HOBBES AND THE PROBLEM OF RELIGIOUS BELIEF

Thomas Hobbes's religious doctrines set a puzzle for his commentators. Among those who have addressed these questions, in increasing numbers in recent years, opinion differs widely on the sincerity and consistency of Hobbes's views. By his own admission, as his faithful biographer John Aubrey recounts, “he liked the religion of the church of England best of all other,” a confession made in France on “his (as he thought) deathbed” to Dr. John Cosin (Aub. 1.353). But Aubrey reports another witness to the same occasion, Elizabeth, viscountess Purbec, who claimed that Hobbes dispatched the ministering divines, Catholic, Anglican, and Genevan, with the threat “Let me alone, or els I will detect all your cheates from Aaron to yourselves” (Aub. I.357-8). These apparently contradictory reports are symptomatic of the confusion that surrounds Hobbes's religious beliefs. He himself, in the epistle dedicatory to Charles II of 1662 that prefaces his Seven Philosophical Problems, called upon the testimony of Cosin, now Bishop of Durham, “when [Hobbes] was at the point of death at St. Germain's,” to bear witness that he was no atheist (EW, VII.v).

Critical reputation is the reputation an author enjoys among critics, that cadre of literary professionals who decide which books will be treated as serious and important when they are published, and which will be taught in our high schools, colleges, and universities as examples of American literature. An author of great critical reputation is an author whose work is widely believed to be of permanent value in changing times, an author likely to be read by future generations yet unborn. We call the process of attaining such a critical reputation “canonization,” after the process the Roman Catholic Church uses to decide whether an individual deserves public veneration and may be included in the calendar of saints.

A long line of philosophers, from Plato to Aquinas, from Descartes to Kant, from Hegel to Heidegger, have composed their works at least partly out of concern with the broader social and cultural events of their time. Yet, for a variety of reasons, it is Nietzsche who is most often read as addressing directly the issues and problems created by his historical period. In particular, we regularly concentrate on his views on what is tendentiously referred to as “the problem ” of Modernity. Some see him merely as a diagnostician of that problem,- others also find in his work a solution to it; still others consider him as one of its most telling and poignant parts. It might therefore not be inappropriate to approach Nietzsche by means of an examination of his attitude toward Modernity and its “problem” in the hope that we might thereby reach an understanding of some of his general philosophical ideas.

Both Hobbes and Locke came from families of West Country clothiers, and Bacon was the grandson of a sheep-reeve (a chief shepherd). All three family stories tell us something not only about the importance of wool in the English economy but also about the role of education in stimulating social mobility during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Bacon's father, thanks to his studies at Cambridge, was able to become a prominent lawyer and marry into the aristocracy. Locke's father was also trained as a lawyer, although he remained a humble country attorney; thanks to his own education at Oxford, Locke was able to pursue a career that included diplomatic work, secretarial assistance to a rich politician and, eventually, a well-paid government administrative post. Of the careers of these three philosophers, Hobbes's was certainly the least adventurous. But it too would not have been possible without his education at Oxford, which gave him his entree to the Cavendish family, with whom he was to spend most of his life.

A text, as we are now almost too much aware, is never the same text twice. Words once translucent become opaque; issues once current become historical footnotes. The concerns of one generation are rejected by the next only to be rediscovered by their grandchildren in a different context. A century and a half ago Ralph Waldo Emerson told us that each generation has to write its own books. He might have added that each generation also has to reinterpret the books it has inherited from the past. A Farewell to Arms was written for the generation who experienced the Great European War that we now call World War I. The next generation of readers brought to the text its experience from World War II. We are now past the third generation with its Vietnam experience and well into postmodernist readings.

The first two generations of readers grew up with the public image of Hemingway engraved on their collective consciousness, a condition that encouraged misleading and frequently irrelevant biographical readings of Hemingway's fiction. The author opened his texts to such readings when he used recognizable prototypes from the Left Bank as characters in his first novel, The Sun Also Rises (1926). Afterwards it became an easy generalization to say that Hemingway wrote only about his own firsthand experiences and that his central male character was a thinly veiled self-portrait. This Hemingway Hero, like his creator, grew older as he engaged in the Hemingway interests: bullfighting, hunting, fishing, boxing, and war. That Hemingway never fought in the bullring, hunted African game only twice, never caught a giant marlin on a hand line, was never a professional boxer, and never served as a soldier in any capacity could not dissuade those readers who needed his actual life to be as exciting as his fictive world. That this need was real says more about the period and its readers than it does about the author and his texts.

If there is one central story in the bundle of whipsaw-keen narratives, terse vignettes, and fragmentary epiphanies of Ernest Hemingway's In Our Time (1925), it may be “Out of Season.” The story probes the paradox of the book's title by asking, What does it mean to be in our time but out of season? The phrase “in our time” promises both relevance and revelation. It suggests that the book will deal with contemporary historical circumstances, perhaps record valuable collective wisdoms, and certainly stake a claim to documenting the entire epoch. Moreover, by echoing the plea in the English Book of Common Prayer to “Give us peace in our time, O Lord,” the phrase invites a new descent of the Holy Spirit into the era following the World War I apocalypse. But “Out of Season,” like all the stories of In Our Time, presents a world of thorough disorientation. Spiritual deadness, anomie, aimless wandering, conflict between genders and cultures, and miscommunication - these define the relationship between the expatriate American couple and their guide Peduzzi, and emerge more broadly as Hemingway's concerns in In Our Time, his first major inquiry into the state of the lost generation.

According to a widely discussed recent book by Jiirgen Habermas, Nietzsche's thought represents the “entry into post-modernity”; Nietzsche “renounces a renewed revision of the concept of reason and bids farewell to the dialectic of enlightenment.” In Habermas's unique narrative, this “farewell”to the hopes of the Enlightenment is seen as the decisive European “turning point”that sets the direction for the divergent “postmodernist” paths of Georges Bataille, Jacques Lacan, and Michel Foucault on the one hand, and Heidegger and Derrida on the other. According to Habermas's somewhat tendentious history, the European dissatisfaction with the Enlightenment comes down to the failed attempt of Hegel and the post-Hegelians at a “dialectical” reformulation and completion of such hopes, and a “Nietzschean”inauguration of “irrationalism”and therewith a complete rejection of such hopes.

Such a popular, now nearly standard characterization of Nietzsche as the decisive “post-” or “counter-Enlightenment” thinker is painted in very broad strokes by Habermas. However, for all the scholarly problems with Habermas's characterizations, there is certainly something right in treating so much recent, influential European philosophy as “neo-Nietzschean,” and perhaps even in the extraordinary claim that "Friedrich Nietzsche is today the most influential philosopher in the Western, non-Marxist world."

Hobbes made his name as the author of a brief book about citizenly duty published in 1642. In its various editions, De cive brought his ideas about the need for undivided sovereignty to a wide, and mostly admiring, Continental audience. Similar ideas in an earlier, unpublished, but well-circulated treatise of Hobbes's came to the notice of men of political influence in England in 1640, so that he was known, in parliamentary circles at least, as a political thinker some years before any of his work had gone into print. It is as a political theorist that he is still studied today. Hobbes's Leviathan has eclipsed De cive as the official statement of his theory, but it has much in common with the book he published in 1642 and the manuscript that he circulated in 1640. It is Hobbes's political doctrine that continues to get attention, and new editions of Leviathan are still being issued.

THE NIETZSCHE LEGEND

For many years Nietzsche lived in a room in a house in Sils-Maria, in the Upper Engadine in Switzerland. The room is kept as he lived in it and it has often been photographed. It contains a bed, a writing-table with a lamp on it and a wash-table, and a small sofa. The walls are of wood, and the floorboards are partly covered with a carpet. There is a single window and through it you can see part of the village of Sils and the slopes of the mountains that lie beyond it. It is a typical small room in an Alpine village house.

He lived in this room in the summer months and would have lived in it all the year round if the winters had not been too cold for him. The winters in the Upper Engadine can be very cold.

From this room he wrote on 20 July 1888 that he had succeeded in securing a publisher for a book on the aesthetics of French drama by the Swiss author Carl Spitteler. This “little piece of humanity on my part” he said, was “my kind of revenge for an extremely tactless and impudent article by Spitteler on my entire literature” which had appeared the previous winter. He added: “I have far too high an opinion of the talent of this Swiss to let myself be disconcerted by a piece of loutishness.”

The importance to the humanities and to our culture of the nineteenth-century German philosopher and writer Friedrich Nietzsche may require little motivation or discussion. He was quite simply one of the most influential modern European thinkers. His attempts to unmask the root motives which underlie traditional Western philosophy, morality, and religion have deeply affected subsequent generations of philosophers, theologians, psychologists, poets, novelists and playwrights. Indeed, one contemporary English-speaking philosopher, Richard Rorty, has characterized the entire present age as “post-Nietzschean.” That is because Nietzsche was able to think through the consequences of the triumph of the Enlightenment's secularism - captured in his observation that “God is dead” - in a way that determined the agenda for many of Europe's most celebrated intellectuals after his death in 1900. An ardent foe of nationalism, anti-Semitism, and power politics, his name was later invoked by Fascists and Nazis to advance the very things he loathed.

A full generation after his death Ernest Hemingway remains one of the most famous American writers. Even those who have never read a word he has written, in school or college or on their own, are aware of his presence in the world of celebrity - a rugged macho figure called Papa with a signature white beard. The outpouring of recognition and praise that followed his suicide on the morning of July 2, 1961, nearly obliterated the boundaries of space and time. Hemingway's passing was memorialized by the Kremlin and the White House, in the Vatican and the bullrings of Spain. “It is almost,” the Louisville Courier-Journal editorialized, “as though the Twentieth Century itself has come to a sudden, violent, and premature end” (Raeburn 168). Manifestly, at the time of his death he had become to the general public something more - or less - than a writer of stories and novels. He had become a legendary figure, and seems fated to remain one. Critics and college professors lament this state of affairs. The spurious anecdotes and half-baked biographies and Key West contests for Hemingway look-alikes only serve to draw attention away from his work, they assert, so that the great unwashed public will not take him seriously.

In a letter written to Charles Scribner in 1949, Ernest Hemingway listed “Mr. Turgenieff”and “Mr. Maupassant” as authors he had beaten in the ring. Among his prospective opponents were “Mr. Henry James,”“Mr. Cervantes,” and the redoubtable “Dr. Tolstoi.” Finally, he mentioned “some guys nobody could ever beat like Mr. Shakespeare (The Champion) and Mr. Anonymous” (SL 673). In the notorious 1950 Lillian Ross interview published in The New Yorker, Hemingway, with the same self-conscious braggadocio, repeated this list of authors and declared himself literary heavyweight champion, having won the title in the 1920s and defended it ever since (Ross 49).

Hemingway's boxing metaphor and the male opponents (emphasized by the masculine forms of address) neatly convey his belief - this was before the discovery that Anonymous was a woman - that the world of writing should be a man's world, a boxing gym, no women allowed. And truly, his New Yorker performance and other, even less subtle, public displays have made “Papa Hemingway”synonymous with a stereotypical notion of masculinity. It is a standard rule of reading imaginative literature that one should distinguish between an author's actual life and the lives that appear in his or her fiction, but for many readers - especially women - Hemingway's fame as a man makes this rule hard to observe (Abbott 612). The accusation of male chauvinism hangs over the man and his work.

It is sometimes possible to catch philosophy “doing rhetoric” - which is to say seducing us with mere play of words - where it professes not to, thereby compromising its own claims to truth. Doing rhetoric means orchestrating a subtle slippage of meanings where philosophy has imposed distinctions, surreptitiously evading if not subverting philosophical categories and constraints, and asserting one sort of order but pursuing another. Hobbes offers a particularly tempting target for such criticism, inasmuch as he makes his science linguistic and formal rather than experimental and material. That is to say, he makes science a matter of how we use words. But there is also a considerable, indeed ancient history to this pastime of partitioning off philosophy from rhetoric, perhaps inaugurated by Plato, who depicts Socrates as opposing his sort of speech to the speech of the great Sophists Gorgias and Protagoras, as well as to such virtuoso orators as Lysias.