HOBBES

LEVIATHAN

FOOTNOTES

  1. On the title page of the English Leviathan , there is a quotation from the Latin Vulgate edition of the Bible: Non est super terram potestas, quae comparetur ei: Job 41.24, or ‘There is no power on Earth comparable to him.’ In the King James Bible, it is Job 41.33. The quotation refers to Leviathan, who was a mythical sea monster of great size and power. Many people were shocked by Hobbes’s choice of title, since Leviathan was often identified with the Devil. There was a corresponding land monster called Behemoth, which Hobbes later used as the title of a book about the causes of the English Civil War.

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  2. Since this remark is also in the English version, he is probably thinking of The Elements of Law and the Tractatus Opticus, rather than De Corpore.

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  3. Hobbes has antitypia in Greek. He may have got the term from Sextus Empiricus, Outlines of Pyrrhonism, 3.39: ‘Some say that body is defined as having three dimensions together with counter-pressure.’

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  4. The English version makes it explicit that he is thinking of echoes.

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  5. The English version makes all this more obviously nonsensical by saying ‘being seen’ instead of apparitio or ‘apparition’ (e.g. ‘an audible being seen’). In classical Latin, the word apparitio wasn’t used to mean ‘apparition’, and I doubt that Hobbes’s readers would have confined it to the sense of sight. This must surely be a passage which was written first in English, and then translated into Latin.

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  6. In fact the saying first occurs in an anonymous compilation called the Gesta Romanorum, dating to about 1300 AD.

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  7. ‘Conceived’ in the sense of ‘perceived’. This is the ‘analytic method’ of reasoning from known effects to unknown causes, as contrasted with the ‘synthetic method’ of reasoning from hypothetical causes to unknown effects.

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  8. Although Hobbes has just said that animals are incapable of scientific investigation, he stresses that it is analogous to the skill of a hunting-dog. Applied to humans, these words imply ingenuity and quickness at problem-solving, as contrasted with deductive reasoning.

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  9. Reading similis for similes, as does the English version.

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  10. This accords with Genesis 2.19–20. In the English version, Hobbes says that God told Adam what names to give. The error in the English version is surprising, since Hobbes believed that the process of naming was arbitrary, and he opposed those who held that Hebrew was derived from an original divine language, in which the names of things precisely encapsulated their essences as created by God.

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  11. The idea of value is lost in the English version. Hobbes is making the point that, for example, if I say ‘Four-four-four,’ each occurrence of the word ‘four’ has a different value (400, 40, and 4). Similarly, ‘tree’ has a different value if it follows the word ‘this’ — it becomes a proper name rather than a universal.

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  12. As Hobbes himself implies in the English version, the Latin vivens means equally ‘living’, and ‘a living thing’. Since the only things are matter or body, vivens means ‘living matter’ or ‘living body’. This is a good example of a passage which he must have been translating from Latin into English.

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  13. Remember that, for Hobbes, ‘calculation’ and ‘reasoning’ are equivalent, so ‘the calculation of matter’ means ‘reasoning about matter’. His point is that we can reason about the qualities of things without referring to their materiality, but this doesn’t meant that their qualities are detachable from their matter. There are no distinct abstract entities corresponding to abstract names.

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  14. Here Hobbes is distancing himself from the strict Euclidean method. Euclid starts with a small set of definitions, and then proceeds to theorems derived from those definitions. For Hobbes, the initial definitions give rise to further definitions — and this proliferation of definitions is evident in Leviathan.

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  15. In De divinatione 2.119: Sed, nescio quomodo, nihil tam absurde dici potest, quod non dicatur ab aliquo philosophorum. ‘I do not know why, but nothing can be said which is so absurd, that it is not said by one or other of the philosophers.’ Descartes quotes the same passage (without acknowledgement) in Discourse on the Method, A&T VI.16.

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  16. This reads slightly oddly in both the Latin and the English. Hobbes’s point is that we use terminology appropriate for describing external accidents, when what we are describing are really accidents of our own bodies (i.e. mental images).

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  17. This is true of them only as technical terms in Stoic philosophy, meaning non-rational motivations towards or away from something. In ordinary Greek, horme meant a ‘setting in motion,’ or ‘impelling towards’ — as in the next sentence. But the Greek certainly has a more direct connection with the idea of a ‘beginning of motion’ than the Latin.

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  18. This is a typical Hobbesian pun: the end of deliberation de-liberates us.

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  19. This is how the sentence would read in classical Latin. Hobbes himself has ‘egregious persons’ for my ‘professional elite,’ and ‘idiots’ for my ‘laypersons’. ‘Egregious’ (egregius) means ‘standing apart from the crowd,’ and is often used ironically. In Hobbes’s day, ‘idiot’ had both its modern meaning, and the Latin meaning of idiota as a private citizen, or non-expert. Hobbes usually sticks to the strict classical meanings of words, but I’m pretty sure that he meant egregius ironically rather than descriptively, and idiota at least half in its modern sense.

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  20. The Latin cannot capture the rhetorical brilliance of the English version: ‘When men write whole volumes of such stuffe, are they not Mad, or intend to make others so? And particularly, in the question of Transubstantiation; where after certain words spoken, they that say, the Whitenesse, Roundnesse, Magnitude, Quality, Corruptibility, all which are incorporeall, &c. go out of the Wafer, into the Body of our blessed Saviour, do they not make these Nesses, Tudes, and Ties, to be so many spirits possessing his body?’

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  21. This chapteris almost completely different in the English version.

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  22. St. Paul, in 1 Corinthians 8.4.

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  23. This paragraph is considerably expanded in the English version.

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  24. Python was originally a great snake killed by Apollo near Delphi, and it came to mean a spirit which speaks through a soothsayer. It is referred to only once in the Bible, and then only in the Greek and Latin versions (Acts 16.16.).

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  25. This chapteris substantially changed from the English version.

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  26. Here ‘conceived’ must be in the sense of ‘perceived’, or ‘known’.

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  27. In Latin, Generatio. Hobbes is implicitly distinguishing between ‘causes’ of changes in things, and ‘origins’ of things when they first come into being.

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  28. Until very recently, the West meant the Latin or Catholic (and later the Catholic/Protestant) West, and the East meant the Greek and Orthodox East, and beyond. This division was reinforced by the absorption of the Greek, and much of the rest of the Orthodox world, into the Turkish Empire, which only started to recede during the 19th century.

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  29. i.e. the plural of schole, meaning ‘leisure.’

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  30. The Greek diatribe originally and normally meant something to make the time pass, or pastime; but Plato and others did use the word for a philosophical debate. The English word ‘diatribe’ acquired its modern sense of an invective only in the 19th century.

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  31. Hobbes is referring to a passage in Acts 6.9–10, which leaves it ambiguous whether there were four schools (as Hobbes takes it), or merely one school of freedmen (i.e. Jews who had been enslaved and then freed in different parts of the empire). It is an odd example, since nothing is known about their doctrines, whereas there were earlier Jewish sects with distinct philosophies. Perhaps Hobbes chose this example because he was talking about the time of Christ. Note also that this sentence follows badly from the previous one, in which there is no mention of public schools but in the English version, Hobbes states that there were public schools of philosophy throughout Europe and North Africa.

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  32. I have retained the word ‘universal’ in order to preserve the pun between ‘universal’ and ‘university’. Despite what he says a little later, Hobbes seems to have succumbed to the widely believed, but false etymology of a university as a place where the whole universe of knowledge is studied. In fact the word comes from universitas as a group of people who constitute a single legal person for a specified common purpose — in effect a company. Collegium (college) had the same meaning.

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  33. This is strong stuff. A Christian pope had established the universities in order to propagate the dogmas of a heathen philosopher. Students were reading the works of Aristotle as if he were one of the ‘fathers of the church,’ instead of reading the works of genuine fathers of the church, such as Tertullian, who was untainted by pagan philosophy.

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  34. The Latin word verbum means ‘word’ in general, but also ‘verb’ in particular. In order to preserve Hobbes’s terminology as far as possible, I normally translate verbum as ‘word’, even when he is referring to a verb. Here it is impossible, since the expression ‘substantive verb’ (verbum substantivum) has a long history as denoting the verb ‘to be’ when used to say that something exists, rather than as a copula. It is ‘substantive’ because, as Hobbes says, it asserts that something is a substance, and not a mere phantasm.

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  35. The verbal slide of which Hobbes is accusing Aristotle cannot be captured in English. In the Latin ‘to be’ is esse; and scholastic philosophers used this as a noun meaning ‘being’. ‘Essence,’ or essentia, is an abstract noun formed from esse.

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  36. I’m afraid English vocabulary is rather impoverished here. I have used the phrase ‘the individual beings they belonged to’ for Hobbes’s ‘their entibus,’ which is Latin for individual beings (which Hobbes is quite happy to allow), as contrasted with esse, or being in general, which Hobbes rejects.

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  37. I am sure Hobbes intended the pun between ‘copulate’ meaning to join two names by the word ‘is’, and meaning the act by which one generates a bastard.

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  38. ‘Superstition’; but literally it means ‘fear of demons’.

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  39. Again, there is another untranslatable pun. Magnitudo is an abstract noun from magnus, meaning ‘big’, and it came to mean ‘size’ or ‘quantity’, whether big or small. Maximus (‘greatest’) is the superlative of magnus, and literally means ‘biggest’. Here, Hobbes implies that it is a contradiction in terms to deny that God has magnitude (i.e. spatial dimensions), and yet to assert that he is maximus (i.e. the largest possible being). And, of course, it would be blasphemy to deny that God is maximus.

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  40. This is an allusion to the almost universal belief that the soul is essentially active, and can only ‘suffer’, or be passive, through being united to the body. So if it is disembodied, it cannot undergo pain — or bodily pleasures, for that matter. As it happens, it was Plato rather than Aristotle who believed in a separable, immaterial soul; and official Catholic doctrine was more Aristotelian in believing that both blessed and damned would be provided with ‘spiritual’ bodies. Plato’s own solution was to say that eternal pleasure consists in the contemplation by the immaterial soul of eternal truths. The damned are punished by being reborn as more miserable humans, or (in extreme cases), by being relegated to the league of animals.

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  41. For Hobbes, this is absurd, since only the actual can be the actual cause of anything.

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  42. The Latin for ‘heavy’ is gravis, and the Latin for the abstract noun ‘heaviness’ is gravitas. Remember that Hobbes is writing long before Newton made the concept of gravity scientifically respectable. Nevertheless, Leibniz and others criticised Newton on the very Hobbesian grounds that it is tautologous to explain the falling of bodies (their ‘gravity’) as due to ‘gravity’. Compare Molière’s joke about opium sending you to sleep because it has a ‘dormitive virtue’ (or the power of sending you to sleep); or saying that smoking gives you cancer because tobacco contains ‘carcinogenic substances’ (i.e. it has constituents which give you cancer).

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  43. It is odd that Hobbes should see this as a peculiarly scholastic doctrine. It was more an issue among the Moderns. For example, Galileo and Gassendi explained condensation and rarefaction in terms of the amount of empty spaces within a body. Hobbes, on the other hand, agreed with Descartes in denying a vacuum, so they both had to say that a smaller body contained less matter than a larger one.

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  44. An Aristotelian term for the opposition or reaction of surrounding parts.

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  45. Reading non praetereunda for praetereunda.

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  46. Romans 9.19–21: "You will say, ‘Then why does God blame a man? For who can resist his will?’ Who are you, sir, to answer God back? Can the pot speak to the potter and say, ‘Why did you make me like this?’? Surely the potter can do what he likes with the clay. Is he not free to make out of the same lump two vessels, one to be treasured, the other for common use?"

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  47. cf. Romans 13.1–7.

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  48. Virgil, Eclogue iv.36. The first half of the sentence is ‘There will be other wars, and . . . .’ In other words, unless the universities are reformed, there may be more civil wars.

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  49. The whole of the appendix is added in the Latin edition, and it replaces ‘A Review, and a Conclusion.’ It is in dialogue form, and, as with Hobbes’s other dialogues, the speakers are A and B. Generally B represents Hobbes’s position, though he often also agrees with what is said by A.

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  50. As a devout (or perhaps legally minimalist) Anglican, Hobbes believed, or said he believed, what he was legally required to believe by the 39 Articles of Religion, promulgated by Henry VIII in 1562, when he established the Church of England. Article 6 States ‘ Holy Scripture containeth all things necessary to salvation: so that whatsoever is not read therein, nor may be proved thereby, is not to be required of any man, that it should be believed as an article of Faith, or be thought requisite or necessary to salvation.’ The body of Leviathan includes innumerable passages where Hobbes argues that his views are consistent with Holy Scripture. However, Article 8 adds that ‘The three creeds, Nicene Creed, Athanasius’s Creed, and that which is commonly called the Apostles’ Creed, ought thoroughly to be received and believed: for they may be proved by most certain warrants of holy Scripture.’ Here he is concerned to show that his views are consistent with the Nicene Creed in particular. The Creed was the outcome of the Council of Nicaea (the modern Isnik in Turkey), which was convened by Constantine in 325 to establish the fundamental doctrines of Christianity.

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  51. In antiquity, demons were not necessarily malign. For example, Socrates believed that he was watched over by a benign demon, just like the guardian angels of Christian mythology. In French, the Greek daimon was translated as génie, and Descartes had to specify that the ‘evil genius’ which might be deceiving him into believing that God existed was malin.

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  52. Again, there are not enough words in the English language to discriminate between all the scholastic derivatives from the word ‘to be’. It’s the abstract nouns which Hobbes objects to — here, essentia, entitas, and esse. He only accepts the concrete noun ens (which I translate as ‘being’), in the sense of an existent individual.

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  53. In Genesis 1.2.

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  54. The Latin is species.

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  55. This is a curious mixture of Revelation 20–21, and the Stoic doctrine of the holocaust, according to which there is a periodic universal conflagration, in which the four elements are separated from each other, and a new world cycle begins.

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  56. The two parts of each word mean ‘under’, and ‘stand’, or ‘remain constant’.

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  57. In fact this is a misquotation. It should be ‘each in his own proper place.’

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  58. Not an exact quotation. It should be ‘Then Death and Hades were flung into the lake of fire. This lake of fire is the second death; and into it were flung any whose names were not to be found in the roll of the living.’ It clearly supports Hobbes’s thesis that the punishment of the damned is not eternal, but is ended by a second death.

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  59. Literally, ‘was created’ — but this wouldn’t make sense.

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  60. Indeed this is difficult to make sense of, and commentators are generally agreed that the text must be corrupt. He might mean that it is incomprehensible how a soul could live without a body (but many of his contemporaries believed that); or he might mean that merely putting a soul into a dead body doesn’t make the body alive.

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  61. He is using a highly literal translation of the Hebrew into Latin, and I have not attempted to reproduce its lack of grammar, tenses, etc.

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  62. ‘would judge between them.’

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  63. ‘about the speech.’ The King James version has ‘estate’ (i.e. ‘condition’), which makes better sense.

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  64. In the Latin, ‘subjectum corpus.’ Subjectum is normally the Latin noun meaning ‘subject’, but here it is an adjective. Although the English ‘subject’ can be used as an adjective, the expression ‘subject body’ would not get Hobbes’s meaning across.

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  65. Literally, ‘unless some substance or other actually subsists for the apparition.’ In scholastic philosophy, ‘subsist’ sometimes means the same as ‘exist’ (as in two sentences above); and sometimes it refers to a weaker form of existence (e.g. possible mountains ‘subsist’, whereas actual ones ‘exist’). Here Hobbes is using the term in the classical sense of serving as a solid support for something — like the foundation of a building.

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  66. i.e. ‘the white’ is short for ‘the name white’.

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  67. The same is true of English. I am a concrete being living in Leeds. But we can say, abstractly, that ‘Life in Leeds is great fun,’ or that ‘To live in Leeds is great fun.’

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  68. In the Latin, doctrina causarum.

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  69. In the Latin, essentia ullius entis. In this sentence the meaning would be clearer if it is translated as ‘the abstract being of any concrete being.’

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  70. In the Latin, essentia vel esse.

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  71. In the Latin, esse album.

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  72. No commentator has managed to give a satisfactory explanation of this sentence, which not only fails to follow from the previous one, but flatly contradicts the conclusion Hobbes has just reached. Even if a ‘not’ is added, the logic is still rather odd.

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  73. In Latin, only a couple of letters are changed: from animal rationale to animam rationalem.

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  74. In the Latin, realiter.

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  75. Here he is distancing himself from Descartes, who equated body with magnitude or extension in general.

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  76. In the Latin, realia.

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  77. The root meaning of the Latin spiritus is ‘breath’.

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  78. [Footnote deleted]
  79. The sub-text could hardly be more obvious. The 39 Articles were drawn up over a thousand years after the authoritative Christian texts (the Bible, the Early Fathers, and the creeds). The Anglican Church had no business to import a false or meaningless philosophical doctrine without such authority. However, it was part of Hobbes’s political philosophy that the sovereign (and head of the Anglican Church) was the sole authority on the interpretation of the faith within his jurisdiction, and that he had the right and duty to punish anyone for publicly disagreeing. On the other hand, he had no authority over people’s private beliefs, and Hobbes is letting it be known that he believes it is false to say that God is without body and without parts.

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  80. Reading, with the 1670 edition, a more civili alieni for amore civili alieni.

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  81. On this reading, ‘dogma’ implies a heretical dogma — and Hobbes always uses ‘dogma’ in a pejorative sense. In other words, why has Hobbes not defined ‘heresy’ in terms of truth and falsehood, and said that it is a false doctrine? An alternative reading is ‘Every dogma is necessarily either true or false;’ but I think my reading makes better sense in the context.

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  82. Near the end, in fact (p.30).

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  83. The Latin is crucially ambiguous as to whether God is body or a body. It is not even absolutely certain that Hobbes is thinking of God the Father here, since his supporting arguments relate mostly to Jesus Christ; and it would hardly be heretical to say that, while on earth, Jesus Christ had a body like that of other humans. But assuming he is talking about God the Father, it makes much better sense to say he is body than to say he is a body, since he could not be infinite if he were one body among many. Hobbes’s position could be described as ‘materialist pantheism.’

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  84. In Colossians 2.9.

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  85. This argument presupposes Hobbes’s own thesis that ‘essence’ means the same as ‘being’ (in the abstract rather than the concrete sense).

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  86. The Greek angelos means a messenger or envoy.

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  87. In Latin, Nosce teipsum. The Greek version (gnothi seauton) was inscribed on the temple of Apollo at Delphi, which was one of the holiest shrines in the Greek world.

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  88. Reading, with the 1670 edition, definiti for defnitae.
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