Abstract
Dimitrijević examines the political consequences of methodological naturalism, which presupposes the nonexistence of God’s will as the first principle of natural motion. Focusing on Hobbes’ application of mechanic interpretation of natural motion to the whole body politic and addressing a significant fragment of Plato’s Laws, the chapter draws attention to the fact that the atheistic peace, artificially produced by political art grounded in the mechanization of nature, does not mirror any idea of justice. Finally, Dimitrijevic searches for the way out of belligerent contraposition between convenience and justice by rethinking the concept of friendship and by making the tactical case for a moderate political atheism.
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Notes
- 1.
In the seventeenth century, when the idea of the state of nature was fully elaborated, it had three basic meanings: political, ethnographic, and theological. In the first sense, the state of nature is opposed to the political State, in the second one to the civility, culture, society, and in the third one to the state of grace. In this last meaning, the nature coincides with the state of original sin that only the baptism can remove. See Landucci (2004, 262).
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Dimitrijević, I. (2020). Beyond the Enmity: The Mechanization of Nature and the Moderate Political Atheism. In: Wróbel, S., Skonieczny, K. (eds) Atheism Revisited. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-34368-2_4
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