8

IMPOVERISHED MODERNITY

Will, Action, and Person in Hobbes’s Leviathan

At times a terror, Leviathan has always been an enigma on account of an innate tendency of instrumental reason to turn into its other, rather in the spirit of William Blake’s dictum that “Opposition is true friendship.” Embodying those very terrors of irrational strife that it had been designed to keep at bay, the Hobbesian state thus peremptorily seizes all possible venues from which it might be materially or intellectually challenged. Most obviously, that means securing a monopoly on power (potentia), which now is conceived strictly in terms of efficient, instrumental causality. Our prevailing idea of the modern state has been profoundly shaped by Hobbes’s notion of power as mechanical “force,” that is, as the state’s unconditional, legal, and material prerogative to effect a “decision” on any range of issues—including prima facie the decision of what issues stand to be decided. Hobbes’s political voluntarism thus effects a downward transposition of the classical meaning of “power” (Grk. dynamis; Lat. potentia) to a strictly efficient “force.” It abandons the generative meaning of potentia—which, as Hannah Arendt was to remark, can be “actualized only where word and deed have not parted company, where words are not empty and deeds not brutal . . . Power is always . . . a power potential and not an unchangeable, measurable, and reliable entity like force or strength” (HC, 200). Yet beginning with Machiavelli and Hobbes at the latest, political power comes to be understood as a non-cognitive and mechanistic means. Thus arguments for the legitimacy of power, while not abandoning an appeal to a transcendent, divine source, tend to emphasize its pragmatic efficacy and sustained enforceability. Designed to constrain the brute and inarticulate wills of its subjects—and, invariably, coming to mirror their supposedly non-cognitive nature—Hobbesian sovereignty is not, however, an entirely novel phenomenon in modern political thought. Rather, it secularizes and radicalizes some central tenets of voluntarist theology.1 However startling it would have been to Aquinas’s fourteenth-century critics, what the apologists of absolute state power from Hobbes to Carl Schmitt propose is nothing more (or less) than to draw out the irrational implications so unwittingly prepared for by William of Ockham’s conceptualist approach to God as the agent whose absolute power (potentia absoluta) must never be constrained, not even by the reality of his own creation (potentia ordinata).

We can now begin to trace the evolution of modernity’s dominant conception of power as efficient force, that is, as the outward manifestation of a non-transparent and non-cognitive will that can only be known or unmasked after it has projected itself into social and political spaces. In so doing, we become aware of the omnipotence, unaccountability, and consequent opacity of voluntarism’s God, on the one hand, and the emergent ideal of modern “autonomy” or self-possession, on the other.2 It also helps us understand how, by the middle of the nineteenth century, a rather flat, voluntarist notion of power could have migrated from the self-possessed and autocratic persona of the Hobbesian monarch to the abstract proceduralism of the modern, liberal-bureaucratic nation-state. Somewhere in the volatile transition from the late Enlightenment to the early nineteenth century, this transformation of state power is finally completed; and by the 1850s, the notion has effectively metastasized to a complex institutional and bureaucratic landscape that, on the face of it, has little in common with Hobbes’s notion of a polity governed by an autocratic will. Yet to understand the historical emergence (and intrinsic paradoxes) of the systemic and institutional model of politics long associated with the nineteenth-century liberal, secular, and institutionally embedded state, a bit of intellectual history (albeit in highly compressed form) is in order. For only by linking the historical genesis of theological voluntarism to the modern state’s view of the individual subject as begging institutional containment is it even possible for us to assess the viability of the project of Enlightenment and post-Enlightenment political culture. Absent such a counter-narrative, all thinking about modernity—and the modern state’s institutional, economic, and constitutional frameworks—remains premised on an underlying (and, I would argue, deeply flawed) assumption that these frameworks are the only conceivable embodiment, indeed the very apotheosis of rationality.

A sensible place to begin this narrative—though certainly not its point of origin—is with Hobbes. For more than any other conception of sovereign power, it is the Hobbesian model that has thrown a long shadow over subsequent political thought. As Hannah Arendt observed some time ago, “there is hardly a single bourgeois moral standard which has not been anticipated by the unequaled magnificence of Hobbes’s logic.”3 To which one should add that this is the case because virtually all subsequent models (from Locke and Montesquieu forward via Adam Smith and Kant to John Stuart Mill)—regardless of how their various progenitors felt about Hobbes—are dialectically conditioned by his thinking. While they may seek to contain the more disconcerting implications of Hobbesian voluntarism, they remain (with very few exceptions) unable to escape Hobbes’s model of human agency. Setting aside the question of Hobbes’s intellectual forebears for the moment, we merely note that his concept of power in the Leviathan constitutes an extension of his earlier reflections on physics and anthropology, which show Hobbes to understand matter as intrinsically “minded, or at least willed” and of humans “as bodies driven by passions.”4

The conception of political power advanced in the Leviathan thus reflects its author’s underlying view of nature as prima facie irrational and categorically incapable of furnishing the human individual with any purposive and coherent framework. As Hobbes insists, “notions of good, evil, and contemptible are ever used in relation to the person that useth them, there being nothing simply and absolutely so, nor any common rule of good and evil to be taken from the nature of the objects themselves” (Lev., 6:7). Devoid of the substantive forms that Aristotelian and Scholastic thought had postulated, nature is instead conceived as an aggregate of inherently value-neutral forces. For Hobbes, order is never found in nature but has reality only as something constructed, ascribed, and imposed—even as the appeal to natural law as a putative source of authoritative meanings may well help legitimate the sovereign’s political will. In partial compensation for nature’s apparent lack of rational order, Hobbes imagines sovereignty as a countervailing force composed of the law, an (Erastian) church, and a monopoly on military might.5 With latent menace, the sovereign’s will casts its long shadow over the totality of all the embodied wills of which the body politic is composed—wills axiomatically viewed as a-rational and (at best) indifferent to the interests of the state. Unlike the rational coherence of Aristotelian energeia or the omnipresent love that Aquinas posits as the supreme quality of the creative will (potentia absoluta), power for Hobbes is intrinsically agonistic and a-rational. To the question first broached in Plato’s Republic and here reformulated by Oliver O’Donovan—“Is there in the nuclear core of human judgment a shortfall of reason, which generates an exertion of force to compensate for its lack?”—Hobbes answers with an emphatic “yes.”6 The Leviathan’s sovereignty thus is (dialectically) legitimated by its adversarial relation to the kinetic force of so much unruly, minded matter, the containment of which the Leviathan takes to be its principal, perhaps its only, task.

Once power is no longer legitimated by its rationality or exemplarity, its peremptory and compulsory nature rests on a view of the individual as categorically incapable of rational self-possession. Echoing C. B. Macpherson’s account of the “possessive quality” surfacing in the seventeenth-century view of the individual (“essentially the proprietor of his own person or capacities, owing nothing to society for them”), John Milbank views Hobbes as the pivotal figure within a broader historical shift: “Dominium over oneself, ‘self-government,’ was traditionally a matter of the rational mastery of the passions and . . . also the basis for one’s legitimate control and possession of external objects . . . Yet at the margins of this classical and medieval theme there persists the trace of a more brutal and original dominium, the unrestricted lordship over what lies within one’s power” and in the “seventeenth century this original Roman sense not only returns, but for the first time advances from the margins into the center.”7 Undoubtedly, Hobbes would be Exhibit A in a more expansive version of that story, which would also tell of the virtues’ gradual retreat from political and theological thought, a development certainly not initiated, though greatly accelerated by the religious, political, and scientific upheavals of the sixteenth century.8 Of crucial importance here is Hobbes’s rejection of “right reason” in De Cive (Chapter 2, 1n):

By Right Reason in the naturall state of men, I understand not, as many doe, an infallible faculty, but the act of reasoning, that is, the peculiar and true ratiocination of every man concerning those actions of his which may either redound to the dammage, or benefit of his neighbours . . . Although in a Civill Government the reason of the Supreme (i.e. the Civill Law) is to be received by each single subject for the right; yet being without this Civill Government, (in which state no man can know right reason from false, but by comparing it with His owne).

The scope of rationality here has contracted to whatever a given individual feels compelled to assent to simply because the sovereign demands and enforces such assent. Yet absent a strong state power, Hobbes insists, “no man can know right reason from false.” Long before Frege, Wittgenstein, and Ryle, Hobbes is already calling into question the possibility of the inner life as a rational and purposive (narrative) progression. Indeed, by appraising human agency strictly in terms of desire and volition—to be contingently thwarted or accommodated—Hobbes effectively denies that individual life may ever coalesce into a meaningful and continuous narrative. Pared down to an agglomeration of disjointed volitional states (themselves the outward projection of so many random desires), agency appears denuded of all the formal, historical, and hermeneutic coherence implied by the idea of a “person.” As Iris Murdoch (thinking of Wittgenstein and Stuart Hampshire rather than Hobbes) puts it, on this view “reasons are public reasons, rules are public rules. Reason and rule represent a sort of impersonal tyranny in relation to which however the personal will represents perfect freedom. The machinery is relentless . . . What I am ‘objectively’ is not under my control; logic and observers decide that. What I am ‘subjectively’ is a foot-loose, solitary, substanceless will. Personality dwindles to a point of pure will.”9

What has usurped the place of personhood, virtues, and inner (right) reason is an increasingly monochrome conception of the will as sheer kinesis, a mindless force to be conceived solely in terms of efficient causality. Already in De Cive (1642; Chapter X, i), Hobbes thus identifies potentia with causa. As Hannah Arendt notes, long before it came “to be substituted for Reason as man’s highest faculty” the will already tended to lack any meaningful relationship to the fullness of past time: “the Will’s ability to have present the not-yet is the very opposite of remembrance. Remembrance has a natural affinity to thought” whereas “the will always wills to do something.”10 With the peculiar satisfaction of a confirmed pessimist, Hobbes thus remarks that “I can do if I will; but to say I can will if I will, I take to be an absurd speech.”11 Paradoxically, even as Hobbes posits the will as the unconditional and indisputable source of the self’s inner reality, he can do so only at the expense of rendering that source terminally opaque and incommensurable with all propositional or discursive knowledge. Long before Schopenhauer’s extraordinary decision to reinterpret the Kantian noumenon as, in fact, the ontological datum of the will, Hobbes thus posits the will as an absolute source—unaccountable, inexplicable, and hence beyond the reach of any intellectual, reflexive, or dialectical attempts at sublating it into a rational progression.

For Hobbes, no such remedial strategy can ever succeed, quite simply because he has already determined that ostensibly more complex and self-aware intellectual processes are, in fact, nothing more than “calculative” epiphenoma of the will. Impervious to Platonic “recollection” (anamnēsis), Aristotelian “judgment” (prohairesis), or Thomistic “deliberation” (consilium), mind in Hobbes lacks any distinctive phenomenology. It merely presents as a depthless, self-seeking force begging containment by a stronger counterforce; its relation to other minds is defined strictly in legal terms, that is, as party to political and economic covenants of some kind or other: “The value or WORTH of a man is, as of all other things, his price, that is to say, so much as would be given for the use of his power; and therefore is not absolute.” Likewise, “Dominion, and victory, is honourable, because acquired by power; . . . Riches are honourable, for they are power. Poverty, dishonourable” (Lev., 10:16, 39–40). One cannot but be struck by Hobbes’s brazenly confident and apodictic style, an idiom “entirely freed from the doubts and hesitancies of the process of thought” and unflinching in its reliance on a basic syllogistic method.12 This prevailing rhetorical model also shows Hobbes’s voluntarist psychology to be anchored in the same framework of corpuscular mechanism that Gassendi had begun to establish for physics. Already, Johannes Kepler (whom Hobbes admired) “had proposed the substitution of the word vis [force] for the word anima in physics,” and Hobbes’s “staunchly reductionist reading of mechanism led him close to a materialist theory of the mind.”13 As extrapolated from his arguments in De Corpore (1655), mind is conceivable solely as an embodied causal agent, and “the interaction between bodies is restricted to physical contact between their surfaces.” Indeed, the notions of impetus and conatus that Hobbes there develops are deployed “in a completely reductive way.” Where Descartes had credited bodies with “a tendency to motion,” Hobbes refuses to credit matter with any intrinsic dynamism whatsoever: “he cannot allow a conatus without a motion, even an imperceptible—because infinitesimally small—one.” In so draining natural substances of even the smallest trace amounts of agency, “Hobbes has reduced the power to produce motion to the motion itself.”14

Bearing marked affinities to Hobbes’s mechanistic idea of matter as full space and as defined by its impetus and conatus, the human individual in the Leviathan likewise constitutes an ipso facto mindless force—self-referential, self-interested, and forever opaque to other “minds.” As Quentin Skinner has argued in great detail, Hobbes’s deep-seated distrust of man’s capacity for intellectual self-governance goes hand in hand with his opposition to humanism’s “dialogical and anti-demonstrative approach to moral reasoning” and the “assumption that there are two sides to any question.”15 Though subsequently qualified, Hobbes’s early disavowal of humanism’s rhetorical approach to moral self-governance still resonates in his later denial that the concepts and problems associated with a scientia civilis exhibit any historical depth and hermeneutic complexity. His paring down of individual consciousness to an embodied and overwhelmingly reactive will incapable of self-transcendence voids the person of all temporal continuity and historical awareness. Hence his repudiation of that quintessential objective correlative of Renaissance humanism’s optimistic and integrative view of history: the book. “Those men that take their instruction from the authority of books, and not from their own meditation [are] as much below the condition of ignorant men, as men endued with true Science are above it” (Lev., 4:13). Whatever rationality we may ascribe to sovereign power in Hobbes’s scientia civilis no longer derives from the interpretive and rhetorical skill with which it establishes its view of political order, but only from the effectiveness with which it imposes that order on the body politic. Pragmatics has displaced cognition.

The sovereign will is thus characterized by just the kind of autistic constitution that it ascribes to the myriad individual wills whom it seeks to contain; and it is this basic template that explains the prevalence of “war” as Hobbes’s preferred metaphor. War becomes the quintessential negative whose latency underwrites the positive rule “that men perform their covenants” and, indirectly, the image of civil society at large.16 In order to safeguard the power that the political covenant has conferred on him, Hobbes’s sovereign must steadfastly resist the temptation to enter into any affective or discursive relation with its subjects. The “sovereign cannot be imagined to love his people” since doing so would inevitably lead to “flattery.” Conversely, it is a “great [fault] to speak evil of the sovereign or to argue and dispute his power” since doing so is to incite “contempt” of power itself (Lev., 30:8, 9). Yet even if critical reflection on sovereign power might avoid undermining the latter, its character of “deliberation” ultimately finds its natural end in something on the order of a “decision.” For sovereign power can manifest itself only as the termination of competing political scenarios. Hence, the rhetoric of “decision” frames all deliberative thought, contemplation, and dispute as mere symptoms of indecision. Whatever “deliberation” has preceded the moment of decision must, according to Hobbes, necessarily find its end in “a last appetite . . . that we call the WILL.” As the following two passages, taken from early and late in the Leviathan, make clear, Hobbes’s will is not merely the ultimate instantiation of power as efficient force. Consumed with its own finality, Hobbesian “power” appears incommensurable with all rational contemplation and thinking:

The definition of the will commonly given by the Schools, that it is a rational appetite, is not good. For if it were, then there could be no voluntary act against reason. For a voluntary act is that which proceedeth from the will, and no other . . . Instead of a rational appetite, we shall say an appetite resulting from a precedent deliberation . . . Will therefore is the last appetite in deliberating. (Lev., 6:53)

Aristotle and other heathen philosophers define good and evil by the appetite of men; and well enough, as long as we consider them governed every one by his own law: for in the condition of men that have no other law but their own appetites, there can be no general rule of good and evil actions. But in a Commonwealth this measure is false: not the appetite of private men, but the law, which is the will and appetite of the state, is the measure. And yet is this doctrine still practised, and men judge the goodness or wickedness of their own and of other men’s actions, and of the actions of the Commonwealth itself, by their own passions; and no man calleth good or evil but that which is so in his own eyes, without any regard at all to the public laws. (Lev., 46:32)

Hobbes’s well-known rejection of the doctrine of “free decision” (liberum arbitrium) stems from his very understanding of the will itself. Forever impelled by antecedent and inscrutable causes, the will in Hobbes defines human agency as compulsive and a-rational, no matter how sophisticated the individual’s conscious (and seemingly rational) calculations may be. Conceived as sheer appetition, the will thus stands to be opposed by an equally opaque and inarticulate notion of sovereign power. Wholly self-certifying, devoid of meaning, and hence immune to rational evaluation and potential falsification, power here has been pared down to the occasionalist notion of the particular “decision” or “last appetite” wherein it manifests itself.17

It is the sheer irrationality and inarticulacy of the will—and the consequent creation “of political hedonism”—that constitutes Hobbes’s most significant legacy. Ultimately, his view of man as “the victim of solipsism, . . . an individual substantia distinguished by incommunicability” not only shapes all positive law but at times even threatens to vitiate Hobbes’s idea of natural law.18 For what sanctions law is not its intrinsic and universal rationality but its efficacy and enforceability: “There is . . . requisite, not only a declaration of law, but also sufficient signs of the author and authority.” For “law in general is not counsel, but command” (Lev., 26:16; 26:2). To be sure, Hobbes will qualify these particularly blunt statements elsewhere in the Leviathan by invoking God as the source of “natural law” and “reason.”19 Yet this paradox only foreshadows Hobbes’s vexing bequest to modern political thought, viz., to have “sharply divided the work of reason seen as deliberation from the operation of the will seen as decision.”20 As a result of this division, state interest is the highest (perhaps the only) conceptual framework from which specific arguments and injunctions can derive force and legitimacy. Hobbes’s Leviathan may well be the first time that the notion of a highest good is no longer being couched in transcendent, metaphysical terms but solely in the language of interests—itself a secular variant or extension of a voluntarist and determinist model of agency whose origins arguably predate Hobbes by at least three centuries.

Still, any account of the sort just offered risks lopsidedness insofar as it leaves unaddressed the relationship of the will to natural law, which (in Hobbes’s account of it) appears to embody a certain rationality after all. The appeal to nature as a timeless source of rationality was, in any event, central to the undertaking of his contemporaries, Hugo Grotius and Samuel von Pufendorf. By putting the ancient concept of natural law on a new footing, they sought to provide “a rational terrain d’entente” and a “basis for rational agreement” in a world devastated by prolonged confessional strife.21 Yet to argue that for Hobbes “laws of nature are always obligatory” and that they can be equated with “Natural Reason . . . ‘written in every man’s own heart’” is hardly persuasive.22 For if that was indeed the case—and if Hobbes’s idea of natural law could be shown to comprise a set of distinct propositions or certitudes grounded in “conscience”—then his entire doctrine of the state’s absolute and peremptory authority over its subjects would seem rather uncalled for. Yet Hobbes is fully aware of the ways in which voluntarism renders the self irrational, intractable, and terminally opaque to other minds. As a result, any appeal to “conscience,” even where it is proposed as the source for the subject’s assent to the will of the sovereign and the law, proves unjustifiable on logical grounds and unacceptable on political grounds: “As the judgment, so also the Conscience may be erroneous.” Framing the question in exclusively epistemological terms, Hobbes views conscience as nothing more than self-awareness or “consciousness,” and he denies it any metaphysical authority or certitude. If in the past people “gave . . . their opinions also that reverenced name of conscience,” the latter word for Hobbes reflects either an instance of bad faith or of self-delusion. In the realm of private life, there is only “opinion” (Lev., 7:4), and only “the law is the public conscience” (Lev., 29:7). Consequently, “Hobbes does not so much deny personal revelation as bar it from any public use.”23 So as to avoid reintroducing inner states and certitudes as the arbiters of what is to count as rational, Hobbes takes extra care to disaggregate conscience or “private judgments” from reason. Hence, as Michael Oakeshott remarks, Hobbes “does not normally speak of reason, the divine illumination of the mind that unites man with God; he speaks of reasoning.” The point is echoed by Reinhard Koselleck, who notes that Hobbes’s “distinction between conscience and action . . . allowed the substance of an act to be separated from the act itself—the necessary premise of a formal concept of law.”24

The operative concept of reason and natural law found in the Leviathan never stipulates any normative or absolute contents: “LAW OF NATURE (lex naturalis) is a precept or general rule, found out by reason, by which a man is forbidden to do that which is destructive of his life or taketh away the means of preserving the same, and to omit that by which he thinketh it may be best preserved” (Lev., 14:3). Hobbes’s arguments in this regard take to its logical conclusion a line of thought influentially developed by Grotius for whom natural law (and the concept of individual rights derived from it) curiously vacillates between an Aristotelian, right reason model and an Occamite voluntarism. The latter position, already prevalent in Grotius and the only framework for Hobbes’s notion of sovereignty, shines through in Grotius’s remark that “even the Law of Nature itself, . . . may be justly ascribed to God, because it was his Pleasure that these Principles should be in us.” Grotius’s often critical editor, Jean Barbeyrac (whose 1715 French translation of De Iure Belli ac Pacis was the basis for the first English version, published in 1738), takes Grotius here to be specifically “talking of Divine Voluntary Law . . . or of that, which, being in its own Nature indifferent, becomes just or unjust, because GOD has commanded or forbidden it.”25 In fact, Grotius seems confused, even erratic on this crucial point: whether natural law flows from the intrinsic and eternal order of things, or whether its authority hinges on the exegetical and rhetorical effectiveness with which individuals and groups ascribe it to a divine origin. Thus he will at times claim that “the Law of Nature is so unalterable, that God himself cannot change it” (1:155), and elsewhere that “the Mother of Natural Law is human Nature itself” (1:93). As regards the former, seemingly Scholastic claim, Jerome Schneewind points out that Grotius’s affirmation “is not decisive unless being good is equivalent to, or entails, being obligatory,” and on that question Grotius time and again punts.26 Conversely, the second, manifestly anthropocentric view of divine reason has been supplanted by a hypostatized, immutable human nature of the kind associated with Grotius’s Renaissance teachers. Yet he also realizes that human institutions (“often changed, and different in different Places” [1:107]) may often prohibit what natural law seemingly allows or fail to enforce what it commands, such that “right” often “signifies merely that which is just, and that too rather in a negative than a positive Sense. So that the Right of War is properly that which may be done without Injustice” (1:136). As Grotius’s opening discussion proceeds, natural law is frequently positioned equivocally vis-à-vis “the Word Right . . . which relates directly to the Person” (1:138), with the result that the very notion of lex naturalis takes on an increasingly anthropomorphic and constructed quality: “Natural Law does not only respect such Things as depend not upon Human Will, but also many Things which are consequent to some act of that Will. Thus, Property for Instance” (1:154). Among Grotius’s more significant bequests to Hobbes is his distinction between natural law and divine voluntary law. The latter supposes that divine command establishes what is to count as rational, good, and just, and in so doing seems to license an analogous command ethic in the finite political realm. By contrast, the idea of a natural law inherent in the structure of the cosmos seems increasingly distant, opaque, and Aristotelian, a point borne out by the rhetorical comportment of De Iure Belli ac Pacis. Bulging with thousands of references to classical Roman and Greek thought (many of them scarcely pertaining to the point in question), the work’s parade of classical learning seems rather symptomatic of its author’s dawning awareness and unease regarding the essential modernity of his position.27

No such compunctions or anxieties plague Hobbes, of course, who no longer operates within a Renaissance humanist framework but, instead, emulates the impersonal methods of Baconian science and a model of efficient causation pioneered by modern physics. As regards questions of (natural) right and the sources of human obligation, Hobbes proceeds analytically, whereas Grotius still proceeds from authority. Thus he distinguishes sharply between notions of wrong (“injury”) and violation of property (“damage”), such that a servant refusing his master’s command to give alms to a beggar in the street is said to “injure” his master by not honoring the (legal) covenant to obey the latter’s orders, while concurrently causing “damage” to the beggar by depriving him of property. As has been noted, this view creates a potentially insoluble problem for Hobbes inasmuch as his Leviathan sees the individual both covenanted to the sovereign and to the persona ficta of the state. For to suggest that “Robbery and Violence, are Injuries to the Person of the Common-wealth” (Lev., 15:12) implies that in some instances it is not the sovereign who determines the meaning of such acts.28 Moreover, and for our purposes most importantly, Hobbes implicitly rejects the notion of a covenant that relates individuals to one another as ethical beings, opting instead to restrict interpersonal obligation only to what has been legally enumerated.

In confining the meaning of natural law to the intellectual skills of the individual seeking to legitimate an inherently self-interested (“prudent”) course of action, Hobbes’s text encourages the conclusion, recently drawn by John Deigh, that natural law is consubstantial neither with “reason” nor with “human nature.” It acquires meaning only by virtue of definitions that invariably arise from (and are legitimated by) the individual’s, and especially the sovereign’s, appeal to (or manipulation of) the prevailing political and discursive conditions. Given his view of consciousness as a historically specific product determined by the aggregate force of political agents and institutions, Hobbes’s appeal to natural law can become an effective part of his intellectual armature only against the backdrop of a latent “state of exception” or, simply, “warre” said to circumscribe all political reasoning. It is a state bound to resurface if ever covenants should no longer be honored and appeals to natural law be contested outright. Both as regards its rationality and force, in other words, natural law no longer reflects a realist (Aristotelian) framework but, instead, exists only by virtue of ascription.29 It does not mean anything per se but only serves as a mute and ineffable origin, the appeal to which licenses a variety of “principles” such as the fundamental one regarding that covenants must be honored. As John Milbank puts it, “natural law transcribes the sealed-off totality of nature, where eternal justice consists in the most invariable rules. These are not derived (as for Aquinas) from the inner tendencies of the Aristotelian practical reason towards the telos of the good, but rather from purely theoretical reflections on the necessity for every creature to ensure its own preservation.”30 Unsurprisingly, then, the voluntarist logic of Hobbesian thought also informs his basic concept of natural reason and natural law, thereby demonstrating yet again just how decisively reason has become estranged from nature. It does not suffice to posit (as Hobbes occasionally attempts) a homology of reason with the law of nature, quite simply because it is the principal business of finite, political reason to distill certain binding principles from that law. Hobbes’s familiar definition of “Reason . . . [as] nothing but reckoning (that is, adding and subtracting) of the consequences of general names agreed upon for the marking and signifying of our thoughts” (Lev., 5:2) rather bluntly underscores its pragmatic and denatured status.

This remarkable flattening out of human agency confronts us on almost every page of the Leviathan, such as in Hobbes’s contention that thought acquires meaning and coherence only insofar as it is “regulated by some desire and design . . . From desire ariseth the thought of some means we have seen produce the like of that which we aim at; and from the thought of that, the thought of means to that mean, and so continually, till we come to some beginning within our own power” (Lev., 3:3). The catalyst of all intellectual processes, including those instances where reason identifies a certain principle as (supposedly) licensed by the law of nature, is the will as desire—implacable, opaque, and wholly bereft of any framing vision of the good. There being “no natural harmony between the human and the universe,” Hobbes places unprecedented stress on the will’s restless, at times frantic quest for constructing a second nature—“a City of Man to be erected on the ruins of the City of God”:31

the felicity of this life consisteth not in the repose of a mind satisfied. For there is no such Finis ultimus (utmost aim) nor Summum Bonum (greatest good) as is spoken of in the books of the old moral philosophers . . . Felicity is a continual progress of the desire, from one object to another . . . I put for a general inclination of all mankind, a perpetual and restless desire of power after power, that ceaseth only in death. (Lev., 11:1, 2).

Leo Strauss’s passing remark that in Hobbes “death takes the place of the telos” impresses on us how utterly the very notion of final causes has been emptied of all meaning.32 Instead of being understood as the completion of a life and the point where its overall meaning and achievement can be articulated, death in Hobbes is but the cessation of a mechanistic and implacable desire; Georg Simmel had called this “the common idea of death as a life-ending cut, like the fates [Parzen-Vorstellung des Todes], with a more organic conceptualization in which death is understood as a shaping moment of the continual course of life from its beginning.”33 All but synonymous with the will, and just as enigmatic and implacable in its manifestations, such a model of desire also explains why Hobbes should regard all political association and covenants as infinitely precarious, no matter how elaborately rationalized they may be. Arguably, no one before Hobbes had stated the usurpation of the intellect by the will quite as bluntly as that. Whatever role the intellect may yet play in Hobbes’s conception of the individual has been pared down to the computation of cost-benefit and means-end ratios; and at least one consequence of that contraction now stands to be considered.

Arguably the most conspicuous casualty associated with the rise of a secular and voluntarist model of agency is that of “personhood” or (as Coleridge was to term it later) “Personëity.”34 That is, the idea of the individual as centered on a rich, unique, and dynamic spectrum of intellectual and affective dispositions and states—and their experience as both generative and transformative of the very idea of the self as a person—has all but vanished. Both in the Elements of Law and the Leviathan, this disappearance is reflected by the sharp divide between “the person naturall” and a “civil” and “artificial” person or “person in law.” What Koselleck describes as Hobbes’s fracturing of man “into private and public halves” also explains why in the Leviathan Hobbes consistently appeals to a Roman and emphatically pre-Christian conception of personhood while ignoring its powerful revision and deepening in the writings of the Cappadocian fathers, Tertullian, Augustine, and Boethius.35 With noticeable satisfaction Hobbes thus remarks on the supposed shift from the Greek “prosopon, which signifies the face,” to the Latin “persona . . . [which] signifies the disguise or outward appearance of a man, counterfeited on the stage,” and from there to “any representer of speech and action.” Given the overall thrust of his political philosophy, of course, it does not surprise to find Hobbes so elated at the apparent disappearance of psychological depth and individuation that this etymological shift betokens. In his customary, apodictic style, he thus concludes that “a person is the same that an actor is, both on the stage and in common conversation” (Lev., 16:3). What renders such a historical genealogy appealing to Hobbes is the seeming shift away from divine plenitude to the strictly outward “mask” of the finite human being. Hobbes’s argument here seeks to capitalize on the supposedly diminished aura of prosōpon (“face”). In its Old Testament usage, frequently embedded in a propositional, genitive construction, prosōpon denotes the highest source of meaning and authenticity: thus, ἀπὸ προσώπου κυρίου τοῦ θεοῦ (Gen. 3:8; Lat. Abscondit se Adam et uxor eius a facie Domini Dei / “turned away from the face of God”). It bears pointing out that the Old Testament in particular seems to support Hobbes’s notion of a shift from the authenticity of the divine “face” to the constructed and impersonal logic of roles and masks. For in the Septuagint in particular God’s face is frequently conceived as a presence that finite human beings cannot endure and from which, consequently, they will turn away: thus, καὶ ἔφυγον ἐκ προσώπου αὐτοῦ (1 Sam. 19:8; et fugerunt a facie eius / “and they fled from his face”).36

Having construed the authenticity of the “face” (prosōpon) as an overwhelming psychological burden and (under the heading of “conscience”) also as a political liability, Hobbes naturally welcomes the impersonality of the Latin persona. According to a (now discredited) etymology found in Boethius and still invoked by Aquinas (ST, I Q 29 A 3), the word is derived from the compound verb personare, “to sound through,” which had referred to the amplification of the actor’s voice by the funnel-shaped opening in the mask. Capitalizing on the analogous usages of persona on the stage and in courts of law—viz., as a “role,” or officium, to be fulfilled without regard for inward struggles, desires, and dispositions—Hobbes places quasi-Ciceronian stress on the relation between persona, mask, and official action. Thus persona signifies a politically or legally expedient fiction to be enacted rhetorically in ways that acknowledge and reinforce the objectives of the state. Mask, role, and office thus abstract from—indeed, positively disavow—the complex inner dynamics and teleological orientation of the “person.” Suspending the contingency and inscrutability of the “soul” (psychē/anima), the Roman, alternately legal, theatrical, or rhetorical understanding of persona allows Hobbes to construct a strictly public, quasi-behaviorist model of agency.

Such depersonalization clearly supports Hobbes’s underlying objective, viz., to confine all political relations to what can be expressed as a legal covenant and, in so doing, to ensure maximum enforceability for the sovereign’s decrees. No doubt, the point here is to cordon off the intractable and potentially divisive appeal by so many selves to “inner” (spiritual) certitudes and the kind of non-negotiable political action variously sanctioned by the Catholic magisterium, an Anglican episcopacy, Calvinist presbyters, and a wide and fluctuating spectrum of antinomian communities. Against such richly textured and obstinately entrenched notions of political and religious agency, Hobbes posits a self that strictly warrants consideration as the “representer” (sic!) of its own or someone else’s interests—that is, a self whose inner dispositions and commitments are simply irrelevant to the state. In both political and epistemological senses, the Leviathan recognizes the self solely as the author of “covenants.” By emphasizing the etymological conjunction (to which we shall attend again later) between author (auctor), authority (auctoritas), “action” (actus), and property, Hobbes construes all agency as staking a claim to some kind of virtual dominion or material ownership: “That which in speaking of goods and possessions is called an owner (and in Latin dominus, in Greek kurios), speaking of actions is called author. And as the right of possession is called dominion, so the right of doing any action is called AUTHORITY” (Lev., 16:4).

Ultimately, it is less that Hobbesian willing triumphs over the intellect than that Hobbes’s Leviathan stages the utter collapse of all “thinking” into a strictly outward, performative “representation” of volition. Resembling an early precursor of artificial intelligence, the Hobbesian intellect is merely calculative and as such secures its efficiency by suspending the entire philosophical vocabulary of normativity, evaluation, inner dispositions, contemplation, and ethical reflection. Without denying their reality within the life of any given individual, the Leviathan simply considers them something between a distraction and an encumbrance for its pragmatic objectives. Wholly incapable of hesitation, doubt, and revision, the Hobbesian performer of covenants appears substantially denuded of everything we associate with the category of a “person.” In light of our present-day intellectual legacies—including the aesthetic theories of Jena Romanticism and its eventual descendants in 1970s deconstruction—there is ample reason to acknowledge performativity, stagecraft, rhetoric, and the whole counterfeit world of the “mask” (persona) as integral features of personhood. At the same time, it would amount to a self-defeating or, rather, empty proposition to construe all appeal to inner states as either delusional or an instance of bad faith and, hence, to dismiss inspired action as a mere fiction and agency as sheer impersonation. Hobbes, however, comes very close to doing just that. For unlike other philosophers writing before him, Hobbes appears in a principled way uncurious about the myriad ways in which “person” comprises countless ambivalences, inner conflicts, and minute shifts and, consequently, poses profound interpretive challenges for other subjects within its social orbit.

Hobbes’s rigid voluntarism prevents him from distinguishing between the classificatory term of the “human being” and the singularity of personhood as first set forth in Boethius’s crucial definition of person as “an individual substance of rational nature.”37 As Robert Spaemann points out, substantia here renders the Greek ousia, which could just as plausibly have been rendered as essentia. For Boethius clearly means to suggest that this “‘rational nature’ exists as a being-in-itself” and, consequently, that it “cannot be displayed in full by any possible description. No description can replace naming. A person is someone, not something, not a mere instance of a kind of being that is indifferent to it.” Put differently, “personhood is a mode of existence, not a qualitative state.”38 Yet Hobbes, once again revealing the physical and mechanistic foundations of his psychological theory, accords reality and relevance for his political philosophy only to objects—that is, to entities that can be captured descriptively and that ultimately admit of an exhaustive definition. World for Hobbes means the sum total of all possible objects as the bearers of their inherent force and as arrayed in more or less antagonistic ways vis-à-vis each other. Gone is the Scholastic distinction between “intentionality” (nomen intentionalis) and that antecedent, unique reality of the living rational being (nomen rei) for which alone the world could ever become an interpretive, epistemological, and moral challenge.

For strategic purposes, it ought to be stressed here that the singular nature of the person is not to be taken as prima facie evidence of its incommensurability with other persons and, hence, of its irrationality. For where persons are concerned, singularity is not an epistemological proposition but an ontological reality. The person is unique not because I venture to ascribe that trait to each and every person as a quality, in the way that incommensurability and indivisibility are predicated of atoms by Leucippus and Democritus. Rather, “persons are singular in an unparalleled fashion . . . Their self-identification cannot occur solipsistically. It necessarily implies the existence of others and the possibility of being available to their knowledge.”39 By contrast, the Hobbesian individual is little more than the coefficient of legal constraints and inward compulsions, of outward force and inward motive. As such, it lacks all transcendence vis-à-vis its inner constitution. It merely is what it is. Yet precisely this axiom turns out to be deeply incoherent and involves Hobbes in an ongoing performative contradiction. Not only does Hobbes’s implicit denial of any qualitative divide between human and animal life cause us to stray into very dangerous moral space; but his basic reductionist account of selfhood as mechanical, embodied desire licenses another claim, soon to follow, to the effect that when all is said and done our conscious and rational awareness is but an epiphenomenon of subterranean drives or insensible impressions nesting in the recesses of our unconscious. That, at any rate, was the pessimistic implication readily seized by his successors, Mandeville, Hume, Schopenhauer, and Carl Schmitt among them.

The performative contradiction, meanwhile, is as follows: to develop the reductionist position concerning the will and to dismiss ethical accountability as something impossible by definition still means to have advanced a sophisticated rational claim and, hence, to have engaged in precisely the kind of meta-critical reasoning about consciousness that this claim itself asserts to be impossible. Taken as a comprehensive political argument, Hobbes’s Leviathan effectively aspires to reasoned uptake by individuals whose capacity for authentically rational behavior the book consistently disputes. Among Hobbes’s most acute early critics, Anthony Ashley Cooper, Earl of Shaftesbury, was quick to deploy his favorite argumentative mode of “raillery” against Hobbes and to muse how, in a world where “Force and Power . . . constitute Right” a philosopher might conceive any wish to articulate that very knowledge for the benefit of others: “whence is this Zeal in our behalf? What are We to You? . . . why all this Pains, why all this Danger on our account? Why not keep this Secret to Your-self? Of what advantage is it to You, to deliver us from the Cheat? . . . It is directly against your Interest to undeceive Us” (SC, 1:58). More recently, Robert Spaemann has flagged the paradox underlying all reductionism by stressing that to concede consciousness to an agent is never simply an attributive but an existential proposition; for to the extent that a person “has consciousness at all, he is aware that he is more than consciousness.”40 It will not do to construe all cognition mechanistically, viz., as the surface representation of some inscrutable desire, or as a tranquil cover draped over an unconscious and implacable force or will.

What Hobbes, Hume, Schopenhauer, and other radical epistemological skeptics fail to consider is this fundamental “self-differentiation of a human subject from everything that may be true about him.”41 At times, Hobbes comes close to grasping this contradiction, and hence struggles throughout his career to adjust the ratio of syllogistic reasoning and rhetorical argument in his philosophy. In his dedicatory epistle to De Cive, he insists that he wishes to persuade “by the firmness of rationes and not by any outward display of oratio [neque specie orationis, sed firmitudine rationum].” Yet to proceed in that manner is to reintroduce the “dictates of right reason” (dictamina rectae rationis) as a condition of uptake, even as the argument in question takes for its point of departure the lack or, at the very least, the unreliability of right reason in matters of (political) argument.42 Hobbes’s refusal to think through this tension between the propositional and performative dimensions of his political theory is a consequence of his startlingly impoverished concept of the human person. In part because of his vehement rejection of Aristotelian and Scholastic thought or, at least, of any dialectical engagement with that tradition, Hobbes is unprepared to consider that the human person might be a self-subsisting reality, and hence not just another “category” (praedicamentum) or aggregation of generic traits such as could be indifferently ascribed to any variety of beings.

In a passing remark, Coleridge nicely flags the over-determined character of Hobbesian voluntarism when observing that “Hobbes repeatedly speaks of the will as compelled by certain causes where an accurate speaker would say impelled.”43 What has dropped out of view, then, is the idea of an inner life—of rational personhood as a reality antecedent to mere computation or “reckoning”—which is to say, the sheer possibility of consciousness operating in transformational and narrative, rather than reactive and mechanistic, fashion. We thus witness in Hobbes the determined expulsion of what the Aristotelian, Augustinian, and Thomistic traditions had variously understood as “soul” (anima) and as “thinking” in its various senses—viz., as “feeling,” as “contemplation,” and as potentially counterintuitive and transformative of the materials with which it is engaged. Were it not for that possibility of “transformation”—which no calculative model of thinking can ever approach—all thinking would remain forever a mere apperception of data and could logically never carry over into an awareness-of-self, not even a fictitious or impersonated one of the kind sanctioned by Hobbes’s own account. Not until the work of the late Coleridge, the writings of John Henry Newman, and the psychology of Franz Brentano do we find this fundamental blindspot in Hobbesian voluntarism fully exposed and analyzed. Meanwhile, the most salient point may well be that Hobbes’s powerful influence on most subsequent thinking about political community (rational or otherwise) involves his decommissioning the fullness and complexity of what philosophy before him had always taken to be a central category: that of the “person.” What remains—and what (mistakenly, I think) Hobbes thought was not only sufficient but preferable to limit himself to—is a strictly outward and voluntaristic notion of the self as the “actor” or “agent” performing covenants such as he deems advantageous in accordance with “motives” whose curious insistence the agent himself or herself remains forever unable to grasp, let alone articulate.

It would be a mistake, however, to assume that Hobbes’s notion of the will—blind, inarticulate, and compulsive—was the only one conceivable for his contemporaries. As we already saw, his conception of human agency was the result of momentous shifts within Scholastic theology as, early in the fourteenth century, Franciscan intellectuals begin to challenge key aspects of Dominican (Thomistic) thought. Without that background story, one might conclude (as has frequently happened) that the concept of a voluntarist and self-defined subject—the “punctual self” (Charles Taylor) observable in the political theories of Machiavelli, Hobbes, James Harrington, and Locke—might have leapt into existence ex nihilo, which supposition in turn might lead one to conclude (just as mistakenly) that the Aristotelian and Thomistic models of agency do not so much differ from these projects as they are simply unrelated to them. Such a view fails on two counts. First, it remains premised on a strictly voluntarist source of order, say of the kind that at times emerges from accounts of the divine will in William of Ockham, Nicholas of Autrecourt, Gabriel Biel, and later nominalists. Yet even the neo-Stoic projects of the early Enlightenment that seek to recover from the more dire implications of Hobbes’s secular voluntarism—viz., by situating the modern individual in a meliorist narrative of economic self-discipline and rational self-possession—still accept one of the Leviathan’s crucial premises. Thus the descendants of Hobbesian naturalism, which beginning with Hume, the late Edmund Burke, and all the way through Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Oswald Spengler, and Carl Schmitt takes on an increasingly pessimistic cast, yet also those Enlightenment thinkers committed to a progressive notion of civil society (Adam Ferguson, Adam Smith, James Steuart, Kant, Bentham, Mill) equally struggle with conceptualizing the will. They can only posit it as a non-cognitive and inarticulate force—to be either duly constrained or subjected to a painstaking disciplinary regimen of “improvement” for which writers from Locke and Kant to John Rawls and Jürgen Habermas have mobilized any variety of economic, legal, and affective tropes.

Needless to say, there has been a lively and ongoing debate about the plausibility of grounding modern, liberal-secular community in a social contract voluntarily entered into, in a cosmopolitan public sphere to be realized by deontological ethics, or as a deregulated, discursive space whose inhabitants (whatever their inner lives may dictate) will acknowledge one another in what Habermas apostrophizes as an “ideal speech situation.” As remains to be seen, one of modern liberalism’s most neuralgic points concerns the fact that the systems that it conjures up so as to contain and/or remediate the individual’s baser instincts do themselves require for their very implementation that the proposed therapy has already taken place and been successful. In positing the individual will as categorically beyond the realm of the intelligible—an atavistic, entrenched, and inscrutable force that can be neither demonstrated nor falsified—modern political philosophy in effect imitates it. Destined to terminate in a radically instinctual and implacable agency on the order of Schopenhauer’s will or Freud’s unconscious, modern voluntarism constitutes a petitio principii on a large scale. For voluntarism infers a wholly irrational and inscrutable source of energy simply because it finds its own strategies of containment and remediation persistently frustrated or to have failed outright. Having denuded the will of all intellectual substance and self-awareness, modernity unsurprisingly wrestles with what now proves at the very least an irrational and, quite possibly, an indemonstrable and ultimately empty notion. There is something circular and perilously imitative about sequestering the human person in an irrational and inarticulate will. For aside from precluding any independent verification or falsification, such a position can only get started as a retroactive inference drawn by modern reason, which now appears consumed with containing the will as its (putative) other.

In rather pointed form, Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer thus characterize the Enlightenment’s de-mythologizing fervor as “mythic fear turned radical.”44 The main fallacy of modern voluntarism thus involves its assumption that the will is wholly self-originating and self-certifying, and that its ostensibly psychological epigenesis can be captured by some epistemological procedure or method—such as Johann Gottlieb Fichte’s Tathandlung, Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Sprachspiel, John Austin’s “performative utterance,” or any variety of post-Freudian tropes. To sharpen the point: voluntarism as theory effectively imitates what it seeks to demonstrate about the self. Rejecting out of hand the apparent fact that all self-formation takes place in a deep and richly textured, social, historical, and affective space—and, hence, arises in response to a hermeneutic challenge rather than a methodological impasse—modern voluntarism and its numerous descendants have essentially foreclosed on the possibility of grasping the human being as an ethical reality, that is, as a “person.”

Incapable of appraising the self’s teleological orientation toward rational, supra-individual, and transcendent ends, medieval voluntarism and its secular descendants wax understandably anxious about how to defend against the spectral vision of a self that is nothing more than a quasi-kinetic and irrational speck of consciousness forever incapable of achieving enduring, rational self-awareness. Moreover, if the peculiar fort/da game that modern reason is playing with the will at times takes on paranoid overtones, this is the case because any rational method that identifies a primal and ineffable will as its core premise and antagonist also betrays confusion about the nature of concepts in general. What the theorists of modern autonomy fail to recognize is that to start out a conceptual claim on a (supposedly) non-conceptual basis is, in fact, quite impossible. Hegel exposed that fallacy in his account of “sense-certainty” early in the Phenomenology. To be sure, I am not imputing to the concept of the will some ideal and trans-historical (as it were Platonic) quality. Rather, following Hans Blumenberg, I also believe that “the continuity of history across the epochal threshold lies not in the permanence of ideal substances but rather in the inheritance of problems” (LMA, 48). Simply put: understanding the self means understanding its relations, its constitutive embeddedness and participation in the world. For the self cannot coherently be thought of as a bundle of transient impressions autonomously processed by an apperceptive punctum. Rather, it is above all person—that is, a being endowed with reason and, hence, intrinsically self-interpreting and at least potentially aware that its own place within the world hinges on its practical, symbolic, and discursive engagements, which present it with an ongoing interpretive challenge. To grasp the primacy of the “person” is to recognize that selfhood is prima facie not an epistemological category but a hermeneutic event. Yet to take that view—as Hobbes and his liberal descendants from Locke to Kant were no longer prepared to do—is to recognize that the will, too, is not some primal agency operating independent of consciousness, that it is not a concept but an embedded facet of the total person, and that it consequently partakes of a long, convoluted, and sometimes agonistic history of interpretation.

In the immediate aftermath of Hobbes, it was the Cambridge Platonists—particularly Ralph Cudworth (1617–1688)—who pointed out many of the biases and deficiencies of modern voluntarism. Responding to Hobbes’s 1654 letter “Of Liberty and Necessity,” Cudworth’s Treatise of Freewill (published only posthumously in 1838) offers a condensed version of arguments that also inform his 1678 True Intellectual System of the Universe, a work whose scope and ambition, as well as deeply critical view of modernity, calls to mind the intellectual Urtext of the Counter-Reformation, Cardinal Robert Bellarmine’s Disputationes (1581–1593). Yet there is nothing dogmatic about Cudworth, whose brand of Christian Platonism would undoubtedly have been perceived as worrisomely heterodox by the Catholic magisterium, and whose unparalleled linguistic and philological range made him a natural choice for Brian Walton’s implicitly ecumenical project of a “Poly-Glot Bible” (1654–1657). A graduate of Emmanuel College, Cambridge, master of Clare Hall and, subsequently, of Christ’s College, and from 1645 until his death Regius Professor of Hebrew, Cudworth spent much of his life critically engaging the determinist and empiricist turn that philosophy had taken with Hobbes, Gassendi, and Locke. This basic concern is manifest in all of his writings, though Cudworth takes pains to situate his modern antagonists within a long philosophical tradition that spans from the “Democritick” atomists through Lucretius to Ockham’s voluntarism and, eventually, to his contemporary Puritans, whose doctrinaire tendencies he had already criticized in a precariously timed sermon given to the House of Commons in 1647. In the Treatise of Freewill, Cudworth not only postulates “something ἐϕ ἡμιν, In nostra potestate, In our own power” and “self-active” per se, but he also marshals strong evidence that the opposing argument for the total extrinsic determinacy of all processes animate and inanimate would inevitably put an end to intellectual activity of any kind.45 Precisely this capacity of the will to elect a course of action, and thus to assent to and partially transcend the conditions and constraints with which it is prima facie presented defines the very essence of the intellect and, ultimately, of reason itself: “Rational beings, or human souls, can extend themselves further than necessary natures, or can act further than they suffer, . . . [and] are not necessarily determined by causes antecedent” (Treatise of Freewill, 14). Yet for this view to amount to more than a mere assertion it is crucial to overcome the Hobbesian scenario of a strictly reactive intellect by showing how it fails on its own terms. Cudworth does just that by arguing that the Hobbesian position ultimately makes it impossible to sustain the conceptual integrity of the very terms it purports to elucidate. A rigidly deterministic and mechanist (mono-causal) account of the will inexorably corrodes the broader semantic field of mind, consciousness, reason, deliberation, judgment, and a host of peripheral psychological concepts such as had ensured a nuanced and differentiated understanding of the inner life since Plato. If “mind” is to signify at all, Cudworth insists, it must be generative, just as the will as liberum arbitrium cannot be imagined as a merely indifferent faculty. For “it is very absurd to make active indifference blindly and fortuitously determining itself, that is, active irrationality and nonsense, to be the hegemonic and ruling principle in every man” (34).

What in true Plotinian terms Cudworth calls “an ever bubbling fountain in the centre of the soul, an elater or spring of motion” (28), reflects a fundamentally evaluative and incipiently normative orientation of the whole person toward a specific telos. A person’s identity and reality originate neither in some agnostic computational act nor in a contingent volitional spike as Hobbes had argued. For if that were to be the case, the faculty of the intellect would be marooned on a desert island of endless prevarication, just as “that which willeth in every man will perpetually will not only it knows not why, but also it knows not what.”46 Willing, Cudworth here implies, is inseparable from having a representation both of what is willed and of that for the sake of which it is being pursued. To be sure, that representation need not necessarily be entertained in fully conscious and transparent form, but it must at least be qualitatively distinct from the act of will itself. For only so is it possible for the subject of the will to have a sense of her or his own agency as continuous over time. Likely thinking of Ockham, Cudworth thus remarks on the problematic tendency of Scholastic nominalism to disaggregate things by proliferating distinctions and, in so doing, fragmenting the reality of the person into ostensibly unrelated and incommensurable acts of intellect and will: “to attribute the act of intellection and perception to the faculty of understanding, and acts of volition to the faculty of will, or to say that it is the understanding that understandeth, and the will that willeth” is tantamount to saying “that the faculty of walking walketh, and the faculty of speaking speaketh.” In short, it is to create “two supposita, two subsistent things, two agents, and two persons, in the soul . . . But all this while it is really the man or the soul that understands, and the man or the soul that wills, as it is the man that walks and the man that speaks” (25).

Numerous worrisome consequences arise from modernity’s fragmentation of the person. Above all, we perceive an erosion of key concepts indispensable for humanistic inquiry—all integral to evolving Platonic, Stoic, and Augustinian traditions. Such erosion threatens as soon as it is supposed that change can only ever be caused ab extra, that there is only one type (i.e., efficient) of causation, and that a cause can never partake of the order of mind but, instead, determines the latter’s movements in a strictly adventitious manner. Cudworth’s theological arguments in support of a universe in which there is at all times an element of contingency at work recall almost verbatim Stephen J. Gould’s thesis about “replaying life’s tape”—which is to say, finding that evolutionary history, if repeated from the very beginning, could never take the exact same course it did.47 In a dystopic vision that conjures up Nietzsche’s “eternal return” or, at a less exalted level, Harold Ramis’s 1993 movie Groundhog Day, Cudworth thus imagines how “after the conflagration of this earth, [God will] put the whole frame of this world again exactly in the very same posture that it was in at the beginning . . . [and that] it should continue or run out such another period of time as this world has lasted before, seven thousand years or more.” Then would “everything, every motion and action in it be the very same that had been in the former periodic revolution.” Both on theological and physical grounds, however, this scenario of a (post-lapsarian) world spooling out in the exact same way as before toward the appointed day of judgment strikes Cudworth as unacceptable. For it would suggest a God either cruelly indifferent to the possibility of improvement or incapable of effecting it. In fact, Cudworth insists, a world denuded of all “contingent liberty” would ultimately be meaningless (Treatise of Freewill, 9, 13).48 In the case of the widely misconstrued liberum arbitrium, Cudworth thus points out that when faced with seemingly “equiponderant” choices, the mind (unlike Jean Buridan’s ass facing two equidistant bales of hay and so supposedly doomed to starvation) is perfectly able “to cast in some grains into the scale . . . Here, therefore, is a sufficient cause which is not necessary, here is something changing itself, or acting upon itself” (15–16). For Cudworth, at any rate, it is just this spontaneous and creative dimension of human consciousness that alone makes it meaningful to speak of “mind” at all. For in the obverse scenario, which would find “our souls in a constant gaze or study, always spinning out a necessary thread or series of uninterrupted concatenate thoughts . . . [we] could never have any presence of mind, no attention to passing occasional occurrences, always thinking of something else, or having our wits running out a wool-gathering, and so be totally inapt for action” (27–28). Though Cudworth is taking his cue from Hobbes, his critique of the deterministic model of mind and the pervasive, deleterious consequences that he shows to be unwittingly produced by its naïve acceptance will be even more applicable in the case of Locke, Mandeville, and Hume—whose conceptions of the will qua “passion” now remain to be considered.

Yet Cudworth’s most valuable insight concerns the extent to which a methodologically self-conscious and hyper-rational modernity inadvertently produces deeply irrational outcomes. It does so by failing to notice that its reductionist understanding of all causation as “efficient,” its fragmentation of the person into ostensibly unrelated powers or faculties, and its conflation of action with sheer mechanical motion effectively erases much of Western philosophy’s conceptual legacy. If philosophy starts out from the premise of a blind, indeterminate, and compulsively reactive will, Cudworth argues,

then is all consideration and deliberation of the mind, all counsel and advice from others, all exhortation and persuasion, nay the faculty of reason and understanding itself, in a man, altogether useless, and to no purpose at all. Then can there be no habits either of virtue or of vice, that fluttering uncertainty and fortuitous indifference, which is supposed to be essential to this blind will, being utterly uncapable of either. Nor, after all, could this hypothesis salve the phænomena of commendation and blame, reward and punishment, praise and dispraise. (23)

What Cudworth is sketching here is the dystopia of a pervasive loss of conceptual histories and the intellectual orientation they afford. More recently, this very scenario has received two crucially different assessments (by Iris Murdoch, Alasdair MacIntyre, Stanley Cavell, and Charles Taylor, among others), and we need to clarify which of these accounts Cudworth here means to convey. Is it that the philosopher (primarily Hobbes) here being opposed “writes as if he lacked the concept of morality” and, hence, as someone who is de facto “cut off from a mode of application of the moral vocabulary”? And if so, does such a philosophy experience its particular modernity as an instance of conceptual loss and consequent moral inarticulacy and intellectual impoverishment? Put differently, does this portrayal of “a world in which the concept of morality is missing” amount to “a true portrayal of our world, or is it . . . a reflection of [a] blindness to what we still have?” Juxtaposed to the debate that Cora Diamond portrays MacIntyre and Cavell to be waging three centuries later, Cudworth’s critical perspective proves quite different; for his historical advantage is to recognize and seize the opportunity of articulating at the very moment of its occurrence a seismic shift in the conception of the human will and reason, and to deduce the incipient demise of what Coleridge would call “a responsible will” just as that process is gathering momentum. Unlike Gertrude Anscombe’s and Alasdair MacIntyre’s dispiriting ex post facto analysis of modern moral philosophy as a deeply incoherent and all but defunct enterprise, Cudworth’s claim is not “that we lack the kind of life within which such concepts as we need could be intelligibly applied.” Rather he is arguing that the incipient depletion of a nuanced conceptual framework such as enables us to articulate our inner life will, in due course, produce that scenario as its eventual (and by then seemingly inevitable) outcome. To be sure, it is well beyond Cudworth’s purview to forecast just when the loss of a rich conceptual framework will have wormed its way into the modern psyche to such an extent that it is no longer experienced as a loss at all—a point when the very notion of a rational, reflectively self-determining, and ethically responsible human being will have undergone a dramatic contraction. In any event, on Diamond’s persuasive reading, even an avowed modern Platonist like Iris Murdoch still holds that “the conceptual losses we have indeed suffered have not actually changed us into human beings limited to the interests and experiences and moral possibilities we can express in our depleted vocabulary.”49

In fact, it is just this palpable asymmetry between a bewildering spectrum of quotidian experience and conceptual resources too atrophied to permit rendering that experience intelligible which by the later eighteenth century furnishes abundant thematic prompts for the modern novel. Acknowledging that asymmetry, we have good reason to suspend, if not reject outright, modernity’s endorsement of a self-originating and inarticulate will. Modern secular agency, even (or, perhaps, especially) when advanced in highly sophisticated accounts such as, say, Kant’s critical philosophy, exemplifies rather than eschews the failure of Enlightenment liberalism to achieve a timely and comprehensive understanding of its own historicity and hermeneutic continuities. Readers of modern political and moral philosophy—from Hobbes forward to Locke, Kant, and the Victorians—would do well to recall Hans-Georg Gadamer’s reminder that “the prejudices of the individual, far more than his judgments, constitute the historical reality of his being.” Gadamer’s caveat that “the fore-meanings that determine my own understanding can go entirely unnoticed” is ignored as much by the overconfidence of Lutheran sola scriptura as by modern (secular) liberalism’s presumption that social meanings and frameworks may be created instantaneously and from whole cloth. For Gadamer, what “makes us deaf to what speaks to us in tradition” in the first place is a deep-seated and unreflected prejudice against the very idea of “tradition” itself.50 Lest tradition and what it may have to tell us be rendered unintelligible by its peremptory stigmatization, we should listen in on it again—not as hidebound devotees of the past but as open to its persistent calling, its unfathomable complexity, and its dynamic, steadily evolving contemporaneity.

1. For influential accounts of modernity as the emergence of the secular, bureaucratic, and institutionally embedded state—paralleled by the decline of ancient and medieval virtue ethics—see MacIntyre, esp. After Virtue and Whose Justice?; Pocock, Machiavellian Moment; Blumenberg, LMA; Giddens, Consequences; C. Taylor, Sources and Secular Age; and Arendt, Origins of Totalitarianism.

2. On the emergence of modern autonomous agency, see Schneewind, Invention, esp. 17–36.

3. Origins of Totalitarianism, 186. On Hobbes’s Leviathan as the culmination of the political consequences wrought by post-Reformation religious strife and its specter of religious hyper-pluralism—acknowledged by magisterial Protestantism no less than by Catholic Counter-Reformers—see Gregory, Unintended Reformation, 148–163.

4. Gillespie, Theological Origins, 225, 236; Schneewind also notes how Hobbes’s “psychology is intimately tied to his physics” (Invention, 84, 88f.); Strauss sees Hobbes fusing Epicurean materialism and Platonic idealism and conceiving of “a universe that is nothing but bodies and their aimless motions” (Natural Right and History, 172); for detailed accounts of Hobbes’s radical mechanism and his dispute with Boyle regarding the foundations of experimental science, see Shapin and Schaffer, Leviathan and the Air-Pump, and Gaukroger, Emergence, esp. 281–289 and 368–379.

5. On the complicated legacy of that axis for post-Hobbesian theories of the commonwealth, see Pocock, Machiavellian Moment, 406–422; see also Eisenach, “Hobbes on Church and State and Religion”; Koselleck, Critique and Crisis, 23–40; and Oakeshott, Hobbes on Civil Association, 50–58; Strauss remarks on the “essential ambiguity” of Hobbesian “power” as both “potentia, on the one hand, and . . . potestas (or jus dominium) on the other. It means both ‘physical’ and ‘legal’ power” (Natural Right and History, 194).

6. Ways of Judgment, 15.

7. Milbank, Theology, 3, 13.

8. On this point, see Schneewind’s discussion of Suarez and Grotius (Invention, 58–81) and their uneasy vacillation between a Thomistic, virtue-based, relational, and participatory account of created life in divine being, and the Franciscans’ (nominalist and proto-legalistic) understanding of right as moral self-governance of individuals seeking to compensate for their de facto abjection from God. See also Milbank’s distinction between a “theological natural rights tradition [that] discovered a self-sustaining world of pure power without virtue” and a “non-Christian Machiavellian tradition derived from Polybius [which] insisted that human power was a form of virtue” (Theology, 25). Undoubtedly accelerated by the Reformation, the diminishing role of the virtues in the first of Milbank’s senses can be measured by the collapsing belief in their inculcation by way of Aristotelian and Augustinian habitus. In Aristotle’s Politics, it is precisely “habit” (ēthos) that mediates between nature (physis) and reason (logos) as the three things “which make men good and excellent” (1332^a40); on this topic, see MacIntyre, After Virtue, 181–243 and Whose Justice? 103–145; C. Taylor, Secular Age, 112–136; Dupré, Passage, 15–29; and Herdt, Putting on Virtue, 23–45. For a different and somewhat perplexing account, see Skinner, who rather improbably reads Hobbes “essentially as a theorist of the virtues, whose civil science centres on the claim that the avoidance of the vices and the maintenance of the social virtues are indispensable to the preservation of peace” (Reason and Rhetoric, 11).

9. Sovereignty, 15–16; of significant influence on Murdoch is Simone Weil, whose discussion of “Human Personality” also stresses (and rejects) the voluntaristic understanding of that term in the modern era: “So far from its being his person, what is sacred in a human being is the impersonal in him . . . Impersonality is only reached by the practice of a form of attention which is rare in itself and impossible except in solitude” (Simone Weil Reader, 317–318).

10. Life of the Mind, 2:20, 37.

11. Quoted in Schneewind, Invention, 89; though without attribution, Hobbes’s position is restated almost verbatim in Schopenhauer’s 1839 Prize Essay, 14–17; for a provocative reading of Hobbes within a modern genealogy of skepticism, see Thorne, Dialectic, 183–208.

12. Oakeshott, Hobbes on Civil Association, 15.

13. Ibid., 21; Gaukroger, Emergence, 283. For Oakeshott, “Hobbes’s philosophy is, in all its parts, preeminently a philosophy of power precisely because philosophy is reasoning, reasoning the elucidation of mechanism, and mechanism essentially the combination, transfer, and resolution of forces. The end of philosophy itself is power—scientia propter potentiam” (Hobbes on Civil Association, 19). In his “Introduction to Leviathan” (1935) Oakeshott convincingly situates Hobbes in the tradition of nominalism, especially the “Scotist belief that the natural world is the creation ex nihilo of an omnipotent God, and that therefore categorical knowledge of its detail is not deducible but (if it exists) must be the product of observation. Characteristically adhering to the tradition, Hobbes says that the only thing we can know of God is his omnipotence” (ibid., 26–27n).

14. Gaukroger, Emergence, 287–289.

15. Skinner, Reason and Rhetoric, 299.

16. Lev., 15:1. The irrational thrust of Hobbesian voluntarism would eventually be drawn out by Carl Schmitt who notes how war, though not the aim, purpose, or content of politics, “is the leading presupposition which determines . . . human action and thinking” (Concept of the Political, 34); Schmitt, of course, was intensely aware of the way in which a modern, secular state might eschew “earlier exaggerations of the state . . . [and] its claim to possess the monopoly of the highest unity” (44) by defining itself as a pluralist order of nineteenth-century liberal and secular polities. For Schmitt, that is, war is not itself a rational calculation but, rather, the outer boundary (beyond which lies the realm of madness and slaughter) whose fragility forever threatens and, thus, implicitly conditions the rational deliberations of individuals and societies alike with an unspoken “. . . or else.” As Strauss notes, “Schmitt’s basic thesis is entirely dependent upon the polemic against liberalism,” and indeed Schmitt’s chiasmic inversion of Hobbes’s thinking is striking: “Whereas Hobbes in an unliberal world accomplishes the founding of liberalism, Schmitt in a liberal world undertakes the critique of liberalism.” “Notes on Carl Schmitt,” in Schmitt, Concept of the Political, 84, 92–93.

17. On Hobbes, see Arendt, Origins of Totalitarianism, 186–196, whose reading seems less beholden to Hobbes’s position than the more pessimistic accounts of Carl Schmitt, Leo Strauss, and Michael Oakeshott; echoing Oakeshott’s argument that Hobbes’s premise of a “world composed of individuae substantiae” ought to be traced to nominalist thought (Hobbes on Civil Association, 64), Gillespie has recently focused on Hobbes’s debt to medieval nominalism (Theological Origins, 207–254).

18. Strauss, Natural Right and History, 169; Oakeshott, Hobbes on Civil Association, 44.

19. “What interested [Hobbes] was not the substance of laws but their function as warrants of peace. Their legality did not lie in their substantive qualification but in their source alone, . . . the fact that they expressed the will of the sovereign power” (Koselleck, Critique and Crisis, 35); on this issue, see Lev., esp. Chapters 31–33; on Hobbes’s religious thought, see Gillespie, Theological Origins, 246–253; on the command-logic of law in Leviathan, see Oakeshott, Hobbes on Civil Association, 44–47.

20. McCabe, On Aquinas, 85.

21. C. Taylor, Secular Age, 127.

22. Hoekstra, “Hobbes on Law, Nature, and Reason,” 112, 118; more plausibly, Schneewind maintains that “Hobbes does not think that each individual is to be an interpreter of the laws of nature” and that Hobbes specifically “den[ies] that we can appeal to natural law in order to criticize positive law” (Invention, 93).

23. Schneewind, Invention, 98; see also Koselleck, who remarks on Hobbes’s quest for an “extra-political, supra-partisan position . . . Unlike his contemporaries, [Hobbes] did not argue from the inside outwards but the reverse, from the outside in” (Critique and Crisis, 26, 29–30).

24. Oakeshott, Hobbes on Civil Association, 27; Koselleck, Critique and Crisis, 36.

25. Grotius, Rights, 1:90n, 91; henceforth quoted parenthetically.

26. Quoting Barbeyrac, Schneewind notes that “if [as Grotius suggests] rules impose obligation independently of the will of God, then it is not clear why God’s will must be invoked at all” (Invention, 74–75).

27. With evident approval, Grotius quotes Anaxarchus, by way of Plutarch: “that GOD does not will a Thing because it is just; but it is just, that is, it lays one under an indispensible obligation, because GOD wills it” (1:164).

28. Runciman notes that on Hobbes’s “account, the victim of violence cannot remit his injury precisely because he has suffered none, having no covenant with his assailant.” For Hobbes to stipulate that “there is nonetheless injury done to the person of the commonwealth) . . . now makes no sense, for it suggests that each subject has a covenant with the commonwealth itself, which is then master, and the subject servant. This is impossible, because the person of the commonwealth speaks only through its sovereign representative, whom Hobbes is adamant cannot contract with a subject, and without whom, he is equally adamant, there is no person of the commonwealth with whom to contract” (Pluralism, 19).

29. As John Deigh remarks in his controversial article, Hobbes may have “failed to see that the real theorems of ethics were propositions about which principles are laws of nature and not the laws themselves.” Alternatively, Hobbes may simply have been “speaking loosely . . . because for him proving that a principle is a law of nature is as good as proving the principle itself . . . Unfortunately, a problem of circularity arises if the only definition from which the principle follows is the definition of a law of nature. For the principle meets this definition only if it is found out by reason, yet it is supposed to qualify as a rule of reason because it follows from this definition” (“Reason and Ethics,” 45). For critical responses to Deigh, see Hoekstra (“Hobbes on Law, Nature, and Reason”) and Murphy (“Desire and Ethics in Hobbes’s Leviathan”). Strauss had already offered a convincing reading of Hobbes’s attempted “restoration of the moral principles of politics, i.e., of natural law, on the plane of Machiavelli’s ‘realism,’” which is in effect tantamount to “maintain[ing] the idea of natural law but to divorce it from the idea of man’s perfection” (Natural Right and History, 180).

30. Milbank, Theology, 10.

31. Strauss, Natural Right and History, 175.

32. Ibid., 181.

33. “Metaphysics of Death,” 75.

34. On the concept of “person,” see esp. the comprehensive entry Person in Historisches Wörterbuch der Philosophie. For a classical Thomistic statement on the category of “person,” in contradistinction (though not in opposition) to individual, see Maritain, Person and the Common Good; Clarke, Person & Being, esp. 25–42; Sokolowski, Phenomenology of the Human Person, 157–176; and Spaemann, Persons, 16–33. With good reason, the critique of modern, voluntarist conceptions of agency—framed as an epistemological problem and approached as a methodological rather than hermeneutic challenge—has often converged on the idea of the “person.” The result is a rather varied spectrum of counter-Enlightenment (though by no means irrational) strands of thought often loosely gathered under the heading of “Personalism.” For a fuller account of the ethics of “personalism” and the intricate evolution of the idea of person, see below, 504–534. For a thoughtful discussion of the notion of “person” within the broader phenomenon of modernity’s depleted moral vocabulary—a thesis richly argued by G. E. Anscombe, Cavell, MacIntyre, Murdoch, C. Taylor, and others—see Diamond, “Losing Your Concepts.”

35. Koselleck, Critique and Crisis, 37; on Hobbes’s varying usages of “person” and “persona,” see Tricaud, “Investigation,” which also takes up Hobbes’s reinterpretation of “person” in the context of Trinitarian thought; see also Runciman, Pluralism, 6–33.

36. Needless to say, the New Testament appears to reverse the Septuagint’s insistence on Yahweh’s “face” as an unknowable and unendurable plenitude; thus Acts 3:20 typologically links the aura of God’s face to the Christ’s supremely realized personhood: ut cum venerint tempora refrigerii a conspectu Domini [ἀπὸ προσώπου τοῦ κυρίου] et miserit eum qui praedicatus est vobis Iesum Christum / “That when the times of refreshment shall come from the presence of the Lord, and he shall send him who hath been preached unto you, Jesus Christ.” For a telling (if likely unwitting) echo of Hobbes’s anti-humanist construction of persona as pure artifice, mask, and role, see de Man’s “Autobiography as De-Facement.” Like Hobbes, de Man categorically reads acts of self-reference as performative self-deceptions, such that “the identity of autobiography is not only representational and cognitive but contractual, grounded not in tropes but in speech acts . . . Voice assumes mouth, eye, and finally face, a chain that is manifest in the etymology of the trope’s name, prosopon poien [sic], to confer a mask or a face” (71, 76). On Hobbes’s concept of persona, see Skinner, Reason and Rhetoric, 337–339.

37. Persona est definitio naturae rationabilis individua substantia. In Boethius, Contra Eutychen et Nestorium, 3; for a fuller discussion of Boethius and the idea of person in late antiquity—as well as the reception and inflection of that intellectual genealogy in the later Coleridge—see below, 535–543.

38. Spaemann, Persons, 28–29.

39. Ibid., 35.

40. Ibid., 10 (trans. modified). Ger.: Sobald er überhaupt Bewuβtsein hat, weiβ er, daβ er nicht nur Bewuβtsein ist” (Personen, 18).

41. Ibid., 14.

42. From the Latin edition of De Cive, quoted in Skinner, Reason and Rhetoric, 302.

43. Logic, 123; elsewhere, Coleridge reiterates the distinction between “absolute” and “conditional” necessity (OM, 8), and he specifically notes how the careless “use which Hobbes and his disciples made of the terms ‘Compulsion’ and ‘Obligation,’ till his antagonist, Bishop Bramhall, had de-synonymized them and thus enabled his readers to call into distinct consciousness the proper contradistinguishing character already implied in the words ‘Should’ and the conditional ‘Must,’ i.e. ‘I must do this, though I can, perhaps, far more easily and pleasurably—yet still I must if I will not forfeit my sole and proper claim to the name of man” (OM, 36–37); Coleridge’s often polemical and at times reductive accounts of Hobbes repeatedly center on the latter’s failure to maintain the distinction between compulsion and obligation and, thus, to elide the entire question of conscience, guilt, and a responsible will; see BL, 1:92–94 and LHP, I:213, 256 and II:542–549.

44. Dialectic, 16.

45. Treatise of Freewill, 1, 9.

46. Ibid., 23; as Cudworth here recalls, “Aristotle himself determines that βουλή, counsel, cannot be the first moving principle in the soul, because then we must consider, to consider, to consider infinitely” (ibid., 28).

47. Gould, Wonderful Life, 46–53.

48. For a fuller discussion of Cudworth, see Darwall, British Moralists, 109–148; Schneewind, Invention, 194–214; and E. Cassirer, Platonic Renaissance, esp. 42–85.

49. Diamond, “Losing Your Concepts,” 260, 261, 263.

50. Truth and Method, 278, 271–272. With varying emphasis and drawing on different methodologies, Charles Taylor, Alasdair MacIntyre, and Hans Blumenberg have all advanced similar arguments; see esp. Taylor, Sources, 3–52 and MacIntyre, Three Rival Versions, 149–215; for a thorough discussion of Gadamer’s conception of “tradition” (Überlieferung)—a term that also connotes aspects of “transmission” and “translation”—see Auerochs, “Gadamer über Tradition.”