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Hobbes's Grounds for Belief in a Deity

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  25 February 2009

K. C. Brown
K. C. Brown
Affiliation:
University of London
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Extract

I Propose to re-explore here some aspects of a very shop-worn question: ‘Was Hobbes in any sense an atheist?’ Three centuries ago, Hobbes's personal security in part depended on the way his contemporaries answered this question; today, the validity of several current accounts of his philosophy are similarly bound up with it. These accounts vary extraordinarily, all the way from Polin's confident assertion that ‘pour qui sait lire entre les lignes, … c'est ľatheísme qui triomphe implicitement’, to Taylor's equally firm belief that ‘a certain kind of theism is necessary to make [Hobbes's] theory work.’1 And now the latest of the Taylorians, Prof. Howard Warrender, has published his book The Political Philosophy of Hobbes, in which Hobbes's statements regarding the place of God are again treated as an essential part of his theory; and the charge explicitly made, that there are no sound grounds for regarding them as ‘the product of confusion or pretence on Hobbes's part’.

Type
Articles
Information
Philosophy , Volume 37 , Issue 142 , October 1962 , pp. 336 - 344
Copyright
Copyright © The Royal Institute of Philosophy 1962

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References

page 336 note 1 Polin, R., Politique et Philosophic chez Thomas Hobbes. Paris, 1953, p. 15.Google ScholarTaylor, A. E., ‘The Ethical Doctrine of Hobbes’, PHILOSOPHY XIII, 1938, pp. 406–24.(p. 420.)Google Scholar

page 336 note 2 Brown, Stuart M., ‘Hobbes: The Taylor Thesis’, Philosophical Review, 68, 1959, pp.303–23. ‘“Hobbism”,’ he writes, ‘is simply a name for Hobbes's theory as it was understood by Hobbes's contemporaries, and by the subsequent tradition of British …philosophy. To substitute “Hobbes” for “Hobbism” is to introduce in a question-begging way a theory never systematically expounded by Hobbes himself. … This may conceal from us those elements in Hobbes's theory which outraged his contemporaries.’ (p. 310.)CrossRefGoogle Scholar

The only trouble with this is that Hobbes's theory was on the whole manifestly not ‘understood’ by his contemporaries at all, and frequently misrepresented by them for self-interested reasons even when it was. Glanvill, for instance, heatedly attacked the De Corpore, contrasting it with the views of ‘the late restorers of the corpuscularian hypothesis’ who teach that God created matter and is the supreme orderer of its motions, whereby ‘Piety and the Faith of Providence is assured’.—But the ‘corpuscularian hypothesis’ was itself ‘tainted with Hobbism’ in the opinion of many, and similarly suspected of irreligion and atheism: Glanvill, a clergyman, had more than one motive for exaggerating the gap between his friends’ views and those of wicked Mr Hobbes. (See Carré's Phases of Thought in England, pp. 249, 262.) Cumberland's 500 folio pages make no really valid point against Hobbes. (See Laird, J.: Hobbes, London, 1934, pp. 275–6.) Cudworth's C.I8 editor, himself believing in Hobbes's ‘wickedness’, nevertheless repeatedly has to show that passages cited by Cudworth to prove Hobbes's atheism in fact equally well prove the reverse, or have been misquoted. And, whatever his views in the present controversy, surely any modern reader can see the general irrelevance of the attacks on Hobbes described in Bowie's Hobbes and His Critics.Google Scholar

One need not, however, quarrel with what appears to be Prof. Brown's further assumption that this ignorant, often bigoted and even hysterical outcry has succeeded in conditioning the attitude to Hobbes of almost the whole ‘subsequent tradition of British moral and political philosophy’; but it seems odd that he should be so happy about this.

page 337 note 1 Plamenatz, J., ‘Mr Warrender's Hobbes’, Political Studies, 5, No. 3, 1957, 295–308. (Also note Warrender's reply, Vol. 8, No. 1, pp. 48–57.)CrossRefGoogle Scholar

page 339 note 1 E.W. II, Ch. II, art. 21. My italics. (Also see E.W. IV, pp. 94 and 293; and elsewhere.) References to Hobbes's writings here are to the Molesworth edition of his works. E. W. refers to the English, L. W. to the Latin volumes.

page 340 note 1 One does not prove such a general charge as this by specific illustrations. But the general climate of Hobbes studies is demonstrated well enough, perhaps, by the fact that Taylor actually found it necessary to say explicitly (p. 422) that he considered Hobbes ‘a fundamentally honest man’!

page 341 note 1 See Wernham's, A. G. review of the Pelican Hobbes, in the Philosophical Quarterly, vol. VIII, (p.366).Google Scholar

page 343 note 1 I have seen it seriously maintained that Hobbes does, however, dismiss the Argument from Design by a remark in E.W. V, p. 14, where he says:

‘That which we call design, which is reasoning and thought after thought, cannot be properly attributed to God.’

But who among those who have supported the Argument from Design would ever want to deny this? It is merely analogous to the point that those who talk of God ‘seeing’ have no wish to imply that He does so by means of pupil, retina and optic nerves. Hobbes is here merely following up his own assertion, earlier on the same page, that when God speaks to men concerning His will and other attributes He must necessarily speak of them as if they were like to those of men, ‘to the end that he may be understood’.

(Indeed, Hobbes in this very same paragraph seems to be supporting the Argument from Design, when he refers to: ‘the order of [God's] work, the world, wherein one thing follows another so aptly as no man could order it by design.…’)

It is surely significant that Prof. Strauss, despite his willingness to support his own views by very strained appeals to Hobbes's text, and despite his great knowledge of those texts, nevertheless made no use of this passage to back up his dismissal of Hobbes's appeals to teleology. Nor does he cite any other passage. Nor does anyone else.