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6 Hobbes, Human Nature VII.1-2, XII, XI; cf. De
Corpore XXV.12-13 (Gaskin, 43-44,
70-73, 64-70, cf. 226-28) In Human
Nature I.vii and I.xi-xii,
Hobbes began to apply his account of knowledge and the mechanical workings of
the brain to social and political topics.
There are two principal topics that come up over the course of this section. One, broached in I.vii
and continued in I.xii has to do with the
operations of the will and the related question of the use and justification of
rewards and punishments, and of praise and blame. Hobbes argued that reward and punishment
serve as effective ways to determine citizens to submit to the dictatorial
authority of a sovereign, and so are important for the design of
well-functioning societies. In the
process he emphatically rejected the view that punishment ought to be used
for retribution, that is, to “pay back” those who cause suffering by causing
them to suffer equally in return. The
only proper use of punishment, he argued, is for reform of the delinquent and
deterrence of others, to prevent future delinquency. The second topic is religious inspiration. In Hobbes’s day, as in our own, various people claimed to have been inspired by (literally, to have “breathed in the spirit”) of “the Lord.” They fancied that they had been specially “chosen” by God, who was in direct communication with them. They attended prayer meetings and “prophecyings” where they worked themselves up into an enthusiastic frenzy and spoke in tongues and rolled on the carpet and imagined God was appearing to them and instructing them to believe certain things, and to engage in particular activities. Typically, the beliefs were of an extreme Protestant sort, involving the assertion of the priesthood of all believers, the rejection of the authority of the Roman Pope, of bishops, and even of ministers, and the rejection of prescribed rites and sacraments, of religious vestments and statuary, of feast days and common prayers. And the actions were actions of rebellion against the established authority of the Church of England, and even against the Crown, insofar as it supported that authority. Hobbes is notorious as a political theorist who argued for a form of dictatorship. He had similar views about religion, and set out to argue for obedience to religious authority in opposition to the doctrine of the priesthood of all believers. His treatment of religious inspiration was a crucial part of that project. QUESTIONS
ON THE READING
1. How is pain
defined on Hobbes’ mechanical conception of the workings of the mind?
2. How are appetite
and fear defined?
3. Explain the
connection between will, appetite, fear, and deliberation.
4. When are we said
to be at liberty?
5. What is the
relation between liberty and deliberation?
6. When is an
action said to be voluntary?
7. If terrorists
threaten to kill your loved ones unless you smuggle something for them, and
you do smuggle the goods, is your action voluntary? Explain Hobbes’ reason for answering the
question as he does.
8. If, due to an
innate character flaw, you are quick to anger, are the actions you perform
out of anger voluntary? Explain
Hobbes’ reason for answering this question as he does.
9. If you will to
perform an action, is your willing voluntary? 10.
What can we know about God? 11.
Why do people believe that God exists? 12.
What is the erroneous and what the true conception of
spirits? 13.
What does a miracle prove? 14.
How can we tell whether a revelation, or message, or
inspiration that has been given to someone really came from God? 15.
What is the basis for the belief that the Christian
scripture is the word of God? 16.
How did Hobbes respond to the charge that he had
made faith depend on such natural capacities as our ability to discern
whether other people are noble and worthy of trust, rather than (as
Protestant doctrine would have it) an inspiration, graciously given by God to
the elect, that could bring them to accept the scripture in defiance of all
reason? 17.
What side did Hobbes take in the dispute over
whether the individual or the Church is to be the ultimate authority in the
interpretation of scripture? NOTES
ON THE a. Human nature VII.1-2 and XII. Hobbes thought
that the will is mechanically determined, just like sensation, memory,
imagination, and prudential and scientific knowledge. In fact, it is determined in large part by sensation,
memory, and prudential and scientific knowledge. Prudential knowledge determines the more
immediate and automatic reactions of the will, and scientific knowledge plays
a larger role in determining its more deliberate and
reflective operations. To see how this occurs, we need to consider Hobbes’s
accounts of pleasure and pain, desire and aversion, deliberation, and will. These topics have already been alluded
to in connection with Hobbes’s account of deliberation in Human nature IV. The main points are nicely outlined in Human nature VII.1-2 and De corpore
XXV.12-13. Pleasure and pain are
motions that enhance or impede the vital motions of the heart. Whatever has caused pleasure or pain in the
past is associated with its surroundings in space, and its causal antecedents
in past time. Consequently, when we
encounter those same surroundings or antecedents in the future, they lead us
to conceive the pleasurable or painful object. The human machine is so constituted that
pleasurable conceptions are immediately followed by the “first beginnings” of
motion towards the source of the pleasure, and painful objects by the “first
beginnings” of motion away from the source of the pain. These “first beginnings” of motion are
desire and aversion. When we act
immediately and automatically these “first beginnings” are more than just
first beginnings. The motion they
start continues over time and we end up moving towards or away from the
object, as the case may be. This
operation is governed by “prudence,” that is, by our past experience of the
connections between pleasurable or painful things and their surroundings and
antecedents. However, we do not always act
immediately and automatically.
Sometimes we anticipate what is involved in the course of action
required to obtain the pleasurable object, and the conception of those means
brings something painful to mind (e.g., obtaining a pleasurable object by
theft might bring the thought of arrest, imprisonment, and other punishment
to mind). In this case, the subsequent
conception prevents the “first beginnings” of motion from continuing on their
course. The “first beginnings” of a
contrary motion instead appear, canceling the earlier impulse. This is of course very important for any
sovereign concerned with exercising social control to consider. It provides an insight into how to engineer
things to ensure that people will be motivated to do what you want them to
do. As Hobbes understood these matters, will
is just the last desire or aversion to arise from this process of alternating
desires and aversions arising from reflection and deliberation. In cases where we act immediately and
automatically, the “first beginnings” of motion are also the last, and we
will and act on our initial impulse.
In other cases, we will and act on whatever is the last desire or
aversion to emerge from our reflections.
Our initial desires and aversions arise mechanically from the
communication of motions from the brain to the heart, producing pleasure or
pain, and thereby desire and aversion.
Any subsequent alternation of desires and aversions is likewise
mechanically produced, either by connections between good and bad objects
experienced in the past and remembered now by means of connected conceptions
of those objects, or by the automatic processes involved in the analysis of
terms that gives rise to scientific knowledge. Since the will is nothing more than the
last desire or aversion, it, too, must be mechanically caused, and this is
just the conclusion that Hobbes proceeded to draw: our wills are not free,
but determined by antecedent mechanical causes. We might object that the will is
something more than desire or aversion, and that this is proven by the fact
that we do not always will to do what we desire to do or refrain from doing
what we have an aversion to doing. But
as far as Hobbes was concerned this never happens. If I do not always act to bring about what
I desire or avoid what I fear, it is only because my will ends up being
determined by some subsequent desire or aversion that demands a different
course of action. For example, suppose I am in a rush but the stoplight at
the upcoming intersection is turning red and I am tempted to run it, but
refrain from running it because I can foresee that I might get a ticket or
crash into other vehicles entering on their green. In this case we might say that I am doing
what I do not will to do. But Hobbes
would say I am doing exactly what I will to do. My initial
desire may have been to run the light.
But we need to consider that this initial desire first motivated me to
consider the means of satisfying that desire (blasting through the
intersection on red), but that a contemplation of this means brought to mind
consequences to which I have an aversion (being chased down by traffic police
or getting involved in a crash), and the aversion made me refrain. So while I did not do what I at first
wanted to do, I did do what my finally arising aversion directed. We speak loosely and misleadingly of not
wanting to do what we want to do when in fact what has happened is that a complete
consideration leads us to modify our initial desire and to act in accord with
a different, subsequent desire. Often, we hesitate in our action because
the desire to act is checked by an aversion, which is checked by a further
desire, which is checked by a new aversion, and so on. Hobbes identified the succession of desires
and aversions that we experience as we contemplate the means to and
consequences of an action with the act of deliberation. So, deliberation, for Hobbes, is not the
act of weighing opposed considerations and reaching a decision based on
rational choice. It is just the
circumstance of having an initial desire to act balked at its initiation by
an aversion arising from a contemplation of some means or consequence of that
action, of having this aversion in turn balked by some other desire or
aversion, and so on until a last desire or aversion finally emerges. The last desire or aversion in the chain of
deliberation results in action.
Reaching the last desire or aversion constitutes making up one’s mind,
and making up one’s mind means deciding and what is decided on is what is
willed. This is why Hobbes identified the will with the last desire or
aversion to emerge from the process of deliberation. On Hobbes’ view, we are at liberty or
free as long it lies within our power to act in either way, that is to either
do something or refrain from doing it.
If it is simply not in your power to do it (say, because you are tied
down) you are not free. Similarly, if
it is simply not in your power to refrain from doing it (say, because you are
being pushed by an irresistible force) you are not free. It makes no difference in these cases
whether the restraining or compelling forces are external to your body,
holding it in place or pushing it, or internal to it, working through the
chain of motions in the brain and muscles.
This led Hobbes to declare that we are only free or at liberty as long
the process of deliberation is still ongoing.
While we are still thinking about what to do, a third person observer
might be able to observe that we have it in our physical power to either move
or refrain from moving. However, once
we have finished deliberating and made up our minds we are no longer at
liberty. Once your mind is made up,
you are determined to act and proceed immediately to do so, and there is no
chance of your doing any differently.
If there were, you could not truly be said to have made up your mind
yet. This is why Hobbes said that
someone who has drawn up a “will” really only makes up their mind the day
they die, since prior to that time it is always possible for some further
desire or aversion to arise that will lead them to change what they have
written. What they have written is not
truly their will. The will is truly
the last desire or aversion to emerge from the process of deliberation — the
one that results in action. As long as
the process is still ongoing, there is no last desire or aversion and so no
will. It follows from Hobbes’ definitions of
“liberty” or “freedom” and “will” that there can be no such thing as free
will, any more than there can be round squares or married bachelors. This is because being free means not having
made up your mind yet and having no will, whereas making up your mind and
acquiring a will to do a particular thing means terminating your
freedom. As he put it, deliberation is
the process of removing freedom. When
deliberation terminates in a last desire or aversion, that is, in will, that is precisely when the last vestige of freedom,
the ability to act either way, is destroyed. However, even though Hobbes believed
that our wills are determined, he still maintained that there is an important
distinction to be drawn between voluntary and involuntary action. The Latin, “voluntas”
just means willed, and an action is said to be voluntary when it is willed
or, more precisely, caused by the will.
Involuntary actions, in contrast, are those that are not caused by the
will. For example, someone who throws
a punch at someone else can be said to act voluntarily insofar as they willed
to throw the punch, whereas someone who is thrown through the air by an
explosion and hits someone else as a result can be said to have acted
involuntarily since they did not move their body or will to move their body.
Of course, in the first case, where the person is said to have acted voluntarily
because they willed to throw the punch, it is still the case that their will
is determined. It might be objected that if an action
proceeds from the will, but the will is determined, then the action is
likewise determined. Hobbes would not
have disagreed. He would simply have
observed that there are two kinds of determined actions, the voluntary or
willed ones and the involuntary or unwilled ones. Voluntary actions are ones that are
determined by causes that move through the will; involuntary actions are ones
that are determined by causes that move the body directly, independently of
the will. Even though both voluntary and
involuntary actions are determined, the distinction between voluntary and
involuntary actions is very important for the sovereign or the social engineer,
who is attempting to construct a well-functioning society. In order to prevent the same bad things
from continually happening, the sovereign or social engineer needs to understand
the chain of events that produces them, and think how to best intervene to
prevent that chain of events from recurring.
When the chain of events involves the will of people, different
preventative measures are called for than when the the
chain bypasses or short-circuits the will.
When the goes through the the will, one way to prevent bad actions is
by punishment and one way to encourage good ones is by rewards, because we
have learned that pleasure and pain produce desire and aversion which in turn
intervene to turn the will from its course.
But when the cause is not the will, punishments and rewards will have
no effect. If vehicles are colliding
because intersections have been too poorly designed to allow people to see
approaching traffic, then you need to put up stop lights or improve the sight
lines rather than hand out traffic tickets.
On the other hand, if they are colliding because people are breaking
rules they have it within their physical power to obey, then rather than
modify your infrastructure you need to do something that will mechanically
change people’s process of deliberation so that they come to be prevented
from willing to break the law, such as putting police in public view and
ensuring that motorists see other motorists getting ticketed. Just as Hobbes said that the will cannot
be free, so he said that it cannot be voluntary. Whereas “free will” is a contradiction in
terms, “voluntary will” is a kind of category mistake. Since what is voluntary is what follows
from the will, you have to already have a will before you can be said to do
anything voluntary. To claim that the
will itself might be voluntary would be to claim that the will itself might
follow from the will, which is either meaningless or trite or gets us caught
in a vicious regress, by implying that you need to will to will before you
can will, from which it would follow that you need to will to will to will,
and so on. Rather than be voluntary,
or what follows the will, will is what follows from the process of
deliberation. The will, considered as
the last desire or aversion is mechanically caused by the mechanical
interaction of motions around my heart and in my brain, not spontaneously
chosen by some mysterious capacity of the mind. It
is a consequence of Hobbes’ view that actions proceeding from drunkenness,
rage, or other sudden passions are all voluntary. It will not do to object that in such cases
the alcohol or the passion interfered with our will or our judgment and made
us do what we did. For, it is always the case that something
influences the course of our deliberations and makes us end up with the last
desire or aversion that is our will.
There is no reason to treat cases where passion or inebriation
influences the course of deliberation any differently from cases where fear
of punishment or desire to win praise influences the course of deliberation. The alcohol or passion does not take away
the will. It simply shortens the
course of deliberation that leads up to the will. We still feel a last desire or aversion and
act on it. Similarly, being put in difficult
circumstances that compel you to make a certain choice does not change the
fact that your act is voluntary. An
act is voluntary as long as you will it and if your willing it was compelled by threats or fears
that makes no difference. The will is always determined by antecedent desires
and aversions of one sort or another so that there is no difference between
sticking to your diet because of your aversion to getting fat and perjuring
yourself in court because of your aversion to having your family murdered by
gangsters. However, Hobbes was willing to allow
that, insofar as actions can sometimes be considered as complex events
resulting from mixtures of simpler actions or aspects of actions, there can
be mixtures of voluntary and involuntary elements. Actions typically consist of motions, and
any motion can be considered to have two aspects: speed and direction, both
of which can be compounded from different factors. This opens the possibility that one
component of a motion, its speed, for example, might be voluntary while
another, its direction, might be involuntary. Hobbes gave the example of a prisoner being
led off to prison on the end of a rope.
The prisoner voluntarily goes at a walking speed so as not to be
painfully dragged by the rope, but the direction is not voluntary. Hobbes’ position on the will has
profound implications. If people’s
wills are determined in the ways that he thought then it is futile to simply lay
down some laws and expect that people will follow them. However just and well-considered those laws
may be, no one will follow them just because they know about them. People will do whatever their last desire
inclines them to do, and their last desire will in turn out to be determined
by mechanical causes. Nor can they be
blamed for doing not otherwise, since the power to do otherwise is only something
that they have temporarily, while still deliberating but that disappears as
their deliberation reaches its determined conclusion. This raises interesting questions about the
usefulness of moral rules and about the justice of praise, blame, reward and
punishment. It suggests, for instance,
that rather than worry about articulating ethical rules and principles, we
should be worried about politics: how to construct a Commonwealth where
people will be mechanically induced to desire to do what is best for the
common good. It also suggests that
punishment is a practice that should only be engaged in as part of a policy
of deterring members of the general populace from breaking the law, and not
because it is “justly deserved” by the lawbreaker. Hobbes said as much, though not in the
assigned reading. In a debate he had
with Bramhall over liberty, he declared that “The intention
of the law is not to grieve the delinquent for that which is past and not to
be undone, but to make him and others just that else [i.e., in the future]
would not be so,” (Questions concerning Liberty, Necessity, and Chance
§14). Hobbes here clearly rejected the
notion of retributive justice. The
past cannot be changed, he observed.
This means that when a “delinquent” does some harm, that harm cannot
be changed or undone. It is a fact about
the past that will forever remain what it is.
The “delinquent” might try to make up for it in some way, but that
does nothing to change the past, and we are rather inclined to think that
rich “delinquents” (or their parents), who can easily afford to pay for misdeeds
without feeling any real suffering, are doing nothing to prevent the social
problem of delinquency when they pay off those who have been harmed. We are rather more inclined to think that
the delinquent should be “paid back” for the harm by being harmed equally in
return. But Hobbes clearly appreciated
that this does nothing to change the past either. It does not take away the past harm. At best it satisfies the lust for vengeance
of the people who have been harmed.
But that may do nothing to prevent the possibility of a recurrence. On the contrary, harming the delinquent
solely for “pay-back” simply creates an opposed lust for vengeance in the
delinquent and the delinquent’s family, which is the source of feuds and
wars. There is only one thing that can
justify inflicting harm on the “delinquent,” according to Hobbes, and that is
if it serves a corrective purpose.
Since the past cannot be changed, we must focus on the future — not on
punishing the delinquent for crimes past, but on taking such measures as are
needed to reform the delinquent to prevent further crimes in the future, and
to deter others like the delinquent at the same time. To the extent that punishment serves that
purpose, and only to that extent, it is justified. This implies that people’s wills be determined by the fear of future
pain. So on Hobbes’s account, far from
it being the case that determination of the will makes punishment unjust, it
is the only thing that can justify the practice. The same holds for blame, which is a form
of punishment, and for praise and reward for good actions. This position becomes particularly
interesting when set against the Christian belief that God will reward the
just and punish the wicked in an afterlife.
What justice, we might wonder, is there in punishing people with
eternal damnation in hell for something they were determined to choose to
do? Here, reform and deterrence cannot
be invoked, because the damned will never be let out of hell, but will suffer
eternal torment without hope of any reprobation, whereas the elect will all
be saved and in no need of deterrence.
Whereas human beings may only punish to the extent that it exerts a
reformative or deterrent effect, God claims the right of vengeance. “Vengeance is mine,” the Christian
scriptures report God as saying. But
what justice is there in such vengeance, as it cannot change the past and
only inflicts suffering on the delinquent that can only be judged to be
vastly disproportionate to any crimes they may have committed? This is not a question that would have
given Hobbes’ Puritan fellow citizens in England any trouble. From the very beginning of the Protestant
Reformation, the reformers had opposed what they considered to be the Pelagian view that one can be saved by good works. Adhering to the darker Augustinian
doctrines of inveterate corruption as a consequence of original sin and
predestination to eternal damnation, they maintained that we are all born in
a state of total corruption, meriting eternal damnation, and that it is
impossible for any of us to do a truly good work unless we have first been
given the power to do so by a gracious gift of God. This gift must be truly
gracious (that is, given for free) because no one can deserve it. Before getting the gift, you are corrupt
and do not merit it, and cannot possibly do anything to escape your state of
corruption since good deeds only become possible after getting the gift. (To suppose any otherwise would be to
“render the cross of Christ of none effect,” as Augustine put it, for it
would suggest that people could earn salvation through their own good works,
and in that case Christ’s sacrifice would have been unnecessary.) The gift, moreover is irresistible (God
being all-powerful, his grace cannot be resisted) so that those who get the
gift are in effect compelled to be good.
For his own inscrutable reasons, God has determined that not all are
to be saved. All we are in a position
to observe is that all are totally corrupt and undeserving of salvation and
that God, like a rich man walking down a street full of beggars, graciously
gives a coin to one and not to another.
That he gives anything to anyone is more than they deserve, so we are
not to wonder why he does not save more.
Instead, we admire him for stooping to save any at all, and consider
this an act of immeasurable goodness.
Those who get the gift are the elect; those who do not will be damned,
and justly so for they are totally corrupt and wicked. In addition to praising God for freely
condescending to elevate the few undeserving wretches that he does, we must
not question God’s justice in condemning people to eternal torture in hell
for doing things they were predestined from the beginning of time to do as a
consequence of God’s decision to withhold Grace. God’s justice is not our justice but
justice of a more supreme and perfect kind than we can understand. These views were vigorously upheld by
those in the dominant Puritan and Presbyterian congregations of Hobbes’s b.
Human nature
I.xi.1-6 and 11-12. Radical as he was in the application of his
materialism, Hobbes hesitated to extend his mechanistic views beyond physical
and human nature to the nature of God.
He believed there is a God, and that we can rationally demonstrate
God’s existence by appeal to a cosmological argument that he sketched over
Human Nature I.xi.2. But his rigorous
commitment to the mechanical philosophy evaporated when it came to describing
the nature of God. Rather than take
God to be an extended, corporeal being who created the world by building
machines out of pre-existing, unorganized parts, Hobbes took God to be
indescribable. Perhaps he did this
because he was afraid of the charges of heresy or atheism that would be laid
against him had he said that God is just a machine made up of moving
parts. Or perhaps he was simply
persuaded by the logic of the argument that if God is the being who first
created matter, as Christianity (which Hobbes claimed to accept) teaches,
then God could not himself already be material. Either way, Hobbes found himself in a
very difficult situation. On the one
hand, he could not say that God is a material being or a machine made up of
moving parts. But neither could he say
that God is an immaterial substance.
Hobbes considered the words “immaterial substance” to be as much a
contradiction in terms as the words “free will.” “Substance” is just another name for body,
and body is something that takes up space.
However what is immaterial is what is not located anywhere in
space. The combination of the two
words is an explicit contradiction. People
claim that spirits are immaterial substances, but this is an abuse of
language. The term “spirit” had
originally been coined to refer to transparent bodies, like smoke or swamp
gas or fumes of alcohol (which we still call “spirits”). These are material things, though invisible
to the eye. They take up space and
have moving parts and interact mechanically with other things. But then people began using the term,
“spirit,” to refer to the images they saw in dreams, and the word came to
acquire the sense of some sort of immaterial being. As far as Hobbes was
concerned, this is nonsense. Something
cannot both be and be nowhere. But then what are we to say of God? Hobbes could get around the difficulty for
angels, by claiming that the only angels ever described in the Christian
scriptures are not explicitly said to be immaterial, and so may be either
invisible but material beings of a special sort created by God, or simply
images directly created by God in some prophet’s mind. The latter images would have no independent
existence but would be simply “messages” from God. He could also get around the problem for
human souls (which the Bible also assures us exist), by claiming that while
revelation may assure us that we have souls, it does not tell us that they
are immaterial. Our souls might be
gaseous, material spirits that dissipate or decay along with the parts of the
body when we die, and there would be nothing contrary to Christianity in
this, since Christianity does not actually teach the immateriality of the
soul, but only the resurrection of the body.
However, while these devices might solve the problem with angels and
human souls, what of God himself?
Hobbes could not admit that God is an immaterial spirit without giving
up his claim that the notion of immaterial spirits is contradictory, and
opening the door to the possible existence of other kinds of spirit as
well. In the end, he set upon the
device of claiming that God is simply unknowable. We can be sure that God exists by reasoning
from the cosmological argument, but God is simply too great a being for his
nature to be within our grasp. This gave rise to a suspicion, which has
persisted, that Hobbes was actually an atheist. As a matter of fact, the existence of God
does not fit well with his world-view, and it might look as if his talk about
the indescribability of God is simply a ruse to conceal this fact. This suspicion gains much of its
traction from the fact that it is easy for us to be atheists today. This makes us think it must have been
equally easy for people to be atheists in earlier times — just not as easy to
admit to it. But their times were not
our times. The early modern period was
a profoundly religious time and we should not underestimate the difficulty
someone living at that time would have bringing themselves to reject
religious doctrines. It is far more
likely that a thinker of that time whose philosophy led to irreligious
conclusions would try at all costs to reconcile the philosophy with the
religion in some strained fashion than that they would follow the argument
where it leads — and not because they feared being branded as atheists, but
because they were in fact sincerely religious. c. Human nature I.vi.7-9 and xi.7-10. In addition
to prudence, or knowledge based on past experience, and philosophical or
scientific knowledge, which proceeds by deduction from stipulative
definitions of universal names, Hobbes recognized that we form beliefs or
opinions. Two particularly important
grounds of belief are trust in the testimony of human witnesses (Human nature I.vi.7-9) and “inspiration”
by a supernatural beinig (Human nature I.xi.7-10). Most of what we think we know is in fact
not knowledge but opinion based on the testimony of others, who claim either
to have had sense experience of something or to be able to demonstrate
it. If I have never been to There is an important relation between inspiration
and trust in the testimony of others. Various
people throughout history have believed that God has inspired them with some
knowledge denied to others, or even that God or some divine messenger has
appeared to them and revealed some message to them. Hobbes insisted that such experiences
cannot be taken at face value. Anyone
having such an experience needs to ask whether they were really inspired by
God, or whether the messenger appearing to them really was God or some
messenger from God. And anyone
accepting anyone else’s claim to have been so inspired or informed needs to
ask the same question. Scriptural tradition represents prophets
as having been sensitive to this concern, and as having demanded that they be
given some sign to prove that the inspiration or the message is really coming
from God. Such a sign would be the
performance of some deed that it would be beyond the powers of any human
being to achieve and that only a supernatural being could perform — a
miracle. However, Hobbes observed that even when
a miracle is performed, it is not enough to justify accepting an inspiration
or a message. Just as there are wicked
people, who lie in their testimony to us, so there are devilish supernatural
beings, who may give us false messages and who may have the power to perform
miracles. Before we accept an
inspiration or a message we must know for sure that it came from God or an
angel of God, and not a devil. The test for this, Hobbes claimed, is the
consideration of the content of the inspiration or the message. If you are inspired to do something evil,
it cannot have come from God. The same
holds if you are inspired to promulgate a doctrine that has evil
effects. But it can be difficult to
determine whether an inspired course of action or an inspired doctrine is
good or evil. In these cases, Hobbes,
claimed, we have recourse to a further test: the message should at least
conform to what is said in the Christian scripture. No message contrary to what is said in the
Christian scripture, and no message given by a being who does not confess the
divinity of Christ, could be accepted as a message worthy of credence. This just pushes the problem back
another step. The Christian scripture
is itself just a collection of books written by inspired authors. What assures us that those authors were
inspired by God? To answer this question, Hobbes reverted
to the original criterion of “works and fruit.” He took faith in the testimony of other
(human) witnesses to support revelation.
We trust people whom we respect as being of good and wise
character. If those people tell us a
story that they got from other good and wise people, who got it from other
good and wise people, and so on back to original good and wise eye witnesses,
then we trust the story to the extent that we can trust the entire chain of
testimony that it is built on. This is
what Hobbes took to be the case with the Christian scriptures. We trust that those scriptures report the
authentic revelations of God on the strength of our respect for the entire
group of people and the entire tradition that reports it to us. We think that these people are honourable
and would not deceive us and so we think that these scriptures are the ones
that ought to be believed. A further element enters in here. There has always been a stream within
Christian denominations, including even the Catholic, that has maintained
that it is not possible to be “saved,” that is to truly believe the Christian
doctrine without the aid of a gift of faith or will to believe from God. The Protestant sects of Hobbes’s day had
made a great deal of this notion, maintaining that only certain people are
“elected” to become true believers and receive the rewards that brings, but
it had always been an element of orthodox Christianity since at least the
time of Augustine. Hobbes needed to accommodate this
element of orthodox Christianity. To
do so, he claimed that God created people with various different aptitudes
and dispositions. Some are stronger
than others, others more dexterous, and so on. A further naturally created difference is
that some are more disposed to draw a conclusion from a given body of
evidence than others. Some are
blockheads, who will not draw a conclusion from any body of evidence unless
it provides them with total certainty.
Others are enthusiasts, who will draw any conclusion from any evidence
as long as it conforms to their predilections. In between are the people of good sense,
who will draw a conclusion from good evidence even though the evidence is not
overwhelming. It is in this sense,
Hobbes maintained, that some people really have been “elected” by God for
salvation. It is not that God appears
to them or inspires them or makes them feel compelled to do something in
defiance of all inclinations. It is
rather that God made them so as to be disposed to lend credence to certain
kinds of probability. Note the
difference. For Hobbes, there is no
private, personal, felt, inspiration.
The conviction does not arise from some sort of communication with God. Instead it arises from constant and abiding
character traits that have the same effect in all similar cases, and not just
in this one. Moreover, the conviction
has a rational foundation. It is based
on reasoning from certain kinds of evidence.
The reasoning, however, is merely probabilistic and therefore always
leaves room for doubt. The evidence,
moreover is of a public and historic sort.
It presupposes a community of believers who have earned the trust of
the individual and who contribute to forming a chain of testimony reaching
back to the original revelation and miracles.
That circumstance does not render the testimony indubitable. But it is good enough for some people,
because God has made them that way. We might object that Hobbes’s account is
circular. The testimony of the
Christian community can only be as trustworthy as the testimony of first
Christians, which it reports: the testimony of the Apostles and other
followers who actually saw Christ and reported on the miracles Christ performed. But how did these people know that they
were being appeared to by God and not by a supernatural being who was
impersonating God and giving them a false message? We cannot say, “because the message Christ
delivered was in accord with scripture,” because there was no scripture
yet. (Or if there was, then the
question of the authenticity of that scripture arises and the question just
gets pushed back to the authors of that scripture, e.g., Moses.) If the first Christians were in no position
to authenticate their religion, then those who now hear tales of what they
did and experienced are in no better position to do so. But this objection misses the
point. It presumes that there is some
rational justification for religious belief.
But Hobbes denied that there is any such thing. HN I.xi.8 declares that there is no means,
either natural (by reasoning) or supernatural (by direct inspiration), by
which we may obtain knowledge (meaning infallible science and evidence) of
the truth of Christianity. The faith
we have is nothing more than a hunch that certain people have — a hunch that
perhaps God made them be disposed to draw from such evidence as there
is. But only perhaps. We have no way of knowing for sure. If God (specifically that Christian god) does
exist and does demand belief, then in making them that way, God would have
“elected” them for salvation. And in
not making the rest of us able to be compelled by that evidence he would have
predestined us to damnation, consistently with rigorous Protestant doctrine
about election to Grace and predestination to eternal damnation. That having been said, there is
something of an appeal to the record of history in Hobbes’s account. Whatever problems the first apostles might
have had with rationally justifying their belief, and whatever need they
might have had for a special revelation, we today can look back on a
historical record of the works of those who have testified to a particular
religion and form some judgment of whether they were good, honest, intelligent
people whose views ought now to be respected. However disappointing this account of
the foundations of religious belief might be to those who would want to
maintain that the evidence of the truth of Christianity ought to be patent to
all, Hobbes would have been attracted to it for political reasons. Hobbes’ lifetime spanned one of the most
tumultuous periods in British history, the period of the Puritan revolution,
Cromwell’s dictatorship, and the Restoration.
Events in Hobbes’ position on religion needs to be
understood in this context. Hobbes had
been profoundly disturbed by the civil and religious strife of his time, and
concern with civil and religious strife was never far from his mind (witness
the example at the outset of HN I.iv: “from St.
Andrew the mind runneth to St. Peter, because their
names are read together; from St. Peter to a stone, for the same cause; from
stone to foundation, because we see them together; and for the same cause
from foundation to church, from church to people, and from people to
tumult”). Even before the civil war
got under way, he had fled into exile in France out of fear that his
political views on the deference that subjects owe to the sovereign (views
that he had developed as part of a project to calm passions and argue against
a revolution) would lead to his persecution were he to remain in England
should Cromwell gain control. But
these same views argued as effectively against a restoration once Cromwell’s
authority was established, and made Hobbes unpopular with the court in
exile. In taking the view on the basis
for religious faith that he did, Hobbes was trying to combat an extreme
enthusiasm that would rest faith simply on the intense, inward conviction of
having been born again in the word and filled with certainty of the divine
message through an irresistible infusion of the Grace that God arbitrarily
disperses to the elect. This
enthusiasm had made the English bold enough to overthrow and execute their
sovereign. Hobbes found it wild and
dangerous. He wanted to found
religious faith on some sort of more stable and sober communal authority and
argue for a degree of respect for an established church and its
hierarchy. Hence the concluding
paragraphs of HN I.xi, condemning the prerogative of individuals to interpret
Scripture on controversial topics (10) and commenting on the forms that
worship ought to take (11-12). ESSAY
QUESTIONS AND RESEARCH PROJECTS
1. Drawing on the
notes, HN VI.5-9 and XI, and Leviathan
I.xi, III.xxxiii, xxxvii,
and xlii, describe Hobbes’ account of the basis for religious faith, being
careful to specify the role played by each of testimony, miracles, conformity
to scripture, and authority in that account.
Try to reach a verdict on the respective roles of reason (say in
authenticating miracle claims, adjudicating testimony, or drawing conclusions
from the design in nature) and revelation (whether accepted by a leap of
faith, on the evidence of reason, or as a result of irresistible Grace) in
that account. Outline some problems
with the account in addition to the one mentioned in the notes.
2. Did Hobbes make
a compelling case for denying freedom of the will?
3. Did Hobbes make
a compelling case for soft determinism?
4. Supposing Hobbes
was right in what he said about the will, does it still make sense to praise,
blame or punish people for their actions? Does it make any sense to legislate
moral rules? Even if it does not make
sense to legislate moral rules, might it still make sense legislate civil
laws and enforce them with punishments?
5. How would Hobbes have accounted for what is termed weakness of
the will? |