HOBBES THE PYTHAGOREAN?

The time has not come to talk about Hobbes’s theory of the State yet. There is still one small matter to talk about, namely, the authorship of the superb Hobbesian metaphor opening his Leviathan. Let us refresh our memory of this immortal paragraph:

Nature (the art whereby God has made and governs the world) is by the art of man imitated, so that it can make an artificial animal. This interesting analogy, becoming the philosophical basis of Leviathan, shows an intriguing subtleness of definition here. “Nature” is not equated to the world, but, rather, to the creative force of God, his “art.” In this context, the “forces of nature” come to mean the physical processes utilized by God’s spiritual powers, and thus, God appears to be in full direct control of his Creation, where “direct” is the key word. Being a matter of definition, Hobbes is completely within his rights, representing his idea of nature in this fashion, but the philosophical implications are quite significant. It would have been fun to examine the consistency of his philosophy as a whole with this challenging premise, but I cannot spare any time for such an effort. Besides, the entire range of his philosophy is somewhat limited in its scope, unlike in Kant’s case, for instance, and may not provide us with sufficient evidence to make such a judgment. For, seeing life as only a motion of limbs, the beginning of which is in some principal part within, why may we not say that all automata (engines which move themselves by springs and wheels as does a watch) have an artificial life? For what is the heart but a spring; and the nerves, but so many strings; and the joints, but so many wheels giving motion to the whole body, such as was intended by the Artificer? Art goes yet further, imitating that rational and most excellent work of Nature, man. For, by art is created that great Leviathan, called Commonwealth, or State, which is but an artificial man, though of greater stature and strength than the natural, for whose protection and defense it was intended; and in whose sovereignty is an artificial soul giving life and motion to the whole body, while judiciary and executive officers are artificial joints, reward and punishment are the nerves, the wealth and riches of all members are its strength, and salus populi, its business, counselors, the memory, equity and laws, artificial reason and will, concord is health, sedition is sickness, and civil war is death. Lastly, the pacts and covenants by which the parts of the body politic were first made, set together and united, resemble the Let us make man fiat, said by God in the Creation.

How original is this idea of the State being “an artificial man”? In our study of Aristotle’s Politics, we have already noticed Aristotle’s parallel between the State and the human body. As Bertrand Russell summarizes it, “the conception here is that of an organism: a hand when the body is destroyed is no longer a hand.” This little journey into Aristotelity, as Hobbes derisively refers to the scholastic preoccupation with Aristotelian theories, may not be convincing enough, unless we are prepared to dig yet deeper, into the underlying layer of Pythagoreanism. What I am trying to say here, rather incoherently, is that our Mr. Hobbes may not be the novel originator of this idea, but a Pythagorean, whether he was at all familiar with the Pythagorean idea of cosmos being an organism… then man is an organism… and then by a logical progression the State can be seen as an organism too?

But whether or not Hobbes could have been influenced by this Pythagorean prototype, his originality in its further development cannot be denied. Russell sees his “thoroughgoing materialism” in this development: Life, Hobbes says, is nothing but a motion of the limbs, and, therefore, automata have an artificial life. The commonwealth he calls Leviathan, is a creation of art, and is, in fact, an artificial man. This is intended as more than an analogy and is worked out in some detail. The sovereignty is an artificial soul; the pacts and covenants, by which Leviathan is first created take the place of God’s fiat when He said, Let Us make man.

What I see in this remarkable passage is a breathtaking flight of fancy, that soars well beyond its plausible Greek (Pythagorean/Aristotelian) starting point. Hobbes reminds me of Nietzsche’s perspective on man as both creature and creator. As a creator, he parallels God, hence the magnificent correspondence of the two creations, one God’s: man; the other, man’s: the State.