To save content items to your account,
please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies.
If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account.
Find out more about saving content to .
To save content items to your Kindle, first ensure no-reply@cambridge.org
is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings
on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part
of your Kindle email address below.
Find out more about saving to your Kindle.
Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations.
‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi.
‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.
For someone who traveled as long and far as Ernest Hemingway did, it is little wonder that his luggage - a trunk stored in the family attic, a valise stolen at a railway station, another trunk left for decades at a hotel - might become metaphors for his life; and it is less wonder that their contents, known or suspected, would be curiously examined at the borders of Hemingway criticism. I will inspect two of them here: the trunk holding boxes of early papers stored in Oak Park just before Ernest and Hadley sailed for Paris in December 1921, and the valise of manuscripts stolen from Hadley at the Gare de Lyon as she was on her way to join Ernest in Lausanne in December 1922.
The first set of Chicago manuscripts was returned to Hemingway by several editors of popular magazines as not worth publishing; and the second set, not worth stealing, was probably dropped into a Paris sewer by a disgruntled thief. By 1924 both the rejection of the first and the theft of the second variously informed the composition of In Our Time, and those erstwhile losses became early instances of Hemingway's long-standing luck.
I imagine future thinkers in whom European-American indefatigability is combined with the hundredfold-inherited contemplativeness of the Asians: such a combination will bring the riddle of the world to a solution. (1876)
The conjunction signified by the “and ” of the main title is to be taken in three ways. First of all the question of what influence, if any, ideas from Asian philosophies may have exerted on the development of Nietzsche's thinking. Conversely, there is the issue of the enormous impact Nietzsche's ideas have had in Asia and the enthusiasm with which he continues to be studied there today - especially in China and Japan. A subsidiary theme here concerns the ways his thought has been appropriated by those quite alien cultures and thereby transformed, as well as the relevance of such appropriations to Nietzsche scholarship in the West. And finally the field of comparative research, which embraces a variety of styles of discourse. A comparison of Nietzsche's ideas on a certain topic with those of an appropriate Asian philosophy can enhance our appreciation of both sides. For people familiar with Nietzsche, a comparison with an East-Asian thinker might serve as a way into hitherto unfamiliar modes of thought. And since Chinese and Japanese philosophies are for the most part immetaphysical in outlook, insofar as Nietzsche's ideas can be shown to resonate sympathetically with features of those quite alien traditions of thinking, such resonances may boost his standing in the competition, among such figures as Hegel and Heidegger, for the distinction of being the first Western thinker to “overcome” the metaphysical tradition.
Hobbes's philosophical project is bound up with a rational reconstruction of knowledge. At what point did this reconstruction become associated with a first philosophy that was intended to explicate the most basic concepts and principles of knowledge? Did the development of the first philosophy coincide with the formulation, at the end of 1636 or the beginning of 1637, of a complete system of philosophy: corpus, homo, civis, which was to lead to Elementa philosophiae, or did it come later? Did the first philosophy have something to do with the logic that Hobbes was questioned about in Kenelm Digby's letters? It is difficult to give firm answers to these questions because the dating of the manuscripts marking the successive stages of the composition of the first philosophy is for the most part uncertain.
This chapter discusses some large questions in Hobbes's political philosophy. My aim is to identify what, if anything, Hobbes thought to be the central problem, or problems, of politics and to link the answer to an account of why the state of nature is so intolerable, of how we may leave it, and whether the manner of our leaving is well explained by Hobbes. I then turn to the implications for Hobbes's account of the rights and duties of the sovereign, and then to the contentions issue of the subject's right, in extremis, to reject his sovereign and rebel. In the course of that discussion, I also consider Hobbes's account of the nature of punishment and the question whether his two rather different accounts are not one too many. In answering these questions, I shall say something about Hobbes's conception of the law of nature, his theory of political obligation, and the role (or lack of a role) of religious belief in his political system. I say a little about Hobbes's account of liberty and link its oddities to the politics of his own day.
Discussions of law occupy a prominent place in all three of Hobbes's principal works on political philosophy: The Elements of Law, Natural and Politic, De cive, and Leviathan. He also wrote a Dialogue between a Philosopher and a Student of the Common Laws of England Remarks on law sometimes occur in other works by Hobbes. Discussions of law recur in his writings because law and legal theory are deeply involved in his moral and political philosophy through his conceptions of sovereignty and the state.
THE DEFINITION OF LAW
In Leviathan Hobbes defines law as a command "addressed to one formerly obliged to obey" the commander. A command addressed to someone not obligated is not law. Nor is advice or counsel law, since its recipient is not obligated to follow it.
Hobbes claimed that his political theory was a rigorously philosophical, that is, scientific, system. “[C]ivil philosophy/' he said, is “no older than my own book De cive ” (Wi,ix). Dedicating that work to the third earl of Devonshire, he argued that recent progress in science was largely the work of students of geometry, who had reasoned correctly from first principles. Moral philosophers, by contrast, had failed to adopt an adequate method, instead contenting themselves with winning the approval of their audiences by rhetorical devices designed to appeal to the emotions. He himself, however, had succeeded in grounding moral and political thinking upon firm foundations. He had begun his investigations, he said, by examining the nature of justice. Justice meant giving every man his own, and that raised the question of how things became one man's rather than another's. The answer, he concluded, was that nature taught people to shun the horrors that resulted from community of goods, and by consent to introduce private property.
Nietzsche has been one of the most influential critics of Christianity. Like Feuerbach and other philosophers of the Hegelian Left, he was not content with merely rejecting Christianity. Instead, he developed a kind of “genetic criticism.” In other words, he claimed that his critique of religion demonstrated the reasons why human beings become religious and the mechanisms by which they comprehend the religious realm.
For some time Nietzsche, the son of a Lutheran minister, was an active Christian himself. He was familiar with Christian practice, with the Bible, and with Christian doctrine. In his critique of religion, he made more use of this familiarity and knowledge than did other critics. His criticism has been effective not only through the arguments he articulated but also through the vitality of his language and the richness and splendor of his rhetoric. Emulating Luther's German translation of the Bible and Goethe's poetry and prose, Nietzsche utilized keen images and impressive similes to persuade his readers.
For several years after he had lost his faith, Nietzsche relied on the historical refutation of Christianity available at the time. In this period his own critique of religion mainly recapitulated that of Schopenhauer. To a certain extent, he accepted religion as a fictitious “ suprahistorical power” at the same time expecting that religion in general, and Christianity in particular, would automatically vanish with the passage of time.
That a psychologist without equal speaks from my writings, is perhaps the first insight reached by a good reader - a reader as I deserve him, who reads me the way good old philologists read their Horace. (Nietzsche, Ecce Homo)
Nietzsche repeatedly insisted on his importance first and foremost as a psychologist, but this has not always been taken as seriously as it ought to be, especially by philosophers. Philosophers tend to insist on the truth of a belief, but psychologists are more interested in why one believes what one believes. “The falseness of a judgment is not for us necessarily an objection . . . The question is to what extent it is life-preserving.” Philosophical doctrines also carry with them a strong sense of universality and necessity, while psychological analyses remain inevitably bound to the particular contingencies of a personality or a people. But Nietzsche was suspicious of claims to universality and necessity, and he almost always preferred the witty, dazzling or even offensive psychological insight to a grand philosophical thesis. Writing about Socrates, he began, “In origin, Socrates belonged to the lowest class: Socrates was plebs. . . . he was ugly.” On Kant, he noted, “The instinct which errs without fail, anti-nature as instinct, German decadence as philosophy - that is Kant!” On the “shabby” origins of morality as such he suggested, “The slave revolt in morality begins, when ressentiment itself becomes creative and gives birth to values.” And on German philosophy, he complains, “How much beer there is in the German intelligence!” He saw himself and praised himself as a diagnostician, and his philosophy consists to a very large extent of speculative diagnoses, concerning the virtues and vices of those whom he read and read about, whose influence determined the temper of the times. His central strategy, accordingly, was the use of the ad hominem argument, a rhetorical technique often dismissed as a “fallacy,” an attack on the motives and emotions of his antagonists rather than a refutation of their ideas as such. (“We know, we can still see for ourselves, how ugly [Socrates] was. But ugliness, in itself an objection, is among the Greeks almost a refutation.”)
In November 1923, after having written for his high school newspaper, trained as a cub reporter for the Kansas City Star, and worked as a correspondent for the Toronto Star on and off from 1920, Hemingway wrote to Gertrude Stein, “I am going to chuck journalism I think. You ruined me as a journalist last winter” (SL 101). Yet Hemingway stayed with the Toronto Star until September 1924, and he continued to write for newspapers and magazines at intervals throughout his career, covering the Spanish civil war for the North American Newspaper Alliance in 1937 and 1938, the tension in the Orient for PM in 1941, and World War II in England and France for Collier's in 1944, as well as writing intermittently for Esquire, Look, and Life, among other publications, until as late as 1960, all the while producing short stories, novels, and other books and essays of creative nonfiction as well.
Although Hemingway often complained that journalism robbed him of the juices he needed to write fiction, there is evidence that moving among journalism, creative nonfiction, and fiction stimulated all his writing, that his work in each genre informed and enriched his experience in the others. In this essay I will examine the journalism Hemingway produced at intervals throughout his life, focusing on the significance of the choices this writer of realist fiction made when he found himself reporting real life and on how these choices in turn inform his fiction. I demonstrate that throughout his career Hemingway tends to blur distinctions between fiction and nonfiction as well as between the concrete and imagined realities they purport to represent.
Hobbes's philosophy of natural science is dominated by the idea that all true knowledge must arise from an understanding of causes, so that a genuinely scientific account of a phenomenon requires knowledge of the process by which it was produced. This emphasis on the scientific priority of causal knowledge was by no means a methodological novelty in the seventeenth century. Aristotle's Posterior Analytics, the source for the traditional Scholastic understanding of science, declares that scientific understanding must be rooted in the knowledge of causes. Aristotle and his Scholastic followers conceived of substances as composites of form and matter, and their methodology distinguished between formal, material, efficient, and final causes. Thus, a causal explanation in the Scholastic tradition might include reference to a substance's form (the formal cause), its matter (the material cause), the process that produced it (the efficient cause), and the end or purpose for which it was produced (the final cause).
That I still cleave to the ideas that I take up again in the present treatises today . . ., that they have become in the meantime more and more firmly attached to one another, indeed intertwined and interlaced with one another, strengthens my joyful assurance that they might have arisen in me from the first not as isolated, capricious, or sporadic things but from a common root, from a fundamental will of knowledge, pointing imperiously into the depths, speaking more and more precisely, demanding greater and greater precision. For this alone is fitting for a philosopher. (GM, P:2)
A certain amount of historical and philological schooling, together with an inborn fastidiousness of taste in respect to psychological questions in general, soon transformed my problem into another one: under what conditions did man devise these value judgments good and evil? And what value do they themselves possess! Have they hitherto hindered or furthered human prosperity? . . .
Thereupon I discovered and ventured diverse answers . . .; I departmentalized my problem,- out of my answers there grew new questions, inquiries, conjectures, probabilities - until at length I had a country of my own. . . . Oh how fortunate we are, we men of knowledge, provided only that we know how to keep silent long enough! (GM, P:3)
The Nietzsche speaking here is the Nietzsche of 1887 - vintage Nietzsche, by any reckoning, commenting on the thinking that led up to On the Genealogy of Morals. In these passages and this whole Preface, one will find much that is of interest and importance in connection with the question of Nietzsche's kind of philosophy. The same is true of the other prefaces he supplied to his earlier and subsequent works (and, of course, of his post-Zarathustra works themselves).
Nothing was ever the same after The Sun Also Rises. With the appearance of his first novel on October 22, 1926, Ernest Hemingway's life was forever altered. He was no longer an aspiring young writer, no longer the “promising”writer of a slim volume of short stories, no longer a journalist who also wrote fiction. This book made him, almost instantly, an international celebrity identified with an entire generation, torn by war and grieving throughout the Roaring Twenties for their lost romantic idealism. Although he was somewhat ill-suited for the role, because he was a hard-working young writer with a wife and a son to support, he came to be regarded as the spokesman for American expatriates, those disillusioned and disaffected artists, writers, and intellectuals who spent the decade on the Left Bank in Paris. On a more subtle level, the novel also established Hemingway as one of the most brilliant stylists the United States had ever produced, and his crisp and unpretentious prose changed the nature of American writing. Newspapers and magazines produced decades later bear clear indications of the transformation in style brought about by this remarkable book.
With a few exceptions, Hemingway's biographers have discounted his interest in and understanding of politics. In his foreword to Ernest Hemingway: A Life Story, Carlos Baker summarizes many of the paradoxical, even contradictory, aspects of his complex subject, calling him politically a “fierce individualist . . . who believed that that government is best which governs least.” In his intellectual inventory of Hemingway in By Force of Will, Scott Donaldson follows suit, finding the consistent pattern of his political stance to be “the ideas of conservative Republicanism,” deeply distrustful of big government and jealous of the autonomy of the individual person. “Basically bored with politics” according to the biography by Jeffrey Meyers, Hemingway responded to the call of the left in the 1930s in a “half-hearted”way with To Have and Have Not, which represents “only a token commitment to the class struggle.” Kenneth Lynn's Hemingway brings a neoconservative as well as psychoanalytical perspective to the life and works, arguing that his political naivete allowed Hemingway to become a communist dupe. James Mellow's recent Hemingway: A Life without Consequences, discussing the writer's relationship to the communist magazine New Masses, characterizes his political stance as that of “an individualist first and liberal second.”
Hobbes's whole philosophical enterprise, coming as it did so late in his life, has the character of mature reflection on an entire culture with which he was already completely conversant. Nowhere is this truer than in the area of moral philosophy, in which Hobbes looked back in all his great philosophical works at the way in which he and his contemporaries had actually discussed moral issues, and at the rich and complex ethical culture of Renaissance humanism. Accordingly, in this essay I will deal not only with the philosophical reflections in their own right but also with the way in which they drew upon and interacted with that earlier world of practical moral discourse.
'MORAL PHILOSOPHY'
The first issue to consider is just what Hobbes himselfunderstood by "moral philosophy," and in particular how he differentiated it from politics. On a number of occasions he tried formally to define the place of "ethiques" or "moral philosophy" inside his grand system of human knowledge.
Many of Hobbes's philosophical views about psychology appear quite up-to-date. Views very similar to Hobbes's are still being maintained by many, although often in a slightly more sophisticated form. In what follows I shall discuss only Hobbes's philosophical views concerning psychological topics, not his empirical speculations. With regard to matters of sense, this is explicitly in accordance with Hobbes's view of philosophy, for he says, in talking of phantasms involved in sense, we can only know “some ways and means by which they may be, I do not say they are, generated” [De Corp. ch. 25, i; EWl, p.388). Hobbes was quite inventive to say that “phantasms seem to be without, by reaction of the endeavour outwards, so pleasure and pain, by reason of the endeavour of the organ inwards, seem to be within”(De Corp. ch. 25, 12,- EWl, 406. See also Lev. ch. 1, WIII, 2; and D.H. ch. 11, 1). Hobbes knew, however, that this was empirical speculation, and it should be distinguished from what would now be classified as his philosophical views concerning sense.