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If there is anything that is
unambiguously modern in modern political philosophy specifically or modern
thought in general, it is a reject of ancient thought. What was it that the moderns rejected? All ancient thought was in the widest sense
theological. Including in the term ancient both the classical philosophy of
Plato and Aristotle (along with the pre-Socratics and the post-Socratic
philosophers) as well as both pagan and Biblical theism, all the ancients
recognized some authority that was higher than man. Even the Epicureans, who thought that the
gods took no interest in human affairs and so did not bother to legislate for
human beings, thought that wisdom amounted to accepting the place of man in the
natural order. Plato and Aristotle
regarded nature as an authority.
Machiavelli’s thought is
founded on a rejection of higher authority.
Neither God nor nature provides guidance or salvation. We are on our own and must make out way by
our own will and resources. Hobbes
political thought, despite his necessary concessions to Christian theology, is
grounded in that same foundation. This
is most apparent in The Leviathan,
his magnum opus.
Perhaps the most striking
feature of that work is the introduction of early modern science at the
beginning. Hobbes gives us a thoroughly
mechanical account of the human being, body and soul as so many machines, and
an account of the commonwealth. Here is
the opening paragraph:
NATURE (the art whereby God hath made and governs the world)
is by the art of man, as in many other things, so in this also imitated, that
it can make an artificial animal. For seeing life is but a motion of limbs, the
beginning whereof is in some principal part within, why may we not say that all
automata (engines that move themselves by springs and wheels as doth a watch)
have an artificial life? For what is the heart, but a spring; and the nerves,
but so many strings; and the joints, but so many wheels, giving motion to the
whole body, such as was intended by the Artificer? Art goes yet further,
imitating that rational and most excellent work of Nature, man. For by art is
created that great LEVIATHAN called a COMMONWEALTH, or STATE (in Latin,
CIVITAS), which is but an artificial man, though of greater stature and
strength than the natural, for whose protection and defence it was intended;
and in which the sovereignty is an artificial soul, as giving life and motion
to the whole body; the magistrates and other officers of judicature and
execution, artificial joints; reward and punishment (by which fastened to the
seat of the sovereignty, every joint and member is moved to perform his duty)
are the nerves, that do the same in the body natural; the wealth and riches of
all the particular members are the strength; salus populi (the people's safety)
its business; counsellors, by whom all things needful for it to know are
suggested unto it, are the memory; equity and laws, an artificial reason and
will; concord, health; sedition, sickness; and civil war, death. Lastly, the
pacts and covenants, by which the parts of this body politic were at first
made, set together, and united, resemble that fiat, or the Let us make man,
pronounced by God in the Creation.
Two things occur to me
here. One is that Hobbes regards the regime
as an altogether artificial creation, as much as any automata. Think of a player piano. This sets him apart from the Socratics who
took the political community as a natural growth resulting from man’s nature as
a political animal. More on that
later.
The other is that Hobbes work
mirrors Socrates’ strategy in the Republic. It is frequently forgotten that the political
theory developed in that work is secondary to its moral psychology. Socrates builds a regime in speech in order
to model the human soul, so that he can defend justice against the challenge
posed by his spirited interlocutors.
Plato’s soul is tripartite: intelligence rules (or ought to rule) the
passions and the passions rule (or ought to rule) the appetites. The three parts of his regime: philosopher
kings, guardians, and producers, correspond to the parts of the soul.
In the passage above we can see
that Hobbes adopts the same strategy.
The human being is a natural machine consisting of a number of
mechanical parts. The regime is an
artificial machine consisting of roughly the same set of parts. The difference is that Plato’s soul is based
on the classical understand of nature.
Natural wholes are primary in that account. The parts of things are derivative from the
wholes of which they are parts. For
Hobbes, apparently, the parts are primary and the wholes are derivative from
the mechanisms that coalesce into them.
This raises a profound problem
for Hobbes and for the moderns generally that did not bother the
Socratics. This is noted by Leo Strauss
in the introduction to Hobbes’ Political Philosophy.
Hobbes tried to base his political philosophy on modern
natural science. The temptation to take
this way could hardly be resisted. As
traditional moral and political philosophy was, to some extent, based on
traditional metaphysics, it seemed necessary, when traditional metaphysics were
replaced by modern natural science, to base the new moral and political
philosophy on the new science.
Attempts of this kind could never succeed: traditional
metaphysics were, to use the language of Hobbes’ successors, ‘anthropomorphistic’
and, therefore, a proper basis for a philosophy of things human; modern natural
science, on the other hand, which tried to interpret nature by renouncing all ‘anthropomorphisms’,
all conceptions of purpose and perfection, could, therefore, to say the least,
contribute nothing to the understanding of things human, to the foundation of
morals and politics.
Yes. Human beings are creatures with purpose. We care, each of us, about ourselves and
others. We can live better or worse
lives and what is better or worse suggests the possibility of perfection. We are wholes which can flourish or decay and
die. If modern science indeed requires
the rejection of all anthropomorphisms, then indeed it can have nothing to say
about the moral and political things. It
drives a wedge between the human being and all other things, leaving the former
as strangers estranged from the world they live in.
I think that this is the root
of the anxieties expressed by critics of scientism. The fear is that when the light of science is
brought to bear on love, literature, art, etc., that it will extinguish the
human being in those things. I think
that this fear is mistaken because the early modern view of modern science, the
one in which Hobbes was situated, is wrong.
Some things can be explained in purely mechanistic terms. Biology cannot. Purpose is not uniquely human. A spider, crawling across the kitchen floor,
is up to something. A vine crawling up a
stone wall is, in a metaphysical sense, trying to get somewhere.
If to have purpose is
anthropomorphic, then living organisms are metaphysically, robustly
anthropomorphic. When science turns its
attention to organisms, it is not the latter that are reduced; it is the former
that is enlarged. The same is true when
scientific methods are applied to the foundations and origins of human morality
and political life, to love, literature, and art.
Hobbes believed that human
beings were by nature solitary animals.
Hobbes was wrong. Classical
philosophy did not drive a wedge between human nature and nature in general, as
Hobbes was forced to do. Classical
philosophy was closer to the truth, as the modern biosocial sciences are
discovering.
