Professor Steven Smith:
Where else are we?
Today we're going to continue
the state of nature,
Hobbes' most famous discovery,
his most famous metaphor,
his most famous concept.
At the end of class last time,
I tried to identify Hobbes'
central problem,
is the problem of authority,
what makes authority possible,
what makes authority
legitimate, and in order to
answer that question,
I suggested,
he created this idea,
this metaphor again,
of a state of nature,
a state in which he says we are
naturally in.
Hobbes' state of nature is
virtually the opposite of
Aristotle's conception of the
natural end or the natural
telos of man.
It does not consist of our
perfection, a condition of our
perfection as Aristotle
believed,
but for Hobbes the state of
nature is something like the
condition of human life in the
absence of authority,
in the absence of anyone to
impose rules,
order, law on us.
What would human beings be like
in such a condition,
a condition of the type that he
imagined maintains in periods of
crisis,
civil war of the kind that was
true of England in the 1640s?
And I suggested at the end of
last time that in many ways
Hobbes' idea of the state of
nature can be understood in a
sense as an extension of his
scientific methodology set out
in the opening chapters of the
book.
Let's imagine,
as he says, human beings as if
they were in a sort of
laboratory test tube.
Let's strip human beings of all
their social ties and customs
and traditions.
Let's see what they would be
like in abstraction from all of
the social and political
relationships which they enjoy
and see how they would interact
with one another almost as
chemical properties.
And you can see Hobbes working
along that line but I would say
this as it were scientific or
proto-scientific conception of
the state of nature is not the
whole answer to this story
because underlying Hobbes'
conception of the state of
nature is a powerful moral
conception,
a moral idea of the human
being, and that's what I want to
talk a little bit about today.
Hobbes is a moralist,
which seems odd in some ways.
How could grim and dour old
Thomas Hobbes be regarded as a
moralist or someone with a moral
conception of human nature and
the human condition?
But that's what I want to
suggest to you today.
The term, in a sense in which
we might better characterize his
conception of the state of
nature, is one of individuality.
Hobbes shows us what it is to
exercise the qualities of moral
agency;
that is, to say to do for
ourselves rather than to have
things done for us or for you.
Hobbes introduced into our
moral language the idiom of
individuality.
And this concept,
the concept of what it is to be
an individual,
a moral agent,
isn't really--is really not
older than or at least not much
older than the seventeenth
century.
Until the Renaissance or not
much later, people considered
themselves primarily not as
individuals but as members,
members of a particular family,
of a caste, of a guild,
of a particular religious
order,
of a city or so on.
The idea that one is first of
all a self with an "I," an ego,
would have been regarded as
unintelligible and even as late
as the nineteenth century Alexis
de Tocqueville in Democracy
in America says,
"individualism is a recent
expression arising from a new
idea."
That idea appeared new to
Tocqueville as late as the
nineteenth century and this idea
of the individual,
I want to suggest,
is at least in part and maybe
in large part traceable back to
Hobbes.
What is Hobbes' individual?
Hobbes conceived us through a
process of abstraction from the
web of attachments in which we
find ourselves.
We are beings,
he argues again in the opening
chapters, whose fundamental
characteristics as human beings
are willing and choosing.
We are beings for whom the
exercise of the will is a
preeminent feature and much of
our happiness as human beings
depends upon our capacity to
exercise our will and our
ability for choice.
Life for Hobbes is an exercise
in continual willing and
continual choosing that may be
temporarily interrupted but can
never come to an end except with
the end of life itself.
Hobbes' individuality or
individualism is closely
connected to this conception of
a human being or human
well-being as success in the
competition for the goods of
life.
"Continual success," he writes
in chapter 6,
"continual success in obtaining
those things which a man from
time to time desireth is what is
called happiness or felicity.
Our well being depends on our
ability to achieve the objects
of our desires,
the objects of our choices,
for there is no such thing," he
continues, "as perpetual
tranquility of mind,
no such thing as perpetual
tranquility, while we live here,
because life itself is but
motion and can never be without
desire nor without fear no more
than without sense."
These are the characteristics
of human life,
sense, fear and desire,
continual desire for one thing
after another,
and for Hobbes this fact is not
simply a physical or factual
description of human behavior
but it is a moral condition
because we are each of us
bundles of activity and
initiative,
of likes and dislikes,
of desires and aversions.
Life for Hobbes is competition
or struggle not just over scarce
resources, although that might
be part of the struggle,
but for honors,
for anything else that a person
might value or esteem.
Hobbes is fascinated and,
is again like Montaigne and a
number of others,
he is fascinated with the
diversity,
the sheer diversity,
multiplicity of human desires.
What leads one person to
laughter, leads another person
to tears, what leads one person
to piety and prayer,
leads another person to
ridicule and so on and so on.
Even moral terms,
Hobbes says,
terms like "good" and "evil,"
he says are expressions of our
individual likes and dislikes.
We like something,
he says, not because it is good
but we call something good
because we like it and the same
with other moral qualities and
attributes.
They are expressions for him of
our psychological states and
aspirations and it is this
individualism that is the ground
of the general competition that
we all experience for the
objects of our desires that he
says the--or from this he infers
that the natural condition is
one of competition,
of struggle,
of enmity and of war.
In a famous passage from
chapter 11 he posits,
as he puts it,
"a general inclination of all
mankind,
a perpetual and restless desire
of power after power that
ceaseth only in death."
This is, as he puts it,
"a general inclination of all
mankind," this constant
restlessness and motion and
expression of our individuality
and what I have been calling
Hobbes' individualism is
connected,
in fact even is underwritten by
another attribute that is
central to Hobbes.
It is his skepticism.
Like many of the great early
modern philosophers,
Montaigne, Descartes,
Spinoza,
Hobbes was obsessed with the
question about what can I know
or, maybe put a different way,
what am I entitled to believe,
and there are many passages in
Leviathan that testify to
Hobbes' fundamentally skeptical
view of knowledge.
Right?
He is a skeptic not because he
believes that we can have no
foundations for our beliefs
whatever but he is a skeptic in
the sense that there can be no,
on his view,
transcendent or nonhuman
foundations for our beliefs.
We cannot be certain,
he thinks, of the ultimate
foundations of our knowledge and
this explains,
you may have wondered about
this, this explains the
importance he attributes to such
things as naming and attaching
correct definitions to things.
For reason, he writes in a
famous passage,
"for reason is nothing but
reckoning,
that is adding and subtracting
the consequences of general
names agreed upon."
Knowledge, in other words,
is for Hobbes a human
construction and it is always
subject to what human beings can
be made to agree upon and that
skeptical view of knowledge or
at least skeptical view of the
foundation of knowledge has far
reaching consequences for him.
If all knowledge,
according to Hobbes,
ultimately rests on agreement
about shared terms,
he infers from that that our
reason, our rationality,
has no share in what Plato or
Aristotle would have called the
divine Noos,
the divine intelligence.
Our reason has within it no
spark of divinity.
Our reason does not testify to
some kind of inner voice of
conscience or anything that
would purport to give it some
kind of indubitable foundation.
Such certainty as we have about
anything is for Hobbes always
provisional, discovered on the
basis of experience and subject
to continual revision in the
light of further experience,
and that again experiential
conception of knowledge.
That kind of skepticism about
the foundations of knowledge has
further implications for Hobbes'
views on such things as religion
and religious toleration.
"There are no signs or fruit of
religion," he says,
"but in man only," he says in
chapter 12.
That is to say,
the causes of religion can be
traced back and are rooted in
the restlessness of the human
mind in its search for causes.
And it is because,
he says, we are born ignorant
of causes, we are ignorant of
the causes of things,
that we are led to search out
beginnings and origins and this
leads us ultimately,
he says, to posit the existence
of God who is,
so to speak,
the first cause of all things.
Hobbes does not,
despite this kind of
rationalistic view of religion
and his view that religion has
its origin again in the
restlessness of the human mind,
Hobbes doesn't deny the
possibility of revelation or
some kind of direct
communication of God to us.
But what he does deny is that
anyone who has claimed to
receive such a revelation,
he denies that any such person
has the right to impose that
view on anyone else because
nobody else can correctly have
the means to verify a person's
claim to revelation.
No one can impose their claim
of revealed knowledge on
another.
Does this make Hobbes an
atheist, as many would have
maintained in his day?
No.
It makes him a skeptic about
revealed religion.
So it is because of this
individualism and skepticism,
a view of life as willing and
choosing,
that there are in the state of
nature so to speak no standards
to adjudicate conflicts,
that the central issue of
politics arises,
namely what makes authority
possible,
how are people who are
biologically individually
constituted, so to speak,
how can any of them ever--any
of us ever be capable of obeying
common rules or having moral
obligations to one another?
How is that possible,
Hobbes continues to ask in a
manner of speaking on almost
every page of the book.
But before answering that
question, consider a little
further Hobbes' account of the
state of nature and what makes
it seem like a plausible
starting point to answer the
question of what makes authority
possible.
To say that the state of nature
consists primarily of
individuals with again diverse
likes,
dislikes, beliefs,
opinions and the like is not to
say that the state of nature is
a state of isolation,
as it sometimes attributed to
him.
People in the state of nature
may have regular and continual
contact with one another.
It is just that their relations
are unregulated.
They are unregulated by law;
they are unregulated by
authority.
The state of nature is simply a
kind of condition of maximum
insecurity, an unregulated
market with no common laws or
rules to sustain it.
The emphasis on the individual
is just another way of saying,
again unlike Aristotle,
that no one has natural
authority over anyone else.
Relations of authority exist
only by, so to speak,
the consent or the will of the
governed.
And the fact that relations in
the state of nature are
unregulated for him makes
it--it's synonymous with making
it a condition of war,
of "all against all," in his
famous formulation.
Now, you might look at that
formulation, the state of war is
one against--of all against all
and you might say that such a
condition of civil war,
of maximum insecurity,
of the total breakdown of
condition of rules and laws is
if anything the state of the
exception.
How often does that really
occur in our experience in human
life?
But Hobbes, like Machiavelli,
as we saw, likes to take the
exceptional situation and turn
it into the norm.
It becomes the normal
condition, state of security,
insecurity, fear,
conflict and the like.
This is not to say,
again, that the state of nature
for Hobbes is one of permanent
fighting.
But it is one of permanent fear
and distrust and he asks his
readers…there are so many
wonderful passages in this book,
this just happens to be one of
my particular favorites,
he asks his readers if you
don't believe me,
again think of his skepticism,
don't believe me,
he says, check your own
experience and see if I'm not
right.
And this is what he writes.
"Let him, the reader,
therefore ask himself," Hobbes
writes, "when taking a journey
he arms himself and seeks to go
well accompanied.
When going to sleep,
he locks his doors even when in
his house, and even when in his
house he locks his chests and
this,
when he knows,
he says, there be laws and
public officers armed to avenge
all injuries shall be done to
him.
What opinion,
Hobbes asks,
he has of his fellow subjects
when he rides armed?
What does that say about your
thinking about your fellow
citizens when you arm yourselves
going for a trip,
of his fellow citizens when he
locks his doors at night or of
his children and servants when
he locks his chests?
Does he not therefore as much
accuse mankind by his action as
I do by my words?"
You can see the mischievousness
of Hobbes in that delightful
passage.
What about you,
he says, and this is not in
some kind of state of nature.
This is in a completely fully
functioning society when you go
armed, when you lock your doors,
when you lock your chests at
night, don't your actions and
your experience simply confirm
what I'm saying?
And this tells us another thing
about the state of nature which
it is easy to forget.
The state of nature,
at least for Hobbes,
is not some kind of primitive
anthropological datum that we
find by going back in time
somehow.
Rousseau will speak about it
more this way.
For Hobbes, the state of nature
exists, he says,
whenever authority is not
enforced.
The state of nature fully
continues, in many ways,
oddly even in civil society,
he says, whenever we have
reason to believe that our lives
or our properties or ourselves
are not secure.
In fact, we can never be fully
free of the fear and of the
anxiety and uncertainty of the
state of nature,
even within to some degree of
fully constituted civil society.
The only exception to this of
course in Hobbes' account of the
state of nature when he says
"don't you lock your doors at
night" are of course Yale
students living here on campus
who are so trusting that they
never lock their doors at night
in the entryways and so on and
then of course are always
stunned to find when something
is stolen from them,
how could this be?
And I tell them lock your doors
but they still don't believe me.
Maybe you'll now believe Hobbes
if you don't believe me.
So the state of nature,
it's a state of insecurity,
it's a state of conflict.
How do we get out of it?
This is of course the huge
issue that Hobbes asks for the
rest of--for much of the book.
What do we do to get out of
this state of nature to enter a
condition of civil society and
civilized life?
How do I give up my right to do
whatever is in my power to
secure my person or my
possessions,
when I have no expectation,
you might say,
that others around me are
prepared to do so as well?
This is sort of a classic
example of what economists and
other people like them call the
prisoner's dilemma.
Why should I act in such a way
if I have no expectation or
reasonable expectation that
those around me will
reciprocate?
Hobbes' members of a state of
nature seem to be in a classic
prisoner's dilemma problem.
Maybe we can say,
we could say or Hobbes could
say, that laying down our right
to do all things in seeking
peace with others is the
rational thing to do in the
condition of nature.
We are all rational actors and
therefore it is rational for us
to seek and to desire peace,
but note that that is exactly
what Hobbes does not say,
he does not say this.
Far from having a sort of
rational actor model of
politics, he operates with an
irrational actor model.
He assumes that it is not
reason but our passions that are
the dominant force of human
psychology, our desires,
our aversions,
our passions.
And although I have said that
Hobbes has emphasized the
diversity of our passions there
are still two main passions that
he feels universally dominate
human nature and these two
passions are pride and fear.
Pride and fear,
these are the Hobbesian
equivalents of the two
great--what Machiavelli called
humors you remember,
the two humors of the two great
social classes,
the desires of the rich and
powerful as it were to rule over
others and the desire of the
weak not to be ruled.
Machiavelli called those the
two umori,
the two humors.
And Hobbes similarly works with
a kind of model.
He's a great political
psychologist,
the two great passions of pride
and fear.
Pride, he says,
is the passion for preeminence,
the desire to be first and also
to be seen to be first in the
great race of life.
Prideful people,
he tells us,
are those overflowing with
confidence about their own
abilities to succeed and we all
know people like this,
don't we, like Yale students?
They're all overflowing with
confidence, kind of alpha types.
Machiavelli might call them
sort of manly men who are fully
confident about their abilities.
And yet Hobbes is a great
debunker of human pride.
Pride is equivalent to what he
calls vanity or vainglory.
It is a kind of exaggerated
confidence in one's own power
and ability.
It is pride,
the desire to lord it over
others and to have one's
superiority acknowledged by
others,
that is the great problem for
Hobbes to be averted.
But if pride for him is one of
his great universal passions so
is its opposite,
fear.
Hobbes makes the fear of death
that may come to us at any time
in the state of nature,
perhaps he exaggerates this,
by making it appear that the
state of nature is a kind of
existential condition in which
death can come to you at almost
any moment.
But there is more to fear than
this, simply fear of death,
although Hobbes emphasizes and
dramatically perhaps
overemphasizes this.
Fear is not just the desire to
avoid death but to avoid losing,
you might say again,
in the great race of life,
to avoid losing and to be seen
as a loser.
It is the desire to avoid the
shame of being seen by others as
losing out somehow.
There is a social quality
clearly to both of these
passions, pride and fear,
one again the desire to have
one's preeminence esteemed by
others, fear,
the desire to avoid shame and
dishonor.
How we are seen by others is a
crucial cardinal part of Hobbes'
moral psychology and each of us,
he says, contain.
These do not simply represent
two classes of individuals,
two classes of persons.
Each of us contains these two
warring, you might say,
elements within us,
both self-assertion and fear of
the consequence of
self-assertion.
The question is for Hobbes,
how do we tame these passions?
It is most of all pride that
Hobbes wants to tame and of
course the very title of his
book, Leviathan,
he tell us later on comes from
what?
Do you remember?
Where does it come from?
Who remembers?
Passage from what?
Job, Book of Job,
where he refers to Leviathan as
king of the children of pride.
The book is based on a biblical
metaphor about overcoming or
subduing pride.
As the great Marsellus Wallace
says in the film Pulp Fiction,
pride never helps,
it only hurts,
if you remember that
magnificent speech.
Fear, Hobbes says,
is the passion to reckon on,
is the passion to be reckoned
on.
It is fear, not reason,
that leads us to abandon the
state of nature and sue for
peace.
The passions that incline men
to peace, Hobbes writes,
are fear of death.
This is not to say that Hobbes
believes fear to be the
naturally stronger of the two
passions;
in fact, far from it.
There are many people certainly
even around us who Hobbes
believes do not fear death as
they should,
the proud aristocrat who
prefers death before dishonor,
the religious zealot prepared
to sacrifice his life and of
course those of others in order
to achieve the rewards of heaven
and of course just the risk
taking individual who seeks to
climb Mount Everest just for the
honor and esteem involved.
And it is part of the broader
educational or pedagogic
function of Leviathan to
help us see,
Hobbes thinks,
the dangers of pride and the
advantages of peace.
Properly directed,
fear leads to peace.
Fear is the basis,
even of what Hobbes calls the
various laws of nature,
that lead us to civil society.
The laws of nature for Hobbes
are described as a precept or a
general rule of reason that
every man ought to endeavor
peace and it is out of fear that
we begin to reason and see the
advantages of society;
reason is dependent upon the
passions, upon fear.
The first and most fundamental
law of nature,
he says, is to seek peace and
follow it.
Not only should one seek peace
but we have an obligation,
he says, to lay down our arms,
to lay down our right to all
things on the condition that
others around us are prepared to
do so as well.
And Hobbes goes on to enumerate
19 laws of nature,
I won't go into all of them,
19 laws of nature that
constitute a kind of framework
for establishing civil society.
These laws he even compares as
his equivalent of the Golden
Rule which he states in the
negative: Do not do unto others
what you would not have them do
unto you.
Here is Hobbes' rewriting of
the Golden Rule in terms of
these laws of nature but these
raise a question for us as
readers of Hobbes.
Right?
Don't they?
What is the status of the laws
of nature?
What is the moral status,
if any, of these laws?
Hobbes, as we see,
sometimes writes as a sort of
scientist or proto-scientist for
whom nature and one supposes the
laws of nature operate with the
same kind of necessity as the
laws of physical attraction.
That's how he often writes
about human behavior,
that we obey the same laws of
physical attraction as do any
other bodies that we might
choose to describe.
They describe how bodies in
motion always and necessarily
behave, these laws of nature.
And yet at the same time,
Hobbes writes as a moralist for
whom the laws of nature,
he calls "precepts of reason"
or general rules according to
which we are forbidden to do
anything destructive of life."
In this sense,
the laws of nature,
as he describes them,
appear to be moral laws with
moral commands,
commands you not to do anything
that is destructive of life,
your own or that of others,
and these moral laws,
in this sense,
we have presumably the freedom
to obey them or disobey them.
If they acted with a kind of
mechanical necessity or even
geometric necessity,
they could not possibly be
moral laws in that way.
They can only be moral if there
is some semblance of human
choice or will expressed in the
relationship,
our ability to do otherwise.
So these laws of nature,
seek peace and so on,
do not simply seem to be
descriptive of how people do
behave.
They seem to be prescriptive of
how people ought to behave and
this Hobbes even suggests at the
end of chapter 15 when he writes
about the laws of nature,
"these dictates of reason men
used to call by the name
‘laws' but improperly for they
are conclusions or theorems
according to what conduces to
the conversation of mankind."
These used to be called laws of
nature, he says,
but improperly.
So if they are only improperly
laws of nature why does Hobbes
continue to use the term?
Why does he use this
terminology of "laws of nature"?
In a sense, this might simply
be Hobbes' way of paying homage
to the ancient tradition of
natural law going back to the
medieval scholastics,
to the stoics,
and perhaps even beyond them.
The natural laws for Hobbes are
not divine commands or
ordinances, he says,
but they are rules of practical
reason figured out by us as the
optimal means of securing our
well-being.
These laws of nature,
as he describes them,
do not issue categorical
commands so much as sort of
hypothetical rules.
If you want X, do Y;
if you want peace,
here are the means to it.
And he calls these laws,
these 19 laws of nature,
the true and only moral
philosophy.
So you can see in that passage
Hobbes takes himself to be a
moralist writing within the
great tradition of moral
philosophy.
These laws of nature are for
him the true and only moral
philosophy.
Well, this brings me to some
criticisms or at least some
questions about Hobbes'
conception of the laws of
nature.
What are we to make of these
laws, as I've asked before?
In one sense,
there seems to be a genuine
moral content to Hobbes' laws of
nature which can be reduced to a
single formula:
Seek peace above all other
goods.
Hobbes, more than anyone else,
wants us to value the virtues
of civility.
Those, you might say,
summed up in a word are what
the 19 laws of nature command.
The civility entails the
virtues of peace,
equity, fairness,
playing by the rules.
Peace is for Hobbes a moral
good and the virtues are those
qualities of behavior that tend
to peace and vices are those
that lead to war.
Consider the disadvantages of
war and the benefits of peace.
Here is what Hobbes writes.
"In such a condition,
that is the state of nature,
there is no place for industry
because the fruit thereof is
uncertain and consequently no
culture of the earth,
no navigation nor building nor
instruments of moving and
removing things as require much
force,
no knowledge of the face of the
earth, no account of time,
no arts, no letters,
no society and which is worst
of all continual fear and danger
of violent death."
This is again the sort of
existential condition in which
Hobbes wants to put us in the
state of nature and all the
benefits he lists there,
he enumerates,
that are denied to us in such a
condition, again no knowledge,
no geography,
no cultivation of the earth,
no navigation or building.
All of these things are the
fruits of peace,
he tells us.
But at this point,
a careful reader such as all of
yourselves no doubt,
would no doubt be suggesting,
I've gone too far in suggesting
or calling Hobbes a moral
philosopher whose motto in a way
could be summed up in the phrase
"Give peace a chance."
Is that what Hobbes believed?
Why is the peace the highest
good anyway?
Why not justice?
Why not honor?
Why not piety?
Why not the examined life?
What makes peace so good for
Hobbes?
Well, I've given a number of…
have quoted him on a number of
reasons but one suggestion might
be that it is not so much peace
alone that Hobbes cherishes as
life.
Peace is a means to life.
Every creature,
he says, has a built-in desire
to preserve itself,
to persevere in its own
existence,
to continue in its own steady
state you might say,
and to resist invasion or
encroachment by others.
We are all endowed,
he says, with a kind of natural
right to life and the desire to
preserve oneself is not just a
biological fact,
although it is also that,
it is for him a moral right,
it is a moral entitlement,
every being has a fundamental
right to its own life.
We not only have a right to our
lives but to do whatever we
regard as needful to protect our
lives.
And again, this is not simply a
brute fact of nature.
It is a moral entitlement for
Hobbes, the source of human
worth and dignity.
But now you will suggest,
I've really gone too far,
attributing to Hobbes a
doctrine of human dignity that
one might expect to find in a
philosopher like Kant or someone
else.
Didn't Hobbes cynically write
in chapter 10,
"the value or worth of a man is
of all things his price,"
what price we will fetch in the
marketplace no doubt,
the value or worth of a man is
his price,
a phrase incidentally quoted by
Karl Marx to indicate the sheer
heartlessness of the kind of the
bourgeoisie society that Hobbes
was hoping to bring about.
And doesn't Hobbes' materialism
and his sort of mechanistic
theory of nature seem to detract
from any inherent worth of the
individual?
There seems to be something to
that and yet Hobbes certainly
regards life as a precious good,
perhaps the most precious good
of all, and he writes with a
lively sense of how fragile and
endangered life is.
The work as a whole can be seen
as an effort to dispel what he
believes to be false beliefs,
false doctrines and beliefs,
that disguise the truth from
us, truth about the value of
life;
for example,
beliefs about the afterlife and
all beliefs that detract from an
appreciation for the value of
life as it is.
This provides the moral basis
of what I would call Hobbes'
humanitarianism and yet that
humanitarianism seems to raise
further problems.
Doesn't Hobbes or does Hobbes'
attempt to instill in us,
the readers of his book,
his attempt to instill in us an
appreciation for life and the
value of life,
does this simultaneously create
an aversion to risk,
an extreme fear of conflict and
challenge or disorder?
You could say is this constant
fear that Hobbes harps on fear
of death and the value of life,
to put it rather rudely,
is this not another word for
cowardice?
Does Hobbes' emphasis on the
preservation of life as the
supreme moral value,
does this turn his mighty
Leviathan into a kind of
commonwealth of cowards?
Where Aristotle made the
courage of men in combat a
central virtue of his ethics,
Hobbes pointedly omits courage
from his list of the moral
virtues.
At one point,
he even suggests that courage
is really just a species of
rashness and his example of
courage comes from duels and
duel fighting which he says will
be always honorable but are
unlawful.
"For duels," he says,
"are many times effects of
courage and the ground of
courage is always strength or
skill though for the most part,"
he says, "they be effects of
rash speaking and the fear of
dishonor in one or both of the
combatants."
In other words,
courage for him again is a form
of vanity or pride,
the desire not to appear less
than another.
It is a form of rashness,
he says.
And that suspicion is further
carried out in Hobbes' very
interesting treatment of
military conscription which he
talks about in chapter 21.
There he describes battle,
as he says, "a mutual running
away" to armies confronting one
another he describes as a mutual
running away,
and furthermore he says when it
comes to conscription there
should be allowance made for
those that he calls "men of
natural timorousness,"
cowards in other words.
A man that has commanded as a
soldier, Hobbes writes,
to fight against the enemy
though his sovereign has the
right enough to punish his
refusal with death may
nevertheless,
Hobbes writes,
in many cases refuse without
injustice as when he
substituteth a sufficient
solider in his place.
In other words,
Hobbes' view of this is why do
the fighting yourself,
if you can get someone else to
do it for you?
There is no intrinsic virtue in
courage or battle,
if you can get somebody else to
do the job for you,
a sort of perfect description,
I think, of our volunteer army,
how we pay people to do this
difficult and dangerous work for
us.
But the question is,
can even a Hobbesian society,
one which insists on rules and
so on,
can a Hobbesian society do
entirely without-- Professor
Steven Smith: Anyway,
can a Hobbesian society do
without what we might call them
the manly virtues,
the civic virtues,
pride, love of honor that
Hobbes seems to condemn?
Consider the case of Ralph
Esposito.
Who is Ralph Esposito, you ask?
His name is not in the index of
Hobbes' book but Mr.
Esposito is a New York City
fireman who came to Branford
College to be a Master's Tea
guest not long after 9/11 and at
length he discussed there people
like himself who daily risk
their lives running into
building burning--burning
buildings to rescue total
strangers.
Why do people do this?
Is it because some people have
a kind of built in sense of
thumos,
that wonderful Platonic term,
pride, courage,
love of risk that no society,
not even a Hobbesian one,
can do without?
Even Hobbes' society presumably
cannot do without a fire
department or a police
department;
yet, if one were to follow
Hobbes' risk averse psychology,
if one were to follow the 19
laws of nature that advise us to
seek peace and to avoid
conflict,
why would anyone ever become a
fireman, a soldier,
a risk taker,
a policeman of any sort?
Why would anyone ever risk
one's life for one's country or
a cause just to help other
people, people that we don't
know and probably will never
know?
Even in the passage that I
cited earlier,
where Hobbes describes the
benefits of civil society,
he speaks of activities like
navigation, exploration and
industry.
Presumably, these are
activities that are all engaged
in risk taking behavior of one
kind or another that seem not to
be able to be explained by
Hobbes' law of nature alone.
So the question I want to leave
you with today and that I want
to pick up again on Wednesday
is, in the end,
what do societies require more
of?
Do they require more of Hobbes'
men of natural timorousness or
do they require more Ralph
Espositos?
And on that we'll finish up
Hobbes on Wednesday.
 
