Thomas Hobbes

Otfried Höffe, Nicholas Walker

• Publisher: SUNY Press
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9781438457666, 9781438457659
• eBook ISBN: 9781438457673
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Modern Philosophy

Best known for his contributions to political philosophy, Thomas Hobbes set out to develop a coherent philosophical system extending from logic and natural philosophy to civil and religious philosophy. In this introduction to Hobbes's thought, Otfried Höffe begins by providing an overview of the entire scope of his work, making clear its systematic character through analysis of his natural philosophy, his individual and social anthropology, and his political thought. He then offers an innovative examination of religious and ecclesiastical questions, touching not only on the political implications of religion so important to Hobbes, but also on his attempt to reconstruct Christianity in terms of a materialistic philosophy. He also explores Hobbes's continuous critique of Aristotle and Aristotelian Scholastics, in which Höffe argues that Hobbes and Aristotle have much more in common philosophically than is normally supposed—and certainly more than Hobbes himself acknowledged. Finally, Höffe sketches the influence Hobbes had and continues to have on the development of legal and political philosophy.

ONE

Introduction

Thomas Hobbes: A Pioneer of Modernity

If the philosophy of the state, and of the nature of political authority as such, had long been a neglected, even expressly despised, area of study, there is certainly no doubt about its acute contemporary relevance. In view of an ongoing wave of wars, and particularly of civil wars and internal social conflicts, we no longer simply talk of “prosperity” or “emancipation” as the ultimate ends of political action and intervention. These ends now seem more basic and elementary, namely: peace and freedom, in immediate conjunction with the principle of justice.

The quest for a social order capable of securing such ends has now lost any suggestion of musty irrelevance. The fundamental question for any philosophy of politics—the legitimation and limitation of the public exercise of power—has emphatically passed beyond a merely antiquarian interest in intellectual history and has returned to occupy the place where it has always belonged: the center of a truly political philosophy. And Thomas Hobbes is one of the most important representatives of political philosophy in this sense.

Yet this thinker was concerned with far more than simply “the state” and the nature of law and political authority. For the body of work that Hobbes left us is essentially encyclopedic in character. This philosophy embraces an ontology and a natural philosophy; it examines the nature of language, reason, and knowledge; it investigates human feelings and emotions, and many other issues in what we would now call the philosophy of mind; and, last but not least, it engages with fundamental questions of morality and religion.

If we ignore the field of mathematics, where Hobbes occasionally lost his way (for a judicious account of his views in this respect, see Grant 1996), he addressed his chosen problems in a way that is almost always original, and indeed radical in two senses of the word. In his thorough and resolute pursuit of understanding he penetrates below the apparent surface, illuminates hidden corners of experience, and thereby opens up new perspectives that are highly challenging in both substantive and methodological terms. Hobbes is an intellectual revolutionary who undertook nothing less than a fundamental re-grounding of philosophy, one comparable in its radicality with the new beginning proposed by Descartes. But apart from the methodological significance that he assigns to mathematics—something that he shares with the French thinker—Hobbes develops an entirely different revolution in the field of philosophy. He regards the famous Cartesian argument from the cogito as fallacious, he repudiates all mind-body dualism, and he replaces ideas with nomina or names. Hobbes is an emphatic nominalist. And instead of beginning with an exercise in radical doubt, the English thinker begins by offering a radical new construction of the world.

It is, above all, in his philosophy of the state, of the nature of law and political authority, that Hobbes reveals the full originality, radicality, and consistency of his thought, engaging explicitly with principles and forms of argument (concerning the concept, grounding, and normative criteria of the state and legal authority) that have remained an object of systematic discussion to this day. In this respect too, Hobbes is still our philosophical contemporary.

In the courage that he shows in making full use of his own understanding, Hobbes can be seen as an Enlightenment thinker in the Kantian sense, and one who demands a similar courage on the part of his readers. He struggles against all superstition, derides uncritical reverence for books and supposed authorities, and subjects religious and political communities of every kind to the most thorough critical examination.

This son of an uneducated country priest (who was apparently more interested in drink and cards than in matters of theology), a university student who stoutly rejected the scholastic disputes that were common in such institutions, Hobbes sought to overcome superstition of all kinds by appeal to natural forms of explanation. He is a rigorous naturalist and an equally rigorous materialist, whose views in this regard are not merely intellectually suggestive but remain profoundly challenging. And since he was forced to engage directly with theological questions, he also developed an intimate knowledge of the Bible itself, thus becoming a notable exegete and even a significant theologian.

1.1. Three Challenges of the Epoch

In terms of cultural and intellectual history, Hobbes is very much a philosopher of the seventeenth century. This was an age that witnessed momentous advances in mathematics and the natural sciences, but it was also a period of great political insecurity, marked by numerous wars, social conflicts, and civil wars. In addition, it was an epoch in which many commonly shared moral and religious convictions were beginning to disintegrate. In directly addressing the three challenges created by these specific developments, Hobbes was able to produce an eminently political philosophy that was not merely focused upon political issues in the narrower sense.

In these historical circumstances, especially the situation of political insecurity and the weakening of once shared moral convictions, the philosophers of the time were generally preoccupied with discovering some “firm ground” on which to build. And since they understood this search either under the aegis of mathematics or under that of reliable factual knowledge, the philosophical debate emerged as a struggle between a rationalism that privileges “understanding” or “reason” (ratio, in Latin) and an empiricism that privileges “experience” (empeiria, in Greek). But the philosophy of Hobbes cannot be understood exclusively in terms of either approach, which only serves to show that rationalism and empiricism are not necessarily mutually exclusive positions after all.

Both the rationalist and the empiricist sides of the debate promoted the notion of a unified and universal science that was supposed to serve the cause of human well-being. There were three fundamental ideas involved here: philosophy must assume a rigorously scientific character and adopt a single unified method (i.e., be a unified science); it must investigate the whole of the natural and social world, including the nature of language (i.e., be a universal science); and it should serve the welfare of human beings (i.e., be an expression of practical interest). To fulfill the first of these demands, philosophy must begin from the simplest possible elements; and to fulfill the second, it must attempt to present the totality of its insights as an organized whole, as a system. This unified and universal science is thus essentially systematic in character. Yet it no longer answers to the classical, and above all, Aristotelian ideal of a pure autarchic theoria, and indeed explicitly renounces this ideal. Hobbes’s unified and universal science (as we can see from The Elements of Law, 1640) is intended to be useful for human beings.

Hobbes seeks this dimension of utility above all in the political state or “commonwealth,” an area of reflection that is conspicuously absent from the philosophical system of his outstanding contemporary René Descartes (1596–1650). It was through addressing this theme that Hobbes stepped out onto the contemporary philosophical stage and responded to the challenges in question. He recognized the direct relationship between this novel theme and all of these challenges: in methodological terms, the exemplary character of science and of mathematics as the ideal of rigorous demonstration (“reason is reckoning”); in political terms, the bloody reality of civil war and religious conflict, along with the crisis of received moral convictions and religious beliefs. It is in this context that Hobbes introduced the idea of the “covenant”—the theoretical model of the social contract that is typically mobilized by modern political thought against all established usage and tradition—and thereby also created one of the most important philosophical theories of the state and the nature of political authority in the history of Western thought. Some of the peculiar features, or perhaps even incoherencies, of this philosophy can be explained by reference to the social and economic conditions of the time, and the transition from a feudal to a bourgeois social order. These new conditions can be roughly characterized in terms of the market society of early modern capitalism and the possessive individualism associated with it. Jean-Jacques Rousseau already drew attention to such developments in his Discourse on the Origin and Foundation of Inequality among Men (1755), and they have been specifically analyzed and investigated by Franz Borkenau (1934), a thinker close to the Frankfurt Institute of Social Research, and more recently by C. B. Macpherson (1962).

Hobbes himself, on the other hand, ascribed little or no significance to social and economic developments as such, and one looks in vain in his writings for any incipient contributions to a general theory of economic life or social development. The all-defining political experience for Hobbes was the civil wars of the time, or rather simply the English Civil War. For in spite of his early travels in Europe, and his long period of exile in Paris later, he was exclusively interested in the political affairs of his home country.

Nonetheless, Hobbes’s theory of the state is significant far beyond the limits of his time, beyond the English Civil War and the emergence of early modern market society. For, after all, it is not only capitalist or bourgeois society that requires an international condition of peace if our material and intellectual powers are to be developed and realized. Furthermore, the English Civil War was only one case of many such political and religious wars in Europe during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. As another example, we might recall the Huguenot wars in France that, two generations earlier, had inspired Jean Bodin (1530–1596), the most important theorist of international law in the second half of the sixteenth century, to compose his Six Livres de la République (Six Books on the Republic, 1576). These writings develop a theory of sovereignty on the part of the prince (that is to say: the French king) and reject any rival authority in relation to pope or emperor, or to the feudal rights defended by the nobility. Hobbes explicitly agrees with Bodin in this regard (E part I, ch. 8, §7).

With his own translation of Thucydides, the English philosopher reached back into the distant past in order to warn his contemporaries of the horrors of civil war. And the things that led to civil war in the early modern period, such as the ruthless rivalry between religious positions each claiming absolute authority for itself, have their later counterpart in the exclusive claims of other competing political and indeed religious factions. Finally, it is clear that the relevance of Hobbes’s philosophy of the state is certainly not limited to historical situations of civil war. The position that has often been maintained, under the ultimate influence of Carl Schmitt, that the whole philosophy of Hobbes only acquires its full coherence and plausibility in relation to the civil war (see Kosellek 1959, chapter I.II and Willms 1970, p. 34ff.), is unnecessarily reductive.

The principal question of Hobbes’s philosophy is this: Why, and in what form, is a state, an institutionalized order of peace, needed in the first place? Other political philosophers before Hobbes, such as Niccolò Machiavelli (1469–1527) or the aforementioned Jean Bodin, still essentially appealed to the lessons of political experience, to considerations of prudence, and to established historical knowledge, to justify their claims. But right from the beginning, from his first contribution to political thought onward (The Elements of Law of 1640), Hobbes always developed his argument on the basis of general or universal principles. But these most basic principles are confirmed in turn by constant reference to experience. And they are systematically derived from a philosophical anthropology that is itself grounded in a philosophy of nature. It is thus in terms of a rigorously scientific form of argument that Hobbes attempts to resolve the fundamental political problem of his time, that of civil war, in a way capable of commanding universal agreement in spite of the loss of earlier moral beliefs and convictions. Hobbes undertakes to pursue the fundamental questions of politics without appealing to a now problematic system of moral values, and solely by recourse to a truly scientific form of philosophy.

If we ignore the specific way in which he relates it to human experience, this scientific approach to the political belongs, methodologically speaking, to the rationalist tradition. And with a particular variation on the title of Spinoza’s principal early work, Ethica Ordine Geometrico demonstrata (Ethics demonstrated in accordance with Geometrical Method), the entire life work of Hobbes, dedicated as it was to the fundamental questions of politics, could plausibly be described as Politica Ordine Geometrico demonstrata (Politics demonstrated in accordance with the Geometrical Method). It is clear, of course, that we should not understand geometry here merely in the narrower sense as the mathematical treatment of space. Since Hobbes also speaks of the “reckoning [that is, adding and subtracting] of the consequences of general names.” (L ch. 5: 18; cf. C ch. I, §2) his life work could also be entitled “Politics demonstrated in accordance with the Mathematical Method.” Whether geometry or mathematics is taken as the methodological model, Hobbes is essentially interested in the exemplary clarity, coherence, and completeness that they both share, and above all in a process of justification that starts with the most basic possible assumptions and proceeds from here to develop its results step by step.

But in spite of his methodological rationalism, Hobbes argues that all our representations derive from sense experience, and his theory of knowledge is emphatically sensationalist (from the Latin sensus: the faculty of sense). And since he also defines “the good” in naturalistic rather than in normative terms, he must be classed as an empiricist. With this singular combination of methodological rationalism and substantive empiricism, Hobbes effectively undercuts the bald opposition between the two principal philosophical movements of his age.

The political result of Hobbes’s reflections also fulfills another fundamental cultural hope of the period, namely the idea of the state as a guarantor of internal peace. Since religious and confessional conflicts also underlie many civil conflicts, so that controversies regarding religious truth endanger the internal peace or security that is the necessary condition of any community, Hobbes expressly removes the political order from any influence or interference on the part of the contending religious confessions. In this way, Hobbes prepares the way for the modern idea of the state as an institution that is supposedly neutral with regard to differences of philosophical outlook or religious belief on the part of its members. It is true, of course, that Hobbes is usually regarded as the philosophical apologist of unlimited state power, and is widely interpreted, not without reason, as the leading theorist of political absolutism. Yet Hobbes clearly thought of himself, as we can see from the dedication of Leviathan, as a thinker who sought a middle way between excessive freedom on the one hand and excessive authority on the other. Nonetheless, he hardly expected his theory to be universally welcomed or readily accepted. And as if anticipating the typical reaction that his philosophy of the state has indeed provoked ever since, he expects to find his labors “generally decried,” as he says in the dedication. But the real reason for this reaction probably lies in the way Hobbes actually pursues his goal. For in spite of the way he interprets his own work, he clearly adopts a strongly autocratic rather than a moderate or middle way.

The threefold intention behind his thought finds particularly clear expression in Leviathan, his most important work. Here Hobbes develops his argument with remarkable methodological rigor. On the one hand, he refuses to weaken his claim to provide a strictly scientific grounding for philosophy. Indeed he reinforces the appeal to mathematical method (more geometric vel arithmetico), here reduced to a simple notion of calculation in terms of addition and subtraction that hardly does justice to the thinking actually practiced in the book. Finally, and this is why it is so instructive, Hobbes’s work is not governed by any purely theoretical interest but by an essentially practical and political one: that of promoting the power and authority of the state (as the dedication makes clear) on the one hand, and of helping human beings to become obedient citizens of the state on the other (L ch. 2: 17). This already strongly evokes the side of his thought that is so concerned with authority and obedience, while the other side of the coin, the concept of liberty, is rather obscured.

1.2. A Pioneer in Three Senses

When we speak of a pioneer, we usually think of someone who does not simply discover a new field but actually explores and recognizes its significance. In this sense Hobbes deserves to be regarded as a pioneer of modernity, for he did not merely anticipate or prefigure the new epoch that was beginning to emerge, but was an emphatic representative and protagonist of this development, even a crucial part of it. Hobbes was both acutely aware of a fundamental issue and made a fascinating attempt to resolve it, and the heart of his response to this issue has proved relevant and instructive for a considerable period of time, and in a certain sense still remains so. At least as far as political philosophy is concerned, what we understand as early modernity begins in the seventeenth century.

At first sight this claim may seem paradoxical. For both the central issue and the proposed solution, and the specific way in which they are presented, are obviously prompted and influenced by the particular historical time in which they arose. They thus appear to be limited to this time and place, rather than directly relevant in the present. But the claim only appears paradoxical as long as we regard the time in question as utterly different from our own. In fact, the differences are not so fundamental after all.

Of course, Hobbes’s repeated, and indeed copious, reference to the Bible is a reflection of the age. In a period that was obsessed with adducing scriptural support and justification of one kind or another, Hobbes appealed with remarkable frequency to both the Old and the New Testament, even if he often cites Scripture for purposes quite different from the usual ones (as he himself points out in the dedication of Leviathan). The emblematic figures that furnish the titles for two of his most important works, Leviathan and Behemoth, are monsters from the pages of the Old Testament. And in Leviathan, the two parts of the work that directly concern the philosophical system itself, namely his anthropology and his philosophy of the state, are followed by two further parts that deal with religious and ecclesiastical questions. And it is above all here that we find the most frequent references to biblical figures: Aaron, Adam, and David, John the Baptist and Moses, Paul, Peter, Solomon, Samuel, and Saul. Finally, Hobbes also appeals to “the law of the Gospel”—the so-called Golden Rule—as confirmation at a particularly important point of his argument regarding the second law of nature (L ch. 14: 65).

Since some version of the Golden Rule can be found in many different cultures, it can be regarded as a core element of a cross-cultural morality. It thus serves to support Hobbes’s principal interest in providing a universally convincing justification for the authority of the state even in times when generally shared values a...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Abbreviations
• 1. Introduction: Thomas Hobbes: A Pioneer of Modernity
• I. Hobbes’s Career and Philosophical Development
• II. The Encyclopedic Character of Hobbes’s Philosophy
• III. The Influence of Hobbes
• Chronology of Hobbes’s Life and Work
• Bibliography
• Name Index
• Subject Index