Hobbes's understanding of love, and its significance for his political thought, has received insufficient attention. This essay contends that Hobbes has a consistent and comprehensive teaching on love that directly repudiates what he regards as the Platonic teaching on eros. In attacking the Platonic idea of eros, Hobbes undermines a pillar of classical political philosophy and articulates a significant aspect of his new understanding of the passions in terms of power, which is itself a critical part of his new political science most famously presented in Leviathan.
For example, "love" does not appear in the indexes of the major works on Hobbes, such as Jean Hampton's Hobbes and the Social Contract Tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), Gregory S. Kavka's Hobbesian Moral and Political Theory (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1986), Sharon Lloyd's Ideals as Interests in Hobbes's Leviathan: The Power of Mind Over Matter (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), or Deborah Baumgold's Hobbes's Political Theory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988). There is a mere two-line entry (and no entry on eros) in Aloysius Martinich's A Hobbes Dictionary (Cambridge: Blackwell, 1995) and only scattered references in Mary Dietz' edited collection Thomas Hobbes and Political Theory (Lawrence, KS: University Press of Kansas, 1990), and M. M. Goldsmith's Hobbes's Science of Politics (New York: Columbia University Press, 1966).
2.
See, for example, Sorell's brief discussion of desire and eros in the context of the psychological egoism of Hobbes: Tom Sorel, Hobbes (London: Routledge1991, 97); Spragen's observation that Hobbes's critique of Platonic eros as well as Augustinian amor Dei is a logical outcome of his rejection of teleology and rationality: T. Spragen, The Politics of Motion: The World of Thomas Hobbes (London : Croom Helm, 1973), 185; R. E. Ewin's ("Hobbes on Laughter ," The Philosophical Quarterly51, no. 202 (2001): 29-40 at 35-6) and Bernard Gert's ("Hobbes and Psychological Egoism," Journal of the History of Ideas28 no. 4 (1967): 503-20 at 512-14) views regarding the unreliable nature of passion; and George Schulman's argument that for Hobbes (especially in his account of Ixion in De Cive) there is an oedipal relationship between citizens and justice ("Hobbes, Puritans and Promethean Politics," Political Theory16 no. 3 (1988): 426-43, at 432-3). James Martel's treatment of the theme in his Love is a Sweet Chain: Desire, Autonomy, and Friendship in Liberal Political Theory (New York: Routledge , 2001), 190; 199 is indicative. He notes the importance of Hobbes as the "road not taken" by liberalism on "its task to create a politics out of love," without indicating the character of this "road not taken."
3.
Consider, for example, Allan Bloom, "Introduction" to Jean-Jacques Rousseau Emile or On Education, trans. Allan Bloom (New York: Basic Books, 1979), 21; and Diana Schaub's reference to Hobbes as a "sere-souled" English bachelor, with his political philosophy described as "unerotic liberalism" in Erotic Liberalism: Women and Revolution in Montesquieu's Persian Letters (Lanham, MD: Roman & Littlefield , 1995, ix-x; 9).
4.
Victoria Kahn , "Hobbes, Romance, and the Contract of Mimesis ," Political Theory2 (2001): 11.
5.
Ibid., 11, 22.
6.
Ibid., 10.
7.
Ibid., 8.
8.
Perhaps Kahn does not examine the connection to Plato because she attributes so much importance to Aristotle's understanding of the passions in shaping Hobbes's views (Kahn2001, 9). Yet as she acknowledges in her major work Wayward Contracts: The Crisis of Political Obligation in England, 1640-1674 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004), 225, neoplatonism played a fundamental role in the "formal elements" of seventeenth-century romance.
9.
References to Hobbes's works are as follows: Leviathan (L, chapter, and page number) from Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, ed. C. B. Macpherson (Middlesex, UK: Penguin Books, [1651] 1968); De Homine(DH, chapter, section number) from Thomas Hobbes, De Homine , in Man and Citizen, ed. with translation by Bernard Gert (Gloucester, MA: Peter Smith, [1658] 1978); Human Nature (HN, chapter, section number) from Thomas Hobbes, The Elements of Law: Human Nature and De Corpore Politico, ed. J. C. A. Gaskin (Oxford: Oxford University Press , [1640, 1650] 1994); De Corpore Politico (DCP, chapter, section number) from Thomas Hobbes, The Elements of Law: Human Nature and De Corpore Politico, ed. J. C. A. Gaskin (Oxford: Oxford University Press, [1640, 1650] 1994); De Corpore (DCo, chapter, section number) from Thomas Hobbes, De Corpore, in Thomas Hobbes: Metaphysical Writings, ed. Mary Whiton Calkins (LaSalle, IL: Open Court Classics, [1657] 1989); De Cive (DC, chapter, section number) from Thomas Hobbes, De Cive. In Man and Citizen, ed. with translation by Bernard Gert ( Gloucester, MA: Peter Smith, [1658 ] 1978); and Behemoth (Behemoth page number) from Behemoth; or The Long Parliament, ed. Ferdinand Tonnies with an introduction by Stephen Holmes. (Chicago : University of Chicago Press, [ 1890] 1990).
10.
See generally, Allan Bloom, Love and Friendship ( New York: Simon & Schuster, 1993), 46-7; Thomas L. Pangle and Lorraine Smith Pangle, The Learning of Liberty: The Educational Ideas of the American Founders (Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 1993), 288; Mark J. Lutz, Socrates' Education to Virtue: Learning the Love of the Noble (Albany: SUNY Press, 1998), 19; and Haig Patapan, Machiavelli in Love: The Modern Politics of Love and Fear (Lanham, MD: Lexington , 2006), 1-14.
11.
See also Waller Newell, Ruling Passion: The Erotics of Statecraft in Platonic Political Philosophy. (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2000), "Introduction."
12.
See C.B. Macpherson , "Introduction" to Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan. [Middlesex, UK: Penguin Press, 1968], 9.
13.
J.C.A. Gaskin , "Introduction" to Thomas Hobbes, The Elements of Law: Human Nature and De Corpore Politico (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 1994), xii. The Elements of Law was completed by 1640 and circulated in manuscript, but was not published until 1650-and then in two parts (Human Nature and De Corpore Politico) and probably without Hobbes's approval. See also Daniella Coli, "Hobbes's Revolution " in Politics and the Passions, 1500-1850, ed. Victoria Kahn, Neil Saccamino , and Daniela Coli ( Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006), 77.
14.
This is not to deny that, according to Hobbes, the first or original impetus for moving toward objects is pain-specifically, the physical pain caused by the need "of food . . . of excretion, and exoneration" (L 6, 120). Once we taste certain objects, however, we learn "from Experience" that they give us pleasure (L 6, 120). At that point, a desire for them is born independent of their ability to quell our pains.
15.
While Locke nowhere talks systematically about eros, he does speak of "love": (TCU, sec. 45; ECHU, II, XXI, sec. 38). References to Locke's works are as follows: On the Conduct of Understanding (TCU, section) from John Locke, On the Conduct of the Understanding, ed. Ruth W. Grant and Nathan Tarcov (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Publishing Company, [1706] 1996); An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (ECHU, book, chapter, section) from John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, ed. Peter Nidditch (Oxford, UK: Clarendon Press, [1700] 1975).
16.
The status of fear of death in Hobbes's thought is contested: see for example, Lloyd, 1992; Spragens 1973, 194-7; F.S. McNeilly, The Anatomy of Leviathan, (London: Macmillan1968), 178-182; Peter Ahrensdorf, "The Fear of Death and the Longing for Immortality: Hobbes and Thucydides on Human Nature and the Problem of Anarchy" American Political Science Review94, no. 3 ( 2000): 579-94; J. Blits, "Hobbesian Fear," Political Theory17, no. 3 (1989). While Hobbes acknowledges that the pursuit of power often creates disorderly passions like the desire for honor that lead people to risk their lives, preservation remains for him the objective standard by which human beings can judge what is good for them: as he says, "the greatest of goods for each is his own preservation" (DH XI, 6), and he that foreseeth the whole way to his preservation (which is the end that every one by nature aimeth at) must also call it good, and the contrary evil. And this is that good and evil, which not every man in passion calleth so, but all men by reason. (HN XVIII, 14) It is true that in De Homine, he says that "though death is the greatest of all evils (especially when accompanied by torture), the pains of life can be so great that, unless their quick end is foreseen, they may lead men to number death among the goods" (DH XI, 6). Note, however, that he does not say that it may reasonably lead men to do so. More importantly, consider the context of Hobbes's statement: it occurs in a section that begins by asserting that "the greatest of goods for each is his own preservation" (DH XI, 6; emphasis added). As we have seen, for Hobbes preservation means more than "bare Preservation." A person living in hopelessly inescapable and overwhelming pain no longer feels any pleasure and thus no longer feels alive; he is experiencing the horrifying feeling of extinction over and over again. In a truly hopeless situation, it might be reasonable to prefer actual extinction, after which there is at least no pain.
17.
Hobbes judges the reasonableness (and therefore the rightness) of even "natural" desires and pleasures based on whether they promote preservation. According to Kahn, Hobbes makes such distinctions between desires because "consistent naturalism" would have obliterated the distinction between good and bad passion essential to his political thought ( Victoria Kahn, "`The Duty to Love': Passion and Obligation in Early Modern Political Theory," in Rhetoric and Law in Early Modern Europe, ed. Victoria Kahn and Lorna Hutson [New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2001], 259). We would only add that Hobbes believes that his philosophy is one of "consistent naturalism" (what Gaskin calls "one-world realism" [Gaskin 1994, xxv]) because he believes that all passions (even the "foundational" desires for pleasure and power) can be traced back to the original "impulsion of nature"-to avoid death (DC I, 7).
18.
A fourth kind of person alluded to by Hobbes is the scientist, who finds his greatest pleasure in satisfying curiosity, especially through speculation (L 6, 124; L, "A Review and Conclusion," 729).
19.
Coli, "Hobbes's Revolution ," 75.
20.
Indeed, it is so true that there is no "such thing as . . . simply good" that "even the goodness of which we ascribe to God Almighty, is his goodness to us" (HN, VIII, 3).
21.
In Leviathan, Hobbes says that the Latine Tongue has two words, whose significations approach those of Good and Evil; but are not precisely the same; And those are Pulchrum and Turpe. But in our tongue . . . for Pulchrum we say in some things, Fayre; in others Beuatifull, or Handsome, or Gallant, or Honourable, or Comely, or Amiable." (L 6, 121)
22.
Gaskin, "Introduction," xiii.
23.
The importance of eros for Hobbes reaches beyond romantic vainglory because, as Kahn notes, such vanity fueled "the Crown's chief competitors in the production of ideological fictions: the common lawyers, natural rights theorists, Presbyterians, Independents, and radical sectarians" (Kahn 2004, 136).
24.
Natural lust is a very powerful form of love; so powerful, in fact, that in the absence of law in the state of nature, the "concord" of "small Families" "dependeth on naturall lust," not erotic love (L 13, 187). According to Hobbes's analysis, lust can replace law and love (however imperfectly) because people naturally have an "indefinite desire of the different sex" based on a need for "issue" (HN IX, 5). See in this context Carol Pateman, The Sexual Contract (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1988), 44-54.
25.
For an interpretation of Quixote's erotic vision of Dulcinea, see Henry Higuera, Eros and Empire: Politics and Christianity in Don Quixote ( Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 1995), chap. 2.
26.
In Behemoth, Hobbes cites the example of the third Earl of Essex, who was moved to show his valor by risking his life in leading the parliamentary army because of taunts that he was a cuckold. Essex possessed Amadis de Gaul, Don Quixote's favorite (Kahn 2004, 138, 328, n. 11; Higuera 1995, 17, 99).
27.
Hobbes commends Plato as "the best Philosopher of the Greeks" not because Plato understood the passions but because he "forbad entrance into his Schoole, to all that were not already in some measure Geometricians" (L 46, 686).
28.
All citations from Plato's Symposium are taken from Plato, Symposium. Trans. Avi Sharon (Newburyport, MA: Focus Philosophical Library, 1988).
29.
Newell, Ruling Passion , 2-3
30.
While apparently positing that Greek homosexuality was conventional ("the use of that time"), Hobbes seems to admit the possibility of homosexual erotic attraction. Compare this with his definition of lust as desire for "the different sex," or his observation that eros "cannot be without diversity of sex" (DH VIII, 5; HN IX, 16).
31.
Hobbes does not deny that charity exists; indeed, he says that charity is the sole virtue in the state of nature and encompasses all those qualities necessary for "the cause of peace" (DH XIII, 9; HN XVI, 8). As Hobbes defines it, however, charity is not sacrificial love but "that passion by which we strive mutually to accommodate each other . . . as far as may be without danger to their persons, and loss of their means" (HN XVI, 8).
32.
Gaskin therefore misses the point when he says that Hobbes had an insight into "benevolence" that "is a pointer to the road later taken by Shaftesbury and Hume" (Gaskin 1994, xxxv). Shaftesbury explicitly criticizes Hobbes for trying to ignore benevolence by reducing all human actions-including benevolent ones-to some form (however confused) of self-interest ( Anthony Ashley, Earl of Shaftesbury, Characteristicks of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times, ed. Douglas Den Uyl [Indianapolis, IN: Liberty Fund Press, [1712] 2001, 57).
33.
One reason is our natural vanity: to fall in love we must find someone who is extraordinary but does not offend our vanity by making us feel foolish, a potentially difficult combination. Adding to the problem is the fact that to feel eros, a person must have hope of winning the beloved's "singular" love in return. He would have to need the particular kind of power that the beloved has while himself having the type of extraordinary power that the beloved is herself seeking, another combination that is extremely hard to find. Finally, this difficulty is magnified by the problem of imagination. Eros requires imagination because beauty "is pleasant by imagination, even before the good of which it is a sign is acquired" (DH XI, 5). But when the lover actually experiences his beloved, she may have less of the good quality than he had hoped, which would make her less beautiful and perhaps cast doubt on (or even shatter) the imagination necessary to sustain his passion of love. Thus, while Hobbes admits that people can imagine finding their "felicity" in love, he suggests that no one in reality can have all the power we seek. It is no wonder, then, that the lover as a type of human being is largely absent from Hobbes's political thought.
34.
For Don Quixote as an example of someone whose eros for a beloved becomes more and more a desire for his own martial glory, see Higuera 1995, 47-8.
35.
As Gaskin persuasively shows, The Elements has "considerable claims as the primary source for Hobbes's main ideas, as the most succinct presentation of them, and as an epitome of those parts of his philosophy that have most enduring value" (Gaskin 1994, xiii).
36.
On the tension between Hobbes's rhetoric and his scientific principles see Quentin Skinner, Reason and Rhetoric in the Philosophy of Hobbes (Cambridge : Cambridge University Press, 1996 ).
