2.1 Hobbes’s Doctrine of Necessity and Existence
Thomas Hobbes flipped over the theory of natural law that had prevailed in Europe until the early seventeenth century by means of his ‘doctrine of necessity’. Utilizing natural rights, Hobbes’s novelty delivered a powerful theory whose meaning derived from his instrumental use of the principles of necessity.Footnote 1 This and the next chapters describe the main features of that doctrine and its impact on Hobbes’s political philosophy, particularly in Leviathan.Footnote 2
The political language of ‘necessity’, or in the words of its most radical exponent, ‘the Doctrine of Necessity’, presupposes the philosophical method of determinism. By the mid-seventeenth century, the doctrine was common among the promoters of civil religion and the new science to explain rationally the foundation and causes of (political) things in the world. ‘Necessity’ was linked to faith in that the design or constitution of the world was conceived to have been decreed by God. Furthermore, the will of a human being was regarded as necessitated as opposed to free. As a moral and philosophical principle, ‘necessity’ emphasizes the (physical) body and downplays the spirit. Politically, what is necessary is by definition expedient. These terms are in fact synonymous to the extent that justice is implied in neither. In a system of natural law such as that of Hobbes, who attributes to each individual ‘a Right to everything’, natural rights are literally emptied of meaning. Instead, when one acts or appropriates things by necessity, this is always done justly.Footnote 3 In the state of nature, the importance of justice is thus confined to situations of necessity. Some years ago, Noel Malcolm termed the former description of ‘a right to everything’ an account of external rights, which presupposed ‘a sort of moral vacuum’, and the latter, about necessities of the internal standard, which is right (or just) because it is conducive to self-preservation.Footnote 4 This chapter argues that Malcolm’s internal/external distinction that is a characteristic of Hobbes responds to his adoption of necessitarianism as a philosophical method. That which is necessary constitutes the internal structure of normative events and things, while Hobbes represents the contingent with an idea of what is external to the constitutions of things and thus free and unnecessary.
At the outset ‘the doctrine of necessity’ could be any of the following in a theological mindset: a call for duty, an abandonment of supererogatory acts or a command to leave anything that is not necessary behind (Luke 10.42). For this reason, as a philosophical method ‘necessity’ seems to have operated as a valuable political staple in England around the time of the Civil Wars, balancing, in the name of science, the free will of ‘crypto Popish Arminianism’ against that of the ‘elect Brethren’ of Rebellious Puritanism.Footnote 5
‘Necessity’ appears as a ubiquitous key element in the contemporary theological, political, metaphysical, scientific and, with the revival of scepticism, moral discourse.Footnote 6 In extreme cases, such as in Hobbes’s determinism, what seemed to be contingent was also necessary. Everything thus was necessary, voluntary actions included, since every single instance of existence was established by ‘the decree of God’ – that is, by necessity.Footnote 7 The problem of contingency was thus transformed into ignorance about the necessary causes, and therefore acted as a boost to scientists’ endeavours.Footnote 8 Hobbes reasoned that there was always a necessary cause in any particular action. A necessary cause is at play, for example, if we are caught in a rain shower while walking outside: we had a necessary cause for going out and there was also a necessary cause for it to rain at that moment. We simply do not know the necessary causes of contingency, but they exist. ‘There is no such thing as freedom from necessity’, Hobbes stated. The necessary cause of a voluntary action was the will, thus voluntary actions were ‘necessitated’, by which he meant that they were effected by a necessary cause. The necessary cause ‘necessitated’ the voluntary action.Footnote 9 Hobbes’s understanding of freedom in his dispute with Bramhall was novel within his own work and is the solution he would retain in Leviathan and later.Footnote 10
Over the course of the past century or so scholars have reflected upon Hobbes’s accomplishment of the mechanization of scholastic political thought for the sake of civil authoritarian peace.Footnote 11 What were his intended political and theological purposes – whether royalism and episcopacy, independency and commonwealth or merely eirenic peace and security – remains a matter of debate.Footnote 12 It is clear, however, that an emphasis on the philosophy of ‘necessity’ leads to the de facto tendencies in government. Kinch Hoekstra uses nothing short of Hobbes’s entire political works as an example, arguing that when the sovereign exists de jure and has de facto power, subjects’ submission to sovereignty is necessary. Moreover, the requirement of de jure power may appear spontaneously: it is present when the people have consented to it, or in fact must necessarily consent to it due to circumstances such as that the de facto sovereign is keeping peace and order, and covering basic necessities.Footnote 13 It seems therefore that all other political choices are rendered meaningless if the rule of necessity is taken to its logical conclusion.Footnote 14 The greater the insistence on necessity, the more intense the de facto theory would result and vice versa.
Hobbes has been acclaimed for his radical reconstruction of the philosophy of natural law.Footnote 15 My argument in the following chapters is that it was due to his employment of the doctrine of necessity that Hobbes was able to reinvent the tradition of natural law. Several of his key political concepts – including ‘natural rights’, ‘Common-wealth’ and the ‘Christian commonwealth’ – draw meaning from his multifaceted understanding and intense application of the doctrine of necessity. Furthermore, his employment of a philosophy of necessity culminated in the wholesale adoption of the metaphysics of necessity in his masterpiece of political philosophy, Leviathan. I suggest that Hobbes was inspired, either directly or indirectly, by the Aristotelian and Neoplatonist Arabic philosopher, jurist and physician Avicenna (Ibn-Sīnā) (circa 970–1037) and his metaphysics of existence and necessity. I also contend that Hobbes appropriated it to the extent that it was useful for his project of separation of philosophy and theology and developed it further as he dovetailed it with mechanistic philosophy. The following chapters show that through the concentration on physical body that the philosophy of existence implies, natural necessities rather than natural rights acquire the real central meaning and foundation of Hobbes’s political philosophy.
The interest shown by both Thomas Hobbes and Robert Boyle in the work of the groundbreaking French mechanistic philosophers of necessity and contingency, René Descartes (1596–1650) and Pierre Gassendi (1592–1655), has been extensively researched.Footnote 16 Within that scholarship of the history of science, Margaret Osler has studied the indebtedness of French philosophers of nature to the Middle Ages voluntarist discourse on the absolute power of God, in particular that of William of Ockham (1285–1347), and of the version put forward by Duns Scotus that balanced absolute power against ordained power. Osler viewed Gassendi’s aim as being ‘to baptize’ Epicurean atomism, and that of Descartes as being to root the laws of nature in a divine source.Footnote 17
In the fourteenth century, ideas about the absolute and thus unpredictable will of God weakened confidence in the ability to arrive at demonstrated truth in natural philosophy and theology and thus propagated general doubt, which was, however, fruitful in terms of stimulating scientific inquiry.Footnote 18 Nevertheless, the entire debate on the power of God has a complex history that started in the thirteenth century with both theologians and lawyers deeply involved in it and touching on core themes of theology, ecclesiology and moral philosophy.Footnote 19 In their search for a firm foundation for the new knowledge, the seventeenth-century natural philosophers borrowed liberally from that rich source of texts.
2.1.1 A Yearning for Necessity
The project of the ‘patrons of necessity’, as Bishop Bramhall mockingly labelled them, was epistemological and metaphysical and, of course, political.Footnote 20 In the spring of 1645, Thomas Hobbes and John Bramhall had a philosophical discussion on human freedom at the invitation of the Marquess of Newcastle. Since they were all in exile due to the English troubles, the debate took place at the Marquess’s lodgings in Paris. A pair of excellent texts followed from it, starting with one by Bramhall (finished before the end of the summer of 1645), and a response by Hobbes, which were intended to remain private. After Bramhall’s rejoinder and partly due to a misunderstanding about the publication, a further series of publications ensued that, to put it mildly, abandoned the courteous tone of the first texts and the academic style of the first encounter.Footnote 21 Nicholas D. Jackson interprets the debate, through a strongly contextualist lens, as almost a Parisian skirmish in the war taking place in England, between an Arminian royalist (Bramhall) and an almost Puritan rebel (Hobbes).Footnote 22 But if we observed the different planes and philosophical schools in which the contents of Bramhall’s ‘Discourse’ and Hobbes’s treatise Of Liberty and Necessity were situated, the scientific momentum of the debate cannot be denied.Footnote 23 Hobbes’s discourse was about natural philosophy, epistemology and metaphysics, and in his ‘antipodean way’ also about theology, while Bramhall’s discussion of freedom and necessity focused on humanist moral theology and philosophy.Footnote 24 Bramhall’s position may be summarized in the sentence, ‘God leaves many things indifferent’.Footnote 25 In Hobbes’s first response to Bishop Bramhall, the treatise Of Liberty and Necessity, the philosopher noted that he had drawn his doctrine of necessity ‘from the nature of the things themselves’, but due to its speculative and complex character, he chose not to explain what he meant by that.Footnote 26
The moral question Bramhall and Hobbes discussed was directly linked to the problem of knowledge per se: how to reach or understand nature and what about its moral demands? Arguably, the important variations in the moral philosophy of the times, which become more radical as political strife intensified, were variations on an attempt to understand the divine plan for human beings with the scant help provided by sceptic natural reason. Was that divine plan still hidden in nature? As described by J. Sears McGee, the spiritualism of the Puritans in the early seventeenth century had threatened to make that style of religion concerned with natural law irrelevant to real life, while an excessively Calvinist emphasis on justification and predestination had brought about an alarming moral decay.Footnote 27 But, could a (wo)man be saved without having led a good life? According to Margaret Sampson, this was the question that troubled many devout citizens in England during that period.Footnote 28 Later in the century, the conclusion of an attentive and practical John Locke was clear enough:
I cannot see of what use the Doctrine of Election and Perseverance is unlesse it be to lead men into presumption and neglect of their dutys being once perswaded that they are in a state of grace, which is a state they are told they can not fall from.Footnote 29
Hobbes’s complex programme of moral philosophy and natural law ends with the hypothesis, tested against the empirical effects of civil war, that nature, and thus God, demands the establishment of a sovereign with supreme legislative authority.Footnote 30 The fact that, in Hobbes’s view, necessity was the guiding principle of Creation made this choice less repulsive. In Robert Boyle’s epistemological project, ‘nature’ would ultimately fall apart as an epistemological category around the 1660s, weakening greatly the entire project of necessity.Footnote 31
Debate about the influences in Hobbes’s natural philosophy is far from concluded. Since Frithiof Brandt’s groundbreaking Thomas Hobbes’ Mechanical Conception of Nature (1928) recent work continues the tradition by analysing Hobbes in relation to mechanical philosophers.Footnote 32 Gianni Paganini has emphasized Gassendi’s influence on Hobbes’s philosophy as well as, more generally, humanist inspiration, as discussed below.Footnote 33 Daniel Garber’s recent study on the context of Hobbes’s natural philosophy is also worth highlighting. Together with a comparison with Galileo, which underlines various similarities between a number of philosophers of that era, Garber restates the thesis as to the striking similarity between the natural philosophy of Descartes and that of Hobbes. Significantly, Garber notes that while Descartes views God as the foundation of the first law of nature, this foundation is conspicuously absent in Hobbes. The centrality of the principle of necessity in Hobbes’s philosophy of nature is implied, though not fully articulated, in Garber’s subsequent analysis, which shows how closely Spinoza follows Hobbes. By way of illustration, I will quote from one of Spinoza’s passages, also quoted by Garber, that revolves around law, its possible voluntarism and the ‘necessity of nature’ implied in the constitution of a thing, also taken to be a law:
The word law, taken without qualification, means, that according to which each individual, or all or some members of the same species, act in one and the same certain and determinate manner. This depends either on a necessity of nature or on a decision of men. A law which depends on a necessity of nature is one which follows necessarily from the very nature or definition of a thing.Footnote 34
The remainder of this chapter and the next chapter trace the centrality of the principle of necessity in Hobbes’s work to two particular influences: necessitarian tendencies both in French theology and Arabic philosophy. Remarkably, the language of necessity and of necessitarianism in the nature of the things that Hobbes employed in Of Liberty and Necessity took for granted the innovative nature of late thirteenth- and early fourteenth-century Parisian theology and philosophy. The following paragraphs briefly describe a branch of voluntarism of the thirteenth-century Parisian theologians and Avicenna’s necessitarianism and highlight its similarities with Hobbes’s.
2.1.2 Neoplatonist Necessary Existence of Avicenna
Ideas of necessary existence appear in the work of those Parisian theologians that sought to liberate civil and commercial life from religious rigorism and interference, while promoting a sort of theologians’ rule.Footnote 35 In the past century Etienne Gilson, Jean Paulus and José Gómez Caffarena – joined in recent decades by Jos Decorte and, in particular, by Pasquale Porro and Jules Janssens – have attributed these ideas to the influence of the Arabic philosopher Avicenna.Footnote 36 Janssens writes, in his study of the very influential Gallican theologian Henry of Ghent (1217–1293), that much research is needed to ascertain how the authors of the Latin West received Avicenna’s idea of necessity.Footnote 37 Aquinas, who was also inspired by Avicenna’s understanding of necessity and whose writings benefit from it on occasion, is a case in point.Footnote 38 Nevertheless, Aquinas’s theological project in the Summa theologiae concerns the promotion of interaction between spirit and body and the integration of worldly and divine activities. His reasoning begins with the goodness (divinity) of the created world. Furthermore, much of the Summa revaluates positively secular activities and also points to people’s dangerous tendency to become attached to them, as noted before.Footnote 39 After the appearance of evil, that attachment to the world may cause people to deviate from the first commandment: ‘You shall not have other gods before me’ (Exodus 20:3). Hence, in metaphysics, epistemology and practical morality Aquinas might be described as seeking to transcend the dualism of Neoplatonism. In other words, he employed Neoplatonist elements instrumentally but did not become a Neoplatonist.Footnote 40
To Henry of Ghent’s overwhelming influence as a theologian in Paris and beyond, one may add the fact that he is remembered by historians of natural law as the first author ever to devise the concept of a subjective natural right – a type of property right over one’s body – similar to the way in which the concept was to be understood later in modernity, in particular by Hobbes and Locke, as is analysed in the last chapter 12.Footnote 41 Henry’s very sophisticated metaphysics can be summarized in his theory as to things having three ways of being: (a) as pure essences, (b) in existence and (c) in the human mind. Henry viewed the pure essences as a sort of participation in a formal order in the divine mind and the essences in existence as the effect of God’s will. In an ingenious stroke of the pen, he accordingly combined a rationalist and a voluntarist vision of God – in effect analogous to God’s ordained and absolute power – that came close to sketching a dual conception of the world.Footnote 42 The doctrine of duality of essences as pure essences (esse essentia) and existing in the real world (esse existentia) was, as Henry also noted, originally Avicenna’s.Footnote 43 The esse essentia/esse existentia division produced by Avicenna offered an explanation of both the universal and the particular thing.Footnote 44
Pasquale Porro explains that Henri of Ghent is the Latin master that understood Avicenna in his own right in relation to the issue of the universal. First, there is the individual thing, the reality of the thing in existence. Then there is the universal, which Avicenna held to be a common definition in the mind. Lastly, there is nature, which is the essence of humanity expressed in a particular human being.Footnote 45 Thus, Avicenna writes ‘[t]he reality of such a thing exists either in concrete things, or in the soul, or absolutely, being common to both’.Footnote 46 In this ‘being common to both’ laid the secret of a novel conception of something akin to a universal. Neither Platonic exemplars nor Aristotelian universals, Avicenna’s division between esse essentia and esse existentia gave a certain consistency like a more robust entity to the general names:
The fact that the animal existing in the individual is a certain animal does not prevent animal inasmuch as it is animal … from existing in it. [This is] because, if this individual is a certain animal, then a certain animal exists. Hence, animal [in as much as it is animal] which is part of a certain animal exists.Footnote 47
Robert Wisnovsky describes thus Avicenna as a synthesizer. When he made distinct but co-implied ‘thing’ (essence) and ‘existent’, he was carrying out a compromise between different positions in the speculative theology (kalām) of his time (in turn also influenced by Greek philosophy), encompassing Ashʿarites and Māturidītes’ position that ‘a thing is an existent’, and Muʿtazilites and al-Fārābī’s that ‘a thing is a thing before it comes into being’.Footnote 48 In Avicenna’s thought, the worlds of ‘being’ (esse) and ‘existence’ (existentia) are separated and distinct but connected and concomitant.Footnote 49 In the physical world what exists is everything, the real and true being.Footnote 50 In the metaphysical reality what exists is the means of understanding the essences.Footnote 51
In the work of the voluntarist Henry of Ghent, the doctrine between the division of esse essentia and that of esse existentia seems to explain what he took to be a cosmological order composed of related essences (of natures) underlying the reality of what we see in the world – a ‘necessary’ order in effect that the empirical world tends to mirror.Footnote 52 Hence for sceptic natural lawyers ‘necessity’ determines much of the validity of natural law. Something X ought to be X-1, because it is in the nature of the thing – that is to say that it is so in the underlying order of essences, and accordingly necessary.
2.2 Necessitarian Metaphysics and (Human) Body in Avicenna and Hobbes
Key similarities can be seen between Avicenna and Hobbes in respect of the important method of necessity. In Hobbes’s work, these culminated in Leviathan. The extreme deterministic stance of both philosophers thwarts further thinking on and the development of a theory of moral freedom, and indeed of a foundational political theory of freedom.Footnote 53 In Avicenna’s thought, ‘necessary’ and ‘good’ appear to be linked – for Avicenna, God is no longer the ‘Prime Mover’ but rather the ‘Necessary Existent’.Footnote 54 Jack Macintosh has recently written about the currency of this idea in seventeenth-century thinkers.Footnote 55 Furthermore, at the beginning of the fifth chapter of the first book of his Metaphysics, Avicenna describes ‘the necessary’ as primary knowledge, almost like innate ideas, that enables further knowledge: ‘We say: the ideas of “the existent”, “the thing” and “the necessary” are impressed in the soul in a primary way, this impression not requiring better known things to bring it about.’ As to which is prior – ‘the possible’, ‘the impossible’ or ‘the necessary’ – Avicenna wrote:
Nonetheless, of these three, the one with the highest claim to be first conceived is the necessary. This is because the necessary points to the assuredness of existence, existence being better known than non-existence because existence is known in itself while, non-existence is, in some manner or another, known through existence.Footnote 56
Avicenna’s argument was that ‘whatever exists (other than God) was necessitated by another’.Footnote 57 As Michael E. Marmura explains, Avicenna viewed existence as a reality, a ‘brute fact’ from which his reasoning commenced. ‘Why is this thing here?’ he asked, the answer being that it is the cause that necessitates the thing, as in a cause-effect situation that goes backwards (the cause of the apple tree is the apple), and it must be outside its own nature.Footnote 58 Daniel D. De Haan has recently referred to this as ‘Avicenna’s existential necessitarian metaphysics’.Footnote 59 The similarity with this and Hobbes’s reasoning is evident; when in frustration about Bishop Bramhall’s and his disparate discourses Hobbes writes: ‘And where he saith, that it is ridiculous to say, the object of the sight is the cause of seeing, he showeth so clearly that he understandeth nothing at all of Natural Philosophy, that I am sorry I had the ill fortune to be engaged with him in a dispute of this kind.’Footnote 60
The subject matter of metaphysics is for Avicenna ‘the existent’ that is necessitated.Footnote 61 Thus it produced a sort of ultrarealist ontology that gives precedence in knowledge to what exists in the real world.Footnote 62 More importantly, it produces determinism in so far as the effect necessarily follows from the efficient cause, and, as argued by Catarina Belo, arises from the fact that Avicenna is using logic to argue a metaphysical point. If something exists, it is necessitated. If it is not necessitated, then it does not exist – otherwise, the principle of non-contradiction would be violated.Footnote 63
An example from Hobbes’s first response to Bramhall helps highlight again the similarity with Avicenna’s determinist metaphysics of existence and necessity:
That which I say necessitates and determinates every action, that his Lordship may no longer doubt of my meaning, is the sum of all those things which, being now existent, conduce and concur to the production of that action hereafter, whereof if any one thing now were wanting, the effect could not be produced. This concourse of causes, whereof every one is determined to be such as it is by a like concourse of former causes, may well be called (in respect they were all set and ordered by the eternal cause of all things, God Almighty) the decree of God.Footnote 64
Gianni Paganini has also described Hobbes’s redesign of metaphysics as being concerned only with what exists. Paganini thinks that by rejecting a ‘presumed “separate” existence of essences’, Hobbes was getting rid of the matter with which ‘the scholastics conjured up the existence of a “spiritual” kingdom’.Footnote 65 It is only logical that metaphysics and political philosophy would emerge very differently if the theology of ‘pure essences’ – its spiritual half – were to be put aside, and only a philosophy about the ‘essences in existence’ were considered. But Hobbes had a theological project of his own. His seventeenth-century conception of a ‘decree and plan of God’ that established the events that take place in the world may be as well compared with Henry of Ghent’s metaphysical order of the ‘nature of the thing’. In lieu of the latter’s conception of a rational order of creation that the existing creation mirrors, Hobbes lays down a decree and plan from which follows his deterministic confluence of necessary causes. It seems therefore that Hobbes endows thereby with religious or theological content his philosophical enterprise.Footnote 66
In his chronology of the writing of Leviathan, Noel Malcolm shows that in 1642–1643 Hobbes was engaged in the refutation of Thomas White’s Catholic natural philosophy and metaphysics, and in 1645 with Of Liberty and Necessity.Footnote 67 But the work that most occupied him, at least from 1642 onwards, was De Corpore, his treatise on physics, metaphysics and logic. Hobbes was grappling with its argument during the 1640s, and busy teaching mathematics to Prince Charles in France. Then he fell seriously ill in 1647, and in fact he wrote Leviathan between 1649 and 1651, in the middle of the production of De Corpore, which was finally published in 1655.Footnote 68 In a similar manner to the situation in respect of his natural philosophy and his politics, Hobbes’s source of inspiration in relation to metaphysics is still the subject of scholarly debate. His contemporary and friend, the poet Abraham Cowley pointed to his inspiration in Aristotelian, Roman and Arabic philosophy. In his poem ‘To Mr. Hobbes’, Cowley explains that the fields ploughed by the ancients, the ‘Stagirite’, the ‘Roman Eagle’ and ‘Mecha itself’ no longer offered (philosophical) nourishment. What was required by the times was to ‘break up tombs with sacrilegious hands’ and search for ‘treasures buried’.Footnote 69 A possible interpretation of Cowley’s poem is that instead of a complete new beginning, what was at issue was the pillaging of tradition.Footnote 70 Paganini argues in favour of Lorenzo Valla’s critical philology that ultimately rendered the word ‘essence’ superfluous, since essences did not have a separate existence, and were one with existence.Footnote 71 As I have shown above, ideas about ‘essences in existence’ and ‘essences separated from existence’ appeared in medieval Parisian theology and some of them had been extracted from the work of Avicenna. Hence the novelty of Hobbes (or the humanists before him) appears to be in how they selected and combined these ‘essences’. Hobbes certainly merged ‘thing’ and ‘body’ into one. In the Appendix to the Latin Leviathan, for instance, he wrote: ‘By “body” I now understand that thing of which it can truly be said that it really exists in itself, and also has some magnitude.’Footnote 72 At any rate, the resemblance between Hobbes’s metaphysics of necessity and existence and Henry of Ghent’s and Avicenna’s metaphysics is striking. While I am not arguing that this resemblance is complete, I contend that Hobbes’s metaphysics of necessity and existence is similar to Avicenna’s novel contribution in the way in which his reasoning starts with the fact of existence, and that the principle of causal necessity utilized by both is strikingly similar.
I would like to suggest that since the dualist Avicenna dealt separately and in the first place with the things existing in the material world, his philosophy of existence was useful to a committed physicalist like Hobbes- in the expression of Robert Pasnau. That is, someone for whom nothing is ‘nonphysical’.Footnote 73 There is a certain development concomitant to Hobbes’s choice of metaphysics of existence, his physicalism and the secularist and absolutist project. Avicenna’s dualism offered the new philosophers of nature studying the physical body a strictly physicalist metaphysics.Footnote 74 On this point it is worth quoting Avicenna at length on metaphysics:
Thus, in its own right, this science should be prior to all the [other] sciences; but from our point of view, it is posterior to all of them … As for the name of this science, it is [metaphysics,] “that which is after nature”. By “nature” is not meant the power which is a principle of motion and rest, but the totality of the things that come about through corporeal matter – [including the latter] power and accidents. For it has been said that “nature” is said of the natural body that has the nature, the natural body being the sensed body [along] with what belongs to it by way of properties and accidents. The meaning of “[that which] is after nature” [involves] a posteriority relative to us. For when we first observe existence and get to know its states, we observe this natural existence. As for that which this science, if considered in itself, deserves to be name, [this] is to speak of it as the science of what is “prior to nature,” because the matters investigated in this science are, in [terms of] essence and generality, prior to nature.Footnote 75
Thus, Avicenna viewed nature as all the bodies that exist and metaphysics meant ‘after physics’, according to human beings’ point of view, that is starting with what exists. For Avicenna, we humans observe first the existence of body, and from that observation, we may deduce the general principles of things and nature. Despite his Aristotelianism, Avicenna’s metaphysics was unrelated to the Aristotelian and scholastic idea of ‘transcending’ nature that Hobbes derided.Footnote 76 The latter found this point sufficiently relevant to political philosophy as to define it properly in Leviathan and to distinguish ‘a certain Philosophia prima on which all other philosophy ought to depend’, from the ‘Books of supernaturall philosophy’ of the scholastics. As Amos Bertolacci has noted, Avicenna’s metaphysics also sought to prove, in a secondary way, ‘the Necessary Existent’ (the Superior Being) that ‘has no cause’. But it is important to emphasize that Avicenna viewed the subject matter of metaphysics as primary ‘existence’, and not a divine necessary existent.Footnote 77
Dag Nikolaus Hasse has described Avicenna’s dualist epistemology, involving epistemology in two steps – rational abstraction from the physical thing that is in front of me as primary learning, followed by retrieving the understanding of the same thing as emanation from the supralunar separate intellect – as a useful antidote to scepticism. Avicenna was an optimist about the capacity of human reason to grasp things in that first step of observing existence unproblematically.Footnote 78 In fact, Avicenna regarded the first ‘benefit’ of his metaphysics of existence as being, in his own words, ‘to bestow certainty on the particular sciences’.Footnote 79 To remain within the bounds of Christianity, one needed only to dispose of the second step, and hence of Neoplatonic dualism, which involved, in Avicenna’s work, a separate intellect that was not God, but a supralunar giver of forms. The physicalist and the spiritualist aspects are thus set apart.
No attempt will be undertaken here of tracing the textual connections or sources from Avicenna to Hobbes. My purpose is rather to use the ideas of both philosophers to depict the capacity of ‘necessity’ to establish a metaphysical category that may inform religious, moral and political theory to a greater extent than has hitherto been regarded as possible in scholarly discourse. Since whatever exists is necessary in one way or another, and necessity is moreover self-evident, ‘necessity’ gives a sufficient metaphysical foundation to existence.
In its most pure forms, however, the paradox of the project of necessity is that philosophers were doing theology. Theirs was a theology marked by the non-involvement of God in the activities of the current world – a secularist theology if you will. The world that had emanated from God in Avicenna’s Neoplatonism tends towards perfection with the goal of reaching the supralunar intelligent beings.Footnote 80 In its Christian version, Hobbes’s ‘decree of God’ has also a similar metaphysical function but with more profound consequences.Footnote 81 God produces or creates the world, and continuing on a sort of autopilot, through ‘necessity’, things existing in the world follow God’s plan. And unless there are special revelations – which are hardly to be expected – human beings remain within the limits of natural reason in control of what happens on this side of the line. Hobbes’s project against free will might well have been concerned primarily with preventing ‘ecclesiastical promotion’ (i.e. intervention).Footnote 82 However, it is well buttressed by self-contained philosophical ideas about necessity that blur the spiritual aspect of free moral and political human decisions in the exposition of political philosophy, underlying, nevertheless a robust theological framework.
2.2.1 Hobbes’s Early Necessitarianism
Hobbes’s knowledge of necessitarianism was not acquired during his long sojourns in France in the 1630s and 1640s.Footnote 83 His Short Tract of First Principles from around 1632–1633 evidences that, as Karl Schuhmann also noted.Footnote 84 Ferdinand Tönnies described the tract as ‘an intermediate stage’ between Hobbes’s scholasticism acquired during his early training in Oxford and his later knowledge of mechanics and mathematics.Footnote 85 The tract in question deals with the philosophy of nature and mainly with optics. Significantly, Hobbes also experimented with the devising of moral concepts on the basis of strictly physical concepts in this tract. This was done by (ambiguously) prescinding from a spiritual soul in the explanation of understanding and by pushing Aristotle’s concepts in that direction. After a strictly physical explanation of the role of motion in understanding and sensing, Hobbes adds that ‘Good is to every thing, that which hath active power to attract it locally’. He then notes that this definition agrees with the way in which Aristotle defined ‘Good to be that, to which all things are moved’. Hobbes remarks that that ‘hath been metaphorically taken, but is properly true’. Finally, he describes ‘Malum to every thing is that which hath active power to repell it’ and ‘Badness’ as ‘the power of Malum’.Footnote 86
By the end of the tract, one understands that Hobbes’s view is that good and evil may primarily be explained through a physical motion of attraction and repulsion – he upheld a version of that understanding of moral good and evil all the way up to Leviathan.Footnote 87 Hobbes’s is not an altogether arbitrary explanation. It is important to make this clear, in order to reject the thesis that Hobbes was an extreme nominalist, for his explanation of good and evil is backed by a deep insight into the philosophical significance of real bodily attraction or repulsion. However, what he says about good and evil is metaphysically and ontologically reductionist as to what being a human being entails. One may at least say that a human being is more than a body. Although Hobbes gave some explanation of reality, his definition of good and evil is an insufficient explanation of reality.
With regard to the doctrine of necessity, Hobbes illuminates it in The Short Tract as follows in principles 12 and 13 in Section I:
‘12. Necessary is that which cannot be otherwise.
13. A necessary cause is that which cannot but produce the effect.’
And conclusions 11 to 14 of Section I state as follows:
‘11. A Sufficient Cause is a Necessary Cause.
12. Every effect produced hath had a Necessary Cause.
13. Every effect to be produced shall be produced by a Necessary Cause.
14. Necessity hath no degrees.’Footnote 88
In summary, Hobbes’s elaboration states that any cause that is sufficient to produce an effect necessarily produces that effect. Therefore, it is contradictory to speak of a ‘free agent’ that has all that it needs in order to work but may or may not work.Footnote 89 Both in his The Mechanisation of Aristotle and in a previous article Cees Leijenhorst considers that the Jesuit Benito Pereira (1535–1610) is a plausible source for Hobbes in relation to these ‘conclusions’ on a necessary cause.Footnote 90 Pereira had noted that Ockham had sought to prove a statement by Avicenna while (Ockham) not mentioning Avicenna by name.Footnote 91 Leijenhorst, however, acknowledges that the reason for Hobbes’s use of this unconditional necessity ‘remains obscure’ and that there is little evidence of its origin. More recently, Kara Richardson has suggested that Avicenna might have been one of the main sources of seventeenth-century rationalism on account of his necessitarianism.Footnote 92 At any rate, Hobbes’s notion of a ‘necessary cause’ appeared in similar terms in Avicenna’s The Metaphysics of ‘The Healing’:
Hence with the existence of the cause, the existence of every effect is necessary; and the existence of its cause necessitates the existence of the effect.Footnote 93
The evidence present in this text from the 1630s allows one to emphasize Hobbes’s early and uncompromising position on necessitarianism. This leads to inquiry as to whether his political writings are dependent on historical events. I argue below that Hobbes gains methodological proficiency in the sequence of his political writings, until in Leviathan other methods are discarded in favour of this method of necessary causality. The threat of civil war – in the form of empirical proof of danger – and other political events might have influenced the sense of urgency with which he adopted the principle of necessity in his political writings.Footnote 94 A philosopher of necessity investigates how the needs of human nature relate to moral and political life. The outcome of such investigation will be a precisely defined branch of natural law founded on necessity and survival – not unlike Hobbes’ project in De Cive and the first three sections of Leviathan. This looks like a more complex version of ‘the older picture of Hobbes’ in the words of Peter Munz.Footnote 95 The older picture indicates that Hobbes studied the natural principles of survival that lie within human beings – that is the ‘strict nature’ – and put them at the disposal of atheists. Nevertheless, what the evidence suggests is that he wanted mostly to reach believers by combining his philosophy of necessitarianism with the argument of divine decree.
2.2.2 Hobbes’s Metaphysics of Bodies and Its Implication to Morality
The perspective of Avicennian necessity of existence described above gives new insights about Hobbes’s interest in the existence of bodies and in the conception of political society that derives from it. That interest has been neglected by an important group of scholars that concentrated on his nominalism and hence individualism.Footnote 96 Of this group, I will consider in particular Yves Charles Zarka’s La decision métaphysique de Hobbes. To be sure, Zarka’s work is helpful in navigating Hobbes’s attempt to unite natural philosophy and the science of politics. But the French philosopher argues that in opposition to Aristotle’s metaphysics, Hobbes’s foundation of politics was a ‘metaphysics of separation’ between knowledge and being and that he regarded truth as residing not in things but in thinking.Footnote 97
Zarka comes to this conclusion in interpreting Hobbes’s supposition as to the ‘annihilation of the world’. The first line of Chapter 7 of De Corpore affirms that natural philosophy begins first with ‘privation’, by which Hobbes means, among other things, a scenario in which the universe is removed. Next, Hobbes invites us to imagine that the world is annihilated and only a thinking individual remains.Footnote 98 He would retain only a few ideas (phantasmata) of the bodies that had disappeared and consideration of how the things he remembered had a being without the thinking individual’s mind, which would produce a conception of ‘imaginary space’. That individual would obtain a conception of time by remembering how the things moved from one space to another. Zarka notes that the fundamental aspect of Hobbes’s supposition of the annihilatio mundi is that nothing changes in our representation of the world whether it exists or not.Footnote 99 This interpretation is persuasive. However, pushing it a little bit further, it seems to me that Hobbes is eminently concerned with the physical existence of the world – i.e. with body and how bodies operate – both in his exposition of natural philosophy (in De Corpore) and in political philosophy (in Leviathan). Hobbes’s metaphysics is a metaphysics of existence that he exposed as a metaphysics of body.Footnote 100 In sum, it is a metaphysics of what is physical, in which bodies are the agent and patient of movement.Footnote 101 This is evidently a metaphysics that is important, but reduced in scope as compared to the Aristotelian metaphysics of ultimate causes. For, notes Hobbes, philosophy must not be subjected to theology, ‘since when I say theology’ he wrote:
I say that the Church regulates’, that is to say, establishes dogmas, whereas philosophy is about right reasoning.Footnote 102
Hobbes viewed spiritual matters as a question of belief, not of reasoning. And one must add, he was making an interesting point in that regard. But the confusion started when he employed the framework of a Neoplatonist metaphysics, with a sharp division between the spirit and the real thing; between the human soul and the human body.Footnote 103 In that type of Neoplatonist dualism what is spiritual is outside the realm of nature. Hence in this reading, morality as a branch of spirituality is not the outcome of right reasoning; instead, not unlike Revelation, it must be taught.Footnote 104 And then, in parallel to that there are the natural laws of the human bodies. Hobbes was particularly adamant that a human being can reason about these natural laws of the human bodies.
Another famous thought experiment – Avicenna’s floating man from the first book, The Soul, from The Cure – provides an unexpected background against which to interpret Hobbes’s annihilatio mundi.Footnote 105 Avicenna invites us to imagine that one of us has been created as an adult. The sight of that individual is veiled, and she or he cannot see things in the external world. The person in question is in a state akin to floating, but without feeling the air, as in a void, and with the limbs stretched out so that they do not come into contact with each other. The world exists but for some reason it is not tangible for the floating individual, who cannot see it or feel it in any way. Avicenna’s question again concerns existence: can this floating individual assert the existence of her or himself? The answer is that without a doubt she or he can do so. Avicenna’s conclusion is that the reader is now aware of ‘the existence of the soul as something that is not the body – not in fact any body’.Footnote 106 What he had asked in ‘The Soul’ is that we annihilate all (past and present) perception of body in order to grasp the existence of the soul. My suggestion is that once that had been done, the next step was for Hobbes, in a study entitled ‘Concerning Body’, to propose annihilating the present perception of the body (in terms of space, time, number etc.) in order to ascertain how we think about the body, albeit that it is not present or no longer in existence. Avicenna analyses the soul through existence by means of his thought experiment, and Hobbes followed this by analysing the body.Footnote 107
Zarka traces the key pieces of Hobbes’s metaphysics, including his focus on existence, his necessitarianism and the principle of ‘necessity’, but consistently refers them to Ockham’s nominalism and Hobbes’s own original work.Footnote 108 He thinks that the ‘legal-political structure’ that Hobbes designs for the human world does not correspond to a previous ‘ontology’ and that he describes a human being as ‘separated from a world of things’.Footnote 109 Without claiming that there are no other valid approaches to this point of Hobbes’s political philosophy, I have attempted to show that Hobbes theorized about a human being whose body is immersed in things, rather than separated from them. The next chapter will accordingly interpret Leviathan by reference to the principle of necessity. The implication of this novel approach is that Hobbes was able to found politics on a philosophy of nature, contrary to what Leo Strauss argued.Footnote 110 In response to Strauss’s rich discussion of Hobbes I accept that the latter retained the public spirit of traditional political philosophy and that he was a materialist.Footnote 111 However, Hobbes was not only a materialist, as we will see below, but rather an expert on the sectionalization of social and political explanations of life. He was able to do this at the cost of reducing metaphysics to a metaphysics of existence devoted only to what is corporeal in human beings. Moreover, as a consequence of this approach, the aspect of human physical necessities assumes a central position in his political philosophy. This metaphysics of ‘body’ and of ‘what exists’ is successful thanks first to Hobbes’s clever use of the principle of causal necessity, which functions as an anchor for thinking, and second by degrading all meaningful natural rights to natural necessities. The reason I have chosen Leviathan for particular attention is that in that text Hobbes was able to, or decided to, double down on his chosen approach by dispensing altogether with other foundational philosophies and principles in order to concentrate on necessity.
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