HOBBES, THOMAS

HOBBES, THOMAS. – Philosopher, b. at Malmesbury on 5 Apr. 1588, d. at Hardwicke on 4 Dec. 1679. He studied at Oxford; then, still young, he began the series of his travels in Europe, first to act as tutor to the son of Lord Cavendish, and later to escape the troubled atmosphere created in England by the struggles between Cromwell and the Stuarts. He thus visited, among other places, Italy, where he met Galilei. But above all he travelled in France, where he stayed repeatedly for long periods; in Paris, through Mersenne, he came into contact with Cartesian philosophy, whose rationalism exercised a lasting influence on his thought, modifying his original Baconian orientation. A clear record of his interest in Cartesian speculation, in addition to his repeated contacts with the Cartesian circles in Paris, is provided by the Third Objections to the Meditations, which are of particular importance in clarifying H.’s position in the history of thought.

At first glance, H.’s criticism of Descartes’ Meditations appears disconcerting because of its failure to grasp the theoretical value of those works: all the concepts most familiar to French thought (such as the substantiality of thought, the nobility of ideas, the existence of God and its proofs) are systematically disparaged or misunderstood by H. This is due to the original Baconian inspiration of his thought. With Bacon (v.) H. had been on familiar terms from 1623 to 1626, and from him he had inherited that naturalistic vision of reality which was to lead him, in the name of a rigorously consistent materialism, to flee from every abstruse metaphysics of apparently traditional inspiration.

Nevertheless, contact with Descartes contributed to determining H.’s orientation, ultimately diverting the fundamentally empiricist and anti-metaphysical inspiration of Baconian thought towards a renewed metaphysical interest, which in the Englishman’s mind would later take the form of a metaphysics of physics, transcribed in materialistic terms, in which the metaphysical aspirations of thought are resolved and dissolved. The fully-fledged expression of this orientation in H.’s thought is found in the speculative works of his late maturity, *De corpore* (1655) and *De homine* (1658), which, together with *De cive* (1642), form the trilogy known under the title *Elementa philosophiae*. The *Leviathan*, which is considered H.’s masterpiece, will be discussed later.

The uncritical assumption of the corporeal world as the only reality, to whose materiality every phenomenon must be reduced, is the starting point of H.’s philosophy, anti-Cartesian par excellence; the substantialist conception of that world is the materialistic expression of a metaphysical exigency. This twofold aspect, both Cartesian and anti-Cartesian, of H.’s thought, already revealed in the Objections, is particularly confirmed by *De corpore*. Matter is the only substance, endowed with extension, resistance, and force. Empty space does not exist: it is the *idea corporis*, the *phantasma rei existentis, quatenus existentis*; the body is the metaphysical reality, space is the subjective representation of this reality in its externality. Similarly, time is nothing but the phantom or subjective representation of movement, which

animates the body. Body and movement, and together with them space and time as their phantoms: these are the fundamental concepts of H.’s philosophy. From such analytically determined concepts, science synthetically deduces the universe, reducing every aspect of reality to them and thus framing physical, psychic, and political reality within a single materialistic-mechanistic view: geometry, mechanics, physics, morals, and politics are thus merely successive moments of the same scientific and philosophical procedure. But science is knowledge, which contains within itself its own logic and method: it therefore denotes an emergence upon reality as reflection upon II. How is this emergence to be justified? H. made a vigorous attempt to reduce the process of knowing itself within the framework of his materialistic conception. The attempt consists in separating sensible knowledge from the logic of universals, which develops from II. Only the former is concrete, just as concrete is the movement produced by objects upon the sensory organs and transmitted from them to the brain. The logic of science, on the other hand, reduces to pure nominalism: universals are nothing but names, which require to be defined; definition is thus the logical principle of science. And science proceeds precisely by linking names to names in propositions and syllogisms. Language, therefore, is for H. the *deus ex machina*, unjustified, which should mediate and reconcile the empiricist-materialist exigency with the logical exigency of an organization of knowledge, accepted by rationalism as mathematically deductive.

The canon of materialistic interpretation is consequently applied also to the phenomena of psychic life. Sensation, which is the foundation of knowledge, is reduced to the resistance offered by the brain to the movement transmitted to it by the organs of sense, while imagination and memory are likewise psychic facts, dependent on sense and ultimately reducible to II. The same applies to ethico-passional life: the will, which underlies it, is explained as an effect of the reaction of the heart to organic movement transmitted to it by the brain; and this reaction is determined as pleasure or pain, and thus as a tendency or repulsion towards the perceived object, according as the movement from which it arose favours or depresses the vital motion of the heart. Every other passion arises as a complication of this tendency or repulsion with the representation of objects. Freedom of the will is therefore excluded; and for this exclusion H. engaged in a noted controversy with J. Bramhall, Bishop of Derry.

The criterion of good is therefore, for H., purely utilitarian, inasmuch as good itself is reduced to an object of pleasure. Man is therefore fundamentally egoistic, and his morality is nothing but reasoned egoism. Consequently, H.’s political interest, which was particularly keen, finds satisfaction in a rigorously consistent theorization of state absolutism. Since man is by nature *homo homini lupus* (*De cive*, ch. 1), if humanity remained in the state of nature, it would live in a perpetual fierce *bellum omnium contra omnes* (ibid.), but since this war is damaging to the egoism of individuals themselves, the same egoism gives rise to the necessity of a social contract, by which individuals alienate a part of their natural rights into the hands of a sovereign, in order to ensure the preservation of social peace. The sovereign, who personifies the State, therefore has unlimited power, deriving from the necessity of organizing even the members of society themselves into that unitary organism called “people,” and of preserving that organism from every attempt at individual evasion or domination. A living document of H.’s absolutist conception and its extreme consequences is the *Leviathan* (1651), in which, after a summary exposition of the principles informing the system, the State is treated as an artificial body, analysable according to the same principles that govern the study of natural bodies.

It must however be observed that, by virtue of the essence of an absolutist organization and of an idea of reason of State founded on a materialistic and at the same time pessimistic vision of human reality, a new element was infiltrating to contradict rather than mitigate the original inspiration of the *Leviathan*: namely, a sort of utilitarian individualism, which is intended not, of course, as a protest of the interest of the individual against that of the State, but rather as a justification of the State as the only organism capable of providing for the interests of individuals. Thus the Machiavellian realism of H. found itself faced with the necessity of reconciling such individualistic inspiration with the abstract supra-individual end of his *Leviathanic* State: and for this he even paid tribute to the humanitarian legalism of U. Grotius. The transition from the state of nature to the state of civil society is explained by H. through the distinction between «right of nature» and «law of nature»: the former conceived as the expression of the unlimited claim of each individual against others, the latter as a rational norm indicating the best way to realize one’s own utility. But it is evident that such a distinction is altogether ambiguous: it actually conceals the exigency of justifying the constitution of a State which does not extract itself from the social reality from which it arises, and which recognizes the ends and necessities of life of that reality. It is thus understandable how the *Leviathan* could stir up the political and cultural world of the age in which it was composed: its very ambiguity, deriving from the unresolved contrast between nature and freedom, necessity and reason, made it the object of opposing evaluations; Spinoza (v.) could not escape being deeply influenced by II. The Enlightenment was now at hand; and Hobbesian philosophy cannot be said to be extraneous to the process of its formation: as is shown, among other things, by the religious insensitivity of its author, who crudely compared religious truths to pills, which, if swallowed, may do good, while if chewed they nauseate.