© George MacDonald Ross, 1987

Delivered at the Northern Philosophical Society conference: The Social and Metaphysical Philosophy of Thomas Hobbes, Lose Hill Hall, Castleton, 14–16 September 1987.

The problem of giving expression to what it is that distinguishes human beings from animals has always been one of the main concerns of philosophy. I have no quarrel with this being taken as a genuinely philosophical concern. However many continuities there may be between ourselves and the animal kingdom, it remains the case that human beings are in fact very different; and the more the continuities, the more challenging a philosophical problem it is to articulate the difference. Yet solutions to the problem have often incorporated two theses which I believe to be erroneous — the one metaphysical, and the other ethical.

The metaphysical thesis is that of essentialism — the error of assuming that there must be some distinct component of human beings which not only functions as their differentia from other creatures, but also constitutes their true essence. The traditional candidate for this essential component is, of course, the rational soul.

A lesser version of the same error is to assume that for humans to be really distinct from animals, there must be an easily definable characteristic, or set of characteristics, present in all human beings, and absent in all other creatures. Again, philosophers have tended to pick on the ability to reason, though other characteristics, such as a propensity for civil association, have raised their heads from time to time. But this is well worked territory, and there should be no need for me to rehearse the arguments about essentialism here.

The ethical dimension has been given less attention. Once it is held that humans have an essential nature, whether or not this nature is attributed to a special ingredient such as the soul, there is an almost irresistible temptation to give special value to the characteristic constitutive of that nature, and to regard all else as at best only accidental to the ability of the individual to flourish as a human being. Thus the intellectualist tradition stemming from Plato and Aristotle has persistently devalued forms of human fulfilment such as physical fitness, gastronomy, wine tasting, love, craftsmanship, managerial efficiency, gardening, and social skills, to name but a few. Recently, certain philosophers have drawn up somewhat more catholic lists of approved forms of human flourishing, other than indulging in rational thought alone; for example, John Finnis, in his Natural Law and Natural Rights (Oxford, 1980). But such lists are still desperately narrow.

Now, as long as we philosophers are talking only to each other, it doesn’t really matter if we flatter ourselves with metaphysical arguments designed to show that we alone, or perhaps some rather more generously defined class, fully instantiate the essence of humanity. But such ideas become dangerous when they get into the heads of politicians with the power to do something about them. When idealist dictators have a clear conception of what human nature consists in, they are liable to consider themselves positively obliged to force their subjects into that particular mould — or, in Platonic terms, to force them to conform to the form of humanity. If recalcitrant individuals can be re-educated into a better understanding of what their flourishing as human beings consists in, then well and good. If not, then they must either be treated as sub-human, or eliminated altogether, as standing in the way of the perfectibility of the human species.

The most suitable term I have come across for this particular syndrome is ‘Procrusteanism’, coined by Antony Flew, in his article ‘Socialist Procrusteanism or Conservative Justice’, in The Salisbury Review 4, No.2 (1986), pp.16–20. Admittedly, Professor Flew’s primary concern is to distance a conservative conception of justice, consisting in giving each person their due, from a socialist conception, consisting in an enforced taking away from some and giving to others, just as the Greek hotelier Procrustes chopped off the feet of tall guests and stretched short guests on the rack, so that they would all exactly fit his bed. But Flew’s analogy needs no stretching on the rack in order for it to extend to the concept I have just outlined.

The purpose of this paper is to consider how far Hobbes’s account of human nature is either essentialist or Procrustean. And first there is the question of whether Hobbes, as a nominalist, had any right to have a theory of human nature at all. As he explicitly says in Leviathan, ch. 4:

Yet, on a number occasions, he trots out the standard definition of man as a rational animal (e.g. De corpore I.ii.14), which would seem to imply that mankind does have a universal essence, and that it consists in rationality. Alternatively, in Leviathan, ch. 2, he makes the possession of speech the essential differentia between humans and animals:

So, in the case of human nature, what was Hobbes denying, when he denied that there was anything universal in the world? One theory he was clearly denying was the Averroist theory that there is a single, universal Reason, or form of humanity, of which each individual is but a part. Nor was he tilting at windmills. It is evident from his Second and Third Objections to Descartes’ Meditations that he interpreted Descartes as a sort of Averroist; and elsewhere I have argued that there is much to be said in favour of such an interpretation. It is also likely that Hobbes was denying the strong essentialist thesis that all human beings have a numerically distinct but qualitatively identical ingredient, such as an immaterial soul, or a substantial form of humanity. Although he himself often used the word ‘soul’, he makes it clear in Leviathan, ch. 44 (p.638), that this is merely a way of talking about the ‘body alive’. What Hobbes does seem to accept, however, is the weaker essentialist thesis that individual things have identical, namable qualities in common, and that universal terms refer indiscriminately to all individuals possessing the same quality or set of qualities. As he says in Leviathan, ch. 4, immediately after the statement of his nominalism quoted above:

Thus in De corpore I.ii.14, he says that the name ‘man’ is equivalent to the compound name ‘animated rational body’. Unfortunately, he does not speculate on whether it would be appropriate to apply the name ‘man’ to a being which resembled humans only in its animation and rationality. Nevertheless, it remains the case that his emphasis is on the accidental nature of the qualities singled out by a universal name. It would be entirely foreign to his approach to see these qualities as emanating from some underlying human nature which constituted the true essence of each individual. As he says in Leviathan, ch.5:

But what does Hobbes’s concept of mankind amount to? The main problem is the apparent conflict between his definition of man as rational, and as a user of speech. It might be tempting simply to ignore the first definition, as nothing other than an unthinking hangover from conventional scholasticism. But this would be odd in such a militant anti-scholastic as Hobbes. Moreover, there were plenty of precedents for denying that rationality, in the sense of intelligence or reasonableness, was either universal or unique to humankind. It was commonplace among the army of sceptical writers that flourished in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries to emphasis both the frailty of human reason and the intelligence of much animal behaviour.

Even that great rationalist Descartes, in his answer to the currently fashionable scepticism, refrained from basing his case on the superior practical intelligence of humans over that of animals. Instead, on the one occasion when he actually confronted the question, at the end of the Discourse on the Method, part 5, he appealed to the capacity to use abstract language as the only observable differentia between humans and animals. Indeed, the only disagreement between Descartes and Hobbes on this point, was that Descartes felt it necessary to attribute this capacity to an immaterial, rational soul; whereas for Hobbes, it simply so happened that human brains had a function which animal brains were too small or too unsophisticated to support. As for Hobbes, it seems likely that when he used the word ‘rational’, he was thinking of it in an etymologically restricted sense. This would be highly characteristic of him, since it is obvious to the most casual reader of his writings that he was obsessed with the etymology and correct historical meanings of terms. Thus in Leviathan, ch. 4, he writes:

Hobbes must have known that the Latin animal rationale was translationese for the Greek zoon logikon; and he certainly knew that the primary meaning of logikon was ‘possessed of speech’. So if the word ‘rational’ is glossed as meaning ‘possessed of speech’, Hobbes’s two definitions of man are exactly identical.

Hobbes was, however, aware of the difficulty that animals as well as humans are capable of communicating desires and feelings by means of symbolic sounds and gestures. This is why he made a sharp distinction between natural signs, and signs which are the outward expression of an arbitrary but conventionally agreed notation. Animal communication was wholly dependent on empirically learned associations between certain signs and certain forms of behaviour. The roaring of a lion was a sign that it was about to attack, in the same way as thunder was a sign of an impending storm. Only humans had the capacity of enlarging their vocabulary with arbitrarily invented signs; of stringing them together into propositions and syllogisms; or the higher-order capacity of inventing signs to refer to signs. It is important to note that, for Hobbes, the difference in kind between human and animal communication consisted in the arbitrariness of human language. He did not make the mistake, remarkably common among philosophers of language, of assuming that only human concepts are general in scope.

So, when Hobbes defined man as an ‘animated rational body’, he meant that the differentia between human beings and animals was that only human beings had the capacity to invent arbitrary symbols for their thoughts. That this was his meaning is reinforced by his stressing that every other aspect of rationality is common between humans and animals; and I shall now consider a number of these aspects, namely understanding, intelligence, consciousness, private thought, and free will.

In Leviathan, ch. 2, Hobbes says that understanding, other than that which depends on peculiarly human language, is common to humans and animals:

He then goes on to make the qualification, already quoted above, that the understanding peculiar to humans involves the contexture of names into speech.

As for intelligence, this is broadly what Hobbes calls ‘prudence’, namely the capacity to act appropriately in the future on the basis of past experience. As he says in Leviathan, ch. 3:

Yet, earlier in the same chapter, he distinguished between the capacity to discover causes, which is common to man and beasts, and curiosity, or the ability to imagine uses for things, ‘of which I have not at any time seen any Signe, but in man onely.’

Consciousness is more problematic, since it is far from clear that anyone had a modern concept of consciousness in Hobbes’s day. In their translation of Descartes’ Meditations, Anscombe and Geach take the bold step of sometimes translating cogitare and penser as ‘to be conscious’. I think they are right to see as at least one element in Descartes’ thought, the idea of the centre of consciousness reflecting on itself and on the nature of its experience. However, as I have already hinted, such a translation obscures not only Descartes’ Averroist tendencies, but also the fact that he had no special word for consciousness. This was why the next generation of philosophers had to coin one — apperception for Malebranche and Leibniz, and ‘consciousness’ for Locke. But in Hobbes there is hardly even a hint of the idea that the experience of human beings might be luminous with consciousness in a way in which that of animals is not - and this despite his having read Descartes and moved in Cartesian circles. The nearest he comes to it is in the Sixth Objection to Descartes’ Meditations, where he implies that human beings might be able to accompany their experience with a sort of verbal commentary:

Closely related to the notion of consciousness is the ability to think private thoughts. Here too, Hobbes is quite adamant that there is no difference between humans and animals. As he says in De corpore IV.xxv.8:

Again, in De corpore IV.xxv.13, he discusses free will:

Like the sceptics before him, Hobbes emphasises human capacity for folly, but not in order to obscure the line of demarcation between humans and animals. For Hobbes, language is a powerful tool which can debase humans if misused, as much as it elevates them above animals if used well. As he says in Leviathan, ch. 5:

Having outlined Hobbes’s account of human nature, I now return to the question I raised at the beginning of this paper: Does Hobbes show any signs of Procrusteanism? The answer is clearly not. Although he exemplifies the twin preconditions of a totalitarian view of the state, and an essentialist view of human nature, he does not take the further step of enjoining the sovereign to create conditions in which the flourishing of the characteristics essential to human nature as such can be maximised. The reason for this depends partly on his theory of sovereignty, and partly on the characteristic he picked as essential to humanity.

As far as sovereignty is concerned, Hobbes was obsessed with the dangers of a divided authority. He seems to have sensed that for the same reason one cannot specify both the mode of decision-making to be followed in an ideal state, and the sort of decisions that will be made. For example, if the concept of social democracy (or, if you prefer, democratic socialism) specifies both that decisions depend on the will of the majority, and that the outcome must be socialist, then there are obviously going to be difficulties whenever the democratic will dictates anti-socialist policies. Hobbes, on the other hand, specified only that decisions must depend on the arbitrary power of a single sovereign; and, with the exception of his overriding deference to the Christian religion, he generally refrained from circumscribing the decisions which the legitimate authority might make.

As for his characterisation of human nature, it differs from those of the great Procrusteans by being almost entirely devoid of positive content. It goes without saying that dictators who systematically deprived their subjects of the power of speech would seriously diminish their capacity to flourish as human beings. Indeed, Hobbes makes just this accusation against the universities and the priesthood; and there are interesting comparisons between his remarks on pseudo-language, and George Orwell’s concept of ‘Newspeak’.

However, Hobbes is vaguer about positive ways in which the sovereign might enrich the lives of his subjects as essentially language users. One might imagine how the ability to speak could of itself be elevated into a recipe for human fulfilment. There could perhaps be a post-structuralist paradise, in which everyone spent all their time talking about talking, or writing about writing. Homo loquens finally brought to fruition.

But in Hobbes’s hands, speech was primarily an enabling faculty, and who could say where it would lead? One thing at least is certain, namely that the quintessentially human power to arbitrarily invent new linguistic notations gave human beings the power to think what they liked, irrespective of the wishes of the sovereign. Modern readers are sometimes repelled by Hobbes’s totalitarianism, because they associate totalitarianism with Procrusteanism. But I hope that I have succeeded in showing that, whatever else one might have to say against Hobbes’s political philosophy, it would be grossly unfair to accuse him of wanting to cram all individuals into a single mould determined by an essentialist definition of human nature.

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