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Thomas Hobbes on Intentionality, Desire, and Happiness Chapter 9 Thomas Hobbes on Intentionality, Desire, and Happiness Hobbes offers a surprisingly modern account of happiness, or felicity, as con- tinuous success in life. At the same time, he recognizes its paradoxical aspects, namely, happiness is never devoid of anxiety. His idea of happiness is based on desires, which is to be expected because for Hobbes persons are dynamic agents who aim at their own good directed by deliberation. I pay attention to the problems of intentionality. Deliberation is presented by Hobbes in exten- sional language, according to the principles of his scientific project, although intensional language is clearly needed when we discuss the success of projects and something like hitting a set target. I review and criticize the views of some authors who write as if Hobbes’s project were plausible, or he could reduce causa finalis to causa efficiens. In the end, I offer some comments on Hobbes’s alleged egoism. Theories of Happiness The following theories of happiness have been popular. They answer the ques- tion, when can we say a person is happy? I provide a brief sketch of each of them, relate Hobbes to some of them, and finally go deeper into his theorizing. Here are six typical views of happiness: A virtuous and only a virtuous person is happy, or happiness is virtuousness. A person who enjoys life is happy, or happiness means maximal pleasure and avoidance of pain. This is hedonism. A person who is calm and contented is happy, or happiness is peace of mind (ataraxia); it is also possible she enjoys the benefits of apatheia or freedom from passions. A person is happy when she systematically gets what she wants, or hap- piness is fulfilled desire. © koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���9 | doi:�0.��63/97890044�0305_0�0 This is an open access chapter distributed under the terms of the CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 license.Timo Airaksinen - 9789004410305 Downloaded from Brill.com09/29/2021 03:32:19PM via free access <UN> 164 Chapter 9 A happy person is, somehow, a complete person, or happiness is flourish- ing as self-realization, or “becoming what you are” in terms of one’s real- ized potential. This is eudaimonia. A happy person enjoys a full range of social goods, such as loving family, prosperity, and overall appreciation and success in her social and politi- cal life, in addition to such natural goods as good health. The idea that happiness is or follows from moral virtue has been the dominant theory from antiquity to the early modern times. Socrates is perfectly happy in his prison cell although he is sentenced to die and he is innocent. One could expect that these two conditions over-determine his unhappiness, but they do not. He is happy because he is virtuous. This has been called a “Socratic para- dox” in ethics, and a paradox it is, namely, to say a virtuous, happy person is immune to the vagaries of the world is clearly an exaggeration. Normally, we think the world makes one happy or the world takes happiness away. However, the Socratic view does not respect this intuition. Hobbes’s own view of virtue is rather bleak, perhaps even ironic. He knows perfectly well how important and central this notion has been and still is. Therefore, he plays down virtue’s import in a way that he knows so well, by ironic belittlement: [T]herefore that modesty, equity, trust, humanity, mercy (which we have demonstrated to be necessary to peace), are good manners or habits, that is, virtues. The law therefore, in the means to peace, commands also good manners, or the practice of virtue; and therefore it is called moral.1 In the Aristotelian lore, moral or practical virtues are acquired character traits but no one would call them mere good manners. Nevertheless, Hobbes says that the laws, both natural and civic, command the good and that is why they are moral. Perhaps they are moral because no peace can prevail without those virtues and in this sense the law’s purpose presupposes them, but that alone does not make them moral virtues in the traditional sense. Hobbes says virtues are moral when they aim at peace, peace makes it possible to act and succeed, and hence virtues promote happiness; but virtues as such do not make men happy. Hobbes could well ask, why would they? Now, it is still possible that virtue brings about happiness and if it does, it certainly is valuable happiness. Obviously, many types of successful happiness ascriptions are devoid of value or they may even be evil – hedonistic 1 De Cive, 1642, Ch. 3, Sec. 31. All references to Hobbes’s works are to the standard Molesworth edition. Timo Airaksinen - 9789004410305 Downloaded from Brill.com09/29/2021 03:32:19PM via free access <UN> Thomas Hobbes on Intentionality, Desire, and Happiness 165 happiness has been the main culprit here. Today, many philosophers may find it difficult to explicate why exactly virtue should make a person happy. Here I mean, of course, the tradition of Aristotelian and medieval virtues as character traits, the so-called pagan virtues like moderation, courage, justice, and practi- cal wisdom where also the Christian virtue of benevolentia can be added.2 As a personal reminiscence, let me tell that I, while lecturing on virtue ethics, easily counted nine different theories, including of course the Roman-Machiavellian virtù as manly capability and the Kantian virtue of consistently following one’s moral duty. There are also many popular watered down views of vir- tue, such as the 17th century British view of natural virtue meaning not much more than decent social behaviour of a good Anglican, a view supported by, e.g., Edmund Burke, George Berkeley, and Jonathan Swift.3 Such a view is clearly related to Hobbes’s view but in their case without any trace of irony or disdain. Why does virtue make the virtuous happy? Nicholas E. Lombardo puts the point succinctly: Virtue’s more characteristic affections are joy and pleasure. Virtue gener- ated joy because the will attains goods that it desires through virtue, and when the will attains some desired good the volitional affection of joy necessarily results […] There is usually some sensible pleasure too as the joy spills over into the sense appetite.4 Stanley Cunningham further explains, While happiness has to do with the reasoning and intellectual part of the soul, it would be wrong to conclude that it does not also include pleasure. […] Albert characterizes the pleasure element of happiness a profound element of flourishing, an expansivess and tranquillity of the [virtuous] soul.5 I find these ideas highly interesting in the sense that they blend most of the listed theories of happiness together. For this reason, it seems that we cannot pretend that all the happiness theories are fully independent of each other. On the contrary, happiness theories should be named after their dominant 2 See J. Casey, Pagan Virtue, An Essay on Ethics. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991. 3 S. Breuninger, Recovering Bishop Berkeley: Virtue and Society in the Anglo-Irish Context. Bas- ingstoke: Palgrave, 2010, pp. 18, 19. 4 N.E. Lombardo, The Logic of Desire: Aquinas on Emotion. Washington, D.C.: The Catholic Uni- versity of America Press, 2010, p. 107. 5 S.B. Cunningham, Reclaiming Moral Agency: The Moral Philosophy of Albert the Great. Wash- ington, D.C.: The Catholic University of America Press, 2008, p. 261. Timo Airaksinen - 9789004410305 Downloaded from Brill.com09/29/2021 03:32:19PM via free access <UN> 166 Chapter 9 element, that is, the virtue theory of happiness is what it is because the idea of virtue dominates it. Yet it employs pleasure, ataraxia, and desire as its sub- elements, as the two quotations above make clear. Perhaps we can continue and expand on this line of thought by saying that some theories of happiness are less significant than others. The criterion would then be how many differ- ent elements of happiness theories they include. For instance, hedonism does not seem to mention any other happiness theory. The self-realization theory does not necessarily include virtue, but virtue theory mentions self-realization and flourishing as well as pleasure. Of course one may remark that the role of the notion of desire and desire satisfaction is inessential. The fact that some desires as desires get satisfied is not important at all; all that matters is what one gets, or what it is and how one gets it, when one’s desire is satisfied. This is uncontroversial, as far as I can see.6 A more difficult problem is that of pleasure in hedonism. If virtue is essentially a matter of intellect and reasoning; that is, it is cognitive in nature, its conative and emotive aspects are secondary but real. The next question must be, is the virtue derived pleasure of the same type of pleasure as that spoken of by the hedonists proper? My intuition says that answer must in the negative. Let us focus briefly on the early hedonists like the Cyrenaics: “living pleasantly is a synonym for ‘happiness’”; moreover, “if we could accomplish the goal of living pleasantly, there would be nothing further to desire.”7 It is also significant that all this applies mainly to the present time events: “directing too much care and attention to the future is self-defeating.” This is easy to understand for the sim- ple reason that to take care of the future is often incompatible with enjoying of what you have here and now. Any worries about the future tend to destroy, or at least postpone, the present enjoyment.
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