This online colloquium has been established to discuss Timothy Raylor’s recent book, Philosophy, Rhetoric, and Thomas Hobbes. We began with an introduction to the text by Professor Raylor, followed by responses from Ted H. Miller, Patricia Springborg, and Alan Cromartie. We conclude this week with a reply by Timothy Raylor. Many thanks to Oxford University Press for supporting this colloquium.
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An author can hope for no greater honour than a careful,
critical engagement with his work. I am most grateful to the three
distinguished scholars who have generously offered their thoughtful and candid
responses to Philosophy, Rhetoric, and
Thomas Hobbes. It is a matter of great satisfaction that all three
respondents agree with the central claims of the book: that Hobbes’s
understanding of rhetoric is Aristotelian rather than Ciceronian, and that this
allows us to account for his various theoretical pronouncements about rhetoric
and its relationship to philosophy without having to posit a series of phases,
in which rhetoric is first embraced, then rejected, and finally embraced again.
Each of them has questions about my approach to the subject, or objections to
particular aspects of my argument, and it is on these, rather than on points of
agreement, that I shall focus my response.
Professor Miller finds me too narrowly focused on
‘school logic’, suggesting that while ‘Hobbes attacked pedagogues for the
political and social consequences he attached to their teaching, Raylor’s
tendency is to turn these pedagogical conflicts into ends in themselves’—as if, as he puts it, while Hobbes is criticizing the direction in which
his contemporaries were travelling, I have chosen to treat him as cavilling
about the inadequacies of their driving manual. Hobbes was certainly concerned
with incorrect teaching and illicit logical processes; but his focus was their
political and social consequences. Such consequences were not simply ‘attached
to’ school and university teaching; they were, rather, the direct result of the
pollution of logic by rhetoric (chapter 5). I do not think it fair to suggest
that I shrink this problem to quibbling over a driving manual. I devote the
better part of a chapter to Hobbes’s analysis of the consequences of this
compromised logic in the world. Chapter 6 examines Hobbes’s exposure of the weak
logical foundations of political and indeed most other areas of western philosophy,
built as they are on mere opinion and prejudice; it goes on to trace Hobbes’s
increasingly sophisticated and wide-ranging analysis of the church’s use of
rhetorical argumentation in order to establish and extend its temporal power.
A focus on logic and rhetoric is the prerequisite for an
historically informed grasp of what Hobbes is doing. We need to understand, for
example, that when he talks approvingly about ‘logic’ we cannot assume that he
is referring to the discipline as it was then understood. Such a focus is needed
also because Hobbes saw university education as one of the most important means
by which the forces of darkness have consolidated and transmitted their power. In
analysing the corruption of logic, Hobbes was not just criticizing a driving
manual’s skewed and tendentious interpretations of road signage, he was also exposing
the identities and motivations of its authors, and those of the instructors who
followed it: those who have, without proper authority, taken upon themselves responsibility
for road regulation and have, to serve their own interests, led drivers into confusion
and peril.
My emphasis on the development of Hobbes’s thinking
about the relationship between logic and rhetoric is, for Miller, symptomatic
of a ‘monopolism’ of perspective, which allegedly impedes my ability to see other
possible contexts. I do not believe that my approach is contextually monopolistic.
One of my chapters explores the historiographical background to Hobbes’s
translation of Thucydides; another examines the natural historical context of
Hobbes’ poem on the Derbyshire Peak. The problem is that the contexts with
which Miller wants me to engage do not strike me as useful for the tasks at
hand. Thus, for example, Miller thinks I ought to have discussed Hobbes’s
rhetorical practice in a work like Behemoth.
But Behemoth—important though it is—is a work of history, not a
work of philosophy; an analysis of Hobbes’s rhetorical practice therein would
be largely irrelevant to an investigation of his understanding of the appropriate
relationship between rhetoric and philosophy.
But it is not the absence of Behemoth that most bothers Miller. Readers familiar with his work
will not be surprised to find that the most important context Miller thinks I
ignore is that of mathematics: specifically ‘the mathematical culture in which
[Hobbes] was immersed from the time of his earliest works’—a culture both humanist and courtly, in which the mathematician’s skills
were not only admired and patronized but were also practised at the highest
levels of society.[1]
Miller accuses me of setting up an unnecessary barrier to the search for
‘connections between’ Hobbes and this culture by insisting that ‘we should not
credit the notion of a mathematical humanism or its relevance to Hobbes if we
cannot first establish that mathematics was at the core of university humanist
pedagogy’. This does not reflect my position.
Miller is right that I do not regard mathematics as the
core of grammar school or university education; but then neither does Miller—or, at least, he did not when he wrote Mortal Gods (‘Mathematics was not a key part of the education at
any given school’).[2]
Where he now claims broadly that Quintilian and Vives ‘recommended’ mathematics,
in his book he noted more precisely that they recommended it mostly for mental
training.[3] Vives saw in it some
practical utility (everyone needs to know how to count, it’s helpful to know
how to measure things, and so on), but he was concerned, as were others, that a
young gentleman who spends too much time on maths would be unfit for public
life.[4] In sum, Miller and I agree
that within the grammar school and university, mathematics, though a fundamental
aspect of a liberal education, was not viewed as a discipline worth pursuing
for its own sake.
And yet it does not follow from this that I regard
curricular centrality as the necessary prerequisite for taking seriously the
notion of ‘mathematical humanism’. The problem, as I explained in the book, is
that I am not persuaded by the evidence Miller has mustered to support his account
of a high culture of mathematics in which courtiers and monarchs were enthusiastically
and knowledgeably engaged. In expressing such doubts, I did not intend (as
Miller claims) to ‘stop us from looking towards the court, and to the
households of noblemen for such connections’; a large part of my book is
concerned with Hobbes’s place in just such a household. Nor do I ‘brush aside evidence
of Hobbes’s connection with Britain’s mathematical culture’; on the contrary,
my discussion of Hobbes’s surveying work with William Senior furnishes evidence
unnoticed by Miller for Hobbes’s connection with the world of practical
mathematics. Hobbes clearly had links to this world, as he did to that of
scholarly mathematics—in his friendship with Gilles
Personne de Roberval, for instance. But I am not persuaded by Miller’s claim
that such connections amounted to immersion in any kind of ‘culture of mathematics’.
Would anyone thus immersed have committed so many glaring faux pas in his mathematical works as Hobbes? Those who were immersed in that culture (e.g. Barrow,
Wallis, Huygens, de Sluse) did not see him as one of their number, but, rather,
as a dilettante working beyond the pale. And while personal animus and
political opposition can account to some degree for such responses, these cannot
be uniformly attributed to enmity: witness the efforts of Hobbes’s friend Sorbière to
encourage him to acknowledge and correct the paralogisms
that ‘nearly all the mathematicians’ found in his duplication of the cube.[5]
Even allowing for these disagreements, it is unclear
to me that a discussion of Hobbes’s mathematics forms a necessary aspect of an
argument about Hobbes’s understanding of the relationship between philosophy
and rhetoric. Miller feels it necessary because he thinks that many scholars regard
Hobbes’s ‘embrace of mathematics’ as signalling his ‘break with humanism’ and that
those who wish to argue that there was no such break must confront this
‘head-on’. But I show that Hobbes was always a humanist by looking at the
disciplines and genres in which he worked. And while I agree with Miller that
there was a turn in Hobbes’s thinking at the end of the 1630s, the view that
this amounted to an ‘embrace of mathematics’ is founded on a cursory reading of
Hobbes’s approving comments, in texts like the epistle dedicatory to The Elements of Law, about the firmness
and certainty of the knowledge attained by mathematical learning, in contrast
to the endless controversies generated by dogmatical learning—a topos I discuss in chapter 6 (see especially 272–4). Hobbes does not here embrace mathematics; rather, he embraces the
idea of disciplinary protocols that can generate certainty. Mathematics
provided a model of accomplishment, but different fields required different
approaches. The method by which certainty could be generated in the field of
philosophy was, Hobbes argued, his austere apodiectic logic, purged of the
approximations and probabilities of rhetoric. Hobbes’s radical redefinition of
logic, and his separation from it of the traces of rhetoric, was thus not just
pedagogical quibbling; it was central to what he thought he was doing as a
philosopher.
Professor Springborg suggests that my book ‘does not
really discuss’ Hobbes’s ‘science’, his optics, or ‘the atomism of the
Cavendish circle’, in addition to ignoring his mathematics. She finds this
surprising because I edited a collection of essays on the Cavendish circle and
am working on an edition of De corpore.
But one may surely work on different aspects of a writer without talking about
them all at the same time. Philosophy,
Rhetoric, and Thomas Hobbes is concerned with Hobbes’s understanding of
philosophy in general—its character and status, its relation
to other forms of knowledge and practice. Thus, I discuss Hobbes’s conception
of scientia, and his theorizing of a
distinction between those species of philosophy in which scientia is achievable and those (e.g. natural philosophy) in which
it is not. But Hobbes’s endeavours within particular sub-branches of philosophy—e.g. natural philosophy (Springborg’s ‘science’), optics, mathematics—are not among the concerns of this book.
Although Springborg thinks my argument is probably right,
she feels that in order to prove it ‘we need to know more about the
distribution of knowledge in early modern England, which cannot simply be read
off from the heavily Ciceronian educational curriculum’. But my account of the
context of Hobbes’s thinking is not ‘simply read off from’ the standard
grammar-school curriculum. In regard to rhetoric, for instance, I show that he
was working in a tradition of neo-Aristotelianism that had nothing to do with
grammar school Ciceronianism, and which I trace back via Goulston and Vossius
to the editions of mid-sixteenth century Venice. In exploring Hobbes’s thought
I have focused on texts to which he had access and on contexts that are
demonstrably relevant to our understanding of him. Professor Springborg thinks I
would need to range far more widely to secure my case.
Her review essay for Global Intellectual History furnishes a full account of what she
has in mind: a survey of the transmission of Greek scientific writings via the
translators of Abassid Baghdad and the Clunaic monks of Toledo to the Latin
west, together with an account of the renewed search for Arabic, Syriac,
Coptic, and Hebrew manuscripts in the seventeenth century.[6] It is a learned, stimulating,
and provocative investigation, striking for its geographic and historical
reach. But I do not see how it might help me persuade anyone of the merits of
my argument about Hobbes. It does not, I think, yield a single new source that
might pertain to my argument, and its conclusion that Hobbes saw himself as the
inheritor of a discrete tradition of ‘science, philosophy and rhetoric’ derived
from Aristotle via the Arabs, and opposed to Latin scholasticism, seems to me doubtful.
It is, at least, at odds with Hobbes’s typical self-presentation as either sui generis, or, as in the epistle dedicatory
to De corpore, the latest in a short
line of modern philosophers (Copernicus, Galileo, Harvey) who have thrown off
the dead weight of tradition and established new sciences.
Rather than focusing on topics my book does not attempt
to address, Professor Cromartie faces squarely up to the central questions that
it does raise, flagging up the difficulties involved in working out ‘the
precise relationship of rhetoric with logic’ in Hobbes’s thinking and, in doing
so, directing our attention to the importance of attending to the Latin Digest
and English Briefe of Aristotle’s Rhetoric—a desideratum also recently registered by Quentin Skinner.[7] Cromartie asks two questions.
First, he wonders how much, in his mature political writings, Hobbes’s view of
rhetoric has changed from the ‘capacious view’ he registered in his Digest of
Aristotle’s Rhetoric, according to
which it encompassed not just ēthos
and pathos, but also logos. Cromartie observes that human
interaction depends upon things that do not meet the strictest requirements of
formal logic: we cannot function without beliefs and opinions, for instance, or
act without the prompting of the passions. In my view, Cromartie is right on
these points, and I think that Hobbes would have agreed with him. But Hobbes’s
political philosophy was not designed to regulate such quotidian interactions;
it was to lay the foundations for an incontrovertible understanding (scientia) of the principles of authority,
on which grounds a solid political structure might be raised. Nor was his
earlier view of rhetoric quite as capacious as Cromartie implies. Rhetoric did
not, either in Aristotle’s view or in Hobbes’s rendition of it, depend (as Cromartie
suggests) upon formal logic. Within rhetoric, logos denotes something offered as a reason, an argument, a proof,
rather than ‘logic’ in the strict sense. Thus, while I agree with Cromartie
that there is little change in Hobbes’s understanding of the character of rhetoric—the works of his maturity still register an Aristotelian conception of the
three kinds of proof (even if, as in the passage from De cive, XII.12, that both Cromartie and I discuss, he sometimes
downplays the importance of logos)—the official position of his maturity is, as he puts in Anti-White, I.3, that since philosophy is
the product exclusively of formal logical procedures it can have nothing to do
with rhetoric.[8]
The second question raised by Professor Cromartie
concerns logic’s limitations. Here he suggests that in practice Hobbes often
exceeds the boundaries of strictly logical argumentation and that in order to
pursue the kinds of quarry he seeks he is obliged to do so. Since matters of
faith fall outside the scope of scientia,
this may explain Hobbes’s use of rhetorical techniques to attack the church in
part four of Leviathan, and since Leviathan as a whole has ‘some elements
of advocacy’ its use of rhetorical argumentation is not really surprising. I agree.
Techniques of ridicule designed to undermine ēthos are famously deployed in the ‘Comparison of the Papacy with the Kingdome of Fayries’.[9] And Leviathan is clearly engaged in advocating primarily the utility of
Hobbes’s political philosophy, as in the suggestion at the end of part two that
this should be publicly taught: a claim that follows from, and exceeds, the
logical demonstration of its validity of the two preceding sections.[10]
Thus far, I think, Cromartie and I are in agreement.
Where we begin to depart is over the question of whether Hobbes’s practice in Leviathan is the consequence of a
changed theory of philosophy that now allows room for rhetorical persuasion. In
his final paragraph, Cromartie turns to Hobbes’s much-discussed dismissal, in
the ‘Review, and Conclusion’ of the argument, drawn from ‘the contrareity of some of
the Naturall Faculties of the Mind’, that
‘in all Deliberations, and in all Pleadings, the faculty of solid
Reasoning, is necessary: for without it, the Resolutions of men are rash, and
their Sentences unjust: and yet if there be not powerfull Eloquence, which
procureth attention and Consent, the effect of Reason will be little.’[11]
Cromartie suggests that Hobbes here rejects just the
conclusion that strength of reasoning and force of eloquence cannot co-exist in
the same person, rather than the premise that ‘eloquence is necessary “in all
Deliberations”’. He certainly rejects that conclusion, suggesting that while the
two faculties cannot be deployed at the same time, they may indeed co-exist in
the same person: ‘Judgement, and Fancy may have place in the same man; but by
turnes; as the end which he aimeth at requireth’.[12] But this does not imply
endorsement of the premise that eloquence is necessary to deliberation. While eloquence
may contribute to the ‘adorning and preferring of Truth’ once discovered, it must
be excluded from reasoning, and as such it is, as Hobbes’s discussion of
counselling in chapter 25 of Leviathan
argued, a threat to proper deliberation.[13]
Despite these disagreements, I think Cromartie is
right that Hobbes’s literary practice frequently violates his austere theory of
valid logical process, and right that it must inevitably do so. This is
certainly the case in Leviathan,
which taken as a whole, I have argued, does not constitute a work of philosophy
or ‘science’ according to Hobbes’s criteria. But it is not, I think, uniquely
true of Leviathan. Hobbes’s logical
procedures are so narrow and so rigid that it seems unlikely that they could
ever generate in practice all the conclusions to which his philosophy tends; recourse
to the improvisations and approximations of informal, rhetorical reasoning
seems inevitable. A well-known example of this kind of slippage is Hobbes’s
ambiguous use of the concept of conatus
at one moment to denote just the beginning of a motion, at another to suggest its
cause.
Although his early critics made, as I have noted, much
of the contradiction of austere logical theory by high-handed rhetorical
practice, only very occasionally does Hobbes acknowledge that his philosophical
conclusions exceed his logical protocols.[14] We see this, for
instance, in his treatment of natural philosophy (which I discuss in chapter 5),
where he acknowledges that hypothetical knowledge only is attainable. We see it
also in his backing away, in the preface to the 1647 edition of De cive, from the implication that
everything said therein was philosophically demonstrated, and allowing that his
argument for the superiority of monarchy was offered only ‘probably’.[15] But any reader keen to find
a more substantive acknowledgement or wide-ranging reflection on the problem would,
I think, be disappointed. The stakes were too high and the intellectual
environment too hostile for Hobbes to open up for scrutiny the foundations of
his philosophical practice.
But such practice may well repay further
investigation. A full study of the logical and rhetorical moves involved in
each of the three parts of the Elements
of Philosophy—Body, Man, Citizen—would establish precisely the points at which Hobbes slides from strict philosophical
demonstration into rhetorical proof and thus help us grasp more precisely than
hitherto the relationship between Hobbes’s theory of philosophical reasoning,
with its clear separation of logic from rhetoric, and his practice of it. Such
a study might shed light also on the reasons underlying Hobbes’s painfully slow
progress on a work that was, allegedly, fully conceived by 1642, but which was
not finally available in print until 1658. Research of this kind will be facilitated
by the provision of critical editions of the texts that make up the trilogy—editions that register not just the latest printed versions but also the
evolution of the texts in question. New editions of all three texts are in
preparation for The Clarendon Edition of the Works of Thomas Hobbes. It is on an
edition of the first part of the trilogy, De
corpore (Of Body), that I,
together with Stephen Clucas, am currently engaged.
Professor Timothy Raylor
(Carleton College)
[1] Ted H. Miller, Mortal Gods: Science, Politics, and the Humanist
Ambitions of Thomas Hobbes (University Park, PA., 2011).
[2] Mortal
Gods, 93.
[3] Mortal
Gods, 17–23.
[4] Juan Luis Vives, On Education, ed. and tr. Foster Watson
(Cambridge, 1913), 200–3.
[5] The
Correspondence of Thomas Hobbes, ed. Noel Malcolm, 2 vols. (Oxford, 1994),
ii, 565.
[6] ‘Raylor’s
revisionist humanist Hobbes. Patricia Springborg review essay of Timothy
Raylor, Philosophy, Rhetoric, and Thomas
Hobbes’, Global Intellectual History,
online first: https://doi.org/10.1080/23801883.2019.1606692.
[7] http://www.europeanhobbessociety.org/general/new-directions-for-hobbes-research/ I am at currently work on a comparative study of the two
texts.
[8] Hobbes, Critique
du ‘De mundo’
de Thomas White,
ed. Jean Jacquot and Harold Whitmore Jones (Paris, 1973), 107; Hobbes,
Thomas White’s ‘De mundo’ Examined,
ed. and tr. Harold Whitmore Jones (Bradford, 1976), 26; cit. Philosophy, Rhetoric, and Thomas Hobbes,
215.
[9] Leviathan,
385; see Philosophy, Rhetoric, and Thomas
Hobbes, 268–70.
[10] Philosophy,
Rhetoric, and Thomas Hobbes, 270.
[11] Leviathan,
389.
[12] Leviathan,
389.
[13] Leviathan,
390; Philosophy, Rhetoric, and Thomas
Hobbes, 249, 252.
[14] Philosophy,
Rhetoric, and Thomas Hobbes, 1–2.
[15] Philosophy,
Rhetoric, and Thomas Hobbes, 177.
