Monday, December 17, 2018
Puritans and Liberty are quite antonymic
Thomas Hobbes is first of all a Puritan
I would say that Hobbes' obsession with the senses is coming from his Puritan religious thinking. Sin is necessarily in the senses. Man is a sinner because he is dominated by his senses. At the same time man is nothing in front of God, though he was created in his image, because he is only a bunch of sensual, sensory sensations and he does not have the mind of God, just a divine soul that enables him to see the truth of God that he has to accept and obedience is the first and final quality of this puritan man. Note we find that kind of attitude in Bach too. Descartes is not different since he wants to prove by the development of science that the creation of God is perfect, and this perfection is the proof of the existence of God as a creator.
Aristotle was a pagan for Hobbes and as such missed the real point that man is nothing in the hand of God and that the senses or nothing but illusionary means of not knowing anything. Think of Plato and his famous cavern: man can only know what he can imagine about the shadows of the real world he captures in his cave of ignorance. Aristotle's dialectics must have been some kind of crime against God for Hobbes. How can there be one truth, then its opposite truth and then the final synthesis of these two becoming the truth in the end? Same thing with Descartes who is looking for the ultimate concept, the ultimate truth that stands beyond his sensory impressions and has to be deducted from these contradictory sensory impressions. and this pure unitary concept is the ultimate proof of the existence of God the creator of the world.
The materialism of these people is the result of the belief the world was created by God. God is a pure spiritual being, but his creation is pure matter. The materialism of these people in the 17th century was the result of their complete belief that the material world was perfect because it had been created by a pure spiritual force called God. Check what I wrote about Hobbes and his Leviathan at https://www.amazon.fr/gp/customer-reviews/R260SFK9KC74K6/ref=cm_cr_dp_d_rvw_ttl?ie=UTF8&ASIN=1840227338
Publication Date: 2018
Publication Name: Medium.com
# posted by Dr. Jacques COULARDEAU @ 12:14 PM 
