act in a way that one can and cannot do, it is necessary to seek peace, but it is possible and necessary to prepare for war if peace cannot be achieved!  But after all, "if" is incompatible with necessity and obligation.

This paradox is formulated by T. Hobbes as follows: "The main reason for wars is the unwillingness of people to fight, because the human will always strives for the good ..."[6, p. 78]. J. Buchanan speaks about the same paradox — absolute freedom turns into absolute slavery [34]. M. Oakshot sees the origins of this paradox in the fact that T. Hobbes is engaged in solving two directly unrelated tasks: a) creating a theory of debt in accordance with the principles of the entire system of his philosophy (a purely logical task); b) formulation of a practical guide for contemporaries in order to combat anarchy. Their combination turned out to be impossible, as it is impossible to mix the esoteric and profane, intellectual and ordinary [31, p. 186]. It seems that the problem here lies in the most paradoxical essence of modern science, designated by G. Galileo — to describe nature as existing outside and independently of man and at the same time appearing to man in experience and experiment.

 

7. The birth of Leviathan as a solution to the problem

What exactly makes a person opaque to another person? The same thing that makes it possible for one person to transmit their thoughts and ideas to another, that is, language. The fact that a person has said something does not mean that a person thinks that way - even if from the point of view of the logical structure of his speech is impeccable. On the other hand, the very method of T. Hobbes, stated in the Preface to Leviathan, begins to play a cruel joke on a person: "... Although when observing people's actions, we can sometimes reveal their intentions, but doing this without comparing with our own intentions and without distinguishing all the circumstances that can make changes in the case, it's all the same what to decrypt without a key ..." [4, pp. 7-8]. Comprehending the universal through the individual, I will inevitably come only to a general abstract form, which can tell me nothing about how my individual, and not universal counterpart will act in this or that particular case. "However, no matter how excellently one person reads in another based on his actions, he can only do this in relation to his acquaintances, whose number is limited. The one who has to govern an entire nation must comprehend (to read) in himself not this or that individual person, but the human race" [4, p. 8].

Thus, a single subject cannot, without falling into absurdity, act on behalf of the universal and represent it. The desires and passions of a single subject, forming its space of law, cannot claim to be universal — their irremediable singularity is precisely resolved through the elimination of any singularity in the war of all against all. It is not for nothing that T. Hobbes talks about this war and the natural state almost immediately after the description of a single person with all his passions, ideas and rational properties is completed. War exhausts the singularity, preventing the universal natural law from being realized. In order for universality in the form of a natural law to gain existence, people need to create an "artificial body" of Leviathan-the guarantor of its execution (in the person of the sovereign), to create this body it is necessary to abandon the abstract universality of rights, more precisely, to transfer them to the same person (the sovereign). But how is this refusal feasible if verbal expression alone is not enough? What should flesh and blood tell the words?

M. Oakshot, who devoted a well-known article to this problem, described this transition as follows [31, pp. 194-196]. The contract is a deferred obligation. Those who conclude a contract limit their rights to one extent or another with these obligations (I must do not what I want, but what the other requires). Compliance with the contract is, as you know, a requirement of natural law. In the natural state, a person who wants to observe the natural law (that is, who wants to fulfill a contract concluded with another person) inevitably gives himself away to his counterpart, since there is no guarantee that he, in turn, will also fulfill his obligations. The one who first restricts his rights under the contract, thus, violates the same natural law, which directly prohibits causing any harm to himself. "Nobility," T. Hobbes notes, "is too rare to be counted on," and the example of Sidney Godolphin is the exception, not the rule [4, p. 536]. A rational person cannot count on such shaky grounds. Therefore, the main acting force is not nobility, but fear of a very real threat.

A different situation develops when all people enter into the contract, transferring their rights to the sovereign, alienating their will in his favor. In this situation, the sovereign's order is the initial manifestation not of my will, but of the sovereign's will, which in the process of transfer became... my will, my representation. T. Hobbes does not accidentally spend an entire chapter explaining the specifics of such a transfer of law and focusing on the representativeness of the sovereign's figure. The sovereign's order — the expression of the universal will — is from this moment an unambiguous demand of my will, the fulfillment of which is in full agreement with the requirement of natural law.

In this situation, non-fulfillment of the sovereign's order acts as disrespect for the universal will (which, once again, the sovereign proclaims) and a direct challenge to it. By not obeying the order, I present myself as an opponent of the contract. If we reasonably came to the idea of concluding a contract, then it would be no less reasonable to fulfill it without any fear (more precisely, at our own risk) than not to fulfill it — as if we sign in disbelief to others the very next moment after its conclusion, that is, initially we give ourselves out as a potential violator of it.

On the other hand, if no one does it first (executes the sovereign's order), peace will never come at all. Of course, having fulfilled the sovereign's order, I can expect many to follow me, but even if someone does not follow, we still have nothing to lose. If the sovereign state does not arise, then we all just remain in a natural state (perhaps until the next attempt to negotiate or until our mutual death). If the state machine has already been built and entered into operation, then those who did not follow me, who did not follow the order, are destroyed automatically. It is not unreasonable to expect that a sufficient number of participants will fulfill the terms of the deal in order to give the sovereign the necessary power and authority. As soon as there are enough forces for this, as soon as — here it is, the long-awaited "fiat!", here it is, Leviathan! Otherwise... the sovereign will not take place, and Leviathan will not be born, alas…

The only hope here is that at some point the majority will not follow passions, but reason, will seek peace, not war, will put the general above the particular, will conclude an agreement on the mutual transfer of rights to the sovereign and, by virtue of the latter, will fulfill the first order of the sovereign, expressing the will of the latter as a representation of the universal will - at this moment it is (all)the general arises, gaining strength. Endless trials (it will work out-it will not work out) sooner or later should be crowned with the long-awaited "fiat!", and the fact that we are talking about people who are exclusively rational and reasonable gives every chance that this will happen quickly enough, because in conditions of formal verbal transfer of rights, in conditions when everything is equal the degrees have abandoned everything in favor of the representative sovereign, the fulfillment of one's duty can no longer act as a contradiction with natural law, as a kind of surrender of oneself not the arbitrariness of another.

Thus, a natural law becomes binding if and only if it becomes part (the basis) of a civil law. The divine law itself is also not obligatory — it is a piece of advice that a person only has the right to follow. The civil law knows no exceptions — sanctions are inevitable for its non-fulfillment, force punishment is inevitable, losses are inevitable, damage is inevitable [31, pp. 168-178]. At the same time, a complete reformatting of the person himself takes place. A person in a natural state, who has the right to everything, is not at all the person who remains after "fiat!", because the latter no longer has absolutely no rights except those granted to him by the sovereign. Thus, for lasting peace as the basis of a whole prosperous human life, it requires not just a restriction of rights (as it happens in an ordinary contract), but a complete rejection of them and their return in a reformatted form. "This is more than agreement or unanimity. This is a real unity embodied in one person through an agreement concluded by each person with each other" [4, p. 133]. The original man must be reformatted so as to become a citizen — but no longer within the framework of the realization of his original potential essence, but as part of the whole, defined through the whole, as a representation of the universal, as the will of the sovereign, representing the will of each subject.

Here we see a very interesting point. In the Hobbesian system, there is no longer any question of a person's "place" in being, according to his essence, since the state here does not so much define this "place" as arbitrarily establishes it according to the principle of equality. A person cannot take a wrong place here, as it was in the Platonic-Aristotleian world, simply for the reason that all places are equal, the same in themselves, any hierarchy is fixed by the state after the fact, and therefore is absolutely secondary. However, the state of T. Hobbes still gives life and existence to what existed without it only as a potential, natural law. One can see some Aristotelian atavism in this. However, from the point of view of T. Hobbes, it makes no sense to talk about the actual-potential here, since what has a reason arises by necessity, and there is no difference between the acting cause and potency [6, p. 165].

Leviathan is perceived as created - fiat! — but it must be remembered that a) he was created by man as an artificial body, as a mechanism that allows the natural law to gain full existence; b) in relation to his creator (a person of a natural state), he acts as a complete denial of it, but this creator no longer exists inside him, he also turns out to be transformed into a "personality", "citizen", acting, nevertheless, as a manifestation of that original person who remained outside of this "fiat!". At the same time, man is left by man in this duality, and this duality is not athinomic (man and the state in the real world are against our ideas about man and the state in their essence, as it was with Plato), but paradoxical (the idea of man as himself and the idea of him as part of a common whole, synthesized one from the other). The man of the "natural state" is constantly present in the man of the "Leviathan" with his passions, his physicality, his life, which cannot be taken out of brackets.

Now briefly about why it is impossible to analyze and learn the problems of morality, justice and law, why these issues should be guarded by a guardian Leviathan. The state interest can never be fully comprehended by the subjects, because there is nothing to comprehend here: there is nothing behind the laws as an expression of the sovereign's will, except the same will for peace. Leviathan is outwardly absolutely transcendent, but this transcendence, like the transcendence of the external body or God, is absolutely empty. And if the transcendence of almighty God is something taken for granted, if the transcendence of the surrounding world needs justification (in a discussion, for example, with R. Descartes), then the transcendence of Leviathan must be ensured by Leviathan itself and its laws. It cannot be said that there is something hidden behind these acts of expression of Leviathan's will (laws) — the Leviathan sovereign is extremely open, the purpose of the law is, ultimately, peace and only peace. There is no point in putting additional meanings and meanings into this. You can't fully participate in Leviathan — just recognize all the acts of his will as your own, and that's it! The state does not explain anything to anyone, it just shows its will. But Leviathan does not completely penetrate into a person, does it?

And again — Leviathan is not free from contradictions and paradoxes. So A. Filippov, for example, points out the following, in his opinion, fundamental contradiction: the right of the sovereign to kill anyone and the right of anyone to protect [3],[17, pp. 62-63]. The list can be continued: complete subordination to the sovereign and the possibility of changing the sovereign, the absolute fullness of the sovereign's power, which has no formal boundaries, and the duty of the sovereign's response to the court, if it is not about state issues, etc. These paradoxical contradictions arise, as it is easy to see, in well—defined places of the Leviathan construction - when the universal "law and morality" of Leviathan come into contact with corporeal singularity, when the state law discovers that it cannot be absolutely and completely applied to the real situation, when the general rule reveals an infinite number of annoying exceptions. Just as a universal law cannot embrace the immensity (an infinite number of individual cases), so individual cases cannot exhaust the entirety of objective reality.

 

8. T. Hobbes and I. Kant: where the rights of the sovereign endSo, the sovereign, by all his actions, must do everything to bring peace, to do everything so that discord and disputes disappear from society.

Apparently, T. Hobbes does not intend to leave scientific discussions at the mercy of the sovereign, however, here he makes a reservation that if it is impossible to reach a compromise, the participants in the discussion should use the authority of the arbitrator (not because he is smarter or more competent than them, but because his decision excludes the influence of personal factors and preferences arguing). Any other disputes, including religious ones, are prohibited. There is nothing surprising in this — there is no need to argue about religion, because the whole truth is in dogmas that cannot be subjected to analytical decomposition, doubt, interpretation. There is also no need to argue about justice, morality and law — everything that leads to peace is just, moral and lawful, and these are laws expressing the will of the sovereign as a representation of the universal will.

All the restrictions imposed by the state on citizens pursue one goal — peace. But the main limitation here is the prohibition on your own judgments on the above issues. Thus, a person in the state does not have the right to universal judgments in certain areas, leaving this right entirely to the sovereign. Of course, the sovereign cannot forbid a person to think, but he can forbid getting acquainted with dangerous thoughts by banning dangerous books, the reading of which can lead to disputes, strife and, as a result, war against everyone. The same applies to the corresponding concern for the education of citizens. Let's pay attention to how weak the notorious "unity" of the commonwealth turns out to be, how weak Leviathan turns out to be, how ambivalent the mind is, which has no safety mechanisms against either the absurd or senseless discussions and disputes.

D. Hume also points to the unrestricted freedom of the press as an evil, considering it in relation to the realities of Great Britain of the XVIII century as a consequence of the struggle of republican and monarchist factions in power [35, p. 487]. But D. Hume has no speech about the rational contractual basis of statehood. He quite convincingly, within the framework of his own position, proved the serious conditionality of the concept of the "original contract", its small explanatory power in the issue of the emergence of the state and very weak significance for understanding modern political and legal processes. "This is not justified by the history or experience of any country in the world in any period of its existence" [35, p. 660]. But Hume's reasoning is based on pure empiricism, which denies universal and necessary laws both in nature and in morality and the state — the latter are understood as some "convenience" that allows people to more or less successfully coexist with each other, based on a habitual way of life. Hobbes' conceptual series is qualitatively different — T. Hobbes speaks of the law precisely as a universal and necessary rule (both in nature and in the state), which has exceptions in the real world, but does not cease to be universal and necessary from this. And if for D. Hume the roots of the state and its nature lie in naked violence (although in the modern world it is rather potential [35, p. 662], but no less effective [35, p. 666-667]), then for Hobbes this violence always goes side by side with consent and rational acceptance. How to combine initial consent and total censorship? How to combine the rational character of the Hobbesian man as a subject of a social contract and the strict protection of this person from possible mental temptations that can potentially cause discussions, discord or — God forbid — a full-fledged war?

It was this point that caused sharp objections from I. Kant (on the connection of I. Kant's philosophy with T. Hobbes, see for example: [36, pp. 279-280]). I. Kant himself defines a social contract as an association of people, which "in itself is a goal ... therefore, there is an unconditional and first duty in general in all external relations between people" [37] and which forms a community, i.e. a certain common essence (ein gemeines Wesen). At the same time, this contract has nothing to do with the natural goals of people (happiness), nor with the means to achieve it. The civil state, therefore, requires the subjection of free people to compulsory laws as a requirement of pure reason, without any purely empirical goals. Everyone, therefore, has the right to seek his own happiness, that is, to arrange his own "empirical" life, if at the same time he does not interfere with another in the same matter. This preserves the activity of a person, and does not destroy it as under despotism, while guaranteeing the right to the same activity on the part of another. I. Kant notes that the conclusion of such a contract cannot be considered as an empirical fact, it is just an idea of reason, that is, the ultimate reasonable concept that does not need contemplation, however, requires that for any law to be mocked by the sovereign ruler "as if" it came from the will of the whole people, "at least at the moment the people were in such a position or held such a way of thinking that if they were asked about this law, they probably would not approve of it" [38]. The impossibility of the latter automatically delegitimizes any law. This, however, does not apply to the judgment of a subject who is obliged to obey the law in any case. By rebelling against the sovereign and the law, citizens are doing the greatest injustice - which again does not mean that the people have no right at all in relation to the sovereign (although these rights are not compulsory).

This "non—compulsion" represents the right of a citizen to express his own opinion about the justice or injustice of the law - of course, with the unconditional and full implementation of the law. The head of state is also a person, he can also make mistakes — and it is our duty to point out the mistake to him. Otherwise, we should recognize him as divinely inspired, sinless — and in general, superhuman. The sovereign must be able to see his mistakes in order to be able to correct them and thereby change himself. Everyone should be able to verify the legality of a particular law with their own mind.

"Man," writes I. Kant, "is an animal that, living among other members of its kind, needs a Master. The fact is that he necessarily abuses his freedom in relation to his neighbors; and although he, as a rational being, wants to have a law that would define the boundaries of freedom for everyone, but his selfish animal inclination encourages him, where he needs it, to make an exception for himself. Consequently, he needs a master who would break his own will and force him to obey the universally recognized will, under which everyone can enjoy freedom" [Kant I. Idea ... p. 428.]

Thus, it is obvious that I. Kant speaks of man as a free being who realizes freedom in an endless search for his universal definitions (theoretically) and the mutual determination of its boundaries relative to the freedom of others. A person who considers himself as a goal sees himself already as a singularity, revealed into the universal, but not as a pure singularity. This presupposes a person's transcendental openness to another person. In T. Hobbes, a person is separated from a person by an abyss — a person cannot penetrate into the thoughts of another, a person cannot put himself in the place of another, cannot judge himself from the position of another (and if he can, then this does not generate empathy, but something directly opposite).

For I. Kant, a person is at a kind of junction between the world of natural necessity (of course, understood as such in the context of New European science) and human freedom and can be understood in the context of a particular world. Actually, the political construction of a person as an actor of politics balances between these poles — the pole of naturalism (where a person is understood and evaluated as a being subject to the laws of both nature and society) and the pole of freedom, where a person does not so much turn into an object of political manipulation or violence, as it becomes a project with a purpose and meaning in implementation and disclosure I. Kant's two conceptions of freedom collide — the individual (as an individual's freedom to do something in accordance with his needs and ideas about happiness) and the universal (as a regulatory idea of reason, as the embodiment of the genus in the individual). A free individual is one who sets his own limitations and follows them regardless of circumstances, one who freely defines himself and follows this definition without alienating critical reason from himself. Freedom is precisely the ability of a person to subordinate himself to the requirements of reason, that is, to the universal. The state is an instrument for the coordination of general and private interests through generally accepted universally valid norms. A law-abiding citizen, in the words of I. Kant, "requires nothing but freedom, and the most harmless of all that can be called freedom, namely freedom in all cases to use his mind publicly" [Kant What is enlightenment].

Here the difference in the understanding of freedom by both thinkers plays a decisive role. Freedom in I. Kant is super-natural and represents the possibility of creating oneself in the context of all humanity as its phenomenon. In T. Hobbes, freedom is natural — freedom understood, first of all, as the ability to set goals and achieve them, goals, in turn, necessarily set by one or another relevant reasons. For I. Kant, a person is a "thing" for himself, for T. Hobbes, he acts as such an opaque "thing" for others. For I. Kant, the state and the social contract enable a person to achieve happiness independently in harmony with the self-development of both himself and other people and society as a whole. For T. Hobbes, the sovereign state cannot be the object of citizens' judgments, it is the pure retention of a person within certain limits, excluding any violation of the peace, any disputes, any discussions - except for natural sciences, and even those can exist only within certain limits.

However, in the understanding of man by T. Hobbes, a timid sprout of a thing in itself also looks through — this is the physical being of a person who does not obey both the sovereign and state laws (the sovereign does not have the right to order a subject to harm himself, although he can order another person to do this to me), and the person himself (natural law prohibits suicide). I, as a living being, find myself initially determined in life — I have no right to encroach on it, even having the right to everything.

 

ConclusionThus, completing the study, the following conclusions can be drawn in terms of the stated goals and objectives.

Firstly, the philosophy of T. Hobbes is a relatively complete and independent version of the philosophy of the early Modern period, based on the latest achievements of science of that era. Almost always and everywhere in his major works of the 40-50s, T. Hobbes acts not as an experimental scientist, but as a teacher and an original interpreter, not discovering fundamentally new truths, but putting in order the discoveries already made by others, building the latter into a coherent rational system. The exception is the doctrine of T. Hobbes on law and the state, where T. Hobbes creatively applies the methodology of science of the XVII century, going back, on the one hand, to R. Descartes, on the other hand, to a greater extent, to G. Galileo.

Secondly, on the example of T. Hobbes' philosophical system, the fundamental novelty of the paradigm of classical New European science in relation to the paradigm of science and natural philosophy of Antiquity, which goes back to the works of Plato and Aristotle, as well as the sophists, is very clearly revealed [39]. The world in the context of the ancient paradigm appears as closed, defined both in its own position (absolute top and bottom) and in the position of all objects in it and its components without exception. The concept of the state in the framework of antiquity goes back to this understanding of the world — the polis state itself is a set of places that people should occupy in accordance with their "essential" purposes. The new time radically breaks this picture, turning a certain world into an infinite universe, the absolute location of objects into a relative one, and any place into its own place of any thing, which it passes under the influence of other things, realizing itself through the process of moving from place to place.

Thirdly, the Hobbesian system clearly demonstrates a characteristic feature of Modern science dating back to G. Galileo: the derivation of a new analytical-deductive (objective) world from directly (sensually) given everyday reality, with which scientific description deals. Hobbes discovers the roots of this deduction in language, which is autonomous even at the ordinary everyday level in relation to the reality that it represents. At the same time, the objectivity of language unfolds in joint human practice — that is, when language designations are realized in the objective sensory-given world through the activities of people to transform the latter.

Fourth, this analytical-deductive world, which has the character of universal definitions and scientific laws, inevitably generates its own "antithesis" - a world that exists by itself, that is, the world of bodies external to man. The person himself is, first of all, a complex physical body, the existence of which cannot be encroached upon either by the sovereign (who has no right to demand from the subject to deprive himself of life), nor by the person himself (who cannot deprive himself of the right to exist as such). According to T. Hobbes, this most important condition of any cognitive rational activity became the subject of a well-known discussion between T. Hobbes and R. Descartes. Reason-reason, T. Hobbes believes, cannot be and act absolutely autonomously, it necessarily assumes something external to itself, other to itself, not given to itself, and, therefore, unknowable.

Fifth, the socio-political concept of T. Hobbes demonstrates the solution of the problem of interrelation and mutual transition of the individual (concrete, sensually-given) and the universal (abstractly "essential"), that is, one of the main issues of the theory of knowledge and philosophy. This solution in the socio-political sphere is a social contract, which represents the procedure of representing the universal will in the person of the sovereign through the renunciation in his favor of all natural rights — that is, the radical transformation of some original individual person, albeit abstractly constructed, into some part of the universal artificial body. Actually, the need for such a body is the need to translate an abstract word (contract) into the real world, the need for reverse representation, the translation of knowledge into practice, without which knowledge itself remains only a set of words that have nothing to do with reality and human activity.

The task of such an artificial body (Leviathan) is to maintain peace, that is, to embody agreements and contracts between people, to give them material strength, existence — in a world where there are no absolute "entities" and their corresponding absolute "places", but there are endless interactions, mutually destroying and mutually reinforcing each other, and there is infinite movement generated by these interactions. The condition for the functioning of Leviathan is the prohibition to make private judgments on a number of issues. Leviathan acts as the boundary of analytical reduction and meaningful deduction, that is, the scientifically described, objective world. But if in natural science this kind of boundary is determined naturally (for example, through God), then in the field of morality, politics and law this boundary is practically established by an "artificial body".

The world, which is an objective world described by science, thus has well-defined boundaries within which only a theoretical understanding of objective reality is possible. True, objective reality itself is always left out of the brackets here as an "unknowable remnant". This is indicated by the paradoxes indicated by G. Galileo. This is evidenced by the general paradox of T. Hobbes' philosophy. I. Kant will also pay attention to this in the next century, but in a slightly different context.

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The reviewed article is a holistic and highly competent essay on the philosophical teachings of Thomas Hobbes. The author examines all its main elements, showing the intersection of semantic lines of various sections of Hobbes' philosophy, a result rarely achieved by both authors who wrote about the English philosopher and historians of philosophy who sought to reconstruct other complex and contradictory concepts of Modern thinkers. The achievement of this unity of the image of Hobbes' philosophy testifies not only to professional historical and philosophical erudition, but also to the depth of penetration into the style of thought of the studied philosopher, culminating in the gradually developing skill to think like the studied author, as if "anticipating" and restoring the course of his reasoning. The undoubted advantage of the article is the presentation of the socio-cultural context of the era of the English Revolution, Hobbes acts in the full sense of this expression as a "son of his time", turning out to be one of the exponents of the spirit of the era in which he had to live. However, the "historicity" of the narrative is not limited to the "age of Hobbes", the text also presents the connections of Hobbes' philosophy with ancient philosophers and thinkers of the Renaissance, and here the author is also characterized by erudition, the ability to extract non-trivial conclusions from seemingly well-known facts, the ability to surprise the reader with unexpected parallels or oppositions. Separately, it should be said about the style of the article: it is written in light and sometimes even elegant language, demonstrating the possibility of achieving a synthesis of professionalism and simplicity of presentation. This feature is especially pronounced precisely where the author discovers the above-mentioned "intersections" of various lines of Hobbes' thoughts, for example, when he reveals the place in his system of the doctrine of signs. In the existing tradition of perception of New European philosophy, Hobbes is sometimes characterized (although this does not apply to his socio-political teaching) as a "boring" philosopher; however, the author managed to fully overcome this prejudice. At the same time, it is impossible not to pay attention to one circumstance that prevents the article from being recommended for publication without a doubt – this is its volume: the fact is that it amounts to more than three author's sheets (the number of sources corresponds to it). Is it possible to divide an article into parts without damaging the impression it makes? – In the opinion of the reviewer, yes, however, the last word still, apparently, should remain with the Editorial Board. Whatever it turns out to be, there are no shortcomings in the submitted text that would imply the need for repeated review (the author can eliminate several typos in a working order). Based on the above, I recommend accepting the article as a whole or one of its sections for publication in a scientific journal.
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