58 pages • 1 hour read
Thomas HobbesLeviathan
Nonfiction | Book | Adult | Published in 1651A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Introduction-Chapter 9
Part 1: “Of Man”
Introduction Summary
At the start, Hobbes maps out the structure of his book, which is divided into four parts. Part 1 defines humanity and the natural laws by which it is governed. Part 2 details the basis on which covenants between rulers and subjects are built in sovereign states—which Hobbes refers to as commonwealths—and how these commonwealths may be preserved or dissolved. Part 3 presents arguments pertaining to the relationship between civil power and ecclesiastical power in Christian commonwealths. Finally, Part 4 identifies and critiques a number of faulty philosophical and religious arguments that threaten the spiritual and intellectual health of man and the commonwealths in which he resides.
Chapter 1 Summary: “Of Sense”
Hobbes begins his discussion of humanity with an investigation into sense and perception. Given his persistent view that the universe is governed solely by matter and motion, Hobbes characterizes perception as an external object colliding with our senses either directly, as in the cases of touch or taste, or via the function of nerves, as in sight. He contrasts this view with the teachings of contemporary universities that promote the Aristotelian argument that objects radiate an incorporeal apparition or aspect with which our senses interact.
Chapter 2 Summary: “Of Imagination”
Building off the previous chapter, Hobbes describes imagination as “decaying sense” (8), likening it to the dark visual remnants one sees upon staring at the sun and then looking away. By this measure, Hobbes concludes that imagination and memory are the same; while a man’s dreams or idle imaginings may be utterly fictitiousness, they are invariably sourced from the remnants of real things he has perceived in the past. When such things are recalled in multitudes and with a fair amount of accuracy, Hobbes terms this experience. And given the importance of experience in exercising judgment and prudence, imagination is an important component in how citizens of a commonwealth interact with one another and their sovereign ruler.
Chapter 3 Summary: “Of the Consequence or Train of Imaginations”
The sensory remnants that make up the imagination of man tend not to present themselves in isolation but rather as a train of thought, a succession Hobbes calls “mental discourse” (12). While this discourse often proceeds without design or intent, humans are frequently able to control the course of their thoughts to various ends—for example, how one might secure a favorable outcome based on the experience of past events. From this guided thought process proceeds humanity’s faculty for speech and reason.
Chapter 4 Summary: “Of Speech”
Without speech, Hobbes writes, one can neither learn, teach, nor express one’s will to another. For humans to use speech advantageously, they must adhere to names that accurately signify what they mean to express. For this reason, Hobbes rejects the use of metaphor except in poetry or other contexts in which metaphorical language is advertised or otherwise expected.
Aside from communication, speech benefits humans by allowing them to express mental discourse in verbal terms, which in turn allows them to recall a specific conclusion without the need to recreate the entire train of thought that led to it. As an example, Hobbes writes that a human who sees a triangle and two right angles may reasonably deduce that the sum of the triangle’s angles are equal to the sum of the two right angles. Yet only by giving names to these shapes can a person apply that knowledge every time a three-sided object is seen. Because of this, speech is a necessary prerequisite for reason, science, and mathematics.
Chapter 5 Summary: “Of Reason and Science”
Having ascribed accurate and agreed-upon names to objects through speech, humans can then order these names—through simple acts of addition and subtraction—into causal sequences from which all can draw the same conclusions. This, Hobbes writes, is reason. Because humans who speak the same language will use the same names and draw on the same observed phenomena to reach conclusions, true reason is infallible. Conversely, conclusions arrived at through means other than reason are termed as belief.
Unlike sense and memory, Hobbes argues that humans are not born with reason. Nor is reason the product of experience, as prudence and good judgment are. Rather, reason is the result of diligent work and practice. Meanwhile, science—the application of reason to better humankind—represents the fruit of this labor.
Chapter 6 Summary: “Of the Interior Beginnings of Voluntary Motions, Commonly Called the Passions; and the Speeches by Which They Are Expressed”
Hobbes divides the motions of humans and animals into two types: vital and voluntary. Vital motions include breathing, digestion, and the flow of blood. Meanwhile, voluntary motions include walking, talking, and moving limbs for the purpose of either attaining what we desire or avoiding what we abhor. Thus, Hobbes writes, all voluntary action is the result of either appetite or aversion.
It is from these states of desire and loathing that humans distinguish between what is good and what is evil. Unlike reason, humans’ assessments of good and evil are subjective and reliant on each individual’s appetites and aversions.
Before deciding whether to act on one’s appetites and aversions—and thus also one’s designations of good and evil—a person enters into a process Hobbes calls deliberation. From this deliberation, the individual may choose to act or abstain. This decision is what Hobbes calls the will, and it is not a “rational appetite” (33), as some schools of philosophy suggest. Rather, Hobbes argues that it is merely the result of the final appetite one experiences at the end of a period of deliberation and is therefore subject to error.
Chapter 7 Summary: “Of the Ends or Resolutions of Discourse”
Returning to the topic of discourse, Hobbes writes that when discourse begins at universally defined names and proceeds through causal connections and sequences, the end result is known as a conclusion. Yet when discourse is based on ambiguous definitions, Hobbes calls the end result an opinion. In turn, when discourse begins with an opinion—either that of oneself or that of a separate individual, trusted or otherwise—the end result is belief, or faith.
Chapter 8 Summary: “Of the Virtues Commonly Called Intellectual; and Their Contrary Defects”
Hobbes identifies two types of intellectual virtues: natural and acquired. Natural intellectual virtues, Hobbes writes, are obtained solely through experience and imagination rather than academic instruction. Experience, Hobbes writes, leads to strong judgment, a useful faculty in the writing of history. Imagination, meanwhile, leads to a strong sense of what Hobbes calls fancy and is useful in writing poetry.
Only through method, education, and culture does one develop acquired wit, a term Hobbes effectively equates with reason. As argued earlier, reason is most useful in the sciences.
For Hobbes, passion and intellect are deeply intertwined. He attributes a dull intellect to a lack of passion. Hobbes also argues that the areas or disciplines to which humans focus their intellect is also dependent on the passions, specifically whether an individual hungers for wealth, knowledge, or honor. At the same time, Hobbes suggests these passions are all variations of the same appetite: the desire for power.
Chapter 9 Summary: “Of the Several Subjects of Knowledge”
Like motion and intellect, Hobbes divides knowledge into two types: fact and science, the latter of which he defines as “the consequence of one affirmation to another” (47). Though dependent on sense and memory, fact is absolute and unassailable. Science, though developed through reason and rigor, is ultimately conditional, as new facts or circumstances may alter its conclusions in the future.
Hobbes ends the chapter with a tree encompassing all known sciences, which he groups under the header “Philosophy.” The tree includes disciplines as diverse as ethics, geometry, and architecture, among others.
Introduction-Chapter 9 Analysis
Leviathan begins at a place that, on first glance, bears only casual relevance to the big political questions Hobbes seeks to answer. Its initial chapters, for example, go to great lengths to probe all aspects of the human experience, including sense, imagination, speech, reason, and passion. Yet Hobbes’s insistence on providing a unified theory of humankind is not done merely for its own sake. Rather, the author strongly believes that before one can understand how humans behave in groups—in other words, the study of politics—one must understand how they behave as individuals.
Like his political philosophies, Hobbes’s view of sense, reason, and the material world may be best understood by comparing it to the opinions of his predecessors and successors. For example, Hobbes’s arguments on virtually all subjects are strongly materialistic. In philosophy materialism is a school of thought that holds everything in the universe, including human consciousness, the human soul, and even God, are made up of matter or owe their existence to material interactions. Hobbes’s materialism is one of many ways he diverges starkly from the works and beliefs of the Greek philosopher Aristotle, whose influence on both the church and universities in England is a source of major irritation for the author. Aristotle believes that an individual’s mind or intellect can exist without that person’s body and is therefore immaterial. Aristotle also argues that all living organisms, including plants and lower animals, possess an incorporeal essence or soul that drives their self-nourishment and reproductive efforts.
To Hobbes, such arguments are nonsense. There is nothing incorporeal at work in the functioning of our intellects, he contends, for perception is merely the interaction between matter and our physical senses. This runs counter to the Aristotelian doctrine that, in Hobbes’s words, states “for the cause of vision, that the thing seen sendeth forth on every side a visible species, (in English) a visible show, apparition, or aspect, or a being seen; the receiving whereof into the eye is seeing” (7). Nor, Hobbes believes, is there anything incorporeal or properly imaginary about imagination. If sense is merely the result of interactions between matter, and imagination is little more than “decaying sense” (8), then it stands to reason that imagination is also a material process. This argument also runs counter to the views of René Descartes, a French philosopher and contemporary of Hobbes who believed that mental phenomena are nonphysical and that the mind is distinct from the body.
The question remains, why is it so important to Hobbes that he reject all philosophical arguments pertaining to the immaterial and incorporeal? For one, he believes that Aristotelian arguments about the incorporeal breed a fear of spirits among both clergy and commoner that stand to threaten the social order. Hobbes writes:
If this superstitious fear of spirits were taken away, and with it prognostics from dreams, false prophecies, and many other things depending thereon, by which crafty ambitious persons abuse the simple people, men would be would be much more fitted than they are for civil obedience (11).
It won’t be for many chapters before Hobbes explains more clearly why a fear of the incorporeal is so destructive to the obedience needed to preserve civil commonwealths. Essentially, he believes that various spirit-related rituals embraced by the Catholic Church—including exorcism—work to keep its followers in awe of the clergy’s power, which necessarily subtract from a subject’s awe toward civil sovereign power. This seems to be the primary source of Hobbes’s persistent antipathy toward philosophies that reject materialism and the reason why he devotes so much of the book to this topic.
Hobbes also examines questions related to speech and signification. This too may seem to be rather irrelevant to his broader political philosophies, yet nothing could be further from the truth. When outlining the uses of speech, for example, Hobbes lists four corresponding abuses, all of which are used in the arts of deception and grievance. And it is these abuses, he argues, that cause humans to disagree with one another, which in turn causes civil war, the phenomenon Hobbes most wishes to help humanity avoid by adopting his philosophy. By relying on mutually-agreed-upon speech and language as the ultimate sources of philosophical and political truth, Hobbes presents a view that differs from some of his contemporaries, including Francis Bacon, who believed that the primary method for uncovering truth is science and experimentation. And while Hobbes by no means rejects science and, on the contrary, elevates it at various points in Leviathan, truth itself is viewed here as a social construction rather than a scientific one. He writes, “For true and false are attributes of speech, not of things. And where speech is not, there is neither truth nor falsehood” (18). To be sure, one may find ample reason to argue with the thesis that reality is a social construction. Yet it makes sense in the context of Hobbes’s broader efforts to establish civil politics as a branch of natural philosophy.
Finally, it is worth examining here Leviathan’s famous frontispiece which adorns the book’s title page. Etched by the French artist Abraham Bosse after heavy consultation with Hobbes, it depicts a giant sovereign king looming over a walled town with a sword in one hand and a crozier or ecclesiastical staff in the other. The king’s body is a composite of countless subjects, all looking toward the monarch’s face for leadership and guidance.
The image of a monarch both lording over and comprising of his subjects is self-evidently fitting, given Hobbes’s broader political philosophy of the sovereign who both leads and receives his authority from the individuals he governs. Furthermore, the fact that the monarch wields both a sword and a clergy staff reflects Hobbes’s belief that civil power and ecclesiastical power must not be divided between a king and a high priest but organized under one sovereign. A closer look, however, reveals a set of other curious observations. For example, the streets of the walled town below the sovereign are completely empty. This could be viewed as a reflection of the immaculate sense of order engendered by a strong civil sovereign.
Yet law professor Thomas Poole, writing in the London Review of Books, has a different interpretation, one that is no doubt informed by the coronavirus pandemic of 2020. Among the only two individuals shown within the town’s walls is a pair of plague doctors, identifiable by their beaked masks. Although the Black Death peaked in Europe around 200 years before the publication of Leviathan, Poole points out that England suffered periodic outbreaks of the plague for centuries to come, including one that ravaged Oxford in 1606, when Hobbes was a student there. That, combined with the plague depicted in Hobbes’s iconic 1628 translation of Thucydides’s History of the Peloponnesian War, offers ample evidence that the author was fully aware of both the natural and civil dangers posed by the plague.
So while the threats to civil order found in Leviathan generally take the form of war or rebellion, Poole argues that plague is equally capable of dissolving a sovereign and offers an instructive example of Hobbes’s philosophy at work. He writes, “Whatever else government does, the trick it absolutely has to pull off, according to Hobbes, is to make us afraid of breaking the rules while ensuring that we have no real cause to panic about our survival.” (Poole, Thomas. “Leviathan in Lockdown.” London Review of Books. May 2020.)
