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Six Points About Thomas Hobbes

 



  1. In anthropology, Hobbes was a thorough-going materialist. He didn’t believe in a ‘ghost within the machine,’ only in the machine.
  2. In metaphysics, again, he was a thorough-going materialist. This meant that he disbelieved in any notion of God that would involve a Being transcending in any way the material world. It is possible that he believed in a God in SOME sense, but he statements on the subject are confusing and subject to a lot of interpretive controversy. They may be confusing because he wanted them to be so: his Stuart patrons would hardly have smiled on open atheism.
  3. In epistemology, Hobbes was a nominalist and empiricist. “There is nothing universal but names,” he said, and that notion was in his mind a sword with which to slay nonsense.
  4. In ethics, Hobbes was of two views. In a state of nature, there is only generalization from psychological egoism. I want power. I have to expect that you, too, want power. What is right for me then is to dominate and perhaps to kill you. What is right for you is the reverse. There is no natural court of appeal — only the appeal to force. Beyond the state of nature, which is undesirable because no one wants to fear ambush behind every boulder, there is the social contract. Like Rawls closer to our time, Hobbes imagines people in this state of nature conquering their own fearful endangered state by making a deal with each other. And that hypothesis brings us to politics.
  5. In politics, Hobbes was an absolute monarchist. Since we have to assume that the hypothetical contractors were rational, we also have to assume that they understood that the only way to get out of the state of nature is to submit one’s self to a sovereign. Furthermore, the only sustainable sovereignty is that embodied in a single all-powerful human and his lucky family line. Thus: the Stuarts.
  6. In aesthetics, Hobbes was a traditionalist. He thought, like ancient writers, that art should both inform and delight. He thought epic works should be about great people, not commoners, and should portray them as carrying out grand designs. So far, quite traditional. But there was a twist: Hobbes suggested that art appreciation and criticism must be founded in psychology. THIS suggests a focus on the impact of a work, rather than the work itself, as the key to evaluation.
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