Thomas Hobbes Leviathan

1. Thomas Hobbes Leviathan --By Shih-hong Chuang 英碩二, 69412105

2. Leviathan was a Biblical sea monster referred to in the Old Testament (Psalm 74:13-14; Job 41; Isaiah 27:1). The word leviathan has become synonymous with any large aquatic monster or creature. In the novel Moby-Dick it refers to great whales, and in Modern Hebrew, it means simply "whale". Leviathan的說文解字

3. Norton’s Introduction 1594/1/6 • Hobbes held that everything in the universe is composed only of matter; spirit does not exist. All knowledge is gained through sensory impressions, which are nothing but matter in motion. What we call the self is [. . .] simply a tissue of sensory impressions. [. . .]. As a result, an iron determinism of cause and effect governs everything in the universe, including human action.

4. 1594/2 • Human beings, Hobbes thought, seek self-preservation as a primary goal, and power as a means to secure that goal. His politics spring directly from these premises. Because all humans are roughly equal, physically and mentally, they possess equal hopes of attaining goods, as well as equal fears of danger from others. In the state of nature, before the foundation of some sovereign power to keep them all in awe, everyone is continually at war with everyone else, and life, in Hobbes’s memorable phrase, is “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.”

5. Maslow’s “hierarchy of needs”

6. 1589/0/4 • That sovereign power—which need not be a king but is always indivisible—incorporates the wills and individuality of them all, so that the people no longer have wills, rights, or liberties apart from the sovereign’s will. 自己的權力應讓渡出來

7. 1595 • In Hobbes’s system, the founding political covenant, once made, cannot be revoked. Revolution against or resistance to the sovereign for any reason is absurd, [. . . ]

8. 1595/1/6 Hobbes’s materialism and secularism scandalized Puritans. The Puritans also rejected its argument for an absolutism that cannot be modified or qualified, even on religious grounds.

9. 皇室與宗教兩邊都不是人1595/1/倒數8 • Yet his argument made no real distinction between a legitimate monarch and a successful usurper, like Oliver Cromwell; moreover, Hobbes’s virtual exclusion of God from politics made many supporters of the king as uncomfortable as it did the Puritans. After the Restoration, Hobbes was widely suspected of atheism, and publication of his books, including a history of the civil war entitled Behemoth, was prohibited until his death.

10. 1595/2/5 • During these lengthy sojourns he became acquainted with many of the leading intellectuals and scientists on the Continent, including Galileo, Descartes, and the prominent French mathematician Pierre Gassendi, who argued that the universe was governed entirely by mechanical principles. The most important political philosophers for Hobbes were also Continental figures: the Italian Niccolò Machiavelli, who saw human beings as naturally competitive and power hungry, and Jean Bodin, a French theorist of indivisible, absolute monarchy. (in England, Francis Bacon)

11. Niccolò Machiavelli (1469 –1527) was an Italian political philosopher, musician, poet, and romantic comedic playwright. He is a figure of the Italian Renaissance and a central figure of its political component, most widely known for his treatises on realist political theory (The Prince) on the one hand and republicanism (Discourses on Livy) on the other. Niccolò Machiavelli

12. Jean Bodin (né en 1529 à Angers, en Maine-et-Loire - mort en 1596, à Laon, dans l'Aisne) était un jurisconsulte, un philosophe et un théoricien politique français, qui influença l'histoire intellectuelle de l'Europe par la formulation de ses théories économiques et de ses principes du « bon gouvernement ». Il est considéré comme l'initiateur du concept moderne de souveraineté. Jean Bodin

13. Hobbesian, in modern English usage, = a situation in which there is unrestrained, selfish, and uncivilized competition among participants. • Machiavellianism is primarily the term some social and personality psychologists use to describe a person's tendency to deceive and manipulate others for personal gain.

14. INTRODUCTION • NATURE (the art whereby God hath made and governs the world) is by the art of man, as in many other things, so in this also imitated, that it can makean artificial animal. For seeing life is but a motion of limbs, the beginning whereof is in some principal part within, why may we not say that all automata (engines that move themselves by springs and wheels as doth 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 a COMMONWEALTH, or STATE (in Latin, CIVITAS), which is but an artificial man, though of greater stature and strength than the natural, for whose protection and defence it was intended; and in which the sovereignty is an artificial soul, as giving life and motion to the whole body; the magistrates and other officers of judicature and execution, artificial joints; reward and punishment (by which fastened to the seat of the sovereignty, every joint and member is moved to perform his duty) are the nerves, that do the same in the body natural; the wealth and riches of all the particular members are the strength; salus populi (the people's safety) its business; counsellors, by whom all things needful for it to know are suggested unto it, are the memory; equity and laws, an artificial reason and will; concord, health; sedition, sickness; and civil war, death. Lastly, the pacts and covenants, by which the parts of this body politic were at first made, set together, and united, resemble that fiat, or the Let us make man, pronounced by God in the Creation.

15. CHAPTER I : OF SENSE 1596 • Concerning the thoughts of man, I will consider them first singly, and afterwards in train or dependence upon one another. Singly, they are every one a representation or appearance of some quality, or other accident of a body without us, which is commonly called an object. Which object worketh on the eyes, ears, and other parts of man's body, and by diversity of working produceth diversity of appearances.

16. 1596/2 • The original of them all is that which we call sense, (for there is no conception in a man's mind which hath not at first, totally or by parts, been begotten upon the organs of sense). The rest are derived from that original.

17. Exterior -> interior 1597/1 • The cause of sense is the external body, or object, which presseth the organ proper to each sense, either immediately, as in the taste and touch; or mediately, as in seeing, hearing, and smelling: which pressure, by the mediation of nerves and other strings and membranes of the body, continued inwards to the brain and heart, causeth there a resistance, or counter-pressure, or endeavour of the heart to deliver itself: which endeavour, because outward, seemeth to be some matter without. And this seeming, or fancy, is that which men call sense; and consisteth, as to the eye, in a light, or colour figured; to the ear, in a sound;

18. CHAPTER XIII OF THE NATURAL CONDITION OF MANKIND AS CONCERNING THEIR FELICITY AND MISERY (p.1598) (人皆生而平等) • NATURE hath made men so equal in the faculties of body and mind as that, though there be found one man sometimes manifestly stronger in body or of quicker mind than another, yet when all is reckoned together the difference between man and man is not so considerable as that one man can thereupon claim to himself any benefit to which another may not pretend as well as he. For as to the strength of body, the weakest has strength enough to kill the strongest, either by secret machination or by confederacy with others that are in the same danger with himself.

19. 戰爭的肇因1598/3/ “天下兼相愛則治，交相惡則亂”《兼愛上》。 • From this equality of ability ariseth equality of hope in the attaining of our ends. And therefore if any two men desire the same thing, which nevertheless they cannot both enjoy, they become enemies; and in the way to their end (which is principally their own conservation, and sometimes their delectation only) endeavour to destroy or subdue one another.

20. 戰爭的肇因: 肉弱強食的社會中, 求自存的統攝是可被接受的 1589/最後一段 • And from this diffidence [缺乏互信]of one another, there is no way for any man to secure himself so reasonable as anticipation; that is, by force, or wiles, to master the persons of all men he can so long till he see no other power great enough to endanger him: and this is no more than his own conservation requireth, and is generally allowed.

21. 1589/倒數2行 • And by consequence, such augmentation of dominion over men being necessary to a man's conservation, it ought to be allowed him.

22. 戰爭的三種肇因 1599/2 • So that in the nature of man, we find three principal causes of quarrel. First, competition; secondly, diffidence [猜疑]; thirdly, glory.

23. 1599/3 • The first [competition ] maketh men invade for gain; the second [猜疑];, for safety; and the third [glory], for reputation. The first use violence, to make themselves masters of other men's persons, wives, children, and cattle; the second, to defend them; the third, for trifles, as a word, a smile, a different opinion, and any other sign of undervalue, either direct in their persons or by reflection in their kindred, their friends, their nation, their profession, or their name.

24. 戰爭的時令 1599/4/3 • For war consisteth not in battle only, or the act of fighting, but in a tract of time, wherein the will to contend by battle is sufficiently known: and therefore the notion of time is to be considered in the nature of war, as it is in the nature of weather. For as the nature of foul weather lieth not in a shower or two of rain, but in an inclination thereto of many days together: so the nature of war consisteth not in actual fighting, but in the known disposition thereto during all the time there is no assurance to the contrary. All other time is peace.

25. 1599/5 • Whatsoever therefore is consequent to a time of war, where every man is enemy to every man, the same consequent to the time wherein men live without other security than what their own strength and their own invention shall furnish them withal. In such condition there is no place for industry, because the fruit thereof is uncertain: and consequently no culture of the earth; no navigation, nor use of the commodities that may be imported by sea; [. . .] and the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.

26. 1600/3 • To this war of every man against every man, this also is consequent; that nothing can be unjust. The notions of right and wrong, justice and injustice, have there no place. Where there is no common power, there is no law; where no law, no injustice. Force and fraud ( “勢, ” “術”: 韓非?)are in war the two cardinal virtues. [. . . ] It is consequent also to the same condition that there be no propriety, no dominion, no mine and thine distinct; but only that to be every man's that he can get, and for so long as he can keep it. And thus much for the ill condition which man by mere nature is actually placed in; though with a possibility to come out of it, consisting partly in the passions, partly in his reason.

27. 1660/4 • The passions that incline men to peace are: fear of death; desire of such things as are necessary to commodious living; and a hope by their industry to obtain them. And reason suggesteth convenient articles of peace upon which men may be drawn to agreement. These articles are they which otherwise are called the laws of nature, whereof I shall speak more particularly in the two following chapters.

28. CHAPTER XIVOF THE FIRST AND SECOND NATURAL LAWS, AND OF CONTRACTS1660/最後一段 • THE right of nature, which writers commonly call jus naturale, is the liberty each man hath to use his own power as he will himself for the preservation of his own nature; that is to say, of his own life; and consequently, of doing anything which, in his own judgement and reason, he shall conceive to be the aptest means thereunto.

29. 1601/2/斜体字那裡 The FIRST LAW[追求和平]: And consequently it is a precept, or general rule of reason: that every man ought to endeavour peace, as far as he has hope of obtaining it; and when he cannot obtain it, that he may seek and use all helps and advantages of war.

30. 1601/3/斜体字那裡 The SECOND LAW [自衛]: From this fundamental law of nature, by which men are commanded to endeavour peace, is derived this second law: that a man be willing, when others are so too, as far forth as for peace and defence of himself he shall think it necessary, to lay down this right to all things; and be contented with so much liberty against other men as he would allow other men against himself.

31. CHAPTER 15: OF OTHER LAWS OF NATURE [THE THIRD LAW] 1601/最後兩行 • And in this law of nature consisteth the fountain and original of justice. [. . .]. But when a covenant is made, then to break it is unjust and the definition of injustice is no other than the not performance of covenant. And whatsoever is not unjust is just.

32. Other laws are . . . • The fourth Law is that a man which receiveth benefit from another of mere grace, endeavour that he which giveth it, have no reasonable cause to repent him of his good will. Breach of this law is called ingratitude. • The fifth Law is complaisance: that every man strive to accommodate himself to the rest. The observers of this law may be called sociable; the contrary, stubborn, insociable, forward, intractable. • The sixth Law is that upon caution of the future time, a man ought to pardon the offences past of them that repenting, desire it. • The seventh Law is that in revenges, men look not at the greatness of the evil past, but the greatness of the good to follow. • The eighth Law is that no man by deed, word, countenance, or gesture, declare hatred or contempt of another. The breach of which law is commonly called contumely. • The ninth Law is that every man acknowledge another for his equal by nature. The breach of this precept is pride. From: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_law#Hobbes.27_natural_law

33. Chapter 17: OF THE CAUSES, GENERATION, AND DEFINITION OF A COMMONWEALTH1603/1/ • For the laws of nature, as justice, equity, modesty, mercy, and, in sum, doing to others as we would be done to, of themselves, without the terror of some power to cause them to be observed, are contrary to our natural passions, that carry us to partiality, pride, revenge, and the like. And covenants, without the sword, are but words and of no strength to secure a man at all.

34. 若無至高無上的力量來壓制的話, 則彼此互爭, 強大自我, 則戰事無息.1603/倒數六行. • For if we could suppose a great multitude of men to consent in the observation of justice, and other laws of nature, without a common power to keep them all in awe, we might as well suppose all mankind to do the same; and then there neither would be, nor need to be, any civil government or Commonwealth at all, because there would be peace without subjection.

35. 1604/3 • First, [. . . ]competition for honour and dignity • Secondly, [. . . ] whose joy consisteth in comparing himself with other men, can relish nothing but what is eminent. • Thirdly, that these creatures, having not, as man, the use of reason, do not see, nor think they see, any fault in the administration of their common business.

36. 1604/6 • Fourthly, that these creatures [. . . ]want that art of words by which some men can represent to others that which is good in the likeness of evil; and evil, in the likeness of good; and augment or diminish the apparent greatness of good and evil, discontenting men and troubling their peace at their pleasure. • Fifthly, [. . . ] whereas man is then most troublesome when he is most at ease; for then it is that he loves to show his wisdom, and control the actions of them that govern the Commonwealth.

37. 1604/8 • Lastly, the agreement of these creatures is natural; [. . . ] a common power to keep them in awe and to direct their actions to the common benefit.

38. 1605/第5行 • “I authorise and give up my right of governing myself to this man, or to this assembly of men, on this condition; that thou give up, thy right to him, and authorise all his actions in like manner.”

39. 1605/第11行 • This done, the multitude so united in one person is called a COMMONWEALTH; in Latin, CIVITAS. This is the generation of that great LEVIATHAN, or rather, to speak more reverently, of that mortal god to which we owe, under the immortal God, our peace and defence. (almost end)

40. 1605/倒數第10行 • For by this authority, given him by every particular man in the Commonwealth, he hath the use of so much power and strength conferred on him that, by terror thereof, he is enabled to form the wills of them all, to peace at home, and mutual aid against their enemies abroad.

41. 1605/倒數第7行 • And in him consisteth the essence of the Commonwealth; which, to define it, is: one person, of whose acts a great multitude, by mutual covenants one with another, have made themselves every one the author, to the end he may use the strength and means of them all as he shall think expedient for their peace and common defence. And he that carryeth this person is called sovereign, and said to have sovereign power; and every one besides, his subject.

42. J’ai quelques choses à dire !!!! 我有話要說 Foucault (1926-84) 傅柯,近代偉大的法哲

43. Foucault 認為：「必須從《利維坦》的模式中解放出來，因為這是一個人造人的模式，是制造出來而又單一的自動化機器，它試圖囊括一切現實的個人，又試圖把實際的公民當成它的實体，卻把統治主權當成它的靈魂。必須在《利維坦》的模式以外，在法律的統治權和國家制度劃定的領域之外研究權力。重要的是要從統治的技術和戰術出發進行分析。」(Foucault Dits et Ecrits, 184; 轉引自高宣揚 《福柯的生存美學》p.175)

44. -A network of power • 權力是一種遠比這類簡單連接更為復雜的力量對比關係網，是同權力運作時所發生的各種社會、文化和政治因素等密切相關並相互交錯的關係總和，尤其同權力運作策略的生產和實施過程相關聯。(高宣揚 《福柯的生存美學》p.175)

45. 我的comment—or delirium? “無為”法家(尤其韓非)的= “Levianthan”

46. In my general—or somewhat fragmentary—view, Thomas Hobbes’ thought of “Leviathan” bears a similarity with Han Fei’s “無為.” Both, no doubt, embraces a universal or even absolute (monarchical ) power to govern people.

47. Hobbes, as shown in his great political book Leviathan, reiterates the mortal God figure Leviathan, the supreme power that keeps the people in awe. This notion of “Levathan” can be, I think, an absolute power to suppress the subject of an emperor, to deny any right that the common people shall possess, despite the fact that Hobbes thinks it is necessary or requisite to have such a powerful sovereignty to reinforce the covenants between people or nations, as well as to maintain a man’s security.

48. Moreover, Hobbes even thinks that “Force and fraud are in war the two cardinal virtues（1602）,” which similarly goes with 荀子's notion of "evil-nature" (性惡), denying the possibility that humans are in some way good. Force and fraud are essentially negative and evil act, which does not deal with the situation of war at all.

49. About Han Fei’s political view, in order to have a much more convenient and correct understanding, allow me to cite 勞思光’s interpretation. 勞comments that 韓子一面將性惡論推至極致，另一面則承權威主義之思想，否定一切價值，而只肯定一君權。「二柄」供人主之用；法術亦僅為人主所需。（勞思光《中國哲學史》302　）

50. 勞’s interpretation of Han’s may closely related, in terms of the absolute political purpose. Moverover, Han’s appropriation of Taoism’s “無為” further reinforces the irrevocable, irreplacible monarchal status of the feudal absolutism. Han says