Human Dignity and Bioethics

64 | Robert P. Kraynak
immaterial minds. Hobbes was a strict materialist in asserting that
thinking or consciousness is simply a motion in the brain and that
language is a motion of the tongue (he denied, in other words, that
mental states of inner awareness existed in addition to brain waves).
He opposed the dualism of matter and mind as both unnecessary and
as politically dangerous insofar as it led to beliefs in souls and spirits
that could be exploited by religious leaders for rebellion against
political authority. Hobbes also denied the essential difference of
humans and animals and therefore rejected any notion of human
dignity based on a hierarchy of beings in the universe as a dangerous
illusion that led to vainglorious claims of superiority and wars
of religion. He asserted that all human beings are equal in their vulnerability
to being killed and that mankind would be better off if
everyone accepted their status as mortal machines without inherent
dignity. For Hobbes, this was the whole truth about man—the low
but solid ground on which to build an enlightened, secular civilization
that could avoid the anarchy of the state of nature and establish
lasting civil peace.
Despite his determined effort to be a thorough-going materialist,
Hobbes seemed to admit that the human mind could not simply
fit the model of a machine. He recognized that the activity of science
itself, especially political science, stood outside the determinism
of nature because the mind could construct an artificial world of
speech based on free choices of the will in defining words—the very
words needed for the social contracts of politics and the method of
exact science. As Hobbes claimed, “we know only what we make,”
by which he meant that the mind could construct systems of knowledge
outside the world of mechanical causality, and that these logical
constructs were the only certain knowledge. Hobbes therefore contradicted
himself by assuming something like an immaterial mind or
soul which distinguished human beings from animals and enabled
them to overcome nature. In the last analysis, then, Hobbes acknowledged
that the whole truth about man included body and soul.
It would be an oversimplification to say that all scientific materialists
have been Hobbesians, but Hobbes provided the model of
mechanical man for later materialists to refine and develop. His daring
conception became a prototype for behavioral psychology and its
offshoots—for the physical-chemical model of mental and emotional