Hobbes, the Scriblerians and the History of Philosophy

Conal Condren

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9781848932234
• eBook ISBN: 9781317321996
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

Satire was core to the work of Thomas Hobbes although his critics also used it as a weapon to ridicule him. Condren uses Hobbes as an example to demonstrate that an examination of the persona is needed to advance our understanding of a writer's philosophy.

Part I

In my opinion the philosopher himself is a satirist.

T. J. Mathias, The Pursuits of Literature

1 Hobbes, Lucianic Humour and the Philosophic Persona

Wit and Reason

John Aubrey remarked on Hobbes's addiction to emphatic oaths (expletives); recalled his dogged ingenuity in trying to square the circle and extolled the 'reason' by which he wished to be known.¹ Yet what is striking about Aubreys account is the persistent emphasis on Hobbes's wit and good humour: 'pleasant facetiousness', 'wit and drollery', the delightfulness of his 'wit and smart replies'; his lack of rancour in debate, his twinkling hazel eyes. This 'merry humour' was not incidental to the 'reason'.² It tells us something about the character of Hobbes's philosophy that has until recently been largely ignored.³ First, however, some of the slippery relationships between humour, wit, jesting, laughter and reason need comment.

Wit was an elusive notion, as Cowley put it, 'Comely in a thousand shapes', 'we only can by Negatives define'.⁴ It was associated with acuity of intellect and freshness of expression, but its elusiveness is illustrated in Hobbes's differing discussions of it in The Elements of Law and Leviathan. In the earlier work Hobbes treats wit as a clear virtue of the mind, a 'tenuity and agility of spirits', its defining negative being 'DULNESS'. In Leviathan, however, he distinguishes natural from acquired wit. Dullness and stupidity provide the defining contrast to natural wit, which 'consisteth principally in ... Celerity of Imagining ... and steddy direction to some approved end'.⁵ He then equates' Good Wit' with' Good Fancy, but in order to become an intellectual virtue, it has also to be joined with good judgement. And clearly there can be a differing balance of dispositions; in poetry fancy dominates, in history, judgement. 'In Demonstration, in Counsell, and all rigorous search of Truth, Judgement does all', allowing only for the occasional apt similitude, but certainly excluding the exercise of wit through metaphorical dexterity (a view modified in other works).⁶ Acquired wit is a different matter; it comes from method and instruction and is reason.⁷ As he had written of an undifferentiated wit in The Elements, it is the means 'by which men attain to exact and perfect knowledge'.⁸ Wit was, therefore, a necessary attribute of the philosophic persona. It remains unclear, however, whether the acquired wit of Leviathan is refined from or contradicts the earlier natural wit inclusive of fancy. More significantly, the common though asymmetrical relationships of wit with jesting allow some degree of humour to be carried into a conception of 'reason'.

In neither work does Hobbes explicitly discuss humour as manifesting wit, although in each the facial distortion of laughter is specified as expressing a 'sudden glory at another's defeat.⁹ In The Elements the victorious grimace is the sign of a passion that has no name, but what 'moveth laughter ... must be new and unexpected'.¹⁰ He denies that it is exclusively tied to wit, for we laugh where there is no jest (thus implicitly accepting the strong associations of wit with humour). In Leviathan, where these associations with wit are unmentioned, laughter is often the sign of small mindedness. Hobbes also explicitly regarded excessive levity as a mental defect betraying an uncontrolled mobility of spirits, with 'every little jest or witty observation' distracting from the 'steddy direction' of discourse.¹¹ As the fault of levity lay in its excess, by implication a little might aid that' steddy direction', and so ought not to be censured. Hobbes's lack of specificity about humour in discussing wit and reason, was, I suggest, simply because a degree of philosophically directed humour, philosophical jesting, could be taken for granted. Humour might be analogous to, or exemplified in the occasional apt simile that furthers the ends of reason. It might, in short, be at one with Wilson's notion (see above p. 19) that a fittingly placed jest can be a form of discursive punctuation, actually helping to maintain attention. But for Hobbes, as his own philosophical practice will show, humour, wit and jesting can be a means by which the acquired wit of reason could itself be directly advanced; it is philosophically sanctioned because it is satiric. As I shall argue, Hobbes's self-image as a philosopher entailed that he be a satirist. In the meantime, it is noteworthy that Cowley praised Hobbes in much the same way that he characterized wit. Just as in wit 'All things agree', so in Hobbes's philosophy, eloquence and wit creates a concord in variety.¹²

Where Cowley and Aubrey drew attention to Hobbes's humour, modern scholarship has been apt to overlook it. One explanation for this may lie in a narrowing of the notion of wit, restricted to what Hobbes called 'witty observation', to levity and superficiality. More importantly, I suspect, is the common misconception, on which I have already touched (above p. 19), that all humour is necessarily framed in some way and so insulated from the serious.¹³ On such a basis, it can thus be discounted without apparent damage to the intellectual content of the work of a philosopher such as Hobbes, whose suitably filtered propositions can then take their places in the lineage of a modern discipline and its austere purposes of establishing analytic truth.¹⁴ However, in Hobbes's day there was more involved than insulated patterns of proposition. In controversy, both the specification of responsibilities and the qualities needed for philosophizing could be stimulated and shaped through the exercise of satiric wit. It is precisely this that is encompassed by Hobbes's praise of wit as 'tenuity and agility', an implicit acceptance of the legitimacy of argument serio ludere.

The Lucianic in Hobbes's World

Symptomatic of this missing dimension is the fate of the Democritan writer Lucian, who as I have also noted, claimed to have made the philosophical dialogue laugh.¹⁵ In the provocation of laughter at others, Lucian had capitalized on arguments found largely in the philosophy of rhetoric and poetics that gave humour a serious rationale.¹⁶ As an aspect of a speaker's presented persona in argument, the ethos in Aristotelian terms, humour reached out selectively to an audience, signalling an appropriate response.¹⁷ This in turn, especially through overt laughter, could be a sign of argumentative success, the achievement of a common understanding, helping to create, or sustain a community by excluding those laughed at, scorned and diminished by it. Laughter could express an informed critical engagement, a sense of superiority.¹⁸ It was, as Wilson summarized, condemnation. This might make outright laughter ethically uncertain, as Hobbes himself recognized in associating so much of it with mean-spiritedness, but it insured the liaison between satire as moral critique and the humour given such a 'steddy direction.

For Lucian, risible failings could be detected in discourse covering what we would now see as logic, metaphysics, moral and political theory and religious belief, so stretching in a virtually unbroken continuum from putatively bogus philosophy to the promotion of superstition and idolatry. Indeed, as Jones remarks, in Lucian's work, philosophy and religion were intimately linked. In a number of his satires it is philosophers who defend the absurdities of religion, and occasionally it is the gods who look down upon the absurdity of philosophy.¹⁹ If the scope of philosophy is narrowed to be consistent with the sort of propositional economy now taken much for granted, this may seem odd, and may help to explain Lucian's position somewhere near outer darkness; but if, as Kinch Hoekstra has shown, the scope of philosophy could be taken to embrace utilitas as human betterment, then the use of the Lucianic to puncture bladders puffed up with self-delusion and manipulative self-interest is in no way discrepant with what it was to be a true philosopher.²⁰

This deflationary purpose is apparent in the seventeenth century, during which time the positive citation of Lucian is both an indication of discontent with religious practice and a sign that there is good philosophical reason to laugh at philosophers.²¹ Thus Samuel Butler in his character of 'A Philosopher' first dismisses philosophers in terms at one with Lucian and with Hobbes in his accounts of early Christianity. Philosophers discover nothing but their own mistakes and when there was money in the business, 'maintained themselves and their Opinions by fierce and hot Contests'. Now, without credit they have collapsed into the single sect, he styles 'Epicuro-Gassendo-Charltoniana'; its controversies are easily ignored. Butler then ridicules the very things Hobbes had ridiculed. The philosopher

is confident of immaterial Substances and his Reasons are very pertinent, that is, substantial as he thinks and immaterial as others do. Heretofore his Beard was the badge of his Profession, and the length of that in all his Polemics was ever accounted the Length of his Weapon.

In Lucian's time, he continues, 'philosophers were commonly called Beard-Wearers; for all the Strength of their Wits lay in their Beards'.²² Lucian had taken the beard - long bushy, unkempt, and on one man weighing 'three score ounces' - as the hallmark of the philosophical type he satirized. In one case it was forcibly removed.²³ In another, Hermotinus vowed to shave his own 'big, shaggy beard' to proclaim his rejection of philosophical dogma; in another sapience is accorded to Apollo, despite his lacking the usual facial foliage of philosophical standing.²⁴ Hobbes's philosophy, I would suggest, had a clear Lucianic dimension, sanctioned by his general views on wit and reason.²⁵ To recognize this, as Butler appears to have done, and as Brian Duppa did, on the publication of Leviathan, is to enhance the context needed for understanding his thought.²⁶ Quentin Skinner and Roger Lund have both rightly stressed the importance of recovering the wit of Hobbes's works, most noticeably that of Leviathan, which each takes to be a watershed. However, there the agreement ends: Skinner at one point argued that Leviathan steps back to embrace the Renaissance theory of laughter (singular) because Hobbes came to believe that philosophy on its own was unpersuasive, an explanation predicated on philosophy and humour being then as distinct as they have since become.²⁷ Rather, it may have been that the Lucianic, easily at one with philosophy or eloquence, encouraged the Hobbesian embrace of eloquence to a philosophically demonstrative end.²⁸ It is perhaps worth remarking both that it was Lucian's predecessor Bion who first conjoined eloquence and philosophy, according to Diogenes Laertus; and that Lucian was apt to run philosophy and rhetoric together by satirizing the personae of rhetorician and philosopher in similar terms. Each was subject to the same failings, each indifferently the butt of his humour.²⁹ In contrast to Skinner, Lund has claimed that Hobbes introduced a new heterodox wit, to become typical of the Restoration and Augustan worlds. This will be discussed further when the satiric strain in Hobbes's critics is addressed.³⁰

In the meantime, either way, the contextual enrichment is hardly unproblematic given the often entangled functions of humour and laughter in early modernity (above, pp. 18—19) - to express wonder or joy, to aid good health, to sustain attention, as well as to criticize, scorn and condemn. Once we allow the possibility of humour to enter Hobbes's texts, the differing rationalities for it become potentially destabilizing. When is humour invented or rediscovered, according to our convenience? We need to be armed with little more than a concept of irony to make almost any text say what we want.³¹ And how do we know the point of humour, where it stops and whether laughter is itself a sign of interpretative acuity? As Aubreys amplifications on Hobbes's humour indicate, there can always be 'merry humour' beyond the philosophic requirements of serio ludere. It is a humour that laces his correspondence, much to the joy of his friends, one recalling the gaiety (lagayeté de tonics conversations) of Hobbes's conversation.³² When Hobbes wrote to a friend that 'I have a cold that makes me keepe my chamber, and a chamber, that makes me keepe my Cold', we have something both benign and pretty quarantined from serious implications;³³ but does the satire of priestcraft extend beyond a 'pleasant facetiousness' to a subversion of Christianity?³⁴

If we see no humour in his theological and ecclesiological theories, he can seem entirely orthodox, a possibility that raises the question of why so many of his theologically informed contemporaries took offence.³⁵ Conversely, if we see too much, he becomes the implausible caricature atheist presented by his more extreme English foes and at odds with so much circumstantial evidence.³⁶ Yet, if in this way, the gap between the semantic meaning of a statement and the intended point of it is opened up so decisively by humour as Lund suggests, why is it that he and Hobbes's seventeenth-century critics can come to broadly the same conclusions: namely, that Hobbes was responsible for something new and nasty? Before taking up these issues, a word is needed on the tantalizing presence of Lucian in Hobbes's milieu. It may suggest why Hobbes could have taken the legitimacy of serio ludere much for granted when briefly outlining the relations...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Dedication
• Preface
• Introduction
• Part I
• Part II
• Afterword: The History of Early Modern Philosophy: Method, Speech Act and Persona
• Notes
• Works Cited
• Index