Abstract (english) | Research in this doctoral thesis is based on the assumption that the semantic field of the term homo lupus is most active and most relevant where the classical, historical and religious-mythological narratives of human nature hinder our attempts to understand the
articulated creation of the philosophical visions of that notion. Man is nothing more than an
amalgam. So if human beings are inclined to awaken as semigods, Titans, or fantastic
supernatural beings, this then means that Hobbes' parabola homo lupus, perhaps more than
any other, becames emblematic for our disordered condition. Homo lupus therefore marks the
man's inner image and this penetration in the aura of animality is comparable to melancholia.
We can agree that this statements does not declare the beautiful truths. These lines resist
understanding and desirable hierarchies of human nature. They stimulate questions that
pervade the primordial instability, the survival of zoological closeness, and the twilight that
undermine our fragile humanity. Hobbes wanted to say that humanity was born out of
conflict, so for our author violence is a form of existence. An anti-man (homo lupus) manages
people by means of violence, therefore in the state of nature the price of freedom is constatnt
caution.
Thomas Hobbes has been permanently marked by two claims, which also can been
seen as platforms for researching his political opus: one says that man to a man is a an arrant
wolf, and the other says that the state of nature is a war of all against all, that means the state
without a political authority. Though Hobbes in his work did not explicitly designate a natural
man as a wolf-man, the term homo lupus became the main epochal and anthropological
concept by which any serious interpretation of Hobbes' political theory begins and by which is
denounced the original human nature. The dissertation will show that the premise which says
that Hobbes' natural man is mere instinctive being driven exclusively by the passions and the
self-preservation requirement does not fully exhaust the content of the concept of homo lupus
and that, for a deeper understanding of the human problematic nature and the conflict nature
of the natural state, therefore it is necessary to redefine Hobbes anthropological starting point
and to determine its new epistemological status. For the beginning, we need to shift the focus
from the state of nature to human nature and examine the phenomena of melancholy and
madness as disintegrating factors of human status that point to the impotence in replacing the
lost sense of social struggle resulting from the Early Modern's turn into subjectivity, then it
will be more understandable how melancholy and madness, apart from causing mental 6
distortion of man by degrading him to the animal level, can also deliever consciousness of
natural freedom that was lost under the necessity of political authority.
Madness and melancholy, as a particular mental state, have a stronghold in human
nature and not beyond it, so the melancholic feeling of anxiety and fear of this astonishing
insanity that violently rages in natural state, should be observed in the context of the
universality of Hobbes's political doctrine paradigmatically based on fear as its dominant
character. Hence, melancholy and madness within Hobbes's political anthropology should be
seen as metaphorical diseases, that means as mechanisms for the liberation of moral, cultural,
political and social norms. Melancholy at Hobbes' theory of science does not manifest itself as
a mental disruption, but as a craving for power, which at the same time is accompanied by
anxiety and withdrawal. In other words, melancholy and madness are the means for man to be
in direct relationship with himself and his original nature, and the animal that goes through
insanity points to the fact that during the Early Modern Period, on the one hand, he expressed
the man's idea precisely through shaping after animals, on the other hand, the zoometaphore
transformation of man into the animal determined the inner limits of mankind.
With a more attentively study of the phenomenological characteristics of a natural
man, we came to the conclusion that the pre-political being we encounter in Hobbes's
description of the natural state is not an animal – homo lupus – but that his psychological
profile indicates that he is a man of melancholic temperament for which he acts as a beast or
beastly animal, but in the same time he paradoxically continues to retain his human status. By
imprisoning man in political bestiality, Hobbes has shown that animality of madness is the
lowest point of humanity, but it is also the transcendental principle for overcoming the hell of
a natural state and of a problematic human nature. Therefore, the formula of homo lupus can
not be regarded as an anthropological starting point of Hobbes' science of politics, since this
term is deduced on the basis of the particular mechanisms of man's nature in order to
legitimize the political (all) power of the Leviathan as the "mortal god", but instead we should
end a discussion of a human conception in the state of nature with this term.
The purpose for which we have described what can be made by the self-consistent
sequence of the long tradition of Hobbes's political science interpretation was to show the
relationship between human nature and politics and how melancholy and madness within the
discourse of political anthropology can be observed in two ways: first, it can be seen as the
marginal states of spirit that distort human status to the level of animality and open up the
ability to transcend the classically assumed ontological disposition of human nature and the
like, can be seen as deformations of personality that cause disharmonious relationships among 7
people and manifest themselves in a way deviant and socially improper role played by a
moral subject. It is implicit in this view that social relations between people should be
considered as inherently harmonious, and their disorder is seen only as a result of the presence
of mental illness or problematic human nature. The model drawn by Hobbes in his theoretical
architectural society starts with the negation of a rational social struggle against each and
every man. By antithesis of man's substantial sociability, Hobbes made a break with classical
political knowledge and struck the foundations for a modern theory of law and the state,
giving priority to the law of the individual through the general law which is founded upon
mans' rationality, or his right to self-defense versus the duty of office. Thus, Hobbes' anatomy
of political power rests on natural law as the freedom that every individual has to make his or
her best possible maintenance of one's own life, and the natural order in which man is in
direct relation to one's own nature reappears as a state in contrast to the traditional toposheaven ,which resembles a hell in which a natural man is caught in a psyche of psychology
and battles with everyone else, because he is fighting for his freedom expressed in the selfdefense requirement.
Thus, at the beginning of Hobbes' political cosmogony homo lupus is standing before
which the imperative of establishing a social equilibrium is created by the split between the
selfishness of particular interests and the generality of the public order is imposed. It follows
that human nature is a major hermitic factor of a natural state that needs to be turned against
itself to overcome the atmosphere of general threat and achieve a harmonious common order.
Thus, on the structural axis of Hobbes' theoretical-political construction, a natural man is
assumed to be declaratively assumed as a wolf-man. However, although his nature is taken in
the specific context of the opposition to the centrifugal forces of egoisms and conflicting
passions of the natural state, that fact does not yet fully reveal the metastructure of the
anthropological concept of homo lupus, legitimately linked to the classic starting point of
Hobbes' political philosophy. In other words, formula homo homini lupus might serve as the
self-explanatory principle of problematic human nature within the discourse of Hobbes's
anthropology only in case if we consider that it rests on a nonhypothethically knowledge of
nature as a constitutive human being, and not on a hypothetical construction starting from the
position of a single assumption of a vision of human nature to the general aspirations of all
people. Otherwise, the formula homo lupus is merely an anthropological concept whose
content is marked by negative human nature of the human being and the cultural and
historical symbol of man as a non-being that determines a deviant social role deduced from 8
the mechanicist-individualistic and occult-esoteric terminology of the spirit of the Early
Modern Period.
Therefore, it was Michel Foucault who pointed out that during the 17th and 18th
centuries in Europe, experience of madness took important place in literature, philosophy and
art, but what needs to be emphasized is that the theme of madness was dealt with in various
ways. Madness now exists in a man, not out of it. The experience of madness takes on the
form of moral satire – it has become the "truth" of knowledge and the search for the voice of
reason in the age of delusions (court jester). Classicism which dominated during Early
Modern Period restrained madness and restricted it to reason, morality and law. Also, in
classicism the motive of the animal begins to be considered as something that is contrary to
nature. Hence, the madman is an anti-man (or homo lupus) - he is an unnatural creature that is
not yet a man, but has to become man. Madness is a mixture of nature and something what we
could call anti-nature. However by this great imprisoned of madness, it is realized that the
melancholic mind was an ontologically very lonely mind, which directly points out to an
individualism. The imprisonment of madness did not arise from the desire to punish or repair,
but simply to discipline and tough. Just as nature was subdued, the human mind was subdued
in the same way. So for those and such individuals society made life alive after bars like
carnivores. Namely, the medicine at that time considered madness with the excessive
development of dangerous passion – too much mourning or joy could have caused
melancholy and delirium. Therefore, madman is not a sick man – because of animality it is
insensitive to coldness, hunger and pain. His animality of madness actually protects him.
Furthermore, the Early Modern Period was obsessed by the beasts and the monsters. The
monster is a mixture of beings – a man fused with an animal. That is why the monster
represents the transgression of our natural boundaries. Thus Hobbes' homo lupus embodies a
legal labyrinth and depicts an antipathy or negative dialectics.
Though Hobbes never explicitly defined a natural man as a wolf-man, the term homo
lupus has nevertheless become the main historical and anthropological notion that not only
represents the starting point of Hobbes's political theory but denies the original human nature.
By studying the phenomenological characteristics of a natural man, we came to the
conclusion that a man of a natural state is not an animal – homo lupus – but that his
psychological profile indicates a melancholic temperament for which he acts as a beast, in
other words, like an animal. Thus, the mere assumption is that Hobbes' natural man is a
impulsive, unreasonable being whose "animal" nature must be "humanized" because it has all
the time its own personalities that make it a moral subject and a human individual. It turned 9
out that Hobbes had lowered the natural from its natural state even below the level of
animality, which is why the natural man in his pre-disposed state actually became a
borderless, unnatural beast – a beast that behaved worse than any animal. Furthermore, it is
clear that the understanding of Hobbes' anthropological starting point homo homini lupus as
an ontological foundation of human nature shows certain contradictions in the interpretation
of the epistemological status of that formula.
In the Early Modern Period's contemplation of the status of man's nature and of
Descartes's thesis about animals as machines, the idea was that animals were an insatiable
"automata" because they did not have a reasonable soul that would allow them the power of
speech, while man determined his foundations in self-consciousness and completely separated
from animal. This leads to an absolute delimitation between the interpersonal human status
and the unbalanced animal status. The subject of discussion about the difference between jude
and animal was just a matter of reason. From Aristotle until the middle of the seventeenth
century, it was the rule that it was just a reasonable soul (reason) to distinguish the principle
by which the boundary between humans and animals was concerned, and therefore it was
considered that the reasonable part of the soul belongs to man, whereas the lusty part
belonged to the animals. However, during the Early Modern Period, it has been noted that
people have the vicious side that directly connects them with animals. People, therefore, have
a "lower nature" symbolically expressed in a beast who through stormy madness shows the
lowest point of man's fall and the most obvious sign of his guilt. Therefore, Hobbes's political
anthropology needs to be read through the prism of the iconosphere of bestiality in the
representation of human nature, whereby the notion of transformation, or spiritual
transformation of the image of the world, whose impulse on the political plan Hobbes
depicted through the symbolic anthropometamorphosis of the natural man as a wolf-man in
character political subject – a citizen.
Since the notion of human nature as the principle of division in Hobbes' political
anthropology is prejudiced and abused by an ephemeral social constellation that on the one
hand is reflected in the loss of the continuity of the scholastic metaphysical support and the
aspiration for man to rejoin his center, and on the other hand in the growing particular
exaggerations of proprietary market society and Protestant nonconformism which, according
to Hobbes, were the main cause of the English Civil War, this dissertation aimed to
reconstruct the classic anthropological starting point of Hobbes' political science and through
the reflexes of melancholy and madness to offer new solutions in terms of theming the image
of a natural man as a wolf-man. Madness and melancholy as a particular mental state have a 10
fulcrum in human nature, and therefore the melancholic feeling of anxiety and fear and the
fiery insanity of madness must be observed in the context of the universality of Hobbes's
political philosophy, which is paradigmically based on fear as its dominant characteristic. On
the other hand, melancholy with its faces and sensations has a tremendous impact on the
human spirit and thus enables the emergence of new segments in the interpretation of the
epistemological status of Hobbes' homo lupus, which, besides ontological meaning, has
transcendental potential for overcoming the classic principles of Hobbes' anthropology.
Therefore, we have set melancholy and madness as a reference framework for the
research of the anthropological and ethical dimensions of the term homo lupus in Hobbes'
political philosophy, since melancholy points to the inability to replace the lost mental social
struggle resulting from the novel turning into man's subjectivity. Although melancholy and
madness can be observed from the medical, socio-political and philosophical point of view,
we have not talked about the madness in his narrow medical field in the sense of mental
illness, but we discussed the so-called 'methodical form' of madness. This is primarily the
understanding of madness as a state of freedom or a method that breaks down the established
metaphysical, moral, and cultural patterns within a human being, but also within the political
community. Madness and melancholy are therefore a metaphorical disease – this must be
taken into account when we talk about the mentioned phenomena in the context of Hobbes'
political theory.
In an effort to answer the question to which extent the dependence of melancholy and
madness on human disposition came to the fore in Hobbes' anthropology and what are the
possibilities of shaping the image of homo lupus through these phenomena, we have convey
madness through the philosophical jargon of Hobbes' natural state. The natural condition is
nothing more than a display of madness that defies the world and distorts man, but it is also
the price of freedom for which a perpetuating war is taking place. In Hobbes' eyes, the Early
Modern Period was a time of chaos and apocalypse that was supposed to spell out a new man.
Instead of making a man ontologically immortal, Hobbes has brought him back to the wild.
The natural man, therefore, is only the animal symbol of that foolishness. The animality of
madness that rages in a natural man reminds him of the scary truth about him and it becomes
a mirror reflected by his devilish alter ego. But it is also a desire for man to define and
conform not so much to the truth about the world, but to the truth about himself. So the
critical reconstruction of the basic categories of Hobbes anthropology, in essence sceptical
theories of man, reveals the answer to the fundamental question – what determines us as
human beings in the political community?11
Every philosophical reductionism that determined man to a solely spiritual, bodily or
natural instinct, or as a being of language, carries a specific type of imperialism and blinds for
his openness to the experience of history and nature. Therefore, once again, Plessner's thesis
has to be considered that man's spirit is in fact only his eccentric positional form, and
eccentricity means that for man a characteristic form of his frontal attitude towards the world,
which leads to the paradox of man's life situation – that he as a subject stands against himself
of the world and that at the same time, it dispels this contradiction. In the world and against
the world, in itself and against oneself – none of these contradictions do not overlap one
another, because there is a gap, void, hiatus between here and there. It is precisely in this
hiatus that represents the boundary between the human and animal sphere of existence, it is a
way of shaping human nature, so Hobbes's understanding of human nature should not be
interpreted solely on the horizon of rigid mechanistic-instinctive powers, but within the scope
of metaphysical overcoming of our biological basis through education and language.
On the basis of this hermeneutics of human nature and political anthropology, the
question of the conditions for achieving human eccentricity within the horizon of sociopolitical experience is raised. Hobbes, in his understanding of the state of nature as a state of
animalited madness, showed that the element of evil and disorder that dominates the natural
pretentious being is not a punishment for its original sinfulness or the end of a real social
struggle, but only of the flaws and disadvantages that point to the incompleteness of human
nature. It is about Hobbes's aspiration to be a man's fragmented being, a symbol of the mood
of the natural state being depicted as a vague possibility and a negative freedom that instead
of extending, degrades man to the status of the outdated creature, connects to the whole entity
or the political collective body primarily with the aim of limiting the problematic human
nature. Consequently, Hobbes's design of absolute authority as a sovereign authority has no
pedagogical character, since under the "mortal god" Leviathan individuals, who by social
agreement commit themselves to the recognition of the sovereign word and deeds as their
own, have lost the right to resistance, but implicitly assume the ontological communication
with the political turnaround. However, on such an established political pole, a real
transformation of the human spirit can not come because there is a need for a better way than
the creation of an artificial being that would serve as a means of self-liberation and infinite
survival in freedom. So Hobbes's natural man can be seen as homo melancholicus, which is
nothing but apology of selfishness and the paradigm of apolitical individuality, which is in a
permanent inability to become a true political subject and zoon politicon. In Hobbes's political
theory the main actor is only a sovereign whose application for unlimited power disposition 12
must be subordinated to all subjects, hence that homo melancholicus is such a model of
human behavior that is crucified between the emancipation logic of man's freedom and
equality of natural state on one side and institutional repression of the political community on
the other.
But that does not mean that Hobbes's imaginative experiment has not fully succeeded
because in that dichotomy of the modern man lies the key to his salvation from the hell of a
natural state. If Hobbes, by chance, offered a solution to rescue man from a natural state of
himself and not of others, then the formula homo lupus could be a paradigm for the original
human nature and to be the starting assumption of his political theory. However, in the
interpretation we realize that at Hobbes's theory we can only find that the image of a natural
man as a homo lupus was created on the gap between metaphysical and physical, and that it
was largely derivative of occult and esoteric influences to which the spirit of the Early
Modern Period was concerned. Melancholy and madness open up the prism of understanding
the limb and fragility of human status, from which the greatest possibilities of man can be
extracted, but because of which he can reach even the lowest forms of humanity.
Animality that erupts in madness draws from man anything that is humane in it, but
not in order to undo him, but to point to his ontological inconsistency with a single ethics that
is characteristic of inclusiveness and closeness to its subjectivity. Namely, Hobbes built his
science of politics on the foundations of radical individualism and his basic problem was to
bridge the gap between the interests of particular individuals and the state as a collective body
imposing a demand for political unity. Therefore, the link between human nature and Hobbes'
theory of the modern state needs to be sought on the horizon of the mindless conflict of
passion of the brutal state of nature, but also within the framework of political bribery from
which one can best read the ethical and political implications of melancholy and its
importance for deciphering an animal in man. In this way we will get an explanation of how
the mythology around Thomas Hobbes was constructed and how the character of a wolf-man
became an epochless concept that with its negative anthropomorphic symbolism became a
permanent archetypical image of evil human nature and gained a strong moral connotation.
So what is the significance of melancholy and madness for Hobbes' political science?
The answer to this question could be formulated in the following way: Hobbes destabilized
the rational social being precisely through the melancholic impulse. Melancholia and
madness, besides pointing to the fundamental break-up in the mental world, they also mark a
kind of loss, either in the aspiration of eliminating the pure form (what Hobbes has taken to
the world by destroying them with their mechanistic-materialistic method) or in the loss of 13
human status by slipping into the animal. The presence of melancholy is evident in the
concept of the animal state of the madness of a natural state, in which man brings a constant
and irreversible desire to gain more and more power, bringing him down to an unnatural,
bountiful being – the zoo-figure of homo lupus – freed from religious and moral bonds and
guided by the passions and principle for self-preservation lives in constant fear for bare life.
However, paradoxically melancholia has the power to reconcile the antinomies that are at the
perilous ends of Hobbes' political context, and therefore, by its emancipatory role, rejuvenates
the desire for the natural freedom inherent in mankind and lost under state power.
Furthermore, the influence of melancholy is evident in the visual representation of the
Leviathan as the "mortal god" represented on the cover of his famous book. Leviathan is a
demonic symbol that a man has to face in order to achieve balance and his inner cosmos
would no longer be scribbled. Within Hobbes' theory of political representation the
melancholy painted image of the Leviathan from the cover represents a physiognomic fate of
the sovereign in which his political and legal subjugation comes to light. Finally, the
melancholy is more than justified with the fact that the image of Hobbes' natural man was
rooted in the symbol of the vultures rather than some other animals because in the culture of
the Early Modern Period there was a widespread belief in the existence of fantastic creatures,
such as the wolf-man, who were then transferred by cultural transmission into collective
consciousness in order to continue to form allegorical images and zoomorphic figures as
tokens for coding good and evil in humans. |