HOBBES, THOMAS. — Philosopher, born at Malmesbury on 5 April 1588, died at Hardwicke on 4 December 1679. He studied at Oxford; then, while still young, began the series of his travels in Europe, at first to serve as tutor to the son of Lord Cavendish, and later to escape the troubled atmosphere that had arisen in England owing to the conflicts between Cromwell and the Stuarts. In this way he also visited Italy, among other places, where he met Galilei. But he travelled above all in France, where he stayed for long periods on several occasions; and in Paris, through Mersenne, he had the opportunity to come into contact with Cartesian philosophy, whose rationalism exerted a lasting influence on his thought, modifying its original Baconian orientation. An explicit document of his interest in the speculation of Cartesio, besides his repeated contacts with the Cartesian circles of Paris, is provided by the Third Objections to the Meditations, which are of particular importance for clarifying H.’s position in the history of thought.
On a first reading, H.’s critique of Cartesio’s Meditations appears bewildering because of his failure to understand their theoretical value: all the concepts most familiar to the French thinker (such as the substantiality of thought, the innateness of ideas, the existence of God and its proofs) are systematically distorted or misunderstood by H. This is due to the original Baconian inspiration of his thought. With Bacone (v.) H. had been acquainted from 1623 to 1626, and from him he had inherited that naturalistic vision of reality which was to make him flee, in the name of a rigorously consistent materialism, from every metaphysical obscurity of apparently traditional inspiration.
Nevertheless, contact with Cartesio helped to determine H.’s orientation, ultimately diverting the fundamentally empiricist and antimetaphysical inspiration of Baconian thought toward a renewed metaphysical interest which would later assume, in the mind of the Englishman, the form of a metaphysics of physics, transcribed in materialistic terms, in which the metempirical demands of thought are resolved and dissolved. The complete expression of this orientation in Hobbes’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 regarded as H.’s masterpiece, will be discussed below.
The uncritical assumption of the corporeal world as the sole reality, to whose materiality every phenomenon must be reduced, is the starting point—anticartesian par excellence—of H.’s philosophy; the substantialist conception of that world is the materialistic expression of the metaphysical demand. This twofold aspect of H.’s thought, Cartesian and anti-Cartesian at the same time, already revealed by 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 metaphysical reality, while space is the subjective representation of this reality in its exteriority. Likewise, time is nothing other than 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 these concepts, determined analytically, science synthetically deduces the universe, thereby reducing every aspect of reality to them and consequently framing physical, psychic, and political reality within the same materialistic-mechanistic outlook: geometry, mechanics, physics, morality, and politics are thus merely successive moments of the same scientific procedure and of the same philosophy. But science is knowledge, which possesses within itself its own logic and method: it therefore denotes an emergence above reality, as reflection upon II. How is this emergence to be justified? H. made a vigorous attempt to reduce the epistemological process 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 sense organs and transmitted by them to the brain. The logic of science, on the other hand, is reduced to pure nominalism: universals are nothing but names, which demand to be defined; definition is therefore the logical principle of science. Science proceeds precisely by connecting names with names in the proposition and in the syllogism. Language, therefore, is for H. the unjustified Deus ex machina that should mediate between and reconcile the empiricist-materialistic demand and the logical requirement of an organization of knowledge, accepted by rationalism as deductive mathematism.
The criterion 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 opposed by the brain to the movement transmitted to it by the sense organs, while imagination and memory are likewise psychic facts, dependent upon sensation and ultimately reduced to II. The same applies to ethical and passionate life: the will, which lies at its foundation, is explained as the effect of the heart’s reaction to the organic movement transmitted to it by the brain; and this reaction is determined as pleasure or pain, and therefore as a tendency toward or repulsion from the perceived object, according as the movement from which it originated promotes or depresses the vital motion of the heart. Every other passion arises as a complication of that tendency or repulsion with the representation of objects. Freedom of the will is therefore excluded; and in support of this exclusion H. engaged in a celebrated controversy with J. Bramhall, bishop of Derry.
The criterion of the good is therefore, for H., purely utilitarian, inasmuch as the good itself is reduced to a mere object of pleasure. Man is consequently fundamentally selfish, and his morality is nothing but reasoned egoism. Accordingly, H.’s particularly lively political interest finds satisfaction in a rigorously consistent theorization of state absolutism. Since man is naturally homini lupus (De cive, chap. 1), if humanity remained permanently in the state of nature, it would live in a fierce and perpetual bellum omnium contra omnes (ibid.); but since this war is harmful to the egoism of individuals themselves, the necessity of a social contract arises as an effect of that same egoism, whereby individuals alienate into the hands of a sovereign a portion of their natural rights, in order to ensure the preservation of social peace. The sovereign, who personifies the State, therefore possesses unlimited power, deriving it from the necessity of organizing the dissecta membra of society into that unified organism called the “people,” and of preserving this organism from every attempt at individual evasion or domination. H.’s absolutist conception and its extreme consequences remain vividly documented in the Leviathan (1651), in which, after a summary exposition of the principles informing the system, the State is treated as an artificial body, analyzable according to the same principles that govern the study of natural bodies.
It must nevertheless be observed that, as a result of the very exacerbation of the absolutist demand and of an idea of raison d’état founded upon a materialistic and at the same time pessimistic vision of human reality, an element
A new element was insinuating itself, however, to contradict rather than mitigate the original inspiration of the Leviathan: namely, a sort of utilitarian individualism, which was intended—not, of course, as a protest of the individual’s interest 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 H.’s Machiavellian realism found itself obliged to reconcile this individualistic inspiration with the abstract supra-individual purpose of his Leviathanic State; and, for this reason, it even paid its tribute to the humanitarian natural-law theory of U. Grotius. The transition from the state of nature to the state of civil coexistence 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 of achieving one’s own utility. But it is evident that such a distinction is wholly ambiguous: in reality, it conceals the need to justify the establishment of a State that does not abstract from the social reality from which it arises, and that recognizes the purposes and necessities of life inherent in that reality. It is therefore understandable that the Leviathan could have caused such a stir in the political and cultural world of the age in which it was composed: its very ambiguity, deriving from the unresolved conflict between nature and freedom, necessity and reason, made it the object of opposing evaluations; and Spinoza himself (v.) could not avoid being deeply influenced by II. The Enlightenment was now near; and Hobbesian philosophy cannot be said to have been unrelated to the process of its formation, as is demonstrated, among other things, by the religious insensitivity of its author, who crudely compared religious truths to pills, which, if swallowed, may be beneficial, whereas when chewed they cause nausea.