Sabrovsky, Eduardo_Thomas Hobbes's Leviathan_a Grin Without a Cat

8/10/2019 Sabrovsky, Eduardo_Thomas Hobbes's Leviathan_a Grin Without a Cat

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Thomas Hobbes s Leviathan: a Grin Without a Cat 1

Eduardo [email protected]

Wordkeys: The Leviathan Paradox Sovereign Author Decision

As most of you may have realized, the title of this paper has been borrowed from Lewis

Carroll s Alice in Wonderland ; more precisely, from one of Alice s encounters with the

enigmatic and always vanishing Cheshire Cat. In this encounter the Cat, admonished by

Alice not to keep appearing and vanishing so suddenly , does it quite slowly, until only its

grin remains visible for a while. And Alice, so we are told, says to herself: Well! I ve often

seen a cat without a grin; but a grin without a cat! I ts the most curious thing I ever saw in

all my life. (100)

Though Hobbes s Leviathan is rather an Artificial Man than a cat, and though his

expression, in the image Hobbes designed for the frontispiece of his treatise may hardly be

considered a grin, I would like to argue that there is something of Carroll s Cheshire Cat in

it. But, before developing my argument, a review of the problems that Hobbes appeal to

the image of the mythical monster Leviathan has raised to his readers may be convenient.

In fact, since 1651, the year of Leviathan s publication, scholars, critics, political friends

and enemies have dealt with the enigmatic character of this creature, as it appears in the

Bible and in ancient Near East myths a sea monster, a serpent, a dragon and have

wondered why did Hobbes choose such an inauspicious title, that dr eadful Name , as he

says in his autobiographical poem, for a work that was controversial enough without it.

Besides, what is this dubious image doing in the frontispiece and title of a treatise that,

given Hobbes emphatic rejection of metaphor and myth, is supposed to do away withthem, at least in philosophy and politics?

1 This text was read in spanish the November 26th 2013 in the International Colloquium Poltica Arte,Literatura, Lenguaje: de Carl Schmitt a Jacques Rancire. This colloquium was organized by the Instituto deHumanidades of the Universidad Diego Portales (November 28th to 29th). The text that follow is a translationof that reading.
mailto:[email protected]:[email protected]:[email protected]


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This latter question can be explored without any assumptions about Hobbes psychology

and intentions. And I agree with John Tralau who, writing in The Cambridge Companion to

Hobbes Leviathan , argues that Hobbes transgression of his own interdict is precisely the

reason why we should look closely for something interesting in it. He writes:

[] the mythological image is [ ] not merely a superfluous, accidental ornament but

serves a theoretical purpose in Hobbes argument. Moreover, we will see that his use of

the image, which contradicts his own principles regarding method in philosophy, is in a

sense a theoretical and political necessity for him (Tralau 2007, 61).

Besides being a transgression, what is interesting in it, deserving a close look? Tralau draws

a parallel between Hobbes Leviathan and Dionysus and Medusa. What they have in

common is their inherent paradoxical nature. Based in ancient documents and contemporary

interpretations 2, Tralau concludes that Medusa is ug ly, yet beautiful; female, yet male;

human, yet a beast; young, yet old; mortal, yet intimately related to immortality. And, in

Euripides Bakchai , we learn, so Tralau tells us, that Dionysus is no less paradoxical: male

and female; terrible and lenient; god and monster; even wh oever he is .

And what about Hobbes L eviathan? In the Hebrew Bible, the word Leviathan is used only

a few times. In Psalm 104, that highlights the playfulness of the divine order, it is a creature

made for God s gratification, as are the taninim, the great sea monsters created on the fifth

day of creation (Genesis 1: 21). But, in Psalm 74, that laments the destruction of Jerusalem

by the Babylonian army in 586 B. C. E, it is mentioned, along with the dragon and the

taninim, as one of the ancient enemies God had to defeat to establish his order; in Isaiah,

Leviathan, described as a fleeing and twisting serpent, and as a sea monster, is yet to be

defeated.

But the most disturbing Leviathan, and the one Hobbes more explicitly refers to is Job s.Job 41. 24, in the Vulgate version ( non est super terram potestas quae conparetur ei ) is

engraved in the frontispiece; then, at the end of Chapter 28, ( Of Punishments and

Rewards ) Hobbes explains what he means by Leviatha n quoting Job 41:33-34: There is

2 Mainly Apollodoro s Library , and Jean Pierre Vernant and Franoise Frontisi-Ducroix.


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nothing on earth to be compared with him. He is made not to be afraid. He seeth every high

thing below him, and is king of al the children of pride. And, in fact, the image engraved in

the frontispiece is that of a giant, seeing every high thing below hi m, even, and

purposefully as Hobbes direct participation in the design of the frontispiece certainly

implies the cathedral, the largest building in the city, and upon which the Mortal God s

shadow falls.

In the Hebrew Bible, Job is a parable on the omnipotence, and thus, the radical Otherness of

God regarding human justice and reason. He is presented as perfect and upright, and one

that feared God, and eschewed evil ( Job 1, 1), so perfect and upright that even God,

assembled with his sons, Satan included, brags about him: Hast thou considered my

servant Job, that there is none like him in the earth, a perfect and an upright man, one that

feareth God, and escheweth evil? ( Job 1, 8). But his virtues notwithstanding, he is the

caught in the web of divine laws (read: inhuman laws) Borges, in one of his most

outstanding nominalist fictions, Tln, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius and doomed to every

conceivable punishment. And, although he retains his faith, he deems himself innocent. But

that is the whole point: he claims to know right from wrong: he was righteous in his eyes

( Job 32 , 1). Finally God himself, speaking out of a whirlwind, admonishes him: Wilt thou

also annul My justice? Wilt thou condemn Me, that thou mayest be justified? (40, 8). And,

as for an omnipotent God, might makes right, He parades his power: Canst thou draw out

Leviathan with a fishhook? Or tie down his tongue with a cord? (41, 1). Indeed, the whole

paragraph 41 is dedicated to display the powers of Leviathan, till we are led to understand

that what is being praised is nothing but God himself: None is so foolhardy that dare stir

him up. Who then is able to stand before Me? (41,10; 41,2 in the Hebrew version).

Hobbes God, regardless of his own private beliefs, is precisely this omnipotent God,

whose designs must be considered beyond the scope of human reason and moral judgment.

In the Latin version of L 31, 5 ( On the Kingdom of God by Nature ) he is quite explicit:

To an omnipotent nature, which cannot be resisted, both reign and dominion over the

whole human race naturally belong. And this is the foundation of the right by which God

afflicts whom he will, and pardons whom he will [ ] not, as many have thought, the


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sins of men 3

With this and similar statements; also, with his position on universals: [] there being

nothing in the world universal by names; for the things named are every one of them

individual and singular. (L 4, 4), Hobbes, as many of his readers have recognised, proveshimself a nominalist. Universals in re, universals out there, in things themselves, were in

fact the key elements in the Medieval Scholastic power- knowledge apparatus: realism

guaranteed that the Creation would be a rational Cosmos, an order that, with a certain

degree of support from Divine Grace a Grace administered by the same institution in

which Scholasticism was raised and thrived could be translated into naturalised political

and morals laws. In other words, for the Medieval world there was a bridge connecting

heaven to earth, so that earthly life became, somehow, sacralised. But bridges can be

crossed in both directions, so that the sacralisation of earthly life can be understood so it

was, by the Nominalist theologians and, later on, by the Reformation as a profanation of

the sacred. God is not our debto r, wrote William of Ockham, perhaps the most

outstanding of the late Middle Age Nominalist theologians. A God commensurable with

human reason would be nothing but a human construct, an idol.

Now the question of realism vs. nominalism, that bears on the relation between reason and

reality, cannot be solved by reason. Because it would entail a second order reason, to whichthe same problem would be presented, and so on. This stairway to heaven can only be

interrupted by a decision, which would then be exempted from the requirements of reason

though, being its foundation, neither alien to it. A sovereign decision, then, both within and

without reason. And a decision understood, not as the expression of an individual will in

Hobbes account, that would be nothing but the last appetite in deliberating (L 6, 53) but

in its etymological sense (from the Latin de-caedere, to cut), as an interruption or

bifurcation in historical time, related not only to changes in ideas and mentality, but also to

decisive transformations in the material realm; to the emergence of modern capitalism, that

3 In this section, Hobbes deals specifically with Job . Regarding the question Why evil men often prosper, and good men suffer adversity , he writes: This question, in the case of Job , is decided by God himself, not byarguments derived from Job s sin, but his own power .


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commands that reality be, not a pre-ordered Cosmos, but a neutral, non-teleological

(disenchante d) space. Because only in such a void a will-to-order, expressed in the global

techno-scientific enterprise and market rationality; in a constructive, perspectivist

understanding of language and last but not least in modern political sovereignty, can be

deployed so as to build a humanized world Elaborating on Hobbes d ark view of the

world , M. A. Gillespie writes:

[Hobbes ] dark view of the world is the result of his acceptance of the basic tenets of

nominalism, especially as it is received and transmuted by the Reformation. [ ] Hobbes

transforms this thought in essential ways. Luther and Calvin sought to show that nothing

we do on earth can affect our chances of salvation, which depend solely on divine

election. Hobbes accepts this doctrine of unconditional election, but he turns it on its

head. If nothing we do on earth affects our salvation, then there is no soteriological

reason to perform any earthly action. Properly understood, the nominalist doctrine of

divine omnipotence and the Calvinist notion of election that follows from it thus

undermine the authority of religion in secular affairs. Therefore, it is not the rejection of

religion that produces modern natural and political science but the theological

demonstration of religio ns irrelevance for life in this world (Gillespie 2008, 209-210). 4

But not only the authority of religion has been undermined. The Reformation made theindividual s conscience the privileged locus for transcendence, now turned opaque, to be

heard. In Hobbes writings we witness his painstaking efforts to deactivate this time bomb

threatening each and every political power. He does it by establishing an economy of

power, based on a distinction between the inner and the outer: For internal faith is in its

own nature invisible, and consequently exempted from all human jurisdiction. (L 42, 42).

And, in the very delicate political question of miracles, to which he dedicates Chapter 37 of

his Leviathan (On miracles and their use ), though asserting that the sovereign, as the

embodiment of public reaso n is, in this and in every cognitive matter, the supreme judge

(so, a sort of lightning rod, preventing so said miracles to disturb the commonwealth), he

4 On Hobbe s nominalism, Gillespie adds: W hat is immediately clear is that Hobbe s thought is deeplyindebted to nominalism. He accepted nominalism s basic tenets: that God is omnipotent, that only individualsexist, and that the meanings of words are purely conventional. (Gillespie 2008, 228).


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asserts that A private man has always the liberty (because thought is free) to believe or not

believe, in his heart, those acts that have been given out for miracles .

This distinction between public confession and inner, private belief was understood by Carl

Schmitt, in his much discussed The Leviathan. The State Theory of Thomas Hobbes as afatal crack in Hobbes state design; a crack through which those who claim a source of right

external to the commonwealth would be able to instil their venom. In the spirit of the times

the book was published in 1938 Schmitt blames Jewish thinkers, from Spinoza to

Mendelsohn and beyond, for this. But, if we go back to Hobbes, it was not Jews he had in

mind, but mainly Puritans. But again, Puritans were only a radical faction of Protestantism:

it is not, then, a foreign venom, but the privileged role assigned by the Reformation to

subjectivity, to inner conviction, that Hobbes is trying to deactivate, not by denying it, but

by confining it to the space of privacy. So, the distinction of inner and outer is not a defect

in Hobbes Artificial Ma ns design: on the contrary, it is its main constructive principle. In

the Hobbesian Commonwealth, every substantial conviction has to be turned into private

belief (or maybe better: value) that can be sustained in the interiority of ones heart, or

within a community of believers, with the only condition that it should not interfere with

public reason. And, though this process of neutralization starts with religion, it does not

have to stop there. In fact, it wo nt: even now it is at work, turning what used to be

substantive political convictions into aestheticized life styles. This is the work of the

astonishingly consistent [ ] systematics of liberal thought (Schmitt, in The Concept of

the Political ), that replaces the conflictivity of the political with the rule of law and techno-

scientific administration.

Now, I can come back to Leviatha ns image in the frontispiece of Hobbes controversial

book. Where is he, really? Will he stay there forever? Or is on the move, arriving or,

maybe, leaving? Leviathan is a sea monster, England is an island. So, I suggest, he is

coming from the sea, having shed his monstrous features in favour of a human form. But, as

we know from Schmitt, sovereignty is a borderline concept . So there in principle he

should stay, in the border between the humanized world and the state of nature .

Emmanuel Kant, in his First Critique , at the beginning of the chapter titled Of the Ground

of the Division of all Objects into Phenomena and Noumena offers a very powerful image


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of this world ( an islan d) and what lies beyond:

This land, however, is an island, and enclosed in unalterable boundaries by nature itself. It is

the land of truth (a charming name), surrounded by a broad and stormy ocean, the true seat or

illusion, where many a fog bank and rapidly melting iceberg pretend to be new lands and,ceaselessly deceiving with empty hopes the voyager looking around for new discoveries,

entwine him in adventures from which he can never escape and yet also never bring to an end

(KrV A 235 / B 294-5). 5

Invoking Kant here is not out of place here, because it is mainly in his name that efforts

have been made by liberal thinkers to replace the uncomfortable person of the sovereign,

and the even more uncomfortable notions of exception and decision, with the impersonal

rule of law. But, to say there is nothing but the law is to incur in a paradox of self-inclusion, such as Bertrand Russell had to face in his attempt, at the beginning of the XXth

Century, to ground mathematics in logic. Russell attempted to straight things out with his

theory of types , a theory that prescribes that self- inclusive statements, that refer to

themselves through a totality ( the la w), are to be considered as belonging, not to that

totality, but to a meta-level. In that way, he established a hierarchy of levels and meta-

levels, a stairway to heaven (remember the differend between realism and nominalism!) that

can only be interrupted precisely by what it aims to avoid: a sovereign decision that, at a

certain level (the second, no more are necessary) absorbs into itself the paradox. In the case

of the law, this would mean that the proposition there is nothing but the law raises that

nothing to the level of the sovereign. But that is precisely what happens with sovereignty

under the pressure of the astonishingly consistent [ ] systematics of liberal thought : far

from being wiped out, it can now, devoid of the ontic features that used to burden it, rule

unlimited.

The example of science may clarify what I am saying. In Hobbes account (L 5, 3), scienceis not an uncontroversial discipline: no ma ns reason, nor the reason of any number of

men, makes the certainty , so that, there will be occasions in which some arbitrator or

judge to whose sentence they will both stand will be required. And the last word, we

5 Kant, Immanuel. Critique of Pure Reason . Cambridge Edition, USA, 2000.


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understand, would be the sovereign s. But this is just the beginning of modern science, with

Hobbes as one of its pioneers. After that first impulse, science runs by itself: it does not

require the sovereig ns decision because, in a fundamental way, it has internalized its

innermost substance, the disenchantment of nature that is its Commandment.

So, what we have is, to paraphrase an expression coined by Georgio Agamben, the

sovereign as gesture: a grin without a cat. Agamben is elaborating on a well-known

conference pronounced by Michel Foucault, What is an author (1969). This conference

contains several statements worth remembering, and Agamben does not fail in driving our

attention to them. I will just quote one: The mark of the author is reduced to nothing more

than the singularity of his absence; he must assume the role of the dead man in the game of

writing. And Agamben concludes: Th e author is only present in the text as a gesture .

It is odd that Agamben does not perceive that the structure that he, through Foucault, is

unveiling, is the same logical structure of sovereignty. In fact, there is a long tradition that,

through etymological speculation a style of thinking very dear to Agamben establishes a

close link between authority and authorship, with Agambe ns fellow countryman, Dante

Alighieri, as a relevant representative of that tradition 6.

But, in Hobbes case, the relation he establishes between his authorship and sovereign

authority is closer. In the Introduction to Leviathan , Hobbes says that, to know men and

that knowledge is the basis for describing the nature of this artificial man , Leviathan, you

have to begin by knowing yourself: nosce te ipsum, read thyself . And this is especially

important in the case of the sovereign:

He that is to govern a whole nation must read in himself, not this or that particular man,

6 In fact, Dante Alighieri, dedicated part of his Convivio (The Banquet ), written in the threshold of the modernera, to emphasize, via a clever reading of Medieval sources, that closeness; more precisely, he stresses thedouble derivation of the word auctor : from the Greek auieo , to tie together (so that the poet ties togetherwords, as the very form of the word, composed only of vocals would suggest), and also from the Greekautentin . He writes: [T]he other source from which author as Hugutio bears witness in his

Derivationes descends is a Greek word autentin , which in Latin means worthy of faith and obedience. Asthus derived, author refers to every person worthy of being trusted [worthy of faith] and [of being] obeyed.From this comes the word with which we are concerned now, namely authority, so we see that authority is equivalent to an act worthy of faith and obedience. Whence, given that Aristotle is most worthy of faithand obedience, it is obvious that his words are the supreme and highest authority. (4, 6, 5) Quoted by RussellAscoli, (Russell Ascoli 2007, p. 55).


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but mankind, which though it be hard to do, harder than to learn any language or science,

yet when I shall have set down my own reading orderly and perspicuously, the pains left

another will be only to consider if he not find the same in himself. For this doctrine

admiteth no other demonstration .

What are we supposed to do with this? On the one hand, Hobbes is placing himself as the

sovereig ns closest advisor. But what Hobbes offers us in the following pages is not a first

person account of man if that is ever possible but a third person account according to

which human beings would be nothing but mechanic automata: automata provided with

what nowadays we would call an internal program (the heart, a spring; the nerves, strings;

the joints, wheels) that receives mechanical stimuli through the sense organs and responds

to them mechanically, so that all the knowledge we might get, even though it can be

elaborated into trains of thought, memory and words we may use to recall and communicate

it, would be, in the final analysis, nothing but fancy. This account holds as an extreme, and

politically inspired, critique of reification: not only there are no universals in re, but no rei,

no things at all we might know about.

I cannot elaborate further on this here (the elaboration would lead us to recognize how

Hobbes, through the role of language and through his famous definitions, has to re-

introduce intentionality into his account of the behaviour of human beings). The finalquestion I want to raise is the following: if we accept human beings are causal automata, as

Hobbes seems to think, what happens with Hobbes himself? Is he also an automaton?

Again, we are faced with Russell s paradox. Le ts fly away from Hobbes 17 th Century and

get back to our 21 st. The name of the game now is not mechanics, but neurophysiology.

Explaining human behaviour in neurophysiological terms means that, albeit in a complex

way, we should be able to map each and every human behaviour into a region of the human

brain. But, what happens with the human behaviour consisting in drawing causal maps? Is it

also causal? And what, then?

For Hobbes, geometry was the only science that it had pleased God hithertho to bestow on

mankind (L 4, 12). And also the skill of making and maintaining commonwealths

consisteth in certain rules, as doth arithmetic and geometry (L, 20, 19). So Leibniz, who


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was a great admirer of Hobbes (in a letter, he told Hobbes that he considered him above

Descartes, to whom he attributed a superhuman intellect ) may have been thinking in

Hobbes when, in a brief essay ( On the Radical Origination of All Things ) he gave an

example of what he meant by the principle of sufficient reason.

Let us suppose that the book containing the Elements of Geometry exists since the

beginning of time and that a new book has always been copied from a former one. It should

be clear that, although we can always give reason of the present book referring it to the

former from which it was copied, we would never reach a perfect reason, even though we

might cover, in a regression, as many books as we wished. In fact, it will be always

legitimate to ask, with amazement, why do those books have always existed, why precisely

books, and what is the reason for them to have been written in such a way as they have.

For Leibniz, causal explanations have to be grounded in something he, very fittingly calls

Dominating Unity , related to an absolute, metaphysical necessity. The figure of Author /

Sovereign may be reduced by its immersion in the highly corrosive medium of rationality;

in other words, he may be retreating back to his noumenal stormy ocean, leaving space for

the ever-growing rationalised human world. But the metaphysical grin lingers on.

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Sabrovsky, Eduardo_Thomas Hobbes's Leviathan_a Grin Without a Cat