Thomas Hobbes

From Philosopedia

Hobbes, Thomas (5 April 1588 - 4 December 1679)

In the spring of 1588, all England was alarmed at the news that the mighty Spanish Armada had set sail for the purpose of deposing Queen Elizabeth, bringing the country under a foreign yoke, and re-establishing the power of the papacy. In sheer fright, the wife of the vicar of Westport, now part of Malmesbury, gave premature birth to her second son on Good Friday, the 5th of April. This seven months’ child used to say, in later life, that his mother brought forth himself and a twin brother Fear.

Thomas Hobbes was delicate and nervous all his days, according to Foote. Yet, he was to reach the age of ninety-one. This parson’s son was destined to be hated by the clergy for his heresy. The Great Fire of 1666, following the Great Plague of the previous year, excited popular superstition, and to appease the wrath of God, a new Bill was introduced in Parliament against atheism and profaneness. The Committee to which the Bill was entrusted were empowered to “receive information touching” heretical books, and Hobbes’s Leviathan was mentioned “in particular.” The old philosopher, then verging on eighty, was naturally alarmed. Bold as he was in thought, his inherited physical timidity shrank from the prospect of the prison, the scaffold, or the stake. He made a show of conformity, and, according to Bishop Kennet, who according to George William Foote is not an irreproachable witness, Hobbes partook of the sacrament. It was said by some, however, that he acted thus in compliance with the wishes of the Devonshire family, who were his protectors, and whose private chapel he attended. A noticeable fact was that he always went out before the sermon, and when asked his reason, he answered that “they could teach him nothing but what he knew.” He spoke of the chaplain, Dr. Jasper Mayne, as “a very silly fellow.”

Disliked by the clergy, and especially by the bishops; owing his liberty and perhaps his life to powerful patrons; fearing that some fanatic might take the parsons’ hints and play the part of an assassin; Hobbes is said to have kept a lighted candle in his bedroom. However, Foote notes, that is not mentioned in Professor Croom Robertson’s exhaustive 1886 biography, and if true it was not for superstitious reasons but for his safety in the event he became sick at night.

Samuel Pepys, in his Diary, complained that in 1668 he paid three times the original price for Leviathan, simply because it is “a book the Bishops will not let be printed again.” (In various scriptural accounts, Yahweh defeated a sea monster which was called liwyathan.) The work was well received in France and Germany, bringing Hobbes many admirers who continued to correspond with him for the remainder of his life. In his own country, the book’s reputation received notoriety because of its author’s alleged atheism.

Hobbes is described by Rudolph in the Encyclopedia of Unbelief:

• The philosopher of Malmesbury was hated and feared by contemporaries for his heterodox views. His philosophical system is thoroughly materialistic and determinist, but the scandal he created was the carrying over of these same principles into theology. . . . Religion, according to Hobbes, is a distinctively human phenomenon, a habitual disposition to fear invisible powers. Hobbes attributes the disposition to fear of ghosts, ignorance of second causes, devotion toward what men fear, and taking casual events to be significant prophecies.

Certainly, his materialism upset churchmen in France, where he visited. He thought the life of each person “nasty, brutish, and short” and built a philosophy around his mechanistic view that life is simply the motions of the organism, that man is a selfishly individualistic animal, that fear of violent death causes men to create government.

Leviathan (1651) develops Hobbes’s political philosophy. His mechanistic view of human behavior was that men were entirely amoral. If anything gratified their self-interest, it was "good," but the reaction was simply a mechanical response to a stimulus. If men were overawed by some strong central authority, of course they would be at one another's throats. Hume and others were not so cynical.

His works, prohibited from being read by the Vatican in 1649 and again in 1701 and 1703, are masterpieces of atheistic materialism and Epicureanism. Hobbes is known for his witty aphorism, that superstition is religion out of fashion, and religion is superstition in fashion.

During the French Revolution, Pierre Maréchal cited Hobbes as being one of the greatest atheists of all time. J. M. Robertson describes him as “the most important thinker of his age, after Descartes, and hardly less influential. . . . Hobbes is in fact the anti-Presbyterian or anti-Puritan philosopher; and to discredit anarchic religion in the eyes of the majority he is obliged to speak as a judicial Churchman. Yet nothing is more certain than that he was no orthodox Christian. . . . Reviving as he did the ancient rationalistic doctrine of the eternity of the world, he gave a clear footing for atheism as against the Judaeo-Christian view.” David Berman, however, points out that in Hobbes’s time atheism and irreligion were viewed with the greatest fear and horror, that no rational person could actually be an atheist. As a result, Berman believes Hobbes chose to remain “a covert atheist.”

At one point, a committee of Parliament in 1666 decided to investigate Hobbes, citing his “atheism” as a possible provocation of divine wrath leading to the outbreak of the plague in London. When Hobbes submitted to King Charles his Behemoth (1668), a history of the period between 1640 and 1660, the king advised against its publication and the book was not published until three years after Hobbes’s death. Gaskin cites Hobbes’s friend John Aubrey as saying, “There was a report that some of the bishops made a motion to have the good old gentleman burned for a heretic.” But, adds Gaskin, “Hobbes lived on, befriended by the rich and powerful, to die of natural causes in his ninety-second year.” (He had played tennis until he was seventy-five.)

Foote wrote that Hobbes did not appear to have troubled himself about death. Bishop Kennel related that “the winter before he died he made a warm great-coat, which he said must last him three years, and then he would have such another.” Even so late as August, 1676, four months before his decease, he was “writing somewhat” for his publisher to “print in English.” About the middle of October he had an attack of stranguary, and “Wood and Kennet both have it that, on hearing the trouble was past cure, he exclaimed, ‘I shall be glad then to find a hole to creep out of the world at.’ . . . This story was picked up thirty years after Hobbes’s death, and is probably apocryphal. If the philosopher said anything of the kind, he doubtless meant that, being very old, and without wife, child, or relative to care for him, he would be glad to find a shelter for his last moments, and to expire in comfort and peace.”

At the end of November his right side was paralyzed, and he lost his speech. He “lingered in a somnolent state” for several days, said Robertson, and “then his life quietly went out.”

McCabe says of Hobbes, “It is clear that he was at the most a Deist, and his psychology must have made him skeptical about a future life.” Tim Madigan, however, considers Hobbes an atheist.

(See an inclusive article by R. S. Peters in the Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Vol. 4.)

{BDF; CE; CL; ER; EU, Ross Rudolph and Aram Vartanian; FO; FUK; HAB; JM; JMR; JMRH; Noel Malcolm, ed., The Correspondence of Thomas Hobbes; RAT; RE; TYD}