Routledge History of Philosophy Volume IV

236 RENAISSANCE AND SEVENTEENTH-CENTURY RATIONALISM
pleasant life gives them a reason to refrain from making laws that overburden
their subjects, while the predictable excess of pain over pleasure in rebellion or
civil disobedience provides a reason for law-abidingness on the part of subjects.
In Gassendi’s theory of politics the pleasure principle promotes the stability of
states.
HOBBS
How far does Gassendi’s Epicurean system agree with Hobbes’s philosophy?
Their politics appear to provide at least one point of agreement, for the respective
treatments of the state of nature and the right of nature are similar. They diverge
strikingly, however, in their theories of the social contract, the laws of nature,
and the relations of subjects to rulers. Not three pacts but one take people from
the Hobbesian state of nature into society. Hobbes’s laws of nature provide a
more detailed analysis than Gassendi’s of what it is to come into society, and
they rest on an account that implies that people’s personal judgements about the
relative pleasantness of life within the state and out of it are unreliable.
Accordingly, in the act by which a Hobbesian subject simultaneously contracts
for protection and makes himself subject to a sovereign, he also gives up the right
to let his own judgements about pleasure and pain rule his impression of his wellbeing.
He delegates the judgements to someone—a sovereign—who has a wider
and more detached view than he does.
The disagreements between Hobbes and Gassendi do not stop there. It is
crucial to Hobbes’s morals and politics that death be an evil and that it be rationally
compulsory to avoid premature death (De cive, ch. 1, vii, E II, 8), while
Gassendi’s account tends to minimize the disvalue of death and the importance
of staving it off. Another disagreement, this time on the borderline between
ethics and politics, is over whether man is by nature sociable. Gassendi,
inclining uncharacteristically toward Aristotle, thinks that man is naturally
sociable; Hobbes, in a political treatise that Gassendi admired, argues vigorously
to the contrary. The divergences extend to other sectors of philosophy. In logic
Gassendi puts forward precepts that reflect his sensitivity to scepticism; Hobbes
does not. In metaphysics and physics Gassendi makes much of God’s activity; in
comparable parts of Hobbes’s philosophy, on the other hand, a discussion of
God’s nature and attributes is either omitted or is highly curtailed. In physics
proper Hobbes doubts the existence of the vacuum (De corp., ch. 26, vi–xi, E I
426–44) and probably also, though not so explicitly, the divisibility of anything
material (De corp., ch. 7, xiii). He is thus at odds twice over with Gassendi’s
belief in the existence of atoms in the void.
Where the theories of Hobbes and Gassendi do resemble one another is in the
reductive and materialistic bent of their psychologies. After examining Hobbes’s
doctrine in this connection I shall consider the relation of his materialism to the
rest of his philosophy. Then I shall ask whether there is a way of comparing