Rousseau, Nature and the Transformation/ Cultivation of the Passions

The Body Politic “is a fictitious body”: Hobbes on Imagination and Fiction

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Abstract

Thomas Hobbes once wrote that the body politic “is a fictitious body”, thereby contrasting it with a natural body. In this essay I argue that a central purpose of Hobbes’s political philosophy was to cast the fiction of the body politic upon the imaginations of his readers. I elucidatethe role of the imagination in Hobbes’s account of human nature, before examining two ways in which his political philosophy sought to transform the imaginations of his audience. The first involved effacing the false ideas that led to sedition by enlightening men from the kingdom of spiritual darkness.I thusadvance an interpretation of Hobbes’s eschatology focused upon hisattempt to dislodge certain theological conceptions from the minds of men. The second involved replacing this religious imagery with the fiction of the body politic and the image of the mortal God, which, I argue, Hobbes developed in order to transform the way that men conceive of their relationship with the commonwealth. I conclude by adumbrating the implications of my reading for Hobbes’s social contract theory and showing why the covenant that generates the commonwealth is best understood as imaginary.

Keywords

Thomas Hobbes, imagination, fiction, social contract, eschatology

Thomas Hobbes once wrote that the body politic “is a fictitious body”, thereby contrasting it with a natural body.[1]In this essayI argue that a central purpose of Hobbes’s political philosophy was to cast the fiction of the body politic upon the imaginations of his readers.Hobbes first set forth his ideas of fiction and imagination in the earliest enumeration of his political theory:TheElements of Law. The account developed there is largely in accord with the corresponding discussion in the opening chapters of Leviathan, and it is the later workthat proved to be Hobbes’s most comprehensive attempt to shape the imaginations of his seventeenth-century audience.

Hobbes thought that the disturbances and disorders that ravaged England in the middle of the seventeenth century were predominantly due to men having mistaken ideas of important concepts.Seditious doctrines flourished as men failed to understand the proper signification of words like sovereignty and the people, with erroneous definitions being utilised to promote civil discord.[2]Hobbes’s philosophy started from definitions and throughout he stressed the importance of getting these right, not onlyso that civil philosophy could be demonstrated scientifically,much like geometry, but equally because it was necessary for men to have the right definitions of words for peace to prevail.

For Hobbes, as many scholars have recognised, language and words were of great consequence.[3]Yet thefull significance of wordscannot be appreciated without attending to theprominence of the imagination in Hobbes’s account of human nature, which has received far less scholarly attention.[4]Much of the power of words lay in their ability to cast images that would deeply affect and even transform the imaginations of their audience. That Hobbes was well aware of the power of images is clear from the visual importance he accorded to the frontispieces that adorn many of his works.[5] Less recognised, however, is the role that Hobbes deemed political and religious argument to have on shaping theimaginations of men. By bringing his ideas on the imagination and fiction to the fore, I show both that Hobbes’s political philosophy depended upon men coming to understand their relationship with the commonwealth in a certain way, and thatLeviathan was itself designed to bring about the very transformation in their imaginations required to make this understanding possible.

I proceedby elucidating the role of the imagination in Hobbes’s account of human nature, before examining two ways in which his political philosophy sought to transform the imaginations of his audience. The first involved effacing the false ideas that led to sedition by enlightening men from the kingdom of spiritual darkness. Ithus advance an interpretation of Hobbes’s eschatology focused upon hisattempt to dislodge certain theological conceptions from the minds of men. The second involved replacing this religious imagery with the fiction of the body politic and the image of the mortal God, which, I argue, Hobbes developed in order to transform the way that men conceive of their relationship with the commonwealth. I conclude by adumbrating the implications of my reading for Hobbes’s social contract theory and showing why the covenant that generates the commonwealth is best understood as imaginary.

Imagination and Fiction

In both the Elements and Leviathan Hobbes’s political philosophy proceeds from an account of human nature, or of man, and it is in the former of these works that his ideas concerning imagination and fiction are presentedmost clearly. The opening chapters of the Elements are concerned with the powers of the mind that may be called cognitive or imaginative, for the understanding of which

we must remember and acknowledge that there be in our minds continually certain images of conceptions of the things without us, insomuch that if a man could be alive, and all the rest of the world annihilated, he should nevertheless retain the image thereof, and of all those things which he had before seen and perceived in it; every man by his own experience knowing that the absence or destruction of things once imagined, doth not cause the absence or destruction of the imagination itself. This imagery and representations of the qualities of things without us is that which we call our cognition, imagination, ideas, notice, conception, or knowledge of them.[6]

In short, even if the whole world around us was destroyed we would still have our imaginations, since our cognition, ideas and knowledge of the world are all based on the images we have of things. Although Hobbes continued to analyse the different senses that wepossess, it is striking that this passage, as with much of the second chapteron sense, is so exclusively focused on images and sight. The images we have of things are simply apparitions of the mind caused by motion, socolour is not inherent in the object viewed but an effect upon the observer. Hobbes thusconcluded, in opposition to the prevalent Aristotelian view,“that whatsoever accidents or qualities our senses make us think there be in the world, they are not there, but are seemings and apparitions only.”[7]At this point he turned to examine the imagination.

Hobbes defined imagination as “conception remaining, and by little and little decaying from and after the act of sense”,[8] or more succinctly in Leviathan as “nothing but decaying sense”.[9] The remainder of the chapter is predominantly concerned with the question of dreams and how they can be distinguished from original sense. In dreams the imagination restores or recalls sense to the mind with such clarity that the mind can take notice of nothing but the present. It is primarily this that distinguishes dreams from waking sense andwe should be unsurprised to find that men are often deceived by taking their past dreams for truth or visions.[10] Within the discussion of dreams, Hobbes defined a “FICTIONof the mind” as where the mind “composeth an imagination of divers conceptions that appeared singly to the sense.” Hobbes provided the example of a gold mountain, which is composed by the imagination from the independent senses of a mountain and the colour gold. Similar fictions that appear to us are “castles in the air, chimeras, and other monsters which are not in rerumnatura.”[11]

A fictionis a composition of things once sensed that is created by the imagination and which does not correspond to the nature of things, that is, to any natural body or object. In visual terms, this composition is one of images. In the followingchapter Hobbes considered the succession of conceptions in the mind, which takes place in the imagination, and allows us to have ideas of the future. From “our conceptions past, we make a future”,[12]which is a form of presumption, or as he put it in the equivalentsection of Leviathan:“the Future [is] but a fiction of the mind”.[13] For Hobbes, then, the future is something wevisualise based on our imaginations and is determined by the images we hold of the present and past.

The role of the imagination in Hobbes’s account of human nature is often understated.[14] Greater attention is usually given to the importance of language or words, which are signs (mutually recognised marks), which enable us to recall to the mind the conceptions of the thing that is thereby signified. Names and definitions are types of signs, the use of which distinguishes men from beasts and makes science and philosophy possible. Words and language are often abused, not least when people use words that have “no images or conceptions in their minds answering to the words they speak.”[15]Nonetheless, the proper use of language isequally capable of imposing order and regularity upon men’s disparate imaginations. As the example of dreams illustrates well, the imaginations of different individuals can vary sharply, making them particularly difficult to control. The succession of conceptionsin the mind involved in thought is similarly precarious because “in the Imagining of any thing, there is no certainty what we shall Imagine next.”[16] The possibility of effectivelyregulating the imaginations of men depends uponthe use of settled definitions that enable everyone to understand a given word in the same way.

Hobbes defined understanding as “nothing else, but conception caused by Speech”, which is attained when someone, upon hearing certain words, has the precise thoughts that those words “were ordained and constituted to signifie”.[17] In this respect, understanding is always shared, for it requires men having the same conceptions in their minds in response to the utterance of certain words. The power of language thusstems from its capacity tocast images or conceptions upon the imaginations of men, which could bring otherwise diverse imaginations into accord. This would only ever be achieved if words are clearly defined; indeed,Hobbes claimed that one of the properties of a definition is “that it gives an universal notion of the thing defined, representing a certain universal picture thereof, not to the eye, but to the mind.”[18]Although it is not clear precisely what Hobbes meant by a “universal picture”,his idea seems to be that a definition can transmit many images to the mind, since a word maysignify a potentially unlimited number of particular objectswhich satisfy its definition.[19]To this extent language is of greater force than sight.The reason why Hobbes was so concerned with defining the proper signification of words, then,is precisely because words conjure up images that go a long way to determining how we act.[20]

The imagination is also closely related to man’s passions, which, according to the account in the Elements,are “the beginning of all his voluntary motions”.[21]Hobbes even described many of the passions in terms of the imagination, so glory (the first passion he defined) proceeds “from the imagination or conception of our own power”, and,similarly,he defined pity as “imagination or fiction of future calamity to ourselves, proceeding from the sense of another man’s present calamity”.[22]As our passionsflow from ourimaginations, Hobbes’s position in the Elements is quite consistent with that he later formulated in Leviathan, where he stated that “the Imagination is the first internall beginning of all Voluntary Motion”. Indeed, it is the role of the imagination that defines all voluntary motion in contradistinction to vital motion.[23]

Given the role the imagination serves in his account of human nature, one would expect it to be of great consequence in Hobbes’s political philosophy as well. As will become apparent, a central purpose of his philosophy was to guide or even transform his audience’simaginations, much as he intimated when invoking one of his favourite contrasts, averring that“whatsoever distinguisheth the civility of Europe, from the barbarity of the American savages; is the workmanship of fancy, but guided by the precepts of true philosophy.”[24]Imagination is necessary for people to understand the world and their relationship with it.This is due to the crucial role itplays in human understanding as, in a sense,it is all encompassing and cannot be distinguished from reasoning or deliberation. This is a point that Hobbes admonished one of his great adversaries, Bishop Bramhall, for failing to appreciate:

He would have known that consideration, understanding, reason, and all the passions of the mind, are imaginations. That to consider a thing, is to imagine it; that to understand a thing, is to imagine it; that to hope and fear, are to imagine the things hoped for and feared.[25]

Hobbes consistentlydisparaged those who used words that failed to produce mental images,[26]yet he was equally aware of the damage that could be done by words that conjured up images or conceptions that would excite men to sedition and to mistake their rightful sovereign.He was, then,at once concerned to constrain the power of the imagination in controlling political argument, whileat the same time relying on the imagination to make his philosophy effective, creating a problem that might be viewed as paradoxical.[27] Yet the paradox can easily be explained away. For Hobbes, it was simply a fact of political argument that it deeply influences the imaginationsand therewith the beliefs of its audience. Whilewell awareof the dangers of such argument, he equally appreciated how imperative it was to expound a philosophy that would cast the right images upon theimaginations of men; these being the images that would lead them to peace rather than to sedition and civil war.

For Hobbes, philosophy must start from definitions, and the first property of a definition is to take away all equivocation.[28] This is not only a theoretical necessity, but also of great practical and political import, which is why the sovereign must give meaning to words and thereby render them unequivocal.[29]Much as he advised the sovereign, Hobbes himself attempted to formulate unequivocal definitions to conjure up images that would quell civil discord.AsLeviathan is a book of words its purpose was to evokeconceptions in the imaginations of its audience, for, according to Hobbes,that is simply what words do. Yet his attempt to impress images upon the minds of his readerspermeates far deeper. Before analysing the way Hobbes sought to cast the fiction of the body politic upon his audience, I first examine that which hedeemed of equal importance: the evisceration of the false images promulgated by dark and vain philosophy.

Enlightenment from Spiritual Darkness

As early as the Elements,Hobbes devoted much of his discussion of the imagination to the topic of dreams and how we are deceived when we mistake them for reality. Inthe second chapter ofLeviathan, however,the rhetorical force and political significance of this deception is made far more explicit:

If this superstitious fear of Spirits were taken away, and with it, Prognostiques from Dreams, false Prophecies, and many other things depending thereon, by which, crafty ambitious persons abuse the simple people, men would be much more fitted than they are for civill Obedience.[30]

The final part of Leviathan is reserved for enlightening men from the kingdom of darkness disseminated by“a Confederacy of Deceivers”,[31] yet,as the passage illustrates, this theme is anticipated throughout the work. The belief in sprits, ghosts and prophesies was surprisingly widespread during the middle of the seventeenth century, with Anglican ministers actively encouraging the proliferation of ghost stories to confute the materialism, mortalism and (alleged) atheism associated with Leviathan. The links between beliefs in ghosts and religious faith were emphasised to support ideas of the immortality of the soul, bodily resurrection, and the authority of the Holy Trinity.[32]Hobbes’s heterodoxtheology challenged all these ideas (among many others), which he thought weakened or tended tothe dissolution of the commonwealth.He thus chided those who set up “another Kingdome, as it were a Kingdome of Fayries, in the dark”, foras soon as the spiritual kingdom is opposed to the temporal one the danger of civil war is imminent,precisely “because the fear of Darknesse, and Ghosts, is greater than other fears”.[33]

Recall that to fear, for Hobbes, is to imagine the thing feared. The kingdom of darkness is one in which men’s fear leads to the dissemination of seditious opinions and finally to civil war. In De corpore Hobbes wrote of “how hard a thing it is to weed out of men’s minds such inveterate opinions as have taken root there, and been confirmed in them by the authority of most eloquent writers”.[34]To do so it was necessary to transform his audience’s imaginationsby effacing the dark images from the minds of men so that peace could be secured. Although Hobbes was at his most polemical in attempting this in the fourth part of Leviathan, the foundations of his critique were laid in the preceding part,concerning the Christian commonwealth.

Much of the third part of Leviathan was aimed at dethroning the false ideas that men have of certain theological concepts.The centralchapters,whichare concerned with the proper signification of words found in Holy Scripture, serve the purpose of demystification. One of the most pernicious false beliefs propagated by the schoolmen was that spirits are incorporeal substances. For Hobbes, such speech was absurd as incorporeal signifies without body and substance signifies body; these words, therefore,“when they are joined together, destroy one another”. The proper signification of spirit is either an invisible substance or a “Phantasme of the Imagination”.[35] Hobbes did not deny the existence of spirits, but by reducing them to either material phenomena or phantasms of the mind—that is, dreams—the evocative imagery associated with them could be displaced. In such cases to explain was to explain away the false conceptions that occupied men’s minds.[36]