Liberty and Necessity

Hobbes on Liberty and Necessity

MARGARITACOSTA

The word 'liberty' appears in Hobbes in two different contexts: 1) when man is regarded as an individual living by himself or in small groups not politically or- ganized, in the so-called state of nature; 2) when he is regarded as a citizen or subject, i. e., as a member of a civil society. In order to develop this point and show its connection with other aspects of this philosopher's conception of man and society, I will first of all consider his basic or metaphysical conception of liberty. To state it briefly, the questions I will attempt to answer here are the following: in the first place, is man by nature a free being for Hobbes and if the answer be affirm- ative, in what sense and to what extent?; in the second place, does man's civil liberty arise from the same source taking into account the change of circumstances, as his liberty of action in the private sphere? The distinction between metaphysical and civil liberty in Hobbes was taken into account by later British philosophers, in most cases to regret the misunder- standings to which the first sort had led and to stress the importance of the second sort. John Stuart Mill, for instance, at the very beginning of his Essay On Liberty, announces that the liberty he is going to speak about is not of a metaphysical sort: The subject of this Essay is not the so-called Liberty of the Will, so unfortunately opposed to the misnamed doctrine of Philosophical necessity; but Social or Civil Liberty: the nature and limits of the power which can be legitimately exercised over the individual.1

* All references within parentheses in the text are to The English Worksof ThomasHobbes, edited by Sir William Molesworth (London, 1839-45), abbreviated EW and followed by number of volume and of page.

1 J. S. Mill, ThreeEssays, On Liberty,Representative Government, The subjection of Women, London,New York, Oxford UniversityPress, 1975,"On Liberty",Chapter I, Introductory,p. 5 I think Hobbes would have agreed to the meaning of liberty as defined by Mill in its political context, though certainly within more narrow bounds; but he had to prove that liberty in its first, metaphysical sense, was not incompatible with the rest of his conception of reality.

I. The Metaphysical Issue

According to Hobbes, the metaphysical foundation of liberty is necessity. To begin with, his mechanical materialism did not allow for any essential distinction between mind and body, the former being just a sub-class of bodies, only made of subtler matter, invisible to the human eye. Consequently, his theories of motion and causality apply univocally to physical objects and to human thoughts and ac- tions. Moreover, what is valid for natural bodies - individuals of all sorts, both human and not-human - will be valid for artificial bodies, such as Hobbes con- ceives political institutions to be. As to the sciences which study the motions of bodies, there is first Geometry, which considers "what is produced by simple motion" (EW, I, p. 71 )*, meaning how geometrical figures of all sorts are generated; Physics, which is "the consideration of what one body worketh upon another" (EW, loc. cit.) and Moral Philosophy, which studies "the motions of the mind, namely appetite, aversion, love, benevolence, hope, fear, anger, emulation, envy, etc., what causes they have and of what they be causes" (EW, I, p. 72). These lat- ter motions, according to Hobbes, have to be studied after Physics, for "they have their causes in sense and imagination, which are the subject of physical contem- plation" (EW, pp. 72-3). As to Civil Philosophy, it must be preceded by the consideration of all the objects previously mentioned, chiefly the passions of the mind. Having established that all events, whatever their nature, have causes, Hobbes goes on to assert that causes are all necessary, and, therefore, that "... all things come to pass with equal necessity" (EW, I, p. 127). He not only claims that there is a power in the agent when a movement is produced, which he calls active power, but also a power in the patient, which, though passive, is nonetheless necessary for the effect to come about. Therefrom springs Hobbes's theory of an `entire cause', constituted by those two powers, or accidents, as he is also wont to call them, residing respectively in the agent and in the patient. His analysis of the entire cause, therefore, strengthens the idea of that necessity which commands all events or phenomena. He takes into account Aristotle's classification of causes, the passive power in the patient being the material cause, the essence of the agent the formal cause, and the end to be achieved by a certain movement, the final cause, but he finally reduces the four causes to the efficient or complete cause. He adds that power is spoken of in respect of an effect to be produced and cause in re-