Threshold

The human mind has phased out its traditional anchorage in a natural biological basis (the «reasons of the body» which even Spinoza’s Ethics could count on) – an anchorage that had determined, for at least two millennia, historically familiar forms of culture and civilisation. Increasingly emphasising its intellectual disembodiment, it has come to the point of establishing in a completely artificial way the normative conditions of social behaviour and the very ontological collocation of human beings in general. If in the past ‘God’ was the name that mythopoietic activity had assigned to the world’s overall moral order, which was reflected onto human behaviour, now the progressive freeing of the mind – by way of the intellectualisation of life and technology – from the natural normativity which was previously its basic material reference opens up unforeseen vistas of power. Freedom of the intellect demands (or so one believes) the full artificiality of the normative human order in the form of an artificial logos, and precisely qua artificial, omnipotent. The technological icon of logos (which postmodern dispersion undermines only superficially) definitively unseats the traditional normative, sovereign ‘God’ of human history as he has been known till now. Our West has been irreversibly marked by this process, whose results are as devastating as they are inevitable. The decline predicted a century ago by old Spengler is here served on a platter....

Political Theology Reconsidered

All this leads, in the fourth chapter, to a re-examination of the problem of a “Political Theology” (see also Corollary II of this book), mainly regarding the link between “creation (ab aeterno)” and “political constitution”, the latter being considered in its profound ontological basis. The chapter shows how the Spinozan-Nietzschean hypothesis of “potency” cannot but exclude any modern form of “theological-political constitutionalism”, namely any modern mode of limitation – largely determined by ethical motivations, or by the primacy of ethics over ontology: ethics of will over ontology of potency – of actions exerted by potency itself. Here Spinoza and Nietzsche come into play as a team against Kant and against all of Enlightenment natural law, revealing the weaknesses of the latter.

On the Origins of Conventionalist Political Philosophy in the Seventeenth Century

At the basis of any consideration about the modern state of experience lie concepts of great theoretical and practical import, such as the dialectic between private and public, ‘internal’ and ‘external’, essence and appearance, which only a historiographic-philosophical investigation into the origins of the new conventionalistic concept of political order allows us to clarify. I will endeavour, therefore, in the following notes, to focus on the theoretical elements that the new political anthropology injected into the circuitry of sixteenth-century Europe, thanks especially to key thinkers such as Montaigne and Charron, convinced as I am of their thematic relevance in the context of a closer analysis of that phenomenon of primary importance now called, to use Benjamin’s term, the ‘crisis experience’....

The Logos of Potency: A Theoretical Introduction

This first chapter examines the metaphysical hypothesis of a “Being permeated by the Logos”, witnessing at once the clash “at a distance” between two giants of modern philosophy: Leibniz and Spinoza. Their solutions to the metaphysical problem in question are radically different, but equally representative of the highest levels on which the problem can be posed. At the end of this chapter an interpretive hypothesis is set forth, which could be defined as “neo-Spinozist”, and which underpin the entire framework of this essay. According to this hypothesis, potency has its own autonomous, immanent logic, not artificially delimitable by pre-constituted external entities, as would be the case of the objective existence of a logos as ontological, normative measure.

Rhetoric of Ethical Universalism: Jürgen Habermas and the Dissolution of Political Realism

Today there is in vogue a humanitarian religion that regulates the expression of people’s thoughts, and if by chance someone defies it, he seems monstrous, just as in the Middle Ages anyone denying the divinity of Jesus would have seemed monstrous. (V. Pareto, Cours de sociologie générale...

The Problem of a Political Theology

– We may say, as an initial, broader approximation, that political theology poses the problem of the relationships between the dimension of ‘political’ and the transcendent Veritas. In Hobbes – as Schmitt’s interpretation claims1 – allowance is given (or even postulated) for an exceptional ‘opening’ of the political system towards the ...

Genealogies of Constituent Potency: Schmitt, Nietzsche, Spinoza

Another theorist joins here the game: the German jurist Carl Schmitt, who – from the standpoint of an ultra-mature modernity – interprets the array of forms inherited from classical metaphysics, allowing us today to establish an unexpected link between the ontological dimension of potency and the juridical concept of “constituent power”. The ways in which this concept, with its various theoretical issues, is reflected in our contemporary world, and precisely in our present historical period, which preludes the end of the West, understood as a horizon we have inhabited until now, is the subject of the fifth (and last) chapter of this essay. A finale short on hope but anchored in a solid, realistic analysis of what has become our contemporaneity.

‘Potentia Ordinata’ vs ‘Potentia Absoluta’

In the third chapter the metaphysical concept of potency is further investigated in its inner relationships, which concern the opposition between potentia Dei absoluta and potentia Dei ordinata, and the theoretical result reached is to point out, in direct disaccord with the canonic system of Aquinas’ Summa Theologica, a substantial difference between the “jurisprudential model” of potentia Dei absoluta in Duns Scotus and the “logical model” of the same potentia Dei absoluta in William of Ockham.

Logos of ‘Potentia Dei’

Chapter two deals with the problem of how Spinoza’s metaphysical approach relates – whether in agreement or in opposition – to the past philosophical tradition, from Aristotle to his Arabian readings (e.g. Averroes) of Aristotle’s Metaphysics, including Spinoza’s counter-arguments to both Greek-Arabian “necessitarism” and the naive anthropomorphism of Jewish theology, rooted in the Scriptures themselves. The issue therefore involves the ways in which the concepts of “Natural Law” and “Natural Right” will be formulated in The Western cultural tradition and philosophy, from St. Augustine to Aquinas, and from Duns Scotus to Ockham.