Hobbes 1

Socit qubcoise de science politique
Hobbes's Modern Prometheus: A Political Philosophy for an Uncertain Future Author(s): Loralea Michaelis Source: Canadian Journal of Political Science / Revue canadienne de science politique, Vol. 40, No. 1 (Mar., 2007), pp. 101-127 Published by: Canadian Political Science Association and the Socit qubcoise de science politique Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/25166066 . Accessed: 05/12/2013 14:35
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A Political Philosophyfor
an Uncertain Future
Hobbes's Modern
Prometheus:
Loralea
I. Introduction
Michaelis
Mount Allison University
that there be causes of all things that have arrived hitherto, For being assured or shall arrive hereafter; it is impossible for a man, who continually endeav the good he the evill he feares, and procure oureth to secure himselfe against solicitude of the time to come; So that every desireth, not to be in a perpetuall man, are in an estate like to that of those that are over provident, especially Prometheus. For as Prometheus, is, The prudent man,) was (which interpreted, an Eagle a. place of large prospect, where, to the hill Caucausus, feed bound as was repayred in the day, as much in the night: So ing on his liver, devoured that man, which looks too far before him, in the care of future time, hath his heart all the day long, gnawed on by feare of death, poverty, or other calamity; and has no repose, nor pause of his anxiety, but in sleep. (Hobbes, 1968: 169)
Prometheus waking each day to the ravages of the eagle, we wake each day to find our anxiety over the future renewed, and the repose of sleep wasted. Burdensome as we might find this condition, we tend to regard
*Loralea Main Michaelis, of Political Science, Mount Allison Department New Brunswick, E4L 1A7; lmichael@mta.ca University, 144
take for granted that the future will be substantially different from the past; we take for granted that the passage of time calls us to the great task of preparing for themultitude of changes that lie ahead. The ability to adapt quickly and effortlessly to change has become the new cardinal virtue. But no matter how flexible we become, the uncertainty of the future still weighs heavily upon us; we never have certainty enough to rest content before the need for reassurance overtakes us once again. Like
Hobbes's portrait of human beings as caught in a web of causes and effects on which they are aware their good fortune depends but over which they have insufficient control, so that they are necessarily tormented by thoughts of the future, has been so thoroughly absorbed into our modern consciousness that it hardly seems shocking or controversial today.We
Street,
Sackville,
Canadian Journal ofPolitical Science /Revue canadienne de sciencepolitique DOI: 10.1017/S0008423907070023 40:1 (March/mars 2007) 101-127 ? 2007 Canadian Political Science Association (1'Associationcanadiennede science politique) and/et la Societe quebecoise de science politique
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will bring him no relief rather than the pain of remembering the injustice that dispatched him to this unfortunate condition. But it is none other than this past injustice that forms the centrepiece of ancient versions of account of the story in the Theogony the Prometheus story. Hesiod's as a tormented figure but as a trickster so not Prometheus much presents who reveals Zeus as a vainglorious and vindictive tyrant:after Prometheus' "crafty trick" of presenting him with bones and fat in the shape of an ox,
it as inescapable, even natural. This is how Hobbes presents it.And yet his portrait of the temporal situation of human beings is as peculiar as his retelling of the story of Prometheus. What is so remarkable about Hobbes's retelling is the absence of to which Prometheus the crime is being punished, any for reference any to stress In the to the order reference, indeed, past. futility of Prometheus' reverses direction of his suffering: his Hobbes the condition, temporal a future that he already knows the of is anticipating primarily pain pain
Zeus hides fire from mortals; after Prometheus' theft of fire, Zeus fash It is the excesses ions the punishment of Pandora (Hesiod, 1973: 40-42). of Zeus, and not the sufferings of Prometheus, on which Hesiod's ver sion of the story lays the greatest emphasis. Similarly, in Aeschylus's Prometheus Bound we encounter a Prometheus who suffers not so much from his anxiety over what might befall him in the future as from his rage over the past injustice that Zeus has committed against him. His ability to foresee the future is not a terrible burden but a source of strength that enables him to endure his present misfortune; he has foreseen his own deliverance as well as the part that he will play in bringing an end to the dominion of Zeus. He fears the coming of the eagle but his mood comes to ismore defiant than anxious. It is for this reason thatOceanos
warn him against provoking Zeus any furtherwith his "angry mood." "You are not yet humble," he says, "still you do not yield to your misfor tunes" (Aeschylus, 1956: 151). What these ancient writers find compelling about the figure of sense of Prometheus is not the particular quality of the punishment?the is Hobbes future which of the with and the dread preoccupied?so futility much as the chain of events that it concludes. The tragic scene opens
with the deed already accomplished and the consequences already unfold ing in the agonies of the hero. The audience's anticipation is not directed forward to what will happen but rather backward to what has already happened. Every suffering has a history that gives itmeaning and it is thismeaning that the tragic drama is concerned to address. The fact that Prometheus suffers immediately raises the moral and theological prob What hangs in lem of why he suffers and whether he deserves to suffer. the balance is nothing less than the sovereignty of Zeus and the inevita exer bility of thewretched condition of the human beings over whom he cises his dominion. By failing tomention the crime forwhich Prometheus
Abstract.
This paper takes the Prometheus story in chapter 12 of Leviathan as the point of entry for an examination of the importance thatHobbes assigns to the problem of an uncertain future in his political philosophy. Hobbes's thinking on human nature represents a dramatic
departure from the ancients not only because his mechanistic psychology reverses the ancient conception of the relation between reason and passion but also because his understanding of the temporal situation of human beings privileges the future to an unprecedented degree. It is against the backdrop of a universe in which the problem of an uncertain future has reached intolerable proportions thatHobbes develops his portrait of human nature; it is against the back drop of this universe that he develops his account of Leviathan as the only earthly power capa the horizon of expectation.
ble of stabilizing Resume.
l'histoire de Promethee au chapitre 12 du Leviathan comme intro duction a l'examen de 1'importance qu'accorde Hobbes au probleme de 1'incertitude de l'avenir sur la nature humaine constitue une dero dans sa philosophic politique. La pensee de Hobbes Cet article utilise
gation spectaculaire par rapport aux Anciens non seulement parce que sa psychologie meca niste s'oppose diametralement a l'ancienne conception de la relation entre raison et passion, mais egalement parce que sa comprehension de la situation temporelle des etres humains pri vilegie
l'avenir et ce, a un degre sans precedent. C'est sur la toile de fond d'un univers dans lequel le probleme de 1'incertitude de l'avenir a atteint des proportions intolerables que Hobbes construit son portrait de la nature humaine comme un tourbillon de passions incontrolees; c'est capable sur la toile de fond de cet univers qu'il elabore de stabiliser les attentes de l'avenir. son recit du Leviathan, seule force terrestre
precisely the exclusivity of this temporal orientation from which he suf fers so keenly. Hobbes's Prometheus is none other than Sisyphus in dis guise: his gaze is fixed forever forward, bound to a future thatwill bring him no satisfaction no matter how well he prepares and no matter how
suffers,Hobbes moves these issues into the background. The sufferings as a consequence. He has no past of his Prometheus appear meaningless to which he can turn for anchorage. He has only the future, and it is
strenuously he labours against his fate.1 In this paper I argue that the distortions inHobbes's retelling of the story of Prometheus provide the key to understanding the radicalism of his portrait of human nature and more broadly the radicalism of themod ern age on which his thinking is a compelling, if involuntary,meditation. It is customary to set the radicalism of Hobbes against the backdrop of the intellectual revolutions of the seventeenth century,which swept away teleological accounts of nature as a purposive totality and established in
their place mechanistic accounts of nature as a field of motions without purpose and end (Spragens, 1973). Bodies inmotion do not move them selves, seeking to unfold theirpotentialities, as Aristotle taught, but rather, according to the new science of Galileo, theymove only in response to themotion of other bodies. Hobbes is hailed as one of the first thinkers themomentous implications of this intellectual revolution for and morality politics. His starting point in the opening pages of the Levia than presents human beings as matter inmotion who seek nothing more to develop
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inherits the preoccupation with durability that polit philosophy. Hobbes ical philosophers have harboured since Plato. For him as well as for his predecessors, it is in the nature of all things that come into existence to some day pass out of existence, to be carried away, or to fall into ruin, with the passage of time; for him as well, politics is the attempt to cre ate for human beings a more durable habitation than what time alone can provide (Gunnell, 1968). What is so distinctive about Hobbes's ren dering of this longstanding problem of durability is that in his hands the temporal orientation shifts almost entirely to the future. The prob lem is no longer the preservation of what is or what has been, the over coming of its loss, or even the work of its recovery but rather the anticipation of what is not yet and never will be, since the future is by definition a time of which there can be no knowledge or experience. In Plato and Aristotle and even inMachiavelli it is quite otherwise: the fragility and transience of theworld brings into relief not the relation to the future but rather the relation to the past.2 Provided that the griefs of temporality are not to be transcended altogether, as Plato's philosopher advises, the most pressing question for the individual and particularly for the statesman to whom these thinkers' writings are addressed is not
marks a radical break from what has gone before not because his mechanistic only psychology reverses the ancient under reason and passion; it is also because of the relation between standing his understanding of the temporal situation of human beings privileges the future to a degree that is unprecedented in the history of political But Hobbes
than the continuation of motion. Human actions originate in the impres sions that themotion of external bodies make upon the senses, and these impressions of motion produce in their turn themotions of the passions the appetites and aversions by which human life is governed or, rather, ungoverned: in the absence of a nature composed of purposes transpar ent to the human mind, reason, that rock on which the ancient philoso phers found safe landing, can but calculate themeans.
lies ahead but whether the deterioration that accompanies the pas sage of time can be slowed and the anchorage inwhat has gone before made more secure. For these thinkers, it is not the horizon that is advanc ing but the horizon that is receding on which the greatest care and con cern is bestowed. Anxiety over what the future holds is recognized as a
what
problem in this older tradition of conceiving temporality but the impor tance of the future is qualified by the continuing importance of the past.3 Particularly when the passage of time is still understood with reference tomyths of cyclical repetition and eternal return, the past, although it is past, is never entirely closed.4 As the ancestral origin to which all suc cessive generations owe a debt, and as a record of deeds and person ages by which the present takes itsmeasure and inspiration, it remains a bright horizon.
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period Hobbes writes with the explicit intention of bringing about a break with the past: as he frequently emphasizes, what is past offers nothing more than a record of the errors to which men's passions have driven them;5 we abide by its authority only when our own powers of discovery and invention are weak or insecure.6 This deauthorization of past wis
It is this tradition of conceiving temporality that is overturned in Hobbes's thinking. The intellectual revolutions that engendered such skep ticism for the teleological universe of Aristotle also engendered skepti cism for the authority of the past on which alone, itmay have seemed, the preeminence of Aristotelianism was based. Along with others of this
dom is compounded by the demotion of the study of history which fol lows from Hobbes's ambition to recast the study of politics as a science that begins from first principles rather than empirical facts: the study of history yields neither reliable knowledge of human nature nor reliable
look its implications for his account of human nature as well as his under standing of the tasks of the Leviathan (Pocock, 1989; Lund, 1992). As I will suggest in this paper, Hobbes's human beings no less than his sci ence of politics bear witness towhat has been identified as the defining experience of the modern age, the experience of time as a movement into the future whose direction can no longer be inferred from the past (Koselleck, 1985, 2002). For us moderns the old is always dying and the new is always being born; we occupy, continuously, this point of rupture between past and future.What makes Hobbes especially interesting is that thismodern experience of temporal rupture has not yet been resolved into the expectation of inevitable progress with which modern time con sciousness is so often conflated. The expectation of a future that is dif ferent from the past has not yet been stabilized by the expectation of a as a political problem of the better future; it appears, in consequence, first order. To the scientist especially belongs the deliberate work of safe guarding as a condition of free inquiry the possibility of this rupture and the open horizon that follows from it. But for ordinary individuals and for societies as a whole, this experience of rupture can be more difficult to manage. Hobbes builds this latter recognition into the substance of Leviathan just as firmly as he builds the former into itsmethod. It is against the backdrop of a universe inwhich the problem of an uncertain future has reached intolerable proportions that Hobbes develops his account of human nature as a whirlwind of ungoverned passion; it is the incoherence of this universe that informs his controversial arguments on
instruction in the respective rights and duties of sovereigns and subjects because knowledge of the past depends on sense and memory rather than reason. Commentaries documenting Hobbes's turn from history to phi new the of for his science of losophy grounding politics have picked up on the thread of this temporal reorientation but they have tended to over
political obligation.
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This interpretation of uncertainty of the future as the central prob lem of Hobbes's political philosophy does not challenge the usual empha sis on the problem of competitive egoism so much as it clarifies the larger human drama within which this problem Influential arises. of offered Hobbes CB. MacPherson and Leo Strauss interpretations by have tended to narrow the scope of this drama to the dawning self consciousness of a bourgeois society inwhich the desire for gain takes above all in the life of the individual (MacPherson, 1962, precedence 1965; Strauss, 1952). These interpretations have lost some ground in recent years: in addition to the historical argument that they exaggerate the extent of the development of capitalism in England in themid-seventeenth cen tury,7 there have been a number of textual recoveries devoted to showing that there is a far greater diversity ofmotivations among Hobbes's human
clearly reveal, for instance, the importance of religion as well as civic education to his understanding of the tasks of modern politics. But the pendulum may well have swung too far in the opposite direction. Espe account of human cially where the aim has been to show thatHobbes's nature ismuch more compatible with the liberal requirement of limited government thanHobbes himself was willing to allow, these studies have tended tomake Hobbes look more like Kant or Locke.9 Oddly, this pro cess ofmaking Hobbes more palatable to liberal tastes has tended to dilute the significance of his modernity. Hobbesian man has been rehabilitated as universal man. The denaturalization of Hobbes's account of the human condition which MacPherson and Strauss sought to effect is reversed, and the atmosphere of urgency that permeates his writings is back grounded as nothing more than "historical context" whose passing war
beings than the traditional focus on competitive egoism would seem to allow.8 In place of the traditional view of Hobbes's political theory as more a an than nothing apologia for bourgeois market society of individ uals incapable of aspiring to anything more lofty than enlightened self interest, we now have richly detailed portraits of Hobbes which more
rants the revision of those parts of his thinking that still bear its outdated trace. It is as ifwe believe that the crisis towhich Hobbes was respond ing has been satisfactorily resolved, assuming, of course, thatwe believe it to have existed at all. This paper will begin to outline the dimensions of this crisis as it arises inHobbes's Leviathan as a crisis of temporality.
II. Desiring
the Future
The importance of the future toHobbes's understanding of human nature first emerges inLeviathan over the question of what distinguishes human beings from animals. The development of Hobbes's position on this ques tion inLeviathan isworth tracking because it is so haphazard. At the end
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he draws a rough distinction between of chapter II, "Of Imagination," human beings and animals based on the extent to which their imagina tions are affected by speech. Although animals can understand and respond towords as indications of thewill of theirmasters, he says, human beings can understand from speech not only commands but also "conceptions
industry; and of most men learned by instruction, and discipline" (1968: 98). The distinction of reason must be earned, in other words. In reach ing for this distinction human beings can just as easily fall below the animals as rise above them. "This priviledge," he writes of reason in chap terV, "is allayed by another ... the priviledge of Absurdity; towhich no living creature is subject, but man only" (1968: 113). Indeed, Hobbes remarks thatwhat ismore frequently the case among human beings than the misguided cultivation of reason is the failure to cultivate it at all. Most human beings remain remarkably close to the animals in their think ing; they rely,with animals, on prudence, on past experience rather than on general concepts, in calculating what is good for them. To this extent prudence can be regarded as more "naturally planted" in human beings than reason. Unlike reason, prudence requires nothing more for its exer cise, Hobbes says, than that one be "born a man, and live with the use of his five Senses" (1968: 98). Yet even in the exercise of prudence there is often little to recommend human beings over animals. "There be beasts, that at a year old observe more, and pursue thatwhich is for their good, more prudently," Hobbes writes, "than a child can do at ten" (1968: 98). The well-worn path along which Hobbes would seem to be leading his readers by distinguishing human beings from animals on the basis of their superior cognitive capacities here takes an unexpectedly ironic turn:
sure of the difference between human beings and animals. At the end of or Trayne of Imaginations," Hobbes chapter III, "Of the Consequence matter next two chapters by emphasizing that of the the prefaces subject reason is a capacity that needs to be cultivated before it can bear fruit; it is one of those faculties that are "acquired, and encreased by study and
and thoughts." More elaboration is promised "hereafter" (1968: 94), pre sumably referring to chapters IV and V, "Of Speech" and "Of Reason, inwhich human beings are distinguished from animals on and Science," the basis of their capacity to reason, their capacity to calculate, as he of generall names agreed upon" (1968: defines it, "the Consequences soon But it becomes clear that reason is not a very reliable mea 111).
tinguishing between human beings and animals altogether. The cognitive capacities which are distinctive to human beings but which are misused more often than they are realized have their foundation in a far more stable measure which Hobbes has already begun to elaborate in chapter
his account of human nature is designed to persuade his readers of their flaws and limitations, not their virtues and potentialities. But this rhetor ical agenda does not mean that he has abandoned the enterprise of dis
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III, where what is at issue is not so much the difference of whether and how far thinking is penetrated by language or abstract concepts as the difference of its temporal orientation. Hobbes (1968: 96) writes:
The Trayn ined, wee Man all what of regulated Thoughts is of two kinds; One, when of an effect imag or means to seek the causes, that produce it: and this is common wee seek and Beast. The other is, when whatsoever, any imagining thing
the possible that is to say, we imagine effects, that can by it be produced, we can do with I have not at any time it. Of which it, when wee have seen any signe, but inman onely; for this is a curiosity hardly incident to the of any living creature that has no other Passion thirst, lust, and anger. but sensuall, such as are
nature hunger,
beings and animals share a common interest in the past as a of information for determining the means by which some repository desired object can be brought about but curiosity over what the future holds is unique to human beings. The future is an object of interest for us in a way that it cannot be for animals because, as Hobbes explains it, Human the desires of animals are anchored in their bodies, and theirbodies anchor them in the present. They are governed primarily by what he describes in chapter VI as "the pleasures of sense," those pleasures arising from "the sense of an object Present" (1968: 122). Animals are also endowed with the faculty of imagination, which means that they are able to conceive of a thing and desire itwhen it is not directly available to the organs of
sense. But in animals this faculty can do no more than preserve, as mem
needs that they do not now experience but might yet experience; they do not imagine, as Hobbes says, themany future desires that any one par ticular object might be able to satisfy. Human beings, however, are not captive to the pleasures of sense; they are not restricted to the enjoyment of what is currently before them. refers to as "pleasures of the mind," They are capable of what Hobbes those pleasures arising "from the Expectation, that proceeds from fore of things" (1968: 122). So central is sight of the end, or Consequence this interest in the future that each of the passions assumes its distinctive cast from the nature of the expectation associated with it, the passions being "diversly called," Hobbes explains, "from the opinion men have of the likelihood of attaining what they desire" (1968: 122). Because human
ory, the traces of past sensations.10 What has passed continues to exist for them, however faintly, but what is to come hardly exists for them at all. They make plans for the future in the sense that they attempt the coordination of means and ends, seeking out themeans by which future ends can be achieved, but their temporal reach is limited by their subjec tion to the immediate pressures of the body and its needs. They do not regard the future as an object of inquiry; that is to say, they are not curi ous. For this reason animals do not anticipate or plan for the variety of
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beings are also capable of the pleasures of sense, some passions do take their name from their opinion of what they already possess, but what is absent clearly occupies the foreground of their desires. Their capacity to enjoy what is before them is inevitably overshadowed by their greater preoccupation with what is absent; they are less likely to enjoy some thing for its own sake than for the sake of something else that itmight be able to bring them in the future. This is the true nature of desiring, is always desire for what is absent rather according to Hobbes. Desire than what is present. Desire forwhat is present, he says, ismore prop erly called love; love, as the pleasure of possession, signals the end of desire. The same holds for the passions at the other end of the spec trum. "So also by Aversion," he writes, "we signifie the Absence; and of the the Presence (1968: 119). Object" by Hate, The absences to which we are referred by our appetites and aver sions are inevitably future desires. The chain of human desire reaches endlessly into the future, each new link producing another strand, each strand intricately linked to every other. So thoroughgoing is Hobbes's
might be inclined to regard as concerned with some past event, is described as a passion concerned with the future,with displeasure in the (1968: 122). The passion thatHobbes terms "expectation of consequences" "Sudden Dejection," the passion, he explains, that causes weeping, is sim ilarly future oriented; it is "caused by such accidents, as suddenly take away some vehement hope, or some prop of their power" (1968: 125). There would appear to be no word inHobbes's psychological lexicon for the pain that we might feel over the loss of something that cannot be retrieved or replaced, something thatwe had loved for its own sake; there are only words for the pain that is felt over the loss of some "future appar ent Good" (1968: 150) thatwe had hoped to secure with its assistance. Because all desiring is oriented to the future, it is necessarily activist: each desire begins a sequence of calculative reasoning by which we deter mine the means necessary for its fulfilment, and the means thatmake these means available, as Hobbes says, "and so continually, tilwe come to some beginning within our own power" (1968: 95-96). And because it does not lie within our power to alter the past, the past cannot be an sternly reminds us, "of things past, there is object of desire. As Hobbes no Deliberation; because manifestly impossible to be changed" (1968: 127). The past, once ithas passed, has trulydied. "For no man Laughs at old jests; orWeeps for an old calamity" (1968: 125). The desires of human beings orient them to the future to such an extent that the future itself becomes an object of desire. What they seek above all is a clear horizon, an unbroken chain of desire and fulfillment
understanding of the future orientation of human desire that his narrative periodically overturns common sense; at timeswhat seems merely descrip tive comes to seem almost normative. The passion of "Grief," which we
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know what the future holds. It is this very quality of uncertainty that makes the future such a compelling object of interest in the first place. Our curiosity is only aroused to the degree that our minds cannot readily penetrate the relationships that determine theworld that is grasped with the senses. And of the relationships that govern past, present and future, those that govern the future are the most difficult to discern. Hobbes writes: "The Present onely has a being in Nature; things Past have a being in theMemory onely, but things to come have no being at all; the Future being but a fiction of themind, applying the sequels of actions
The problem is that this interest in the future cannot be satisfied: we experience more of the pains of foresight than its pleasures because our knowledge of the future can always only be imperfect. Uncertainty of the future is built into the human condition just as firmly as the desire to
terms "felicity," "a continuall reaching far into the future,what Hobbes one to of the from desire, progresse another, the attaining of the object to still the the later" but former, being way (1968: 160). Here it is not matters so much as the ability to antici the experience of fulfilment that pate the possibility of fulfilment in the future; it is not their preservation so much as the "foresight of their preservation," Hobbes says, that is the "finall Cause, End, or Designe of men" (1968: 223, emphasis added).
Past, to the actions that are Present; which with most certainty is done by him that has most Experience; but not with certainty enough" (1968: 97). For curious creatures such as ourselves it is the very darkest hori zon, the future, which holds the greatest allure. The curiosity with which human beings regard the future is propor tionate to their ignorance of what the future holds. The difficulty is that ignorance and curiosity are mutually reinforcing conditions. Our curios ity is aroused for the very same reason that itwill never be satisfied. If we are interested in the future because the future is unclear to us, the future is only unclear to us because the resources that we have at our disposal for its illumination are so limited. It is hardly surprising to find that the problem of the limitations of human knowledge occupies a cen tral position in the first twelve chapters of theLeviathan. Again and again Hobbes draws attention to the inability of human beings to provide them selves with what they seek above all?not power, as we might be tempted
assure the power and means to live well, which he hath present, without the acquisition ofmore" (1968: 161). At the root of the problem of power forHobbes is the problem of the relation between past, present and future. This is an extraordinarily unstable relation, as it is presented in the text,
to conclude from Hobbes's characterization of the "generall inclination of all mankind" as "a perpetual and restlesse desire of Power after power" (1968: 161) in chapter XI, but something more fundamental, something of that animates the search for power and sends it on itsway?certainty the future. "And the cause of this,"Hobbes continues, is that "he cannot
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and itweighs heavily on the human beings that he describes. It is this problem of the relation between past, present and future thatHobbes brings to a dramatic climax in the Prometheus story of chapter XII, immedi ately before turning to his account of the natural condition of human beings in chapter XIII. It isworth retracing his steps to that point.
III. The Uncertain
Future
the nature and limitations of human knowledge. And yet the artificiality of the problem thatHobbes seeks to naturalize as a problem of knowl edge keeps breaking through. The very terms inwhich he describes knowl with convey his preoccupation edge powerfully temporality. All In its knowledge, forHobbes, is knowledge of causes and consequences. most rudimentary form our knowledge of causal relations is knowledge of temporal sequences which we have perceived with our senses: we look for the causes or effects of a thing from among the things that came before or those that came after by casting ourselves back in time and reviewing our past sense impressions. But the knowledge that is yielded by the it disorients far more than it organs of sense is fragile and misleading; orients. Memory and imagination are described as "decaying sense," that which remains after the gradual fading of the impressions that external objects have made on our senses. While the impression of objects removed from our senses remains in our minds it is inevitably succeeded by the says, "the impression of new and more present objects, and so, Hobbes as of the is and made ofman the voice obscured, weak; past Imagination is in the noyse of the day" (1968: 88). Because theworld thatwe appre hend through our senses is constantly inmotion, and because we would seem to be able only to register the impressions of our senses one at a time, themore time that has passed, theweaker the impression becomes.
Hobbes presents the problem of the relation between past, present and future in the first 12 chapters of Leviathan primarily as a problem of knowledge. By presenting the temporal problem in thisway he also masks it: he masks the temporal disturbance that comes to the surface in his thinking by describing it as natural, as rooted in the human condition, in
which it is progressively destroyed: "as Voyces grow weak, and inarticu late: so also after great distance of time, our imagination of the Past is weak; and wee lose (for example) of Cities wee have seen, many partic ular Streets; and of Actions, many particular Circumstances" (1968: 89). The limitations of human knowledge are even more starkly revealed when we consider that human beings, in seeking to know the causes and the consequences of things, seek to know the future above all. Sense expe
The faculties of imagination and memory, oddly, do not preserve theworld that we apprehend through our senses but rather mark the speed with
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rience is entirely unreliable in this respect because the future cannot be grasped by the senses. As the continuously fading impressions of what has long ago passed from our immediate grasp, sense experience is inev itably incomplete. Even if one's powers of imagination were such that one could retain enough of one's past impressions and recall them with sufficient accuracy, it would be impossible, Hobbes says, for any one individual to have experienced all of the conditions and circumstances thatmight have bearing on the course of events. And even if one's expe rience were extensive, there can be no assurance that the futurewill be a
very term "prudence" would seem to be misused in this context. "Though it be called Prudence, when the Event answereth our Expectation; yet in its own nature, it is but Presumption" is called pru (1968: 97). What dence is littlemore than guesswork; when we guess correctly, we are not wise, but lucky. Reason is a more reliable form of knowledge than prudence but it is still unable to provide a clear way out of the difficulties of an uncer tain future. Hobbes defines reason as knowledge of the causes and the consequences of concepts, that is to say, the "Reckoning (that is,Adding of generall names agreed upon, and Substracting) of the Consequences for the marking and signifying of our thoughts" (1968: 111). Whereas prudence aims at the accurate description and proper sequential ordering of events, reason aims at the proper definition of concepts and their sound ordering in logical relation to each other, proceeding, as Hobbes explains,
continuation of the past. Temporal rupture is just as likely a possibility as temporal continuity. Although one might have observed the same so that, for example, one sequence of events on numerous occasions, becomes habituated to seeing dark clouds in advance of rain, events that follow each other in time are not necessarily causally related; what has been observed in the past is not a reliable indicator of what will transpire in the future. Hobbes does concede that the individual who has an exten sive store of observations on which to draw ismore likely tomake accu rate predictions than the one whose store of observations is limited. But he is unwilling to regard such predictions as a form of knowledge. The
to Assertions made by Connection of one of them to from "Names, another; and so to Syllogismes, which are the Connections of one Asser of tion to another, tillwe come to a knowledge of all the Consequences names appertaining to the subject in hand; and that is it,men call Sci ence" (1968: 115). By means of this knowledge of the causes and con sequences of concepts it is possible to extend one's temporal reach into the future, not, as with prudence, by projecting the past forward, but by working out the logical consequences of a principle of action or a law of motion under the carefully defined conditions of a thought experiment. Such deductions and their combination into elaborate conceptual models by which one thinks one's way into the future can be considered reliable
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granted but that cannot be verified beyond any doubt, and the reliability of the entire chain of reasoning rests on the reliability of this starting assumption. Although the ultimate aim of reason is to attain an infallible in which all starting kind of knowledge, comparable to mathematics, man can know by can not this is "No be verified, possible. assumptions or "that Hobbes Discourse," that, is, has been, or will this, emphasizes,
to the extent that they are internally consistent but, as with the general names with which they begin, they can have no certain correspondence to the world of motion that is registered by the senses. Every rational calculation begins with an assumption, something thatmust be taken for
knowledge, and especially knowledge of the future, is by definition lim ited. This is the argument to which Hobbes keeps returning throughout the first 12 chapters of Leviathan, as he lays the foundation for a science of politics appropriate to themodern age. Hobbes's account of the uncertainty of the futurewith which human beings must contend is designed to persuade his readers that uncertainty is a natural condition born of the limits of human knowledge. But an uncertain future is not just a problem of knowledge, an affliction with which the solitary, thinking individual must contend. It is also a problem of community. We do not claim the future as our singular possession; we
be; which is to know absolutely: but onely, that if this be, that is; if this has been, that has been; if this shall be, that shall be: which is to know conditionally; and that not the consequence of one thing to another; but of one name of a thing, to another name of a thing" (1968: 131). Whether it arises from general concepts or from particular experiences, all human
portrays them it is hardly conceivable that anyone would base their cal culation of their future prospects upon such variable creatures; in the absence of a common power there is no common ground. All human beings want the same thing; as matter inmotion they seek only to keep moving, avoiding those things that seem likely to threaten their contin ued motion and approaching those things that seem favourable. But each individual has a different understanding of what these things are, an under
share itwith others who, having purposes of their own, can intervene in the chain of events thatwe set inmotion and influence its outcome. Our attitude toward the future is a measure of our attitude toward our fellow human beings, on whom our future ultimately depends. And as Hobbes
Appetites and Aversions; much lesse can all men consent, in the Desire of almost any one and the same Object" (1968: 120). The constant of self-interest is not a very reliable guide to how others will behave when interpretations of self-interest are so different thatwhat counts as peril ous in the judgement of one counts as beneficial in the judgement of
standing that changes, moreover, with time: "And because the constitu tion of a mans Body," Hobbes explains, "is in continuall mutation; it is impossible that all the same things should alwayes cause in him the same
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brance" (1968: 101) by which munication facilitated, Hobbes human beings "than amongst But the bonds of community precarious as the connection
past conceptions can be recalled and com says, there could be no more society among (1968: 100). Lyons, Bears, and Wolves" that language is supposed to forge are as to the past that it is supposed to secure. Language preserves past conceptions but itcan also distort or falsify them; language conveys intentions and ideas, to teach others or to solicit their assistance, but it can also conceal, mislead or offend (1968: 102). The variability of the passions makes communication even more hazardous. "For though the nature of thatwe conceive, be the same; yet the diver sity of our reception of it, in respect of different constitutions of body, and prejudices of opinion, gives everything a tincture of our different passions," Hobbes writes, "... [f]or one man calleth Wisdome, what another calleth feare; and one cruelty, what another justice; one prodigality, what another magnanimity; and one gravity, what another stupidity,&c." (1968: 109). Hobbes describes the human community in the absence of the Levi athan as a kind of tower of Babel inwhich each individual is unable to depend on the possibility of sharing with any other themeaning of the events that befall him and the kind of life towhich he aspires; the only that enable him to make his experiences and his aspirations meanings intelligible are those that he has created for himself. From the perspec tive of this sort of individual the future necessarily assumes an uncer tainty of dramatic proportions. When we refer to tradition as a set of shared meanings handed down from the past, we are also referring to something that provides its practitioners with a set of expectations for the future, so that the future does not appear to them as novel and unpre dictable but as a continuation and elaboration of the past. Tradition sta bilizes the horizon of expectation; it secures the continuity of past and future. But theHobbesian individual does not participate in any commu common store of memory and experience of shared the nity meaning; that resides in language is only marginally available to him. He has no reason to expect that the future will bear any relation at all to what he has experienced in the past. The future is an entirely open question, not is limited and vulnerable to error but simply because his knowledge the inclinations and actions of those upon whom his welfare depends appear to him as too far beyond the range of anything he could predict with any certainty, and because language only aggravates his rela tion to these variable others with misunderstanding and contention. because
another, and when these same interpretations can vary just as widely in the judgement of the same individual. The mediation of human relations by language only aggravates the difficulty of predicting how others will behave. Language endows human beings with greater recollective powers than animals and for this reason also a greater sociability; without these "Markes, or Notes of remem
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IV. Anxiety
and Conflict
Leviathan
gious belief underscores the importance thatHobbes accords to religion as one of the principal means by which human beings have sought not their anxiety over the future but also to overcome the only to manage limitations of their knowledge of what the future holds: from anxiety, Hobbes explains, is born the idea of "some Power, or Agent Invisible" (1968: 170), which holds sway over the course of events and which can be prevailed upon through gifts and other expressions of worship to bring about favourable outcomes. Hobbes that anxiety over the emphasizes future is not the source of all religious belief. Fear is the author of the pagan gods but not, he suggests, the God of the Christians, at least not necessarily. One can arrive at a belief in the existence of an omnipotent and infinite being towhich one gives the name of "God" in the course of
It is the uncertainty of the bonds of community in the absence of the thatmakes the limitations of our knowledge of the future so intolerable; it is this uncertainty and that produces the condition of per petual anxiety that Hobbes describes so vividly in his retelling of the story of Prometheus in chapter XII. The location of this story at the begin ning of a chapter which deals with the various origins and nature of reli
investigating the causes and properties of natural motions: if all motion has a beginning, it follows, as a matter of rational necessity, that there must have been "a First, and an Eternall cause of all things" (1968: 170), a power infinite and omnipotent and eternal but whose actual workings and purposes remain beyond the grasp of finite human understanding. This is a religion entirely consistent with science insofar as it shares with science a common origin in curiosity rather than fear and requires no one to believe anything that is contrary to reason. But when fear of the time to come is unmasteredit actively works against science and mono theism, hindering human beings, Hobbes says, "from the search of the causes of other things; and thereby gives occasion of feigning of as many Gods, as there be men that feigne them" (1968: 170). The result is a
muddled
religion comprised of themost fanciful superstitions and ritual practices, ranging from the belief in ghosts and witches, the fashioning of charms, the saying of oaths, and theworking of augurs all theway to com the mindless dependence on priestly authority of which Hobbes so are XII. Because bitterly throughout chapter they plains always look
172). The problem is not only that an overemphasis on "Prognostiques of time to come" breeds superstition and confusion; it is also that when miracles fail and prophecies are exposed as false, faith is undermined
ing for signs of the future, he says, believers "are very apt, not only to take casuall things, after one or two encounters, for Prognostiques of the like encounter ever after, but also to believe the like Prognostiques from other men, of whom they have once conceived a good opinion" (1968:
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of the connection inHobbes's thinking between conflict and anxiety over what the futureholds is oftenmissed in interpretations that trace the source of conflict to some particular quality in human nature, usually egoism, which gives rise to competitiveness and so also to aggression.12 The prob lem with Hobbes's human beings, it is claimed, is that they are egoistic;
thinking insofar as it intensifies the variability to which human beings are already naturally inclined and fosters the emergence of politically problematic forms of religious belief, but there is a more direct connec tion: it is this same anxiety that occupies the forefront of Hobbes's dis cussion of the principal causes of conflict in chapter XIII. The strength
(1968: 181). Because the undermining of faithweakens the bonds of civil society, the history of religious upheaval is at one and the same time a history of political upheaval (1968: 182).11 Anxiety over the future is linked indirectly to conflict in Hobbes's
acts of conquest, which they pursue farther than their security requires" individuals have moderate desires; theywish only (1968: 184-85)?most to have means sufficient to assure their peace and security. The diffi culty is that peace and security cannot be assured only on the basis of what is happening in the present; peace and security, like war and inse curity, are temporal concepts in Hobbes's thinking. "And therefore the notion of Time," Hobbes says, "is to be considered in the nature ofWarre; as it is in the nature ofWeather. For as the nature of Foule weather, lyeth not in a showre or two of rain; but in an inclination thereto of many dayes together: So the nature ofWar, consisteth not in actuall fighting; but in the known disposition thereto, during all the time there is no assur ance to the contrary" (1968: 186). My assurance of peace and security rests on my expectation of the future. If I do not expect my future to be peaceful, if I am uncertain about my future security, then, on Hobbes's account, I am in a condition of war. Uncertainty of the futurewith regard to safety and security does not produce the condition of war inHobbes's thinking, it is the condition of war. At the root of the problem of conflict for Hobbes is not thatmost individuals have immoderate desires, naturally desiring more than they need. The problem, rather, is that human desires are not confined to the present: we are concerned with the satisfaction not only of our present desires but also our future desires. As Hobbes says, "the object of man's desire, is not to enjoy once onely, and for one instant of time; but to
theymeasure all things in terms of loss or gain to themselves, and they regard all others as competitors in the struggle for gain. "The way of one Competitor, to the attaining of his desire," Hobbes writes in chapter XI, "is to kill, subdue, supplant, or repell the other" (1968: 161). Yet Hobbes himself concedes at various points in Leviathan that even as some indi viduals are compelled by nature to seek power far in excess of what they who take "pleasure in contemplating their own power in the need?those
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assure for ever, theway of his future desire" (1968: 161). Although what we have now might seem sufficient we can never be certain that itwill will even remain within our grasp. be enough for us in the future or that it we are to terms "diffidence," a lack of what Hobbes prone Consequently, confidence in our future powers, in his phrasing, a "Constant despayre" (1968: 123). As the second of the three natural sources of conflict that he identifies in chapter XIII, diffidence would seem to be themost fun the desire for glory and competitiveness arise from damental. Whereas the vain or immoderate characters of particular individuals, diffidence arises from the interest in the future to which all human beings are sub ject and the uncertainty of the futurewith which theymust contend. It is this uncertainty that leads to an escalation of desire in the state of nature: even though most by nature have fairlymoderate desires, once they are
faced with the uncertainty of the future, these naturally moderate desires begin to spin out of control, so that in the end all fall under the "general inclination" of a "perpetuall and restlesse desire of Power after power,
well, which he hath present, without the acquisition ofmore" (1968: 161). In other words, my present hunger is fairly easily satisfied but my future makes humans more hunger knows no bounds. It is this futurehunger that as than animals: "For swords and guns, the weapons of dangerous just the of brute animals men, surpass weapons (horns, teeth, and stings), so man surpasseth in rapacity and cruelty thewolves, bears, and snakes that are not rapacious unless hungry and not cruel unless provoked, whereas man is famished even by future hunger" (Hobbes, 1978a: 40). Uncer human tainty of the future is the problem that triggers within Hobbes's kind of the that the of the destruction other; beings deadly egoism requires it is the background condition thatmakes egoism as problematic as it is. It is by this route that uncertainty of the future becomes a political prob lem of the first order inHobbes's thinking.
that ceaseth only in Death" (1968: 161). As Hobbes explains: "And the cause of this, is not alwayes that a man hopes for a more intensive delight, than he has already attained to; or that he cannot be content with a mod erate power: but because he cannot assure the power and means to live
V. The Hobbesian
Remedy
The curiosity that distinguishes human beings from the animals inHob bes's account arises from the fact thatwe are not only concerned with the satisfaction of our physical appetites; we also have an appetite for knowledge. Hobbes gives this appetite a temporal dimension: our desire forwhat we do not yet know is a desire for knowledge of the future so powerful thatwe live pitched forward in time; we are creatures forwhom the pleasures and pains of expectation take precedence over the plea
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sures and pains of possession or recollection. This interest in the future is con not in itself problematic. Because it is utility-driven above all?in or a we the effects of consequences sidering possible thing, imagine, as Hobbes says, "what we can do with it, when wee have it" (1968: 96)?it
thinking the possibility of this relation to the future is entirely dependent on the presence of the Leviathan: in its absence the curiosity that fosters invention would inevitably deteriorate into anxiety. The problem is not so truism that the future cannot be known with much one of knowledge?the a rather any certainty?but problem of the ability of human beings to the between and future through the communal bonds that gap past bridge with It is each other. they forge only when this bridge has eroded that the of the future becomes Hobbes intolerable. It is this erosion that uncertainty as in of human of his presumes portrayal incapable reaching agree beings ment on matters of common concern not only because they have differ ent and variable desires but also and more seriously because the capacity for language that could potentially allow for themediation of these dif ferences only magnifies them. Under these circumstances the possibility that individuals might enter into commitments and take part in common projects thatwould afford them a greater measure of control over how the futurewill unfold cannot arise; under those circumstances uncertainty of the future can only lead to an anxiety so powerful that it draws even the most naturally peaceful dispositions into the state of war. By the conclusion of chapter XIII, Hobbes has well prepared the way for his argument that the Leviathan offers the only plausible means by which we can manage our anxiety over the future and minimize the Whatever themeasures to difficulties thatwould otherwise arise from it. which we have turned to overcome the problem of an uncertain future? extending the past forward, as with prudence, devising and applying con
is associated with the innovative and practical spirit of science. On this account, it is entirely possible to imagine our relation to the future as gov erned not by fear of what might befall us but hopeful expectation of the benefits thatwe might be able to provide for ourselves. But inHobbes's
maintains this artificial unanimity with the threat of punish forth, and it ment. In providing this system of law and punishment, the sovereign power
ceptual models, as with reason, or keeping faith with those who claim can measure up in the absence divine inspiration, as with religion?none of political authority. It is the task of the sovereign power to reduce the uncertainty of the future to tolerable levels, tomake itpossible for human beings to live orderly and predictable lives and to die orderly and pre dictable deaths where such orderliness and predictability are not part of our natural equipment but must be grafted onto us, like artificial limbs, from without. In setting down laws that are to govern the conduct of all individuals, the Leviathan establishes an artificial unanimity concerning themeaning of such terms as good and bad, justice and injustice, and so
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not only provides individuals with protection against the potential aggres sion of others, so that all may take the presence of a coercive power into account when they calculate their future prospects, it also offers a sense of coherence, a stable order of shared meaning, that theywould be unable to provide for themselves in its absence; it brings an end to the state of war by stabilizing the horizon of expectation. The futurewill always be different from the past. But under the conditions imposed by the Levia than the difference between what we have experienced in the past and what we can expect in the future is not so great as itwould be if the Leviathan were absent or insufficiently powerful.
It is this understanding of the task of the sovereign power that drives Hobbes's insistence that the legitimacy of its authority be undisputed. Once a multitude has covenanted "to conferre all their power and strength upon one man, or upon one Assembly of men, thatmay reduce all their Wills, by plurality of voices, into one will" (1968: 227), neither it nor any part of it can change the form of government by force or challenge the sovereign's right to be the final arbiter of controversies, including any controversies that subjects might raise against it. The only way out of the hazards of an intolerably uncertain future towhich we are prone is for us to give our unconditional allegiance to the sovereign power, whether itbe monarchic, oligarchic, or democratic, whether we consider its judge
to be just or unjust. The constancy of the sovereign power iswhat makes it possible for individuals to stand security for their own futures when theirwords alone do not have any binding force. The principle of keeping covenants that the Leviathan makes effective in society is the same principle on which it rests: even though circumstances and individ ments uals' interpretations of their interests change with the passage of time, what has been surrendered today cannot be reclaimed tomorrow. Other wise, the futurewould still seem intolerably uncertain and the state of nature would still obtain. This idea of the sovereign power as source and exemplar of tempo ral constancy also informs Hobbes's ranking of the rule of a single indi vidual higher than the rule of an assembly. To be sure, disinclined as he is to give arguments to those who would risk civil war on behalf of a regime that they believe to be authorized by nature or god or tradition, the loyalty of subjects matters farmore toHobbes than the type of regime under which they live (1968: 238, 244). But he does think there is an
important difference between the two regimes regarding their "Conve nience, or Aptitude to produce the Peace, and Security of the people" (1968: 241). Though both may have the same powers at their disposal? vast armies and treasuries as well as the loyalty of the people?a govern ment by assembly is not as capable of using these powers to assure the peace as a government by a single individual because, in an assembly, according to Hobbes, "there ariseth an Inconstancy from the Number"
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(1968: 242). The will of themonarch is likely to be as variable as that of any other human being but the will of an assembly is likely to be even more variable, he maintains, because members can disagree with each other and because attendance can change from day to day. It is not just the potential for discord in assemblies that troubles Hobbes; not even the agreements of assemblies can be trusted to endure beyond the heat of the moment in which they are made, he says, when members are "not moved by their own sense, but by the eloquence of another, or for feare of displeasing some that have spoken, or thewhole Assembly, by contra diction" (1968: 309). As with the conditional sovereign that he rejects, when the sovereign power is exercised by an assembly rather than a sin gle individual, what has been concluded today is far too likely to be undone tomorrow. Government by assembly does not bring an end to the state of nature so much as it transforms it into a public spectacle inwhich
the uncertainty of the future is magnified by the precariousness of its members' policy commitments. Hobbes's uneasiness with the greater inconstancy of multiple wills comes up again in his account of the proper relationship between a mon arch and his counsellors: he recommends that themonarch hear his coun sellors individually rather than in a group; with a single individual he can interrupt and ask questions and reflect on what he hears, whereas faced with an entire assembly of talkers, "a man is rather astonied, and ... than informed of the course he dazled with the variety of discourse ought to take" (1968: 309). As this reference to counsellors suggests, Hobbes's remedy to the problem of an uncertain future does not reside in the sovereign power alone. It depends for its success on a union of power and knowledge. Another reason Hobbes gives for preferring monarchy over the government of an assembly is that the barriers to political access in assemblies make it likely that counsel will be provided by those "versed more in the acquisition ofWealth than of Knowledge," whereas a mon arch, who is able to take counsel "of whom, when, and where he pleaseth ...may heare the opinion of men versed in the matter about which he of what rank or quality soever" (1968: 242). The greater dis deliberates, cretion of the monarch in choosing counsellors clears the way for the greater influence of instructedminds, and it is to theseminds thatHobbes entrusts the Leviathan's great task of mastering the uncertain future. In themetaphor of the artificial man on which Hobbes relies in describing
the Leviathan it is the counsellors who occupy the place of "Memory, when an action comes under deliberation, the and Mental Discourse"; of it" of the counsellor is "to make manifest the consequences purpose are to the the counsellors of Levi So governance (1968: 307). important athan thatHobbes insists that the right to free speech, denied to private individuals, cannot be denied to those who counsel the sovereign: "[H]e that giveth counsell to his Soveraign, (whether a Monarch, or an Assem
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in developing his account of governance as a science of the problem of an uncertain future. This is a science over which managing the expert, and not the ruler, ultimately presides. The knowledge of the future that is yielded by this science cannot be absolutely certain: it is, as we have already seen, a knowledge of causal relationships that takes the form of conditional or hypothetical state ments, such as "if This be, That is; ifThis has been, That has been; if This shall be, That shall be ... and that not the consequence of one thing to another; but of one name of a thing, to another name of a thing" (1968: 131). The fact that this knowledge is based on language rather than sense which he dwells experience further limits any explanatory or predictive powers that it might have beyond the borders of its own conceptual universe: working out the logical progression of concepts does not necessarily shed any light on the temporal progression of events.13 But even ifwe cannot predict reli ably the actual consequences of particular actions, we can at least under stand more clearly the logical consequences of the principles that underlie
bly) when he asketh it, cannot in equity be punished for it,whether the same be conformable to the opinion of themost, or not, so it be to the Proposition in debate" (1968: 303-304). Hobbes does not place much emphasis on the character of themonarch; rather, it is the character of the counsellors?in particular, their intellectual ability tomake rational calculations on the basis of available evidence and to present their opin adornment as possible?on ions as clearly and as free of metaphorical
them, and it is precisely this sort of predictive capacity thatHobbes would seem to be claiming for his civil science. "For all men," as he says, "are by nature provided of notable multiplying glasses, (that is their Passions and Self-love,) throughwhich, every littlepayment appeareth a great griev ance; but are destitute of those prospective glasses, (namely, Morall and Civill Science,) to see a farre off themiseries that hang over them, and cannot without such payments be avoyded" (1968: 239). Such "prospec tive glasses" enable individuals to see, in this case, the connection between the payment of taxes and theirwell-being when such a connection is not immediately evident to the senses. The withholding of taxes entails a breach of the unconditional obligation of subjects of which the sover
calculation of individual self-interest. Even if itgoes undetected, the fool's unjust breach of covenant "tendeth to his own destruction" (1968: 204), Hobbes maintains, because its success depends upon the error of others, "which he could not foresee, nor reckon upon" (1968: 205). Genuine
eign power is composed; while it might not prevent the sovereign power frommaking adequate provision for common security itnecessarily dis solves that power as far as the tax withholder is concerned, removing him or her from the community of those who may rightfully partake of answer to the fool in the security that it provides. Recalling Hobbes's an not to action such does stand XV, up chapter scrutiny as a rational
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foresight for Hobbes consists of sound calculations of rational necessity rather than accurate prophecies of chance occurrences. In this regard, Hobbesian civil science is not so much predictive as it is proscriptive: by enumerating the obligations on which peace depends, it cannot predict whether or not these obligations will be observed or what will transpire when they are not observed, but it can provide indi viduals with the precepts or general rules on which their security depends, as itdoes in chapters XIV and XV oi Leviathan. Such a science does not make the future more transparent but it does make itmore available as
an object of planning and control: one might say that the future becomes all themore stable and predictable themore widely the obligations iden tified by this science are upheld. It is this union of knowledge and power that the Leviathan is supposed to effect. "For the foresight of things to come, which is Providence," Hobbes writes, "belongs onely to him by is plainly referring to whose will they are to come" (1968: 97). Hobbes God in this passage, but the implication is clear enough. The future can
become transparent to human beings only to the extent that they have the power to make their predictions come true.14 The more thoroughly the is able to master the human world, standing in, as Hobbes Leviathan will argue in the last sections of Leviathan, for an absent God, the less uncertain and the less unpredictable does the future appear.
VI. Conclusion In posing uncertainty of the futureas the central political problem, Hobbes signals a sea change in thinking about the nature of being human and the nature of politics, a shift from which we have not yet recovered. Mark ing the distortions in his retelling of the story of Prometheus in Levia than provides us with an opportunity to mark the depth and magnitude of this sea change, and perhaps also to go some distance in combatting our tendency tomistake its effects on the surrounding landscape as nat ural. We take our bearings from what was there before. The original
Prometheus story is concerned with the origins of the creative powers that distinguish human beings; it is concerned with the unsettling of the divine realm that accompanies the cohering of the human. Prometheus' of fire elevates human beings by means of themanifold arts that fire gift makes available, so that the gap between them and the gods is no longer so formidable, the passage of time not nearly so destructive, and the future not nearly so threatening. In Aeschylus's version, Prometheus explicitly ensures that the sorrows of human beings will not be the sorrows that come from an uncertain future.He takes away from them the knowledge of the futurewith which he is uniquely gifted; he plants in them "blind
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of temporal disruption with which Hobbes is preoccupied. We would do well to remember, however, thatHobbes can only portray human beings as debilitated by their anxiety over the future if the importance that the past also has for them has been obliterated from view. His human beings suffer in the same puzzling way as his Prometheus suffers. They suffer not so much from the fact that their future is uncertain as from the fact that they have only the future towhich to turn; they suffer not so much from the fact that their hold on the future is weak as from the fact that they seem to have lost their hold on the past. In this regard the problem of an uncertain future is not the original temporal problem for Hobbes.
hopes" (Aeschylus, 1956: 148). The granting of blind hope along with fire suggests that the future certainly poses a problem for these newly aspiring creatures; without the shield against uncertainty that hope pro vides theywould not have the heart to aspire at all. But there is nothing in the original version of the story to suggest anything close to the kind
exposed. But tempting though it might be forHobbes to raise (and for us to interpret) this version of the Prometheus story as a weapon in his serve not it anti-monarchist does well his rebellion, polemic against larger theoretical purposes.15 His own ranking of monarchy ahead of govern ment by assembly does not draw on the traditional argument thatmonar in The chy is natural or god-given, as we have seen, and the passage Citizen towhich he appends the Prometheus story in a footnote describes these more traditional arguments as weak: "because they do it by exam ples and testimonies, and not by solid reason," he says, "we will pass them over" (1978b: 224). So long as the crime remains in the foreground Hobbes's overriding argument that all government is artificial is vulner able to the very same charge of impiety that traditional monarchists level against arguments for democracy and aristocracy. It is only inLeviathan, where the crime of Prometheus is not mentioned, thatHobbes is better able to press the story into his service as a metaphor of the human condition.
The original problem, the problem thatmakes the relation to the future so pressing, is the relation to the past. Hobbes makes another, earlier mention of Prometheus in his writ ings, in a footnote to the 1647 edition of The Citizen. Here it is precisely that occupy the foreground Prometheus' past crime and its consequences of his retelling of the story as a metaphorical illustration of traditional as most for the natural arguments monarchy political form: the theft of fire is likened to the invention of the artificial regimes of democracy and aristocracy, and the torments of Prometheus are compared to the disor ders to which the partisans of these rebellious regimes are inevitably
It is not the perils of prideful political creation to which Hobbes draws our attention in retelling the story of Prometheus in Leviathan but the new temporal perils with which any act of political creation must contend. We misread Hobbes's rereading of the Prometheus story partly
124 Loralea
Michaelis
because we misread the nature of our own condition as moderns. It is not our powers of self-creation that imperil and distinguish us as modern but the temporal circumstances inwhich we exercise these powers and which drive themyth of self-creation in the first place; it is the fact that the past has been eclipsed by the future. It is this rupture in the relation to the past that defines the self-understanding of moderns as the inhab itants of a new age; it is this rupture that drives themodern aspiration to free the creative energies of human beings from a temporal order inwhich is very much part of this ongo the future is captive to the past. Hobbes not modern but he does rebellion explore its possibilities as fully as ing other modern thinkers. By rendering the temporal interests of human beings as exclusively oriented to the future, imprisonment in the past is simply exchanged for imprisonment in the future.We are no more free in this new condition than in the one before, constrained by a preoccu pation with the future that has become almost claustrophobic in its exclu sivity, and bound by our anxiety to accept a politics that is oriented to nothing more lofty than stability. Hobbes's modern Prometheus shares the very same predicament as that other modern Prometheus, themon ster inMary Shelley's Frankenstein, sick with the vertigo of an absent past. "But where were my friends and relations?" themonster asks. "No father had watched my infant days, no mother had blessed me with smiles and caresses; or if they had, all my past life was now a blot, a blind
vacancy in which I distinguished nothing" (Shelley, 1969: 121). But whereas Shelley's modern Prometheus responds to the predicament of an absent past by embarking upon a search for love, for the anchorage of recognition in the eyes of another, Hobbes's modern Prometheus embarks upon a search for future security, and for the anchorage against uncer tainty that only the Leviathan can provide. Notes
1 Michael his Oakeshott the same confusion of Prometheus with reproduces on this passage to Leviathan'' in his "Introduction commentary as someone "whose achievements Prometheus by night were devoured is eties of the day" (1991: 253). Oakeshott's interpretation of this passage able Sisyphus
in
referring to by the anxi also remark
cial quality of prudence has become a liability, that is to say, those who "look too far is quite clear that the ahead and allow too much care for the future." Yet Hobbes even if it is particularly to "every man," apt for those who are applies analogy 2 "overprovident." reasons about politics without reference either to the author Like Hobbes, Machiavelli of nature but, unlike of religion or the teleological itative guidance understanding of Hobbes, Machiavelli's temporal frame of reference is governed by expectations continuity and even cyclical return; at the lowest point in the cycle the past is con by which the present generation can jured as a record of great deeds and personages find instruction and inspiration. See for example Machiavelli 123-125). (1996:
the impact of Hobbes's for restricting the scope and blunting analogy by inwhom the otherwise benefi suggesting that it refers only to those few individuals
Hobbes
3 The
sModern
unbounded
Prometheus
125
4 5
the stoic Seneca draws attention in his temporal horizon to which of anxiety, for example, extends backward as well as forward. Being unable to limit their desires to the present, human beings are "tormented alike by what is ... formemory past and what is to come brings back the agony of fear while foresight (1969: 38). brings it on prematurely" discussion See for example Eliade 1-25) for a discussion (1991). See also Dodds (1973: time concepts. the fluidity of ancient Greek and Roman emphasizes on the imperfections of all past commonwealths See for example Hobbes (1968:
that
378) See also Kraynak, who argues and the defects of all past philosophy (1968: 682-703). to expose the defectiveness historical writings are explicitly composed that Hobbes's of all that has gone before, and so "to explain why it is necessary and how it is to begin anew" (1990: 3). possible and Example" become rules of conduct As Hobbes "Custome argues in Leviathan, only when men are ignorant of the "causes, and original constitution of Right, Equity, Law and Justice"; he compares them to "little children ... that have no other rule of good and evill manners, but the correction they receive from their Parents, and Mas ters" (1968: 165-166). between older mercan Caton argues that this period testifies to an accommodation on politics and modern of economics ideas of equality tilist ideas of the dependence and 156-159). For the earliest versions of the and the rule of law (1987: 87-102 historical challenge For one of the most see Thomas toMacPherson, (1965) and Letwin (1972). which places particular stress detailed critiques of MacPherson, see Carmichael 1967 and 1996) for the (1983). See also Gert (1965,
to psychological commitment egoism has been vastly over and that, despite his own various misleading formulations, his assessment than egoistic in its assumptions. of human nature ismore pessimistic The broader interpretive implications of Gert's position are developed explicitly in estimated for example, in an argument that seeks to reconstruct Hobbes these terms by Kavka, in order to make his thinking more "consistent," more amenable, that is, to conclu on such issues as revolution and the sions "considerably more liberal than Hobbes
on this point, argument that Hobbes's
10
rights of individuals against the State" (1986: 4). that although both human beings and animals are capable of reach Hobbes maintains ing back in time to find the beginning of a chain of causation by which the posses sion of some desired object might be effected, the recollective powers of human beings
are far greater by virtue of their having invented language (1968: 100). But it is not these greater recollective powers on which he rests his account of the distinction it is a difference of kind rather than of degree to between human beings and animals; he draws our attention. For further discussion of Hobbes's account of lan
which 11
guage, see page 14. As Hobbes's discussion
in Chapter XII develops it becomes clear that Christians no to unreason and superstition in their worship less than pagans have been susceptible to the influence of unscrupulous and have proven no less vulnerable prophetic claims; this particular distinction between Christianity and paganism to persuade Hobbes's Christian readers to keep their distance seems more designed from those who claim
12
Even where
commentators state of reject this traditional view of conflict in Hobbes's nature as driven by rapacious egoism, the singular importance of an uncertain future is not clearly recognized and is often obscured by a tendency to reduce the salient difficulty example to the fear of others Gert, 1996: the fear of violent death (see for and in particular the 161). But the fear of violent death necessarily presumes in the absence of this future orien reach of the Hobbesian individual:
to have prophetic insight into the future that God has ordained for them. Civil peace on which commodious and the cultivation of new knowledge living depends require that Christianity be practiced as a religion of reason rather than a religion of prophecy.
long temporal
126 Loralea
tation, as Rousseau
Michaelis
13
on the Ori argued in his account of human nature inDiscourse can no to be fear of there aversion death, (1987: 46). pain gin of Inequality, only There is a traditional view of Hobbes's civil science as explanatory, predictive, and subject physics:
242). For a critique of this traditional view, which emphasizes Hobbes's of civil science as distinct from (and superior to) the natural sciences, understanding see Sorell (1988: 67-80). of See also Jesseph for an analysis of Hobbes's philosophy smith (1966: science, with particular reference to the natural sciences, for which, he suggests, Hob in Leviathan, bes's emphasis on "purely linguistic activities," especially poses a par ticular puzzle (1996: 99).
to empirical verification on the model of the natural sciences, most notably on this view, Hobbes is a seventeenth-century forerunner of nineteenth- and for Watkins and Gold social science. See, (1965: 166-171) twentieth-century example,
14
Kant makes possibility
15
For
use of the Prometheus interpretations of Hobbes's theme of prideful violations of natural or divine orders, Jacobson (1978: 55-58).
the same observation?more regard to the ironically than Hobbes?with of a prophetic history of mankind. Such a history is only plausible, he and produces the events he predicts" suggests, when "the prophet himself occasions in original). 177, emphasis (1985: myth which see Shulman dwell (1988: upon 432) the and
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Socit qubcoise de science politique

Mount Allison University

ble of stabilizing Resume.

III. The Uncertain

referring to by the anxi also remark

on this point, argument that Hobbes's

guage, see page 14. As Hobbes's discussion

Kant makes possibility

D.J.C. Carmichael, Science of Political

versity Press. Hesiod. 1973. "Theogony." Penguin. Hobbes, Thomas.

1985. "A Renewed

of the Past: Hobbes

on the Study of His

and Other Hobbes." Chicago:

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