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Abstract
Hobbes's political philosophy forwards the advance of modernity: human emancipation can be realized through an enthusiastic development of science and technology. But that project is driven by human curiosity emerging from a sense of anxiety driven by Hobbes's insight – sustained too by Vico – that human beings can know only what they make. Tossed into a world not of their own making, human beings are thereby subject to fear of the unknown. But is that fear all of a piece? Against the prevailing view that fear can only be understood as arising from some specified cause, that is to say in indexical terms, the paper delineates, through an examination of Hobbes's writings – particularly his Leviathan – three such conceptions of fear. They are the iconic, indexical and intellective. They can then be related to each other in order to show their relevance as the basis for an organizing principle in social life as well as to our own precarious, political situation in the contemporary world.
Notes
1. These three terms are employed in N.E. Boulting's On Interpretative Activity (Boulting 2006) in order to distinguish and employ three different kinds of interpretative strategies for Science, Technology and the Arts.
2. So Tuck claims that in Hobbes's Elements of Law (EL) we can find in chap XXIX, sec. 8 ‘an accurate summary of the whole of Hobbes's Theory’ holding ‘the vision atthe heart’ of his political philosophy, a vision which sustains a dualism between the State of Nature and a regime of civil laws. (Tuck 1989, 57–8; cf. Boulting 2007, 185).
3. Can Sartre's account of human emotions be rehabilitated in the way R.C. Solomon did in his writings? (cf. Solomon 1973, 20–41; 2003, 1–18) Is there a role for a cognitive account of the emotions? (cf. De Sousa 1987) Can emotions influence behaviour without conscious mediation and if so how? (cf. De Sousa 1995; Bannan 2004, 207–34) Are there, as Peirce argued (Savan 1981, 319–33), natural or basic emotions? (cf. Ekman 1992) and so on.
4. CP, 1.564 stands for Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce (Peirce 1931–58) where 1 is the volume number and 376 is the paragraph and not the page number.
5. Lev, ch. 33 par. 22 stands for Leviathan (Hobbes 1997/1651), chapter 33, paragraph 22.
6. Letter to Mersenne from 21 January 1641 in Descartes (1997, vol. III, ‘The Correspondence’).
7. ‘[ … ] whatsoever accidents or qualities our senses make us think there be in the world, they are not there, but are seemings and apparitions only. The things that really are in the world without us, are those motions by which these are caused. And this is the great deception of sense; which also is by sense to be corrected. For as sense telleth me, when I see directly, that the colour seemeth to be in the object; so also sense telleth me, when I see by reflection, that colour is not in the object' (EL, part 1, ch. II, sec. 10 in Hobbes 1994, 26).
8. ‘(2) That there is nothing without us really which we call an image or colour. (3) That the said image or colour is but an apparition unto us of that motion, agitation, or alteration, which the object worketh in the brain or spirits, or some internal substance of the head’ (EL, part 1, ch. 2, sec. 4; cf. Gaskin 1999, 23).
9. De Corpore, ch. 25, sec. 2, pars. 1 and 2 stands for De Corpore, chapter 25, section 2, paragraphs 1 and 2 in Body, Man and Citizen (Hobbes 1962, 147).
10. ‘We do not therefore by nature seek society for its own sake, but that we may receive some honour or profit from it: these we desire primarily, that secondarily’ (DC, ch. 1, sec.2, par. 1, where DC stands for Hobbes's De Cive, chapter 1, section 2, paragraph 1 [Hobbes 1983]).
11. ‘[ … ] it will be expedient to consider in what estate of security this our nature has placed us [ … ]’ (EL, ch. 14, sec. 2).
12. In Joseph Conrad's ‘An Outpost of Progress’ we read: ‘Fear always remains. A man may destroy everything within himself, love and hate and belief; and even doubt; but as long as he clings to life he cannot destroy fear: the fear, subtle, indestructible, and terrible, that pervades his being; that tinges his thoughts; that lurks in his heart; that watches on his lips the struggle of his last breath’ (Conrad 1992, 53).
13. B, 2–4 stands for T. Hobbes Behemoth or the Long Parliament, pages 2–4 (Hobbes 1990).
14. ‘[ … ] continually extolling liberty and inveighing against tyranny, leaving the people to collect of themselves that this tyranny was the present government of the state’ (B, 23).
15. Reality refers to what it is that humans regard as existing expressed in some discursive form within a given culture. Margolis's characterization of the Intentional – to include the intentional and the intensional – is important in this context, where the term Intentional includes the ‘linguistic, “lingual”, semantic, gestural, semiotic, significative, symbolic, meaningful, representational, expressive, rhetorical, institutional, rulelike, intentional, purposive, historical, traditional, stylistic, genre-bound, and other similar properties’ (Margolis 2000, 216–7). Claims for existence are ontological in character and concern physical existents or what underpins the nature of such existents. This distinction between reality and existence mirrors Peirce's distinction between Thirdness (what can be thought) and Secondness (brute existence). But C. Hartshorne distinguishes ‘[ … ] the existence of individuals’ from ‘the actuality of states or events’ (Hartshorne 1970, 75; cf.1997, 81). A father may see his offspring as qualified sufficiently to be a line manager. S/he may see him/herself as capable of undertaking far more ambitious projects at work. The two of them differ as to the nature of his/her reality as an employee. But the father realizes that it is more than likely that s/he will be living the next day as an existent. What neither can predict is the nature of his/her actuality on that day; whether angry, sad or happy. (For more on the distinctions between reality, existence and actuality see Boulting 2006, ch. 5).
16. This claim has to be tempered by the way the idea of resistance rights is to be interpreted (Lev, ch. 24, par. 17); cf. Cynthia Cockburn invokes Johan Galtung's conception of ‘structural violence’ where a will can be achieved ‘over weaker countries, classes, groups and individuals without recourse to weapons, sustained by an “uneven distribution of power and resources’ in which case oppression may be ‘so life threatening that outbreaks of physical resistance seem justified’ (Cockburn 2009, 158–9).
17. Merchants, for example, ‘have therefore need to join together in one society; where every man may either participate of the gain, according to the proportion of his adventure’ (Lev, ch. 22, par. 18).
18. ‘And when he cannot assure himselfe of the true causes of things, (for the causes of good and evill fortune for the most part are invisible), he supposes causes of them, either such as his own fancy suggesteth; or trusteth to the Authority of other men, such as he thinks to be his friends, and wiser than himselfe’ (Lev, ch. 12, par. 4).
19. L. Svendsen acknowledges his debt to Solomon and Flores (Solomon and Flores 2001, 100): ‘Fear has an undermining affect on trust, and when trust diminishes, the scope for fear increases. An increase in fear will also be the result of, and a cause of a loss of trust’. Svendsen does not employ the identifying labels employed in this present paper.
20. A suggestion I owe to Pat Boulting.
21. For Macpherson, Hobbes's methodology involves ‘[ … ] a statement of the behaviour to which men as they now are, men who lived in civilized societies and have the desires of civilized men, would be led if all law and contract enforcement (i.e. even the present imperfect enforcement) were removed’ (Macpherson 1969, 22). There is nothing, then, natural about the NCM. It is constructed as a hypothetical fallen state from an actual previously existing civil condition. The attack on Macpherson's position is upon his claim as to the actuality of that civil realm as ‘[ … ] essentially a possessive market society’ (Macpherson 1969, 62) rather than its existence. In other words, the NCM arises as a result of removing ‘[ … ] the fear of unpleasant or fatal consequences’ of human actions both upon themselves and others, taking human beings as they are in a society where there is law enforcement. (Macpherson 1969, 27) Accordingly Hobbes's real methodology is ‘[ … ] from man in society back to men as a mechanical system of matter in motion and only then forward again to man's necessary social behaviour’ (Macpherson 1969, 48–9) in his reconstructed ideal state, the Commonwealth. (cf. Boulting 2005, 43–5).
22. Cf. N.E. Boulting (2006, ch. 5); the case for God's reality as opposed to His existence is set out in Peirce's Neglected Argument: the idea namely that the idea of God ‘should be obvious to all minds high and low alike’ (CP, 6.457); Margolis uses this distinction in speaking of ‘what exists as opposed to what is real (but is not real in the way of existing) in the predicable natures of particular things’ (Margolis 1993, 91).
23. An earlier version of this paper was presented at a Hobbes workshop on 1 September 2010 at a Political Theory Workshop in Manchester Metropolitan University. I am deeply indebted to Dirk Brantl of Tübingen University for his thorough criticism of it, which generated another version, defended at the annual Conference of the Centre for Applied Philosophy and Ethics at Brighton University, 16 September 2010, ‘Politics of Fear: Fear of Politics’. Having emerged from these two presentations, this version is highly indebted to very helpful remarks by two referees, as well as those of Noboss members Miriam Green, Julian Shales and Ann Everett. None of these persons, however, are to be credited with any errors that may yet be discovered within it.