Abstract

In a few quite telling lines in De Cive, Hobbes denies that men’s “universal distrust” of one another should imply that men are evil by nature. And the reason for his denial is that “[…]we cannot tell the good and the bad apart, hence even if there were fewer evil men than good men, good, decent people would still be saddled with the constant need to watch, distrust, anticipate and get the better of others, and to protect themselves by all possible means.” Hobbes here, and in Leviathan, made this mutual distrust among men the principle sustaining his conception of modern, immanent sovereignty. However, in apparent contradiction, he claimed that it is a principle “everyone admits”, even if “many do deny it” . From these few lines dealing with the essence of man, the skeleton of Hobbes’ philosophical / theological-political thought can be inferred; thus, the significance of Hobbes’s conception of man requires the context of his wider ideas to be grasped. These are the main ideas in these lines: • “Good” and “evil”, if they were to denote essential attributes of men, would be unknowable; anticipating Kant’s separation of morals from cognition, Hobbes words here imply that they can only make sense as unconditional predicates; exposed to the empirical realm, they dissolve into uncertainty. • Thus, “good” and “evil”, when applied to concrete human beings, are relational conditional predicates. And, in this uncertain state of affairs, “evil” is the optimal bet. • The “apparent contradiction”, and Hobbes’ solution: what everyone admits is implicit in the social practices, in the lifeworld of a given historical era: they are the unconditional, sovereign truths that give an era its substance; that preside over empirical truth and falsity, and that, from that subordinate domain can only be construed as exceptions. The possibility of denial is subordinated to sovereign truth. Thus Hobbes conception of man would anticipate Nietzsche’s “beyond good and evil”, in its undeniable modern ilk. Therefore, the ensuing uncertainty, and not the evil essence of men would lie at the very conceptual kernel of Hobbes’ “state of nature”. Besides, there would be nothing “natural” in it: widespread uncertainty is the outcome of the collapse of the medieval power-knowledge apparatus, and of emergence of modern capitalist social relations and rationality. In fact, the concept of truth implicit in Hobbes’ “apparent contradiction” is thoroughly modern as well: the relative, falsifiable truths of the modern endeavour of knowledge; at the same time, this relativity as grounded on unconditional sovereign truth; that is, on the exception. Truth closely intertwined with the cloth of political sovereignty that, in the same way as the latter, remains unnoticed until challenged in its very foundations (but then, as perhaps right now is happening, it may be too late).