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ii*—the end of philosophy (the case of hobbes) by Kinch Hoekstra abstract In the first three sections, I argue that Hobbes has a distinctive conception of philosophy, the highest value of which is not truth, but human benefit; and that his philosophical utterances are constrained by this value (both insofar as they are philosophical in particular, and insofar as they are public utterances of any kind). I address an evidentiary problem for this view in the penultimate section, and then turn to the question of how such a conception of philosophy requires different interpretations of particular philosophical positions. The whole is intended as a case study of the need for an interpreter to understand how the interpreted philosopher conceives of the nature and aim of his undertaking.
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ike commentators on a chess match, interpreters of a philosophical work generally assume that however complex or innovative it is, the ultimate aim of the players and the defining rules of the activity are uncontroversial. In studying the history of philosophy, however, the underlying conception and aim of philosophy for a particular philosopher at a particular time are among the subjects requiring interpretation. By focussing on one such case, that of Thomas Hobbes, I hope both to shed light on the nature of his philosophical enterprise and to raise doubt about the common working assumption that attributing our own conception of philosophy to our predecessors is an adequate starting point for interpreting the history of philosophy. I shall focus throughout on making plausible the suggestion that Hobbes has a different conception of philosophy from conceptions now current, but I think that related arguments may be made for many other figures in the history of philosophy, and that this affects the project of interpretation.
An earlier version of this paper was delivered at The Faculty of History, Cambridge University, 26 April 2004; I am grateful to those who discussed it with me then. I am indebted to Mark Greenberg and Jacob Eigen for suggestions, and to Heather Matsumoto for computer file recovery. *Meeting of the Aristotelian Society, held in Senate House, University of London, on Monday, 24th October, 2005 at 4.15 p.m.
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An immediately striking fact is that in Hobbes’s plan for a systematic philosophy – starting with his work on body, on which his work about human nature is built, from which proceeds his work on the commonwealth and the citizen – the entire project begins with the definition of philosophy itself. It is appropriate, then, that we should consider the nature of Hobbes’s philosophy by examining his definitions thereof; this examination will highlight the point that philosophers can have and have had contrasting conceptions of philosophy. ‘PHILOSOPHY,’ Hobbes says in Concerning Body, ‘is such knowledge of Effects or Appearances, as we acquire by true Ratiocination from the knowledge we have first of their Causes or Generation: And again, of such Causes or Generations as may be from knowing first their Effects.’1 Such a view has been assimilated to a common account, generally based on the fifth chapter of Leviathan, that Hobbes’s conception of philosophy is not only alethic, or truth-oriented, but a formal system of rational deductions. Once Hobbes had discovered Euclid, according to this account, he was born as a philosopher, and began to lay out a similarly systematic philosophy. So, for example, in the epistle before his 1649 translation of Hobbes’s De cive, Samuel Sorbi`ere calls it ‘a work of pure reasoning.’2 In Dorothea Krook’s words: ‘For Hobbes, truth, and therefore “science,” remains, in the end, demonstrative; and it is for this reason that he ranks as one of the most thoroughgoing rationalists of the seventeenth century.’3 This rationalism, it is frequently argued, pervades the political theory. According to Jean Hampton, Hobbes maintained that ‘the only effective cure’ for the disorder that surrounded him ‘was to give members of these societies a sound, rational argument for
1. Hobbes, Elements of Philosophy, the First Section, Concerning Body (London, 1656), 1.2, p. 2. Concerning Body is a translation of Elementorum philosophiae sectio prima de corpore (London, 1655). Although the translation was not by Hobbes, he corrected it and considerably altered the contents from the Latin version: cf. Concerning Body, sig. a3r . In all quotations, italic and roman type have been substituted for one another when italic is the default for a given section. 2. Hobbes, Le citoyen ou les fondements de la politique (Paris: Flammarion, 1982), p. 63 (‘un ouvrage de pur raisonnement’). 3. Dorothea Krook, ‘Thomas Hobbes’s Doctrine of Meaning and Truth,’ Philosophy 31:116 (1956), p. 19.
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the correct political structure of the state as rigorous as any of Euclid’s geometric proofs.’4 This view of Hobbes has made him a favourite of philosophers. It has also informed countless historical accounts, according to which Hobbes is part of an important shift from a renaissance humanism based on prudence, rhetoric, considerations of ragion di stato, and counsel to princes; to an early modern civil science based on reason that rejects these central humanist preoccupations as unproductive at best.5 I want to argue, by contrast, that Hobbes simultaneously works within both traditions, and that on balance he does not regard truth as the ultimate philosophical value or aim. My emphasis will be on a few of Hobbes’s affinities with the humanists, though I do not mean to deny the manifest links with the scientists; but the latter affiliations are better known, and in any case that tradition has itself been simplified by ignoring the full views of figures like Hobbes, assimilating them to the paradigm rather than vice-versa. What emerges as Hobbes’s view of philosophy should complicate our understanding of the early modern view of it that is supposed to have so influenced our own.
I A Philosophy of Benefit. The definition of philosophy as knowledge gained by reasoning from effects to causes or viceversa is only a starting point, and Hobbes is quick to characterize philosophy more completely. He goes on in Concerning Body to express a sentiment with which many of us are all too familiar. For [t]he inward glory and triumph of mind that a man may have, for the mastering of some difficult and doutfull matter, or for the discovery of some hidden truth, is not worth so much paines as the study of Philosophy requires; nor need any man
4. Jean Hampton, ‘Hobbes’s Science of Moral Philosophy,’ in Marcelo Dascal and Ora Gruengard, eds., Knowledge and Politics: Case Studies in the Relationship between Epistemology and Political Philosophy (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1989), p. 48. 5. Significant amendments to this view have been proposed by Leo Strauss, The Political Philosophy of Hobbes: Its Basis and Its Genesis, tr. Elsa Sinclair (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1936); and by Quentin Skinner, Reason and Rhetoric in the Philosophy of Hobbes (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996).
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kinch hoekstra care much to teach another what he knowes himselfe, if he think that will be the onely benefit of his labour.6
So what is the end of philosophy, if not the delight in solving problems, the discovery of truth, or the imparting of knowledge? Hobbes has a ready answer: ‘The End or Scope of Philosophy, is, that we may make use to our benefit of effects formerly seen; or that by application of Bodies to one another; we may produce the like effects of those we conceive in our minde . . . for the commodity of humane life.’7 Hobbes repeats Bacon’s formula that ‘knowledge is power,’ and explains that ‘the end of Knowledge is Power; . . . the scope of all speculation is the performing of some action, or thing to be done.’8 In Leviathan, Hobbes defines philosophy as ‘the Knowledge acquired by Reasoning, from the Manner of the Generation of any thing, to the Properties; or from the Properties, to some possible Way of Generation of the same; to the end to bee able to produce, as far as matter, and humane force permit, such Effects, as humane life requireth.’9 The end of philosophy – to produce what humans require – is integral to the very definition of philosophy.10 That Hobbes sees his own philosophical project in these terms must affect our interpretation of it. The beneficial aim or end of philosophy is no mere motivation to engage in philosophy, but a constitutive parameter. I may play chess for fun or for 6. Hobbes, Concerning Body 1.6, p. 5. 7. Ibid. 8. Hobbes, Elementorum philosophiae sectio secunda de homine (London, 1658), 11.13, p. 66: ‘scire est posse’ (cf. e.g. Bacon’s 1597 Meditationes sacrae); Hobbes, Concerning Body 1.6, p. 5. 9. Hobbes, Leviathan 46.1, p. 367: references to Leviathan are to chapter and paragraph number, and then to page number of the first edition (London, 1651). Although the position of the definition seems to have changed, this is presumbably not because of a theoretical demotion, but because Leviathan begins in media res, with a discourse de homine or ‘Of Man.’ Thus, structurally prior considerations, such as the definition of philosophy, or matters of philosophia prima, only arise as they directly affect a later part of the system (cf. Leviathan 46.14–29, pp. 371–5). 10. Hobbes is known for rejecting the idea of a final cause or an explanatory end. This prohibition does not apply, however, to intentional human activities, where reference to an end is necessary for an adequate understanding (an idea he expresses in Decameron Physiologicum: or, Ten Dialogues of Natural Philosophy (London, 1678), p. 15, by saying ‘the Final Cause . . . hath place onely in Moral Philosophy’ and not in natural philosophy).
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money, but those motivations play no role in making the game chess, and they would not normally play any role in interpreting my chess game. The goal of checkmate, however, is integral to the game being what it is, and any interpreter must refer to this goal in understanding any of the moves. The aim of practical benefit, similarly, is requisite for the activity to be philosophy for Hobbes, and any interpretation that proceeds without regard to this constitutive aim is unlikely to be adequate. Hobbes himself thinks that interpretation cannot proceed on the assumption that the writer to be interpreted has the expression of truth as his end, and contends that it must be grounded in whatever the writer’s aim or scope is. ‘For it is not the bare Words, but the Scope of the writer that giveth the true light, by which any writing is to bee interpreted.’11 According to this directive, the true light by which to interpret Hobbes’s philosophical work is ‘benefit (which is the scope at which all Speculation should aime)’12 ; and, as we saw above, the end or scope of philosophy is to benefit human life by bringing about some action. Elsewhere, he gives a complementary account: ‘The Light of humane minds is Perspicuous Words, but by exact definitions first snuffed, and purged from ambiguity; Reason is the pace; Encrease of Science, the way; and the Benefit of mankind, the end.’13 All of his own philosophical efforts, Hobbes is keen to claim, should be seen in light of the end of human benefit. ‘To me therefore that never did write any thing in Philosophy to show my Wit,’ Hobbes says, ‘but (as I thought at least) to benefit some part or other of mankind, it was very necessary to commend my Doctrine to such men as should have the Power and Right to Regulate the Universities.’14 He explains that he would never have written unless he thought his doctrine would be taught, thus persuading the public to obedience, and thereby contributing to peace.15 Similarly, in a rare moment when Hobbes praises 11. 12. 13. 14. the 15.
Hobbes, Leviathan 43.24, p. 331. Hobbes, Concerning Body 20.1, p. 214. Hobbes, Leviathan 5.20, p. 22. Hobbes, Six Lessons to the Professors of the Mathematiques, One of Geometry, Other of Astronomy . . . (London, 1656), p. 57. Ibid., pp. 56–7.
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some earlier philosophers, he does so because they brought benefit to humanity16 ; more characteristically, in censuring such philosophers, he does so insofar as they were ‘unprofitable’ and did not bring ‘Utility.’17 Hobbes specifies that his end for the Leviathan in particular is ‘to advance the Civill Power’; ‘that men may learn thereby, both how to govern, and how to obey’; and ‘to set before mens eyes the mutuall Relation between Protection and Obedience.’18 These professed goals are intimately related in Hobbes’s theory; truth, however, makes at most an implicit appearance in these accounts of general purpose, which suggests that it plays a subaltern role. In his preface to De cive, Hobbes tweaks the well-known injunction, derived from Tacitus, to write ‘sine studio,’ that is, without zeal or partiality. ‘Non partium sed pacis studio,’ Hobbes instead writes, replacing the claim of objectivity with a claim that he is engaging on behalf of peace.19 If Hobbes understands philosophical writing as an action by which he aims to produce beneficial effects, we would expect him to have an underlying view of words as actions. And such a view pervades Hobbes’s work.20 Action is ‘either of the tongue, or other part of the body’; what is more, the wrong words are responsible for the slaughter of many good 16. Hobbes, Historia Ecclesiastica Carmine Elegiaco concinnata (London, 1688), p. 19 (‘Digni laude viri, quorum sapientia juvit / Humanum multˆa commoditate genus’). Hobbes here includes Democritus and Epicurus, and he would have been familiar with the Epicurean idea that philosophy should aim above all not at alethic but at therapeutic ends. Cf., e.g., Epicurus, frag. 54 (‘Vain is the word of a philosopher which does not heal any suffering of man [pathos anthropou ¯ therapeuetai],’ The Extant Remains, ed. Cyril Bailey (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1926), pp. 132–3). Whereas the Epicureans think of philosophy primarily as therapy for the mind of the philosopher, Hobbes thinks of it as benefitting humankind more generally and more materially. The ancient therapeutic paradigm has been the primary alternative to an alethic conception of philosophy (see the work of Pierre Hadot, the leading exponent of this approach to the history of philosophy), but there are other alternatives. 17. Hobbes, Leviathan 46.11, p. 369. 18. Ibid., sig. A2v ; 31.41, p. 193 (condensed in the Latin version to a claim that he writes ‘for the public good’); ‘A Review, and Conclusion,’ par. 17, pp. 395–6. 19. Cf. De cive, Preface, p. 15. References to this work are to chapter and section number; quotations in English (and page numbers when referring to the Preface) are from On the Citizen, ed. Richard Tuck and Michael Silverthorne (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998). 20. Isaiah Berlin claims that ‘one of Hobbes’s truest claims to originality’ is ‘his view of language as a form of action’ (‘Hobbes, Locke and Professor Macpherson,’ The Political Quarterly 35:4 (1964), p. 457).
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kings, the bloodshed of multitudes, rebellion, and civil war.21 So the Nineteen Propositions addressed to the king at the outset of hostilities did not only promote rebellion, they constituted rebellion.22 Speech is often a most harmful action, and Hobbes writes to supplant such speech with his own beneficial doctrine. He addresses John Wallis, referring to himself in the third person: ‘And if your Principles produced Civil War, must not the contrary Principles, which are his, produce Peace?’23 Although a sovereign may encourage such necessary work, it is here that the practical philosopher comes into his own, for opinions are not changed by threats or commands, but by teaching and argument.24 Hobbes thinks that if he wins belief for his views he will thereby cause people to act obediently and peacefully.25 ‘Our wills follow our opinions,’ Hobbes writes, ‘as our actions follow our wills. In which sense they say truly and properly that say the world is governed by opinion.’26 He thinks that the point of philosophy is to change people’s opinions, and thus to change the world. To convince someone of the truth is an excellent way to form his opinion, but it is not the only way. And sovereignty, and thereby peace, is assured not by knowledge, but by opinion. ‘For the power of the mighty has no foundation but in the opinion and belief of the people.’27 By the opinion of power, true power is acquired; the sovereign will have authority if the sovereign is thought to have authority.28 So a claim for the sovereign’s authority may function not as a truth claim, but as a way of
21. Hobbes, The Elements of Law 2.6.3 (cf. ‘the Act of a tongue, or pen,’ Leviathan 37.13, p. 237); De cive, Preface, pp. 8–9; Leviathan 21.9, pp. 110–11; Historia Ecclesiastica, p. 54 (lines 1159–62). References to Elements of Law are to part, chapter, and section of the Ferdinand Tonnies ¨ edition (London: Frank Cass, 1969). 22. Hobbes, Behemoth or The Long Parliament, ed. Ferdinand Tonnies ¨ (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990), p. 107. 23. Mr Hobbes Considered in his Loyalty, Religion, Reputation, and Manners (London, 1662), p. 58. 24. Cf. Hobbes, De cive 13.9; Leviathan 30.4, pp. 175–6; Latin Leviathan, in Opera philosophica . . . (Amsterdam, 1668), p. 327. 25. Cf. Hobbes, De cive 5.1, 6.4, 27.27; Leviathan 42.67, p. 295. 26. Hobbes, Elements of Law 1.12.6. 27. Hobbes, Behemoth, p. 16. 28. Hobbes, De cive 15.13; Leviathan 10.5, p. 41; Leviathan 31.13, pp. 189–90.
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helping to ensure that authority and the many benefits it makes possible.29 That the aim of philosophy is to further human welfare may help to illuminate not just particular arguments, but also the subject of most of Hobbes’s work: that is, it promises to explain the preponderance of political philosophy in his writings. For the greatest benefit one could provide to humanity would be to shore up authority and forestall sedition and war30 ; and this is what Hobbes insists that he provides with his civil science. Moreover, this aim may also help to explain why Hobbes focusses on the metaphysical and epistemological questions that he does. When he does address such questions, he entertains the following objection: ‘But to what purpose (may some man say) is such subtilty in a work of this nature, where I pretend to nothing but what is necessary to the doctrine of Government and Obedience?’31 Hobbes answers that replacing the current metaphysical conceptions with his own would protect citizens everywhere from those who ‘would fright them from Obeying the Laws of their Countrey, with empty names.’32 For Hobbes, ‘practical philosophy’ is a pleonasm.
II Fiat Pax. Hobbes’s eirenic project, this suggests, is independent of, and perhaps even in tension with, a philosophy with truth as its primary aim. Sometimes, however, he says that philosophy is animated by curiosity, and does not mention utility. ‘Philosophy is The knowledge of Natural Causes,’ he writes in Decameron Physiologicum, ‘and there is no Knowledge but of Truth.’33 29. See section V, ‘Self-fulfilling philosophy,’ of Hoekstra, ‘Disarming the prophets: Thomas Hobbes and predictive power,’ Rivista di storia della filosofia 1/2004. 30. Cf. Hobbes, Concerning Body 1.7, pp. 5–6. Cf. also Leviathan 17.1, p. 85, on ‘The finall Cause, End, or Designe of men’ in setting up commonwealth. 31. Hobbes, Leviathan 46.18, p. 372. In this striking statement of the scope of Leviathan, Hobbes sets up (and not for the first or the last time) a parallel between his own work and scripture, which he also understands as having been written to prepare people’s minds to become obedient subjects. Those who assume that everything in scripture must be true misinterpret it by not understanding its purpose (cf. Leviathan 8.26, pp. 38–9). 32. Ibid., 46.18, p. 373. 33. Hobbes, Decameron Physiologicum, p. 1.
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‘The Praises which are given to Philosophy’ belong to those few who have studied philosophy ‘for Curiosity, and the delight which commonly men have in the acquisition of Science.’34 When Hobbes himself says that he took up philosophy for intellectual enjoyment, however, he makes clear that although this was the initial motivation, his end in formulating his philosophy (his constitutive intention) was to bring about obedience and peace.35 And elsewhere he is uncompromising about the emptiness of truth for its own sake. Benefit is ‘the scope at which all Speculation should aime,’ and even the most sophisticated theoretical constructions should be judged according to the improvements they bring about.36 ‘When it is demonstrated, if it cannot also be practised tis worth nothinge.’37 Nonetheless, there is some evidence that Hobbes regarded truth and peace as inseparable. He argues that it is when civil science ‘is derived from self-evident inference from true principles,’ that we see its usefulness, whereas ‘offences, quarrels and killing’ arise from ‘error and even ignorance.’38 Most strikingly, Hobbes says that ‘Doctrine repugnant to Peace, can no more be True, than Peace and Concord can be against the Law of Nature.’39 Hobbes is here arguing that peace and concord can be attained only by ‘the wel governing of Opinions’; thus, ‘it is annexed to the Soveraignty, to be Judge of what Opinions and Doctrines are averse, and what conducing to Peace,’ and to decide who should address the people and what should be published.40 The necessary relation between peace and truth – if there is one – could obtain in quite different ways. Hobbes might think, for example, that all or only true doctrines are eirenic, or that all or only eirenic doctrines are true. If the interpretation I offer below is valid, it would follow that he ultimately rejects each of these possibilities; but we should consider one influential 34. Ibid., p. 2. See Leviathan 6.35 and 6.38, p. 26; De homine 11.9; and especially Elements of Law 1.9.18. 35. Hobbes, De cive, Preface, p. 13. 36. Hobbes, Concerning Body 20.1, p. 214. 37. Hobbes to William Cavendish, earl of Newcastle, 15/25 August 1635 (Hobbes, The Correspondence, ed. Noel Malcolm (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994), pp. 28–9). 38. Hobbes, De cive, Preface, pp. 9–10. 39. Hobbes, Leviathan 18.9, p. 91. 40. Ibid.
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interpretation of the relation, according to which Hobbes defends conventionalism. A conventionalist reading derived from Hobbes’s works runs as follows. We will be in a condition of war so long as there is no sovereign arbiter of disputed terms, who can decide what is a pint and what a quart, what counts as a human being, or what is an act of treason; and truth is a matter of one name in a proposition including the other. The sovereign adjudication of these matters must be accepted if peace is to hold; that is, the sovereign’s determination of the truth of the matter is necessary for peace. ‘It is for the civil authority to judge (when need be) which definitions and which inferences are true.’41 There are two problems with this conventionalist account of Hobbes. The first is that it is a more authoritative voluntarism than Hobbes allows for meaning in general: he does not think that his sovereign has a ‘Humpty-Dumpty ability to make words mean whatever he wants them to.’42 Those who ‘giveth Words their Authority’ are instead ‘the generality of them who acknowledge, that they understand them.’43 It is from ‘the meanings of words accepted by common use and consent’ that we find the truth about ‘all questions of right and Philosophy’; that is, such truth follows from ‘definitions, that is to say, significations received by use and common consent of words.’44 The sovereign can play a special role, for utterances are actions and so, although the ultimate power of acceptance is theirs, people are obliged to follow sovereign strictures on how words are to be used.45 Given that truth depends on definitions, the philosopher, too, can play an influential role, and anyone familiar with Hobbes’s 41. Hobbes, De cive 17, heading of section 12. 42. Pace Don Herzog, Happy Slaves: A Critique of Consent Theory (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989), p. 92; and J. W. N. Watkins, Hobbes’s System of Ideas (London: Hutchinson, 1965), pp. 144–5. 43. Hobbes, The Questions Concerning Liberty, Necessity, and Chance (London, 1656), p. 234. This point is brought out effectively in [William Cavendish?], Horae subseciuae (London, 1620), pp. 48–9. 44. Hobbes, De cive 17.28. 45. See Hobbes, An Historical Narration Concerning Heresie, and the Punishment thereof (London, 1680), p. 7, re. Constantine: ‘he had for his end, in the calling of the Synod, not so much the Truth, as the Uniformity of the Doctrine, and peace of his People that depended on it.’ Hobbes here argues that we should interpret the determinations of this authoritative synod differently because the animating intention was more to establish peace than to arrive at truth.
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definitions, from ‘liberty’ to ‘religion,’ recognizes that he does not simply follow common use, but tries to form it.46 Philosophy proceeds strictly according to whether one name includes another, but the consent on which such names are based is susceptible to influence by the philosopher as well as by the sovereign. The philosopher cannot prove the definitions he uses, but need not simply follow the ordinary use of words: he may ‘make the Definitions of them true by mutual consent in their signification.’47 ‘Whatsoever the common use of words be, yet Philosophers . . . had alwayes the liberty, and sometimes they both had and will have a necessity, of taking to themselves such Names as they please for the signifying of their meaning.’48 The philosopher should imitate God himself in this creative act of definition: ‘Those things that lie in Confusion must be set asunder, distinguished, and every one stampt with its own name set in order; that is to say, your Method must resemble that of the Creation.’49 The second amendment that should be made to the attribution of a conventionalist account of truth, and one that renders inadequate the label of ‘conventionalism,’ is that Hobbes thinks of truth as grounded in experience and not just a product of arbitrary definition or fortuitous agreement. It has been seen as a contradiction that Hobbes characterizes his first principles both as definitional and as known to us by nature.50 The impression of incompatibility derives from understanding Hobbes’s Euclidean enterprise as an attempt to create a formal deductive theory the first principles of which are stipulated rather than empirically grounded. This is an anachronism, however, for it was not until the 1820s, when Lobachevsky formulated a nonEuclidean geometry, that mathematicians began to understand Euclid’s Elements as an abstract series of internally consistent axioms rather than a ‘system of propositions deduced from 46. For a clear example, see Hobbes, Leviathan 25.1, p. 131. 47. Hobbes, Questions, p. 307 (emphasis added and a comma removed after ‘make’). 48. Hobbes, Concerning Body 2.4, p. 12. 49. Ibid., ‘The Authors Epistle To the Reader.’ 50. Both claims are seen in close proximity in Concerning Body 6.12–13, pp. 58–9. See Alexander Bird, ‘Squaring the Circle: Hobbes on Philosophy and Geometry,’ Journal of the History of Ideas 57:2 (1996), p. 221; Ioli Patellis, ‘Hobbes on Explanation and Understanding,’ Journal of the History of Ideas 62:3 (2001), pp. 447–8.
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premises which were supposed to describe the space in which we live.’51 Before Lobachevsky, Euclid’s starting points were seen as reflections of our spatial experience, and Hobbes too accepts that sense experience provides the materials from which any formal structure of deductions must be built. He writes at the beginning of Leviathan that the ‘Originall’ of all thoughts ‘is that which we call Sense; (For there is no conception in a mans mind, which hath not at first, totally, or by parts, been begotten upon the organs of Sense.) The rest are derived from that originall.’52 Melding the definitions and proofs of mathematics with the experienced universe into a system of philosophy would have seemed an altogether natural enterprise for one so influenced by Galileo, who had famously declared that the book of the universe was written in the language of mathematics.53 ‘The Truth of the first Principles of our ratiocination (namely Definitions) is made and constituted by our selves,’ Hobbes says, ‘whilest we consent and agree about the Appellations of things’54 ; but our consent and agreement are not fixed (they can be influenced by philosophers and others), nor are proper definitions altogether flexible (they are constrained by the lineaments of the experienced world). This suggests that although the philosopher may have some truth-making role, it is a limited one; and it raises the question of whether he is limited by common conventions that are bellicose. If truth arises from agreement (whatever the influences on that agreement, and however that agreement may be tied to the world), then is a philosopher propounding untruths if he challenges accepted conventions? Hobbes repeatedly defends the contribution of unconventional contentions, which he calls ‘paradoxes,’ to the progress of knowledge, and he is keen to point out ‘how fallacious it is to judge of the nature of things, by the ordinary and inconstant use of words.’55 He feels he 51. Bertrand Russell, Principles of Mathematics (New York: W. W. Norton, 1938), p. 373. It is for bringing about this dramatic shift in perspective that Lobachevsky is called the Copernicus of geometry. 52. Hobbes, Leviathan 1.1–2, p. 3. 53. Galileo makes this claim in his 1623 Il Saggiatore; for Hobbes’s esteem for and indebtedness to Galileo, see for example the dedicatory epistle of Concerning Body. 54. Hobbes, Concerning Body 25.1, p. 289. 55. Hobbes, Leviathan 25.1, p. 131.
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can instead ‘render to those termes . . . their proper and distinct significations’ by defining them, for example in a way that better reflects experience or is more consistent with other accepted meanings.56 The philosopher can in this way serve as a linguistic legislator, or at least as a kind of counsellor. Consistency with other terms or with experience, however, cannot be the only criteria by which such definitions are guided. Not only is counsel the deduction of reasons from the benefit that will accrue to the counselled,57 but, as we have seen, philosophy itself has benefit as its end. If we cannot accept that Hobbes is committed to a conventionalist coincidence of truth and benefit, we should consider whether he may allow for the possibility that truth and benefit can diverge. If on balance (despite statements to the contrary) Hobbes accepts such divergence and the priority of benefit, the best interpretations of individual doctrines may differ significantly from those that have assumed the primacy of the goal of truth. A number of commentators have argued that Hobbes forcefully rejects the view that truth may bow to the requirements of the political order. So Ruth Grant, in criticizing Hobbes, and Sharon Lloyd and Jeremy Waldron, in defending him, have all sharply distinguished Hobbes from Machiavelli on this front.58 In Lloyd’s words: ‘the doctrines taught are advanced in good faith as true . . . . The political mechanisms that advance these interests are transparent and fully revealed by the education, and, moreover, the grounds for the doctrines are fully revealed. For this reason their acknowledgment seems not to be dependent on illusion or delusion.’59 A usual linchpin for such a view is Hobbes’s famous denunciation of what he calls ‘Suppression of Reason.’60 What Hobbes here condemns, however, is the 56. Ibid. 57. Ibid., 25.3, p. 132. 58. Ruth W. Grant, Hypocrisy and Integrity: Machiavelli, Rousseau, and the Ethics of Politics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997), esp. pp. 12, 177–8; S. A. Lloyd, ‘Coercion, Ideology, and Education in Hobbes’s Leviathan,’ in Reclaiming the history of ethics: essays for John Rawls, ed. Andrews Reath, Barbara Herman, and Christine M. Korsgaard (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997); and Jeremy Waldron, ‘Hobbes and the Principle of Publicity,’ Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 82:3&4 (2001). 59. Lloyd, ‘Coercion, Ideology, and Education,’ p. 46. 60. Hobbes, Leviathan 46.42, p. 380.
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suppression of truth without the civil authority to do so. He excoriates ‘the Introduction of False’ and ‘the suppression of True Philosophy’ by those without ‘lawfull authority,’ and complains that those who asserted that there are antipodeans or that the earth moves have been punished for it by the church. If the truths are contrary to religion as it is established by the civil authority, however, or to other official doctrines of the commonwealth, then Hobbes has few qualms about suppression. ‘Let them be silenced . . . by the Laws Civill: For disobedience may lawfully be punished in them, that against the Laws teach even true Philosophy.’ And if such philosophy should ‘tend to disorder in Government, as countenancing Rebellion, or Sedition,’ Hobbes’s response is steely: ‘let them be silenced, and the Teachers punished by vertue of his Power to whom the care of the Publique quiet is committed; which is the Authority Civill.’61 In Behemoth, Hobbes does argue that ‘suppression of doctrine does but unite and exasperate, that is, increase both the malice and power of them that have already believed them.’62 As all of his political works make clear, however, Hobbes thinks it is an altogether vital role of the sovereign to root out seditious doctrines, and we have just seen that he is also willing to countenance the censorship of truths in the name of political stability. The consideration in Behemoth is itself a practical one – the pursuit and expression of what people think to be true is to be allowed if the disadvantages of censorship outweigh the advantages. What is more, deception is a very dangerous game, for if it is detected it can poison the reception of salutary doctrine, and eirenic doctrines are more likely to spread if those who hear them are convinced of their truth.63 These considerations apply to all doctrines, not just philosophical ones, and to all individuals, not just philosophers. Even if we set aside the constitutive goal of philosophy, that is, the philosopher is still constrained as a citizen to obey sovereign requirements, and as a human being to seek peace if his 61. Ibid. 62. Hobbes, Behemoth, p. 62. 63. Hobbes to Anthony Wood, 20 April 1674 (Correspondence, pp. 744–5); De cive 13.9.
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preservation is not threatened by doing so. The pronouncements of the Hobbesian philosopher would be constrained by what peace requires even if philosophy did not have a practical end; and these constraints are of themselves sufficient to require us to interpret differently. All utterances that meet Hobbes’s general requirements for legitimate action will be limited by consideration of their potential practical consequences: they will be truth claims if and only if such claims are judged likely to be efficacious. These constraints are reinforced by the constitutive requirement of what philosophy itself requires. Philosophy is not unique in this, however, as most kinds of utterance are claimed by Hobbes to have separate requirements of benefit, including history, scripture, counsel, and poetry.64 It may be useful to consider the view of Hobbes’s sometime employer, Francis Bacon, who claims that in some ultimate sense truth and utility are the same thing, but nonetheless argues that a range of deceits are justifiable given their utility.65 While he begins his Essays (which Hobbes helped to translate) with a mixed encomium to truth, he goes on to write, like so many other sixteenth- and seventeenth-century writers, ‘Of Simulation and Dissimulation.’ There be three degrees, of this Hiding, and Vailing of a Mans Selfe. The first Closenesse, Reseruation, and Secrecy; when a Man leaueth himselfe without Obseruation, or without Hold to be taken, what he is. The second Dissimulation, in the Negatiue; when a man lets fall Signes, and Arguments, that he is not, that he is. And the third Simulation, in the Affirmatiue; when a Man industriously, and expressely, faigns, and pretends to be, that he is not.66
64. Cf., e.g., Leviathan 8.5, p. 33 (history); Leviathan 8.26, pp. 38–9 (scripture); Leviathan 25.3, p. 132 (counsel); Homer’s Odysses, tr. Thomas Hobbes (London, 1675), sig. B1r (poetry). As at many points in this analysis, we are confronted with the question of what the status of such claims is: does Hobbes assert them as truth claims, or as beneficial, or both? Even if Hobbes primarily aims at benefit with them, they have to be believed in order to bring about that benefit; to aim at benefit may require one to appear to aim at truth. 65. For a claim of their identity, see section 124 of Bacon’s Instauratio magna (London, 1620), p. 142. 66. Francis Bacon, The Essayes or Covnsels, Civill and Morall (London, 1625), p. 27.
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Bacon’s conclusion is that one should ‘haue Opennesse in Fame and Opinion; Secrecy in Habit; Dissimulation in seasonable vse; And a Power to faigne, if there be no Remedy.’67 As Bacon recognizes, these categories bleed into one another; others therefore prefer a two-fold division. Such a division is found, for example, in another work Hobbes had in his library, the Politiqve Discovrses vpon Trveth and Lying by Matthieu Coignet, who distinguishes between dissembling and counterfeiting. Even in this moralistic book on the subject, the author makes clear that one should not ‘discouer to euerie one the secrete of his minde,’ and that if counterfeiting is undertaken ‘to conceale a good counsell, fearinge least it might bee preuented, then is it not to bee blamed, neither is it alwayes requisite to make manifest what wee doe conceaue.’68 In a similarly pious work, John Downame is willing to defend ‘an indeavour to conceale the truth, when as being unseasonably professed, it would become hurtfull and pernicious to our selves and countrie.’69 Hobbes, too, turns out to countenance silence and falsehood in the service of this end. He argues that deceit may be justifiable both within the commonwealth and outside of it. In the natural condition, fraud is a cardinal virtue, and is legitimate whenever one thinks it will aid self-preservation; and the founders of commonwealths invented holy impostures for the sake of peace.70 And within the commonwealth, one may be allowed or even obligated not to say that which is, or to say that which is not. Peace demands that I keep the truth to myself or utter a falsehood to others if I am required to do so by the sovereign (and that, according to ‘the first, and Fundamentall Law of Nature,’ I do so in the absence of declared sovereign will if I judge the respective silence or utterance to conduce to peace).71 ‘A private man has alwaies the liberty, (because thought is free,) to beleeve, or not beleeve in his heart . . . . But when it comes to 67. Ibid., p. 31. 68. Matthieu Coignet, Politiqve discovrses vpon trveth and lying, tr. Edward Hoby (London, 1586), p. 11. 69. John Downame, A Treatise Against Lying (London, 1636), p. 34; cf. Henry Mason’s agreement with Casaubon, in The New Art of Lying, Covered by Iesvites vnder the Vaile of Eqvivocation, Discovered and Disproved (London, 1624), p. 9. 70. Hobbes, Leviathan 13.13, p. 63; 12.21, p. 57. 71. Ibid., 14.4, p. 64.
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confession of that faith, the Private Reason must submit to the Publique.’72 The great majority of Hobbes’s extant philosophical work was intended for publication, and so would have fallen under this stricture. This suggests that interpreters may not have been sufficiently alert to the possibility, consistent with Hobbes’s conception of philosophy, of obedient or eirenic deceit. Given the end of his philosophy, we must be especially watchful for dutiful falsehoods and significant silences.
III Keeper of the Secrets, Spokesman of the Sovereign. This view is reinforced by consideration of Hobbes’s roles, especially as secretary and citizen, and their attendant obligations. Let us begin with the first item of Hobbes’s extant correspondence, a 1622 letter from Robert Mason that is preoccupied with arcana imperii, or mysteries of state.73 Mason’s letter suggests that Hobbes is concerned with political strategies and the propriety of the spreading of political news and the discussion of affairs of state by private citizens. This is the only letter we have from this period – the next is from 1628 – but it indicates some of the central concerns of Hobbes’s intellectual formation, which are explicit several years later in the prefatory materials of his edition of Thucydides. There, Hobbes is taken with the idea of reading Thucydides as one who ‘was obscure on purpose, that the Common people might not understand him,’ and yet who can be found ‘euery where secretly instructing, and directing a mans life and actions.’74 Hobbes himself recommends that ‘a wise man should so write’ that he is understood on one level by all, and on a deeper level by the wise.75 Political exigencies may require untruths or simulation, but a more common eirenic requirement for a writer like Hobbes will 72. Ibid., 37.13, p. 238. 73. Mason’s reference to his correspondent’s discretion may indicate Hobbes’s uneasiness about probing such questions: ‘there are many things, as your letter discreetly intimates, whereof it becomes us to be ignorant’ (Correspondence, p. 3). 74. Thucydides, Eight Bookes Of the Peloponnesian Warre, tr. Thomas Hobbes (London, 1629), sig. a4v (the ‘not vnlikely’ opinion of Marcellinus); sig. b1r (quoting Lipsius). 75. Ibid., sig. a4v .
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be to keep silent or to dissimulate rather than a truth. Of course, that ‘all truths be not to use the words of Hobbes’s pupil, can be a of good manners for polite company.76 But important political dimension, as John Donne in commenting on Psalm 137:5–6:
communicating be spoken,’ to simple counsel it also has an brings out well
And let our right hand forget her cunning, (let us never set pen to paper to write) Let our tongue cleave to the roofe of our mouth, (let us never open our mouth to speake) of those things in which Silence was an Act of Discretion, and Charity before, but now is also an Act of Obedience, and of Allegiance and Loyaltie. But that which David said to the Lord, (Psalme 65.1) Let us also accommodate to the Lords anointed, Tibi laus silentium, our best sacrifice to both, is to be silent in those things.77
Hobbes’s interest in the arcana imperii is readily traceable to the Tacitist works of his time, and well attested by the many such works to be found in the early catalogue of the books in the library at Hardwick, which he not only used but stocked as he chose.78 And it is there that we can look for a source for the idea of the political centrality of what should be unsaid.79 It is worth pausing to consider the main employment of Hobbes’s life, and his inevitable reflection on his duties as both tutor and secretary to the Cavendish family. For the former role, he not only taught his charges about classical history and rhetoric, he counselled them, for example to avoid offensive speech and vain profession.80 For the latter role, it seems that he ordered a number of books for the Hardwick library entitled Il Segretario (or the like). These provide a rich repository of 76. [William Cavendish?], Horae subseciuae, p. 67. Hobbes is likely to have had at least an editorial hand in these Baconian essays. 77. The Sermons of John Donne, vol. 10, ed. Evelyn M. Simpson and George R. Potter (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1962), p. 115. 78. Chatsworth MS E1A, in Hobbes’s hand. 79. Cf. e.g. De cive 10.14, where Hobbes argues that one of the disadvantages of a democracy is that it makes it difficult or impossible to keep the necessary secrets of the state. 80. See especially the letter to Charles Cavendish of 1638, where Hobbes thinks such advice may cause him to be called ‘Thucidides for my presumption’ (Correspondence, p. 52).
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the reception of humanist political thought, often in a Tacitist vein. The seventeenth-century secretary was supposed to be ‘a master of discretion and an expert in silence and secrecy.’81 So, for example, Tasso writes in a work that Hobbes had to hand: I speak of silence and of speaking, because keeping quiet and reasoning are equally duties of the Secretary . . . it is not for nothing that he takes his name from silence . . . the art of the Secretary is nothing other than the science of the things that must be kept secret and revealed. . . . he is the interpreter of the will, and the keeper of the secrets, of the Prince.82
Hobbes identified himself as a ‘Secretary’ from the title-page of his translation of Thucydides; while scholars and students have paid close attention to how he fulfils his duty to reason, they have paid none to how he meets his equal duty to keep quiet. One of Hobbes’s tasks as secretary was facilitating an extensive correspondence between the earl of Devonshire and Fulgenzio Micanzio, state counsellor of the Venetian Republic, collaborator of Paolo Sarpi, and translator of Bacon. The views of Micanzio and other members of this circle of the ‘Seicento anglo-veneto’ have been neglected as an intellectual context for the development of Hobbes’s views, perhaps because the circle is not a philosophical one in a recognizably contemporary sense, as the Parisian circle of Mersenne and Gassendi is. But there is a set of widely shared concerns in the anglo-veneto circle that Hobbes would have found relevant; one of these is the topic, much discussed in Hobbes’s time, of the legitimacy of 81. Thus Salvatore S. Nigro, in his chapter on the subject in Rosario Villari, ed., Baroque Personae, tr. Lydia G. Cochrane (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), p. 91: he here paraphrases a boast of Fulvio Testi (1593–1646). 82. Torquato Tasso, Il Secretario, p. 6 of 1605 edn. It is this thesis, that the secretary is called such as the keeper of secrets, that sparks the discussion of the history of the position, and of the secretary’s proper balance between politics, rhetoric, and the use of conceptual reasoning, in Battista Guarini’s Il Segretario, Dialogo of 1600. That secrecy is generally legitimate and often laudable is widely agreed upon by these writers: Malvezzi even feels it is necessary to insist that ‘although ordinarily and for the most part, secrecy be a commendable thing, yet [it is] not commendable in all things, seeing to hold ones peace, or to deny in some cases, is not onely unprofitable, but pernicious’ (Virgilio Malvezzi, Discovrses Upon Cornelius Tacitus, tr. Sir Richard Baker (London, 1642), pp. 202–3; this work was first published in Italian in Venice in 1622).
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secrecy, simulation, and dissimulation.83 A shared tenet of the group is expressed by Bacon when he writes that ‘an Habit of Secrecy, is both Politick, and Morall.’84 Micanzio, for example, countenances dissimulation for political ends, and he argues that ‘there are some things which, if they were told to the many, would bring about amazing perturbation’; such truths, he concludes, are too dangerous to publish.85 And Hobbes agrees that truths that would lead to disruption should be kept private.86 ‘Everypt man’s actions are governed by his opinions,’ Hobbes consistently maintains. ‘The conclusion therefore follows, by necessary and evident inference, that it is utterly essential to the common peace that certain doctrines not be put before the citizens.’87 The sovereign is the one who has the final right ‘both to decide which opinions and doctrines are inimical to peace and to forbid their being taught’; even if the sovereign mistakes in authorizing a doctrine, the subject is bound not to speak against his determination.88 When Hobbes asks ‘in case a Subject be forbidden by the Civill Soveraign to professe some of those his opinions, upon what just ground can he disobey?’, he does not think that a legitimate answer might be that one may do so if expressing (what one takes to be) a philosophical truth.89 That the Hobbesian philosopher does not say something may reflect not that he does not think it, but that he thinks that he is not allowed to express it. 83. ‘At Venice Silence is in no less veneration than among the Persians, where it was esteemed a Deity,’ Amelot de la Houssaie later observes. ‘Venice is a place where Secrets are impenetrable to Strangers . . . . Besides, scarce any thing is to be seen in their Government, but clouded with variety of appearances and pretences far enough from the Truth.’ (Abraham Nicolas Amelot de la Houssaie, The History of the Government of Venice (London, 1677), p. 37, sig. A3v .) 84. Bacon, Essayes, p. 28. This is one of the six essays that Bacon, shortly before he died, sent to Micanzio, and one of the two in which the subsequent translation by Micanzio incorporates additional material by the author or translator (Noel Malcolm, De Dominis (1560–1624): Venetian, Anglican, Ecumenist and Relapsed Heretic (London: Strickland & Scott, 1984), p. 120 n. 288, referring to Sette Saggi Morali (Venice, 1626)). 85. The Republic, he argues, ‘by necessity makes men dissimulating, artificial in speaking,’ and so forth; but conscience and prudence can ensure that these are not culpable deceptions (Biblioteca Nazionale Marciana, Venice, MS It. XI 175 (6518). 86. Hobbes, Questions, p. 115 (cf. section IV, below). 87. Hobbes, De cive 6.11. 88. Ibid.; Behemoth, p. 55. 89. Hobbes, Leviathan 43.22, p. 330.
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This is a point that extends beyond Hobbesian philosophers, and Hobbes’s acknowledgement of the practices of secrecy and deception may encourage him to conclude that ‘we cannot safely judge of men’s intentions,’ and thus ‘it is a hard matter, or rather impossible, to know what other men mean.’90 Such scepticism might lead us to give up on the possibility of arriving at what Hobbes means, especially when we think he may have reason not to publish the truth; but there are clues to how we might interpret him in those instances. Hobbes opens his ‘Preface Concerning the Vertues of an Heroique Poem’ with the assertion that ‘in all Writings published,’ the ‘Vertues required . . . are comprehended all in this one word Discretion.’ Discretion, he specifies, consists in every part of the writing furthering the writer’s ‘end and designe’ (which even in a poem should be to profit the reader).91 This suggests not only the importance for Hobbes of discretion in publication, but also that we should refer to the end or design in order to understand such an author. For example, in reply to a question that he feels it is ‘not fit’ to answer, he says that ‘any man that sees what I am doing, may easily perceive what I think.’92 Thus, Hobbes himself says that there are times when what he thinks will have to be inferred from what he aims to do, rather than from a direct interpretation of what he says. The end of benefit to humanity may require profession as well as silence, even if one thinks the profession false. Hobbes proposes an interpretation of Aristotle according to which ‘he knew to be false Philosophy’ his claims about entities and essences, but nonetheless disseminated them for reasons of self-preservation or conformity to the civic religion.93 Hobbes sometimes says that he, too, endorses a position because of ‘reverence due to the Laws.’94 In De cive, Hobbes praises the 90. Hobbes, Behemoth, pp. 72, 37; cf. p. 29. 91. Homer’s Odysses, tr. Hobbes, sig. B1r . Cf. Leviathan 8.3, p. 33. 92. Hobbes, Leviathan 30.14, p. 180. 93. Ibid., 46.18, p. 373. 94. Hobbes, Concerning Body 26.1, pp. 308–9. Note that there is a difficulty in publicly stating that I endorse a given doctrine because it is the law that I endorse it: this may be to undermine that law, for it is effectively to say that my reason for endorsing it is that it is required, not that I believe it; and this would normally suggest
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fables of the ancients that kept authority shrouded in mystery; in the preface to Gondibert, he encourages the use of fiction to teach virtue and obedience; in Leviathan, he approves of the imposture of the first founders of commonwealths who were able to secure obedience and peace by pretending to be divine or authorized by a divinity; and he states in De homine that ‘sometimes simulation is without fault.’95 The idea that deceit may be justified by the end of human benefit was prone to objection on the basis of Romans 3.8, which was commonly marshalled against the Machiavellian idea that evil could be done if a greater good would come of it. James I writes that ‘the deuill hath neuer better tidings to tell to any, then hee told to Saul: neither is it lawfull to vse so vnlawful instruments, were it neuer for so good a purpose: For that axiome in Theologie is most certaine and infallible, Nunquam faciendum est malum, ut bonum inde eueniat,’ one may never do evil that good may come of it.96 This verse is a banner for those who argue against justifications of deception for some higher good.97 Hobbes directly contradicts this view, and thinks that one may legitimately profit from the devil himself. In a private discussion with the third earl of Devonshire, Hobbes maintained that it was ‘lawful to make use of ill Instruments to do ourselves good,’ and vividly illustrated his point: ‘If I were cast into a deep Pit, and the Devil should put down his Cloven Foot, I would take hold of it to be drawn out by it.’98 Simulation is without fault if an actor or hypocrites plays the part of a king, and it is a moral and divine duty when the king that I do not believe it. But to publish such a suggestion would be in violation of the sovereign requirement. 95. Hobbes, De cive, Preface, p. 9; Leviathan 12.20–21, p. 57; De homine 14.8, p. 80 (‘Sed locus hic est, & invitamentum simulationis, quae tamen aliquando culpa vacat’). Cf. De homine 14.9, on public worship which is ordained by civil law rather than by God; here it is still clearer that simulation to meet these requirements can be faultless, and indeed virtuous. 96. Daemonologie, in Forme of a Dialogve, in The Workes of the Most High and Mighty Prince, Iames (London, 1616), p. 107. 97. See George Hakewill, An Apologie or Declaration of the Power and Providence of God in the Gouernment of the World, 3rd edn. (London, 1635), pp. 16–17 (1.2.1); and Downame, A Treatise Against Lying, pp. 80 and 97. 98. White Kennet, A Sermon Preach’d at the Funeral of the Right Noble William Duke of Devonshire . . . With Some Memoirs of the Family of Cavendish (London, 1708), pp. 108–9.
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bears the persona of the people (as well as the persona of God), for this mechanism of representation is what allows for an escape from the brutality of the natural condition.99 Not only may the sovereign be authorized to act on behalf of the people, a citizen may be authorized to act on behalf of the sovereign.100 Moreover, if a citizen is required by the sovereign to endorse a doctrine, despite that citizen’s contrary belief, then the citizen’s pronouncement to this effect is really the action and utterance of the sovereign.101 So any Hobbesian citizen, including the philosopher, may find himself at some point a mere mouthpiece for the sovereign. Hobbes’s own philosophical theory requires us to put his publications within at least one specific context, that of what he considers to be the legislation in force when he writes. A strong case could be made that the single greatest concern in Hobbes’s political theory is with the capacity for individual judgements to stir up sedition and civil war if they are at odds with the laws laid down by the sovereign. Hobbes accordingly articulates a doctrine of doctrines, the position that subjects cannot rightfully publish doctrines contrary to those laid down by the sovereign as necessary for their peace and defence. For the duty of the subject ‘is to carry out the orders of his superiors, not to dispute them.’102 Scholars have not taken up the challenge implicit in this position, that all of Hobbes’s own publicly articulated doctrines must be read in the light of what he regarded as sovereign pronouncements on the subjects they address.
99. See Hobbes, Leviathan, chap. 16. 100. Ibid., chap. 23. 101. If the sovereign requires me, for example, to worship an idol, then the action is not mine, but his (Hobbes, Leviathan 42.11, p. 271). Although I act as if the action were mine, it is ultimately attributable to the one who compels me. Hobbes needs this position to allay compunctions about obedience, but it appears to involve him in vicious circularity (if we interpret the claims on the basis of their logical consistency and not their practical importance). On the other end of the circle, he wishes to pre-empt any objection to sovereign requirements by saying that in authorizing the sovereign all of his actions are mine: thus, it would be absurd both to endorse and reprehend the same action (Leviathan 17.13, p. 87; 18.1, p. 88; 18.6, p. 90; etc.). But if every one of the actions of the sovereign is my own action, then I must take responsibility for the worship or profession he requires after all. 102. Hobbes, De cive 16.18.
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The Sound of Silence. A case of this kind faces a special problem of evidence. As a way of raising it, consider a particular objection to reading Hobbes as a proponent of esoteric instruction and tactical silence: namely, that the evidence for such a view comes from textual sources that can be dated to early in his career. The letter from Mason is from 1622, the extant Micanzio correspondence stops in 1628, the prefatory materials to Thucydides were published in 1629, and the relevant books in the Hardwick catalogue were acquired before 1630; the great works of political philosophy, however, date from 1640 (The Elements of Law), 1642 and 1647 (De cive), and 1651 and 1668 (Leviathan). One might conjecture, therefore, that these concerns are part of Hobbes’s humanism, which he leaves behind when he dedicates himself to deductive reason and science in the 1630s. On the one hand, this would be to ignore some later clues; on the other hand, there is an alternative explanation. To state the second point first: it may be that Hobbes does not reject such views, but puts them into practice. That is, to the extent that such traces disappear, this may be precisely because Hobbes had fully accepted the underlying position. For, as Hobbes may well have noticed while reading the many works on dissimulation and mysteries of state, it is paradoxical to declare, along with a thesis that you want your audience to accept and adopt, that you may be espousing the thesis even while recognizing its falsity. There can be a kind of practical inconsistency in publicly proclaiming the need for silence, and especially in trying to convince readers of a set of positions that includes a defense of dissimulation or deceit. To bring out this point, consider the publication in 1641 of a work by another secretary to a noble family, a close contemporary of Hobbes. In the fifth chapter of his work Of honest dissimulation, Torquato Accetto, secretary to the Carafas, dukes of Andria, defends the dissimulator who deceives in order to prevent damage. Courtier literature had always touted the indispensability of dissimulation for counsellors and men of politics; Accetto’s brief treatise is one that allows that it may be appropriate for anyone. ‘Dissimulating,’ however, ‘is a profession that one cannot profess, except in the school of one’s
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own thought . . . . of the excellent dissimulators, who have been and are, one knows nothing.’103 How is it, then, that we know of Accetto? He does argue that one should only dissimulate when it is important to do so: continued dissimulation will be counter-productive, as the dissimulator will not be believed. So the dissimulator need not be invisible, except as a dissimulator. Accetto concludes his apostrophe to dissimulation (‘Oh Virtue’): ‘I wish that I were allowed to show the entire obligation that I owe because of the benefits that you have given me; but instead of giving you thanks, I would violate your laws by not dissimulating how much I have justifiably dissimulated.’104 It remains puzzling how Accetto thinks he can publish any recommendation of dissimulation, and he at least acknowledges the issue in his address to the reader: on the one hand, he emphasizes that the dissimulator he praises dissimulates as a lover of peace; on the other, he reveals that a year earlier his treatise had been three times as long, and if he had wanted to defer giving it to the publisher, he would eventually have reduced it to nothing. ‘I will be excused in having my book come out this way, almost without its blood, because writing of dissimulation required that I dissimulate.’105 These concerns are widespread in the Tacitist literature of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, and this tension inheres in their central project of writing about arcana imperii. It comes to the surface, for example, when Clapmarius – with what Roman Schnur called ‘genuine German rectitude’106 – intended to publish a general catalogue of Arcana Imperiorum. Naud´e in his Consid´erations politiques pointed out with some frustration that this rather defeated the point. Not only is a list that reveals the mysteries a list of what are no longer mysteries, but to make public such secrets of state would gravely damage
103. Accetto, Della dissimulazione onesta, ch. 5: references to this work are to chapter number (as each chapter is at most a few paragraphs long) of Salvatore S. Nigro’s edition (Turin: Einaudi, 1997). 104. Ibid., ch. 25. 105. Ibid., ‘L’autor a chi legge.’ 106. Schnur, Individualismus und Absolutismus (Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, 1963), 3.5.
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the public good.107 Despite the ample evidence that Accetto, Naudé, and many others provide of the widespread concern with keeping the arcana hidden, both defenders and critics of the attendant deceptions emphasize that such evidence is likely to be the sign of imperfect practice. Identifying practitioners, and distinguishing them from critics, will thus be difficult at the least. This point is made by the self-professed critics. So Henry Mason, in his denunciation of those who think that they may justifiably publish falsehoods if they do so with the right intention, charges many of those who deny and denounce this kind of equivocation with employing it in those very denials and condemnations.108 ‘The professors of that Trade,’ Mason observes, must ‘hide their secrets from the knowledge of other men. And indeed it may be obserued, that . . . they haue certaine mysteries of State, which the more they use, the more they conceale.’109 Throughout his writings, Hobbes insists that words and beliefs should be treated differently. Legislation cannot compel belief, he argues, but all action – under which rubric he includes all public speech and writing – is within its rightful domain. ‘Thought is free,’ he maintains, but that is no reason to think that speech should be.110 As with all of one’s actions, one should in one’s speaking and writing rigorously observe the civil law. What, then, if the sovereign should forbid us to believe in Christ, which is necessary for salvation? ‘To this I answer,’ Hobbes replies, ‘that such forbidding is of no effect; because Beleef, and Unbeleef never follow mens Commands.’ However, ‘if wee bee commanded by our lawfull Prince, to say with our tongue, what wee beleeve not,’ then we must obey the command; for ‘profession with the tongue is but an externall thing, and no more then any other gesture whereby we signifie our obedience.’111 So we must dissimulate if the civil authority prohibits expression of
107. Gabriel Naud´e (1600–1653), Considerations politiques sur les coups d’estat (n.p., 1667): on Clapmarius, see pp. 45, 57, and esp. 61. 108. Mason, The New Art of Lying, p. 37; cf. p. 2. 109. Ibid., sig. a3r−v . 110. Hobbes, Leviathan 37.13, p. 238. 111. Ibid., 42.11, p. 271.
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what we believe, and we must simulate if that authority requires profession of what we do not believe.112 Although it has made little impact on how Hobbes is read now, his justification of simulation and dissimulation was notorious among his early readers for destabilizing any attempt to interpret the intention of Hobbes or his followers.113 Reacting to the restrictions on worship in effect for Christmastide of 1658, Brian Duppa writes to Justinian Isham that ‘som begin to doubt whether they shall be suffer’d to be Christians any longer or no. But the disciples of Hobbs are secure, who if they ar putt to it, ar taught to gratify authority by denying Christ with their tongue, as long as they retain him in their heart, for which you must take their own words, for no outward act of theirs can witness for them.’114 Edward Hyde, earl of Clarendon, recognizes that a retraction by Hobbes would therefore be meaningless, and that the only certain way to silence him would be to have the sovereign prohibit his doctrines. ‘I do not wish that the Author should be ordered to recant,’ Clarendon remarks, ‘because he would be too ready to do it upon his declared Salvo: nor do I wish he should undergo any other punishment, then by knowing that his Book is condemned by the Soveraign Autority, to be publickly burn’d, which by his own judgment will restrain him from publishing his pernicious Doctrine.’115 For Hobbes and his disciples, both the willingness to recant and the readiness to be silenced by authority are dictated by the requirement of peace. 112. Moreover, such simulation and dissimulation may be required on moral grounds, independent of sovereign decree. Where there is no applicable civil law, one should observe the natural law, and ‘the first, and Fundamentall Law of Nature’ is ‘to seek Peace, and follow it’ (Leviathan 14.4, p. 64). One is not only allowed to simulate and dissimulate in the state of nature, but may even be obligated to do so therein (or in a situation within a commonwealth that is not covered by civil law). 113. For example, Vizard, the Hobbes-reading villain of George Farquhar’s The Constant Couple (London, 1700), is above all marked by his inscrutable hypocrisy – as even his name suggests. One of the positions with which Hobbes was most strongly associated in the seventeenth century was the defense of hypocritical subscription to imposed forms of worship or other compelled profession. 114. Duppa to Isham, 5 January 1659, The Correspondence of Bishop Brian Duppa and Sir Justinian Isham, 1650–1660, ed. Gyles Isham (Northamptonshire Record Society, 1955), p. 167. 115. Edward Hyde, earl of Clarendon, A Brief View and Survey of the Dangerous and pernicious Errors to Church and State, in Mr. Hobbes’s Book, entitled Leviathan (Oxford, 1676), p. 319.
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One of these disciples, Daniel Scargill, fellow of Corpus Christi College in Cambridge, makes clear that he professed ‘to be an Hobbist,’ and had publicly asserted ‘That the Civil Magistrate is to be obeyed, though he should forbid the Worship of God.’116 It may be that Scargill’s consideration of Hobbes’s justification of profession contrary to belief prepared him to read some of Hobbes’s own positions as hypocritical simulation of the official line. When in 1668 Peter Gunning, Regius Professor of Divinity at Cambridge, asked Scargill about the discrepancy between positions he had defended and Hobbes’s own published views, Scargill contended that ‘in such places Mr Hobbs canted.’117 And, when required to do so, Scargill publicly recanted.118 He was nonetheless expelled from Cambridge in March of 1669. Scargill was able to arrange for letters from Charles II ordering that he be restored to his fellowship; these letters included provision for a further public recantation and a statement of adherence to the doctrine and discipline of the state church.119 It was Scargill’s turn to cant, and he did so with gusto, delivering a disavowal in the university church that was replete with a tale of how it was ‘through the instigation of the Devil’ that he had come to profess his Hobbist and atheistic opinions.120 At the end of the recantation, Scargill carefully guts it with his protestation of sincerity. Now lest any one should mistake or suspect this confession and unfeigned renunciation of my sinful and accursed errors, for an act of civil obedience or submission in me, performed according to my former principles, at the command of my Superiors, in 116. The Recantation of Daniel Scargill, publickly made before the University of Cambridge, in Great St Maries, July 25. 1669 (Cambridge, 1669), p. 3. There is another issue of this edition, identical except for the printer’s details (‘LONDON, Printed by A. Maxwel. 1669’). 117. I take the quotation from Scargill from Jon Parkin’s valuable study, ‘Hobbism in the later 1660s: Daniel Scargill and Samuel Parker,’ The Historical Journal 42:1 (1999), p. 91. (I should say that my interpretation of what Scargill may have meant by this differs from the one he proposes and the one he criticizes: see ‘cant’ v.3 , defs. 5, 6, and 7, Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd edn. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989).) 118. Parkin, ‘Hobbism,’ p. 91. 119. Ibid., pp. 93–4. 120. The Recantation of Daniel Scargill, p. 3. Hobbes explains that the Devil is simply ‘any Earthly Enemy of the Church’ (Leviathan 38.12–13, p. 244).
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outward expression of words, though contrary to my judgment and inward thoughts of my heart; or that I have not now expressed the most sincere and secret sense of my soul: I call the Searcher of all hearts to witness that I loath and abhor such practices . . . .121
Scargill relentlessly reminds his audience that his recantation provides no evidence that he had renounced Hobbism, and that it could instead be a manifestation of his continued adherence. A philosopher who places any value above that of truth will have to think through the status of his philosophical claims, and so will any interpreter of that philosophy.122 The evidentiary difficulty in establishing that a philosopher has a non-alethic conception of philosophy is likely to prove intractable in some cases; but this does not affect the point that in a case where it can be established satisfactorily, we will have to interpret differently. And it is worth pointing out an asymmetry in the kind of evidence we have if a philosopher provides support for both an alethic and a non-alethic conception of philosophy. One who aims to express the truth will have reason not to say that he does not aim at the truth, for to do so would contradict his aim; whereas one who aims at a practical benefit that depends on persuasion may have reason to say that he is expressing the truth, for this may be necessary to meet his aim. In the absence of supporting evidence, it would hardly be sensible to nurture a suspicion that a philosopher who does claim to or appear to operate according to an alethic conception of philosophy may be deceiving us (not only about that but therefore about an 121. The Recantation of Daniel Scargill, p. 7. One of Scargill’s signal offenses was his avowed disbelief in this Searcher. 122. For an incisive statement from the greatest exponent of a philosophical movement that was indebted to Hobbes, see Henry Sidgwick, The Methods of Ethics, 7th edn. (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1981 [1907]), pp. 489–90. Thus the Utilitarian conclusion, carefully stated, would seem to be this; that the opinion that secrecy may render an action right which would not otherwise be so should itself be kept comparatively secret; and similarly it seems expedient that the doctrine that esoteric morality is expedient should itself be kept esoteric. Or if this concealment be difficult to maintain, it may be desirable that Common Sense should repudiate the doctrines which it is expedient to confine to an enlightened few. And thus a Utilitarian may reasonably desire, on Utilitarian principles, that some of his conclusions should be rejected by mankind generally; or even that the vulgar should keep aloof from his system as a whole. (p. 490)
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indeterminate number of other positions). But if the balance of evidence suggests that a philosopher endorses a non-alethic conception of philosophy, proceeding as if it were alethic could lead us into a series of errors, and the requisite caution should extend to claims the philosopher may make for the truth of his doctrines or for the importance of truth in general. As mentioned above, there are later indications that Hobbes did not abandon his support for politic discretion and mysteries of state with his humanist past. The difficulty we have been considering is how we can know of support for a position that requires that there be little or no evidence of such support. Partial evidence may come from statements of support made before the view has been fully assimilated and the self-undermining nature of such statements appreciated. Another privileged kind of testimony for such a case could be provided in documents that we know were intended to be kept private. And we have such documents in the initial instalments of Hobbes’s debates with John Bramhall about liberty and necessity. In 1645, Hobbes and Bramhall met at the Paris residence of William Cavendish, marquess of Newcastle, and discussed these topics at his instigation. Bramhall subsequently wrote up his views on the matter, sent them to Newcastle, and urged him to have Hobbes do the same. Hobbes complied with Newcastle’s request, but beseeched him in his long letter on the subject ‘to communicate it onely to my Lord Bishop,’ Bramhall.123 ‘I barred not my self from showing it privately to my friends,’ Hobbes explains, ‘though to publish it was never my intention.’124 Bramhall and Hobbes both note that Hobbes urged several times in his initial letter that it remain private; referring to a few of these passages, Bramhall concludes that ‘he is very careful to have this discourse kept secret.’125 Hobbes did, however, agree to have ‘an english young Man’ translate it for ‘a French Gentleman’ of his acquaintance; and ‘this young Man taking his opportunitie, and being a nimble writer, took a Copy of it for himself, and 123. ‘Thomas Hobs,’ Of libertie and necessitie (London, 1654), p. 80; this was written in 1646. 124. Hobbes, Questions, p. 333; cf. p. 19. ´ 125. Ibid., p. 332; cf. pp. 17, 19. Cf. also Thomas Pierce, ’AYTOKATAKPII, or Self-Condemnation Exemplified . . . (London, 1658), sig. *3v -*4r .
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printed it . . . without my knowledge, and (as he knew) against my will.’126 Hobbes’s insistence that publication of the controversy was against his express will is altogether convincing, as Bramhall recognizes.127 I focus on the exchange with Bramhall because a phrase from it – ‘the Question is not what is fit to be preached, but what is true’128 – has been taken as the programmatic motto of Hobbes’s philosophy. When viewed in the context of even a sentence or two of this dispute, the valence of this claim changes completely. One of Bramhall’s objections had been that ‘this very perswasion, that there is no true Liberty, is able to overthrow all Societies and Common wealths in the World . . . . Either allow liberty, or destroy all Societies.’129 Hobbes concedes that ‘ill use may be made of it, and therefore your Lordship and J. D. [Newcastle and Bramhall] ought at my request to keep it private, that I say here of it’; but, he adds, ‘what use soever be made of truth, yet truth is truth; and now’ – that is, in this private dispute – ‘the Question is not what is fit to be preached, but what is true.’130 Not all truths are fit to print, and philosophy must put the procuration of peace before metaphysical accuracy. Hobbes writes that ‘there were some reasons for which I thought it might be inconvenient to let my answer go abroad.’131 In his first letter to Newcastle on this subject – in the midst of the period in which he is usually thought to be most committed to a Euclidean conception of philosophy, the deductive truths of which all are capable of grasping – Hobbes provides more detail: I must confess, if we consider the greatest part of Mankinde, not as they should be, but as they are, that is, as men, whom either the study of acquiring wealth, or preferment, or whom the appetite of sensual delights, or the impatience of meditating, or the rash embracing of wrong principles have made unapt to discuss the truth of things, I must I say confess, that the dispute of 126. Hobbes, Questions, p. 19; cf. p. 2. 127. John Bramhall, Castigations of Mr. Hobbes His Last Animadversions . . . (London, 1657), pp. 54, 56, and [456]. 128. Hobbes, Questions, p. 115. 129. Ibid., pp. 114–15. I have moved a comma from after ‘no true Liberty is’ to after ‘no true Liberty.’ 130. Ibid., p. 115. 131. Ibid., p. 2.
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kinch hoekstra this question will rather hurt than help their piety, and therefore if his Lordship had not desired this answer, I should not have written it, nor do I write it but in hopes your Lordship and his will keep it private.132
In his subsequent reply, Hobbes gives further details about the nature of the ‘inconvenience’ and ‘the hurt I thought might proceed from a discourse of this nature.’ He explains that he ‘never thought it could do hurt to a rational man, but onely to such men as cannot reason in those points which are of difficult contemplation’; and, as we saw above, he thinks that this is ‘the greatest part of Mankinde.’133 ‘The men who I thought might take hurt thereby,’ Hobbes explains, ‘are such as reason erroneously,’ confusing determinism with fatalism: ‘saying with themselves, if I shall be saved, I shall be saved whether I walk uprightly or no, and consequently thereunto shall behave themselves negligently, and pursue the pleasant way of the sins they are in love with.’134 Bramhall and Hobbes agree that Hobbes’s view would be damaging if published. The difference is that Hobbes thinks that the doctrine that is too dangerous to reveal is true. If Hobbes had his way, we would know very little about his views on liberty and necessity, and only the occasion of an unscrupulous translator revealed them. It is not plausible to think that this was the only set of views that Hobbes wished to keep secret or simplify for the purpose of public benefit. ‘Nimbleness’ of a different kind will be required if we wish to catch sight of others.
V The end of philosophy and the beginning of interpretation It is intuitively plausible that the best interpretation of an utterance or 132. Hobbes, Of libertie and necessitie, pp. 35–6. Cf. Hobbes’s letter to Glen of 6/16 April 1636 about the damage recent books may do by putting ‘such Thoughts into the Heads of vulgar People, as will conferre little to their good Life’ (Correspondence, p. 30). Cf. also Memorable Sayings of Mr. Hobbes in his Books and at the Table (a folio broadside published shortly after Hobbes’s death): ‘Drinking a Glass of Wine, he said, ’tis with Truth as it is with excellent Wine, the Drawer (the Priest) is not to fill out the dregs with the purer Liquor.’ 133. Hobbes, Questions, pp. 333–4. 134. Ibid., p. 334.
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activity may well vary with the constituent aim of that utterance or activity (for example, it was not a failed assassination, but a successful warning shot). In the case of interpreting utterances within a non-alethic philosophy as if they were above all alethic, misinterpretation may arise from looking for the wrong thing. Two utterances may be criticized as contradictory, for example, and one of them may be preferred as stronger, or more consistent with other utterances of the author; or an otherwise unattested position may be attributed to him to explain how he might have thought them to be consistent. But the differing utterances may instead be best explained as offered by their author to benefit different audiences, or as reflecting what he thought likely to conduce to peace at different times. When philosophers interpret other philosophers, they standardly assume that those being interpreted are aiming above all to articulate the truth of the matter at hand. This is the procedure that has been used to interpret Hobbes’s philosophy, and even those who have emphasized his practical orientation have typically regarded his attempts to act as not themselves part of philosophy (but of, for example, rhetoric). Even one of the most historically oriented commentators on Hobbes, Robert Kraynak, takes the reader’s task to be ‘to come to terms with Hobbes’s philosophy and to form a judgment about its overall truth claims.’135 But we cannot assume that even central claims of Hobbes’s philosophy are truth claims in the usual sense. As Hobbes thinks that the ultimate aim of philosophical pronouncements is to produce human commodity, and that the paramount benefit is peace and security, it may be better to evaluate them as what we might call ‘peace claims,’ that is, as pronouncements designed to engineer obedience and produce peace. We must first come to grips with what kind of statement we are interpreting, rather than assuming that it will be best understood by reference to its truth value. ‘The cat is on the mat’ may be true, or it may be false; then again, its truth or falsity may be beside the point (it may be given as a password, or pronounced parodically to disparage the exiguity of philosophical examples). Hobbes recognizes that seeming affirmations can have other 135. Kraynak, ‘The Fragility of Civilization in Hobbes’s Historical Writings,’ Filozofski vestnik 24:2 (2003), p. 56.
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functions: they may be optative, for example, or imperative, ‘which when the party is obliged to do, or forbeare, is Command; otherwise Prayer; or els Counsell.’136 Much of Hobbes’s work can be interpreted as counsel, and this counsel is interwoven with philosophy in his central writings. Hobbes holds fast, however, to the idea that philosophy is only composed of affirmations or denials, that is, propositions that admit of truth or falsity.137 Philosophy is not just any way of bringing about benefit, but is defined in terms of its method as well as its aim. Nonetheless, each proposition that constitutes the philosophical system properly speaking is itself capable of analysis in terms of its end, which is ultimately the end of philosophy, the benefit of humanity. Even the propositions of philosophy may not be most accurately understood as ordinary truth claims. ‘The thing which is believed, is always a proposition (i.e., an affirmative or negative assertion) which we allow to be true’138 ; but not all propositions that we ‘allow to be true’ are things we believe. This depends on our intention in allowing the proposition. So we may allow a proposition temporarily, in order to examine its truth by seeing what follows from it; this is to assume. Or ‘we may also allow a proposition simply as such, perhaps from fear of the laws, and that is to profess or confess by external signs; or from the automatic deference, which men give out of politeness to those whom they respect, and to others from love of peace, and this is to concede.’139 In these cases, propositions are allowed to be true not because they are thought to be true, but in order to obey the law, to demonstrate deference, or to keep the peace. Stating a proposition (as true) is not equivalent to expressing one’s sincere belief (in its truth). When we read Hobbes’s philosophy, we have access only to the propositions he ‘allows’ to be true, which may in principle be animated by any of these intentions; thus, what first appears as a normal truth claim may instead be an obedient profession, or a concession for the sake of peace. 136. Hobbes, Leviathan 6.55, p. 29; cf. 4.1, p. 12; 4.18, p. 16. 137. Hobbes, Concerning Body 3.1, p. 23. See, e.g., Leviathan 5.17, p. 21: science is the connection of assertions. 138. Hobbes, De cive 18.4. 139. Ibid.
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One might object that all propositions can and should be analyzed as truth claims; and the truth or falsity of a proposition is not affected by whether or not someone has adduced it in order to encourage obedience. Hobbes, however, insists that to ignore such an intention can be to misunderstand the utterance. ‘In the Attributes which we give to God,’ for example, ‘we are not to consider the signification of Philosophicall Truth; but the signification of Pious Intention, to do him the greatest Honour we are able.’140 Although such utterances are propositional in form, they do not function as propositions, but as oblations. To judge whether such a statement is correct is to determine not whether it is true, but whether it confers honour. Propositions that contradict one another when interpreted truth claims need not contradict one another if understood properly as ‘the actions of those who pay homage.’141 Similarly, if Hobbes sees his words as actions intended to bring about peace, then we should interpret them in terms of that goal. Given his practical end, for Hobbes to produce different arguments for different readers need be no more inconsistent than a company that produces different products for different markets in order to boost overall sales. If we interpret Hobbes as pursuing his stated goal of persuading people into peace, we can see that he appeals to a range of premises or assumptions to bring readers from different starting points to the same conclusion or result.142 Accordingly, Hobbes’s willingness to draw on conquest theory and then consent theory, for example, need not be explained as a theoretical inconsistency, nor as a theoretical shift. The advantage of interpreting Hobbes according to his own conception of philosophy cannot be adequately assessed without fully analyzing particular cruxes in light of that conception, and comparing such analyses to those that assume an alethic model. I cannot offer such examinations and comparisons here, but it may be useful to provide a brief summary of a few
140. Hobbes, Leviathan 31.33, p. 191. 141. Hobbes, Critique du ‘De Mundo’ de Thomas White, ed. Jean Jacquot and Harold Whitmore Jones (Paris: Vrin, 1973), 35.16 (fol. 396r−v ). Cf. Leviathan 12.7, p. 53; 46.23, p. 374; 46.31, p. 376. 142. Consider, for example, De cive 10.11 and 12.12.
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analyses along these lines.143 1) Understanding the philosophy as practical, we can recover some hope for putting to rest longstanding controversies, for example by relinquishing the idea that Hobbes argues for the coextension of duty and interest. He is instead arguing that if we consider the practical alternatives, the coincidence is greater than is usually argued or recognized, and that the right legislation is crucial for maximizing coincidence. He argues, that is, that they coincide more than is thought, and so that they will coincide more than they do. This is not an argument for conceptual identity, but (at least in part) advocacy to minimize divergence. 2) The argument with ‘the Foole’ in chapter 15 of Leviathan has long puzzled commentators because it seems to fail as an argument; but it succeeds if we understand it to be directed against the impolitic utterance of a position rather than as a refutation of the position itself. 3) Once we recognize that Hobbes countenances dissimulation and simulation, doubt is cast on the usual way of interpreting what is seen as a central postulate of the political theory, that of natural equality. For what the law of nature requires is that we acknowledge all others as our equals by nature, even if they are not.144 We must acknowledge this as true, that is, even if it is not true. Moreover, the state of nature itself is best understood in terms of its role in encouraging obedience, and has at least as much in common with an exhortation as with a true premise. 4) The model of sovereignty by institution, central to philosophical readings of Hobbes’s political theory, turns out to play a subordinate role in the crucial eirenic project of justifying sovereignty by acquisition, which is often overlooked in those 143. What follows is merely a stipulative list. For detailed arguments for each position, see Kinch Hoekstra, ‘Hobbes and the Foole,’ Political Theory 25:5 (1997) and ‘Nothing to Declare? Hobbes on the Advocate of Injustice,’ Political Theory 27:2 (1999); ‘The Natural Condition of Mankind,’ The Cambridge Companion to Hobbes’s Leviathan, ed. Patricia Springborg (Cambridge University Press, forthcoming); ‘A Lion in the House: Hobbes and Democracy,’ Rethinking the Foundations of Modern Political Thought, ed. James Tully and Annabel Brett (Cambridge University Press, forthcoming); ‘The De Facto Turn in Hobbes’s Political Philosophy,’ Leviathan After 350 Years, ed. Tom Sorell and Luc Foisneau (Oxford University Press, 2004); and ‘Tyrannus Rex vs. Leviathan,’ Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 82:3&4 (2001). 144. Hobbes, Leviathan 15.21, p. 77. In this case, the law of nature requires us to simulate; for an instance where it requires us to dissimulate, see 15.20, p. 76, where we are forbidden to ‘declare Hatred, or Contempt of another’ whether ‘by deed, word, countenance, or gesture.’
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readings. 5) Hobbes’s inconsistency about whether the possession of protective power legitimates that power can be explained by his view that this position is conducive to peace other things being equal, but that it is no longer conducive to peace to say so once one’s sovereign has made its denial central to official ideology. 6) Similarly, his excoriation of the concept of tyranny as otiose and bellicose, followed by his own employment of the concept, can be explained by its uncivil effect being trumped by the sovereign’s subsequent reliance on the concept to shore up his authority. Taking Hobbes at his word when he defines philosophy as aiming to produce effects that are requisite for human life, it becomes difficult always to take him at his word elsewhere.145 This view of philosophy as ultimately a practical enterprise leads quite naturally to the view that the philosopher sometimes may, and perhaps must, conceal what is true or pronounce what is false. This does not undermine the edifice of Hobbes’s thought, even for those who wish to assess the truth value of the arguments as they are set forth. On the one hand, Hobbes accepts the typical utility of truth and consistency – untruths and inconsistencies put at risk the general good that is the aim of philosophy – so we need a particular reason to think that Hobbes may be secretive or insincere in a given case. On the other hand, one may assess the validity of Hobbes’s claims regardless of his own attitude toward them, as has often been done. For that matter, one could assess whether his arguments scan as poetry. At least at points, however, the project of assessing the truth value of each utterance and minimizing the contradictions between them will not coincide with that of adequate interpretation. Hobbes apparently believes that if people were ‘as they should be,’ then peace and true doctrine would never diverge; and his claim (considered above) that doctrine repugnant to peace cannot be true may be best understood in this ideal sense.146 He has a keen eye, however, for how people are, and is indeed 145. Some such alethic baseline is necessary: for the foregoing argument to get going, some claims (those about philosophy’s practical orientation, etc.) are interpreted as truth claims, and not only as useful. 146. Hobbes, Of libertie and necessitie, pp. 35–6; Leviathan 18.9, p. 91.
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notorious for the unflinching view of human nature at the heart of his theory. He concludes that some truths are likely to cause harm, and so should not be made public; and, according to definitions he adduces, such truths are not even properly part of philosophy. As Hobbes remarks in a letter to Samuel Sorbi`ere, ‘the kingdom of truth is not of this world.’147 What his philosophy could bring about in this world, he thinks, is instead a kingdom of peace. We are only beginning to think through the ramifications of the idea that the conception of philosophy itself has a rich history. This will call for readings significantly different from some of the anachronisms we have been content to attribute to those who would have found them incompatible with their idea of the philosophical enterprise. In projecting our own conception of philosophy onto the history of philosophy, we run the risk not only of a smug meliorism (they do not do Philosophy as well as we do), but also of flattening out our philosophical past, blocking off consideration of alternative ways of conceiving of the philosophical project, and misconstruing arguments by misunderstanding their intent. While it does not always have the same end, philosophy always has an end, and its meaning cannot be reliably apprehended without reference to that end. Balliol College Oxford OX1 3BJ
[email protected] 147. ‘Regnum veritatis non est hujus mundi’: Hobbes to Sorbi`ere, 10/20 February 1657 (Correspondence, p. 447), adapting John 18:36.
