Correction: (max 500 charact.)
The complaint
Adorno XIII 239
Politics/Hobbes/Adorno: The power struggles within which Hobbes' materialism is to be understood were, in essence, the power struggles between the state as an organization that affects the real coexistence of people, against the power of the churches. The inner pathos of the whole Hobbes' thinking goes - this is wholly Renaissance-like - into the direction of strengthening the power of the state against the interference of the Church.
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State , >
Christian Church , >
Society , >
Power , >
Contract theory , >
Contracts/Hobbes .
Therein he is quite similar to Macchiavelli. Cf. >
Machiavelli .
How does Hobbes' extremely authoritarian state philosophy combine with a certain materialistic basic conception in metaphysics or natural philosophy?
Adorno XIII 249
Politics/Power/Hobbes/Adorno: The idea of ruling nature is extended by Hobbes also to the inner-human nature. He equates human nature with the animal world, as it becomes clear in his famous parable, that a human is to another human like a wolf, homo homini lupus.
XIII 250
HobbesVsAristoteles: The Aristotelian concept of zoon politikon, the human as a political animal, is denied by Hobbes. For the nominalistic Hobbes, there are only the pure, natural, self-sustaining individual beings. Certain moments of this view are not so different from the ethics of Spinoza - e.g. the principle that every being is first determined by the need to preserve itself.
XIII 251
State contract/Hobbes/Adorno: according to Hobbes freedom is not good for anything. The evil animals, the human beings, transfer them to the sovereign, who keeps them as far as he still guarantees to them the possibility of self-preservation.
It is materialistic in the fact that humans as natural beings are constituted only by the bare need and the only chance to get beyond the possibility of the conflict is that the fulfillment of the needs is made dependent on the renunciation of the original war of all individuals against all individuals - the original bellum omnium contra omnes.
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Civil war .
