by Xixi Jiang
In an interview with The Guardian, distinguished Israeli historian Yuval Noah Harari discusses how Homo sapiens came to cooperate in their domination over the planet, noting “our power depends on collective fictions.” [1] It is this unique capability that distinguishes humans from other species and allows us to collaborate within our infrastructures, most of which, as Harari points out, are indeed fictional. Humanity progressed when we conceived notions such as the legal system, the economic network, nationality and other incorporeal concepts to facilitate our large-scale, corporeal activities. Beyond the physical world, there exists, as a result, an imaginary but parallel dimension, a platform where humans communicate.
This distinction between the material and spiritual counterpart lies at the heart of dualism. The body of thought, formulated and argued by Plato and Aristotle, was popularized when sixteenth century French philosopher René Descartes published Meditations on First Philosophy, in which he famously cast a grim shadow of doubt on all existing beliefs about the physical world. Disputing the empiricist allegiance to material evidence, Descartes expressed a deep distrust towards the senses, claiming that they’re prone to deceiving us all the time.[2] As this skepticism inevitably extended to his own existence in Second Meditation, Descartes concluded that he does, in fact, exist only when he is thinking. Though sensations could be tricks played on him by an evil God, he can be decisively certain that thought exists: he is sure of this because he is thinking it. [3] Therefore, in order to approach the world without illusion, Descartes advises that human beings must constantly question reality by “[withdrawing] their minds from the senses.” [4]
Descartes’s revelation—the notion that the metaphysical dimension, fueled by the mind, is the confirmation and driving force behind the material world which is perceived by the senses––conjures up a familiar image, namely, that of “body politic”. Much like the Cartesian concept of man, this medieval metaphor holds that the state is a lifeless body incapable of action without the sovereign. The parallel is fairly evident: left to itself, the body/state is not only idle in utility but nonexistent in essence. Its purpose and presence are only affirmed when the mind/sovereign, performs its tasks—respectively, thinking and ruling. It alone has no more agency than a vehicle which becomes wholly frivolous with no one to start the engine.
Granted, machines must operate this way—under the laws of physics—but Descartes thought of man this way (and scientists today have said much differently). His claims were emphatic about the separation of man’s internal essence and external action. While this depiction may be innocuous for most, it is capable of generating alarming connotations when applied to the sovereign. By imagining distance between thoughts and doings, Descartes, intentionally or not, invoked drastic double standards in favor of the subjectivity of the sovereign’s mind. In “The Sovereign State: A Genealogy,” the first chapter of Sovereignty in Fragments, British intellectual historian Quentin Skinner observes that there is an “impersonal significance that rulers must preserve if they wish to avoid a coup d’état, a strike against their state.” [5] Indeed, moral boundaries become blurred when a ruler is explicitly distinguished from his conducts, which, according to Descartes, effectively belong to the state—a fictional entity that cannot be held liable. The logical link between cause-and-effect, action-and-consequence is broken. Descartes’ dualist philosophy, as it unfolds, begins to sound dangerously like authoritarian rhetoric.
In his lifetime, Descartes vigorously asserted his disavowal of politics on the grounds that people do not behave rationally, but a closer look at his scant explicit remarks suggests error—or rather irrationality—in his own reasoning. In an essay published in the 2001 edition of the scholarly journal Humanitas, Quentin Taylor dissects the contradiction between the liberalist thought Descartes’ philosophical anti-traditionalism is said to have inspired and the absolutist sovereign figure his philosophy itself connotes. [6] First, Taylor highlights in footnote that Descartes was “a defender of the political status quo who abjured the discussion of politics as unbefitting a philosopher and a private citizen.” [7] Unlike most major philosophers, Descartes’ quietism in politics, acceptance of established authorities, and overall disinterest in governmental affairs characterize him as an anomaly and a radical conservative. Despite growing protests against the institutions in power, Descartes expressed his own dissatisfaction, but “considers even ‘the slightest reform of public affairs’ so complex and risky as to cast grave doubts on its desirability.” [8] To him, the sovereign’s authority (or the façade of it) is far more important for the stability of society than any substantial reforms. Taylor goes on to point out that “[n]ever, however, does he say that those who gain power through injustice should be opposed or deposed. Indeed, he claims that ‘[a]lmost always’ the means of attaining power ‘are just, provided the princes who use them think them to be.’”[9] This proclamation is especially striking, for Descartes suggests here that justice is determined not according to an extrinsic, unbiased guideline, but solely by the subjective will of the sovereign. The absolutist implications of his mind-body dichotomy are confirmed at what is perhaps his most Machiavellian moment. In the end, Descartes is what Taylor calls “a forerunner of the eighteenth-century proponents of enlightened despotism.[10]” His sovereign is one who governs under few, simplistic, and arbitrary rules, and more importantly, whose integrity is preserved apart from his body, the state, if it were to cross moral boundaries. Like Taylor suggests, “[a] more subjective—indeed, inadequate—notion of public justice can hardly be imagined.”[11]
Utilizing the concept that man’s essence is immaterial, Descartes effectively separated the sovereign and his actions—the state’s mind and body. In performing this figurative decapitation, as a collateral outcome, he endowed the state with human qualities, transforming it into a personified entity. The anthropomorphization of the state was not an unfamiliar concept among political theorists of his time, with one of the most notable examples being the Leviathan, the Hobbesian ‘persona ficta’. An empiricist and materialist, Hobbes rejects Descartes’ complete distinction between mind and matter, but despite their intellectual opposition in every way, Hobbes seems to have taken inspiration from his long-time rival when he developed his theory of the state. In a chapter titled “The State as Mechanism in Hobbes and Descartes”, German political philosopher Carl Schmitt poignantly observes that Hobbes “transferred the Cartesian conception of man as a mechanism with a soul onto the ‘huge man,’ the state, made by him into a machine animated by the sovereign-representative person.”[12] Using the Leviathan symbol, Hobbes introduces the social contract theory: in exchange for full protection, subjects must authorize the sovereign to represent their interests and be their actor, and henceforth pay full obedience to him.[13] As Schmitt brilliantly compares, “‘protego ergo obligo’ is the ‘cognito ergo sum’ of the state.”[14] To replicate Descartes’ logic, the former component “protego” lies at the heart of this contract and is the precedence of the successful workings of the state: in the same way thinking proves the existence of the body, the guarantee of protection affirms the legitimacy of the state. (“[I]n essence, it is not a state, but only a social covenant.”[15]) In this way, Hobbes’ mechanization of the state was an “enlarged mirror image”[16] of Descartes’ mechanization of the human body, which cast a pioneering influence on the subsequent industrial revolution, signaling the coming of an age in which the majority of human productions would come to be characterized by their machine-like qualities.
Given the the indisputable resemblance between the two philosophers’ theories of the state as well as the pure suggestive force of the Leviathan alone, the question naturally arises: could the Hobbesian concept have the same totalitarian implications? Schmitt insists that the use of the biblical metaphor is devoid of any frightening, apocalyptic connotations that many saw implicit in the image. The “totality” in this sense “always accords with the total responsibility for protecting and securing the safety of citizens.”[17] This is the central point of the contract: total obedience ends when total protection ceases to be guaranteed, and people regain the freedom they forfeited during the exchange. The relationship between the sovereign and his subjects is not an oppressive, one-sided exploitation for the sovereign’s selfish agenda, but a mutually beneficial, voluntary exchange in each’s best interest—namely, an ultimate termination to the war of all against all in the primitive, savage state of nature. Moreover, combining Descartes’ “man equals machine” with Hobbes’ “state equals huge man”, the state results in what Schmitt calls a “‘huge machine’, a gigantic mechanism whose function is to protect the physical existence of men whom it rules and guards.”[18] Because it is artificially manufactured by men, itself comprised of men, and for the well-being of men, Schmitt argues that the state, a creation whose “material and maker… machine and engineer are one and the same,”[19] is therefore inherently incapable of any totality.
Hobbes and Descartes are two of many thinkers who successfully created abstract concepts that revolutionized the organization of human activities on a large scale. At the same time, it is fascinating how both conceptions of governmental framework, drawn from the same concept of body politic, have developed thoroughly contrasting political implications. Descartes’ philosophy, seemingly apolitical, has the horrifying undertone of absolutism; Hobbes’ Leviathan, seemingly demonic, protects the well-being of the subjects of the state through the covenant, which serves to ensure mutual benefit. Such multitude of interpretations is testament to, if not the sheer transformational power, the danger of uncertainty that comes along with fictionalizing. For instance, Hobbes’ theory of authorization holds that a sovereign’s actions are by definition on behalf of and in the best interest of his subjects. But ambiguity quickly emerges if the sovereign were to violate the covenant and fail to fulfill his promise of protection. With the absence of an objective third-party, who then is left to determine his validity? Once again, double standards threaten to arise. The previously-thought gap between Hobbes and Descartes’ versions of sovereignty begins to shrink. Moreover, Quentin Skinner observes that Hobbes “categorically distinguishes the state not merely from the figure of the sovereign, but also from the unity of the multitude over which the sovereign rules at any one time.”[20] This was an unprecedented notion, differing from prior absolutist and populist theories where sovereignty resided either with the sovereign or the people. Because of Hobbes, an entity that had been previously non-existent was artificially brought into being, and its surreal, supernatural conception generated puzzling implications. If the Cartesian view of sovereignty invokes an “impersonal significance”, Hobbes’ version commands a “personified significance”, which is more difficult to pinpoint due to the elusive nature of this “person”.
Towards the end of his interview with The Guardian, Harari cautions: “We certainly need some fictions in order to have large-scale societies. That’s true. But we need to use these fictions to serve us instead of being enslaved by them.”[21] In an age where new technology is being invented at an exponential rate, it is helpful to ponder the effect our inventions have come to have on us. In Hobbes’ case, the social contract gave life to “the sovereign-representative person [who] is much more than the sum total of all the participating particular wills.”[22] Somewhere within this unidentifiable excess, the state-entity has developed an ulterior motive, one detached from and larger than the interests of the sovereign and the subjects combined: in acquiring human qualities, the state is now concerned with its own survival. In part, this may be an effort by humanity to vicariously achieve “a possible prolongation of this kind of physical existence.”[23] Through creating an ageless medium which not only documents our vicissitudes but carries the crystallizations of man’s most sophisticated level of thinking, we hope for our ideological legacy to prevail and outlast our brief, insignificant lives. Precisely because it is capable of such metaphysical immortality that is beyond men’s wildest dreams, Hobbes believes in prioritizing this fictional identity over both the sovereign and the represented mass. As Quentin Skinner states, “[w]hile sovereigns come and go, and while the unity of the multitude continually alters as its members are born and die, the person of the state endures, incurring obligations and enforcing rights far beyond the lifetime of any of its subjects.”[24]
But to what extent should men sacrifice their interests, rights, perhaps even their lives for an entity whose very existence is by, of, and for none other than the same men? The cautionary tale of Frankenstein is more applicable here than ever: as Schmitt recounts 16th-century French jurist Jean Bodin’s warning, “those who think they are capable of concluding a covenant with the leviathan should be aware of his multifaceted nature and recognize the difficulty or the impossibility of making him subservient to themselves.”[25] Whether it is the Cartesian separation of man’s mind and body, the Hobbesian state-person who has no material existence in the natural world, or their collective rendering of the state as the amorphous “huge machine”, we put ourselves at risk of being exploited (or in Frankenstein’s case, destroyed) by our own creations, over whom we believed we had clear domination.
Perhaps the question should be: why do we need to create these fictions? It holds true that all creations in nature are necessitated by events or circumstances that made their conceptions inevitable, but humanity, a species notorious for its obsession with power and progress, seems to be striving for something more. Referring to the mechanization of the state, Schmitt observes in his essay: “this codification, like all such processes, led to new calculations and thus to the possibility of mastering this machine as well as security and freedom so that ultimately a specific new notion of the ‘constitutional state’ could arise in the sense that laws are conducive to the calculable workings of the state.”[26] If to mechanize is ultimately to deconstruct the state down to its basic, predictable elements, in the same sense, to fictionalize is to conceptualize the process in hopes of eventually unravelling it. It is almost a convolution that we must mythicize something before we can finally decipher its mysticism. But as Schmitt hypothesizes from the works of the great mathematician Marquis de Condorcet—and maybe this is the endgame—once we master these fictions and, in the process, transform ourselves, so that humanity is no longer dependent on the crutches it had built for its own need, “it can be expected that the state will one day make itself superfluous. In other words, the dawn of the day when the great leviathan can be slaughtered is already visible.”[27]
***
[1] Andrew Anthony, Yuval Noah Harari: ‘Homo sapiens as we know them will disappear in a century or so’ (The Guardian, March 19, 2017), https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2017/mar/19/yuval-harari-sapiens-readers-questions-lucy-prebble-arianna-huffington-future-of-humanity.
[2] René Descartes, Meditations, Objections, and Replies (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, Inc., 2006), 9-13.
[3] Descartes, Mediations, Objections, and Replies 13-15.
[4] Descartes, Mediations, Objections, and Replies 6.
[5] Quentin Skinner, “The Sovereign State: A Genealogy,” in Hent Kalmo and Quentin Skinner, eds., Sovereignty in Fragments: The Past, Present and Future of a Contested Concept (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 28.
[6] Quentin Taylor, “Descartes’s Paradoxical Politics,” Humanitas 14 (2001): 76-103.
[7] Taylor, “Descartes’s Paradoxical Politics,” 78.
[8] Taylor, “Descartes’s Paradoxical Politics,” 80.
[9] Taylor, “Descartes’s Paradoxical Politics,” 95.
[10] Taylor, “Descartes’s Paradoxical Politics,” 103.
[11] Taylor, “Descartes’s Paradoxical Politics,” 96.
[12] Carl Schmitt, “The State as Mechanism in Hobbes and Descartes,” in The Leviathan in the State Theory of Thomas Hobbes (Westport: Greenwood Press, 1996), 94.
[13] Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, with selected variants from the Latin edition of 1668, (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1994), 111.
[14] Carl Schmitt, The Concept of the Political, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007), 52.
[15] Carl Schmitt, “The State as Mechanism in Hobbes and Descartes,” 97.
[16] Carl Schmitt, “The State as Mechanism in Hobbes and Descartes,” 91.
[17] Carl Schmitt, “The State as Mechanism in Hobbes and Descartes,” 96.
[18] Carl Schmitt, “The State as Mechanism in Hobbes and Descartes,” 98.
[19] Carl Schmitt, “The State as Mechanism in Hobbes and Descartes,” 98.
[20] Quentin Skinner, “The Sovereign State: A Genealogy,” 37.
[21] Andrew Anthony, “Yuval Noah Harari: ‘Homo sapiens as we know them will disappear in a century or so’,” The Guardian.
[22] Carl Schmitt, “The State as Mechanism in Hobbes and Descartes,” 97.
[23] Carl Schmitt, “The State as Mechanism in Hobbes and Descartes,” 96.
[24] Quentin Skinner, “The Sovereign State: A Genealogy,” 37.
[25] Carl Schmitt, “The State as Mechanism in Hobbes and Descartes,” 95.
[26] Carl Schmitt, “The State as Mechanism in Hobbes and Descartes,” 99.
[27] Carl Schmitt, “The State as Mechanism in Hobbes and Descartes,” 97.