How is political authority justified and how far does it extend? In particular, are our political rulers properly as unlimited in their powers as Hobbes had suggested?
And if they are not, what system of politics will ensure that they do not overstep the mark, do not trespass on the rights of their subjects? How was he able to set out a way of thinking about politics and power that remains decisive nearly four centuries afterwards? Born in , the year the Spanish Armada made its ill-fated attempt to invade England, he lived to the exceptional age of 91, dying in He was not born to power or wealth or influence: the son of a disgraced village vicar, he was lucky that his uncle was wealthy enough to provide for his education and that his intellectual talents were soon recognized and developed through thorough training in the classics of Latin and Greek.
And these in turn—together with a good deal of common sense and personal maturity—won him a place tutoring the son of an important noble family, the Cavendishes. This meant that Hobbes entered circles where the activities of the King, of Members of Parliament, and of other wealthy landowners were known and discussed, and indeed influenced.
Thus intellectual and practical ability brought Hobbes to a place close to power—later he would even be math tutor to the future King Charles II. Although this never made Hobbes powerful, it meant he was acquainted with and indeed vulnerable to those who were. As the scene was being set for the Civil Wars of and —wars that would lead to the King being executed and a republic being declared—Hobbes felt forced to leave the country for his personal safety, and lived in France from to Thus Hobbes lived in a time of upheaval, sharper than any England has since known.
This turmoil had many aspects and causes, political and religious, military and economic. England stood divided against itself in several ways. Society was divided religiously, economically, and by region. Inequalities in wealth were huge, and the upheavals of the Civil Wars saw the emergence of astonishingly radical religious and political sects. For instance, the Levellers called for much greater equality in terms of wealth and political rights; the Diggers, more radical still, fought for the abolition of wage labor.
Civil war meant that the country became militarily divided. His early position as a tutor gave him the scope to read, write and publish a brilliant translation of the Greek writer Thucydides appeared in , and brought him into contact with notable English intellectuals such as Francis Bacon. His self-imposed exile in France, along with his emerging reputation as a scientist and thinker, brought him into contact with major European intellectual figures of his time, leading to exchange and controversy with figures such as Descartes , Mersenne and Gassendi.
Intensely disputatious, Hobbes repeatedly embroiled himself in prolonged arguments with clerics, mathematicians, scientists and philosophers—sometimes to the cost of his intellectual reputation. For instance, he argued repeatedly that it is possible to square the circle It is no accident that the phrase is now proverbial for a problem that cannot be solved!
His writing was as undaunted by age and ill health as it was by the events of his times. Hobbes gained a reputation in many fields. He was known as a scientist especially in optics , as a mathematician especially in geometry , as a translator of the classics, as a writer on law, as a disputant in metaphysics and epistemology; not least, he became notorious for his writings and disputes on religious questions.
But it is for his writings on morality and politics that he has, rightly, been most remembered. Without these, scholars might remember Hobbes as an interesting intellectual of the seventeenth century; but few philosophers would even recognize his name.
What are the writings that earned Hobbes his philosophical fame? His most famous work is Leviathan , a classic of English prose ; a slightly altered Latin edition appeared in Leviathan expands on the argument of De Cive , mostly in terms of its huge second half that deals with questions of religion.
Readers whose main interest is in those ideas may wish to skip the next section and go straight to ethics and human nature. The first is a reaction against religious authority as it had been known, and especially against the scholastic philosophy that accepted and defended such authority. The second is a deep admiration for and involvement in the emerging scientific method, alongside an admiration for a much older discipline, geometry.
Both influences affected how Hobbes expressed his moral and political ideas. In some areas it is also clear that they significantly affected the ideas themselves. In the first place, he makes very strong claims about the proper relation between religion and politics. He was not as many have charged an atheist, but he was deadly serious in insisting that theological disputes should be kept out of politics.
For Hobbes, the sovereign should determine the proper forms of religious worship, and citizens never have duties to God that override their duty to obey political authority. He insists that terms be clearly defined and relate to actual concrete experiences—part of his empiricism. Many early sections of Leviathan read rather like a dictionary. What is certain, and more important from the point of view of his moral and political thought, is that he tries extremely hard to avoid any metaphysical categories that do not relate to physical realities especially the mechanical realities of matter and motion.
His admiration is not so much for the emerging method of experimental science, but rather for deductive science—science that deduces the workings of things from basic first principles and from true definitions of the basic elements. Hobbes therefore approves a mechanistic view of science and knowledge, one that models itself very much on the clarity and deductive power exhibited in proofs in geometry. It looks rather like a dead-end on the way to the modern idea of science based on patient observation, theory-building and experiment.
Nonetheless, it certainly provided Hobbes with a method that he follows in setting out his ideas about human nature and politics. As presented in Leviathan , especially, Hobbes seems to build from first elements of human perception and reasoning, up to a picture of human motivation and action, to a deduction of the possible forms of political relations and their relative desirability.
Once more, it can be disputed whether this method is significant in shaping those ideas, or merely provides Hobbes with a distinctive way of presenting them.
On his view, what we ought to do depends greatly on the situation in which we find ourselves. Where political authority is lacking as in his famous natural condition of mankind , our fundamental right seems to be to save our skins, by whatever means we think fit. Where political authority exists, our duty seems to be quite straightforward: to obey those in power.
For him ethics is concerned with human nature, while political philosophy deals with what happens when human beings interact. He begins by telling us that the human body is like a machine, and that political organization the commonwealth is like an artificial human being.
He ends by saying that the truth of his ideas can be gauged only by self-examination, by looking into our selves to adjudge our characteristic thoughts and passions, which form the basis of all human action. But what is the relationship between these two very different claims?
For obviously when we look into our selves we do not see mechanical pushes and pulls. As to what he will say about successful political organization, the resemblance between the commonwealth and a functioning human being is slim indeed. Hobbes draws on his notion of a mechanistic science, that works deductively from first principles, in setting out his ideas about human nature.
Science provides him with a distinctive method and some memorable metaphors and similes. Those ideas may have come, as Hobbes also claims, from self-examination. In all likelihood, they actually derived from his reflection on contemporary events and his reading of classics of political history such as Thucydides.
But it does mean we should not be misled by scientific imagery that stems from an in fact non-existent science and also, to some extent, from an unproven and uncertain metaphysics.
But while it is true that Hobbes sometimes says things like this, we should be clear that the ideas fit together only in a metaphorical way. Likewise, there is no reason why pursuing pleasure and pain should work in our self-interest. What self-interest is depends on the time-scale we adopt, and how effectively we might achieve this goal also depends on our insight into what harms and benefits us.
The mechanistic metaphor is something of a red herring and, in the end, probably less useful than his other starting point in Leviathan , the Delphic epithet: nosce teipsum know thyself.
As we have seen, and will explore below, what motivates human beings to act is extremely important to Hobbes. The other aspect concerns human powers of judgment and reasoning, about which Hobbes tends to be extremely skeptical.
Like many philosophers before him, Hobbes wants to present a more solid and certain account of human morality than is contained in everyday beliefs. Plato had contrasted knowledge with opinion. Hobbes has several reasons for thinking that human judgment is unreliable, and needs to be guided by science. Our judgments tend to be distorted by self-interest or by the pleasures and pains of the moment. We may share the same basic passions, but the various things of the world affect us all very differently; and we are inclined to use our feelings as measures for others.
When we use words which lack any real objects of reference, or are unclear about the meaning of the words we use, the danger is not only that our thoughts will be meaningless, but also that we will fall into violent dispute. Hobbes has scholastic philosophy in mind, but he also makes related points about the dangerous effects of faulty political ideas and ideologies. We form beliefs about supernatural entities, fairies and spirits and so on, and fear follows where belief has gone, further distorting our judgment.
Unfortunately, his picture of science, based on crudely mechanistic premises and developed through deductive demonstrations, is not even plausible in the physical sciences. He is certainly an acute and wise commentator of political affairs; we can praise him for his hard-headedness about the realities of human conduct, and for his determination to create solid chains of logical reasoning. Nonetheless, this does not mean that Hobbes was able to reach a level of scientific certainty in his judgments that had been lacking in all previous reflection on morals and politics.
Many interpreters have presented the Hobbesian agent as a self-interested, rationally calculating actor those ideas have been important in modern political philosophy and economic thought, especially in terms of rational choice theories. It is true that some of the problems that face people like this—rational egoists, as philosophers call them—are similar to the problems Hobbes wants to solve in his political philosophy.
And it is also very common for first-time readers of Hobbes to get the impression that he believes we are all basically selfish. There are good reasons why earlier interpreters and new readers tend to think the Hobbesian agent is ultimately self-interested.
Hobbes likes to make bold and even shocking claims to get his point across. What could be clearer? First, quite simply, it represents a false view of human nature. People do all sorts of altruistic things that go against their interests. They also do all sorts of needlessly cruel things that go against self-interest think of the self-defeating lengths that revenge can run to. So it would be uncharitable to interpret Hobbes this way, if we can find a more plausible account in his work.
Second, in any case Hobbes often relies on a more sophisticated view of human nature. He describes or even relies on motives that go beyond or against self-interest, such as pity, a sense of honor or courage, and so on. And he frequently emphasizes that we find it difficult to judge or appreciate just what our interests are anyhow.
The upshot is that Hobbes does not think that we are basically or reliably selfish; and he does not think we are fundamentally or reliably rational in our ideas about what is in our interests. He is rarely surprised to find human beings doing things that go against self-interest: we will cut off our noses to spite our faces, we will torture others for their eternal salvation, we will charge to our deaths for love of country.
In fact, a lot of the problems that befall human beings, according to Hobbes, result from their being too little concerned with self-interest. This weakness as regards our self-interest has even led some to think that Hobbes is advocating a theory known as ethical egoism. This is to claim that Hobbes bases morality upon self-interest, claiming that we ought to do what it is most in our interest to do. But we shall see that this would over-simplify the conclusions that Hobbes draws from his account of human nature.
We are needy and vulnerable. We are easily led astray in our attempts to know the world around us. Our capacity to reason is as fragile as our capacity to know; it relies upon language and is prone to error and undue influence.
What is the political fate of this rather pathetic sounding creature—that is, of us? Unsurprisingly, Hobbes thinks little happiness can be expected of our lives together. The best we can hope for is peaceful life under an authoritarian-sounding sovereign. He claims that the only authority that naturally exists among human beings is that of a mother over her child, because the child is so very much weaker than the mother and indebted to her for its survival.
Chapter 9 of Leviathan tells us something about the differences between scientific and historical knowledge, and the divisions between sciences. Chapter 6 of De Corpore gives a much fuller treatment of issues in the philosophy of science, issues of what Hobbes calls method.
Method tells us how to investigate things in order to achieve scientia , the best sort of knowledge. This has often been developed into a story about the particular influence on Hobbes of the works of Giacomo Zabarella, a sixteenth-century Aristotelian who studied and taught at the University of Padua, which influence is then often said to have been somehow mediated by Galileo.
Here the notions of analysis and synthesis are key. This section tells a version of the first story. For a helpful recent critical discussion of such an approach, see Hattab Still, one should note that Hobbes sometimes uses the language of mathematical method, of analysis and synthesis, in describing his general method Hobbes , 6.
Several commentators have seen this, together with his clear admiration for the successes of geometry, as evidence of a more general use of mathematical notions in his account of method Talaska Resolution moves from the thing to be explained, which is an effect, to its causes, and then composition brings you back from causes to effects. At a suitably general level that is correct, but it misses much detail. A crucial though somewhat mysterious third step stands between the move from effect to cause and that from effect to cause.
The complete sequence, the arguments from effect to cause and back again, Zabarella calls regressus. This sequence improves our knowledge, taking us from confused to clear knowledge of something. But how do we do this? The first step is to move from having confused knowledge of the effect to having confused knowledge of the cause. The second step moves from confused to clear knowledge of the cause.
This step works, Zabarella thinks, by a sort of intellectual examination of the cause. The aim is not just to know what thing is the cause, but to understand that thing. The final step then moves from the clear knowledge of the cause to clear knowledge of the effect.
That is, your new full understanding of the cause gives you better understanding of the thing caused by it. There Hobbes lays out a model of the proper form of a scientific explanation. A proper explanation tells you three things: what the cause is, the nature of the cause, and how the cause gives rise to the effect.
Thus Hobbes accepts the Aristotelian idea that to have the best sort of knowledge, scientific knowledge, is to know something through its causes. Here Hobbes defines philosophy as knowledge acquired by correct reasoning. It is both knowledge of effects that you get through conception of their causes and knowledge of causes that you get through conception of their visible effects. Already we see signs of the Aristotelian picture in which you come to know the cause by knowing the visible effect and to know the effect by knowing the cause.
The requirement to know how the cause works, not just what it is, is analogous to the Zabarellan requirement to have distinct knowledge of a cause. Knowledge that the cause exists comes from the first step of regressus. Complete regressus , i. For Hobbes, analogously, to get to scientia of the effect you need to understand, not just what the causes are, but how they work.
In a more fully Aristotelian picture, explanations are causal, but causes can be of several sorts. Moreover, he thinks the efficient causes are all motions, so the search for causes becomes the search for motions and mechanisms. One story is that Hobbes learned about this method from Galileo, but that claim is problematic. Harvey, whose work Hobbes greatly admired, and who studied at the medical school in Padua, might also have been an intermediary Watkins , 41—2.
This section focuses on two central questions: whether Hobbes believes in the existence of God, and whether he thinks there can be knowledge from revelation. Hobbes at one point rules a good deal of religious discussion out of philosophy, because its topics are not susceptible to the full detailed causal explanation that is required for scientia , the best sort of knowledge.
Also excluded are discussion of angels, of revelation, and of the proper worship of God. But despite these not being, strictly speaking, philosophy, Hobbes does in fact have a good deal to say about them, most notably in Leviathan. Things outside philosophy in its strict sense may not be amenable to thorough causal explanation in terms of the motions of bodies, but they may well still be within the limits of rational discussion.
Many people have called Hobbes an atheist, both during his lifetime and more recently. They thought, however, that he was a rather dubious sort of Christian. Other critics, however, have thought that Hobbes in fact denied the existence of God. This might seem a curious allegation, for Hobbes often talks about God as existing.
Certainly, to read Hobbes in this way requires one to take some of his statements at something other than face value. In the Elements of Law Hobbes offers a cosmological argument for the existence of God Hobbes , So when we seem to attribute features to God, we cannot literally be describing God Hobbes , Those three views — support for a cosmological argument, the belief that God is inconceivable by us, and the interpretation of apparent descriptions of God as not really descriptions — appear to recur in Leviathan Hobbes , However, in later work, such as the appendix to the Latin edition of Leviathan , Hobbes proposes a different view.
The older Hobbes thought that we could know God to have at least one feature, namely extension. By this he means at least that God is extended. However, Hobbes does seem in his Answer to Bishop Bramhall and the Appendix to the Latin edition of Leviathan to believe this strange view sincerely. Indeed, he goes to some pains to defend this as an acceptable version of Christianity.
Whether or not one believes that, this is still on the surface an odd theism rather than atheism. This is notable to some extent in his critical reading of biblical texts, which was not at all a standard approach at the time. Indeed, Hobbes and Spinoza often get a good deal of credit for developing this approach. In chapter 2 of Leviathan Hobbes comes to these topics at a slightly surprising point. In the course of discussing the workings of imagination, he talks naturally enough about dreams.
Emphasizing the occasional difficulty of distinguishing dreams from waking life, he turns to talk of visions. Dreams had in stressful circumstances, when one sleeps briefly, are sometimes taken as visions, Hobbes says. He uses this to explain a supposed vision had by Marcus Brutus, and also widespread belief in ghosts, goblins, and the like. Later he uses it to account for visions of God Hobbes , And Hobbes explicitly uses this to undermine the plausibility of claims to know things because told by God:.
To say he [God] hath spoken to him in a dream is no more than to say that he dreamed God spake to him, which is not of force to win belief from any man that knows dreams are for the most part natural and may proceed from former thoughts … To say he hath seen a vision, or heard a voice, is to say that he hath dreamed between sleeping and waking; for in such a manner a man doth many times naturally take his dream for a vision, as not having well observed his own slumbering Hobbes , This does not rule out the possibility that God might indeed communicate directly with an individual by means of a vision.
But it does rule out other people sensibly believing reports of such occurrences, for the events reported are easily and usually if not necessarily always correctly given a natural explanation as dreams, which themselves have natural causes. Hobbes takes a similarly sceptical attitude to reports of miracles. The case has often been made, however, that Hobbes was not just somewhat sceptical about some religious claims, but actually denied the existence of God.
The idea is that, though Hobbes says that God exists, those statements are just cover for his atheism. Moreover, these interpreters claim, there are various pieces of evidence that point to this hidden underlying view.
Opinions differ on what the crucial evidence of the hidden atheism is. If Hobbes is aware of this circularity, he does not call attention to it. Perhaps he just did not notice it.
Perhaps, as Strauss might have suggested, he leaves it to the reader to discover this for himself. There are some tricky general methodological questions here, about when we can reasonably say that an author is trying to communicate a view other than the one apparently stated.
Note, however, that for someone allegedly covering up his atheism to avoid controversy, Hobbes took the curious approach of saying many other intensely controversial things. He was opposed to free will and to immaterial souls, opposed to Presbyterianism and to Roman Catholicism, and managed to have anti-royalists thinking he was a royalist, but at least one prominent royalist Clarendon thinking he supported Cromwell.
This was not a recipe for a quiet life. Hobbes was a widely read and controversial author. In many cases, the discussion of his philosophy was about his political philosophy Goldie , Malcolm The Cambridge Platonist Ralph Cudworth, for example, devoted considerable energy to arguing against Hobbesian atheism and materialism.
On the other hand, later empiricist philosophers, in particular Locke and Hume, develop several Hobbesian themes. Indeed, one might well speak of Hobbes, not Locke, as the first of the British empiricists. And Leibniz twice in the s wrote letters to Hobbes, though it is unclear if Hobbes ever received them, and there is no evidence of any replies. And Hume, like Hobbes, combines apparent acceptance of a basic cosmological argument with scepticism about many religious claims.
Though the vast majority of work on Hobbes looks at his political philosophy, there are general books on Hobbes that look at his non-political philosophy, such as Sorell and Martinich The best modern biography is Martinich This should enable readers to find references in editions other than the ones used here even though most editions of Leviathan do not print paragraph numbers.
All other references are given by volume and page number. Life and Works 2. Mind and Language 2. Materialism 4. Method 5. Philosophy of Religion 6. Life and Works Thomas Hobbes was born on 5 April Hobbes also describes propositions and syllogisms as sorts of addition: a syllogism is nothing other than a collection of a sum which is made from two propositions through a common term which is called a middle term conjoined to one another; and thus a syllogism is an addition of three names, just as a proposition is of two Hobbes , 4.
Materialism By the time of Leviathan and De Corpore , Hobbes was convinced that human beings including their minds were entirely material. Method Hobbes was very much interested in scientific explanation of the world: both its practice which he saw himself as engaged in and also its theory. And Hobbes explicitly uses this to undermine the plausibility of claims to know things because told by God: To say he [God] hath spoken to him in a dream is no more than to say that he dreamed God spake to him, which is not of force to win belief from any man that knows dreams are for the most part natural and may proceed from former thoughts … To say he hath seen a vision, or heard a voice, is to say that he hath dreamed between sleeping and waking; for in such a manner a man doth many times naturally take his dream for a vision, as not having well observed his own slumbering Hobbes , Reception Hobbes was a widely read and controversial author.
Bibliography Though the vast majority of work on Hobbes looks at his political philosophy, there are general books on Hobbes that look at his non-political philosophy, such as Sorell and Martinich Rogers eds. Springboard, P. Books and Articles Abizadeh, A. Armitage, D. Ashcraft, R.
Baumgold, D. Bobbio, N. Boonin-Vail, D. Byron, M. Collins, J. Curley, E. Giancotti ed. Curley ed. Curran, E. Darwall, S. Ewin, R. Finn, S. Flathman, R. Gauthier, D. Gert, B. Gert, ed. Goldsmith, M. Hampton, J. Herbert, G. Hoekstra, K. Hood, E. Johnston, D. Kapust, Daniel J.
Kavka, G. Kramer, M. Krom, M. LeBuffe, M. Coleman and C. Morris eds. Macpherson, C. Macpherson ed. Malcolm, N. Martel, J.
May, L. McClure, C. Moehler, M. Moloney, P. Murphy, M. Nagel, T. Oakeshott, M. Olsthoorn, J. Peacock, M. Petit, P. Raphael, D.
Ryan, A. Mendus, ed. Shelton, G. Schneewind, J. Schwitzgebel, E. Skinner, Q. Slomp, G.
0コメント