The Word for the Deed

“the Word for the Deed”: Hobbes’s Two Versions of Leviathan Charles D. Tarlton (bio) But wee are to give credit to the Canonicall Scripture, whatsoever be written in the Apocrypha. 1 I This is an essay about Leviathan and its double. It attempts to display and assess the implications of a differentiation within Leviathan that first betrays itself in the ambiguities of the signification of the very word—Leviathan. Thus, on the one hand, Leviathan is the title of a book, the alternative literary expression for “The Matter, Forme, & Power of a Common-Wealth,” somehow even the contents of the book, its “Conclusions, or Theoremes” (111). Leviathan is that treatise on the “Constitution, Nature, and Right of Soveraigns; and concerning the Duty of Subjects, derived from the Principles of Naturall Reason” (254). On the other hand, it is perhaps the name of the thing itself, the state, “that great Leviathan called a Common-Wealth, or State” (9), what he also calls an “Artificiall Man” (9), or “the Multitude so united in one Person . . . the generation of that great LEVIATHAN, or rather (to speak more reverently) of that Mortall God” (120). Or, it could be just “the Governour, whom I compared to Leviathan . . . King of the Proud” (221). This duality within the term Leviathan serves metaphorically to represent the fundamental duplication which exists between the published text of Leviathan and the replication-with-a-difference which Hobbes envisions as the book’s actualization in an act of sovereignty. Hobbes dreamt of Leviathan’s being infused with efficacy by an act of government, thus creating two versions of the book—the one merely textual, the other an official teaching. This division between the purely theoretical and the immediately practical haunts Leviathan from the outset. It is most generally revealed in the recurring distinctions that arise between things mental (ideational, logical, imaginary, and verbal) and things “merely” physical (experience, practice, prudence). The physical side at first takes a back seat, and we hear a lot about how only [End Page 785] rational, conditional, scientific principles can attain the highest levels of immutability and eternalness. Knowledge of the physical, the world of fact and observation (although it is oddly termed “absolute”) remains distant, mediated, uncertain, and, most importantly, greatly variable from person to person. The greatest ambivalence in Hobbes, however, comes to the fore in the political uses made of these distinctions. Of course, principle is said to be superior, and the “skill of making, and maintaining Common-wealths, consisteth in certain Rules, as doth Arithmetique and Geometry; not (as Tennis-play) on Practise onely” (145). But grammatically, the stricter implication is that it does not depend “onely” on those rules, either. The same hesitance is evident in Hobbes’s later views of political knowledge. “When for the doing of any thing, there be Infallible rules, (as in Engines, and Edifices, the rules of Geometry,),” he writes, “all the experience in the world cannot equall his Counsell, that has learnt, or found out the Rule” (180). It seems necessary to put a lot of weight on that “when,” inasmuch as it logically suggests a sometimes category of “things-for-which-reason-is-alone-sufficient,” without establishing that there actually are any such. But, in any event, hardly has Hobbes made that statement, than he reconsiders (it must have occurred to him that not everything reduces to principles after all) and adds the other half of the world (splitting the difference). “And when there is no such Rule,” he says, “he that hath most experience in that particular kind of business, has therein the best Judgement, and is the best Counsellour” (180). Hobbes is continually torn between his logically pure stand on the side of principles, reason, and the conditional knowledge of science and his more grudging realization that politics is, at least in part, a practical matter. His solution to the tension is, at bottom, to bring experience and fact under the umbrella of his conditional knowledge, to reduce experience to definition, to equate principles and experience. Words, for Hobbes, are the names of things, and not even the most monstrously abstract or general proposition is utterable without words. The distance shrinks in

Constitution · Duty · Epistemology · LEVIATHAN (cipher) · Multitude · Originalism · Political science · Theology · Law · Mathematics · Philosophy · Political Theology and Sovereignty · Seventeenth-Century Political and Philosophical Thought