Chapter 4

Hobbes and Husserl

Robert Sokolowski

I have a personal reason to discuss Hobbes and phenomenology in a paper honoring

Richard Cobb-Stevens. He once told me about an incident that occurred while he was
driving from Boston College to his home in Carlisle, Massachusetts. At one point, a
police cruiser flagged him down and the officer came up and went through the usual
inquiries. The interview gradually turned into a conversation, and the officer asked
Richard what he did. He said he was a professor at Boston College, and the policeman
asked, “What do you teach?” On hearing the answer “Philosophy,” the officer drew
himself up, pointed to his badge, and said, “Do you see this badge?” “Yes.” Then, in
stentorian tones, “Behind this badge stands the power of The Great Leviathan.” This
was a striking instance of philosophy flowing back into the Lebenswelt.
Husserl does not say much about Hobbes, in contrast with the extensive attention
he gives to Locke, Berkeley, and Hume, but he does mention him in his surveys of
the history of philosophy and he makes some insightful, if general, remarks about
him as being the source for a number of problems in later British philosophers. In
the “Critical History of Ideas” found in Erste Philosophie, for example, Husserl
says that the psychology being developed by both Descartes and his contemporary
Hobbes modeled itself after the new natural sciences of the time. It proceeded as a
purely inductive science, which, Husserl says, one might call “a natural science of
the soul (des Seelischen)” (1965, p. 88). Husserl distinguishes Hobbes from
Descartes, however, claiming that while Descartes attributed thoughts to a spiritual
substance, Hobbes took cognitional life as “merely subjective appearance,” which
was to be correlated with material objects; he thereby became “the father of modern
materialism and also the new materialistic psychology” (Husserl 1965, p. 94,
cf. p. 301 note). He did so by transmitting into modern philosophy a bad inheritance
(“ein altes Erbübel”) from ancient skepticism and medieval nominalism

R. Sokolowski (*)
School of Philosophy, The Catholic University of America, Aquinas Hall 100,
620 Michigan Ave NE, Washington, DC 20064, USA
e-mail: [email protected]

© Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2015 51

J. Bloechl, N. de Warren (eds.), Phenomenology in a New Key: Between Analysis
and History, Contributions to Phenomenology 72, DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-02018-1_4
52 R. Sokolowski

(1965, p. 127). Such random remarks, drawn from Husserl’s rather textbook
knowledge of Hobbes, stand in vivid contrast with the detail of his discussion of
later British Empiricists and their relation to his phenomenology.
This paper proposes to examine Hobbes’s own work and to show how some of
his doctrines can be illuminated by themes in phenomenology. It will be a retro-
spective analysis, examining not Hobbes’s influence on Husserl but the light that
Husserl’s philosophy can shed on Hobbes.

Philosophical Method

At the beginning of Leviathan, in the introduction, Hobbes, after a long paragraph

about the state as an artificial man, says that wisdom is acquired not by reading
books but by “reading” men (1996, p. 10).1 But there are two ways to read men,
Hobbes says: one is by knowing the conduct of men in the world and gossiping
about them, and the other is by knowing oneself, by looking into ourselves and
using this knowledge to understand the ways of other men. Because of the “simil-
itude of the thoughts and passions of one man to the thoughts and passions of
another,” anyone who proceeds this way will “read and know what are the thoughts
and passions of all other men upon the like occasions.” Hobbes claims, therefore,
that we best know others indirectly, through self-knowledge. Trying to understand
others without this philosophical knowledge of ourselves “is to decipher without a
key,” like trying to figure out a coded message without the help of the code book.
This self-knowledge, however, will itself be clarified by the reading of Hobbes’s
writings, whose claims will be confirmed by our experience of ourselves.
By reflecting on our own experience we will see that what Hobbes says is
self-evidently true. Hobbes promises that his book will enable us to learn the formal
structures of both human thinking and the various passions. He insists that this
knowledge will focus on the passions themselves and not on their objects: “I say the
similitude of passions, which are the same in all men, desire, fear, hope, etc.; not
the similitude of the objects of the passions, which are the things desired, feared,
hoped, etc.”
These remarks of Hobbes bear an uncanny resemblance to Husserl’s claim
that philosophy consists in a reflective analysis of one’s own ego. Husserl says
that each person must “enter into himself,” where the task at hand is to describe the
structures of intentionality that are found in our cognitional activities: “The Delphic
motto, ‘Know thyself!’ has gained a new signification. Positive science is lost in
the world. I must lose the world by epochē, in order to regain it by a universal
self-examination. ‘Noli foras ire,’ says Augustine, ‘in te redi, in interiore homine

1
Hobbes’s use of the term “to read” in this context is noteworthy. It will recur in my citations.
I will quote from this edition but will modernize the spelling.
4 Hobbes and Husserl 53

habitat veritas’” (Husserl 1977a, p. 157).2 Husserl spells out this procedure of
reflection more explicitly and in greater detail than Hobbes does, and in doing so he
offers us a more adequate analysis of what philosophy is. He formulates it in terms
of the transcendental reduction, in which we elevate ourselves into a standpoint
from which we can contemplate our natural attitude and our natural consciousness
(the noetic domain), as well as the objects with which our experience is correlated
(the noematic domain). Husserl also says that we must not just think about our
individual conscious experiences but must raise them to eidetic generality, that is,
we need to perform an eidetic as well as a transcendental reduction. One of the
criticisms Husserl makes of Hobbes is that he did not recognize this eidetic
dimension but remained an empiricist who worked merely with inductive pro-
cedures even in his psychology: Hobbes suffered from “a blindness in regard to
ideas and ideal laws” (1965, p. 127). For Husserl, it is through eidetic insight based
on our own conscious life that we can come to know what consciousness and truth
are for all rational subjects.
Another major difference between Hobbes and Husserl lies in the total absence of
any reference to political philosophy in Husserl, in striking contrast with the domi-
nance of the political interest in Hobbes. After sketching the aims of his philosophy in
his introduction, Hobbes says that a private person would find this knowledge of men
useful only in his dealings with his acquaintances, but “he who is to govern a nation,
must read in himself, not this, or that particular man, but Man-kind” (1996, p. 11).
Hobbes is addressing the one who will bear the sovereignty. The philosophical
achievement will be put into the service of political dominion. He concedes that
this task of reading mankind might seem overwhelming, but he confidently adds that
his book will make it easy: “When I shall have set down my own reading orderly, and
perspicuously, the pains left another, will be only to consider, if he also find not the
same in himself.” All the work will have been done by Hobbes; the sovereign (and his
subjects as well, as Hobbes will say later) will need only expose themselves to the
methodic exposition of his writing. Husserl is very different from this. His aim is
cultural and scientific, not political. He intends to clarify how philosophy is a science,
not how it helps in governing. Hobbes, in contrast, wishes to teach both the sovereign
and his subjects, whom he shows to be subjects by their own volition; at the close of
Part II of Leviathan Hobbes expresses the hope that “men will learn thereby, both
how to govern, and how to obey” (1996, p. 254).
There is, furthermore, nothing small-minded in Hobbes’s ambition. In the
previous chapter he had posed the rhetorical question: “Is it you will undertake to
teach the universities?” (1996, p. 237) Will he presume to teach the teachers in the
commonwealth? He concedes that this is a “hard question,” but he responds, “It is
not fit, not needful for me to say either I or No: for any man that sees what I am
doing may easily perceive what I think.” Husserl would not have been capable of
such Machiavellian subtlety.

2
Hobbes also appeals to the Delphic motto in his introduction to Leviathan: “Nosce teipsum, Read
thy self” (1996, p. 10).
54 R. Sokolowski

To conclude this discussion of philosophical method in Hobbes and Husserl,

I would like to mention a curious passage at the beginning of The Elements of Law,
where Hobbes discusses cognition. He writes, “There be in our minds continually
certain images or conceptions of the things without us, insomuch that if a man could
be alive, and all the rest of the world annihilated, he should nevertheless retain the
image thereof, and of all those things which he had before seen and perceived in it”
(1994, p. 22). Hobbes uses this thought experiment to show what he means by ideas;
he continues, “Every man by his own experience knowing that the absence or
destruction of things once imagined, does not cause the absence or destruction of
the imagination itself.” This passage resembles Husserl’s own Weltvernichtung as
presented in Ideas I and Cartesian Meditations, except that Hobbes seems to take this
possibility rather casually as a step in his argument, while Husserl gives it a more
important role. He uses it as one of his “ways to reduction,” one of the arguments that
establish his philosophical project and to explain the standpoint we need to occupy if
we are to carry it out (1977b, p. 103, 1977a, pp. 17–18). Husserl drew this maneuver
from Descartes, of course, and he calls it the “Cartesian way” to the epochē and
reduction when he later criticizes it in The Crisis of European Sciences, but it is
interesting to see that Hobbes made use of the same conceptual experiment even if he
did not give it a very prominent place in his philosophy (1970, p. 155).

Perception and Imagination

One area in which a superiority of Husserl over Hobbes comes to the fore is in the
analysis of perception and imagination, that is, in the analysis of these two basic
structures of intentionality. Hobbes’s treatment is vastly oversimplified. He discusses
perception under the rubric of “sense.” He claims that sense occurs when the object
works on the eyes, ears, and other parts of the body and “produces diversity of
appearances” (1996, p. 13). The effect of the object is essentially tactile; it or its
effects “press” the organs of sense and then cause a further motion through nerves and
other “strings and membranes” internally “to the brain and heart,” where they cause
“a resistance or counter-pressure or endeavour of the heart.” This endeavour is a
motion outward, and because it is outwardly directed, “it seems to be some matter
without” (1996, pp. 13–14). Whether inward or outward, however, all we have is
motion rolling on in “us,” that is, in our bodies. The endeavour, this beginning of an
outward motion, is tiny and barely perceptible if at all: “unstudied men” do not
acknowledge it because they do not recognize any motion where the thing moved is
not visible “or the space it is moved in is (for the shortness of it) insensible” (1996,
p. 38). We must, however, admit its existence, because if we recognize larger motions
we know there must have been small beginnings for them.3

3
I would like to note the similarity between Hobbes’s notion of this small displacement that he
calls endeavour and Derrida’s notion of différance.
4 Hobbes and Husserl 55

Two points need to be made in response to these Hobbesian claims. The first is
that Hobbes begins his analysis of sense by appealing only to bodily motions. They
are generated by the object, traverse the space between the thing and the perceiver,
enter the sense organs of the perceiver, and finally reach the brain and heart. At that
point the bodily motion rebounds and becomes not just motion but a phenomenon: a
seeming or a fancy or an appearance. How does this change occur? How does a
motion become an appearance? In describing this process, Hobbes shifts from what
I would call “body language” to “fancy language,” but he does not explain how this
transition from physical process to appearance takes place or how the transition
from one kind of language to another is justified. He does not explain how we can
shift from talking about bodies to talking about appearances. And yet, in a striking
passage in the De Corpore, he recognizes the strangeness of this difference and
seems to admit the dilemma: “Of all the phenomena that exist near us, ‘the to be
manifest’ itself (id ipsum to phainesthai) is doubtlessly the most wondrous
(admirabilissimum); that in natural bodies, some have in themselves ‘exemplaria’
of practically all things, others of none” (1839, p. 316).4 This lyrical passage
acknowledges the astonishing fact that appearances have suddenly “made their
appearance” among simple bodies, but it seems to treat this fact as a mystery rather
than as something to be explained. The passage is an expression of premodern,
Aristotelian wonder, quite out of keeping with Hobbes’s standard way of treating
things and reducing them to matter in motion. I would also add, incidentally, that
contemporary brain science has not progressed much beyond Hobbes on this issue;
it also does not explain how the material processes in the brain and nervous system
can also “be” thoughts and images in and through which we experience, name, and
articulate things.
Hobbes goes on in this passage in De Corpore to make a statement that sounds
very much like Husserl’s “principle of all principles,” the maxim that in our
phenomenology we must take intuitive experience as the norm for all knowledge,
and we must accept it with all its limitations (“aber auch nur in den Schranken”)
(Husserl 1977b, p. 51).5 That is, there are absences as well as presences in intuitive
experience. Hobbes’s way of saying this is: “So that if phenomena are the principles
of knowing everything else, and [if] sensing is the principle of knowing those
principles, then it must be said that all science is to be derived from it [from
sensing], and for the investigation of the causes of it [sensing], no beginning can
be taken from any other phenomenon besides this one itself” (Hobbes 1839,

4
I am grateful to James Hart for bringing this passage to my attention. See his book, Who One Is
(Hart 2009, vol. 1, p. 61, n. 8). Part IV is entitled, Physica, sive de naturae phanomenis, Physics, or
on the phenomena of nature. The passage reads: “Phaenomenōn autem omnium, quae prope nos
existunt, id ipsum to phainesthai est admirabilissimum, nimirum, in corporibus naturalibus alia
omnium fere rerum, alia nullarum in seipsis exemplaria habere.” The translation in the text is my
own. The passage is translated in J. C. A. Gaskin’s edition of The Elements of Law: Human Nature
and De Corpore Politico (Hobbes 1994, p. 213). My criticism of Hobbes is analogous to August-
ine’s critique of Democritus and Lucretius in §31 of his letter to Dioscorus (Letter 118).
5
The title of §24 is, “Das Prinzip aller Prinzipien.”
56 R. Sokolowski

pp. 316–317).6 The major difference between Husserl and Hobbes is that Hobbes
restricts intuition to sensory perception while Husserl expands it cover categorial
and eidetic insight as well.
The second point I wish to make concerning Hobbes’s doctrine of perception
deals with the spatial location of the appearances that bodies cause in us. Where do
such appearances occur? Because a “seeming” or a “fancy” is an effect produced by
a bodily motion, the appearance takes its place not in the thing that causes it but in
the body that receives it, that is, it occurs in us as perceivers. The appearance is
spatially displaced from the thing of which it is an appearance. This dislocation of
appearances is vividly brought out in a passage in The Elements of Law. Hobbes
writes, “Every man hath so much experience as to have seen the sun and other
visible objects by reflection in the water and in glasses, and this alone is sufficient
for this conclusion: that color and image may be there where the thing seen is not”
(1994, pp. 23–24). The appearance is not in the thing but elsewhere, where it is a
“thing merely phantastical” (1994, p. 24).7 Hobbes refers to this shell game that
nature plays on us as “the great deception of sense” and he says that it “is by sense
to be corrected” (1994, p. 26). In Leviathan Hobbes says that if colors and sounds
were in the objects, they could not have been severed from them, but we do see that
there are situations “where we know the thing we see is in one place, the appearance
in another” (1996, p. 14). Later on, while discussing the Kingdom of Darkness,
he writes, “The phantastical forms, apparitions, or seeming of visible objects . . . are
nothing real in the things seen, nor in the place where they seem to be” (1996,
pp. 447–448).
Hobbes is not saying that appearances might on occasion be separated from the
things that appear. He claims that they never are to be found in the thing and cannot
be located there, because they are the outcome of a bodily motion that has departed
from the object and has found its residence in us or on some reflecting surface. If
from a certain distance the object may “seem invested [clothed] with the fancy that
it begets in us; yet still the object is one thing, the image or fancy another” (1996,
pp. 447–448).8 Appearances are ontologically and spatially separated from the
things of which they are the appearances.
We can use this colorful and interesting doctrine of Hobbes as a point of contrast
with Husserl’s doctrine of the intentionality of consciousness. For Husserl, the
features that we experience as the manifold of sides, aspects, and profiles
(Abschattungen) in which a thing presents itself to us are all experienced as lodged
in the thing itself. They are given in the thing, not separated from it and dislocated

6
Latin text: “Adeo ut si phaenomena principia sint cognoscendi caetera, sensionem cognoscendi
ipsa principia principium esse, scientiamque omnem ab ea derivari dicendum est, et ad causarum
eius investigationem ab alio phaenomeno, praeter eam ipsam, initium sumi non posse.”
7
We might note how strongly Hobbes substantializes appearances when he speaks of a “thing
merely phantastical.”
8
Hobbes seems to imply that the fancy that occurs in us is like the image that occurs in a mirror.
4 Hobbes and Husserl 57

elsewhere. The thing is the identity given to us in this manifold, not something
separable from it. Following his “principle of all principles,” Husserl takes our
intuitive experience as normative for our philosophical descriptions. Features are
experienced intuitively in things and not in us and we need to begin our philosoph-
ical analysis with this phenomenon as given.9 We must not reconstruct it. Instead of
appealing to a bodily motion that goes from the object to the perceiver, Husserl
describes things as they directly show up to us, and with great subtlety formulates a
vocabulary appropriate to such appearances. He also explains how the standpoint
we adopt when we carry out such reflective analysis differs from the standpoint we
enjoy when we are involved with things in the world. By working out the intricacies
of the transcendental reduction, he clarifies the difference between what I have
earlier called philosophical “body language” and “fancy language.”
One of the strengths Husserl brings to this argument is his extremely refined
differentiation of the many kinds of presences, images, and representations that
enter into our experience, along with the differentiated intentionalities that are
correlated with them. Husserl distinguishes between empty and filled intentions,
categorial and sensory perception, imagination and memory, and imagination and
after-images. A phenomenologist might go on in this spirit and further distinguish
between mirrors and pictures, moving pictures and stills, television and movies,
photographs and paintings, and so on. Perception itself takes on many forms,
depending on the kind of thing being perceived, each kind having its own style of
manifolds. Hobbes fails to make enough distinctions. His vocabulary for imaging is
univocal. For Hobbes, “sense” is reduced to one kind of thing because it is reduced
to matter in motion, and the appearances that are displaced from things are also
flattened out into one kind: Hobbes uses the mirrored reflections in water as being
the same kind of “appearance fantastical” as imagination and memory, and he does
not adequately discuss pictures.10 Because a mirrored image can be displaced from
the object it mirrors, he concludes that even in perception the look of a thing can be
detached from the thing itself, which is counter-intuitive and philosophically
illegitimate.
Hobbes’s blunt univocity in his philosophical lexicon for appearances accounts
in part for his scathing, amusing, but unfair critique of scholastic theories of
knowledge. Toward the end of his chapter on imagination in Leviathan, for

9
In a footnote in Erste Philosophie, Husserl (1965, p. 151) mentions Hobbes and says that both he
and Locke make the mistake of considering the perceived object as a complex of sensory data
instead of seeing it as the substrate for its features. In the main text on this page he is discussing
Berkeley, who, he says, fails to recognize that Dingbewusstsein must be seen as Einheitsbe-
wusstsein and that the perceived thing is a synthetic identity in a manifold of presentations.
Each of the thing’s features, furthermore, such as the color or shape, is itself an identity in a
manifold. Husserl observes in the footnote that the philosophical failure to recognize the identity
of things seems “ineradicable, unausrottbar.”
10
Hobbes claims that statues do not resemble things; rather, they resemble images in the brain of
the person who makes them. In discussing statues and idols, he says, “And these are also called
images, not for the resemblance of any corporeal thing, but for the resemblance of some
phantastical inhabitants of the brain of the maker” (1996, p. 448).
58 R. Sokolowski

example, he writes, “Some say the senses receive the species of things, and deliver
them over to the common-sense; and the common sense delivers them over to the
fancy, and the fancy to the memory, and the memory to the judgment, like handing
of things from one to another, with many words making nothing understood” (1996,
p. 19). The scholastic term species is like the Greek word eidos. It does not name a
thing, no more than the English word “look” – as in “the look of a building” – would
name a thing. But Hobbes takes it to name a thing. The scholastics, drawing on
Greek philosophy, were trying to get a vocabulary appropriate to the philosophical
discussion of thinking and appearing, but Hobbes was obviously unsympathetic
with their efforts. He did not offer them a charitable interpretation, to say the least,
in his linguistic analysis. Each of the first eight chapters of Leviathan conclude with
an almost ritualistic fling at the scholastics and their “absurd” verbiage, and the
attacks continue at intervals later in the work. Husserl, in contrast, is concerned with
trying to get the right words to name the way things show up, and to introduce the
right stance that will allow us to describe how things can be identified. He also
wishes to find the vocabulary to express how we ourselves can become identifiable
as speakers and agents of truth. In this regard Husserl’s work is more compatible
with the ancient philosophy than is that of Hobbes.

Metaphysical, Mathematical, and Political Questions

Chapter One of Leviathan deals with sense, which is caused in us by an object that
is present. Chapter two deals with imagination, whether simple or compound,
which Hobbes defines as decaying sense, the continued “rolling” of the motion
within us; such decaying sense occurs when the object that caused the original sense
is absent and yet the motion it engendered persists. He also discusses memory
(imagination considered as past), experience (many memories), afterimages (imag-
inations derived from strongly pressed sense), dreams (imaginations during sleep),
and understanding (imagination joined to words or other voluntary signs such as
nonverbal sounds, hence common to man and beast).11 The latter five phenomena
are essentially reducible to imagination but imagination is not reducible to sense; it
is, rather, what happens after sense is finished. There is an irreducible distinction
between sense and imagination, even though both are different stages in the
continuous motion caused by the object in us. Imagination is that motion as it has
rebounded within us, so it is partially generated from within and not, like sense,
simply from without.
The relationship between sense and imagination demands further study.
Although the two phenomena are just one motion, the motion is differentiated by
its direction, first from without and then from within. But in addition there is an

11
Hobbes’s failure to distinguish different kinds of intentionality is especially obvious in regard to
afterimages. He considers them a kind of imagination, but they clearly are different.
4 Hobbes and Husserl 59

identity between the two; what we imagine is recognized as the same as what we
perceived. Hobbes, however, does not account for such identity. He says, for
example, that memory occurs “when we would express the decay, and signify
that the sense is fading, old, and past.” He also says that simple imagination occurs
“when one imagines a man, or horse, which he has seen before,” and he refers to
imaginations of “cities we have seen” (1996, p. 16). But why do we not take the
image we now have as simply another “sense”? What is it that allows us to
recognize the sameness between the present image and the original sense? How is
the sense of pastness introduced? If imagination is merely another stage in a bodily
motion, why is it not taken as something simply present, as simply another
perceptual experience and not “the same thing again”? Once again, the shift from
“body language” to “fancy language” is not clarified, and a classical metaphysical
issue – that of identity and difference, sameness and otherness, and even the special
temporal forms of same and other – are not considered. Husserl, in contrast, with his
extensive attention to the theme of identity in manifolds, directly faces such topics
and develops a vocabulary to treat them.
I would like to draw attention to a beautiful philosophical formulation in
Hobbes. It deals with his treatment of speech. After discussing sense, imagination,
and trains of thoughts (imaginations), he moves on, in chapter 4 of Leviathan, to
speech, the form of expression proper to man. Words, he says, are under our
voluntary control, both as reminders to ourselves (“marks”) and as instruments of
communication (“signs”). We can manipulate them in a way that we cannot
manipulate our thoughts. Words enable us to order and guide our ideas in a way
that animals cannot, and they also enable us to represent or “personate” ourselves
and others and so enter into political life. In leading the reader into this topic
(in chapter 2), he mentions and emphasizes a particular feature of words: they exist
not as single items, but are woven together in a deliberate manner by a speaker.
Hobbes refers to such interweaving as the “sequel and contexture of the names of
things” (1996, p. 19).12 This is a wonderful way of expressing syntax, which
Husserl calls categoriality and categorial form. Hobbes’s phrase alludes to the
temporal sequence of words, the fact that they follow one another in time, and it
also signifies their grammatical threading and weaving, their combing and carding.
However, Hobbes’s ontology of speech, his explanation of how words as physical
sounds are related to the meanings and the things that they embody, is far less
successful than Husserl’s intricate clarification of the metaphysics of verbal mean-
ing in the first two chapters of Logical Investigations (2001, pp. 184–215).
Both Hobbes and Husserl were involved in mathematics, and this intellectual
formation affected both their doctrines and the way they wrote philosophy. Hobbes
thinks of reasoning as computation and he often uses mathematical terms to
describe logical operations; adding and subtracting comprise the essential opera-
tions in thinking: “When a man reasoneth, he does nothing else but conceive a sum

12
Ibid., p. 19. On Hobbes’s philosophy of language, see the valuable book: Pettit, P 2008, Made
with Words: Hobbes on Language, Mind, and Politics.
60 R. Sokolowski

total, from addition of parcels; or conceive a remainder, from subtraction of one

sum from another” (1996, p. 31). Sums of names are affirmations, sums of affir-
mations are syllogisms, and sums of syllogisms are demonstrations. He says that
“Reason . . . is nothing but reckoning,” and he compares someone who makes an
error in moving from premises to conclusions with arithmeticians who “cast up
false” (1996, p. 32).13 Definitions for Hobbes are sums of ideas, and in particular his
many definitions of the passions, in chapter 6, seem to be so many equations made
up of a few elementary terms. One might present his definitions formally as
follows14:
(1) hope ¼ appetite + likelihood of attainment
(2) despair ¼ appetite + unlikelihood of attainment
One might even think of substituting values in such equations. For example, since:
(3) anger ¼ courage + suddenness
and
(4) courage ¼ aversion + hope of avoidance by resistance
we might substitute the definition of courage found in equation (4) for the term
“courage” in equation (3) and change the latter into:
(3)1 anger ¼ aversion + hope of avoidance by resistance + suddenness
This procedure is very much like the substitution of terms in physics. If force equals
mass times acceleration:
(1) f ¼ ma
and acceleration is distance over time squared:
(2) a ¼ dt2
then:
(1)1 f ¼ mdt2
In the way he thinks, Hobbes seems to anticipate Newton. Husserl’s first book, of
course, was a philosophical study of arithmetic, and his writing always maintained a
mathematical tone in its precision of expression.
The most conspicuous difference between our two philosophers is the total lack
of any political philosophy in Husserl. In radical contrast with both Plato and
Hobbes, Husserl enters philosophy from the world of science, first from mathemat-
ics and then from logic as the core of scientific thinking. Even The Crisis of
European Sciences responds to the cultural problem posed by science, not that

13
Ibid., ch. 5, p. 32.
14
For the following definitions, see Hobbes 1996, p. 41. I will discuss only hope, despair, anger,
and courage, but one could perform similar operations on many of the definitions Hobbes gives in
this chapter.
4 Hobbes and Husserl 61

presented by modern political ideas. He resembles Descartes in this neglect of

politics as a setting for philosophy. But although Husserl says practically nothing
about political life, what he does can still be of great importance for it. After all,
Hobbes begins Leviathan by talking about perception, imagination, reasoning, and
words. His “epistemology” is a prelude for his treatment of politics. His under-
standing of human cognition and speech is geared toward the politics of sover-
eignty. It describes how a sovereign and a subject in a modern, Machiavellian state
exercise their reason. Hobbes’s anthropology is suited for subjects of the modern
sovereign state.15
Husserl’s metaphysics of knowledge differs from that of Hobbes, and it can be
put into the service of a more classical understanding of human beings as citizens.
The human person described by Husserl is a responsible agent, someone who does
not need to have the definitions of moral terms imposed on him by the sovereign. If
he is a virtuous agent, he can discover through his own prudence what is good and
noble by nature. He can think for himself and he can converse with others; he is also
capable of friendship, for which Hobbes gives no account.16 He is an agent of truth
and a practical agent, and he can politically act for himself as a citizen. He need not
be personated by others or concede the whole of political action to the sovereign
power. If Hobbes dissociates himself from ancient and medieval thinking, Husserl
opens the possibility of regaining philosophy as such, which transcends the differ-
ences between ancient, medieval, and modern, and treats human beings as citizens
and statesmen, not subjects and sovereigns. He enables us to retain our dignity even
before a representative of the great Leviathan.

References

Hart, J. 2009. Who one is. New York: Springer.

Hobbes, T. 1839. De Corpore. In Opera Philosophica quae Latine Scripsit, ed. W. Molesworth.
London: Bohn.
Hobbes, T 1994. The elements of law: Human nature and De Corpore Politico, ed. J.C.A. Gaskin.
New York: Oxford University Press.
Hobbes, T. 1996. Leviathan. New York: Cambridge University Press.

15
On the threat to human freedom in Hobbes’s theory, see Hobbes and Republican Liberty
(Skinner 2008, pp. 211–216).
16
Thomas Prufer gives a highly compressed digest of Hobbes’s political theory, under the heading,
“Hobbes’s sovereign teaching.” The title is ambiguous; it can refer to both Hobbes’s teaching
about sovereignty and his teaching as being intellectually sovereign, that is, as ruling over minds.
In a note to this section Prufer says that his major point “began to become clear to me through a
remark of Francis Slade . . .: ‘For Hobbes, friendship is terrible’.” See Recapitulations: Essays in
Philosophy (Prufer 1993, p. 25). Without Hobbes’s instruction, we are left in a standoff between
tyranny and tyrannicide: “Tyranny and tyrannicide are left facing each other unless both sovereign
and subject are ruled by Hobbes’s teaching. The book Leviathan is the mortal god, the knowledge
of good and evil” (Prufer 1993, p. 26).
62 R. Sokolowski

Husserl, E. 1965. Erste Philosophie (1923–1924): Erster Teil: Kritische Ideengeschichte.

Dordrecht: Springer.
Husserl, E. 1970. The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology. Trans:
David Carr. Evanston: Northwestern University Press.
Husserl, E. 1977a. Cartesian meditations. The Hague: Nijhoff.
Husserl, E. 1977b. Ideen zu einer reinen Ph€
anomenologie und ph€anomenologischen Philosophie,
erstes Buch: Allgemeine Einf€ uhrung in die reine Ph€
anomenologie. Dordrecht: Springer.
Husserl, E. 2001. Logical investigations. New York: Routledge.
Pettit, P. 2008. Made with words: Hobbes on language, mind, and politics. Princeton: Princeton
University Press.
Prufer, T. 1993. Recapitulations: Essays in philosophy. Washington, DC: Catholic University of
America Press.
Skinner, Q. 2008. Hobbes and republican liberty. New York: Cambridge University Press.