In the document I found, this is chapter 2, and it puts together what in the blog is labeled chapter 2 and 3. Mimesis as epistemology and plot structure.
Ch.2 Hobbes the playwright, man the actor: poetic and linguistic dimensions of mimesis in Leviathan.
In the introduction to Leviathan, Hobbes attributes the constitutive power to construct the commonwealth to its citizens, and in the covenanting moment, the knowledge/power required for the fashioning of political authority is a linguistically constituted oath, or covenant.216 Quentin Skinner, Raia Prokhovnik, James Martel, Terrence Ball, and Philip Petit emphasize the dimension of linguistic action, or the constitutive power of language in Leviathan.217 This chapter focuses on the poetic and linguistic dimensions mimesis as the imitative arts or power/knowledge the future subject citizens employ to construct the political authority under which they will live. In
contextualizing the action of Leviathan with the trope of theatrum mundi, Hobbesian men repeatedly perform vis-à-vis one another, and language use is central to these
performances.218 Hobbes figures language as an effective element of any social performance. Skinner notes that there is a sense in which the text is like a
216 Ibid.
217 Skinner, Reason and Rhetoric in the Philosophy of Hobbes.
218 Hobbes and Tuck, Leviathan.
spectacle, seen by its readers, because of the ways in which Hobbes uses perspicuous language in order to turn auditors into spectators.219 In drawing out the consequences
of the theatrical setting of the text, the way in which Hobbes’s language turns the reader into a spectator, this chapter also focuses on the sense in which he figures himself
as a playwright.220 I will highlight Hobbes’s writing strategies in Leviathan by attending to the poetic and linguistic dimensions of mimesis. I will argue that the way that Hobbes draws attention to his own poetic techniques, illuminates how he thinks of the political possibilities of language use in terms of the general man, as well. Hobbes employs poetic mimesis to show an anormative multitude transforming itself into a normative community. The men comprising this multitude are agents in employing language as well. One of the ways that men can become norm abiders, is to show one another arguments for the generalization of norms with imagistic, or perspicuous
language. Interpreting the poetic and linguistic dimensions of mimesis reconciles the mechanistic and theatrical tropes Hobbes uses to characterize the political world.
Hobbes invokes both the theater of human action, and the world as mechanism.221 How does understanding the general man as a language user, inform our understanding of what it means that citizens construct a mechanical world as they perform? The mechanical world constrains and enables a certain understanding of man’s “playing.” In
focusing on the poetic and linguistic dimensions of mimesis, this chapter poses two related questions: ‘how does Hobbes use language?,’ and ‘how does language use figure
in our interpretation of Leviathan and its men?’ Responses to both of these queries will
219 Skinner, Reason and Rhetoric in the Philosophy of Hobbes, 182.
220 Wolin, Hobbes and the Epic Tradition of Political Theory.
221 Hobbes and Tuck, Leviathan, 112, 9.
clarify why and how mimesis complements and clarifies the more typical mechanico-materialist readings of Leviathan. Poetic and linguistic mimesis are necessary lenses
through which to understand the action of Leviathan because poetic mimesis accounts for Hobbes’s agency in creating the movement or force by which the state of nature
transitions into the civil state. Linguistic mimesis accounts for how men show one another images in words. Through proposing norms in imagistic language, Hobbes’s
general men can move one another towards a single set of norms as a precondition of the civil state.
Poetic Mimesis According to Plato’s Republic
and Aristotle’s Poetics, mimesis means plot, story, or drama.222 In tracing the poetic dimension of mimesis in Leviathan, I elaborate insights from previous interpreters. Wolin terms the text an epic, and Hobbes a playwright, while Oakeshott notices the mythical quality of the text.223 Leo Strauss argues that Leviathan is comprised of a typical history, prefiguring Hegel’s master-slave dialectic.224 I argue that Hobbes’s employment of the poetic dimension of mimesis gives the transition from the state of nature to the civil state, an historical character, which complements rather than contradicts the sense in which covenanting for the civil state is the conclusion to a logical syllogism. Since the state of nature is a set of conditions that exists whenever “the will to contend by battle is sufficiently known,” interpreters argue that the state of nature does not have an historical character.225
222 Plato, The Republic, 394c. Aristotle, Benardete, and Davis, Aristotle on Poetics, 1447a10-15. Halliwell, The Aesthetics of Mimesis : Ancient Texts and Modern Problems, 73.
Sörbom, Mimesis and Art 99.
223 Wolin, Hobbes and the Epic Tradition of Political Theory. Oakeshott, Hobbes on Civil Association.
224 Strauss, The Political Philosophy of Hobbes : Its Basis and Its Genesis.
225 Hobbes and Tuck, Leviathan, 88.
The historicity of the early part of Leviathan does not matter in many readings, because what this history expresses amounts to a logical syllogism, concluding it is rational to covenant for the civil state. The logical contradiction that is ironed out in the development of the state of nature is the idea that the raison d’etre of the state of nature is the pursuit of natural right, but lawlessness and a lack of norms frustrates this pursuit. As a result, wanting to pursue one’s desires and wanting to remain in the state of nature amounts to a self-contradiction. Attending to the progression of scenes, however, or the historical texture of the state of nature, illuminates the political and normative agency Hobbes attributes to the general men. I read Leviathan for the ways in which its poetic construction implies historical scenes, elaborating on Oakeshott’s insight that the text
reads like a myth, and Wolin’s observation that Leviathan has an ‘epic’ style.226 I argue that mimetic dynamics define Hobbes’s approaches to normative theorizing, the content of his normative philosophy and his insights about the creation and maintenance of political authority. Instead of depicting the transition according to a strict logical necessity, or attributing to Hobbes a Hegelian view of historical necessity, I will argue that Hobbes emplots scenes which occur one after the next with probability or necessity.227 Since the sequence of events from the state of nature to the civil state occurs with probablility or necessity, Hobbes’s presentation of the historical development from the state of nature to the civil state is comparable to what Aristotle terms in the Poetics a poetic universal.228
226 Wolin, Hobbes and the Epic Tradition of Political Theory, 16. Oakeshott, “Introduction to Leviathan,” 234, 56.
227 Strauss, The Political Philosophy of Hobbes : Its Basis and Its Genesis.
228 Aristotle, Benardete, and Davis, Aristotle on Poetics.
Following the scenes comprising Hobbes’s employment of poetic mimesis shows that Leviathan’s story about why and how men eventually do what they ought, to the minimal extent required by covenanting, rather than a simple argument that it is rational for a self-interested man to covenant for the civil state. Only a reading of the poetic and linguistic dimension of mimesis can illuminate Hobbes’s strategies of authorship and the general man’s use of the imitative arts, because it is through the poetic and linguistic dimensions of mimesis, that one can see how Hobbes shows motives and reasons changing concomitantly. Interpreters relying only on Hobbes’s analysis of the passions, cannot account for agency, while interpreters relying on Hobbes’s definitions of reason usually import a version of the will despite the fact that Hobbes does not presuppose classical or modern formulations of the will. In my view, Hobbes attributes to mimetic language use the power or vis, usually associated with the will. The imitative arts account for how the author moves his readers, and how men in the state of nature move one another toward the covenant. I will examine the kinds of reasoning Hobbes attributes to the general man, arguing that these accounts leave out precisely the element that poetic and linguistic mimesis accounts for, which is the source of the motivating force of action, insofar as men are responsible for this force.
Deliberation and Ratiocination in the Covenanting Moment
Hobbes presents the general man as engaging in two forms of reasoning. Over the course of the first part of the text, the kind of knowing the general man engages in shifts from deliberation to right reason. Interpreters focusing on the Hobbesian man as a deliberator, place the emphasis on the way the material environment constrains his
reasoning by informing his passionate states.229
229 Frost, Lessons from a Materialist Thinker : Hobbesian Reflections on Ethics and Politics.
Interpreters focusing on the Hobbesian man as capable of right reason, paint a portrait of this man as voluntaristic, and capable of a rationally consistent will.230 I offer a reading which follows Oakeshott’s interpretation that there is an “inseparable” relation between “style and matter, method and doctrine,” of the text.231 In my view, Hobbes shows a change in the general man’s motivations, by ensconcing him in difference scenes, with his reasoning processes following reflexively from the conditions of the scene. It is through employing poetic mimesis that Hobbes depicts a man who is constrained by his material environment, but still engages in a dynamic reasoning process. Since it is not only the external environment but also the general man’s social and historical context of interpersonal rivalry which informs his quest for domination, then the last passion in deliberation in not only determined by external stimuli, but also by how man interprets this stimuli.232 While those interpretations focusing on deliberation can err on the side of determinism, readings according to the idea that man covenants after recognizing the rule of right reason, can mislead by implying that the Hobbesian man, despite his materiality, somehow acts on the basis of a pure will interpreting his conscience (which reflects his desire to follow the laws of nature in foro interno) as untouched by experience. In presenting the two kinds of reasoning attributable to the general man in Leviathan, this reading highlights how Hobbes’s employment of poetic mimesis creates the scenes which contextualize both types of reason the general man makes use of in deciding to covenant.
230 Strauss, The Political Philosophy of Hobbes : Its Basis and Its Genesis.
231 Oakeshott, “Introduction to Leviathan,” 228.
232 Hobbes and Tuck, Leviathan.
The general man in the state of nature is engaged in a passion driven reasoning process, deliberation, which does not result in his proclivity to covenant for a tract of time.233 Then the general man’s deliberation about his situation dovetails with Hobbes’s scientific moral philosophy. I argue that the reason the reader “follows” the Hobbesian
man in his ethical reorientation, how Hobbes emplots scenes in the text, contextualizes the change in his reasoning process. Deliberation rises to the level of ratiocination as
the general man recognizes the laws of nature dictating covenanting as the rational course of action. There are two ways of understanding the covenanting moment. Hobbes explains it by accounting for the general man’s deliberative reason and he also explains it through the general man’s arrival at right reason or ratiocination.234 The explanation through deliberative reason depends on Hobbes’s mechanico-materialist psychology. Hobbes outlines this more determinative explanation of the covenant in chapter twelve, on Religion. Due to the limitations of the deliberative man in knowing causes, a sovereign or ‘mortal god’ could be fashioned out of anxiety, provoked by the extreme scene of the state of nature.235 The extreme scene of the state of nature is a passage featured in chapter thirteen. It reads as though it takes place after a battle, despite Hobbes’s definition of the state of nature as the “tract of time, wherein the Will to contend by Battell is sufficiently known.”236 While Hobbes’s definition of the state of nature looks forward to a battle that may take place, the extreme scene of the state of nature is a post discord scene, because the general man is left in a solitary situation, contemplating a life without his fellows.
Whatsoever therefore is consequent to a time of Warre, where every man is Enemy to every man; the same is consequent to the time, wherein men live without other security, than what their own strength, and their own invention shall furnish them withall. In such condition, there is no place for
233 Ibid., 44, 47.
234 Ibid.
235 Ibid., 76.
236 Ibid., 88.
Industry; because the fruit thereof is uncertain: and consequently no Culture of the Earth; no Navigation, nor use of the commodities that may be imported by Sea; no commodious Building; no Instruments of moving, and removing such 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, continuall feare, and danger of violent death; And the life of man, solitary, poore, nasty, brutish, and short.237
This is the passage that most clearly exemplifies the force involved in the poetic dimension of mimesis. The general man’s abandonment of the pursuit of natural right
makes sense when contextualized by this scene. Hobbes presents this vivid post battle scene as the necessary consequence of remaining in the state of nature. The solitary man reflects on what he could accomplish without others, and what he would have without the contributions of others. Returning to chapter twelve, such a scene appears as the precursor to the invention of the sovereign as a mortal god, because the extreme scene is one in which men would feel anxiety. Since in the extreme scene, men have forgotten culturally inherited knowledge, each must be relying on his deliberation. The limit of deliberation is that it does not result in knowledge of causes.238 The man in the extreme scene would not know how to secure himself. Bereft of knowledge of causes he would look continuously and anxiously towards the future. Hobbes explains the situation of the man who searches in vain for knowledge of causes. “Assured that there be causes of all things that have arrived hitherto, or shall arrive hereafter; it is impossible for a man, who continually endeavoureth to secure himselfe against the evil he feares, and procure the good he desireth, no to be in a perpetuall solicitude of the time to come…”239 Hobbes explains that the anxious, overprovident deliberative man would be inclined to invent a god, on whom he can blame his
237 Ibid., 89.
238 Ibid., 47, 76.
239 Ibid., 76.
bad fortune and explain his good fortune to himself. “This perpetuall feare, alwayes accompanying mankind in the ignorance of causes, as it were in the Dark, must have for
object something. And therefore when there is nothing to be seen, there is nothing to accuse, either of their good, or evil fortune, but some Power, or Agent Invisible: In
which sense perhaps it was, that some of the old Poets said, that the Gods were at first created by humane Feare.”240 In this account of the founding of the modern
commonwealth, the commonwealth is born in darkness and out of a necessary fear, rooted in ignorance. Inspired by what they wish they could see rather than by what they do see, men invent authority as a focal point for hope and fear. The account of covenanting from deliberation in which ignorance creates a god, makes sense because the extreme scene leaves the future subject-citizens ignorant, and Hobbes terms the sovereign a mortal god.241 The covenanting moment can also be interpreted in a different way, in which men do not covenant out of ignorance and fear, but from their recognition of the general rule of reason, which dictates to men the laws of nature. I am not arguing that when man recognizes right reason and covenants from racionation, he is not also afraid, but I would like to draw attention to the fact that the fears of the deliberative man arise out of a different set of circumstances depicted by Hobbes, than does the fear of the ratiocinating man. The deliberative man covenants because he is fearful in the general anxious way, out of self-consciousness of his inability to know causal connections. The man who covenants out of racionation, however, has a fear of not attaining the eminence
240 Ibid.
241 Ibid., 120.
required to secure himself.242 This a fear that others would dominate him, or leave him incapable of securing modest means. In this second model of racionation, the laws of nature recommend covenanting. Hobbes presents the laws of nature as something that all men have the reasoning capacity to recognize. “These dictates of Reason, men use to call by the name of Lawes, but improperly: for they are but Conclusions, or Theoremes concerning what conduceth to the conservation and defence of themselves; whereas Law, properly is the word of him, that by right hath command over others.”243 Hobbes has to explain why, if all men have the reasoning capacity to recognize the laws of nature as dictated by reason, the state of nature exists for “a tract of time.”244 His explanation for this is that the “Lawes of Nature oblige in foro intero; that is to say, they bind to a desire they should take place: but in foro externo; that is, to the putting them in act, not alwayes.”245 Here Hobbes presents man as a person of conflicting desires, he wants to live by the laws of nature, which recommend reciprocal relations, but he also desires eminence over others. Victoria Kahn’s interpretation that men do not follow the laws of nature in the state of nature, because of a problem reconciling reasons and motives, is certainly true.246 Men in some sense “know” the laws of nature in their conscience, or in foro interno, but they are faced with incentive not to follow the laws of nature due to the insecurity that others will continue to seek dominance.247 Since the laws of nature essentially dictate reciprocity, if they are not universally recognized, they would not help men fulfill their drive to self-preservation. The reasonability of following the laws of nature depends on
242 Ibid.
243 Ibid., 111.
244 Ibid., 88.
245 Ibid., 110.
246 Kahn Oakeshott, “The Moral Life in the Writings of Thomas Hobbes,” 312.
247 Hobbes and Tuck, Leviathan, 100, 02, 17.
the universality of the motive to follow them.248 The guarantee that others will also follow the laws of nature arises from the appearance of the coercive power that can keep
them all in awe.249 The product of the covenant appears to function as its precondition. The changes in men’s reasoning processes and passionate states is accounted for by Hobbes not solely on the basis of the definition of deliberation or ratiocination. Instead, the deliberative man’s ability to racionate or achieve right reason, makes sense on the basis of Hobbes’s employment of poetic mimesis. In sum, there is an explanation of the covenanting moment which depends on ignorance and deliberation depicted in the chapter on religion and there is a second account of the covenanting moment in which the reasoning leading to the covenanting moment represents right reason, or ratiocination.250 The difference between these two accounts of how the general man reaches the conclusion to the logical syllogism of survival is wholly attributable to
Hobbes’s fashioning the post battle nasty, brutish and short scene, the scene he paints in the chapter on religion, and the scene of the general man losing confidence in is own
power faced with another’s.251 Hobbes equivocates, attributing the covenant to right reason and deliberation. “The matter, or subject of a Covenant, is alwayes something that falleth under deliberation.”252 The laws of nature that recommend covenanting, however are an achievement of right reason, and also articulate Hobbes’s moral
philosophy and political science. According to Hobbes’s account of natural law, “theLaws of Nature, are good; that is to say, Mortall Vertues; and their contrarie Vices,
Evill. Now the science of Vertue and Vice, is Morall Philosophie; and therefore the true
248 Ibid.
249 Ibid.
250 Ibid.
251 Ibid.
252 Ibid., 97.
Doctrine of the Lawes of Nature, is the true Morall Philosophie.”253 According to the text, then, deliberative reason is capable of arriving at the same conclusions of
ratiocination. The moment that men recognize the general rule of reason and the laws of nature which follow from it, can be explained as the moment when the general man’s
deliberation dovetails with Hobbes’s right reason, or ratiocination. Hobbes’s amalgamation of two separate types of reasoning processes puts a finer point on the limits to each account, and the greater importance of Hobbes’s employment of poetic mimesis. In my view, neither deliberation nor racionation accounts for what moves men from one scene of the state of nature to the next, in a way that attributes to the general man a will in the Platonic or Kantian sense. Deliberation refers to a reasoning process on the basis of empirical experience. The way in which the passions are moved in the course of empirical experience, or the alternation of passions counts as a reasoning process, and the will, the arbitrary end point of this process. Hobbes makes the will the culmination of a reasoning process that is inseparable from the movement of the passions. The will, for Hobbes, is “the last passion in deliberation.”254 Interpreters focus on the covenant as an outcome of deliberation, and the mechanico-materialist psychology it entails, because it is Hobbes’s original attempt to rethink the will on the basis of his materialist ontology. Hobbes announces his dissatisfaction with the concept of a rational will, and replaces it on the basis of a materialist ontology, or the idea that the world is comprised of atoms of matter in motion.255 As a result, the Hobbesian will is not like the Platonic soul, in which reason ought to dominate the passions.256
253 Ibid., 111.
254 Ibid., 44.
255 Ibid., 15, 20, 21.
256 Plato, The Republic, 402d, 36a.
While Hobbes distinguishes his view of human motivation from Plato’s, deliberation does not explain how the general men can be termed agents, responsible for the construction of the commonwealth. Deliberation also distinguishes Hobbes’s view of the right organization of the passions for appropriately motivated action from the Kantian view of will. Whereas Kant requires rational consistency of the will, such a requirement does not make sense in Hobbes’s account of the will.257 Even when the reasons and motives are reconciled in the right way, in the way that facilitates the construction of the covenant, it is not possible to argue that the general man’s right reason is somehow autonomous from or unaffected by his passions, as in the later Kantian account of the will. Frost explains that according to Hobbes’s materialism, reason can never be outside the influence of the passions. Frost concludes, “to define ethics as the science of the passions that underlie and guide reason is to install ethics as, in a sense, prior to reason.”258 Since reason is more like the slave of the passions at least in deliberation, Frost also explains why the Kantian criteria of the autonomy of reason does not make sense in Hobbes’s materialist account of men. Individuals’ subjective self-identity, their thoughts, and their desires are constituted and modified by their ongoing encounter and engagement with one another and with the world. So when Hobbes claims that ethics is about the consequences of passions, we must take note of the intersubjective
and worldly character of the passions. More than this, we must understand him to be saying that ethics requires us to attend to the effects of our passions upon one another.259
257 Immanuel Kant, Kant’s Critique of Practical Reason, and Other Works on the Theory of Ethics, 6th ed. ([London]: Longmans, 1967).
258 Frost, Lessons from a Materialist Thinker : Hobbesian Reflections on Ethics and Politics, 113.
259 Ibid.
In my view, arriving at the laws of nature, or the ability to “mutually accommodate” one another, requires a reasoning process that Hobbes terms both deliberation and right
reason. The key idea is that reason and the passions change together and reason does not necessarily lead the process that ends in decision. In a sense the covenanting
moment is about the reconcilation of the passions with reason, but in another sense, according to Hobbes’s epistemology reasons and motives are always reconciled. In my
reading, the historicity of the state of nature can be discerned because different passions dominate in the general man at different moments in Hobbes’s portrait of him. The
changing relationships of the passions and reason throughout the course of the first partof Leviathan, change based on the context, the scene emplotted by Hobbes’s employment of poetic mimesis. The focus on Hobbes’s self-conscious employment of poetic mimesis is a way of elaborating the mimetic relationship set up by the invocation of nosce teipsum. In my view, the dynamic between author and reader that Hobbes executes throughhis depiction of scenes, replaces the need to thematize the will in accordance with the typical classical views in which the reasons are divided from the passions. The way that Hobbes sets up the interplay between reader and text, based on his observation that the poetic sense of mimesis can affect anthropological imitation, means that the aim of the style of the text is to move the passions of the reader. In other words, Hobbes has an account of the way in which men can move one another, with poetics and language, changing the relationship of knowledge, self-knowledge, and ethical action, without developing an account of the will in either traditional sense, classical or modern. Deliberation is the result of the mechanico-materialist psychology, or the
conclusions about how a materialist ontology can account for a thought process. Since the mechanico-materialist psychology suggests men are passive and reactive to events in their external environment, the psychology behind deliberation leads to the conclusion that the inauguration of the commonwealth is “caused” by the appearance of
the sovereign.260 Right reason, or ratiocination, by contrast counts as an achievement, because it requires the organization of language and discourse.261 Hobbes doubles the explanation for the commonwealth as he argues that men covenant on the basis of deliberation, and the laws of nature which recommend covenanting are recognized by
right reason.262 In achieving right reason, the general man attains the knowledge needed to govern, because the laws of nature simply are the conclusions of Hobbes’s
political science, or knowledge of the causes of peace.263 I will show in this chapter that the mimetic dynamics explain how a man’s deliberative reason can rise to the level of
ratiocination.
Hobbes the Poet-Legislator
Hobbes’s invitation to the reader, nosce tiepsum, communicates the idea that reading Leviathan delivers the knowledge needed to govern. With this invitation, Hobbes portrays himself as a poet-legislator, even while in this poem, the future subject citizens themselves found the commonwealth with a covenant.264 As Kahn explains, “for
Hobbes the possibility of political contract is founded first and foremost on a linguistic contract.”265 Hobbes the poet-legislator’s “goal is to eradicate this danger (of mimetic
desire) by subordinating the transgressive activity of emulation to the putatively stable contract of comparison.
260 Hobbes and Tuck, Leviathan, 100, 02, 17.
261 Ibid., 35.
262 Ibid.
263 Ibid., 111.
264 Wolin, Hobbes and the Epic Tradition of Political Theory, 45; Kahn, Wayward Contracts : The Crisis of Political Obligation in England, 1640-1674, 15. Petrarch, “On His Own
Ignorance and That of Many Others,” 107. Petrarch quotes Ovid, “whenever poets were present, I believed gods were there in person.”
265 Kahn, Wayward Contracts : The Crisis of Political Obligation in England, 1640-1674, 18
In so doing, he produces the likeness he asks the reader to recognize.”266 The mimesis, or psychological assimilation to a depicted character, key to listening to a story is the presupposition of Hobbes’s methodological aim in teaching the reader how to govern. Leviathan is a text that aims to take hold of and direct man’s mimetic proclivities in a direction that will lead to peace.267 The significance of noticing Hobbes figures himself a poet-legislator and invites the reader to “demonstrate” Hobbes’s doctrine to himself by reading himself in the general man, is that it reveals the kind of agency Hobbes attributes to players on either side of a mimetic dynamic. In the mimetic dynamic between author and reader both count as agents in the teaching and learning that would transpire in the ideal dynamic. This means that Hobbes posits a force through which one agent can affect another, that does not rule out the use of agency in response. Recognizing that there is a dynamic of forces that is social and linguistic, and not reducible to the materialist ontology, reveals another perspective on the historicity of Leviathan. The plot does not move forward on account of the general man’s movement towards the satisfaction of his appetites based on empirical perception. The plot also moves forward because of the scenes intentionally plotted by Hobbes. A focus on Hobbes’s writing strategies, particularly his use of plot techniques outlined by Aristotle, demonstrates that Hobbes not only recognizes his own agency in constructing the plausible account of the necessity of covenanting, he also shows how men are agents as they reverse their ethical comportment and move towards normative consensus.
266 Ibid., 13.
267 Hobbes and Tuck, Leviathan, 10.
Aristotle’s Poetics: A guide to Leviathan’s plot
Analyzing Leviathan through the lens of poetic mimesis solicits a comparison with Aristotle’s Poetics on two counts. I argue that Leviathan is organized according to techniques of classical drama outlined by Aristotle in the Poetics. Aristotle notes that the elements of plot of a tragedy are present in the written text of the tragedy, despite the fact that the average Athenian attended tragedies as community spectacles rather than read them.268 Aristotle argues that a drama can elicit in its spectators or reader a cathartic experience.269 In other words, like Plato, Aristotle has an account of the way poetic mimesis can direct the anthropological tendency to imitate. Hobbes’s writing in Leviathan counts as dramatic, not only because he attempts to teach his audience, as the tragedian does, but also because he depicts distinct scenes of the state of nature, which can be distinguished by the different passions dominating future subject-citizens.270 The elements Aristotle outlines in the Poetics that can also be found structuring Leviathan are: hamartia, necessary and probably consequences, the first metabasis or change of fortune, recognition and reversal, and fear, pity and catharsis. The significance of reading Leviathan according to its plot, is the perspective it lends to the text, as a story that moves forward on account of stylistic considerations. The alternate way of reading the text is to argue that the plot moves on the basis of the general man’s mechanico-materialist psychology, in which case the state of nature progresses through its scenes on account of man’s reaction to empirical stimulus in his experience. Placing Leviathan into conversation with the Poetics demonstrates that Hobbes employment of techniques of style to plot a series of unfolding scenes.
268 Aristotle, Benardete, and Davis, Aristotle on Poetics.
269 Ibid., 49b28, 53b6, 55a31.
270 Ibid., 58b32; Hobbes and Tuck, Leviathan.
Hamartia: Mistake, sin, error
Aristotle argues that it is morally repulsive to watch very excellent characters suffer needlessly, so the characters in a tragedy must not undergo meaningless suffering. The characters of a tragedy, good, serious, or superior people, suffer on account of their hamartia.271 Hamartia has a range of meanings “from ‘ignorance of fact’ at one end to ‘moral defect’, ‘moral error’ on the other. It can mean, in different contexts, “to miss the mark (literally); to fail in some object or make a mistake; and to offend morally, to do wrong.”272 The agent in a tragedy must be a good or superior person, but cannot be a morally perfect person. He is someone who is neither extremely good, nor vicious and bad. The protagonist should “be like ourselves so that we can identify with him. We tend to sympathize with stage-figures who have qualities such as we ourselves have or
admire; though these may not in fact be moral qualities.”273 The tragic action ought to evoke the emotions of pity. Hobbes was certainly aware of the ability of an author to
provoke this emotion in a reader, because he defined it as one of the passions of the general man. “Griefe, for the Calamity of another, is Pitty; and ariseth from the
imagination that the like calamity may befall himselfe; and therefore is called also compassion, and in the phrase of this present time a Fellow-Feeling.”274 If the character
is overly vicious, the audience will not pity him, because they will not identify with him, and his suffering will be deserved, while pity is the emotion felt towards a character
whose misfortune is undeserved. The idea of hamartia, when added to the criteria of seriousness and pity means the protagonist must be a man who is honorable but
commits some moral error.
271 Aristotle, Benardete, and Davis, Aristotle on Poetics, 49a34, 51a20, 53a10, 54b17. Bad luck cannot be a reason why a character suffers in a tragedy, because the character is not responsible for bad luck, so the plot would not present a universal or have a didactic value if events unfolded on account of luck.
272 Stinton, “Hamartia in Aristotle and Greek Tragedy,” 222.
273 Ibid.
274 Hobbes and Tuck, Leviathan, 43.
In order to elucidate what exactly counts as the hamartia of the protagonist, Stinton looks to the ethical distinctions in the Nicomachean Ethics to find characters that meet the requirements outlined in the Poetics. In the Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle discusses the kind of person who does wrong, but does not count as a wrongdoer.275 This kind of person is described in chapter four, where Aristotle discusses weakness visà- vis the pleasures and uses as examples the pursuit of victory, honor and wealth. These pursuits are good in themselves, but culpable in excess. The culpability involves the “inability to postpone or value properly the satisfaction of the appetites, even if they are natural.” 276 These weaknesses are culpable, but not very, and so are especially suitable for the undeserved misfortune of tragedy.277 Besides moral weakness, there isan epistemic element to moral failings. The epistemic and moral senses of hamartia are brought together when the moral issue at stake in a plot, has an epistemological crux.278
275 Stinton, “Hamartia in Aristotle and Greek Tragedy,” 231. Aristotle and Irwin, Nicomachean Ethics, 7.8.
276 Stinton, “Hamartia in Aristotle and Greek Tragedy,” 232.
277 Ibid.
278 Cave, Recognitions : A Study in Poetics, 37.
The double aspect of hamartia is significant in the interpretation of Leviathan, because the consequences of the war of each against all are alternately attributed to intellectual error, and moral weakness. The general man is one who pursues honor unmoderately, until it results in deadly enmity. Hobbes grafts a person’s epistemic soundness and moral proclivity into each other with his account of deliberation, a reasoning process synonymous with the alternation of appetites and aversions, and the problem of mimetic desire, which informs the general man’s pursuit of honor. The moment of recognition in tragedy in relation to hamartia, is then, both the correction of an epistemic blank spot or mistake, and leaves the protagonist with a “new self-understanding that changes the moral light in which his actions are seen.”279 Renaissance humanists influenced by Christianity, translated hamartia with the typical Latin word for sin, peccatum, because hamartia is translated as sin in the New Testament.280 The epistemic aspect to moral failing in Leviathan, explains why the state of nature can be described as a condition in which men are mistaken as to their true interest, to covenant for the civil state, and as a condition in which man gives full reign to his sin and evility.281 In other words, the state of nature lasts for a tract of time because in some sense they do not know the pursuit of honor is wrong, only in the moment of recognition and reversal do they see their own actions in a different moral light. The concept of hamartia as the kind of suffering a man would experience on account of his non self-knowledge. It also describes the epistemic and ethical condition of the man in the state of nature.
Necessary and Probable Consequences
In order to fulfill the poetic condition of tragedy, wherein events happen because of preceding events, instead of simply after them, the decent into the worst scene of the state of nature must be the necessary and probable consequence of the earlier scenes of the state of nature.282
279 Stinton, “Hamartia in Aristotle and Greek Tragedy.”
280 Cave, Recognitions : A Study in Poetics, 67-69. David Konstan, Pity Transformed, Classical Inter/Faces (London: Duckworth, 2001).Piero Vettori, Commentarius, in primum librum Aristotelis de arte poetarum (Florence: Sons of Bernardo Giunta, 1560), p.123.
281 Strauss, The Political Philosophy of Hobbes : Its Basis and Its Genesis, 3, 13, 23, 111.
282 Aristotle, Benardete, and Davis, Aristotle on Poetics, 52a1, 54a12.
contending for them, are displeased with one anothers attaining them; Desire of Office, or precedence, Ambition: a name used also in the worse sense, for the reason before
mentioned.”283 This activity of men comparing the signs of honor, which contribute to power, they have amassed to those amassed by others, defines the passions of joy,
confidence and vainglory.284 Seeing signs of honor and dishonor in other’s comportment toward oneself, is not a type of seeing that is reducible to mechanicomaterialist
premises alone. In order to interpret the gestures or ‘signs’ of the other, there has to be a shared social and cultural horizon. This means that not only is the
conflict in the state of nature not reducible to the mechanico-materialist psychology, it also means that the interpretation of the state of nature as somehow ahistorical is
untenable. The constant comparison with others makes sense not only in light of the lack of an objective epistemic standard by which one can judge his own virtue, but also
because a man in the state of nature, is concerned with his own power to secure himself, and many different kinds of power are augmented by, if not wholly dependent on the
reputation of having them. “Vertue generally, in all sorts of subjects, is somewhat that is valued for eminence; and consisteth in comparison. For if all things were equally in all
men, nothing would be prized.”285 Since men are continually looking to others to assess their own virtue and power, the value and dignity of a man, depends on what others
think of him.
The Value, or Worth of a man, is as of all other things, his Price; that is to say, so much as would be given for the use of his Power: and therefore is not absolute; but a thing dependent on the need and judgement of another. An able conductor of Souldiers, is of great Price in time of War present, or
283 Hobbes and Tuck, Leviathan, 41.
284 Ibid., 42, 43.
285 Ibid., 50.
The state of nature escalates according to Hobbes’s analysis of rivalry. The pathology of mimetic desire means that men are sensitive to relative interpersonal power, in a way that leads to negative feelings towards competitors. Men do not enjoy witnessing others attain a power that they themselves also desire. “Desire of Riches, Covetousnesse: a name used alwayes in signification of blame; because men
imminent; but in Peace not so. A learned and uncorrupt Judge, is much Worth in time of Peace; but not so much in War. And as in other things, so in men, not the seller, but the buyer determines the Price. For let a man (as most men do,) rate themselves at the highest Value they can; yet their true Value is no more than it is esteemed by others.286 The evaluator of others in this passage is a man considering whom to enlist as ally in either a situation of war, or in trying to establish a peace. The model is still the noble who must be prepared for war, or organize a time of peace. Hobbes maps the evaluating of others for the purpose of war and peace, onto the idea of honoring or dishonoring them. To honor someone is synonymous with acknowledging his power. The practice of valuing or honoring others, is the reciprocal means by which men contribute to others’ power and observe in others’ behavior how much value, honor or power they have acknowledged in him. “The manifestation of the Value we set on one another, is that which is commonly called Honouring, and Dishonouring. To Value a man at a high rate, is to Honour him; at a low rate, is to Dishonour him. But high, and low, in this case, isto be understood by comparison to the rate that each man setteth on himself.”287 The necessity or probability of conflict breaking out in the state of nature, follows from men’s inability to be sure that others value him as much as he values himself, and insecurity that others in fact honor him. This insecurity is unquellable because a man’s power is determined by his eminence, which can never be permanently or objectively secured. Hobbes’s account of the state of nature extends beyond mechanico-materialism because it reflects a socially and historically contextualized attempt to rationally assess one’s place in the social hierarchy. Since there is no objective way to measure where one stands in the social hierarchy, Leviathan’s future subject citizens live in Protagoras’s
286 Ibid., 63.
287 Ibid.
world, rather than Plato’s. “For men measure, not onely other men, but all things, by themselves.”288 The dynamic Hobbes describes in which men look towards one another
to figure out what is desirable, and to confirm or disconfirm their level of social status, is termed the problem of mimetic desire in the history of literary criticism.289
The problem of mimetic desire escalates the state of nature because it stokes “grevious” emotions. The two emotions that a man in the state of nature can have towards his rival, or the man he measures himself against, are both forms of grief. Emulation is the kind of grief that makes a man desire to equal or exceed his rival. Envy is a desire to more decisively dominate the other by hurting him. “Griefe, for the successe of a Competitor in welath, honour, or other good, if it be joyned with Endeavour to enforce our own abilities to equall or exceed him, is called Emulation: But joyned with Endeavour to supplant, or hinder a Competitor, Envie.”290 Even a man who is merely emulous of the other, and could be content without achieving total dominance will still fight the other due to the insecurity of whatever gains he has made. Man desires “power after power” “because he cannot assure the power and means to live well, which he hath present, without the acquisition of more.”291 The ‘more’ that a man wants to acquire is the same signs of honor and power desired by others, because these signs augment power, increasing security. Since men share signs of honor and power their company inevitably results in grief. Againe, men have no pleasure, (but on the contrary a great deale of griefe) in keeping company, where there is no power able to over-awe them all. For
every man looketh that his companion should value him, at the same rate he
288 Ibid., 15.
289 Girard, Mensonge Romantique Et Vérité Romanesque, 12. Kahn, “Hobbes, Romance, andthe Contract of Mimesis,” 5.
290 Hobbes and Tuck, Leviathan, 44.
291 Ibid., 70.
sets upon himselfe: And upon all signes of contempt, or undervaluing, naturally endeavours, as far as he dares (which amongst them that have no common power to keep them in quiet, is far enough to make them destroy each other,) to extort a greater value from his contemners, by dommage; and from others, by the example.292 The enjoyment of natural right, for the sake of the satisfaction of the passions, paradoxically results in no pleasure. A man’s inability to confirm his self-evaluation in the signs conferred on him by others, is enough to make him want to damage his rival, and perhaps improve his reputation for power in the process. In addition to the possibility of emulation and envy provoking a battle, equality heightens the danger of the state of nature. Equality between men in the state of nature is an equal ability to kill one another, and an equal hope that one can satisfy his passions. From this equality of ability, ariseth equality of hope in the attaining of our Ends. And therefore if any two men desire the same thing, which neverthelesse they cannot both enjoy, they become enemies; and in the way to their End, (which is principally their owne conservations, and sometimes their delectation only,) endeavor to destroy or subdue one another. And from hence it comes to passe, that where an Invader hath no more to feare, than an other mans single power; if one plant, sow, build, or possesse a convenient Seat, others may probably be expected to come prepared with forces united, to disposse, and deprive him, not only of the fruit of his labour, but also of his life, or liberty. And the Invader again is in the like danger of another.293 Here equality leads to enmity, which leads to violent attempts at mutual destruction. In this passage, Hobbes refers both to individuals fighting and to an Invader who may lead a group in an attempt to unseat a noble who “possesses a convenient Seat,” which refers to a large tract of land. The rational strategy in a state of nature defined by equality of ability to kill, moral relativism, lack of objective epistemic standards, and men pursuing the satisfaction of their passions, is to attempt to dominate as many men as possible, even if modesty of means is the only goal.
292 Ibid., 88.
293 Ibid., 87.
And from this diffidence of one another, there is no way for any man to secure himselfe, so reasonable, as Anticipation; that is, by force, or wiles, to master the persons of all men he can, so long, till he see no other power great enough to endanger him: And this is no more than his own conservation requireth, and is generally allowed. Also because there are some, that taking pleasure in contemplating their own power in the acts of conquest, which they pursue farther than their security requires; if others, that otherwise would be glad to be at ease within modest bounds, should not by invasion increase their power, they would not be able, long time, by standing only on their defence, to subsist. And by consequence, such augmentation of dominion over men, being necessary to a mans conservation, it ought to be allowed him.294 The characteristics of the state of nature provoke a deliberation wherein the last passion is to dominate, because only domination appears to lessen the sources of insecurity that come from others’ attempt to gain for themselves what the general man also wants. Hobbes concludes that the causes of the war of each against all are competition, diffidence, and glory; which “maketh men invade” for gain, safety and reputation.295 The unfolding of events can be summarized. The lack of objective standard by which to measure one’s own power leads to rivalry. Rivalry descends into enmity as men attempt to extend their dominion over one another. This warring leads to the extreme portraitof the state of nature.296
The First Metabasis or Change of Fortune
As consequence of enmity, the state of nature arrives at an extreme situation. This situation represents a change of fortune because it depicts the general man totally isolated. In contrast to the rivalrous sociality that characterizes the first stage of the state of nature, the state of nature’s climax depicts totally isolated individuals. The change of fortune depicted here is from the tolerability of the pursuit of natural right for
294 Ibid., 87-88.
295 Ibid., 88.
296 Thomas Hobbes and William Molesworth, The English Works of Thomas Hobbes of Malmesbury (London,: J. Bohn, 1839). Volume IX. The history of the Grecian War, written by Thucydides, trans. T.Hobbes (London: John Bohn, 1915), p. 208.
a tract of time to the rearrangement of the passions and reasons such the general man now wants to recognize natural law rather than pursue natural right. Whatsoever therefore is consequent to a time of Warre, where every man is Enemy to every man; the same is consequent to the time, wherein men live without other security, than what their own strength, and their own invention shall furnish them withall. In such condition, there is not place for Industry; because the fruit thereof is uncertain: and consquently no Culture of the Earth; no Navigation, nor use of the commodities that may be imported by Sea; no commodious Building; no Instruments of moving, and removing such 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, continuall feare, and danger of violent death; And the life of man, solitary, poore, nasty, brutish, and short.297 Hobbes has depicted a scene, a time wherein men live with only the products of their
own invention, and use of their own strength. It is not a scene of social behavior rather he depicts man as totally asocial. Without society, there can be no interpersonal
emulation. Unable to read signs of honor or dishonor in others’ comportment, the emulative and envious relations are no longer possible. Men are stripped of the cultural
products of their shared history, so the signs of honor and dishonor in the first stage of the state of nature are unobtainable, and lose their meaning because they have lost their social context.
Recognition and Reversal
Tragedies with complex plots, the best kind, feature scenes of recognition (anagnorisis) and reversal (peripeteia).298 The recognition and reversal of the plot, are concomitant with metabasis, or change in fortune. Recognition is “a change from ignorance to knowledge … the moment at which the characters understand their predicament fully for the first time.”299 Recognition has a clear relationship to hamartia,
297 Hobbes and Tuck, Leviathan, 89.
298 Aristotle, Benardete, and Davis, Aristotle on Poetics, 50a34, 52a15-17.
299 Cave, Recognitions : A Study in Poetics, 1.
when the latter is interpreted as an error, and error is understood as a kind of ignorance.300 While the correction of hamartia through recognition is interpreted epistemically in the sense of the development of a man’s knowledge and self-knolwedge, the ethical element is that the change in self-knowledge represents a change in the general man’s character.301 A character’s recognition scene in a tragedy is related to his coming to understand his own hamartia. The tragic character learns something, to arrive at self-knowledge in the scene of recognition. Hamartia in the Poetics is about how changes in knowledge and self-knowledge can also consitute changes in character, so hamartia has epistemic and ethical dimensions. Since Hobbes’s political science can teach, the scene of recognition in Leviathan depicts the future subject citizens learning about themselves. A Renaissance interpretation of the Poetics, argues that a text featuring a recognition scene inherently teaches the syllogism. “Antonio Riccoboni introduces his
Latin translation of the Poetics with a short prefatory note, entited ‘In what way the art of poetry is a part of logic’, proposing an extraordinary argument (though one wholly
typical of the period) in support of the connection between poetics and logic.”302 [R]ecognition is brought about by either implicit or explicit reasoning [syllogismum],…poetics teaches the best mode of arguing by means of recognition, and in this way is a part of logic…. Thus poetics, in addition to ‘thought’ [sententia], which it has in common with rhetoric, does not only deal with plot [fabulam], whose principal part, which is called recognition, requires reasoning, but also with manners, diction, music and spectcale; yet on account of the particular kind of reasoning [ratiocinationem] which is used in plot, and the best use of which
300 Ibid., 37.
301 Ibid. Cave argues that the moral reading of hamartia turns the focus to individual psychology, which is a modern preoccupation, in contrast to Aristotle’s focus on recognition and reversal as products of plot construction.
302 Ibid., 73.
poetics itself is concerned to teach, it is seen to have been called a part of logic by the great philosopher Averroes and others.303 Riccoboni’s thesis is that recognition entails syllogism, and teaches it, by teaching the spectator to draw inferences.304 The idea that Hobbes’s text may have been written with the stylistic features of tragedy discussed in Aristotle’s Poetics, is not in competition with the text’s scientific status, but complements his view of science, because the plot depicts syllogistic reasoning and teaches it to its readers. This is my point against Wolin, who argues that the poetic and scientific aspects of the text are in conflict such that the scientific aspects of the text trade-off with its poetic aspects. According to Riccoboni’s interpretation, the poetic scene of reversal and recognition is based on an inference, which can be written as a syllogism. The extreme scene of the state of nature precipitates the reversal and recognition of Leviathan. The general man in the state of nature recognizes right reason, which dictates following the laws of nature. The laws of nature, in turn, recommend covenanting for a civil state.305 Man’s recognition and following of the laws of nature is concomitant with his achievement of right reason, which entails a specific organization of the passions. Reasons and motives have to change together, due to Hobbes’s account of the deliberative process. The conclusion of ratiocination also represents a particular organization of the passions. The recognition of the general rule of reason also implies a normalization of the passions, because all reason on the basis of
303 Ibid., 74.
304 Ibid., 74, 75. In this case, hamartia is interpreted as being mistaken about or ignorant of a minor premiss.
305 Hobbes and Tuck, Leviathan, 91.
fear simultaneously.306 The norms followed by adherence to the laws of nature are those norms that can serve as the precondition for the liberal rule of law.307 The moment of reversal and recognition in the text prefigures a second change of fortune. The first change of fortune was when the serious man, on account of his hamartia, entering a competitive situation with a rival. This relation probably or necessarily descends into enemy, resulting in the suffering inherent to the extreme scene of the state of nature. The recognition of the laws of nature leads to men’s covenanting to the civil state, which marks another change of fortune, this time from a very bad situation to a good one. The second change of fortune promises the experience of peace that comes with universal recognition of political authority. In the first stage of the state of nature, there are only men who resemble nobles, however since the general man who recognizes the laws of nature is the same as he who fought for glory and eminence over his rival, Hobbes has attributed two different ethics to the same man. One who would attempt to pursue the satisfaction of his desires with natural right, the other who would renounce tactics employed by his noble self. The reversal of social comportment concomitant with the recognition of the laws of nature appears in the fifth through tenth laws of nature. The fifth law of nature, compleasance, or mutual accommodation encapsulates why the ethic of the laws of nature are the exact opposite of the competition for dominance characterizing the state of nature.308 Revenge as the outcome of the envious competitive struggle is replaced in the sixth law of nature
306 Kahn, “The Duty to Love: Passion and Obligation in Early Modern Political Theory,” 245.
307 Macpherson, The Political Theory of Possessive Individualism: Hobbes to Locke, 90. MacPherson argues they are also the norms required by market society.
308 Hobbes and Tuck, Leviathan, 106.
with forgiveness.309 The sixth through the tenth laws of nature forbid those passions that are the driving force of the competitive struggle as it climaxes into war. In the
place of glory, showing signs of hatred and contempt, pride, and arrogance, the laws of nature command restraint from provoking conflict, recognizing equality, and not
reserving for oneself the natural right that everyone else is abandoning in favor of peace.310 These laws legislate against those passions that introduce the war, the very
passions the problem of mimetic desire makes inevitable. The laws of nature encapsulate the Christian moral attitude of the golden rule. Since normative order is a precondition of law, another way to read the simultaneous abidance by the laws of nature of everyone is to argue that Hobbes depicts a normalized society surpassing the
aristocratic virtue “whose essence consists in the conquest or denial of fear.”311 The anxiety- laden fear of the unknown, gives rise to the thought of god, whose personation
in the guise of the sovereign, becomes the spectacle to fear.
Pity, Fear, Catharsis
According to the Poetics, a tragedy’s effect on its spectators serves as a means for judging the success of the plot construction. Hobbes promises an effect on his readers
encouraging him to read himself in the general man depicted in the text. According to this reading, in which the style of Leviathan is composed according to the plot
techniques outlined in the Poetics, the text itself mediates the passions of the reader. Hobbes is an agent in employing the techniques of poetry, and in so doing he moves his
reader’s organization of knowledge, self-knowledge, and ethical orientation through evoking the pity of his readers. A reader can see himself in the general man depicted in
309 Ibid.
310 Ibid., 107.
311 Strauss, The Political Philosophy of Hobbes : Its Basis and Its Genesis, 49, 113.
the text, a person who is familiar with the Christian narrative of the fall and salvation, yet may fall prey to a culpable weakness in pursuit of victory, honor and wealth. Hobbes
presents the way in which the pursuit of signs of honor can lead to the extreme stage of the state of nature. The reader is to see himself in the general man, pitiably and
undeservedly suffering from Promethean anxiety. There is also agency implied, in what ‘signs’ of honor and dishonor men ‘show’ one another with their gestures. In the
problem of mimetic desire, the way in which men engage in rivalry is not only socially and historically situated, it also involves the agency of showing and reading ‘signs’ of
honor and dishonor. The crux on which the change of fortune from the extreme scene of the state of nature to the civil state turns is fear. By delineating scenes of the state of nature, however, the reader is able to distinguish three different kinds of fear. Fear of the rival, changes to an anxious fear of the unknown, which transforms into fear of the
sovereign’s sword, which is ultimately required to maintain obedience to the laws of nature. The series of fears in Leviathan’s is reflected in the general man’s changing
attitude toward death. In the early part of the state of nature, death is feared only insofar as it would contribute to a dishonorable reputation. Hobbes defines fear as a
subset of the concern for honor, observing that fear is a passion that arises “from internall Honour” and relates to one’s opinion of one’s own power.312 The last passion
in deliberation in this scene of the state of nature is the concern for honor and not the fear of biological death. In fact, risking one’s life in pursuit of glory is a way to win
honor. “Desire of Fame,” disposes men to laudable actions, not because they would be able to enjoy the praise, but “because men have a present delight therein, from the
312 Hobbes and Tuck, Leviathan, 248.
foresight of it, and of the benefit that may redound thereby to their posterity.”313 The ethical contradiction in conscience, in that the general man lives according to recipe
finem but has a desire, in foro interno, to obey the golden rule, relies not on a single fear of violent death, but on the development of fears, from fear of the rival, to fear of the
unknown, to fear of the sword of the sovereign. The progression of fears also explain why a man would trade the freedom involved with the pursuit of natural right, to the
attenuated liberty in the silence of the laws. There is also a sense in which deliberative man invents a god to fear out of the recognition of his own lack of knowledge of causes, i.e., that without somewhat norm conforming behavior towards others, one could not arrive at enough knowledge of causes to construct anything. On the other hand, the idea of right reason appears in the text after the discussion of diffidence, which is more or less a recognition that one is not the only possible candidate for probable dominator. In other words, Hobbes’s general man begins to listen to his conscience out of a recognition of his lack of power. In the case of the deliberative man, the power/knowledge to construct the commonwealth involves a passivity and anxiousness due to an accurate perception of how weak one would be isolated in a post-battle scene. However, Hobbes’s emplotment of scenes also implies a positive power/knowledge to listen to one’s conscience and covenant for the commonwealth out of a recognition of one’s own power, and its attendant fear. In this latter interpretation, men are agents in showing one another arguments for norms with vivid language. In the case of both the deliberative and rationating man, there is agency in the rivalrous social relations despite the probability of escalation.
313 Ibid., 71.
If Leviathan is judged by the standards of the Poetics If Leviathan is judged by the standards of the Poetics, the overall effect on the emotions of the spectator ought to be catharsis.314 “Aristotle puts catharsis at the end of his definition, and that closing clause is his customary place for stating the purpose or goal of a thing.”315 While this term is etymologically associated with the concept of purging, many commentators have noticed that it does not make sense in terms of Aristotelian ethics to think of emotions as something that can be purged.316 If catharsis is interpreted as the training of emotions then the end of poetic mimesis in tragedy, accords with the emotional effect Aristotle attributes to the mimetic arts in the Politics VIII, where music and poetry serve to educate the emotions.317 In the Nichomachean Ethics the correct training or habituation of the emotions, is important for the achievement of excellence.318 The interpretation of catharsis as a means of training of the emotions of the spectator also accords with the didactic value of poetry. When interpreting catharsis is a training or clarification of emotions “tragedy teaches how fear and pity feel and where they are appropriate. That understanding forms part of the groundwork for ethical behavior, since Aristotle’s ethics connects ethical behavior to well-trained emotions. Thus the clarification view helps harmonize Aristotle’s aesthetics with his ethics.”319Leviathan teaches the appropriateness of fear as a consequence of man’s failure to perceive causal relations, limiting his power, and the
314 Aristotle, Benardete, and Davis, Aristotle on Poetics, 49b28, 53b6, 55a31.
315 Stinton, “Hamartia in Aristotle and Greek Tragedy.”
316 Jacques Brunschwig and Martha Craven Nussbaum, Passions & Perceptions : Studies in Hellenistic Philosophy of Mind : Proceedings of the Fifth Symposium Hellenisticum
(Cambridge [Endgland] ; New York, NY, USA: Cambridge University Press, 1993).
317 Aristotle and David Keyt, Politics, Clarendon Aristotle Series (Oxford ; New York:
Clarendon Press ; Oxford University Press, 1999).
318 Aristotle and Irwin, Nicomachean Ethics.
319 This is somewhat of a consensus view, as it is shared by Golden Leon, “The Clarification Theory Of “Katharsis”,” Hermes 104, no. 4 (1976). Richard Janko and Aristotle, Aristotle on Comedy : Towards a Reconstruction of Poetics Ii (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984). and Martha Nussbaum 1986),
appropriateness of fear out of the recognition of his situation in a competition of relative power. It is right to fear civil war, because it may result in an enemy trying to gain
dominion through plausible threats of violent death. It is appropriate to fear the widespread consequences of a civil war, which is solitude, ignorance of causes and extreme anxiety about one’s security. Finally, it is appropriate to fear the sovereign whose creation of a sense of fearful awe will keep everyone faithful to the covenant once it is made.
Examining how Leviathan’s plot echoes elements from Aristotle’s Poetics illuminates why the transition from the state of nature to the civil state, could result in a situation in which all men recognize the general rule of reason simultaneously. The depiction of the general man following the laws of nature reflects the dovetail of Hobbes’s scientific conclusions and the changing passions of the general man reaching the rigor of “right reason.” The general man’s deliberation begins to follow Hobbes’s ratiocination in the moment of recognition and reversal, when the material account of the passions coincides with the normative philosophy. If the readers assent to the necessity or probability of the scenes in the transition from the state of nature to the civil state than in the parlance of the Poetics, Hobbes’s text has achieved a cathartic effect on readers who have their passions organized in a way that leads them to concur that it is rational to make and keep one’s covenant for the civil state. Hobbes’s method succeeds if the poetic mimesis directs anthropological imitation. In other words, Leviathan achieves a cathartic effect on its readers training the passions of its audience in case they agree that the unrestrained pursuit of natural right results in an ethical self-contradiction. The dovetail of deliberation and right reason leads to the thematic of normalization—in order for society to be organized, men’s passions must be organized. Leviathan prefigures the Focauldian emphasis on the normalizing effect of texts and early modern institutions.320 This is another way of saying that the rule of law depends on norms. The state of nature in Leviathan develops from a situation of unstable norms, to an anormative nightmare in the extreme scene, to the universal following of those norms described by the laws of nature. These movements are necessary to show, as tragedies do, the irretrievable loss of a normative order, in the development towards a new order. The force of the plot, is not solely mechanico-materialist, but depends on Hobbes’s ability to plot scenes that read as they follow one another necessarily or probably. The way in which Hobbes draws upon the poetic dimension of mimesis, shows that he presupposes the Latin rhetorical tradition’s emphasis on vis, or the compelling power of language to move its auditors or readers. Hobbes draws on the moving power of language for its specifically political importance, to show how men can move one another towards normative order. By extensively drawing on the poetic and linguistic dimensions of mimesis, Hobbes emphasizes the way in which men’s language use can direct their political possibilities, in the sense that normative order and the construction of a polity are the contingent achievements of linguistic mimetic dynamics.
Poetic mimesis, nosce tiepsum, and mimetic language use
In self-consciously plotting the probability or necessity of scenes following one another, Hobbes must be aware of his own agency in constructing the theatre of action
in Leviathan. This type of authorial agency Hobbes employs, he also attributes to the general man he depicts in the text. Mimetic language can be a subcategory of
320 Foucault et al., Society Must Be Defended : Lectures at the Collège De France, 1975-76, 37, 38; Kahn, “The Duty to Love: Passion and Obligation in Early Modern Political Theory,” 538. Kahn argues that the Romance plot can “contribute to the ‘disciplining’ in the Foucauldian sense of a political subect who internalizes coercion in the form of her very own passions.”
anthropological mimesis, because it is a feature of human behavior, but it is also discussed in traditions relating to poetic mimesis, because it can be a self-conscious technique of authorship. Hobbes argues that when he has “set down my own reading orderly, and perspicuously, the pains left another, will be onely to consider, if he also
find not the same in himself.”321 The perspicuous construction of the text facilitates the textual aim of nosce tiepsum. In an earlier political treatise Hobbes addresses the idea that an author or speaker can use language in a way that teaches. In the Elements of Law, a correct relationship between language and empirical experience can result in a speaker’s ability to teach an auditor. The first use of language, is the expression of our conceptions, that is, the begetting in another the same conceptions that we have in ourselves; and this is called teaching; wherein if the conceptions of him that teacheth continually accompany his words, beginning at something from experience, then it begetteth the like evidence in the hearer that understandeth them, and maketh him know something, which he is therefore said to learn. But if there be not such evidence, then such teaching is called persuasion, and begetteth no more in the hearer, than what is in the speaker, bare opinion.322 Leviathan opens with the claim that text teaches the reader, and that he has discovered science, a moral philosophy of the causes of peace. Though Hobbes no longer uses the exact phrase, “begetteth the like conception in another,” to describe how language teaches rather than persuades, the emphasis on the visuality of language persists. Leviathan develops the idea that the right relationship between language use and empirical experience can present evidence to auditors. Since the visuality of language extends to texts, authors can count teachers to their readers. In the dynamic of mimetic
321 Hobbes and Tuck, Leviathan, 11.
322 Hobbes and Tönnies, The Elements of Law, Natural & Politic, 64.
language use, between author and reader or speaker and auditor, each person has agency in showing others arguments, and in how they ‘see’ what others are saying.
The general man as a language user
Despite the agency of mimetic language use, the Leviathan also accounts for the role of language use in interpersonal rivalry. Hobbes’s initial reflections on language use
in the state of nature conclude that language use is hostage to a man’s management of his reflexive perceptions of social hierarchy. In the state of nature, man’s language use
does not create consensus but foments disagreement because words are used in accordance with individual strategies to gain social dominance. An anthropological condition defined by the problem of mimetic desire means that men intentionally refuse to assent to others’ definitions simply in order to frustrate the adversary’s pursuit of power. Disagreement with others, or extensive debating of terms is a means of assessing one’s place in a social hierarchy or asserting one’s rank.…when there is a controversy in an account, the parties must by their own accord, set up for right Reason, the Reason of some Arbitrator, or Judge, to whose sentence they will both stand, or their controversie must either come to blowes, or be undecided, for want of a right Reason constituted by Nature; so is it also in all debates of what kind soever: And when men that think themselves wiser than all others, clamor and demand right Reason for judge; yet seek no more, but that things should be determined, by no other mens reason but their own, it is as intolerable in a society of men, as it is in play after trump is turned, to use for trump on every occasion, that suite whereof they have most in their hand. For they do nothing els, that will have every of their passions, as it comes to bear sway in them, to be taken for right Reason, and that in their own controversies: bewraying their want
of right Reason, by the claym they lay to it.323 The pathology of mimetic desire creates incentives to disagree with others’ usages of language, so the other cannot use an agreement on terms for advantage and rise on the social hierarchy. The problem of mimetic desire is a dynamic account of why the state of 323 Hobbes and Tuck, Leviathan, 33.
nature, and the linguistic discord that characterizes it, would last for a certain tract of time. Future subject citizens cannot agree on the definitions of moral terms to stand at
the beginning of ratiocination leading to conclusions about right and wrong to which everyone could assent.324 Hobbes seriously challenges the possibility of an objective
moral philosophy, due to the problems of ‘unordained’ metaphors, fluid wills, and an unsocial sociability that would cause men to attempt to grieve others with language use.
Hobbes writes that the individual’s inner diversity of passions, the relations of the names to the passions, and the diversity of customs in the world results in a disagreement on the meanings of the key terms of moral philosophy, good and evil, “from whence arise disputes, Controversies, and at last War.”325 Hobbes’s view of man’s asocial sociality raises the specter of ethical relativism, lodging this relativism in his philosophical anthropology. The ethical relativism that is the consequence of Hobbes’s mechanico-materialist description of the passions is not reducible to the mechanico-materialist premises, alone, however. Hobbes’s account of ethical relativism in the state of nature is
not a simple deduction from empirical perception and the mechanics of the human body. Perception is also mediated by the problem of mimetic desire, as an anthropological
feature of the state of nature.326 Ethical relativism is, therefore also the result of the culturally conditioned mimetic practice of valorization.327 The mimeticism inherent in
the social practice of valuing leads men to search for changing goods, in other words, it
324 Ibid.
325 Ibid., 111.
326 Ibid., 39, 40.
327 Ibid., 32-33, 63.
leads them to propose that their power/knowledge is the most eminent. Since Hobbes depicts a man who uses claims of goodness to augment his own eminence, then the
general man does not want to live by one standard of the good for strategic reasons. Ethical malleability can be attributed to mechanico-materialism, but it can also be
attributed to dynamic of anthropological mimesis.328 The state of nature lasts for a tract of time because men caught in the problem of mimetic desire have incentives in
pursuing their relative power, to disagree about norms and avoid following them. The problem that Hobbes has set himself up to explain entails two sides of the same coin.
Language constitutes a source of discord, and organizing language use perspicuously can create agreement on the norms preconditioning the rule of law. The state of nature
escalates, not on the basis of Hobbes’s account of the mechanico-materialist psychology alone, but due to the ways in which the plot plausibly depicts the development of men’s inability to peaceably negotiate social hierarchy through perspicuous scenes of changing fears. Furthermore, Hobbes not only depicts why men could not agree on terms, he also employs the idea of mimetic language use to show that men can generate norms through language use, as part of the power/knowledge involved in constructing the commonwealth.
Mimetic language use can establish normative consensus
Hobbes depicts the general man’s transition from the state of nature to the civil state as one in which the problem of linguistic discord must ultimately be solved and the
problem of ethical relativism overcome with the establishment of a normative consensus. Hobbes’s emphasis on the virtue of mimetic language use is related to his idea that this sign of knowledge carries a power with it, a power to achieve the “benefit
328 Skinner, Reason and Rhetoric in the Philosophy of Hobbes.
of man-kind.” “Of Reason and Science,” he writes, “The Light of humane minds is Perspicuous Words, but by exact definitions first snuffed, and purged from ambiguity; Reason is the pace; Encrease of Science, the way; and the Benefit of man-kind, the end.”329 The nexus of power and knowledge in mimetic language use is the power to elicit consensus on the foundational norms of civil society, through language use that teaches or shows. The inconstant signification integral to the anthropological dimension of
mimesis explains not only why there has been no moral philosophy before Hobbes’s own in modernity, his claim, but also why the state of nature persists. Normative discord is inevitable due to the idiosyncracies of the mechanico-materialist body and the uncertainty it introduces into language use. For seeing all names are imposed to signifie our conceptions; and all our affections are but conceptions; when we conceive the same things differently, we can hardly avoyd different naming of them. For though the nature of that we conceive, be the same; yet the diversity of our reception of it, in respect of different consitutions of body, and prejudices of opinion, gives every thing a tincture of our different passions. And therefore in reasoning, a man must take heed of words; which besides the signification of what we imagine of their nature, have a signification also of the nature, disposition, and interest of the speaker; such as are the names of Vertues, and Vices; For one man calleth Wisdome, what another calleth feare; and one cruelty, what another justice; one prodigality, what another magnanimity; and one gravity, what another stupidity, &c. And therefore such names can never be the true grounds of any ratiocination.330 Names do not signify the phenomena themselves, but the fancies or conceptions remaining in the imagination as a result of sense experience. Hobbes’s sensitivity to the way the peculiarities of the body can affect naming, undermines the possibility of science and art, because it undermines agreement on definitions, which could serve as the first
329 Hobbes and Tuck, Leviathan, 36.
330 Ibid., 31.
propositions of a syllogism. Inconstant signification accounts for disagreement on definitions and therefore the lack of science. Hobbes exacerbates the problem of inconstant signification with the social pathology of the state of nature, the problem of mimetic desire. In offering such strong accounts of the inevitability of inconstant signification and discord, the reader wonders how future subject citizens rise above the incentives for disagreement and discord in the state of nature to create a normative consensus as a precondition of establishing the law.331 Mimetic language use or “perspicuity” is that kind of knowledge involved in teaching, and for an author, it entails the kind of organization of language that can lead the reader to self-knowledge. Authors and the general men in the state of nature can act as agents on either side of the dynamic of mimetic language use. The ability of perspicuous language in helping others see what one is saying, is politically constructive because men must come to consensus on the meanings of terms in order to agree on the foundational norms of the commonwealth. The idea that sufficiently imagistic words can help auditors or readers see, or that language presents evidence, can be traced to classical and Renaissance precursors, in which imagistic language is termed mimetic language. Hobbes is interested in the clarity of language and its ability to resolve discord, fitting for his ambition to write a text that counts as science. Hobbes’s attempt to combine his scientific analysis of perception, with a view of language in which the central aspect of communicating knowledge is to avail the auditor of the ability to “see” what one is saying, shows the extent to which Hobbes attempted to marry his materialist ontology, mechanical view of motion, and nominalist understanding of language. Delimiting where the effects of perception end, and where agency begins in
331 Oakeshott, On Human Conduct, 122.
naming and responding to perspicuous discourse, is a way of showing how Hobbes complements his mechanico-materialist psychology with an account of agency in mimetic language use. Without the emphasis on mimesis, relying only on the mechanico-materialist explanation, the force which humans are agents in, would be obscured by the idea of mechanical force.
Mimetic language: between mechanico-materialism and nominalism
Hobbes accounts for mimetic language use in authorship and his description of when men use language rightly in the anthropological context, as a proper relationship between sense experience and language.332 Hobbes’s account of this relationship between intuition and language, involves agency, but this aspect is occluded by the fact
that Hobbes attempts to connect two otherwise disparate approaches to epistemology, mechanics and nominalism. The agency involved in mimetic language use coheres with nominalism, because in both the tradition of considering mimetic language use, and in nominalism, language use is recognized as man’s imposition of names on phenomena. Hobbes’s explanation of correct language use, however, makes reference to his mechanico-materialist account of perception, because all names ought to have originated
in sense experience, according to Hobbes. Hobbes argues that speech is the foundation of both the arts and the sciences.333 His conception of art is related to the mechanical sciences, which involves knowledge of causes and effects.334 Without speech, which can “register” thoughts, it would not be possible to remember relations of cause and effect.335 The first use of speech is to
332 Hobbes and Tuck, Leviathan, 23-4.
333 Ibid., 25, 28.
334 Ibid., 25, 32, 47.
335 Ibid., 25.
facilitate an acquiring of the arts, which helps men direct their thoughts towards how they can begin a series of motions resulting in an attainment of an end.336 Understanding cause and effect, or the acquiring of the arts, is not only necessary for those dealing with mechanics, but central to each person’s ability to satisfy his desires.
When Hobbes discusses speech as the origin of science, however, the relationship between the mechanico-materialism of the body and its interaction in the world, are overshadowed by a nominalist view of language. Hobbes’s nominalism is evident when he argues “there being nothing in the world Universall but Names.”337 Nominalism holds that names refer to similitudes between things, not to things themselves.338 This means that names men give things refer to the image left in the mind as a result of sense experience, rather than to the ontological status of the thing. “And though at some certain distance, the reall, and very object seem invested with the fancy it begets in us; yet still the object is one thing, the image or fancy is another.”339 A consequence of nominalism is that whether or not someone knows, is based on his speech, and not a match between language and the ontological status of a thing, because language does not express the ontological status of a thing. “For True and False are attributes of Speech, not of Things.”340 The kind of thinking associated with understanding changes when Hobbes switches registers to nominalism. Knowledge is no longer exclusively understanding causal connections required to satisfy desires, it also involves beginning syllogisms by naming terms in an appropriate way.
336 Ibid.
337 Ibid., 26.
338 Ibid., 25, 27, 31. Malcolm, “Thomas Hobbes and Voluntarist Theology”. Shapin, Schaffer, and Hobbes, Leviathan and the Air-Pump : Hobbes, Boyle, and the Experimental
Life. ; Gillespie, The Theological Origins of Modernity.
339 Hobbes and Tuck, Leviathan, 14.
340 Ibid., 27.
Leviathan introduces ratiocination, the process of “[s]yllogisme; which signifieth summing up of the consequneces of one saying to another.”341 Ratiocination amounts to
scientific reasoning, beginning with “the right Definition of Names,” which is “the Acquisition of Science.”342 While Hobbes termed the first use of speech the acquiring of
the arts, two pages later he claims that the first use of speech is finding the right definitions, or the “acquisition of science.” Hobbes grafts the mechanico-materialist
succession of images in the mind onto “science” by arguing that man ought to turn images from his sense perception into syllogisms. “By this imposition of Names, some of larger, some of stricter signification, we turn the reckoning of the consequences of things imagined in the mind, into a reckoning of the consequences of Appelations.”343
Hobbes’s definitions of arts and sciences, as both beginning with names, attempts to layer a nominalist epistemology over a mechanico-materialist explanation of perception.
The first abuse of speech is using language in a way that does not refer to empirical experience. “First, when men register their thoughts wrong, by the inconstancy of the signification of their words; by which they register for their conceptions, that which they never conceived; and so deceive themselves.”344 This “abuse of speech” shows that Hobbes’s attempts to connect mechanico-materialist empirical perception with nominalism, arguing that there has to be some connection between empirical experience and naming. In other words, one should not talk about things of which he has not intuited, even though there is no sense in which one is speaking of things themselves. Although Hobbes claims that everyone’s speech ought
341 Ibid., 29.
342 Ibid., 28.
343 Ibid., 26.
344 Ibid., 25.
to originate in sense experience, there is no necessary relation between the sense experience and the name. Since names refer to similarities, speakers can use the term
‘man’ to refer to a particular man the speaker has never met, on the assumption that the unknown man will bear some similarity to known men. In my view, the place where Hobbes most clearly overlaps his mechanico-materialist account of perception with the nominalist account of naming is in the account of the relation between imagination and understanding. Hobbes’s explanation of understanding demonstrates that he attempts to create an account that seamlessly moves from the train of thoughts to speech, from perception to naming. At the end of chapter two, Hobbes transitions from his discussions of sense and imagination, to the understanding. The imagination must be “raysed in man” to the level of the understanding.345 In chapter three, understanding, which requires the invention of words, speech, and method, is not natural but acquired, and encreased by study and industry; an of most men learned by instruction, and discipline; and proceed all from the invention of Words, and Speech. For besides Sense, and Thoughts, and the Trayne of thoughts, the mind of man has not other motion; though by the help of Speech, and Method, the same Facultyes may be imporved to such a height, as to distinguish men from all other living Creatures.346 The significant aspect of this account of understanding is that it establishes that language use is required for expressing and improving thoughts. Hobbes’s account of sense experience or perception is mechanico-materialist, and explains the train of thoughts motion in the mind, or mental discourse. The motions in the mind created by sense experience have an afterlife in the imagination, “from the image made in
345 Ibid., 19.
346 Ibid., 23.
seeing.”347 Hobbes notes that imagination is a Latin term, whose Greek precursor is the term ‘Fancy.’348 Despite the classical etymology, Hobbes’s view of the imagination fits
with his account of man as matter in motion. Mental discourse is a series of images, gathered during sense experience and stored in the imagination. The images are termed fancies, and another term for the faculty of the imagination, is also the Fancy. The fancy is a storehouse of images, or decaying sense memory.349 Motion is a central aspect of thought, since for Hobbes trains of thoughts are guided by “passionate thoughts.”350 The fancy can be thought of as a faculty, in the context of Hobbes’s mechanico-materialist psychology, but it can also be thought of as facilitating nominalism, because the fancy creates a match between image and word in the process
of naming.351 If Leviathan is evaluated according to whether it gives pride of place to materialism or nominalism, a case could be made for nominalism, which forms the
backbone of Hobbes’s epistemology. A central problem in this epistemology is the relation between language use and the passion-driven train of thoughts. Language use
contributes to Hobbes’s argument that the commonwealth is artificial, since speech, required for understanding, is not natural, but invented. There is neither science nor
the commonwealth without speech, invented by men to serve a variety of purposes.
347 Ibid., 15.
348 Ibid. Skinner, Reason and Rhetoric in the Philosophy of Hobbes, 183.In the Sophist, the mental pictures that form the basis of imagistic language use are called fantasias, and the phantasia is the faculty which creates them. Skinner notes “the ability to conjure images to use in discourse came to be known as fancying, a synonym for imagination.” Hobbes’s creation of perspicuity as a mark of a discourse of knowledge reaches back to the Greek understanding of the imagination, which it is also defined in terms of a mechanico-materialist ontology.
349 Hobbes and Tuck, Leviathan, 16.
350 Ibid., 20.
351 Oakeshott, “Introduction to Leviathan,” 242.
But the most noble and profitable invention of all other, was that of Speech, consisting of Names or Appellations, and their Connexion; whereby men register their Thoughts; recall them when they are past; and also declare them one to another for mutual utility and conservation; without which, there had been been amongst men, neither Common-wealth, nor Society, nor Contract, nor Peace.352 Speech is central to a man’s relation to his own thoughts. Without speech, it would be impossible to remember one’s thoughts or to organize them. Hobbes anticipates the role he will give to the covenant, a speech act carried out by the citizens, as the solution to the state of nature in this passage, emphasizing the human purposes including peace, served by speech. In drawing attention to the way speech facilitates human ends, he has associated it with power, as well as knowledge. Speech lies at the nexus between power and knowledge because it is central to understanding, and exerts a power, in naming, recalling, and delcaring. Speech exerts a power to organize an individual’s thoughts, and a power of communication between individuals. Hobbes claims his political science consists in his presentation of the knowledge of causes of peace, which participates in the mechanico-materialist concept of cause. Although naming can help remember cause and effect, central to construction, naming is essentially related to intuition or empirical experience because what is named is the image in the mind of the perceiver.353 Cause and effect relations, on the other hand, exist independently of the observer.354 Perception and naming does not determine cause and effect relations, naming simply helps a person remember cause and effect relations in case they are perceieved. Names are names of fancies or images from sense
352 Hobbes and Tuck, Leviathan, 24.
353 Ibid., 25, 27, 31.
354 Blumenberg, The Genesis of the Copernican World, 44.
experience, lodged in the imaginations of people, not objective states of the world.355 The tension in Hobbes’s attempt to marry materialism and nominalism, is that it gives
the impression of mechanical, causal force behind achievements that are essentially rather linguistic in character. For example, reading the transition from the state of nature to the civil state can be accounted for because of the way a man’s mind moves in relation to appetites and aversions, which have experiential causes, and Hobbes’s agency
in creating a plot which moves forward or speakers’ agency in moving others to see what they are saying. Hobbes’s marriage of mechanico-materialism and nominalism
works to explain how language fuels discord and facilitates peace. Nominalism, like the linguistic and social aspects of the state of nature, means that the knowledge aspect of
the power/knowledge required to construct the commonwealth, involves agency and so does not count as caused in the same way that perception as the result of material in motion does. The agency involved in mimetic language use can create consensus, and so is an alternate explanation as to why the plot of the state of nature moves forward.
Mimetic dynamics in knowledge production
Hobbes’s attempt to employ mimetic language use as an epistemology faces two problems related to the fact that mimetic language use is not a transcendental ideal of reason. The first problem is that mimetic language use is not an objective standard by which to judge speech or discourse. Whether or not a discourse or turn of phrase meets
the criteria of perspicuity depends on how it is received. One the one hand, perspicuity is a guideline for the construction of an image in a discourse of knowledge, on the other
hand, it is not a traditional epistemic standard, because whether or not a discourse is
355 Hobbes and Tuck, Leviathan, 14, 25. Peter Robert Dear, The Intelligibility of Nature : How Science Makes Sense of the World, Science.Culture (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 2006), 81.
perspicuous depends on its power, or efficacy in teaching others.356 Hobbes implies that perspicuous discourses exert a force in teaching, unlike in Plato’s Gorgias, where all
teaching is characterized by its lack of force.357 Since I want to argue that Hobbes claims that perspicuous discourse can be part of a discourse of knowledge and of norms, yet
also used in subverting rational consensus or agreement on norms, I argue that for Hobbes unlike for Plato, language that has force can count as teaching or part of a
rational discourse. In this dynamic of force between author or speaker and reader or auditor, however, the force does not work on the passions in a way that leads him to
lose rational control of his passions, rather since reason is the slave of the passions in deliberation, the force of others language use shapes one’s passions which in turn
changes the way he reasons. Parallel to my argument that Hobbes exerts agency in employing mimetic language to move the passions of his readers, the mechanics of
language use Hobbes attributes to the general man also results in the general man’s agency to create arguments about norms that solicit others’ assent.
Leibniz’s Question
The question of this chapter was the political possibilities open to the Hobbesian man given that he is primarily a language user. Hobbes plots scenes from the state of
nature to the civil state, when man’s language use first contributes to the conflict over eminence, and then can be employed to create normative consensus. The political
possibilities open to man do not work in only one direction. The normative consensus that language can create, can always also be threatened through spectator or auditor
interpretations. Leibniz’s questioning of Hobbes puts a finer point on the inability for
356 Hobbes and Tuck, Leviathan, 11, 37. Hobbes and Tönnies, The Elements of Law, Natural & Politic, 64.
357 Plato and Zeyl, Gorgias.
mimetic language to secure a normative consensus indefinitely, because imagistic language does not lend itself to univocal meanings. Peter Fenves explains that in Leibniz’s “Preliminary Dissertation,” Leibniz enters an imagined dialgoue with Hobbes attacking Hobbes’s nominalism because it is not tied to a God who could guarantee truth.358 “Without a basis in either a natural or a divine order, technical terms belong solely to the order of language, which, however, loses its defining function once it no longer represents either the world created by God or the exalted Word in and through which the world comes into being.”359
agreement about the nature of things can be generated solely by discourse under the condition that the latter can arrive at truth, and truth can enter into discourse under the condition that the relationship among linguistic terms corresponds to the underlying order of things—and does not, instead, simply respond to a willful command, regardless of whether it be human or divine.360 Since there is no necessary connection between Hobbes’s materialist ontology of the world and nominalism, he cannot answer Leibniz’s question. Nominalism cannot ensure that words refer in a necessary way to things, and do not merely reflect arbitrary wills. Leibniz points out that since “true and false are attributes of speech not of things,” then syllogisms do not necessarily refer to metaphysical or ontological relations. Leibniz’s argument is that an agreement in language does not thereby constitute the truth. Hobbes did not respond to Leibniz’s letters or his dialogue.361 Instead, he exacerbates the problem of the relation between names and ontology when he explicitly connects naming to the idiosyncratic passionate makeup of the language user. Since
358 Peter D. Fenves, Arresting Language : From Leibniz to Benjamin, Meridian (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2001), 37.
359 Ibid., 16.
360 Ibid., 37.
361 Ibid.
names inconstantly signify, philosophers have not been able to agree on the causes of peace, and men in the state of nature are not able to agree on the norms they ought to
follow for harmonious social relations. Leibniz’s point is even broader. Its not only that language is used in an arbitrary way, but that in the nominalist understanding of
language, meaning could not be ‘fixed’ in the way that Hobbes intends for it to be.
Hobbes’s solution to linguistically driven discord: The Sovereign Definer
Mimetic language use is part of the power/knowledge the future subject-citizens employ in constructing political authority since it is central to the ability to create normative consensus. The covenant which authorizes the sovereign representative is also a linguistic speech act. Victoria Kahn explains Hobbes’s sensitivity to the ways in which improper language use can threaten covenanting. “A contract in language is inevitably also a contract about the use of language—one that proscribes deceit, equivocation, and, in most cases, coercion. The possibility of binding signification then becomes the precondition of binding oneself politically, the precondition of the irrevocable transfer of rights.”362 In order to understand the political possibilities open to the general man on account of his language use, it is necessary to take into consideration that language can destabilize a normative consensus just as much as it can create one. Just as equivocal language stokes strategy in the state of nature, disagreement on language also threatens political unity and authority in the context of the civil state. Recognizing this problem, Hobbes argues the sovereign should play the role of censor of public discourse. “what Opinions and Doctrines are averse, and what conducing to Peace; and consequently, on what occasions, how farre, and what, men are to be trusted withall, in speaking to Multitudes of people; and who shall examine the Doctrines of all bookes before they be published. For the Actions of
362 Kahn, Wayward Contracts : The Crisis of Political Obligation in England, 1640-1674, 18.
men proceed from their Opinions; and in the wel goverening of Opinions, consisteth the well governing of mens Actions, in order to their Peace, and Concord. And though in matter of Doctrine, nothing ought to be regarded but the Truth; yet this is not repugnant to regulating the same by Peace.363 While many interpreters focus on Hobbes’s materialism, and metaphors connecting the mechanical sciences, in my view Hobbes’s observations about the poetic and linguistic dimensions of mimesis illuminate an aspect of the commonwealth the mechanico-materialist metaphors obscure, which is the fragility of the enterprise of forming a normative consensus as a precondition of the commonwealth, and maintaining peace after the institution of the commonwealth. Since language cannot be checked by an external standard of objective knowledge, then there is no authority outside citizens’ themselves in determining truth in public discourse. In the passage above, Hobbes relates a fantasy of order, that true doctrines could always be on the side of peace, or that truth and the normative consensus could always be united. This is certainly a means of securing order, but there are many passages in the history of political thought suggesting that truth is usually not on the side of the majority, and the truth of public discourse cannot be measured by the effect of a pacified citzenry. In the history of Hobbes interpretation, the sovereign in known as the “sovereign definer” on the basis of its role in censoring public discourse and defining the meanings of terms used in law. Hobbes insists that the official language of the commonwealth ought to be perspicuous. Hobbes’s account of perspicuous or mimetic language attempts to marry a mechanico-materialist view of how men perceive, with a nominalist view of naming. Mycentral argument is that the problem with this marriage is that the mechanico-
363 Hobbes and Tuck, Leviathan, 125.
materialist responses of the human body in the course of empirical perception cannot lessen the arbitrariness of names. The result is that perspicuous language use does not
solve the problem of perspective, but draws attention to it.364 Although there is a proper relationship between sense perception and language use, even perspicuous
language can only communicate the perspective of the speaker, and what is communicated is an image that can be “seen” or interpreted in different ways. Perspicuous language may be a sign of knowledge, but not because it could be verified as true in a way that surmounts perspective with objectivity. Instead, teaching and learning take place between the perspectives of the author and the reader, or the teacher and student. The political possibilities of the Hobbesian man as a language user
Since the sovereign decides on which doctrines may be taught in public, whether or not political contestation is possible in the civil state, depends on the degree to which
the sovereign can truly control the definitions of terms. While many democratic theorists argue that there is no lesson in Leviathan for a politics of contestation, in my
view the sovereign definer does not ultimately make political contestation impossible, because mimetic language or perspicuity is inherently polyvalent. In other words,
despite a sovereign’s official definitions, the spectators in the commonwealth may be able to see more than one meaning in a single perspicuous phrase or discourse. Since politics is practiced in and through language, it would be impossible for the sovereign to control the meanings of terms in the public sphere. By relying on perspicuous discourse, or mimetic language creating pictures in the eyes of others’ mind, Hobbes’s observations about the character of efficacious language use run counter to his
364 Ibid., 31, 33.
authoritarian images of order. Hobbes imagines that under the ideal political authority, the censored doctrines, or those that disrupt peace, will also be those doctrines that are untrue. This would be a picture readers could embrace in case sovereigns were philosophers, which we know they cannot be according to Hobbes. Peace and truth exist
harmoniously in the ideally just polity, which according to Plato could be a political experience only outside of time, in other words, the ideally just polity cannot be experienced. Hobbes notices that governors and teachers sometimes approve untrue doctrines, in which case truth would not be on the side of peace but discord. It is true, that in a Common-wealth, where by the negligence, or unskilfullnesse of Governours, and Teachers, false Doctrines are by time generally received; the contrary Truths may be generally offensive: Yet the most sudden and rough busling in of a new Truth, that can be, does never breake the Peace, but only sometimes awake the Warre. For those men
that are so remissely governed, that they dare take up Armes, to defend or introduce an Opinion, are still in Warre; and their condition not Peace, but only a Cessation of Armes for feare of one another; and they live as it were, in the procincts of battaile continually. It belongeth therefore to him that hath the Soveraign Power, to be Judge, or constitute all Judges of Opinions and Doctrines, as a thing necessary to Peace; thereby to prevent Discord and Civill Warre. Directly after defining the duties of the sovereign definer, Hobbes admits that the maintenance of peace through censorship would not prevent contrary Truths from busling in. In my view, this follows from the character of perspicuous language. The harmony between peace and truth reflects Hobbes’s projections of order. By relying on perspicuous discourse, or mimetic language creating pictures in the eyes of others’ mind, Hobbes’s observations about the character of efficacious language use ran counter to his desire to have depicted a constructed political authority which could unequivocally keep the peace. In my view, there is no way to eliminate the polyvalency of perspicuous language, just as there is no center which could control the meaning of sovereign power as established by its spectators. Illuminating how Hobbes’s general man is a mimetic language user illuminates his agency, just as attending to Hobbes’s employment of poetic mimesis reveals the agency of authorship. The conclusion when attending to poetic and linguistic mimesis as integral to the imitative arts that construct the commonwealth, is that peace and order cannot be unambiguously secured given the qualities of imagistic language in public discourse.
Conclusion: Mimesis creates the mechanical world
Poetic mimesis and mimetic language use have consequences for how we understand the mechanical character of the world in Leviathan. According to Hobbes’s techniques of authorship and portrait of men, language creates a world in which men can become particular kinds of agents. Language that men use in a given world, constitutes and reconstitutes the theater of their actions. The metaphor that the commonwealth is an Automaton, has to be complemented with the other tropes Hobbes invokes, including theatrum mundi. The mechanical world in Leviathan, is a world in which men can make evaluations and use language to create normative consensus. The machine of the commonwealth is not definitively made, since the meanings of its machinations are continually open to reinterpretation and contestation, precisely on account of the possibilities mimetic language brings with it. In this chapter, I wanted to demonstrate that poetic mimesis, and mimetic language use inform the sense in which Hobbes, the reader, and the general man all count as agents, despite Hobbes’s emplotment to the transition from the state of nature is comparable to a logical syllogism. Instead of reading the transition from the state of nature to the civil state as something that befalls the general man and reader with the force of logical necessity, I argue that Hobbes shows that poetic mimesis and mimetic language use can exert a force in which men are nevertheless agents, and this is the kind of force that is meaningfully involved in the development of norms preconditioning the civil state. Besides the force exerted by material on the faculties of perception, besides the reaction to what is seen in the visual field, Leviathan is a text about the force of another kind of seeing, one that men make available to one another through their language use. Hobbes relies on both a mechanico-materialist account of perception and the movement of the passions to make his case that general men in a state of nature will covenant in reaction to the frightening spectacle of sovereignty, and a linguistic account of “seeing what others are saying” to account for the normative force through which men recognize it is rational to treat one another reciprocally and covenant for a civil state. Attention to the mimetic dynamics of Leviathan, however, reveals the imitative arts comprise the power/knowledge required for the construction of the commonwealth. Poetic and linguistic mimesis are constituent powers, belong to men who are capable of constructing a normative consensus out of our power to make things clear or appear to one another in language.
