Hobbes on the supernatural from The Elements of Law to Leviathan

Hobbes's unusual religious views in his classical work, Leviathan, are often seen as a product of his attempt to reconcile Christianity with his philosophical materialism. Yet given Hobbes's materialistic view in his earlier works too, this explanatory framework alone is not sufficient for grasping distinctive features of Leviathan. This article remedies this lacuna by paying close attention to an understudied aspect of the development of Hobbes's religious theory from The Elements of Law to Leviathan: his treatment of the supernatural and, particularly, of matters of faith known by supernatural revelation as opposed to natural reason. I argue that over time Hobbes developed an epistemological analysis of supernatural revelation and refined his argument about the sense in which matters of faith are supernatural and about the extent to which they are found in the Bible. It was not materialism per se but the more sophisticated analysis of the supernatural in Leviathan that enabled Hobbes to admit the sphere of the supernatural to a much smaller extent than in De Cive and to discuss in detail what he sees as a matter of faith and beyond the scope of philosophy in De Cive.     

Leviathans Old and New: What Collingwood Saw in Hobbes

Summary

R. G. Collingwood presented his major work of political philosophy, The New Leviathan, as an updated version of Thomas Hobbes's Leviathan. However, his reasons for taking Hobbes's great work as his inspiration have puzzled and eluded many Collingwood scholars, while those interested in the reception of Hobbes's ideas have largely neglected the New Leviathan. In this essay I reveal what Collingwood saw in Hobbes's political philosophy and show how his reading of Hobbes both diverges from other prominent interpretations of the time and invites us to reassess Hobbes's complex association with the origins of liberalism. In doing so, I focus on Collingwood's science of mind, his ideas on society and authority, and his dialectical theory of politics, in each case showing how he engaged with Hobbes in order to elucidate his own vision of civilisation. That vision is based on the development of social consciousness, which involves people coming to understand the body politic as a joint enterprise whereby they confer authority upon those who rule.     

Zum Verhältnis von Religion und Zoologie im 17. Jahrhundert (William Harvey,Nathaniel Highmore,Jan Swammerdam)

Jan Swammerdam was one of the first scientists to do biological research on the basis of physico-theology. He was a very religious man and thought that by studying the secrets of nature he could best serve the Almighty God. He saw his life's work in demostrating the importance of God in the world of the smallest animals. The most important works of Swammerdam refer to the world of the insects and other lower animals, which he called the ?legions of the God of Israel”?, through which God tells mankind to recognize their sins, to desist from them and to honour him with greater humility. ?The miracles of nature”? he said ?are an open bible, which everywhere points to God as its eternal origin.”? This is one of the reasons for the title of the work Biblia naturae. It was Swammerdam's declared aim to demonstrate that the insects were no less perfect than the higher animals. Therefore, he tried to refute all three arguments used by his contemporaries to show up the difference between the higher animals and the insects: 1. insects were believed to have no inner anatomy; 2. they were thought to originate by spontanous generation; 3. development occurred through ?metamorphosis”?. Swammerdam succeeded in refuting all three arguments by exact studies of the nature and development of the insects. Most important for him was his aim to demonstrate that even the structure and the development of the smallest of animals demonstrate that they could only be made by God himself. Science as God's worship must be strictly objective, he said, because only than could one understand the laws of nature and in this way the real nature of God himself.     

Thomas Hobbes and the Term ‘Right Reason’: Participation to Calculation

Three times between 1640 and 1651, once at considerable length, Hobbes used and accepted, and then mocked, repudiated and discarded, the ancient/medieval term recta ratio/right reason. These repeated fluctuations in his thinking and rhetorical strategy occurred during the writing of his three major treatises on moral and political theory, one additional note on the term in De Cive, and an unpublished commentary on Thomas White's De Mundo. They are made obvious by his substitution of recta ratio for reason or natural reason when recycling passages from Elements of the Law for use in De Cive, and by his subsequent reversal of that substitution when revising other passages in De Cive for use in Leviathan. Despite incorporating recta ratio as a structural element in De Cive, he finally reverted in Leviathan to regarding the term as a deceptive verbal construct, non-existent in rerum natura, and ridiculing its users and proponents. Right reason carried connotations linked to it in antiquity and in the Middle Ages, and Hobbes's reversals in his view and use of it, and his final dismissal of it, provide further evidence and justification for the now familiar modern claim that he was a herald of modernity.     

The Locke Essay: Achievement and Promise

Abstract

Strauss's essay on Locke is devoted to Locke's early lectures on the law of nature, a text unpublished when he initially wrote on Locke in Natural Right and History. One purpose of his essay was to show that the Locke text did not contradict the position on the law of nature that Strauss had earlier attributed to him. Strauss also used the essay as an opportunity to further his own reflections on traditional natural law doctrine.     

French Eighteenth-Century Materialists and Natural Law

Summary

This article looks at the discussions of natural law by the eighteenth-century French materialists Julien Offray de La Mettre, Denis Diderot, Paul Thiry d'Holbach and Claude-Adrien Helvétius. It is particularly concerned with their discussion of moral values and their attempt to find a materialistic basis for them as part of their rejection of religion. The discussion brings out the différences between them and analyses their dialogues on this question, including the other materialists' rejection of La Mettrie's amoralism, which threatened to undermine their attempt to found a natural law taught by experience and based on human nature. Particular attention is paid to Diderot's many writings which grapple with the subject, beginning with his Encyclopédie article droit naturel, probably written in 1754. He discussed the question in many of his later writings, including in his annotations on the works of Helvétius, who based natural law on the general interest. These writings reveal a tension between Diderot's emphasis on the search for individual happiness and the interests of society as he, together with d'Holbach, attempted to provide a natural basis for morality and government from which to criticise existing institutions.     

Determinisme et liberte: Approche d'une histoire du conditionnement: La peur de souffrir

The article takes issue with W. G. Runciman's contention, in Great Books, Bad Arguments, that modern political development has moved beyond both theory and practice of governance by a sovereign power over subjects as expounded in Hobbes's Leviathan. Runciman's allegations that Hobbes overrates education, that he fails to recognise the potential for dissent and revolt in a polity under a sovereign, and that he ignores society's pre-political scope and its post-absolutist, eventually democratic prospects, are checked against the text and argument of Leviathan. Runciman's contention that government without subjection has been achieved in modern constitutions is confronted with Hobbes's resistance.     

Thomas Traherne,Thomas Hobbes,and the Rhetoric of Realism

Abstract

Thomas Traherne has often been seen as a mystic detached from the turbulence of his period. Recent scholarship has attempted to place him more firmly in context. This article contributes to this trend in arguing that Traherne's late works, especially Commentaries of Heaven, were shaped by the pressure of responding to Thomas Hobbes's Leviathan. Though Traherne makes only one direct reference to Hobbes, his idiosyncrasies in thought, argument, and mode of expression are all fundamentally influenced by the need to counter Hobbes's account of ethics, metaphysics, and language. Traherne is particularly concerned to assert and display an ardent realism against Hobbes's nominalism. In doing so, he creates a complicated play of rhetorical figures, especially abusio or catachresis, as embodying theological commitments. This both places Traherne more clearly against the background of the intellectual history of the period in which he lived, and demonstrates his particularity as a writer.     

3. CARL SCHMITT'S CONTRIBUTION TO A THEORY OF POLITICAL MYTH

My goal in this essay is to show that myths have played a larger role than we might think in politics and in political theory and that myths are essential to politics. For this purpose I will use Schmitt's theory of myth, since he elaborated his theory with strong interpretations of two different myths: Hobbes's Leviathan and Shakespeare's Hamlet. I will compare Schmitt's interpretations of Hamlet with my own, as doing so will provide a critical view of Schmitt's conclusions, and it will enable me to develop my own conception of myth and its relations to political theory and history.     

Reminiscences of the Solicitor General's Office

A few years ago Danielle Stern suggested to her grandfather that as the oldest member of the family, he ought to put down his memories of both the family and of his law practice. Stern did, and in it he describes various members of the family, and how he came to go to Harvard Law School, graduating in 1932 during the Great Depression. Although he had been an editor of the Harvard Law Review and graduated magna cum laude, the major New York firms passed him by because he was a Jew. He did manage to get a job with a small law firm at $25 a week, and about a year later went to Washington to join the New Deal. We are pleased to present that part of Mr. Stern s memoirs that deals with his years in the Justice Department and then in the Solicitor General s office.     

Dithyrambs and Ploughshares: The Cycle of Creation and Criticism in Nietzsche's Aesthetics

Pairing Thus Spoke Zarathustra with On the Genealogy of Morality foregrounds tensions between artistic creation and critical interpretation in Nietzsche's work. From The Birth of Tragedy to his genesis of the concept, Will to Power, Nietzsche describes the real, or “what is,” in terms of a creative, form-giving force. We might therefore read Zarathustra—a linguistically experimental, richly allegorical, self-reflexive, modernist prose poem—as the pre-eminent, artistic mode of philosophical expression, at least for Nietzsche. But Zarathustra is followed by a sober Abhandlung (treatise), which professes a scientific goal of “getting to the bottom of things” by uncovering the contingency, origin, and fabricated nature of supposedly eternal, “given” values. These instantiations of Nietzsche-the-artist and Nietzsche-the-critic suggest art's “double” or contradictory nature—a nature that accents its kinship with philosophy. Zarathustra and the Genealogy, read together, hint that the destruction of idols—or de-constructive, critical interpretation more generally—is not just supplemental to, but a necessary moment within the aesthetic itself.     

Hobbes et le Républicanisme

Hobbes criticizes the theory of mixed government without presenting this mixed government as republican. For him criticizing republicanism means criticizing the definition of freedom as the participation of citizens in the debate on matters concerning them all. We can find the main points of this criticism in theElements of law natural and politic and in theDe cive. InLeviathan Hobbes summarizes this criticism and makes it more dogmatic, while developing in a new way the idea that in all regimes there is an identity of essence in sovereignty. This idea is at variance with the republican thesis stating a difference of nature between free regimes and those that are not and makes it possible to take the Roman republic or the Athenian democracy as models.     

Hobbes ou la crise de l'état baroque

Thomas Hobbes in Leviathan presented a paradigm of the social contract that has proven foundational in Western political thought. A proper understanding of the philosopher’s thought is thus of paramount importance. I argue that today’s case for a religiously tolerant Hobbes has missed an important part of the historical record. I first consider an obscure but important document, the second edition of the Humble Proposals. It demonstrates that leading members of a seventeenth century Christian denomination, the Independents, considered a state-enforced confession of faith. Independents are generally seen as tolerant, and one of the arguments for Hobbesian toleration is that Hobbes endorsed them. But the second edition of the Humble Proposals aligns with the possibility in Hobbes that the civil sovereign will impose part III of Leviathan on the Universities and treat its contents as a legally required confession of faith – one that may be necessary for security, and the avoidance of civil war. Hobbes’s endorsement of Independency alone cannot be used to argue that his work leads to religious toleration. The evidence I present reinforces an earlier assessment and alongside other evidence points to the return of the intolerant Hobbes.     

Pufendorf disciple of Hobbes: The nature of man and the state of nature: The doctrine of socialitas

No doctrine of Pufendorf's is better known than that of socialitas. The reason is that Pufendorf himself declared that socialitas was the foundation of natural law. No interpreter of Pufendorf can therefore avoid dealing with it. Moreover, Pufendorf linked the issue of socialitas to the question of the state of nature, thus raising important issues with both theological and philosophical implications.

Given the prominence and importance of this theme in Pufendorf's work, a close analysis of what he meant by it is central to the interpretation of his work, even though this means to pose again a new number of questions already discussed in the scholarly literature. In particular, this article examines the relationship between Pufendorf and Hobbes with regard to this central theme. In fact, a traditional historiographic topos is that Pufendorf and Hobbes fundamentally disagree on the doctrine of socialitas, while the former is closer to Grotius and to the Aristotelian-classic tradition that see man as a social animal.

This article takes, instead, Pufendorf to be a follower of Hobbes, and tries to explain how the more traditional view of Pufendorf as a critic of Hobbes was in some way due to Pufendorf's own attempt to distance himself from the accusations of Hobbesism (and hence of atheism and moral indifference) that the critics made against him when his work first appeared. In order to do this, Pufendorf tried to rethink his own position within the history of ethics, and put himself on the side of the Stoics, of Grotius and of Cumberland, against Epicurus and Hobbes. This retrospective ‘illusion’ has greatly influenced later scholarship, giving us a distorted image of Pufendorf's own view of socialitas. A more precise account of the latter gives a better prospective from which to look at the relationship between Pufendorf and Hobbes.     

“The artifice of eternity”: The Wanderings of Oisin and the Byzantium poems

Yeats’s poetry and drama centre on conflict, and crucially, on the clash between the mortal and the eternal. In this essay, I focus on the way in which The Wanderings of Oisin foreshadows and informs the treatment of eternity in Yeats’s later Byzantium poems. The Wanderings of Oisin explores the intensity of human longing for the eternal despite our time-bound nature, prefiguring his later impassioned though analytical Byzantium poems. Although the Byzantium poems seem initially to glorify eternity at the expense of human life, this essay traces the complexity of Yeats’s desire. Previous criticism has understated the extent to which Yeats’s poetry actively resists the siren song of eternity. The Byzantium poems problematise the eternity that they seem to desire, and this article reveals them as inflected by the way in which The Wanderings of Oisin questions the value of the eternal realm in the light of mortal heroic values. The “intensity, solitude, defeat” of the artist are inevitable, but there is a victory of sorts won from the poet’s deliberate inability to commit to any version of the eternal that preclude his own power and humanity. Yeats’s poetry runs the gamut between versions of desire that express an overweening desire for resolution even as they retain their resistance to any single pure state of being, if any such state is possible.     

Oliver O'Donovan's Critique of Autonomy

Abstract

More than any other contemporary theologian, Oliver O'Donovan has revived political theology as a field of enquiry. Yet O'Donovan has been consistent in his critique of the modern idea of autonomy, judging it to be at odds with the more communitarian idea of covenanted community found in the Hebrew Bible/Old Testament. He contrasts this modern idea, and its political implications, with the older biblical idea, also adding some basic points from Aristotle's idea of the polis. But unlike many contemporary communitarians, O'Donovan is also able to incorporate the idea of human rights into his political theology. He sees this supposedly modern idea having fuller precedence in the biblical idea of mishpat ("justice"), which he takes to be God's primordial claim on His covenanted community, a claim that sufficiently grounds both individual rights and communal rights and which enables them to function together. However, O'Donovan draws the line when it comes to the modern social contract theory, arguing that it is at odds with biblical teaching that the primary responsibility of rulers is to divine law. While agreeing with O'Donovan's rejection of autonomy and his acceptance of human rights, this paper argues against O'Donovan's theological rejection of social contract theory. Instead, it argues that a social contract is consistent with the doctrine of the covenant; indeed that the very possibility of the social contract is best explained by the doctrine of the covenant, and that this acceptance of the social contract serves the best political interests of covenanted communities (like the Jewish People and the Christian Church) in an otherwise secular world.     

Spekulation und Physik im 18. Jahrhundert. Lomonossow,Kant und Lavoisier in Sachen Erhaltungsgesetz und Äther

As far as the law of preservation of matter and the existence of ether are concerned, Kant, Lomonossow and Lavoisier had very similar views. Nevertheless, according to historical evidence they worked out their theories never taking each other's results for granted. Whereas it is well known that Lavoisier did not base his experiments on the former ones by Lomonossow, it has been argued that Kant based his philosophy of nature on Lavoisier's experiments. I try to show here, that Kant had his philosophy of nature done, prior to Lavoisier's Elements of Chemistry. Further that the only one to have been able to influence Kant was not Lavoisier but Lomonossow. But Kant never mentioned Lomonossow. There is strong evidence that the similarity of views in Kant, Lomonossow and Lavoisier is not due to any kind of interaction between them. This also holds of the (same) mistakes, which Kant and Lomonossow made. The only substantial difference is that Kant thought, that some laws of nature may be logically inferred without experiments.     

An Empire of the Scholars: Transnational Lawyers and the Rule of Opinio Juris

The eternal conflict between justice and violence is the theme of director John Ford's last great film, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance. In the world of the American West where Ford's story is set, justice does not just happen; it is a work of manly courage that encompasses a willingness—in extreme cases—to kill those men, such as Liberty Valance, who challenge law and order. Justice will require, as Plato said, a rightly ordered soul, but it will be a soul that must do violence to realize justice in a world that too often resembles a Hobbesian state of nature. In Ford's view, the truth of these violent origins of justice are more likely to be obscured than illuminated by the civilized historian's account of this truth. And we do violence not merely to justice but also to truth itself if we fail to respect the hard reality that civilization requires such measures.     

Pious Aspects in the Ethical and Moral Views of Matthias Bel

The author of the paper studies the ethical views of Matthias Bel expressed in his Preface to Johann Arndt's treatise and in Davidian-Solomonian Ethics, which contain a critique of false Christianity and ancient (especially Aristotle's) ethics. Bel refuses any philosophical ethics based on human nature, since man, in his very essence, is sinful and vicious. This leads to the general moral downfall of the young and mankind. He only recognises ethics whose source and the highest good is God. He accepts ancient ethics as long as it is useful for achieving Christian moral values. Bel was a vociferous critic of the morality of the time; he adopted a highly negative stance towards the Jews and Gypsies living in the then Historical Hungary. The author considers Matthias Bel a confident, or enthusiastic, Pietist in the early period of his life and work; later, he rates him as a moderate Pietist.