Routledge History of Philosophy Volume IV

242 RENAISSANCE AND SEVENTEENTH-CENTURY RATIONALISM
and politics supposed to be materialistic or mechanistic or based on a mechanical
conception of nature?
In some formulations Hobbes’s theory of politics does indeed draw on
mechanistic psychology. But in others, notably that of the official statement of
his politics in De Cive, the third volume of his trilogy, no properly scientific
claims about the passions or about psychology are employed at all. The Preface
to De Cive indeed insists on the independence of the principles of morals and
politics from those of the sciences of body and man treated earlier in the trilogy
(E II xx). And similar comments are made in Leviathan (ch. 31, E III 357) and
De Corpore (De corp. ch. 6, vi, E I 74). Hobbes’s insistence on the autonomy of
his morals and politics seems to go against the claim that his morals and politics
are derived from, or a case of, mechanistic materialism. It is better to say that the
morals and politics are consistent with, and sometimes worked out against the
background of, mechanistic materialism, but not strictly deduced from
mechanistic materialism.
Let us consider how Hobbes’s mechanistic psychology contributes to
Hobbes’s morals and politics when he does choose to make use of it, as in
Leviathan. A crucial passage in this connection, which incidentally shows
Hobbes in disagreement with Gassendi, concerns the son of happiness that man
can aspire to while he is alive.
Continual success in obtaining those things which a man from time to time
desireth, that is to say, continual prospering, is that men call FELICITY; I
mean the felicity of this life. For there is no such thing as perpetual
tranquillity of mind, while we live here, because life itself is but motion,
and we can never be without desire, nor without fear, no more than without
sense.
(E III 51)
He is claiming that desire, fear and sense are permanent facts of life, and that life
being motion, it cannot be tranquil. Desire is a fact of life because it is an
inescapable effect of the vital functions of sense and vital motion; fear is a fact
of life because it is a probable effect of sense and vital motion. We learn through
trial and error what to avoid and pursue, and trial and error reveals that some
things we might otherwise try and get can harm us. So long as our environment
is not wholly hospitable there are bound to be fearful things. As for life being but
motion, this is an assertion of Hobbes’s identification of life with vital motion.
The claim that human life can never be without fear and desire has a natural
scientific grounding, and it in turn helps to support a central thesis of Hobbes’s
moral philosophy: that the prospects of felicity in human life in its natural
condition are not very good. For one thing, the pursuit of felicity is unending,
there always being a next desire to satisfy, and risky, there being things to fear.
The unendingness of desire and the constant presence of fearful things both
diminish the prospect of continual success in getting what one wants unless one