Thomas Hobbes's Leviathan features what is arguably the fiercest philosophical indictment of pride since Augustine's City of God. Indeed, Hobbes locates Leviathan's prime contribution and claim to posterity in its rebuke of arrogance. Toward the end of his life, Hobbes predicted that Leviathan would ‘last to all Eternity’ as a ‘severe Reproof of those that Men Ambitious are (ambitionis Elenchus)’.Footnote 1 Scholars have confirmed Hobbes's prediction that Leviathan would be known as an antidote to pride. Following Leo Strauss, it is commonplace to insist that, ‘[a]s its very title expresses, it [Leviathan] is directed primarily against the passion of “pride”’.Footnote 2 With this gloss on Hobbes's title, Strauss foregrounds the role that arguments against pride, and for modesty, play in Leviathan's account of political obligation. In the state of nature, vainglory is foremost among the passions that breed the conflicts that expose the need for absolute sovereignty.Footnote 3 Because the vain crave approval and resort to force at the slightest affront:
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 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.Footnote 4
In the absence of a binding arbiter, disputes surrounding reputation escalate into mortal combat. However, in these battles, combatants experience one passion, fear of violent death, which pierces inflated egos, prompts rational deliberation, and inclines menFootnote 5 to contract. In the story that Hobbes tells, chastening vanity is a prerequisite for establishing a commonwealth. Only the visceral experience of vulnerability inspires recognition that a ‘power able to over-awe them all’ is a necessary condition for peace. Moreover, modesty, or acknowledgement of equality, establishes the protocol for transition to peace – namely, an egalitarian transfer of rights.Footnote 6 In Leviathan, Hobbes promises that chastened, modest individuals can create a ‘Mortall God’ by uniting to form a commonwealth.Footnote 7
If Leviathan aims to deflate vanity and cultivate modesty, why is its author known as a conceited braggart, guilty of ‘magisterial haughtinesse’?Footnote 8 Does Hobbes fail to practise the modesty that he preaches to political subjects? From the moment of Leviathan's publication, critics have charged that Hobbes is not innocent of the passions he inveighs against. Although seventeenth-century critics reserve most of their censure for Hobbes's purported atheism, his conduct during the civil war, and his mathematical incompetence, they also take exception to his bombast.Footnote 9 Accusations of bombast first gained currency in polemics by the university scientists (Seth Ward and John Wallis), polemics spurred by Leviathan's instant notoriety. As Anglican ministers and university professors, Ward and Wallis took offence at Leviathan's patent anticlericalism, not to mention its attacks on university culture. More importantly, with Hobbes's growing notoriety, Ward and Wallis were eager to distance their own (non-scholastic, and so potentially controversial) approach to philosophy from Hobbes's (now compromised) approach.Footnote 10 Accusations of vanity were one weapon in the campaign to immunize experimental philosophy against the Hobbist taint. Toward this end, Ward, Wallis, and their compatriots related damning anecdotes about Hobbes's purported irascibility and lack of philosophical hospitality. Hobbes's brusque rejoinders to philosophical challengers provided ammunition for charges of vanity, which Ward, Wallis, et al., deployed to burnish their own scientific and political bona fides.Footnote 11
For example, in Hobbius heauton-timorumenos, a 1662 polemic, Wallis rehearses the common charge that Hobbes overestimates his novelty and significance. Wallis dismisses Leviathan as a transparent gambit to curry favour with Oliver Cromwell. When Hobbes casts obligation as an obedience/protection exchange, Wallis argues, he justifies treasonous shifts in allegiance. But, on Wallis's view, Hobbes is not only self-interested – he is also self-aggrandizing.
He would be thought, of All that are, or ever have been, the onely knowing Man. And he doth not spare to professe, upon all occasions, How incomparably he thinks Himself to have surpassed All, Ancient, Modern, Schools, Academies, Persons, Societies, Philosophers, Divines, Heathens, Christians; How Despicable he thinks all Their writings, in comparison of His; and, what Hopes he hath, that, by the Soveraign command of Some Absolute Prince, all other Doctrines being exploded, his new Dictates should be peremptorily imposed, to be alone taught in all Schools, and Pulpits, and universally submitted to … To recount All which he speaks, of Himself, Magnificently; and, Contemptuously, of all others; would fill a Volume. ’Twas a motion made by one (whom I will not name) That some idle person should read over all his Books; and collecting together his Arrogant, and Supercilious speeches, Applauding himself, and Despising all other men; set them forth in one Synopsis; with this Title, Hobbius de se. What a pretty piece of Pageantry this would make, I shall leave to your own thoughts.Footnote 12
Their ostensible subjects notwithstanding, all of Hobbes's texts are about their author, Wallis complains. Although Wallis writes with unusual vehemence, his characterization of Hobbes's motives is hardly anomalous. Although the scientific, political, and theological controversies that prompted Wallis's tirade have subsided, accusations of vanity remain a familiar trope in Hobbes scholarship. In the twentieth century, figures like Sheldon Wolin and Steven Shapin and Simon Schaffer have argued – with more sophistication, and in more temperate language – that Hobbes treats philosophy as a pretext for ‘self-advertisement’.Footnote 13
At first glance, Hobbes seems vulnerable to these charges. After all, he does tout his accomplishments. In the Epistle Dedicatory to De corpore, Hobbes famously anoints himself the inventor of political science. ‘Natural Philosophy is therefore but young; but Civil Philosophy yet much younger, as being no older (I say it provoked, and that my detractors may know how little they have wrought upon me) than my own book De Cive.’Footnote 14 To most critics, this passage offers incontrovertible evidence of vanity. But on closer examination, the passage appears ambiguous. Too often, scholars cite Hobbes's ‘boast’ in truncated form, omitting the parenthetical aside (‘(I say it provoked …)’).Footnote 15 But the parenthesis contains a crucial qualification, which tempers Hobbes's bravado. Attacks by detractors (e.g. the university scientists and their allies) prompt Hobbes to retaliate in kind. When Hobbes explains that he speaks upon provocation, he turns an unrepentant boast into a defensive manoeuvre – and thereby absolves himself of vainglory. Here, Hobbes follows ‘Vespasian's Law’ – ‘it is uncivil to give ill language first, but civil and lawful to return it’ – a maxim which he invokes to justify the admittedly ‘sharp’ tone of his polemics.Footnote 16 According to Vespasian's Law, Hobbes cannot justly be accused of boasting, because ‘that which is truly said, and upon provocation, is not boasting, but defence’.Footnote 17 Unlike his detractors, Hobbes appreciates the crucial distinction ‘between that which is said upon provocation, and that which is said without provocation, from vain glory’.Footnote 18 Thus, passages that smack of brash self-assertion are actually motivated by fear – they testify not to Hobbes's vanity, but to his vulnerability. When Hobbes's most notorious ‘boasts’ are dissected, the verdict they are usually cited to support appears questionable. It is harder to convict Hobbes of vanity than critics have realized.
Of course, one could easily dismiss Hobbes's defensive manoeuvres as flimsy pretexts for self-aggrandizement. Hobbes invokes Vespasian's Law in an effort to have his cake (he is immune to charges of vanity) and eat it, too (but still allowed to boast). This objection has force. Nevertheless, I want to bracket it for the purposes of this article, because I am convinced that we gain fresh insight into Hobbes's conception of political theory if we take his disclaimers seriously. Even readers who find these disclaimers unconvincing would concede that Hobbes postures defensively to fortify himself against charges of vanity. Thus, on some level, Hobbes must acknowledge that modesty is becoming, and vanity unbecoming, for a political theorist. But scholars have been too busy cataloguing Hobbes's boasts to notice his appreciation for authorial modesty. Indeed, Hobbes's texts contain passages that are hard to reconcile with the received portrait of Hobbes as unrepentant braggart. Hobbes explicitly professes modesty, and he does so in ways that transcend the perfunctory topoi of prefatory rhetoric.Footnote 19 For example, in Six lessons to the Savilian professors of mathematics, Hobbes directly refutes charges of vanity, protesting, ‘My acquaintance know that I am naturally of modest rather than of boasting speech.’Footnote 20 Hobbes insists that modesty suffuses his published works, as well as his private conversation. ‘As for my self-conceit and ostentation, you shall find no such matter in my writings.’Footnote 21 Indeed, desire to improve humanity's estate – not desire for reputation – motivates Hobbes's philosophical endeavours. Unlike his detractors, Hobbes ‘never did write anything in philosophy to show my wit, but, as I thought at least, to benefit some part or other of mankind’.Footnote 22
In this article, I take Hobbes at his word, and argue that modesty is one of his rhetorical signatures (although it is not his only rhetorical signature). I offer this contrarian reading less to acquit Hobbes of hypocrisy than to enrich our understanding of his approach to political theory. (Thus, I am more interested in recovering Hobbes's literary and philosophical aspirations, in terms of how he defines the political theorist's vocation, than in determining whether he successfully or consistently realizes these aspirations.) Deployment of geometric method does not exhaust Hobbes's theoretical innovations – Hobbes also innovates when he breaks with traditions that define political theory as a vehicle for heroic self-display. In various contexts, Hobbes warns that vanity threatens civil peace, and that philosophical texts can, regrettably, provide vehicles for vanity. ‘The reason why authors often fail to keep their promises is that, first seeking glory, and esteeming truth only afterwards, they are competing for renown and for the applause of their hearers.’Footnote 23 Given these warnings about the abuse of publication, ‘the relationship between text and author and the manner in which the text points to this “figure” that, at least in appearance, is outside it and antecedes it’ is of central concern for Hobbes.Footnote 24 In this article, I offer new strategies for deciphering Hobbes's literary self-presentation, and argue that Hobbes's texts ‘point to the author’ in ways designed to discourage readers' veneration. Shunning the role of hero, Hobbes redefines political theory as a vocation for mere mortals.
To grasp the modesty of Hobbesian political theory, I analyse some of Hobbes's more modest works: polemics, letters, and autobiographical trifles. In the essay's first section, I detail Hobbes's reservations about epic theatricality, and argue that he develops resolutely non-heroic strategies of literary self-presentation. I devote the second section to a hagiographical poem by Henricus Bruno that accompanied Hobbes's portrait in a 1647 edition of De cive – a poem that Hobbes later suppressed. Although Bruno acknowledges that portraiture fails to capture the author's identity, he trusts that the self which eludes visual representation manifests clearly in Hobbes's texts. I contend that Bruno (and the critical tradition which he represents) is mistaken. In his posthumously published Latin verse autobiography (Vita carmine expressa), to which I devote the rest of the article, Hobbes disabuses readers of the notion that his texts are self-portraits. Although the autobiography is usually cited as evidence of Hobbes's vanity, I read it as a perverse profession of modesty. In the Vita, Hobbes identifies fear of death as the spur to his restless quest for ‘Power after power’.Footnote 25 Acute consciousness of mortality, rather than lust for renown, moves Hobbes to philosophize. As Hobbes conceives it, political theory is a modest pursuit grounded in recognition of human finitude.
I
Impressed by Hobbes's decision to devote his declining years to translations of Homer, scholars have often assumed that Hobbes harbours epic pretensions. However, as Paul Davis has demonstrated, the ‘low’ diction of Hobbes's translations systematically subverts conventions of Restoration epic, conventions that, Hobbes feared, bolstered (politically corrosive) priestcraft.Footnote 26 In what follows, I argue that Hobbes's departures from epic convention not only advance a campaign against priestcraft, but also reflect Hobbes's concern with political ramifications of literary personality. I develop this claim by engaging with Sheldon Wolin, who famously assimilates Hobbes to epic traditions of political theory.
In Hobbes and the epic tradition of political theory, Wolin deems Hobbes a glittering ‘ornament’ of a tradition that dates to ancient Greece – the epic tradition – in which lust for renown is the ‘informing intention’ governing political thought.Footnote 27 Not content to expand the scholarly corpus, achieve logical consistency, or intervene in local debates, epic theorists aspire to unprecedented levels of novelty, accomplishment, and acclaim. Unlike its more modest counterparts, epic theory ‘is inspired mainly by the hope of achieving a great and memorable deed through the medium of thought’ – the theorist's goals are personal and aesthetic.Footnote 28 Consequently, epic texts do not invite readers ‘to pronounce upon the logical or factual merits of the words’; rather, they ‘compel admiration and awe for the magnitude of the achievement’.Footnote 29 Given that lust for glory is a defining trait of this tradition, the epic theorist tends to occupy a prominent position in his texts. Designed to elicit astonishment and veneration, epic texts configure their authors as compelling personalities. ‘Self-advertisement’ is the hallmark of a genre that ‘celebrates the theorist’.Footnote 30 Ideally, this celebration continues after the theorist's death. Epic theorists crave the recognition of posterity more than the recognition of their ostensible ‘peers’. Indeed, Wolin models the epic theorist on the hero of epic poetry, ‘an agonal figure who is pictured as seeking immortality by going beyond the highest mark set by others’.Footnote 31 Aggressive, ambitious, and competitive, the epic theorist enters philosophical contest determined to make his name resound through the ages.
Although Wolin reads Leviathan as Hobbes's bid for glory, he concedes that the vehicle for Hobbes's ambition mounts a scathing attack on ambition. Wolin notes the apparent contradiction between Hobbes's ethics and his personal practice, and he takes this discrepancy as further evidence of Hobbes's epic pretensions. According to Wolin, Hobbes's paean to modesty, in Leviathan, is an artful gambit to eliminate rival claimants to glory. When Hobbes extols the virtues of ‘modesty, equity, mercy, gratitude, and justice’, he renders ‘the political landscape of Leviathanland … inhospitable to heroic achievement’.Footnote 32 In an ideal commonwealth, social levelling puts a stop to heroic exploits and aristocratic excess. Consequently, the commonwealth is purged of subjects liable to outshine the one figure legitimately poised to reap glory, the theorist.Footnote 33 Flamboyant aristocrats are not the only persons humbled by Hobbes's ethos – Hobbes also eliminates the sovereign as a potential rival.Footnote 34 Indifferent to the officeholder's character, Hobbes simultaneously ‘depersonalizes the sovereign’ and personalizes theory.Footnote 35 Hobbes's masterful deployment of injunctions to modesty demonstrates his command of ‘the central tenet of epic theory: when politics is treated as a medium whereby theory is translated into reality, political rulers are reduced to being members of a supporting cast in a play where the dominant figure is the playwright’.Footnote 36
Wolin's metaphor (the commonwealth as a theatre, Hobbes as player and playwright) reflects his genealogy of the epic tradition. The tradition that Wolin excavates, and for which he recruits Hobbes, originates ‘in a particular kind of contest over intellectual mastery’, namely, the fifth-century bce contest between Greek philosophers, on the one hand, and poets and dramatists, on the other.Footnote 37 From the Homeric period onward, Wolin writes, poets and dramatists ‘were the special guardians and interpreters’ of the heroic ethos, and, consequently, the dominant figures in Greek culture.Footnote 38 Determined to secure a place for dialectic in an education consecrated to poetry, fifth-century philosophers challenged the poets' hegemony, but they did so by adopting ‘poetic standards of scale and achievement’.Footnote 39 Thus, an epic tradition of political theory emerges when philosophers translate dramatic and poetic ideals into a philosophical idiom. When Wolin casts Hobbes as both hero and playwright, he assimilates Hobbes to a tradition shaped by a very particular dramatic culture, the culture of Greek tragedy.
But the epic stage does not exhaust the definition of ‘theatre’. In Wolin's lexicon, ‘theatre’ means a space in which heroes solicit approbation. By contrast, Hobbes defines the theatre as a space of opacity and concealment, as we learn when we turn to Chapter Sixteen of Leviathan (‘Of persons, authors, and things personated’), where Hobbes uses theatrical metaphors to address questions of authorship. Here, Hobbes conceives of players and playwrights in resolutely non-heroic terms. Although designed to cement Hobbes's epic stature, Wolin's metaphor actually reveals the lack of continuity between Hobbes and the Greeks.
In Chapter Sixteen, Hobbes defines an author as the owner of authorized actions. ‘Of Persons Artificiall, some have their words and actions Owned by those whom they represent. And then the Person is the Actor; and he that owneth his words and actions, is the author: In which case the Actor acteth by Authority.’Footnote 40 On first glance, this definition seems to restrict artifice to those authorized to act. Artificial persons act, while natural persons own and author actions. But when Hobbes defines natural and artificial persons, he intimates that authorship (and natural personality more generally) is actually a role that one plays.
A Person, is he whose words or actions are considered, either as his own, or as representing the words or actions of an other man, or of any other thing to whom they are attributed, whether Truly or by Fiction. When they are considered as his owne, then is he called a Naturall Person: And when they are considered as representing the words and actions of an other, then is he a Feigned or Artificiall person.Footnote 41
Read quickly, this definition seems to restrict artifice to those who act at another's behest. But on closer examination, we see that Hobbes blurs the distinction between natural and artificial persons when he explains that one is ‘called a Naturall Person’ if one's actions are ‘considered’ one's own. Hobbes chooses his words carefully. He never claims that the person in question is actually natural, or that he really owns his actions. Rather, Hobbes tells us that spectators address the ‘natural’ person as an owner, because they consider words and actions his possessions. In this passage, Hobbes locates the ‘natural’ person in an ‘artificial’ realm of appearance, performance, and interpretation.
Hobbes characterizes this realm as one of theatricality when he traces the etymology of the English word ‘person’. According to Hobbes, ‘person’ derives from Latin. While Greek has a word ‘which signifies the Face’, the Latin equivalent, persona, ‘signifies the disguise, or outward appearance of a man, counterfeited on the Stage; and somtimes more particularly that part of it, which disguiseth the face, as a Mask or Visard’.Footnote 42 Where the Greeks see a natural visage, the Romans and the English see a mask that disguises the face. Writing in the latter tradition, Hobbes defines a person as someone who wears a disguise. Indeed, Hobbes equates personality with acting. ‘So that a Person, is the same that an Actor is, both on the Stage and in common Conversation; and to Personate, is to Act, or Represent himselfe, or an other; and he that acteth another, is said to beare his Person, or act in his name.’Footnote 43 This passage confirms suspicions that the ‘natural’ person is an impersonator, just like his ‘artificial’ counterpart. Here, Hobbes includes those who act in their own names (‘himselfe, or an other’) in the category of performance. On this reading, all actions are theatrical.Footnote 44 The ‘natural’ person does not actually own his actions; rather, he performs the role of owner, just as an author performs accountability. Thus, Hobbes's performance of authorship is a masquerade – not an exhibitionist display. Wolin contends that Hobbes would personalize theory by humbling subjects and depersonalizing the sovereign. ‘Hobbes, too, was concerned that the deed not overshadow the identity of the doer.’Footnote 45 But the author so personified remains a mere persona, a mask concealing his ‘true’ identity. Unlike the epic theorist, who strives ‘to compel admiration and awe’, Hobbes never drops the mask to bare his face for an appreciative audience.Footnote 46
Indeed, elsewhere Hobbes suggests that ‘persons’ don masks precisely because they lack a perceptible face. In a 1634 letter which anticipates the themes of personation and masquerade developed in Leviathan, Hobbes ponders a query posed by an unknown correspondent: ‘Why a Man remembers lesse his owne Face, which he sees often in a Glasse, then the Face of a Friend, that he has not seene of a great Time?’Footnote 47 Although Hobbes's response centres on ‘scientific’ issues surrounding memory and sensory perception, it also affords a glimpse of his vexed relationship to the human face.
My Opinion in generall is, that a Man remembers best those Faces whereof he has had the greatest impressions; & that the Impressions are the greater for the oftner seeing them, & the longer Staying upon the Sight of them. Now, you know, Men looke upon their owne Faces, but for short Fits; but, upon their Friends Faces, long Time together, whilest they discourse or converse together; so that a Man may receave a greater Impression from his Friends Face in a Day, then from his own in a Yere: And, according to this Impression, the Image will be fresher in his Mind. Besides, the Sight of ones Friends Face two Howres together, is of greater Force to imprinte the Image of it, then the same Quantity of Time by Intermissions. For the Intermissions do easily deface that which is but lightly imprinted. In generall, I thinke, that, That lasteth longer in the Memory, which hath been stronglier received by the Sense.Footnote 48
It might seem surprising that Hobbes agrees that few recognize their own faces, given his later claim that humans are naturally vainglorious. After all, ‘vanity’ connotes unseemly preoccupation with personal appearance, as well as inflated self-worth. But, unlike Narcissus, this letter's generic individual spends little time (‘short Fits’) before the mirror; hence the ‘light’ impression which his face makes. Notwithstanding the brevity of the individual's sojourns before the mirror, I consider the letter continuous with Hobbes's later works. Here, Hobbes does not describe a man free of vanity, but rather a man with a face that is scarcely perceptible. A vain man could not indulge in narcissistic gazing even if he wanted to. When he looks in the mirror, the individual catches intermittent glimpses which never coalesce into a memorable visage, because he is in some sense ‘defaced’. By contrast, the faces of interlocutors are memorable precisely because conversation transpires in the public sphere, where individuals sport masks that conceal their defacement.
Hobbes emphasizes the theatricality of personality and the elusiveness of the naked face to forestall (politically corrosive) exhibitionism on the part of theorist and subject. Wolin credits Hobbes with turning theory into a vehicle for ‘self-advertisement’. By contrast, I see Hobbes attempting to devise a style of theorizing consistent with his insights into the theatricality of personality. Hobbes goes out of his way to remind readers that his texts are not showcases – they neither provide unmediated access to his self, nor do they reveal his true identity. Considerations upon the reputation, loyalty, manners, and religion of Thomas Hobbes (1662), a sally in Hobbes's campaign against John Wallis, offers a good example of the strategies Hobbes uses to frustrate readers' desire to glimpse (and venerate) his naked face. In Considerations, Hobbes applauds Wallis's facetious proposal, in Hobbius heauton-timorumenos, to publish an anthology of Hobbes's boasts. ‘Thus say you: now says Mr. Hobbes, or I for him, let your idle person do it, and set down no more than he has written, as high praises as they be, I will promise you he shall acknowledge them under his hand, and be commended for it; and you scorned.’Footnote 49 Significantly, to own the ‘self-praise which most offends’ Wallis, Hobbes collapses the convention, upheld in the rest of the essay, of writing in the third person (‘Mr. Hobbes, or I for him’).Footnote 50 When Hobbes abandons the third person, he teases readers with the promise of direct access. Not only will Hobbes avow his boasts, he will do so in the first person, ‘under his own hand’. But Hobbes is playing a mischievous game here. The phrase ‘Mr. Hobbes, or I for him’ echoes Leviathan's theory of representation. If, as the context implies, the ‘I’ who would speak for Hobbes is Hobbes himself, then Hobbes can be said ‘to Act, or Represent himselfe’ when he owns his boasts.Footnote 51 With this allusion to Leviathan, Hobbes reminds readers that even when he writes in first person, they only glimpse a persona or mask, not a natural visage.
II
Although Hobbes first expounds his theory of representation in Leviathan (1651), his concern to avoid the appearance of vanity predates Leviathan's publication. Indeed, Hobbes's reservations regarding conventions of philosophical self-presentation surface early on, in correspondence about the format of De cive's publication. Many of Hobbes's contemporaries believed that philosophical texts should showcase their authors, and this commitment shaped conventions of scholarly publication. Take the case of Samuel Sorbière, a French scientist who supervised publication of the second and third editions of De cive and published his own French translation in 1649. In letters, a starstruck Sorbière repeatedly implored Hobbes to drop the mask and bare his naked face. In a characteristically obsequious letter, Sorbière hails Hobbes as a titan who merits ‘the worship with which I honour you and heroes like you’.Footnote 52 Apparently, gazing upon Hobbes's countenance formed a key element of Sorbière's cult.Footnote 53 In a 1645 letter, Sorbière requested permission to acquire Hobbes's portrait.
Since I fear that when I return to Holland I may start to despise all things human again excessively and neglect the cultivation of a good mind, I have asked de Martel to send me portraits of you (Iconem tuam), the great Gassendi, and the excellent Mersenne. I ask for this most earnestly, in the belief that you will approve and look favourably on the boldness of my request. For I am moved and impelled to be virtuous not only by writings but also by the faces of great men (vultus virorum maximorum); I feel, as it were, an emanation, a natural force (vim insitam) which radiates from them to me.Footnote 54
In a revealing turn of phrase, Sorbière justifies his request for Hobbes's portrait with a claim about the moral suasion exerted by Hobbes's face. Sorbière ignores the role that artifice and representation play in making Hobbes present before him – he treats Hobbes's portrait more like a relic than a representation. Indeed, Hobbes's portrait proves pedagogically useful, according to Sorbière, because it perfectly transmits the ‘natural’ aura of his naked face.Footnote 55
Given Sorbière's belief that portraiture communicates the moral force of the natural face, it is not surprising that he inserted Hobbes's portrait in the editions of De cive whose publication he supervised. De cive was first published anonymously in Paris in 1642, ‘and its authorship remained a well-kept secret for some years’.Footnote 56 By contrast, the second edition, published in Amsterdam in 1647, advertised the author's identity. At Sorbière's direction, the edition's prefatory material featured an engraved portrait of Hobbes.Footnote 57 Moreover, Sorbière commissioned Henricus Bruno,Footnote 58 ‘a man steeped in fine literature, and one of your [Hobbes's] leading admirers’, to compose a series of Latin epigrams on the topic of Hobbes's portrait.Footnote 59 The epigrams were published on pages two and three between the illustrated title page and the engraved portrait.
To Sorbière's chagrin, Hobbes did not ‘look favourably on the boldness’ of his reverential gesture. Hobbes's portrait and Bruno's poem only appeared in one printing of 1647.Footnote 60 When Hobbes received the proofs from Sorbière, he objected to the portrait's caption and the poem's contents, and demanded that they be removed from all remaining copies. ‘We must get the Elseviers to do this, either by pleading with them or by paying them.’Footnote 61 Fear for personal safety and political viability motivated Hobbes's objection to the portrait's caption, which identified him as ‘Academic Tutor to his Serene Highness the Prince of Wales’.Footnote 62 Given that De cive expounds ‘a political theory which offends the opinions of almost everyone’, Hobbes worries that enemies will take the advertised link with the Prince as a pretext ‘to stir up popular ill feeling against the royal family’, and the resulting scandal will ‘be blamed on my carelessness and vanity (vanae gloriae), to my great dishonour’.Footnote 63 But Hobbes also anticipates trouble from another quarter, worried lest close association with the royal family prevent his eventual return to England. Hobbes's objections to the portrait's caption are largely prudential; but they also reflect characteristic scorn for, and desire to avoid accusations of, authorial vanity. Indeed, concerns about vanity come to the fore when Hobbes takes exception to Bruno's poem. According to Hobbes, lust for reputation, not deference, prompts Bruno to pen the sycophantic verses that adorn Sorbière's De cive.
I accept with extreme gratitude the kindness of M. Bruno, and my greatest prayer is that I might be able to become worthy of his kind service by doing him some service in return. However, at present I do not want any verses to be prefixed to my book which I have not seen in advance. Otherwise, I fear that something done cleverly and with a good intention might, in present circumstances, turn into something damaging to me; and I fear that his eagerness for fame (aviditas gloriae) might be used as evidence to suggest that I wanted that undeserved title of tutor to the Prince.Footnote 64
‘Eagerness for fame’ leads Bruno to celebrate Hobbes in verse. However, readers who mistakenly assume that Hobbes approved the epigrams will tax him (not Bruno) with ambition and vanity. Thus, Sorbière's prefatory materials are not only prejudicial to Hobbes's political viability, but also contravene his nascent views on authorial deportment – as analysis of Bruno's epigrams, to which I now turn, reveals.
Curiously, the poems commissioned for De cive reject the fervent belief in portraiture's transparency that guides Sorbière's editorial decisions (as reported in the correspondence). Writing to Hobbes, Sorbière insists that portraiture seamlessly conveys the philosopher's natural aura. The philosopher's portrait provides readers with access to the improving forces that emanate from the philosopher's naked face. However, the fact that Sorbière commissioned a poem to accompany Hobbes's portrait (and justify its inclusion?) suggests that, on some level, even he harboured doubts about the portrait's transparency and pedagogical efficacy. Doubts of this kind animate Bruno's epigrams, which question the relationship of Hobbes's portrait to the self it represents, and the text it adorns. In the first epigram, an apostrophe ‘to the viewer’, Bruno concedes limitations of artistic representation.
Assuming the painter could accurately reproduce the lineaments of Hobbes's face, such a reproduction would still be an unsatisfactory vehicle for communicating the author's true self. Even the most accurate rendering of Hobbes's face conceals as much as it reveals, because the philosopher's character and identity are not legible on his face. Given that interior dispositions escape representation, a painter can never capture ‘Thomas himself’.
But Bruno questions whether the painter can even depict Hobbes's face accurately. In the epigram's final couplet, Bruno instructs the viewer to ‘believe’ in and credit the painter's accuracy – voluntary assent is required to secure the image's verisimilitude. Thus, Bruno concedes that viewers must learn to read the portrait before it can effect moral improvement – an effect which Sorbière initially described as ‘natural’. Like the subjects, in Chapter Sixteen of Leviathan, whose ‘consideration’ determines whether peers are classed as natural or artificial persons, viewers must perform skilled acts of interpretation in order to read the engraving as a realistic representation and thereby absorb its ‘natural force’. The portrait only works if viewers (educated by Bruno, courtesy of Sorbière) agree to ‘consider’ it a realistic representation of Hobbes's face, and then imagine the ‘inner depths’ which the face conceals.
Thus, Bruno's first epigram offers a strikingly Hobbesian account of personality and its construction. A recognizable face only coalesces through interpretation, and the face so constructed does not exhaust the subject's identity. However, Bruno fails to derive a Hobbesian conclusion from this analysis of portraiture's limitations – because personality is a masquerade, the self cannot be rendered transparent in any medium. In the second epigram, Bruno compares the representational skills of the painter to those of the philosopher, and concludes that hope is not lost for readers who crave a direct view of Hobbes.
Although a portrait cannot capture Hobbes's wisdom, this failure does not reflect the self's opacity; rather, it reflects limitations of the artist's chosen medium. Other media are more accommodating. Bruno promises that readers will glimpse Hobbes's true self when they turn the page and begin De cive, which offers a more revealing portrait of Hobbes than any painting. For Bruno, political theory is personal, a medium through which Hobbes unveils himself to admiring readers.
Hobbes's objections to Bruno's poem reflect discomfort with this definition of political theory. Hobbes suppressed Sorbière's prefatory materials not only because they compromised his political viability, but also because they configured him as a celebrity whose countenance shines forth in his texts. Hobbes understood that Sorbière's De cive was liable to provoke accusations of vanity – accusations whose justice he would concede, for, in subsequent works, he insists that texts of political theory cannot, and should not, function as self-portraits.
III
If texts which merit the designation ‘philosophy’ do not showcase their authors' identities, what is the proper relationship between author and text, according to Hobbes, and what, other than lust for renown, could motivate one to philosophize? To answer these questions, I turn to an unlikely source, Hobbes's posthumously published Latin verse autobiography (often referred to as Vita carmine expressa).Footnote 67 The Vita is an unlikely source for an argument about authorial modesty precisely because it is an autobiography. After all, if Hobbes were determined to dispel the assumption that texts are tacit self-portraits, why would he write (more than one) autobiography? (Similarly, why did Hobbes sit for multiple portraits if he rejected the cult of the philosopher's face?Footnote 68) The conventions of autobiography presuppose the self's legibility; further, the autobiographer betrays something like vanity with the assumption that his or her life merits attention. Admittedly, the conviction that autobiography is a token of distinction surfaces in one of Hobbes's autobiographical texts, The prose life. This brief autobiography in Latin prose belongs to the tradition of eminent lives. In The prose life, Hobbes trusts that ‘learned men as yet unborn, and that posterity, will be grateful for this transmission of the text of his life’, given his ‘singular’ scientific accomplishments.Footnote 69 By contrast, I contend that the Vita, which scholars often cite as evidence of Hobbes's vanity, carefully subverts conventions of autobiography. In the Vita, Hobbes beseeches readers to view his texts as testaments not to his distinction, but to his finitude. Acute consciousness of mortality – rather than lust for immortality – moves Hobbes to philosophize.
The Vita demonstrates the contribution of fear to the shaping of Hobbes's philosophical and political projects. Hobbes, whose birth coincides with the Anglo-Spanish war, opens with a lament for ‘Th'ill Times, and Ills born with me’ – foremost among them, fear.Footnote 70 As Hobbes famously relates, the threat of invasion by the Spanish Armada spooked his pregnant mother, prompting her to deliver a pair of twins. ‘For Fame had rumour'd, that a Fleet at Sea,/Wou'd cause our Nations Catastrophe;/And hereupon it was my Mother Dear/Did bring forth Twins at once, both Me, and Fear.’Footnote 71 (The Latin original emphasizes the generative power of Armada-inspired fear. The Armada's approach strikes such terror in Hobbes's mother that she actually conceives, and gives birth to, fear. ‘Atq; metum tantum concepit tunc mea mater,/Ut paretet geminos, meque metumque simul.’Footnote 72) Significantly, Hobbes's birth occasions meditation upon life's fragility, rather than its potential for novelty and renewal. For Hobbes, birth signifies mortality and the imminent threat of death – not natality. The theme of doubling further demonstrates Hobbes's resistance to tropes of natality. Although Hobbes neglects to tell us whether his twin (fear) is fraternal or identical, he does deny that a unique individual was ushered into the world at his birth. As a double, Hobbes cannot take the inauspicious circumstances of his birth as a token of distinction.
Moreover, with this opening scenario, Hobbes invites readers to interpret his life using the theoretical framework provided in Leviathan, a framework that enables men ‘truly to read one another’.Footnote 73 Readers initiated into the cult of philosophical celebrity will doubtless be tempted to impose an epic frame on Hobbes's story. To counter this tendency, Hobbes narrates his life using figures that echo his earlier, philosophical works.Footnote 74 Although the fear that seizes Hobbes's mother remains unnamed, the perilous circumstances of her labour clue readers in to the fact that Hobbes's twin is not a generic fear. Rather, it is fear of violent death at the hands of invading Spaniards. Thus, Hobbes's twin is also a twin to the ‘Feare of Death’ that deflates vanity, and inclines men to peace, in Leviathan's state of nature.Footnote 75 (And, in its materialism and appeal to self-interest, the fear of violent death is itself a consciously deflated double of the lofty religious notion of human finitude.Footnote 76) The Vita's opening vignette depicts Hobbes as someone alive to, and properly chastened by, the horrors of war. Like a dutiful subject in the Leviathan state, Hobbes learns the right lesson when he reasons about his fears – he learns to cultivate peace. ‘For this, My Countries Foes I e'r did hate,/With calm Peace and my muse associate.’Footnote 77 At the outset, Hobbes resists a heroic narrative, casting himself in the modest role of ‘poor worm (Vermiculus)’ – that is, in the role of an ideal political subject.Footnote 78
Nevertheless, readers aware of Hobbes's reputation for bombast may wonder whether Hobbes and his twin were separated at birth. Does Hobbes really remain in character as the ‘poor worm’ throughout the entirety of the Vita? Or does he forsake this humble role for something more spectacular? For the most part, the Vita portrays Hobbes as a frantic bundle of energy, constantly anxious, constantly in motion.Footnote 79 However, in passages devoted to philosophical controversy, Hobbes dons a bellicose guise that seems inconsistent with the modest demeanour we expect from one who avows ‘timorousnes’.Footnote 80 Admittedly, Hobbes wears multiple masks in the Vita, some timid and modest, others brazen and proud. How does Hobbes deploy the various masks at his disposal, and to what end?
Perhaps the best way to fathom these divergent personae is to examine how war functions as a backdrop for, and a metaphor within, the Vita. Hobbes offers diametrically opposed evaluations of war. Although he laments the violence of recent English history, he relishes the violence of philosophical combat. When describing the military conflicts (the Anglo-Spanish war, the English civil war) that provide the unfortunate backdrop to his life, Hobbes mingles horror with indignation. By his admission, Hobbes abhors, fears, and flees from the ‘horrid War’ that breaks out in the 1640s.Footnote 81 ‘The War's now hot, I dread to see it so,/Therefore to Paris well-belov'd, I go.’Footnote 82 When confronted with the chaos and carnage of war, Hobbes's first concern is self-preservation. While some would consider flight cowardly, Hobbes vaunts his ‘cowardice’ as a testament to his rationality. Reason teaches that ‘every man, ought to endeavour Peace, as farre as he has hope of obtaining it’.Footnote 83 As in the Vita's opening vignette, Hobbes's conduct during the civil war demonstrates fealty to Leviathan's political precepts. ‘My Life and Writings speak one Congruous Sense.’Footnote 84
But even though Hobbes (rightly) disdains the heroic ethos during the civil war, he is not entirely innocent of martial pretensions. Toward the middle of the Vita, Hobbes boasts of martial prowess as a geometer. War, which previously inspired fear, is recuperated as a metaphor for exhilarating philosophical controversy. As Hobbes relates, the publication of De corpore set off a ‘constant War’, which provided myriad opportunities for display of valour.Footnote 85 For the most part, Hobbes's skirmishes with ‘the Barb'rous, Bloody Enemy’ yield public acclaim.Footnote 86 For example, with the publication of De principiis, Hobbes scores a triumph at his critics' expense.
(In the Latin original, the martial metaphor is more explicit, and the critics' defeat more ignominious. Vanquished critics rush to conceal wounds which Hobbes has inflicted. ‘Dissimulant aliis vulnera magna locis,/Deficiunt animis, sed deficientibus insto/Culminaque inscendo summa Geometriae.’Footnote 88) Similarly, the publication of Rosetum geometricum elicits a new volley of criticism (‘Wallis opposes, and I lost the day,/As both Divines and Algebrists do say’), but once Hobbes warms to the battle, he manages to rout and scatter his foes.Footnote 89 In a stunning reversal, Hobbes, who once cowered at the outbreak of battle, now inspires fear in lesser men. By his admission (‘Liking the combat’), the mature Hobbes is a zealous warrior.Footnote 90
Waxing triumphant, Hobbes seems to have dispelled the ominous portents that shadowed his birth. In the theatre of philosophical combat, Hobbes overcomes cowardice and becomes a formidable opponent. Moreover, as we learn in one of the Vita's most dramatic anecdotes, Hobbes appears to have vanquished his menacing twin, the fear of violent death. As Hobbes relates, he fell prey to grave illness while in Paris. At death's approach, Hobbes stands resolute and forces his opponent (death) to desert the field of battle (like the vanquished geometers in the passages cited above). ‘Then for six Months was sick; but yet at length,/Though very weak, I did recover strength.’Footnote 91 (The theme of flight and desertion is more explicit in the Latin. ‘Dein per sex menses morbo decumbo, propinquae/Accinctus Morti; nec fugio, illa fugit.’Footnote 92) This face off with death is perhaps the ultimate demonstration of Hobbes's valour. The mature Hobbes displays so much bravado that he can even rout death, the force that dutiful subjects should rightfully fear.
How does this martial rhetoric shape Hobbes's persona in the Vita? For many readers, the recapitulation of Hobbes's ‘wars’ is the most telling passage in the Vita, the passage that reveals Hobbes's true motives for philosophizing. On this view, the valiant hero is the ‘authentic’ Hobbes (not the timid little worm). Although the opening scenario raises expectations that Hobbes will affect a modest demeanour, the unabashed bravado of these passages forces readers to concede that Hobbes and his twin were separated at birth. The Vita is not, ultimately, a profession of modesty, the text in which Hobbes vaunts fitness for political subjection. Rather, the Vita is Hobbes's bid for glory, the text in which he flaunts exemption from his own strictures against ambition. Sheldon Wolin argues along these lines when he glosses the passages cited above. Although Wolin appreciates the irony of Hobbes's self-presentation, he insists that Hobbes's martial posturing reveals the dominant ‘impulse’ behind his political theory.
Despite the mock-heroic tone and the abundant fantasies, it is easy to see an impulse to mastery which could not be satisfied with small triumphs but hungered for a measure of immortality. This suggests the possibility that his conception of theory had been formed by heroic intentions and that, sensitive as he was to the structure and nature of literary epics, strong traces of and resemblances to epic poetry might be found in his political theory.Footnote 93
By contrast, I would place greater emphasis on Hobbes's mockery of epic convention. Hobbes plays dress-up in a hero's mantle, going out of his way to remind readers that his laurels are costume. Nevertheless, certain passages support Wolin's claim that lust for celebrity moves Hobbes to theorize. For example, Hobbes touts the warm reception that De cive received amongst scholars. ‘My book de Cive; the new Matter in't/Gratifi'd Learned Men, which was the Cause/It was Translated, and with great Applause/By several Nations, and great Scholars read,/So that my Name was Famous, and far spread (late nomine notus eram).’Footnote 94 Although Hobbes never admits that he writes in order to solicit praise, he does embrace renown as a testament to his worth.
Wolin's interpretation has the virtue of intuitive plausibility. However, a careful reading recommends an alternative interpretation of Hobbes's self-presentation in the Vita. How can we construe Hobbes's martial posturing as something other than a bid for philosophical immortality? First, recall Vespasian's Law, which licenses polemic in the service of self-defence. ‘It is uncivil to give ill language first, but civil and lawful to return it.’ Although never invoked by name, this maxim informs Hobbes's rhetorical choices. In passages devoted to political controversy and philosophical contest, Hobbes never hesitates to admit the ferocity of his opponents' attacks (e.g. ‘I lost the day,/As both Divines and Algebrists do say’).Footnote 95 At first blush, this candour seems odd. When Hobbes concedes that his texts fail to persuade, he risks ignominy. But on closer inspection, it appears that Hobbes is willing to run this risk in order to dramatize the precariousness of his standing within philosophical circles. If considerations of self-defence motivate Hobbes's bravado, then, according to Vespasian's Law, Hobbes's boasts express vulnerability, rather than vanity. As Hobbes asserts, in response to Wallis's aspersions, ‘But this I am sure is false, that either he or any man living did ever hear me brag of my Science, or praise my self, but when my defence required it.’Footnote 96
More importantly, the Vita's narrative structure undermines the plausibility of a heroic reading. Although Hobbes claims that, upon cessation of philosophical hostilities, he has nothing left to relate (‘These were my Wars (bella mea); what more have I to say?’Footnote 97), his story does not end with triumph in the theatre of geometrical combat. Rather, the Vita features a concluding coda that tallies Hobbes's income and acknowledges death's imminence. In the coda, Hobbes descends from the lofty summit of geometry to the mundane world of domestic accounting.
Although Hobbes disavows greed (‘Content with this, desire no more Pelf’), his accounting provides a surprisingly petty conclusion to what appeared, for a moment, like an epic life.Footnote 99 Would a warrior bent on immortality obsess over his pension? With this account, Hobbes disrupts the ‘mock-heroic’ narrative of the triumphant warrior, and replaces it with an emphatically worldly narrative. Of course, readers could worry that financial security breeds complacency inimical to political subjection, the rationality of which is most evident to the insecure. Hobbes shares these worries. On more than one occasion, he voices doubts regarding the bourgeois' fitness for political subjection. ‘Man is then most troublesome, when he is most at ease: for then it is that he loves to shew his Wisdome, and controule the Actions of them that governe the Common-wealth.’Footnote 100 With this accounting, Hobbes anticipates and defuses charges that ‘commodious living’ has inured him to death's sting: for he reintroduces the spectre of mortality.Footnote 101 Death, which purportedly fled the scene after Hobbes's recovery in Paris, returns to interrupt his tally. Mid-count, Hobbes mourns the death of Sidney Godolphin, a patron whose demise provided occasion for his enrichment (in the form of a bequest). Thus, Hobbes's accounting disrupts a heroic reading in two ways. First, Hobbes deflates his earlier, martial rhetoric. Second, he disarms those who would accuse him of bourgeois complacency by acknowledging death's inevitability.
Indeed, the veneer of bourgeois self-satisfaction grows increasingly ironic if we read the accounting as an allusion to Hobbes's favourite biblical text, Job. Although Hobbes names two texts, Leviathan and Behemoth, after fearsome creatures from the book of Job, his explicit remarks on Job are scant. Nowhere in Hobbes's corpus do we find a full-fledged interpretation of Job. However, on the basis of this scant evidence, we can surmise that Hobbes considers Job the most authoritative biblical antidote to pride.Footnote 102 Job appeals to Hobbes as a story of salutary chastening. In the book of Job, God lets Satan torment a man who ‘was perfect and upright, and one that feared God, and eschewed evil’.Footnote 103 Suffering Job gains notoriety for both the depths of his misery, and the length at which he laments his fate. The equally long-winded arguments of Job's friends fail either to illuminate his predicament or to alleviate his suffering. Only the full display of divine might chastens Job. When confronted with God's unfathomable power, Job acknowledges his insignificance and adopts a posture commensurate with human finitude (and appropriate to political subjection). ‘Wherefore I abhor myself, and repent in dust and ashes.’Footnote 104 Job not only professes his finitude, he also performs it by remaining silent throughout the book's conclusion, which details the restoration of his estate. ‘So the Lord blessed the latter end of Job more than his beginning: for he had fourteen thousand sheep, and six thousand camels, and a thousand yoke of oxen, and a thousand she asses. He also had seven sons and three daughters.’Footnote 105 Hobbes's tally, at the end of the Vita, should be read as an allusion to the accounting that concludes the book of Job. Unlike the bourgeois of whom Hobbes is justly suspicious, Job maintains chastened silence even when showered with bounty. Like Job, Hobbes remains cognizant of finitude even though circumstances threaten to render him smug and complacent.
The Vita's final couplet further confirms suspicions that vanity is not the passion that motivates Hobbes's philosophical endeavour. The Vita concludes with the same passion with which it began: fear. ‘I've now Compleated my Eighty fourth year,/And Death approaching, prompts me not to fear.’Footnote 106 With this acknowledgement of death's imminence, Hobbes invites readers to reevaluate previous assessments of his demeanour and motivation. Death can only inform Hobbes that the time for fear has passed if Hobbes has, in fact, been fearful all along. Thus, the final couplet retrospectively lends a tincture of anxiety to Hobbes's most outlandish boasts. His bravado notwithstanding, Hobbes is fearful even when he scales the summits of geometry. Indeed, Hobbes's word choice, in the original Latin, underscores fear's tenacity. ‘Et prope stans dictat mors mihi, Ne metue.’Footnote 107 The verb ‘dicto’, which Hobbes uses to describe death's admonition, is the frequentative form of the verb ‘dico’ (to say). As a frequentative, ‘dicto’ connotes repeated action: to say over and over again. Hobbes uses the frequentative to convey the depths of his fear. Death must repeat the admonition ‘Do not fear’ because Hobbes's fears are not easily assuaged. This claim to perpetual fear is consistent with the psychology outlined in Leviathan, which deems fear an ineradicable element of human life. ‘For there is no such thing as perpetuall Tranquility of mind, while we live here; because Life it selfe is but Motion, and can never be without Desire, nor without Feare, no more than without Sense.’Footnote 108 As Michael Oakeshott explains, ‘The great fear, the fear of death, is permanent and unassuaged. Life is a dream which no knowledge that mankind can acquire is able to dissipate.’Footnote 109 Triumph in the theatre of philosophical combat does not assuage Hobbes's fear, because philosophical celebrity cannot insulate him from death. Indeed, in a world where fear is a necessary condition of life, death emerges as a perverse consolation, the only possible relief from anxiety, given that the ‘perpetuall and restlesse desire of Power after power … ceaseth onely in death’.Footnote 110 With death lurking around the corner, Hobbes finally anticipates reprieve from the fear that has dogged him since birth.
If fear of death is the passion that dominates Hobbes's life, then heightened sensitivity to mortality, rather than lust for immortality, animates Hobbes's philosophical escapades. The Vita is not, as most have argued, a bid for celebrity on the part of a distinguished philosopher – it is the testament of an ordinary mortal. Of course, for Hobbes, being an ordinary mortal is not inconsistent with the political theorist's vocation. Indeed, Hobbes credits his success as a philosopher to his modest acknowledgement of finitude. In the Vita, fear of death spurs restless philosophical activity. As in Leviathan's state of nature, fear moves humans to assert power. In Leviathan, Hobbes warns that death is imminent, but hopes this warning will inspire readers to develop skills requisite to political association – skills which allow humans to create a ‘Mortall God’.Footnote 111 Similarly, in the Vita, awareness of death's imminence inspires Hobbes to devise schemes for human security. In Hobbes's world, the fearful seek to alleviate human misery, although they renounce presumptuous plans to extinguish human vulnerability. In this sense, Hobbes's professed modesty is consistent with theoretical audacity. Hobbes is a deft philosophical combatant precisely because he appreciates life's fragility.
The reciprocal relationship between fear of death and philosophical creativity is manifest in a widely circulated anecdote about the elderly Hobbes's attitude toward and plans for death. Although an eighty-four-year-old Hobbes awaits death at the end of the Vita, he lived for seven years after the text's completion. In Memoirs of the family of Cavendish (1708), White Kennett, a partisan of Hobbes's employers (but a critic of Hobbes), reports that Hobbes would amuse himself in the latter years by composing imaginary epitaphs. ‘He would suffer some Friends to dictate an Epitaphe, among which he was best pleas'd with this Humour, This is the true Philosopher's Stone; which indeed would have had as much religion in it, as that which now remains.’Footnote 112 We can best appreciate the force of Hobbes's witticism if we look at another text that invokes the legend of the philosopher's stone, the ‘Author's Epistle to the Reader’ from De corpore. Hobbes writes,
Think not, Courteous Reader, that the philosophy, the elements whereof I am going to set in order, is that which makes philosophers' stones, nor that which is found in the metaphysic codes; but that it is the natural reason of man, busily flying up and down among the creatures, and bringing back a true report of their order, causes, and effects. Philosophy, therefore, the child of the world and your own mind, is within yourself.Footnote 113
Here, Hobbes distinguishes his method from the metaphysical extravagances of his predecessors. When philosophers replace metaphysics with method, the tombstone emerges as the true philosopher's stone. That is, once we renounce outmoded aspirations to philosophical transcendence, bodies – their limitations as well as their power – take centre stage as the proper object of philosophical inquiry. Hobbes's mock epitaph reflects a novel conception of philosophy's affective springs, and its ultimate purpose. Philosophy springs from obsession with (bodily) death, and aims to remind readers of their finitude (memento mori).
For Hobbes, as for Socrates, philosophy is preparation for death. However, Hobbes invokes this adage to signal rejection of traditional philosophy (and the Christian theology which emerges in its wake) – specifically, to signal rejection of dualism and the attendant promise of an immortal soul. In the Phaedo, Socrates lectures friends assembled at his deathbed on the deep affinity between philosophy and death. To his friends' great perplexity, Socrates maintains equanimity in the face of death. Socrates explains that true philosophers ‘have actually been looking forward to death’, or the separation of the soul from the body, ‘all their lives’.Footnote 114 ‘Ordinary people seem not to realize that those who really apply themselves in the right way to philosophy are directly and of their own accord preparing themselves for dying and death.’Footnote 115 Philosophy is preparation for death, according to Socrates, because the philosopher disdains the body and its needs. On Socrates's view, embodiment impedes pursuit of wisdom – the senses mislead us, and desires distract us. Philosophers try to bracket the body's claims, but they cannot escape the body altogether. We can only achieve true knowledge, therefore, in death, when the immortal soul is freed from the body's fetters. As a staunch materialist, Hobbes rejects Socrates's and Plato's claims for an immaterial soul, and this rejection leads him to a new conception of the philosopher's vocation. Unlike the Socratic philosopher, who welcomes death, the Hobbesian philosopher fears death. Platonism promises immortality to the philosopher who meets death with equanimity, rejoicing in the soul's imminent liberation. By contrast, Hobbes withdraws the promise of immortality.Footnote 116 Consequently, death becomes an object of obsessive fear, a fear which philosophy works to intensify. Hobbesian philosophy is preparation for death, then, because it exposes the brute fact of vulnerability, a fact that too many overlook, blinded by vainglory and pride. Philosophy is not the vehicle by means of which Hobbes would escape death's clutches. Rather, philosophy is a discipline by means of which Hobbes affirms death's humbling inevitability (and utter finality).Footnote 117
IV
I have questioned whether Hobbes's reputation for arrogance is deserved, arguing, against critical consensus, that modesty is one of his rhetorical signatures. In the texts that I have discussed, Hobbes resists the efforts of critics and admirers to make him a philosophical celebrity. Casting himself in the role of ordinary mortal, Hobbes develops a style of self-presentation consistent with his claims for the theatricality of personality, and humans' equal vulnerability to death. Hobbes hopes to achieve two goals by crafting this literary persona. First, Hobbes attests his fitness for political subjection. Deflating pretensions to immortality, Hobbes affirms his finitude, which affirmation is a prelude to affirming the rationality of subjection. Further, when Hobbes shuns celebrity, he refuses to usurp the glory that is the sovereign's prerogative. Hobbes is keenly aware that celebrity culture undermines the sovereign's power.
Also, the Popularity of a potent Subject, (unless the Common-wealth have very good caution of his fidelity,) is a dangerous Disease; because the people (which should receive their motion from the Authority of the Soveraign,) by the flattery, and by the reputation of an ambitious man, are drawn away from their obedience to the Lawes, to follow a man, of whose vertues, and designes they have no knowledge.Footnote 118
Second, when Hobbes defaces himself, he ensures that his texts are classed as works of philosophy, ‘the nature whereof dependeth not on Authors’, but on rational (that is, impersonal) assent.Footnote 119 Hobbes hopes to develop a style of philosophy whose authority derives not from the promise of access to a distinguished author, but from impersonal canons of method.Footnote 120 As Hobbes conceives it, political theory is a vocation for mortals, not epic heroes.
Although Hobbes's efforts were valiant, he failed to redefine radically the political theorist's vocation. In his lifetime, Hobbes garnered fame, fortune (as the Vita attests), and notoriety as a result of his new philosophical method. Moreover, the judgement of posterity has conferred something akin to immortality on Hobbes. (Wallis would be dismayed to learn that his predictions have proved false. ‘But what Posterity may do, who can tell? For, though he be Despised, while he is Alive; yet who knows but that, when he is Dead, he may be – forgotten.’Footnote 121) How can we account for Hobbes's failure to escape the cult of celebrity? Perhaps the most obvious explanation lies in the motley of Hobbes's persona, and the coyness of his professions. Admittedly, Hobbes mingles declarations of modesty with statements that read like boasts; casual readers cannot be expected to untangle the intricacies of his self-presentation. Further, Hobbes does not perfectly embody his own recommendations. On some occasions, Hobbes fails to achieve a modest demeanour, and on other occasions, he appears to disregard his own pleas for modesty altogether.Footnote 122
A less obvious, but more revealing, explanation lies in Hobbes's relationship to traditions of Anglo-American liberalism. Historians of political theory often trace the advent of liberal individualism back to Hobbes. On this view, Hobbes paves the way for liberal models of subjectivity when he asserts the artificiality of politics, endorses formal equality under law, vindicates pursuit of self-interest, and subverts traditional theology. The genealogy that places Hobbes at the origins of liberal individualism captures much of what is influential in Hobbes's political theory. Yet note the absence of modesty from the list of Hobbes's legacies to liberalism. Hobbes's liberal heirs do not share his conviction that modesty is a constituent of individuality. Indeed, as liberalism consolidates, so does the view that self-esteem is a testament to individuation, and a precondition for agency. In Anglo-American traditions, liberals replace the aristocratic cult of glory, which meets its demise at Hobbes's hands, with the cult of dignity and self-esteem. With liberalism's triumph, vainglorious self-assertion has been recuperated as an expression of individual freedom, and ‘self-respect (or self-esteem)’ elevated to the status of ‘most important primary good’.Footnote 123
Given the pervasiveness of liberal assumptions, the project of recovering a modest Hobbes grows increasingly difficult – but, for that reason, increasingly imperative. From the dominant, liberal perspective, Hobbes's modesty is either invisible – as a progenitor of liberal individualism, Hobbes must exhibit robust self-assertion (hence the fixation on his boasts) – or it betrays Hobbes's failure to effect a complete break from a pre-modern, theological worldview. As I have argued, neither approach captures the complexion of Hobbes's literary self-presentation. From a historical perspective, it is imperative to appreciate nuances of Hobbes's self-presentation, because neglect of Hobbes's modesty obscures the complexity of early modern individualism. Recovering Hobbes's contrarian views on the political theorist's vocation can help us to acknowledge that modern individualism is more diverse, and more contested, than liberal histories of political theory allow. From a political perspective, deciphering Hobbes's persona is imperative because neglect of Hobbes's modesty impoverishes theoretical accounts of the springs of agency. It is no accident that Hobbes's modest demeanour bears little resemblance to that of a humble believer, for, on Hobbes's view, acknowledgement of finitude does not preclude, but actually facilitates, bold exercise of human agency. Unlike his pious forebears and his liberal heirs, Hobbes appreciates modesty's power as a spur to political creativity and – equally important in this context – theoretical audacity. As the Vita attests, affecting a modest demeanour does not doom Hobbes to present correspondingly modest theoretical insights.
