J.S.M.
THOMAS HOBBES
1588-1679 Leviathan
We read the philosophers not only because they are in them- selves interesting, but because their ideas have conse- quences. The quarrel between the individual and the state as to the proper division of power is central to our time. Hobbes is important because he presents the first modern reasoned case for the state as the exclusive holder of power, so long as that state can offer protection to its citizens. Thus ali of today's authoritarian regimes, whether Marxist or non-Marxist, may claim Hobbes as one of their earliest and greatest advo- cates.
Hobbes received a good classical education at Oxford. He later used his scholarship to prepare a translation of Thucydides [9] in whose work he saw a demonstration of the evils of democracy. For some time he made a living as a tutor in a noble family. In his middle years, apparently as a conse- quence of reading a proof in Euclid, he turned from the clas- sics to science and philosophy. His political sympathies during the great English Parliamentary struggle were Royalist; for a short period he taught mathematics in Paris to the future Charles II. But his deeper loyalty was to power irrespective of party. Hence, after Cromweirs victory, he made submission to the Protector. During the Restoration, though attacked as an atheist, he managed to survive successfully enough to reach the age of ninety-one.
His fame rests on the Leviathan. Published in 1651, it was merely a systematic development of ideas he was already holding some years before the Civil War came to a head.
Hobbes's absolutist theory of the state rests on his anti- heroic conception of man's nature. He is a thoroughgoing mechanistic materialist. He does not deny God. But God is irrelevant to his thought. He believes in a proposition by no means self-evident—that ali men are primarily interested in self-preservation. In a natural, lawless state this passion results in anarchy, and the life of man, in his most famous phrase, is "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.,>
To escape such an existence, man institutes a common- wealth or government, the great artificial construct Hobbes calls Leviathan. To secure peace, or, as we say today, "secu- rity," we must relinquish our right of private judgment as to what is good or evil, placing that right in the hands of a sover- eign or assembly. Hobbes prefers a monarchy, but his logic would suggest no basic objection to a committee or party, as in the Communist Leviathan. In such a state, morality would flow from law rather than law from morality.
Most so-called realistic theories of politics find their source partly in Hobbes, though also in Machiavelli [34]. Our own democratic doctrine is anti-Hobbesian in its view of human nature. It rests on the notion of a division of powers (Hobbes thought the Civil War came about because power was divided among the king, the lords, and the House of Commons); on a system of checks and balances; and on a vague but so far workable theory of the general will expressed in representa- tive form. To understand what really separates us from ali authoritarian regimes, a reading of the Leviathan is most helpful.
Despite his iron doctrine, Hobbes himself seems to have been a pleasant and rather timid fellow.
He writes a crabbed, difficult prose. Save him for your more insistently intellectual moods. Read the Introduction and Parts 1 and 2 entire, if possible; Chapters 32, 33, 42, and 46 of Parts 3 and 4, in which he argues against the power claims of ali established churches; and finally his Review and Conclusion.
C.F.
RENЙ DESCARTES
1596-1650 Discourse on Method
Descartes is often termed "the father of modern philosophy." Even if this were not so, he would still be well worth reading for the elegant precision of his prose and the mathematical clarity of his reasoning. These two qualities, more than his specific doctrines, have deeply influenced the French char- acter.
Descartes^ family was of the minor nobility and he never had to support himself. This was as it should be; we shall never know how much genius has been lost to the world by reason of the need to make a living. We willingly provide free board and lodging for lunatics, but recoil before the idea of doing so for first-class minds.
Descartes received a good Jesuit education. As his health was poor, his masters, intelligent men, allowed him to stay late in bed instead of compelling him to play the seventeenth- century equivalent of basketball. This slugabed habit he retained ali his life. It was responsible for much calm, ordered thought.
Even as a young man Descartes had begun to distrust the foundations of everything he had been taught, except mathe- matics. This skepticism (which did not conflict, it appears, with conventional piety) was reinforced during his Paris and Poitiers years (1614-18) when he read Montaigne [37]. He finally abandoned study and set off on a career of mild military adven- ture and travei. He was resolved, he says, "no longer to seek any other science than the knowledge of myself, or of the great book of the world.,>
His great creative years, from 1629 to 1649, were spent mainly in Holland, at that time a general asylum for intelli- gence. His fame grew to such proportions that Queen Christina of Sweden invited (that is, commanded) him to visit her and teach her philosophy. In Sweden Descartes was forced to rise at 5:00 a.m. in cold weather in order to converse with the queen. A few months of such barbarism were enough to kill him. Had not this arrogant monarch caused his death just as directly as if she had shot him, the world might have had another twenty years of Descartes^ mind.
However, he managed to do pretty well. Though the two talents were inextricably connected, Descartes was an even greater mathematician than philosopher. One morning, while lying in bed, he hit upon the idea of coordinate geometry, which married algebra to geometry. He also worked in physics, though with less distinction.
Descartes^ doctrines, dualistic and materialist in tendency, are both interesting and influential. But it is as the creator of a new, or at any rate fresh, method of thought that his position was secured. He threw aside much, though not ali, of scholas- tic reasoning and, as it were, started from scratch. He began by doubting everything. The progression of doubt, however, ended at the point where he found that he could not doubt the existence of his own thought. "I think, therefore I am" is the famous formula with which he begins. (In a somewhat different form, it is found in Augustine [22], too, but Descartes made it do work and Augustine didn^.) He then proceeds to build a system of thought, using four main principies you will find described in his Discourse on Method. "Cartesian doubt," however, describes not only a method but an attitude of mind, and this attitude was to influence profoundly post-Cartesian speculation, whether scientific or philosophical.
We read Descartes, then, as the first supremely great mind to receive its stimulus from the new physics and astronomy of Copernicus, Galileo [42], and others. He incorporates the outlook of the tremendous renaissance of science, partly contem- porary with him, that was to reach a high point with Newton.
C.F.
JOHN MILTON
1608-1674
Paradise Lost, Lycidas, On the Moming of Christ's Nativity, Sonnets, Areopagitica
Miltons life opened on a fair prospect and closed in darkness. At Chrisfs College, Cambridge, the delicate-featured boy was called, half in scorn, half in admiration, "The Lady of Chrisfs." He found his vocation early: poetry and classical scholarship. A period of reading and study at his fathers country house (1632-38) was followed by a year or two of Continental travei. During this time he was a humanist not greatly different from other humanists of the Renaissance. Then carne twenty years of stormy political and religious controversy. Some magnificent prose resulted, but little happiness—and many may think these years a waste of his genius. Championing the Parliamentary cause, hating "the bishops," he served as Latin secretary to Cromwell for over a decade, overlaying his original humanism with Puritan doctrine. From his forty-third year to his death he was blind; none of his three marriages turned out well; and with the Restoration ali his political hopes and dreams were dashed. Nothing was left him but poetry and his personal Christianity, a kind of dissidence of dissent.