Mortal Gods: Science, Politics, and the Humanist Ambitions of Thomas Hobbes by Ted H. Miller

Author:Ted H. Miller
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: The Pennsylvania State University Press

In Hobbes, there would be no golden chains let down from heaven, but (as before) the way Hobbes introduces the world in which these chains are replaced did not depart from the norms and habits of address in which they were.

Leviathan as Masque-Text

One function of Hobbes’s Leviathan is to present the sovereign with an image of himself. He offers the sovereign a complex self-image—one that includes his subjects—and we can better understand these complexities through a comparison to masque representation.132 Insofar as the Leviathan is composed of all the subjects, the monster-state on the frontispiece is their own portrait. Insofar as the Leviathan cannot come into being until the would-be subjects promise one another to transfer their right of self-protection to a sovereign power that represents them, the image in the mirror is also that of the sovereign himself. The sovereign who represents the multitudes, in Hobbes’s words, “personates” them.133

Tracy Strong has commented on the curious reading of “Nosce te ipsum” in Leviathan’s introduction. Hobbes does not make the standard translation, “Know thyself.” Rather, he uses the phrase “Read thyself.” On Strong’s interpretation, this suggests that Leviathan might be read as a work of Protestant civic scripture. The citizens must read themselves in the text, and become that which they read.134 This is not all the introduction suggests. It concludes:

But let one man read another by his actions never so perfectly, it serves him only with his acquaintance, which are but few. He that is to govern a whole nation must read in himself, not this or that particular man, but mankind, which though it be hard to do, harder than to learn any language or science, yet when I shall have set down my own reading orderly and perspicuously, the pains left another will be only to consider if he also must not find the same in himself. For this kind of doctrine admitteth no other demonstration.135

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.