Routledge History of Philosophy Volume IV

GASSENDI AND HOBBES 243
has tremendous resources to put into the pursuit of felicity. The unendingness of
desire and the permanence of fear are among the harsh natural conditions of life
that the construction of a body politic is supposed to alleviate. So Hobbes’s
mechanistic psychology does some of the stage-setting for Hobbes’s civil
philosophy.
It would be a mistake, however, to suppose that it is very extensive stagesetting.
A state or commonwealth or body politic is an answer to the problem of
war, and it takes more than continual desire and ever-present fear in the pursuit of
felicity to create conditions of war. War involves competition, insecurity of
possession and, crucially, what Hobbes calls ‘the right of nature’, that is, the right
of each person to be able to take whatever steps he thinks are appropriate for his
security and well-being (cf. L, ch. 14, E III 116). These additional conditions,
and especially the last, do not belong to a description of the state of nature purely
in terms of matter in motion. And while there may be analogies between the way
that human beings come into conflict with one another, and what happens when
inanimate bodies meet on a collision course, the explanation of war and the
prescriptions for avoiding it are not for Hobbes primarily mechanistic. War and
peace are primarily things that can be deliberated about and chosen or
rejected.They are only secondarily the effects of blind impersonal forces within
human beings. That is why Hobbes presents the causes of peace in the form of
precepts it is rational to follow and the causes of war as seditious beliefs or illconceived
policies of action that it is rational to abandon.
At the heart of his case-both for following the precepts and abandoning the
seditious beliefs is the fearfulness of death through war and (though less
prominently) the desirability of commodious living in the commonwealth (EL,
Pt 1, ch. 14; De cive ch. 1; L, ch. 13). War is what the pursuit of felicity
degenerates into when each human being is the rightful judge of how to pursue
felicity, that is, when no-one can be blamed by any one else for any choice of
means to ends, and when it is common knowledge that this is so. In these
circumstances, whatever one’s character or personality, it can make sense to
injure or dispossess one’s neighbour. Vainglorious people will be disposed to
pursue felicity ruthlessly anyway, and will not stop at fraud or theft or even, if
there is nothing to stop them, killing to get what they want. Moderate people,
concerned with safety before felicity, will have reason to act violently to preempt
the attacks of the vainglorious. And in any case people will be set against
one another by the mere fact of having to compete for goods everyone wants.
Whether they are vicious, virtuous or morally indifferent, people who pursue
felicity, and who have no common power to fear, must suffer from the general
insecurity Hobbes calls ‘war’.
By ‘war’ he does not mean only open fighting between large numbers of men.
It is enough that most men show that they are willing to come to blows (EL, Pt 1,
ch. 14, xi, 73; De cive ch. 1, xi, E II 11; L, ch. 13, E III 113). Hobbes recognizes
what we would now call ‘cold war’, and he does not underestimate its costs.
When most people show that they are willing to enter a fight that can be foreseen