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 serve 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. Thus he visited, among other places, Italy as well, where he met Galileo. But more than anywhere he traveled in France, where he stayed, on several occasions, for long periods: and in Paris he had the opportunity, through Mersenne, 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 Descartes's speculation, beyond his repeated contacts with the Cartesian circles of Paris, remains the Third Objections to the Meditations, of particular importance for clarifying H.'s position in the history of thought.
On a first reading, H.'s criticism of Descartes's Meditations appears disconcerting for its failure to understand their theoretical value: all the concepts most familiar to the Frenchman's thought (such as the substantiality of thought, the innateness of ideas, the existence of God and his proofs) are systematically deformed 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 make him flee, in the name of a rigidly coherent materialism, from every metaphysical abstruseness of apparently traditional inspiration.
Nevertheless, contact with Descartes helped to determine H.'s orientation, ultimately diverting the fundamentally empiricist and anti-metaphysical inspiration of Baconian thought toward a renewed metaphysical interest, which in the Englishman's mind would then take 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 of Hobbesian thought remains 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. Of Leviathan, which is considered H.'s masterpiece, we shall speak later.
The uncritical assumption of the corporeal world as the only reality, to whose materiality every phenomenon must be reduced, is the starting point, anti-Cartesian par excellence, of H.'s philosophy; the substantialist conception of that world is the materialistic expression of the metaphysical demand. This twofold aspect, Cartesian and anti-Cartesian at once, of H.'s thought, 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, space is the subjective representation of this reality in its exteriority. Likewise time is nothing but the phantasm or subjective representation of movement, which animates the body. Body and movement, and together space and time as their phantasms: these are the fundamental concepts of H.'s philosophy. From such concepts, analytically determined, science synthetically deduces the universe, thereby reducing to them every aspect of reality, and consequently framing physical, psychic and political reality within one and the same materialistic-mechanistic view: geometry, mechanics, physics, morals and politics are thus nothing but the successive moments of the same scientific procedure and of the same philosophy. But science is knowledge, which has its logic and its method immanent within itself: it therefore denotes an emergence upon reality as reflection upon it. How is this emergence to be justified? H. made a vigorous attempt to reduce the gnoseological process as well within the framework of his materialistic conception. The attempt consists in separating sensible knowing from the logic of universals, which develops from it. Only the former is concrete, as concrete as the movement produced by objects on the sense organs and transmitted by these to the brain. The logic of science, on the other hand, is reduced to a pure nominalism: universals are nothing but names, which demand to be defined: definition is therefore the logical principle of science. Which proceeds, precisely, by linking names to names in the proposition and in the syllogism. Language, therefore, is for H. the Deus ex machina, unjustified, which should mediate and reconcile the empiricist-materialistic demand with the logical exigency of an organization of knowledge, accepted by rationalism as deductive mathematism.
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 opposed by the brain to the movement transmitted to it by the organs of the senses, while imagination and memory are equally psychic facts, dependent on sense and, in the last instance, traced back to it. The same applies to the ethical-passional life: the will, which is its foundation, is explained as the effect of the heart's reaction to the organic movement transmitted to it by the brain: and such reaction is determined as pleasure or pain, and therefore as tendency toward or repulsion from the perceived object, according to whether the movement, from which it originated, favors 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 for this exclusion H. engaged in a noted polemic 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 pure object of pleasure. Man is therefore fundamentally egoistic, and his morality is nothing but reasoned egoism. Consequently, H.'s political interest, particularly lively, finds satisfaction in a rigorously coherent theorization of state absolutism. Since man is by nature homini lupus (De cive, ch. 1), if humanity remained in the state of nature, it would live in a fierce and perpetual bellum omnium contra omnes (ibid.), but since this war turns to the harm of the very egoism of individuals, there arises through the effect of that same egoism the necessity of a social contract, whereby individuals alienate into the hands of a sovereign a part of their natural rights, in order to ensure the preservation of social peace. The sovereign, who personifies the State, therefore has an unlimited power, deriving for him from the necessity of organizing the dissecta membra of society into that unitary organism which is called "people," and of preserving such an organism from every attempt at individual evasion or overreach. Of H.'s absolutist conception and its extreme consequences, a living document remains the Leviathan (1651), in which, after a summary exposition of the informing principles of 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, through the effect of the very exacerbation of the absolutist demand and of an idea of reason of state founded on a materialistic and at the same time pessimistic vision of human reality, an element new element infiltrated itself, contradicting rather than mitigating the original inspiration of the Leviathan: namely, a sort of utilitarian individualism, which is meant to be, not, of course, a protest of the individual's interest against that of the State, but a justification of the State as the only organism capable of providing for the interest of individuals. So that H.'s Machiavellian realism found itself faced with the necessity of reconciling this individualistic inspiration with the abstract supra-individual purpose of his leviathanic State: and for this it paid its tribute even to the humanitarian natural law theory of U. Grotius. The passage 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 first conceived as the expression of the unlimited claim of each individual against the others, the second 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 conceals, in reality, the need to justify the constitution of a State that does not abstract from the social reality from which it arises, and that recognizes its ends and necessities of life. It is understood, therefore, how the Leviathan was able to stir up the political and cultural world of the era 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; and even Spinoza (v.) could not avoid being deeply influenced by it. The Enlightenment was by now near; and Hobbesian philosophy cannot be said to be extraneous 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, can be beneficial, while chewed they nauseate.