The Limits of Reason in Hobbes's Commonwealth

Michael P. Krom

• Publisher: Continuum
• Year: 2011
• Print ISBN: 9781472505934
• eBook ISBN: 9781441171894
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Political Philosophy

The Limits of Reason in Hobbes's Commonwealth explores Hobbes's attempt to construct a political philosophy of enduring peace on the foundation of the rational individual. Hobbes's rational individual, motivated by self-preservation, obeys the laws of the commonwealth and thus is conceived as the model citizen. Yet Hobbes intimates that there are limits to what such an actor will do for peace, and that the glory-seeker - "too rarely found to be presumed on" - is capable of a generosity that is necessary for political longevity. Michael P. Krom identifies this as a fundamental contradiction in Hobbes's system: he builds the commonwealth on the rational actor, yet acknowledges the need for the irrational glory-seeker.

Krom argues that Hobbes's attempt to establish a "king of the proud" fails to overcome the limits of reason and the precariousness of politics. This book synthesizes recent work on Hobbes's understanding of glory and political stability, challenging the view that Hobbes succeeds in incorporating glory-seekers into his political theory and explores the implications of this for contemporary political philosophy after Rawls.

Chapter 1

From Sense to Reason,
a Genetic Account

A careful reading of Leviathan reveals a nuanced and unique account of the nature of philosophy and its origins in human nature. Focusing on this account is important for understanding Hobbes’s philosophical anthropology as the basis of his civil and natural philosophy. Hobbes is a systematic thinker who attempts as much as possible to provide a solid foundation for all discourse. While this point is often made by commentators, there is much disagreement as to the nature of this foundation. In examining the relationship between natural and civil philosophy, there has been much interest in the possibility that Hobbes derives his civil philosophy from his natural philosophy.¹ Further, numerous attempts have been made to uncover the principle that binds together these two branches and provides a foundation for Hobbes’s philosophy.² While the insights of those who focus on method in Hobbes’s system contribute to my analysis, I ultimately diverge from these commentators inasmuch as I find the unity of Hobbes’s system elsewhere: what stands behind Hobbes’s method is his understanding of the nature of philosophy. As Tom Sorell puts it, both natural and civil philosophy

result from reasoning guided by method. And methodical reasoning in the two areas has the same general point or purpose, namely to find ways of improving human life, where that is understood as a matter of enlarging the number of effects producible by the human will.³

In tracing man’s experience of natural bodies and the human attempt to develop natural philosophy, one comes to appreciate the basic principle of Hobbesian philosophy from which he constructs his system. Hobbes has been dubbed everything from a rationalist to an empiricist; a totalitarian to a father of liberalism; a proto-phenomenalist to a conventionalist; rather than removing such titles, I argue for the addition of ‘proto-pragmatist’ to the list in light of Hobbes’s insistence that a philosophical doctrine be judged by its fruits for life. After explaining the genesis of reason out of sense, I discuss Hobbes’s conception of the nature of philosophy. I conclude by discussing the branches of philosophy and briefly note the importance of civil philosophy in his system. This chapter provides a foundation for my account of Hobbes’s attempt to construct a commonwealth of rational men.

While Hobbes does offer a definition of philosophy in the Fourth Part of Leviathan that I will consider,⁴ in order to understand Hobbes’s views on the nature of philosophy, one must be willing to piece together numerous aspects of his philosophical system; it is first necessary to work through this system in order to appreciate the force of this definition. For this reason, I more or less follow the order of Leviathan in its progression from sense perception to reason, along the way discussing the invention that makes reason possible, namely, speech, as well as the necessary corrective to speech that can lead man to philosophy, namely, method. After explaining the evolution from sense perception to reason in man, as well as the precise nature of reason, I discuss his understanding of philosophy. Only when one has understood the movement from the outside world to the mind and the mind’s attempt to work back to the world in Hobbesian philosophy is one prepared to ask and answer the questions appropriate to determining what he means by philosophy.⁵

From Sense to Reason

One only True Thing, the Basis of all

Those Things whereby we any Thing do call.

How Sleep does fly away, and what things still

By Opticks I can Multiply at will.

Phancie’s Internal, th’Issue of our Brain,

Th’internal parts only Motion contain:

And he that studies Physicks first must know

What Motion is, and what Motion can do.⁶

Hobbes, The Verse Life

Motion is the fundamental concept of philosophy for Hobbes: Hobbes’s philosophical system presupposes that body and reality are coextensive, and thus that knowledge of motion is ‘the clue to all change and to all causation’.⁷ There are two principal branches of philosophy: the study of the motions of natural bodies (natural philosophy), and of the motions of citizens and their sovereigns in that artificial body, the commonwealth (civil philosophy).⁸ The following considers the move from external, natural bodies to the mind and back again in an attempt to understand what he means by philosophy in general.

Hobbes thinks of man in mechanical terms and attempts to understand the mind’s operations by comparing them to the more familiar external world. For example, when considering the faculty of imagination, he draws an analogy from the way water is drawn to a path traced out by a finger in order to explain the fact that, when we imagine one thing, of necessity another imagination will follow: just as the finger touching one bead of water will draw numerous more beads in its train, so too does one sense impression raising an image draw numerous more images.⁹ Both processes are mechanical, and the fact that the mental is difficult to comprehend is alleviated by such comparisons. Hobbes’s task is to explain the internal motions of the mind, their connections to the external motions of the world, and how through inventions man is able to systematize and control both the motions of his mind as well as those of the world.

Hobbes begins the First Part of Leviathan by stating that our access to the external world is mediated through representations, that these representations originate in our senses, and that these senses arise when external bodies impress themselves upon our own body. All of man’s thoughts concerning the outside world are means of representing

some quality, or other accident of a body without us, which is commonly called an object. . . . The original of them all [viz. all thoughts] is that which we call SENSE. (For there is no conception in a man’s mind which hath not at first, totally or by parts, been begotten upon the organs of sense.) The rest are derived from that original.¹⁰

That Hobbes begins his work by pointing out the representational nature of sensation must be kept in mind, for this will prove important in understanding his account of reason and, ultimately, of philosophy.¹¹ In order to indicate the fact that what man perceives of external bodies is merely a representation, I have attempted to provide a clear and simple terminology that will make understanding Hobbes’s account of sense, reason, and so on, easier. The problem is that, despite his criticisms of others for not beginning with carefully defined terms, Hobbes does not adhere to one set of terms to indicate the difference between things themselves and their representations. To indicate this difference, I call the things themselves ‘bodies’; the sensations in the mind that represent these bodies ‘physical objects’; and words, which are in turn representations of these physical objects, ‘verbal objects’, as this seems closest to his own terminology. The basis for this is (1) the fact that, in saying that bodies are ‘commonly’ called objects, Hobbes seems to be indicating that the word ‘object’ has a more conventional connotation than does ‘body’, and (2) it will make the movement to speech clearer. While Hobbes uses ‘body’ and ‘object’ interchangeably, it is generally clear from the context whether he means the body itself or its representation in the human mind, and thus in my explanations I strictly follow this terminological distinction. However, in working from sense to reason it is necessary to gradually introduce this terminology; thus one must also keep in mind that the thing itself is an external motion, or motion outside of the body, whereas the object is an internal motion, or motion inside the human body, and therefore the term ‘object’ is to be introduced as one explains this movement from the external world to the mind.

Sense is either immediately or mediately caused by the motions of external bodies upon the five organs of sense.¹² The act of sensing is the transferring of an external motion to an internal one in the organ of sense, and the continuation of this motion to the brain whereby a corresponding motion is produced that establishes a relation between the human body and the external body; this motion from the external world to the organ of sense into the brain is ‘sense’. Even at this relatively immediate level of relation between man and the world, Hobbes is clear that what is sensed is merely a ‘fancy’ corresponding to the external body, and that sense establishes at best a correlation between two kinds of motion:

And though at some certain distance the real and very object seem invested with the fancy it begets in us, yet the object is one thing, the image or fancy is another. So that sense in all cases, is nothing else but original fancy, caused (as I have said) by the pressure, that is, by the motion, of external things upon our eyes, ears, and other organs thereunto ordained.¹³

What is impressed upon the brain is a representation of the external body: sense is the impression of a motion from a body onto the brain that is transformed into a new kind of motion. This internal motion corresponds to the motion of the external body; with sense, there is an efficient causal link between the external world and man’s body in that certain ‘organs of sense’ respond to the motions of external bodies impressing themselves upon the human body and transfer these motions to the brain. Prior to this bodily reaction, the human mind, which is nothing other than the phenomenal awareness of the contents of the brain, is devoid of content.

In describing sense, Hobbes seems to have in mind a direct presentation of the objects of the senses to the mind such that the mind originally is nothing more than the awareness of these internal motions called ‘original fancies’; in other words, in working through the genesis of thought, Hobbes considers sense and the mind as coextensive, for he describes sense as the ‘appearance to us’ of the internal motions that have been impressed upon the organs of sense by external bodies and transferred to the brain.¹⁴

Once the organs of sense have received motions from external bodies and transferred them to the brain, the senses in turn leave residues upon the brain when the external bodies are absent. When an external body ceases to be present to the human body, it sometimes occurs that an internal motion remains in the senses; this residual, internal motion in the brain is called imagination.¹⁵ Despite the fact that Hobbes has already made clear that all sense is a form of fancy, he follows the common use of the term and identifies fancy with imagination.¹⁶ While he does not use the term ‘original fancy’ to describe sense for the rest of his treatise, it is worth bearing in mind the distinction between original fancy or sense, on the one hand, and fancy or imagination, on the other: once again, Hobbes is eliding a distinction that is important, for imagination is the presence to the mind, not of the external body itself, but of an ‘original’ appearance; sense is itself only the reception of the appearance of the external body. In other words, imagination is the recalling of the way things appear to us, not the way things are in themselves, for an external motion impresses itself upon the organ of sense, creating a motion in the brain. This internal motion, which is the representation of the external motion, remains on the sense organ and is displayed before the mind in the act of imagination. Finally, imagination is to be identified with memory and is either simple, as when one calls to mind what one has previously sensed, or compounded, as when one brings together two or more objects of sense and combines them (e.g. a man and horse to form a centaur).

Since Hobbes is concerned with the progression from sense to reason, he next turns to understanding, which is ‘the imagination that is raised in man (or any other creature endued with the faculty of imagining) by words or other voluntary signs’.¹⁷ With the faculty of understanding, there arises the possibility of internal motions not immediately connected, though causally determined by, the motions of bodies external to the human body. Here the mind considers those external motions without need of their actual presence to the body, which is to say that the mind considers the impressions independently from the external bodies. The faculty of understanding is the mind’s motions working upon those decayed senses; understanding is a series of internal motions that, while causally determined by the impression(s) of one or more external bodies, is self-enclosed. This is what Hobbes means when he says that all thoughts are representations, for the mind has before it what it calls an ‘object’, but which is actually only the decayed fancy of an internal motion impressed upon an organ of sense that remains in the brain. Thinking never moves beyond these physically ‘impressed’ objects to the bodies themselves that caused the physical objects, but remains at the level of these representations.

Thinking is a succession of such impressions, physical objects or residues of the senses remaining in the brain, brought before the mind that, in order ‘(to distinguish it from discourse in words) [Hobbes calls] mental discourse’.¹⁸ Mental discourse is either unguided or regulated. In unguided mental discourse ‘the thoughts are said to wander, and seem impertinent one to another, as in a dream’.¹⁹ On Hobbes’s account, dreams receive their vivacity because when we are asleep the organs of sense ‘are so benumbed in sleep’ that the otherwise decayed fancies have ‘no new object which can master and obscure them with a more vigorous impression’.²⁰ Unguided mental discourse is like a dream in th...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title
• Introduction
• Chapter 1: From Sense to Reason, a Genetic Account
• Chapter 2: Reasoning to the Body Politic
• Chapter 3: Reasoning in the Body Politic
• Chapter 4: Dominated by the Passions, Irrationality and the Prideful Individual
• Chapter 5: The Moralization of Pride
• Chapter 6: Taming Curiosity, the Commonwealth’s Philosopher
• Chapter 7: The Desire for Divinity, Spiritual Pride in the Commonwealth
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Works Cited
• Index