The political philosopher Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679) was born in Malmesbury, Wiltshire, England. At the age of fourteen he was sent to Magdalen Hall, Oxford, where he took his bachelor’s degree. In 1610, after visiting the Continent, where through Kepler and Galileo he discovered the disrepute into which the Aristotelian system was beginning to fall, Hobbes turned to the classics for a better understanding of life and philosophy, and decided to translate Thucydides into English. Upon returning from his third journey to the Continent, he published his first philosophical work, Little Treatise, an explanation of sensation in terms of the new science of motion.
During his exile in France, Hobbes’s De cive (1642) was published, as well as his Minute or First Draught of the Optiques (1642–1646), and he began working on a trilogy on body, man, and citizen, the first book of which is De corpore. In 1650 his Elements of Law, which demonstrated the need for undivided sovereignty, was published in two parts: Human Nature and De corpore politico.
Hobbes’s views on man and citizen were to be included in his masterpiece, Leviathan, which was published in 1651. In the same year he returned to England, where the second part of his trilogy, De homine, was published in 1657. In Behemoth (1668) he interpreted the history of the period from 1640 to 1660 in light of his vision of man and society. He died at the age of ninety-one in Hardwick, Derbyshire.
Thomas Hobbes was fascinated by dreams, to which he dedicated a discussion in the first part of Leviathan, in a chapter on imagination. He claimed that dreams consist of compounded phantasms of past sensations, and, in an attempt to determine what distinguishes dreams from waking thoughts and to develop a mechanical theory to explain them, he described dreams as the reverse of man’s waking imaginations, and as the result of internal motions of one’s organs of sense in the absence of external stimulation. He maintained that dreams are characterized by lack of coherence, since no thought of an end or goal guides them, and by lack of sense of time. He also pointed out that nothing appears surprising or absurd in dreams.
Like many other, more recent philosophers, Hobbes was inclined to a somatic theory of dreams, that is, the belief that physical factors can affect one’s dreams (for example, that overeating leads to certain kinds of dreams). He maintained that there is an intimate connection between dreams and bodily states, since the motions pass both from the brain to the inner parts and from the inner parts to the brain. Motions begin at one end during waking and at the other end during sleep, and this tendency to project images produced by bodily states gives rise to belief in apparitions and visions.
Born Apr. 5, 1588, in Malmesbury; died Dec. 4, 1679, in Hardwick. English materialist philosopher.
Hobbes was the son of a vicar. He graduated from Oxford in 1608 and became a tutor in the aristocratic family of W. Cavendish, later earl of Devonshire, with which he remained associated to the end of his life. The development of Hobbes’ thought was considerably influenced by F. Bacon, Galileo, P. Gassendi, and R. Descartes. His principal works include the philosophical trilogy De corpore (1655), De homine (1658), and De cive (1642), and Leviathan, or the Matter, Form, and Power of a Commonwealth, Ecclesiastical and Civil (1651; Russian translation, 1936).
Working along the same lines as Bacon, Hobbes “destroyed the theistic prejudices of Baconian materialism” (K. Marx and F. Engels, Soch., 2nd ed., vol. 2, p. 144). In his polemic with Descartes, Hobbes rejected the existence of a special thinking substance, arguing that a rational thing is a material entity. Hobbes created the first complete system of mechanistic materialism, corresponding to the character and demands of the natural science of his day. For Hobbes, geometry and mechanics are the ideal models for scientific thought in general. He conceives of nature as the sum total of extended bodies differing from each other in magnitude, figure, position, and motion. Motion is interpreted mechanically; as movement from one point to another. Qualities perceived through the senses are regarded by Hobbes not as properties of things themselves but as forms of perception of things. Hobbes differentiated between extension, an inherent property of bodies, and space, an image created by reason (a phantasm), as well as between the objectively real movement of bodies and time, the subjective image of movement. He distinguished between two methods of cognition—the logical deduction of rationalist “mechanics” and the induction of empirical “physics.”
In Hobbes’ view the state resulted from a contract between men, which put an end to the pregovernment natural condition of “war of all against all.” He adhered to the idea of the primordial equality of men. Individual citizens voluntarily limited their rights and liberty in favor of the state, whose task is to ensure peace and security. Hobbes exalted the role of the state, which he held to be absolutely sovereign. On the question of the form of the state, Hobbes’ sympathies were on the side of monarchy. Defending the necessity of the submission of church to state, he considered it essential to preserve religion as an ideological weapon of state power for keeping the people in check.
Hobbes’ ethics stem from his view of “human nature” as unchanging and concupiscible. He believed the basis of morality to be “natural law”—the striving for self-preservation and for the satisfaction of needs. Virtue is determined by the rational understanding of what facilitates or hinders the attainment of the good. Moral duty coincides with civic responsibilities arising out of the social contract.
Hobbes’ teachings greatly influenced the later development of philosophy and social thought.
B. E. BYKHOVSKII