The Target of Hobbes's Critique

Hobbes was well aware that there was a long-standing tradition of political philosophy in place before he began his work. By his own account of it, the tradition in question began with Socrates, whose turn to political philosophy not only inspired the likes of Plato, Aristotle, and Cicero to direct their attention to “civil science” but also attracted leisured gentlemen, who were enticed by the dignity of politics and the apparent ease of its study (De Cive, Preface; cf. Historia Ecclesiatica, lines 341–73). When Hobbes raised his claim, then, that natural philosophy had begun only with Galileo and that political philosophy was born in his own De Cive, he knew all too well the objection that claim would provoke. Rather than leave it to others to raise the objection, he stated it himself: “But what? Were there no philosophers, either natural or civil, among the ancient Greeks?” (De Corpore, Ep. Ded.).Footnote ²

Hobbes's response to this objection is not to deny that there were men in the ancient world who went by the name of philosophers. But from the presence of men called philosophers, “it does not necessarily follow that there was philosophy.” Instead of genuine philosophy, “there roamed in ancient Greece,” according to Hobbes, “a certain phantasm with a superficial gravity (though inside full of fraud and filth) that somewhat resembled philosophy” (De Corpore, Ep. Ded.). If true philosophy is “the wisest mistress of human life and the singular glory of human nature,” it was not that beauty that was born in ancient Greece, but rather, in her place, “that painted and garrulous harlot” who has “for so long been taken for philosophy” (Latin Leviathan, 1053). Such remarks—to which further examples could easily be added—suffice to provide an initial sense of Hobbes's contempt for classical thought.

We must be careful, however, not to let his vivid expressions of that contempt carry us all the way to the conclusion that Hobbes's contempt was simple or total. Hobbes's first scholarly work, after all, was a translation of Thucydides. And if his respect for Thucydides could perhaps be attributed to his affinity for a classical historian who displayed the tough realism that he found lacking in the more idealistic classical philosophers, Hobbes at times spoke admiringly of Plato as well. Plato was “the best philosopher of the Greeks” (Leviathan, 1058), and it is with good reason that his thought has always found favor with “the better sort” of men (A Dialogue, 124; see also EW VI, 346). Hobbes occasionally acknowledges that even Aristotle at least half-deserves his glorious reputation and that he should be regarded as a true philosopher after all, if only because his genuine love of truth and virtue distinguished him from the foolish and fawning “sectaries” who followed in the wake of the classical masters (Latin Leviathan, Appendix, 1191; see also A Dialogue, 123; EW IV, 387; EW VII, 72, 76; Historia Ecclesiastica, lines 369–70, 405–12). It is likely such tributes, together with the fact that Hobbes sometimes draws on Aristotle's categories (Spragens Reference Spragens1973), that led Frithiof Brandt to claim, in his classic work Thomas Hobbes’ Mechanical Conception of Nature, that when Hobbes refers to Aristotle, it is “most frequently in agreement” and “always respectfully” (Reference Brandt1927, 57).

But that claim goes much too far. If we must be careful not to overestimate Hobbes's disdain for Aristotle, so too must we avoid an excessive swing back in the other direction. After all, many of Hobbes's harshest remarks about classical philosophy are reserved for Aristotle in particular. Let one example, from Chapter 46 of Leviathan, titled “Of Darkness from Vain Philosophy and Fabulous Traditions,” suffice: “I believe that scarce anything can be more absurdly said in natural philosophy than that which now is called Aristotle's Metaphysics; nor more repugnant to government than much of that which he hath said in his Politics; nor more ignorantly than a great part of his Ethics” (Leviathan, 1060).Footnote ³

The important task, however, is not to gauge the precise level of Hobbes's hostility to Aristotle, but to uncover the reasons for it. Although the aim of this article is to examine Hobbes's critique of the classical tradition as such, its primary focus is on his critique of Aristotle, because Aristotle is Hobbes's most important target. Why does Hobbes direct so much of his powerful arsenal of rhetoric and argument against Aristotle? A few preliminary considerations can provide some orientation, if not yet a complete answer. As Hobbes emphasizes time and again, Aristotle's thought, more than that of any other classical philosopher, had been fused with Christian doctrines, both in the time of the primitive church and in the later emergence and development of scholasticism. By the time Hobbes wrote, the “Empusa” of scholasticism—a specter not with one leg of bronze and the other of an ass, but rather with one leg of Greek philosophy, the other of Christian theology (De Corpore, Ep. Ded.)—had become so dominant in the European universities that what was studied there, Hobbes says, was “not properly philosophy. . . but Aristotelity” (Leviathan, 1074; see also Elements 17.1; EW VII, 348; Historia Ecclesiastica, lines 381–84). One might think that the blame for the degeneration of philosophy into dogmatic “Aristotelity” should be laid at the feet of the appropriators, not at those of the appropriated; but Hobbes argues that it is not as simple as that, because Aristotle's teaching readily lent itself to such an appropriation. In other words, there was already a problem at the roots, and so it is no surprise that the tree that emerged, albeit after being watered by sources that Aristotle could not fully have anticipated, proved to be a tangled growth bearing poisonous fruit. Furthermore, insofar as Hobbes thought that Aristotle's thought had been corrupted by its appropriation, he must have regarded Aristotle—as indeed he did—as the serious core of the scholastic tradition and the philosophic rival most in need of confrontation.

These broad considerations begin to indicate the importance of Aristotle for Hobbes. Let us turn, then, to a closer examination of Hobbes's critique of classical thought in general and of Aristotle and his scholastic followers in particular. In examining the objections and arguments in Hobbes's critique, I start from those that appear most immediately on the surface of his texts and that speak most directly to moral and political questions. But one cannot leave matters at Hobbes's relatively straightforward moral-political critique of the classical tradition, because he also criticizes what may provisionally be called the “metaphysics” of Aristotle. Moreover, Hobbes's arguments against Aristotle's metaphysics—we will see later why this term should be regarded as merely provisional—prove to have a bearing on politics, because Aristotle's metaphysical framework, Hobbes contends, had problematic political implications or at least unintended political consequences.

The Moral-Political Critique

Hobbes attributes extraordinary power for good as well as for ill to political philosophy or, as he tends to call it, moral philosophy. The extraordinary power for good, however, is described primarily by way of a promise—as it must be, according to Hobbes, because the moral philosophy of the past and the present (Hobbes's present) has been a disaster. By considering the damage and danger of the “false and loquacious semblance” of moral philosophy that has so far prevailed, then, Hobbes seeks also to indicate the benefits that will flow from his own revolution in moral philosophy (De Cive, Preface; see also Elements, Ep. Ded.; De Corpore 1.7). Hobbes's primary charge against all prior moral philosophy—or, at any rate, his most direct and evident charge—is that it has been a source of chaos and conflict in political life. Indeed, according to his most extreme expressions of the charge, moral philosophy has been the source of all chaos and conflict in political life: “[T]he two-sided dogmas of the moral philosophers, partly correct and attractive, partly irrational and brutish” have been, Hobbes says, “the causes of all quarrels and killings” (De Cive, Preface). Now, Hobbes is surely well aware that this statement is a wild exaggeration. The man known above all for his teaching that outside of civilization the life of man is “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short” can hardly have seriously thought that the world enjoyed peace and a golden age before the moral philosophers unleashed the forces of destruction. Hobbes exaggerates in order to amplify an accusation that he puts more simply elsewhere: “The sophists of the past”—among whom he identifies by name Plato, Aristotle, Cicero, Seneca, and Plutarch—have been “the champions of anarchy” (De Cive 12.3). But what did these philosophers teach that could warrant such a description?

Hobbes assigns the title itself, “the champions of anarchy,” as he is discussing the seditious doctrine that tyrannicide is licit and sometimes even laudable (De Cive 12.3). In many places, Hobbes points to the danger posed by that teaching, as well as by the prior teaching that prepares it as a premise prepares a conclusion. The prior teaching is, in its narrower form, that private men may and even should judge of the justice of the commands of kings or, in its broader form, that private men may claim for themselves a knowledge of good and evil independent of the sovereign's dictates (see De Cive, Preface, 12.1–2; Elements, 27.4; Leviathan, 502). If this teaching is considered in its narrower form, it is not hard to see the danger that concerns Hobbes, or the way in which the conclusion follows from the premise: To teach men to judge the justice of the commands of kings is to lay the basis for the condemnation and thus the attempted overthrow of kings whose commands are judged to be unjust. Aristotle, for instance, as part of his famous division between correct regimes and their perversions, drew a distinction between kingship and tyranny (see Politics 1279a17–b10). But is it not but a mere step from that distinction to the belief in a right to rebellion and even in the justice of tyrannicide (De Cive 12.3; Elements, 27.10; Leviathan, 284, 506–8; cf. Cropsey Reference Cropsey and Cropsey1964, 215; Evrigenis Reference Evrigenis2014, 116–17; Skinner Reference Skinner1996, 315)?

That the premise in question has a broader form, however, indicates that Hobbes blames the classical philosophers for more than the dangerous distinction between kingship and tyranny. “The original error,” which was the “root” of this particular doctrine, was that the classical philosophers let themselves be seduced by “the oldest of the devil's temptations,” the prospect of knowing good and evil for oneself (De Cive 12.1–3). Moreover, Hobbes criticizes Aristotle directly and by name for teaching that democracy is the only form of government compatible with liberty and thus with justice, and that rulers ought to be bound, as their subjects are, by the civil laws. Aristotle—Hobbes's Aristotle, at any rate—put the force of his philosophic authority behind the democratic conception of justice and the belief in the sanctity of the rule of law (see, e.g., De Cive 12.3-4; Elements, 27.2-6; Leviathan, 334, 1094–96; Behemoth, 43). But these are problematic and dangerous teachings: The former encourages popular discontent with and resistance to all nondemocratic governments; the latter ties the hands of the sovereign and puts the power of judgment back in the hands of the subjects, who are taught to see themselves as guardians of the laws against their transgression by the sovereign.

Now, it comes as a surprise to anyone familiar with Aristotle's Politics to hear Aristotle criticized for his excessive commitment to democracy and the rule of law. Is it not a central lesson of Aristotle's political science that, as valuable as the rule of law may be as a check on the passions of men, laws are always derivative from the regime that makes them? Does not Aristotle himself thus stress that it is the regime, not the laws, that is ultimately authoritative in every city (see Politics 1281a34–39, 1282b1–13)? And as for the claim that he regarded democracy as the only just form of government, Aristotle surely indicates that the democratic claim of the many (the poor) to deserve to rule is as problematic as the oligarchic claim of the few (the rich), to say nothing of its merits relative to the claims of the virtuous and the single outstanding individual. Is it not because all of these claims have problems, both in principle and in practice, that Aristotle argues for a regime that mixes democratic and oligarchic elements while trying to carve out at least some role in ruling for the virtuous (consider Politics 1281a11–33, 1281a39–b37, 1293b31–1294b17)?

Hobbes cannot have been aware that Aristotle was not an unambiguous supporter of democracy who thought that democratic principles require only the check provided by the rule of law. After all, Hobbes criticizes Aristotle elsewhere for his view that some men are by nature superior to others and thus more deserving of rule (see, e.g., Elements 17.1; De Cive 3.6, 3.13; Leviathan, 234; Cropsey Reference Cropsey and Cropsey1964, 227–28; Johnson Bagby Reference Johnson Bagby2009, 114; Kraynak Reference Kraynak1990, 48–49; Sullivan Reference Sullivan2004, 91–92). When one takes this criticism, too, into consideration, what seems at first to be a straightforward critique becomes more complicated and even begins to appear contradictory: How can Aristotle be criticized for being at once too democratic and too inegalitarian? Nor is this the only apparent contradiction in Hobbes's critique of Aristotle and the other classical philosophers. Another is that, even as he blames the classical philosophers for spreading the anarchic conviction that men should sit in judgment on the commands of the established sovereign, he also faults them for accepting too uncritically the opinions of their times, that is, for bowing to the authority of the prevailing nomos and for cultivating such habits of deference in their disciples and readers (see De Cive, Ep. Ded.; Elements 27.13; Leviathan, 56–58, 334). So Aristotle is criticized not only as a democratic elitist but also—and equally paradoxically—as a champion of anarchy who slavishly bowed to the established order. What sense can be made of what looks like a set of contradictory charges?

A partial resolution of the second paradox, which bears at the same time on the first, is possible through the following line of reflection. In deferring to the dominant opinions of their times, the classical philosophers, Aristotle in particular, were deferring to an outlook shaped decisively by the ascendance of democratic principles. It may well be the case that neither Aristotle's epoch nor his thought was as democratic as Hobbes sometimes leads his readers to believe (see, e.g., Leviathan, 332–34, 1094; Behemoth, 23, 158). But Hobbes's exaggeration is again in the service of highlighting a problem. The problem is that in the historical circumstances in which the classical authors wrote—and this holds for Roman authors such as Cicero as well as for their earlier Greek counterparts—deference to the prevailing opinions had the effect, not of supporting a stable order, but of throwing the weight and authority of philosophy behind turbulent democratic convictions (see De Cive, Ep. Ded.; Elements, 27.10; Leviathan, 332–34, 46.35; De Homine 13.7). Even the “elitist” teaching that some men are by nature superior to others could strengthen democratic tendencies, because all men in their vanity tend to assume that they belong among the naturally superior and thus are encouraged to assert a claim to rule (see Elements 17.1; Kraynak Reference Kraynak1990, 49–52). But as problematic as these dynamics may have been in the ancient world, the problem becomes much worse when the political teachings of the ancients are brought to bear in later ages that are no longer so democratic (cf. Manent Reference Manent1994, 21–22; Schuhmann Reference Schuhmann2004, 216–18). This is a crucial element of Hobbes's diagnosis of the ideological roots of the English Civil War. According to Hobbes, many men “of the better sort,” who were born under the monarchy but educated in the classical authors in the universities, were seduced first by the eloquence of authors like Aristotle and Cicero and then “from the love of their eloquence fell in love with their politics” (Behemoth, 3, 43; see Skinner Reference Skinner1996, 433; Reference Skinner2008, 66–68, 107; Sullivan Reference Sullivan2004, 102–3). A dangerous faction of gentlemen thus arose who regarded the king's rule as a bit in their mouths restraining the legitimate assertion of their liberty. These rebellious men, made more powerful than their numbers by their eloquence and vehemence, eventually came to dominate the stormy House of Commons during the Long Parliament and, in the end, demonstrated the bloody implications of the classical hostility to monarchy transferred to a modern monarchical age (see Behemoth, 3, 23–24, 43–44, 56–58, 158; Latin Leviathan, 1095–97, 1131; Historia Ecclesiatica, lines 369–76, 1157–60; Hoekstra Reference Hoekstra, Brett and Tully2006a, 215–16; Tuck Reference Tuck1989, 74–75).

This line of reflection explains the complicated circumstances that account for some of the apparent contradictions in Hobbes's critique of classical political philosophy. But it does not yet bring us to the deepest level of that critique. And if matters were left at this line of reflection, the effect would be to historicize the critique too completely. For, in addition to his arguments shaped by historical circumstances, Hobbes has a more universal criticism—one that is at once simpler and yet more penetrating. Consider, for instance, a passage from Hobbes's denunciation of all prior moral philosophy in the Epistle Dedicatory of De Cive. After contrasting the success of the geometers with the failure of the moral philosophers, Hobbes points as evidence of that failure to the endless quarrels that have been intensified by the influence of the moral philosophers. He then makes this remark about the chaotic situation in which the “war of the sword” has long been nourished by “the war of the pens”:

The deeper difficulty that according to Hobbes besets all prior moral philosophy—and this of course includes classical thought and Aristotle in particular is twofold. The first aspect is conveyed by Hobbes's description of the opinions that have been buttressed by the “charming language” of the moral philosophers as “hastily accepted” (temerè receptas). The second aspect is simpler but ultimately more important: the dependence of the moral philosophers on opinions as such and their (connected) failure to establish or employ an adequate starting point.

Regarding the first point, Hobbes probably has in mind one “hastily accepted” opinion above all: the conviction that man is born fit for society or that he is by nature a political animal. Near the beginning of De Cive, Hobbes points to this conviction, for which Aristotle is the original spokesman, as the foundation on which “the greatest part of those who have written anything about public affairs” have built their doctrines (De Cive 1.2; see Aristotle, Politics 1253a1–39). These authors have “either supposed, or claimed, or postulated” that man is naturally social. Yet, although this fundamental conviction or axiom has long been widely accepted, it is, Hobbes declares, “nevertheless false.” “The error stems from an overly superficial contemplation of human nature” (De Cive 1.2). Aristotle and others, by mistaking a veneer of apparent sociality for man's true nature, have embraced and encouraged an excessively sanguine view of the motivations of men and the character of their natural relations; they have failed to see through the façade of mutual concern among men to the underlying truth that the primary concern of each man is for his own honor and advantage. The danger of such naiveté is that it leads men—writers and readers alike—to underestimate the severity of the steps that must be taken to secure peace and order among men (De Cive 1.2; see also Leviathan, 282). It is in large part to combat this danger that Hobbes is so explicit in his own contrary assertions that society is unnatural for men and that men are not only out for themselves but are also driven by nature into conflict (De Cive, 1.2; see also Ep. Ded.; Leviathan, 192–94, 258–60; Elements 14.2-6).Footnote ⁴

Now, Hobbes's critique of the classical view regarding man's natural sociality is well known and relatively straightforward. Let us focus, then, on the second point mentioned earlier: Hobbes's criticism of the earlier moral philosophers for their reliance on opinions as such and for their lack of a proper starting point. This aspect of his criticism, too, is not meant to apply only to Aristotle, but it applies especially to him. And we can see in this consideration, even more than in the preceding one, an important reason besides the sheer immensity of Aristotle's influence that Hobbes directs so much of his firepower at him (see Strauss Reference Strauss1963, 139–40). According to Hobbes, Aristotle and his heirs “take for principles those opinions which are already vulgarly received, whether true or false—being for the most part false” (Elements 13.3). Aristotle and the Aristotelians take their bearings by praise and blame, calling by the names of the virtues those qualities that men praise in everyday speech and by the names of the vices those qualities that they blame (see Elements 17.14; Latin Leviathan, 1095–97; Behemoth, 44). Hobbes is not misrepresenting Aristotle's approach by characterizing it in this way. Aristotle does take his bearings from the opinions expressed in everyday praise and blame (see Nicomachean Ethics 1094b11–1095a4, 1095a30–b14, 1098a26–b8, 1103a9–10, 1119b22–1120a8, 1129a3–31). But why does Hobbes regard such an approach as so problematic?

The problem, according to Hobbes, is that everyday opinions do not provide a sufficiently solid basis either for a secure order or for a science of morality worthy of the name. The problem—the problem of opinions—has several levels. Most simply, everyday opinions are “for the most part false.” Yet Hobbes tends to focus less on their falsity than on their fluctuation. Opinions are diverse and variable; different men hold different opinions at various times, and even in the same man opinions blow with the winds of circumstance (De Cive 3.21-32; Leviathan, 62, 242; De Homine 13.8). The endless disputes within moral philosophy are reflections, Hobbes argues, of a prior diversity and variability of opinions within practical life. Because the moral philosophers have merely reproduced in exalted philosophic language quarrels that begin on the plane of popular opinion—which is already a battleground of competing claims—it is not surprising that moral philosophy has tended to divide into competing schools or sects, nor that these sects have reinforced and intensified the quarrels they have absorbed (De Cive, Ep. Ded.; Elements, Ep. Ded., 1.1; Leviathan, 1056–60; cf. Bacon, New Organon 1.67, 1.71–79; Descartes, Discourse on Method, 7; Weinberger Reference Weinberger1975, 1337). This is another—deeper and less historically contingent—meaning of the charge of “anarchism” that Hobbes directs at moral philosophy. And if the dynamic in question is problematic for obvious practical reasons, because moral philosophy has fueled the fires that it should be putting out, it is also problematic for theoretical reasons, because opinions that are so variable and contested “can never be true grounds of any ratiocination” (Leviathan, 62). No stable political order and no true science can be established on such a shaky and ever-shifting foundation.

There is a reason, according to Hobbes, that opinions are so variable, beyond the obvious diversity of men and circumstances—a reason that accounts for why that diversity leads to a diversity of opinions. Underneath opinions, Hobbes argues, lie passions. Passions in all of their turbulent variability are the wellsprings of opinions, because men call “good” and “bad”—that is, they praise and blame—that which they desire or detest (see De Cive 3.31, 10.11; Leviathan, 62, 80–84, 158; Elements 5.14, 27.13; De Homine 11.4, 13.8; Evrigenis Reference Evrigenis2014, 137). To take one's bearings by opinions, then, is unwittingly to defer to and to buttress the passions. This is what Hobbes means when he says that Aristotle and “other heathen philosophers” merely give a description of the passions, calling them by the names of the virtues (see Leviathan, 1090, 62, 1058–60; Elements 27.13, EW VII, 75). Of course, Hobbes knows that Aristotle would have a response to this charge: Aristotle's famous doctrine of the mean is intended, not to give the stamp of approval to the passions, but to educate men in the proper stance toward the various passions (see Ethica Nichomachea 1106a25–1109a24). But Hobbes dismisses that doctrine as woefully inadequate. Although Aristotle sought to teach men to resist the passions, or at least their extremes, his teaching was too flimsy and equivocal to be effective. His doctrine remained entangled with the passions, and he overestimated the power of reason to educate the passions: “As oft as reason is against a man, so oft will a man be against reason” (Elements, Ep. Ded.). Furthermore, Aristotle failed to identify the end on which the virtues depend for their clear specification. Even if he plausibly enumerated the virtues, Aristotle, “yet not seeing wherein consisted their goodness,” muddied the waters by speaking of the proper degrees of the passions, rather than of the end to which the virtues are means; but “it is not the Much or Little that makes an action virtuous, but the cause” (Leviathan, 242; Behemoth, 44; see also De Cive 3.31–32; Elements 17.14; Skinner Reference Skinner1996, 324).

This last consideration—that Aristotle failed to identify the end to which the virtues are means—can give us guidance on a question that necessarily arises at this point: How did Hobbes think that, by his own approach and doctrine, he could avoid the rocks on which Aristotle and others had foundered? In particular, how did he think that the problem of opinions could be solved or avoided? This question becomes more complicated when one considers that Hobbes's own approach culminates in a teaching about the “laws of nature” that, by his own acknowledgment, can be regarded as a doctrine of the virtues with considerable overlap with Aristotle's (see Leviathan, 242; De Cive 3.31–32; Reference Sorell and SpringborgSorell 2007). And, of course, it can hardly be said that Hobbes's doctrine avoids any entanglement with the passions. After all, it is by basing his doctrine on the most powerful passion—the fear of violent death—that Hobbes attempts to lay such a foundation “as passion not mistrusting may not seek to displace” (Elements, Ed. Ded.). Yet Hobbes departs from Aristotle precisely in this way, that is, by basing his doctrine on the foundation of a single passion that can counteract the whims of the other passions (cf. Sullivan Reference Sullivan2004, 107–8). And more important is the difference between Hobbes and Aristotle concerning the end of virtue. For Hobbes's attempt to bring simplicity and clarity to a realm long clouded by complexity and obscurity depends, above all, on his specification of a single, clear end from which the virtues may take their bearings: peace. If Aristotle defined the virtues as means in the sense of means between extremes of the various passions, Hobbes presents them as means in the simpler sense of means to an end that they should serve. Thus he faults Aristotle for proceeding, as he puts it, “as if not the cause, but the degree” of the virtues (or of the passions they regulate) made them virtues (Leviathan, 242).

Now, one could well ask whether this criticism is entirely fair to Aristotle, because Aristotle does, in certain key passages, identify an end served by the virtues.Footnote ⁵ That end is the noble, or the virtues themselves, insofar as virtuous actions are for their own sake (see, e.g., Nicomachean Ethics 1115b10–13, 1115b20–24). Moreover, the virtues get their specification as means, according to Aristotle, not merely by standing in the middle of a spectrum from excess to deficiency, but by being defined by right reason as the prudent man exercises it (Ethica Nicomachea 1103b31–34, 1106b36–1107a2). Yet Hobbes's point still holds at least in one important respect, because Aristotle himself indicates that his explicit or official account of virtue's end and its specification is not fully satisfactory, and he goes on to treat the matter as a mystery or a problem to which he never gives a perfectly clear resolution (see, in particular, Nicomachean Ethics 1138b18–34, 1144a6–1145a11). It remains true, then—if in a somewhat more complicated way than Hobbes suggests—that a key difference between Hobbes and Aristotle is that the former seeks to bring simplicity and clarity to a realm that the latter was willing to leave in something of a mist.

As for the argument by which Hobbes would establish the end that promises to give virtue its long-overdue simplicity and clarity, it is the following. Although men's appetites and aversions are so diverse and variable that they can never agree on what deserves to be called good, that very disagreement contributes to a state of conflict that clarifies the one thing on which they can agree, namely, that war is bad and, therefore, by implication or inversion, that peace is good. The goodness of peace is easily recognized and universally granted when men contemplate the state of anarchy that results from their otherwise irresolvable disagreements about good and evil (see Leviathan, 242; De Cive 3.31).

Hobbes's argument for the supreme importance of peace is not beyond challenge. But this is not the place to pursue the question of the strengths and weaknesses of that argument, because the primary task of this article is to consider Hobbes's critique of classical thought. Before we turn to further aspects of that critique, however, let us conclude this section of our examination of it by addressing a puzzle that emerges from what we have considered thus far. As we have seen, Hobbes repeatedly highlights, even to the point of vast exaggeration, the terrible damage that has been caused by moral or political philosophy. One might expect, therefore, that he would be driven to call for the abandonment of such philosophy as a pseudoscience that sows chaos wherever it spreads. But Hobbes does quite the opposite. Far from calling for the abandonment of political philosophy, he moves radically in the other direction by promising to raise it for the first time to the rank of a genuine science and to transform it such that it will at long last be a force for good in human life. Yet, if things were better before the rise of political philosophy, why not call for a return to that simple, peaceful situation, instead of launching a massive new enterprise in such a dubious and dangerous branch of philosophy?

It is only a partial answer to that question to say that a return to that simple age is no longer possible: Once the genie of political philosophy has been let out of the bottle, it cannot be put back in (see Kraynak Reference Kraynak1990, 177–78). And it still does not fully answer the question to add that the simple age was surely never the golden age of peace and harmony that Hobbes sometimes pretends it was. Those answers are only partial because Hobbes clearly believed that he can accomplish something far greater than a return to a primitive, uncorrupted past. Hobbes's claim—and we should never lose sight of how bold it is—is that his own political philosophy could be as beneficial as Aristotle's was pernicious, and as scientific as his was unscientific. He goes so far as to promise an “incomparable benefit to [the] commonwealth” than which “nothing more useful can be discovered” (Elements, Ep. Ded.; De Cive, Preface). I will return to this extraordinary promise after examining the other major dimension of Hobbes's critique of classical thought.

The “Metaphysical” Critique

The dimension of Hobbes's critique of classical thought to which I now turn is directed even more pointedly against Aristotle than the one just considered. But what is this other dimension? What should it be called? I have so far used the word “metaphysical,” in part for lack of a better term, but also for a further reason. It could instead be called Hobbes's critique of the natural philosophy of the classical schools, which he describes as “rather a dream than science” (Leviathan, 1058; see also EW VII, 128). But one of the reasons it was merely a dream, in Hobbes's view, is that natural philosophy was not kept sufficiently distinct from metaphysics. And more important for present purposes, Hobbes's critique of it focuses not so much on the whole of classical natural philosophy, in all of its various questions and schools, as on a few closely connected points on which Aristotle's teaching in particular blurs the line between the natural (the physical) and the supernatural (the metaphysical).

Now, Hobbes is aware that in using the term “metaphysical” to refer to the supernatural or to that which is “beyond the physical,” he is following Aristotle's scholastic heirs in taking a questionable step that was not clearly taken by Aristotle himself. If the original meaning of the title of Aristotle's Metaphysics was only that it was written or placed “after the Physics”—that is, after Aristotle's articulation of his natural philosophy in his Physics and elsewhere—the scholastic schools of Hobbes's time took it in the loftier sense of “beyond the physical” (Leviathan, 1076; see Skinner Reference Skinner1996, 411). But although it is a mistake, according to Hobbes, to take the title of Aristotle's work in this way, it is an understandable mistake, and not just for the reason Hobbes most immediately gives: “And indeed that which is there written is for the most part so far from the possibility of being understood, and so repugnant to natural reason, that whosoever thinketh there is anything to be understood by it must needs think it supernatural” (Leviathan, 1076). To understand the deeper reasons why Hobbes thinks that Aristotle himself allowed or even invited the misunderstanding of his heirs, we need to consider the central questions at issue in Hobbes's critique of Aristotle's “metaphysics.”

There is one doctrine, above all, that Hobbes traces back to Aristotle and against which he is unrelenting in his attack: the doctrine of abstract essences. This doctrine, according to which there are in the world certain essences separated from bodies and thus beings with an incorporeal existence is “built on the vain philosophy of Aristotle” (Leviathan, 1082; see also Latin Leviathan, 1079). But in what way does it rest on an Aristotelian foundation? It is not an easy matter—either in considering Hobbes's view of Aristotle or in examining Aristotle's own writings—to discern whether Aristotle accepted the view that essences have an existence separate from bodies.Footnote ⁶ Yet it is sufficient for Hobbes—sufficient before Aristotle's culpability—that Aristotle left his own view so opaque and that he spoke so often of “substances” and “essences” (as his terminology came to be translated). For Aristotle thereby left open a door through which his followers, moved already by the natural human propensity to believe in incorporeal spirits, could travel in their search for philosophic support for their religious beliefs. It is perhaps the most unmistakable evidence of his conviction that Aristotle made a terrible error is that Hobbes chooses the context of his criticism of Aristotle to make his own most uncompromising statements on the question of being and the possibility of incorporeal existence. On the question of being, Hobbes argues that it is a great mistake to suppose that there is any deep mystery surrounding the word “is” or the notion of existence: We could easily dispense with the word “is” and be “not a jot the less capable of inferring, concluding, and of all kind of reasoning than were the Greeks and Latins.” Such an innovation, moreover, would have the benefit of destroying the illusion that there is a genuine need for the terms deriving from the Latin est—“these terms of Entity, Essence, Essential, Essentiality”—and that such terms name things that exist apart from particular bodies (Leviathan, 1078–80).Footnote ⁷ As for the question of incorporeal existence, it is on the heels of his statement about Aristotle's role in the emergence of the doctrine of abstract essences that Hobbes delivers the most strident assertion of his own materialism in his entire corpus:

The danger of failing to be so clear and emphatic, according to Hobbes, is that if one even suggests that the notion of an “essence” can refer to something distinct and separable from a body to which it is tied, one nourishes beliefs in all sorts of incorporeal beings and possibilities that philosophy should instead try to combat. Aristotle's teaching not only allowed the “demonology” of the Greeks to survive, but it also fostered the beliefs that a man's soul, as his essence, can subsist apart from his body, that ghost-like beings can travel throughout the world without the restrictions of bodies, and that faith, wisdom, and other virtues can be poured or blown into men from Heaven (see Leviathan, 1082, 1012–14; Latin Leviathan, 1071, 1081, Appendix, 1177). Why are such beliefs so dangerous in Hobbes's eyes? The danger he complains about most loudly, if not the only one with which he is concerned, is the political danger. Hobbes argues that the prevalence of such beliefs strengthens the power of the “ghostly authorities” (clergymen of various sects) and weakens the attachment of subjects to the civil sovereign. The more vigorous and widespread such beliefs, the more plentiful and powerful are the weapons, in the form of threats and promises, by which religious authorities can challenge the temporal power in the name of a higher spiritual kingdom. That challenge is like a disease—Hobbes compares it to epilepsy—that corrupts the body politic, causes it to shake and move in unnatural ways, and ultimately threatens to destroy it by oppression or civil war (Leviathan, 510–12, 976; see also Behemoth, 41–43; Hoekstra Reference Hoekstra2006b, 32; Lloyd Reference Lloyd2009, 392).

The danger to which Hobbes points was not merely a hypothetical one in his time. The worst inciters of the English Civil War, by his account, were the Presbyterian ministers, without whose seduction of the people the antimonarchical orators in the House of Commons could not have succeeded (see Behemoth, 2–3, 20–28, 57, 95, 158–60; Leviathan, 978, 1106; Latin Leviathan, 1097). Hobbes also spares no contempt for the machinations of the Catholic Church, which, like a dark kingdom ruled by a shadowy king and his army of malevolent fairies, had long asserted its power to the detriment of stability, liberty, and science in Europe (see Leviathan, 956–58, all of ch. 47). But these, of course, are manifestations of the danger in the context of Christian Europe, and thus, it would seem, far removed from the pagan world in which Aristotle wrote. How did it happen that Aristotle came to loom so large and cause such trouble in Christian ages?

As Hobbes tells the story,Footnote ⁸ the philosophic schools first established by the Greek masters persisted until the time of Jesus and the emergence of the primitive church. At that time, philosophy remained relatively harmless and free: “No one was compelled to swear by the words of Aristotle, even though his doctrines were more widely accepted than those of other sects” (Latin Leviathan, 1059). If philosophy was still relatively harmless and free, it was also prevalent, as was the superstitious belief in incorporeal spirits. When the philosophers, or those sectarians who fancied themselves philosophers, embraced Christianity, they did so with reservations—they were semicocti Christiani (“half-baked Christians”)—and to reconcile the new faith with their philosophic principles, they interpreted Christian doctrines in light of the dogmas of their philosophic masters (Latin Leviathan, 1063). Thus philosophy first merged with Christianity. But this combination predictably gave rise to disputes, especially over the doctrine of the Trinity. The attempt to resolve these disputes eventually cemented the notion of a “catholic” (i.e., universal) faith, but it did not end the dynamic by which the importation of philosophy stirred controversies over the proper interpretation of church doctrine. In fact, the role of philosophy grew only larger as later theologians turned to Aristotle with less restraint. After the Catholic Church had grown more powerful by surviving the collapse of the Roman Empire, another crucial development came in the time of Charlemagne. Charlemagne joined forces with Pope Leo III and, at Leo's behest, took the fateful step of establishing the first universities, which provided the cradle for scholastic theology, “a mixture of Aristotle's philosophy and sacred Scripture” (Latin Leviathan, 1075). As the universities spread their influence, Aristotle became at once the dominant intellectual authority in Europe and a kind of high priest: “In the universities, the Logic, Physics, Metaphysics, Ethics, and Politics of Aristotle were taught as if the entirety of the sciences were in one man—at that time the greatest Church Father—Aristotle” (Latin Leviathan, 1075).

The original purpose of the universities and of the scholastic theology that emerged from them, according to Hobbes, was to defend the dogmas of the Catholic Church and thereby to secure its power and claim to supremacy (cf. Historia Ecclesiastica, lines 1854–84). By putting philosophy into the service of a politically motivated theology, the universities, far from providing a home for genuine inquiry, completed the destruction of the freedom of philosophy. Although Aristotelian philosophy seemed to reign supreme in the universities, it “had there no otherwise place than as a handmaid to the Roman Religion” (Leviathan, 1074),Footnote ⁹ and even the weakening of Roman Catholicism meant, not the liberation of philosophy, but only a partial change in the master (see, e.g., Leviathan, 1106, 1114–16; Behemoth, 56–59). We have already considered the political danger that arose from this appropriation of philosophy. But the political danger is not the only problem that concerns Hobbes. Just as problematic—from a certain perspective, even worse—is what the absorption of philosophy by theology meant for philosophy itself. Philosophy was thoroughly corrupted, not only in its aims but also in its character and content, as it was forced to serve a foreign master and to lend its power to the support of its natural enemy (see Leviathan, 1074, 1120–22; Latin Leviathan, 1075–77; Behemoth, 40–42; EW IV, 264; EW VII, 77–79, 348; cf. Bacon, New Organon 1.65, 1.77, 1.89; Kennington Reference Kennington2004, 22).

If Aristotle had possessed a crystal ball in which he could have foreseen these developments, it is not likely that he would have liked what he saw. After all, Aristotle himself, according to Hobbes, may not even have accepted the very doctrines that made the appropriation of his thought attractive to theologians in the first place. I have already alluded to Hobbes's remarks about the meaning of the word “metaphysics” as the title of Aristotle's great work: Does the word refer to that which transcends nature or merely to the fact that Aristotle wrote or placed the work in question after his Physics? “[T]he word metaphyics will bear both these senses,” Hobbes says, and he suggests that the scholastic theologians were wrong, or at any rate departed from Aristotle, in taking it in the more exalted sense (see again Leviathan, 1076). There may be no such thing, then, as a genuine science of “metaphysics” in Aristotle's authentic teaching, as opposed to its later appropriation (see also Anti-White 9.16). Connected to this consideration is Hobbes's uncertainty as to whether Aristotle himself accepted the doctrine of abstract essences. After sketching in Chapter 46 of Leviathan the political problem caused by that doctrine, Hobbes raises the possibility that, when it comes to Aristotle himself (again, in contrast to his later appropriators), “it may be he knew [sc., the doctrine of abstract essences] to be false philosophy, but writ it as a thing consonant to, and corroborative of, their religion, and fearing the fate of Socrates” (Leviathan, 1082). This suggestion that the doctrine of abstract essences may have been for Aristotle merely an exoteric doctrine has to be balanced with the numerous instances in which Hobbes writes as if Aristotle himself held the view in question. Nevertheless, it is a striking indication that Hobbes does not simply assume that Aristotle was a thoroughgoing “Aristotelian.”Footnote ¹⁰

Yet, even if he suspected that Aristotle's own views differed in important ways from those of his scholastic heirs, Hobbes does not follow the path that such a suspicion could open up: to investigate in a deep and thorough way whether Aristotle's genuine thought is more tenable and genuinely scientific than the outlook that his “sectaries” defended in his name. Hobbes's unwillingness to follow that path can be explained only in part by the obscurity of Aristotle's most fundamental works, especially the Metaphysics, which Hobbes repeatedly bemoans (see, e.g., Leviathan, 1076; Behemoth, 41–42; Anti-White, 9.16). The more important reason is Hobbes's settled conviction that, even if one labored to penetrate their obscurity, one would not find a clear and solid position behind the fog. It is even fair to say that, from Hobbes's perspective, if Aristotle's thought was indeed distorted as it was co-opted—at least in the sense that merely exoteric doctrines were taken as much more than that—Aristotle in a way deserved such a fate, because his thought did not contain the resources to fend off its appropriation and distortion. The problem is not just Aristotle's overly accommodating rhetorical approach; it is also that there was no truly solid ground, no genuine science, there to oppose, in principle as much as in practice, the theological appropriation of his thought.

Two indications that this is Hobbes's view of the matter can be found in Chapter 46 of Leviathan, “Of Darkness from “Vain Philosophy” and Fabulous Traditions.” The first is Hobbes's sweeping declaration, already mentioned, that the natural philosophy of the classical schools was “rather a dream than science,” a declaration that is surely meant to apply to Aristotle among others. The second is that, in the wake of his criticism of the doctrine of abstract essences, which falls under the official heading of his critique of Aristotelian-scholastic metaphysics, Hobbes turns to a brief statement on physics, and here, too, he is critical of both Aristotle and the scholastics, but now without indicating any important divergence between them (1086–88). His leading example concerns how “the Schools” answer the question of why some bodies sink naturally toward the earth while others ascend away from it. The scholastic answer, taken “out of Aristotle,” is, in the first instance, “that the bodies that sink downwards are heavy, and that this heaviness is it that causes them to descend.” If pushed to clarify this answer, “the schoolmen will define heaviness as “an endeavor to go to the center of the earth.” Or they will give another answer: “[T]he center of the earth is the place of rest and conservation for heavy things; and therefore they endeavor to be there” (1086). Hobbes argues that the first set of answers amounts to nothing more than an empty description (it is “as much as to say that bodies descend, or ascend, because they do”) and that the second answer is a risible ascription, to inanimate objects, of desires and purposes that makes nature seem more orderly and purposive than it is (ibid.; see also 26; EW VII, 7, 76, 82).

Generalizing from this example, we may say that Hobbes seems to have come to the conclusion that Aristotle's physics—that is, his natural philosophy in the narrower sense of the word, in which it is either subordinate to or independent of metaphysics—offers little more than empty descriptions, on the one hand, or dubious teleological explanations, on the other.Footnote ¹¹ It is true that, when presenting his own natural philosophy, Hobbes borrows here and there from Aristotle (Spragens Reference Spragens1973). But from the outset of De Corpore, the central work of his natural philosophy, Hobbes makes it clear that he regards himself as following in the footsteps of those who had broken with the Aristotelian tradition in natural philosophy. The towering figure for Hobbes—the man who, as he proclaims in the Epistle Dedicatory of De Corpore, was “the first who opened for us the gate of physics as a whole” by unlocking “the nature of motion”—is Galileo, not Aristotle. Galileo was so transformative, according to Hobbes, that “the age of physics” should not be “traced back further than to him” (De Corpore, Ep. Ded.; see also Anti-White 10.9). Hobbes speaks in the same passage of the tremendous progress in astronomy and natural philosophy made also by Copernicus, Harvey, Kepler, Gassendi, and Mersenne. Aristotle is mentioned in this key passage only as the source of “the many absurd and false assumptions” that the early Church Fathers and later theologians merged with Christian doctrines in the process that ultimately gave rise to the pernicious monster of scholasticism.