Hobbes: Leviathan

As I undertake the following task I labour under a paltry weight of learning, and a feebler intellect. What, then, is my claim to the reader's attention? Surely minds more capacious, judgements keener and perceptions more perspicuous have produced works to render mine obsolete. So that, it seems, I would do best to hold my peace, and take the refuge of obscurity.

My only defence for proffering impudent words is twofold: firstly, I have managed to circumvent my vanity. I have rent my "self" to shreds. I have torn asunder all those idle, "edifying" notions of personal ambition; I have razed to ruin all dreams of pre-eminence.

The second reason is just as important -- it is, to wit, that I feel deeply. "Cool reason rather than blind rapture," I hear you say. But I hold it as an aphorism that he who feels deeply - who feels purely, unselfishly - always has something valuable to say. I do not say that I am worthy of credit: all I have achieved (and that is till open to question) is, as I have said, a result of thoroughgoing self-abnegation. All I can offer is hard, honest toil. I am a mere vessel. I grasp in the dark, but I do not give up. After all -- does not the earthworm, blind as it is, eventually find its way into the daylight?

"Covenants without the sword": how important is the Original Contract to Hobbes?

The seminal question of Hobbes scholarship is whether his particular brand of psychological egoism can be detached from his ethical theory. Most answers have been in the affirmative, courtesy of the hegemony of AE Taylor - with the result that the original contract has assumed integral importance. The following pages will disclose a revisionary conception of Hobbes's scheme, arguing two closely
connected points: firstly, that Leviathan is most felicitously read as an atomistic enteprise, ie as one which adduces principles from intuitive, elementary propositions. Hobbes's theory of obligation is derived from his deterministic metaphysics. It is for this reason that Hobbes is able to avoid Hume's objections to contractarian theories. And this is the second strand of my argument. For, unlike Locke or Rousseau, Hobbes does not describe a transition from a unjust to a just state of affairs. For him, the state of nature was a purely hypothetical condition, the result of the abolition of the sovereign in light of certain ineradicable features of human nature. In short, Hobbes is not saying that each citizen "ought" to obey the sovereign, merely that it is in his interests to do so.
Or, more precisely: that it is an axiomatic truth that he would choose to do so.
I am aware that my position is an eccentric one. It will seem more creditable, perhaps, when we consider that most scholarship tends to draw a veil around a very important element of his thinking - namely, his pretensions for the geometric precision of his principles. The reasons why this might be so are twofold: first, because, despite Hobbes's avowed dislike of Aristotelian science, he inherited its bias towards a purely deductive science, even being at the centre of the rise of inductive science. In short, his conception of science now seems horribly outmoded. The second reason is simply that, famously and acrimoniously, he was known to the mathematical world as a bit of a crank. His tussles with, in particular, John Wallis, have left his mathematical credentials, to put it lightly, in doubt. So that scholars have deigned, by and large, to ignore such pretensions, and have focused exclusively on his notions of obligation as if he had established what I will call "utilitarian deontology", a contradiction in terms which in any case commits the "naturalistic fallacy". He assuredly did not say that the contract ushers in a more desirable state of affairs, therefore we ought to agree to its terms. It is crucial to see that Hobbes is trying to show (a) how things are and (b) why things are necessarily as they are. FC Hood repeatedly asserts that obligation always implies an obliger: but, if I may be so bold, this is a misconception, because for Hobbes, the terms of obligation say nothing about the relationship between the obliged and the obliger - only that we will tend to acquiesce in it if it safeguards our self-preservation. The contractual approach operates, at the best of times, at a metaphorical level: but in the Hobbesian scheme, we do not even act ‘as if' an agreement has been made between sovereign and subject, for no duties whatsoever are asked of the sovereign. The sovereign will lose power if he fails to safeguard the subjects' self-preservation, of course; but this cannot hide the fact that, well and truly, “might is right” â€' for without the sword, the contract is null and void. Therefore, the subjects cannot be thought to willingly enter upon an agreement. And this is what we would expect, given Hobbes's determinism. Given certain constants in men's passions, they will always act to preserve a commonwealth which safeguards their self-preservation.
It has been shown in the forgoing that the Original Contract played little to no role in Hobbes's scheme. Of course, it is beyond the scope of this essay to defend such a position. All I can hope to do is give the fullest, most faithful explication possible. Now, as is well known, Hobbes was clearly and explicitly materialist. “Materialism”: such a loaded word. I must be more precise. Materialism of the sort which Hobbes propounded was simply the doctrine that “matter is all”. It is to be opposed to the brand of materialism exemplified by Democritus and Epicurus, where there is a place for the void, or modern physics, where everything reduces to energy. It leads inevitably to a dualism between matter and God. For if every event has a cause, and there is only matter, what caused the first effect? Because this sort of materialism has no recourse to forces, it must posit “something that is the cause of everything” which exists completely externally of the material realm. It is the sort of dualism that the church has always been partial to, obviously because it thereby invests God with a personality (unlike Spinoza's pantheistic cosmos).

More original is his conception of the mind. He boldly repudiates the rationalist tendency to make it sacrosanct, and, in line with a principle he took from his friend Galileo â€' namely, that all matter is in “eternal motion” â€' made the mind consist of motions in the body. Hobbes did not know what these motions were â€' to know this would be to go beyond introspection â€' but he could assert that different parts of the mind involve different motions. His account of the imagination foreshadows Hume. For it is “sense decaying, or weakened, by the absence of the object”.

The reader will thus far be able to impute to me the dual vices of compression and pure style. He will be able to add to that “dubious speculation”. Hobbes wants to show that there is a plausible explanation for all the features of the human psychology in terms of the motions of the body. He makes a distinction between “vital motion” and “voluntary motion”. Vital motion is done unconsciously, without volition; whereas voluntary motion requires sense, for the world to be subsumed under a certain interpretation so that a decision can be made (eg, the movement of a limb). Now, prima facie, voluntary motion seems to pose a threat to the deterministic purport of Hobbes's scheme â€' for if there is free will, then each step in the casual chain is not guaranteed by the previous one. But Hobbes has an answer. The motions of sense interact with each other in such a way that they produce voluntary motion by means of a purely theoretically derived motion of sense which Hobbes calls endeavour. Endeavour is composed of two parts. When it is “towards something it is called appetite or desire… and when endeavour is fromward something, it is commonly called aversion”. What Hobbes is doing here is ingenious. He is framing his conceptions so that the motions of the mind move eternally. For nothing unequivocally provokes aversion or appetite, and though we can develop our appetite for something (as when we train ourselves to eat vegetables) this often results in a new aversion elsewhere. So the motions of the mind impel us to find a kind of golden mean between aversion and desire, as we oscillate eternally between the two. Meaning that free will is conceived minimally to say the least, since it is still subject to the motions of sense.

Hobbes supplements this account of the motions of the body with two “theorems” or “laws of nature”. More to come.

The first is that, since there is a common aversion to the summum malum (death), we will tend to do whatever is necessary to preserve peace. Almost equally important to Hobbes is the natural equality of mankind. No man can dominate all others, and even the weakest can kill the strongest. The best way to find the golden mean between appetite and aversion is to renounce all our rights, save only to defend ourselves in extremis (ie when the sovereign fails to safeguard our self-preservation).

Hobbes's third law of nature is “that men perform their covenants made”. This law is central to the entire edifice. It is a slightly odd law. The others are injunctions of a moral kind. The requirement that we keep promises is peculiar because it appears to be both moral and logical. A covenant says what we should do in the future; if it did not bind us, it would not be a covenant. To know what a covenant is is to know that it is a way of incurring obligation.

The reason for Hobbes's concern for covenants is obvious enough. If we are to escape from the state of nature, it can only be by laying aside our “right to all things”. That is, we can only do that by covenanting not to do in the future what we did in the past. In some ways, the greater oddity of Hobbes's work is his insistence that each of us is obliged because, implicitly or explicitly, we are contracted to obey the sovereign. Of all the routes to obligation, contract is at once the most and the least attractive. It is the most attractive because it is I the most conclusive way of showing the obligation has been self-imposed in some sort of contract-like procedure. The route is uniquely attractive because promising is a paradigm of the way we voluntarily acquire obligations. It is unattractive because very few us have actually promised our leaders. But Hobbes avoids this by making obligation purely horizontal: between citizen and citizen, and not citizen and sovereign. We are protected from each other, not the sovereign. We do not need to pledge our obedience, both because it is our interests and because we cannot help but bow to the power of the sword.