Abstract
Although Husserl never engaged with Hobbes’ thinking, this essay explores the intriguing contrasts and differences between Husserl’s and Hobbes’ accounts of perception, imagination, judgment, knowledge, and metaphysics. Even if Husserl never developed a political philosophy, Husserl’s metaphysics of knowledge can be put into service of a more classical conception of citizenship in contrast to Hobbes’ view of the Leviathan.
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Notes
- 1.
Hobbes’s use of the term “to read” in this context is noteworthy. It will recur in my citations. I will quote from this edition but will modernize the spelling.
- 2.
Hobbes also appeals to the Delphic motto in his introduction to Leviathan: “Nosce teipsum, Read thy self” (1996, p. 10).
- 3.
I would like to note the similarity between Hobbes’s notion of this small displacement that he calls endeavour and Derrida’s notion of différance.
- 4.
I am grateful to James Hart for bringing this passage to my attention. See his book, Who One Is (Hart 2009, vol. 1, p. 61, n. 8). Part IV is entitled, Physica, sive de naturae phanomenis, Physics, or on the phenomena of nature. The passage reads: “Phaenomenōn autem omnium, quae prope nos existunt, id ipsum to phainesthai est admirabilissimum, nimirum, in corporibus naturalibus alia omnium fere rerum, alia nullarum in seipsis exemplaria habere.” The translation in the text is my own. The passage is translated in J. C. A. Gaskin’s edition of The Elements of Law: Human Nature and De Corpore Politico (Hobbes 1994, p. 213). My criticism of Hobbes is analogous to Augustine’s critique of Democritus and Lucretius in §31 of his letter to Dioscorus (Letter 118).
- 5.
The title of §24 is, “Das Prinzip aller Prinzipien.”
- 6.
Latin text: “Adeo ut si phaenomena principia sint cognoscendi caetera, sensionem cognoscendi ipsa principia principium esse, scientiamque omnem ab ea derivari dicendum est, et ad causarum eius investigationem ab alio phaenomeno, praeter eam ipsam, initium sumi non posse.”
- 7.
We might note how strongly Hobbes substantializes appearances when he speaks of a “thing merely phantastical.”
- 8.
Hobbes seems to imply that the fancy that occurs in us is like the image that occurs in a mirror.
- 9.
In a footnote in Erste Philosophie, Husserl (1965, p. 151) mentions Hobbes and says that both he and Locke make the mistake of considering the perceived object as a complex of sensory data instead of seeing it as the substrate for its features. In the main text on this page he is discussing Berkeley, who, he says, fails to recognize that Dingbewusstsein must be seen as Einheitsbewusstsein and that the perceived thing is a synthetic identity in a manifold of presentations. Each of the thing’s features, furthermore, such as the color or shape, is itself an identity in a manifold. Husserl observes in the footnote that the philosophical failure to recognize the identity of things seems “ineradicable, unausrottbar.”
- 10.
Hobbes claims that statues do not resemble things; rather, they resemble images in the brain of the person who makes them. In discussing statues and idols, he says, “And these are also called images, not for the resemblance of any corporeal thing, but for the resemblance of some phantastical inhabitants of the brain of the maker” (1996, p. 448).
- 11.
Hobbes’s failure to distinguish different kinds of intentionality is especially obvious in regard to afterimages. He considers them a kind of imagination, but they clearly are different.
- 12.
Ibid., p. 19. On Hobbes’s philosophy of language, see the valuable book: Pettit, P 2008, Made with Words: Hobbes on Language, Mind, and Politics.
- 13.
Ibid., ch. 5, p. 32.
- 14.
For the following definitions, see Hobbes 1996, p. 41. I will discuss only hope, despair, anger, and courage, but one could perform similar operations on many of the definitions Hobbes gives in this chapter.
- 15.
On the threat to human freedom in Hobbes’s theory, see Hobbes and Republican Liberty (Skinner 2008, pp. 211–216).
- 16.
Thomas Prufer gives a highly compressed digest of Hobbes’s political theory, under the heading, “Hobbes’s sovereign teaching.” The title is ambiguous; it can refer to both Hobbes’s teaching about sovereignty and his teaching as being intellectually sovereign, that is, as ruling over minds. In a note to this section Prufer says that his major point “began to become clear to me through a remark of Francis Slade …: ‘For Hobbes, friendship is terrible’.” See Recapitulations: Essays in Philosophy (Prufer 1993, p. 25). Without Hobbes’s instruction, we are left in a standoff between tyranny and tyrannicide: “Tyranny and tyrannicide are left facing each other unless both sovereign and subject are ruled by Hobbes’s teaching. The book Leviathan is the mortal god, the knowledge of good and evil” (Prufer 1993, p. 26).
References
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Sokolowski, R. (2015). Hobbes and Husserl. In: Bloechl, J., de Warren, N. (eds) Phenomenology in a New Key: Between Analysis and History. Contributions To Phenomenology, vol 72. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-02018-1_4
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