“goats and monkeys!”: shakespeare, hobbes, and the state of nature

MOORE: “GOATS AND MONKEYS!”: SHAKESPEARE, HOBBES, AND THE STATE
OF NATURE
that miserable condition of war which is necessarily consequent […] to the
natural passions of men, when there is no visible power to keep them in awe and
tie them by fear of punishment to the performance of their covenants and
observation of those laws of nature set down in the [previous] chapters. 1
Here Hobbes argues that our natural passions incline us towards liberty, power, and
consequently “that miserable condition of war.” He goes on to say that it is only through
the creation of a sovereign whose authority is enforced that we can make human beings
obey the laws of nature and create an ordered society. Strangely then, it is our natural
passions that cause us to disobey the laws of nature. And so we might say, according to
Hobbes, that human nature causes us to do unnatural things. As if recognizing the
ambiguity of this position, Hobbes restates it immediately in a slightly condensed form:
For the laws of nature (as justice, equity, modesty, mercy, and in sum, doing to
others as we would be done to) of themselves, without the terror of some power to
cause them to be observed, are contrary to our natural passions that carry us to
partiality, pride, revenge, and the like. 2
On one level this argument does not seem particularly revolutionary. Certainly a vision of
human nature “divided against itself” is common enough in the early modern period. 3
Built into the Postlapsarian logic of Christianity is a conception that our rational part is
perpetually at war with our passionate part. But this is not Hobbes’ argument. In
Leviathan Hobbes actually collapses the binary division between passion and reason:
“For the thoughts are to the desires as scouts and spies to range abroad and find the way
1 Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, ed. A. P. Martinich (Peterborough: Broadview, 2002), 125.
Emphasis added.
2 Ibid.
3 Erica Fudge, Brutal Reasoning: Animals, Rationality, and Humanity in Early Modern England
(Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2006), 12-13.
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