»Dabei wird Hobbes' LEVIATHAN anschaulich.« GULLIVER'S TRAVELS an illustration of LEVIATHAN? [continued] 4. The roots of Hobbes's »pessimism« Thomas Hobbes, as his biographer tells us, was no pessimist, but from the beginning his life was haunted by fear. His mother, as he put it, gave birth to him and to fear simultaneousy: he was born when the Spanish Armada, seemingly invincible, was about to attack England. As a man he was traumatized by the horrors of the Civil War of Cromwell's era. His obsession was, if he had one, to find a guarantee that such »bellum omnium contra omnes« would never happen again. His theory of the Leviathan, the all-powerful sovereign, embodied by the State, was the remedy he firmly believed in. To my mind, Hobbes was a realist who painted an image of man that seemed pessimist to later generations and to EJ. Hobbes had reasons for this view that were alien and even hateful to Swift. Hobbes was a rigorous anti-traditionalist like Francis Bacon and other protagonists of the New Science of his age. These men wanted to get rid of the modules of thought invented by Aristotle that for centuries had been honed by speculating minds and carried away from reality. So Hobbes, like Bacon, Galileo, Newton, and other protagonists of the New Science faced a Chinese Wall of tradition fortified by Authority. They resolutely turned away from it and set out in a new direction, trusting only their own observation and their own intellects when looking at the world and at nature. They were eager to base their enquiries on a method that was accessible and plausible to every rational mind. Tradition and authority failed that test because in order to accept them you merely have to obey and suspend your disbelief. The method they turned to was mathematical science, applied to the results of empirical observation. This paradigm change liberated their minds from blinding tradition and opened the road towards discovering the inner workings of nature, from the law of gravity to the structure of DNA, describing them in universally plausible terms and eventually controlling and manipulating them. Today's biologists triumphantly reporting their almost daily advances in the Brave New World of genetic engineering may claim by rights Hobbes and his colleagues of the New Science of 1600 as their founding fathers. His enthusiasm of a pioneer of a new era carried Hobbes as far as to be convinced that he could re-write both political science and psychology »more geometrico«, i.e. treating them as operations of the human mind that consist of exactly definable elements and that interact according to rules that are fully comprehensible to any reasonable man. Since reason, to Hobbes's mind, »is nothing but reckoning, that is adding and subtracting.« he tries to describe his objects of enquiry in terms that approximate mathematical elements. So Hobbes is one of the early advocates of what EJ calls »Verzifferung«: reducing complex phenomena to simpler and finally uniform elements that can be digitized and computed. In its beginnings this method was necessarily crude, and this is why Hobbes may appear as a »terrible simplificateur«. In his situation he had to be. When reading him you realize that this man had a keen sense of essentials, though at the same time you keep protesting, »Es ist alles viel komplizierter.« But for Hobbes it is imperative to arrive at the mathematical result of the termination of the »bellum omnium contra omnes«, which is the installation of the Leviathan by the common consent of all individuals to cede a part of their rights to it. So in order to make his theory »more geometrico« watertight he filters from the complex cluster of human motives just those that can be most plausibly and reliably reckoned with: preservation of self, egoism, striving for power. This absence of all idealism may easily be read as a starkly pessimist image of man. 5. Conclusion This materialist, non-idealist image of man in Hobbes has been regarded as bleakly pessimist. Pessimist like Swift's? The roots of Dean Swift's misanthropy are totally different from Hobbes's, the presumed atheist's, schematism. So the analogy of model and illustration is, as I see it, solely in the eye of the beholder. EJ linked his personal reminiscences of the two books. The resulting brainwave he recorded in #72. If this is a misunderstanding, it is a fruitful one. Though I disagree with EJ on this point he challenged me to take a long look at Hobbes and Swift. And something like excitement grew in the eye of another beholder. It is recorded in this lengthy note. ---------------------------- Dr. Günter Rebing Hügel 20 D-53359 Rheinbach Tel./Fax 02226-3980 Mobil 0177-5961331 E-Mail: g.rebing@eplus-online.de
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