Thomas Hobbes 1588-1679

Basically selfish, driven by fear of death and the Despite his genial character, Hobbes, like Machiavelli, had a low view of human beings. We are all hope of personal gain, he believed. All of us seek power over others, whether we realize this or not if you don’t accept Hobbes’ picture of humanity, why do you lock the door when you leave your house. Surely it’s because you know that there are many people out there who would happily steal everything you own? But, you might argue, only some people are that selfish. Hobbes disagreed. He thought that at heart we all are, and that it is only the rule of law and the threat of punishment that keep us in check. ~ Page 58 (A Little history of Philosophy by Nigel Warburton)

Like many thinkers of his day, Hobbes wasn’t just a philosopher - he was what we would now call a renaissance man. He had serious interests in geometry and science, and in ancient history too. As a young man he loved literature and had written and translated it. In philosophy, which he only took up in middle age, he was materialist, believing that humans were simply physical beings. There is no such thing s the soul: we are simply bodies, which are ultimately complex machines. ~ Page (A Little History of Philosophy by Nigel Warburton)

CHAPTER VII Hobbes's Leviathan

Hobbes (1588-1679) is a philosopher whom it is difficult to classify. He was am empiricist, like Locke, Berkeley, and Hume, but unlike them, he was an admirer of mathematical method, not only in pure mathematics, but in its applications. His general outlook was inspired by Galileo rather than Bacon. From Descartes to Kant, Continental philosophy derived much of its conception of the nature of human knowledge from mathematics, but it regarded mathematics as known independently of experience. It was thus led, like Platonism, to minimize the part played by perception, and over-emphasize the part played by pure thought….. . . . .His theory of the State deserves to be carefully considered, the more so as it is more modern than any previous theory, even that of Machiavelli. ~ Page 546

The political opinions expressed in the ‘Leviathan,’ www.gutenberg.org/files/3207/3207-h/3207-h.htm which were Royalist in the extreme, had been held by Hobbes for a long time. When the Parliament of 1628 drew up the Petition of Right, he published a translation of Thucydides, with the expressed intention of showing the evils of democracy. When the Long Parliament met in 1640, and Laud and Strafford were went to the Tower, Hobbes was terrified and fled to France. His book ‘De Cive’, www.public-library.uk/ebooks/27/57.pdf written in 1641, though not published till 1647, sets forth essentially the same theory as that of the ‘Leviathan.’ It was not the actual occurrence of the Civil war that caused his opinions, but the prospect of it, naturally, however, his conviction was strengthened when his fears were realized. ~ Page 547

We will now consider the doctrines of the ‘Leviathan,’ upon which the fame of Hobbes mainly rests.

He proclaims, at the very beginning of the book, his thorough-going materialism. Life, he says, is nothing but a motion of the limbs, and therefore automata have an artificial life. The commonwealth which he calls ‘Leviathan,’ (the word Leviathan ~ { (in biblical use) a sea monster, identified in different passages with the whale and the crocodile (e.g. Job 41, Ps. 74:14), and with the Devil (after Isa. 27:1).} as more than an analogy, and is worked out in some detail. The sovereignty is an artificial soul. The pacts and covenants by which ‘Leviathan’ is first created take the place of God’s fiat when He said “Let Us make man.”

The first part deals with man as an individual, and with such general philosophy as Hobbes deems necessary. Sensations are caused by the pressure of objects; colours, sounds, etc., are not in the objects. The qualities in objects that correspond to our sensations are motions. The first law of motion is stated, and is immediately applied to psychology: imagination is a decaying sense, both being motions. Imagination when asleep is dreaming; the religions of the gentiles came of not distinguishing dreams from waking life. (The rash reader may apply the same argument to the Christian religion, but Hobbes is much too cautious to do so himself) (Elsewhere he says that the heathen gods were created by human fear, but that our God is the First Mover.) Belief that dreams are prophetic is a delusion; so is the belief in witchcraft and in ghosts.

The succession of our thoughts is not arbitrary, but governed by laws -- sometimes those of association, sometimes those depending upon a purpose in our thinking.

Hobbes, as might be expected, is an out-and-out nominalist. There is, he says, nothing universal but names, and without words we could not convince any general ideas. Without language, there would be no truth or falsehood, for “true” and “false” are attributes to speech. ~ Page 548/549

‘Will’ is nothing but the last appetite or aversion remaining in deliberation. That is to say, will is not something different from desire and aversion, but merely the strongest in a case of conflict. This is connected, obviously, with Hobbes denial of free will.

Unlike most defenders of despotic governments Hobbes holds that all men are naturally equal. In a state of nature, before there is any government, every man desires to preserve his own liberty, but to acquire dominion over others; both these desires are dictated by the impulse to self-preservation. From their conflict arises a war of all against all, which makes life “nasty, brutish, and short.” In a state of nature, there is no property, no justice or injustice; there is only war, and “force and fraud are, in war, the two cardinal virtues. ~ Page 550

It is admitted that the sovereign may be a despotic, but even the worst despotism is better than anarchy. Moreover, in many points the interests of the sovereign are identical with those of his subjects. He is richer if they are richer, safer if they are law-abiding, and so on. Rebellion is wrong, both because it usually fails, and because, if it succeeds, it sets a bad example, and reaches others to rebel. The Aristotelian distinction between tyranny and monarchy is rejected; a “tyranny,” according to Hobbes, is merely a monarchy that the speaker happens to dislike. - Page 552

Throughout the ‘Leviathan,’ Hobbes never considers the possible effect of periodical elections in curbing the tendency of assemblies to sacrifice the public interest to the private interest of their members. He seems in fact, to be thinking, not of democratically elected Parliaments, but of bodies like the Grand Council in Venice or the House of Lords in England. He conceives democracy, in the manner of antiquity, as involving the direct participation of every citizen in legislation and administration; at least, this seems to be his view. ~ Page 554

Excerpt: "The History of Western Philosophy" ~ Bertrand Russell

The more radical Thomas Hobbes, Locke’s contemporary and acquaintance, was alone prepared to contemplate that possibility unflinchingly. Judging without reserve and there was “nothing simply and absolutely” good or evil -- only what we named the object of our desire, and the object of our hatred -- Hobbes dismissed the idea of happiness as a final end. “The felicity of this life consisteth not in the response of a mind satisfied,” he observed: “For there is no such “Finis ultimus (utmost aim) on ‘Summum bonum (greatest good) as is spoken of in the books of the old moral philosophers. Felicity, rather, was a “continual progress of the desire, from one object to another, the attaining of the former being still but the way to the latter.” And so the process would continue unabated, according to the pleasures and tastes, the aversions and fears of each, until it was finally arrested. Even the best scenario need be qualified and provisional. “Continual success’ is obtaining those things which a man from time to time desireth, that is to say continual prospering, is that men call Felicity; I mean felicity of this life. For there is no such thing as perpetual tranquility of mind, while we live here; because life itself is but motion, and can never be without desire, nor without fear, no more than without sense.” In Hobbes’s view, human bodies could be at rest only when all motion stopped. Until that time, they would be ruled by” a perpetual and restless desire of power after power, that ceaseth only in death.” ~ Page 184 Excerpt: "Happiness - A History" Author Darrin M. McMohan