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Political philosophy vs Natural science

anon_nowe said in #3467 2w ago: received

Strauss on Hobbes

>Political philosophy is independent of natural science because its principles are not borrowed from natural science, but are provided by experience, by the experience which every one has of himself, or, to put it more accurately, are discovered by the efforts of self-knowledge and the self-examination of every-one. As a result, evidence in political philosophy is of quite a different kind from evidence in natural science. On the one hand, it is much easier to understand : its subject and its concepts are not so remote from the average man as are the subject and concepts of mathematics which form the basis of natural science. On the other hand, 'the politiques are the harder study of the two'; by reason of their passions, men obscure the, in itself, clear and simple knowledge of the norms which political philosophy builds up. Moreover, man with his passions and his self-seeking is the particular subject of political philosophy, and man opposes by every kind of hypocrisy the self-knowledge on which the proof of these norms rests.

>According to Hobbes, political philosophy is not only independent of natural science, but it is the main component of human knowledge, of which the other main component is natural science.

On a first reading many may reject this dichotomy between political philosophy and natural science, as most will probably be naturally inclined to do on this board. What I find interesting however is that Thomas Hobbes himself had a mechanistic, materialistic view of the world, influenced by the rapid advances in astronomy and physics, by the thoughts of the likes of Kepler and Galileo. He thought that our wills, passions, desires, thoughts, were all produced through a mechanistic materialistic causality in our body, essentially through external stimuli--humans being complex machines whose behaviour is governed by these physical laws of motion.

This mechanistic foundation underlies both his moral and political philosophy. In this view human behavior is determined by appetites (attractions) and aversions (repulsions), which are themselves products of mechanical processes described. Reason is a process of logical calculation, and not an innate faculty tied to natural law (as in most of scholastic tradition).

I'm mostly thinking out loud but I'm wondering why he nonetheless claimed that political philosophy is independent of natural science, despite his materialistic views ? Did he not push his conclusions to their logical limit ? Can we save his reasoning somehow ?

referenced by: >>3473 >>3476

Strauss on Hobbes... received

anon_wybo said in #3473 2w ago: received

>>3467
After letting this ferment in my head overnight, I think you must focus on the difference he makes between understanding things like oneself and understanding things not like oneself. I'm a hard materialist, but I actually agree with Hobbes in a subjective sense about the separation of those two kinds of knowing. To know oneself and one's fellows is much more difficult than to know mechanical facts about the external world.

So even if all processes in the universe are fundamentally mechanistic, to live and breathe as a man in a political context requires knowledge that is arrived at both more intuitively (self-examination is available to all) and with more difficulty (correctness in self-examination is hard) than the mere physical character of the world. I think this is consistent with the tenor of 17th century court philosophers. They were not really attempting any grand unification theories like we are today, and many of their concerns were focused around the sacrality and subjectivity of the human.

After letting this f received

anon_cipy said in #3476 2w ago: received

>>3467
>many may reject this dichotomy between political philosophy and natural science, as most will probably be naturally inclined to do on this board.
I agree with Hobbes there is quite a strong distinction between political philosophy and natural science, at least in methodology. Natural science is strongest at creating tight predictive frameworks for external non-living phenomena, out of which we can built technology. Political philosophy is the self-reflexive art of arrangement of many living people in a complex adaptive system for which the model is part of the structure. And yeah as he points out we live political philosophy every day where natural science despite being more basal is the purview of philosophers and engineers. It's just a completely different thing, even under a materialist or physicalist framework.

As for materialism, I think the early materialists were too hyped up about mechanistic models of people and such. Newton's discoveries were exciting, but we have to understand the result was something of a bubble where everyone thought they could do the same thing for everything else. Even 400 years later there still basically isn't anything else like newton's laws, even if science made many advances in many areas, they all have different character and methodologies, not just different equations.

>Reason is a process of logical calculation, and not an innate faculty tied to natural law (as in most of scholastic tradition).
I haven't read whatever you are paraphrasing, but what does this even mean? Is the innate faculty tied to natural law not the faculty to logically calculate reasonable thoughts?

I agree with Hobbes received

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