Hobbes offers a surprisingly modern account of happiness, or felicity, as continuous success in life. At the same time, he recognizes its paradoxical aspects, namely, happiness is never devoid of anxiety. His idea of happiness is based on desires, which is to be expected because for Hobbes persons are dynamic agents who aim at their own good directed by deliberation. I pay attention to the problems of intentionality. Deliberation is presented by Hobbes in extensional language, according to the principles of his scientific project, although intensional language is clearly needed when we discuss the success of projects and something like hitting a set target. I review and criticize the views of some authors who write as if Hobbes’s project were plausible, or he could reduce causa finalis to causa efficiens. In the end, I offer some comments on Hobbes’s alleged egoism.
Theories of Happiness
The following theories of happiness have been popular. They answer the question, when can we say a person is happy? I provide a brief sketch of each of them, relate Hobbes to some of them, and finally go deeper into his theorizing. Here are six typical views of happiness:
A virtuous and only a virtuous person is happy, or happiness is virtuousness.
A person who enjoys life is happy, or happiness means maximal pleasure and avoidance of pain. This is hedonism.
A person who is calm and contented is happy, or happiness is peace of mind (ataraxia); it is also possible she enjoys the benefits of apatheia or freedom from passions.
A person is happy when she systematically gets what she wants, or happiness is fulfilled desire.
A happy person is, somehow, a complete person, or happiness is flourishing as self-realization, or “becoming what you are” in terms of one’s realized potential. This is eudaimonia.
A happy person enjoys a full range of social goods, such as loving family, prosperity, and overall appreciation and success in her social and political life, in addition to such natural goods as good health.
The idea that happiness is or follows from moral virtue has been the dominant theory from antiquity to the early modern times. Socrates is perfectly happy in his prison cell although he is sentenced to die and he is innocent. One could expect that these two conditions over-determine his unhappiness, but they do not. He is happy because he is virtuous. This has been called a “Socratic paradox” in ethics, and a paradox it is, namely, to say a virtuous, happy person is immune to the vagaries of the world is clearly an exaggeration. Normally, we think the world makes one happy or the world takes happiness away. However, the Socratic view does not respect this intuition.
Hobbes’s own view of virtue is rather bleak, perhaps even ironic. He knows perfectly well how important and central this notion has been and still is. Therefore, he plays down virtue’s import in a way that he knows so well, by ironic belittlement:
[T]herefore that modesty, equity, trust, humanity, mercy (which we have demonstrated to be necessary to peace), are good manners or habits, that is, virtues. The law therefore, in the means to peace, commands also good manners, or the practice of virtue; and therefore it is called moral.1
In the Aristotelian lore, moral or practical virtues are acquired character traits but no one would call them mere good manners. Nevertheless, Hobbes says that the laws, both natural and civic, command the good and that is why they are moral. Perhaps they are moral because no peace can prevail without those virtues and in this sense the law’s purpose presupposes them, but that alone does not make them moral virtues in the traditional sense. Hobbes says virtues are moral when they aim at peace, peace makes it possible to act and succeed, and hence virtues promote happiness; but virtues as such do not make men happy. Hobbes could well ask, why would they?
Now, it is still possible that virtue brings about happiness and if it does, it certainly is valuable happiness. Obviously, many types of successful happiness ascriptions are devoid of value or they may even be evil – hedonistic
Why does virtue make the virtuous happy? Nicholas E. Lombardo puts the point succinctly:
Virtue’s more characteristic affections are joy and pleasure. Virtue generated joy because the will attains goods that it desires through virtue, and when the will attains some desired good the volitional affection of joy necessarily results […] There is usually some sensible pleasure too as the joy spills over into the sense appetite.4
Stanley Cunningham further explains,
While happiness has to do with the reasoning and intellectual part of the soul, it would be wrong to conclude that it does not also include pleasure. […] Albert characterizes the pleasure element of happiness a profound element of flourishing, an expansivess and tranquillity of the [virtuous] soul.5
I find these ideas highly interesting in the sense that they blend most of the listed theories of happiness together. For this reason, it seems that we cannot pretend that all the happiness theories are fully independent of each other. On the contrary, happiness theories should be named after their dominant
Of course one may remark that the role of the notion of desire and desire satisfaction is inessential. The fact that some desires as desires get satisfied is not important at all; all that matters is what one gets, or what it is and how one gets it, when one’s desire is satisfied. This is uncontroversial, as far as I can see.6 A more difficult problem is that of pleasure in hedonism. If virtue is essentially a matter of intellect and reasoning; that is, it is cognitive in nature, its conative and emotive aspects are secondary but real. The next question must be, is the virtue derived pleasure of the same type of pleasure as that spoken of by the hedonists proper? My intuition says that answer must in the negative. Let us focus briefly on the early hedonists like the Cyrenaics: “living pleasantly is a synonym for ‘happiness’”; moreover, “if we could accomplish the goal of living pleasantly, there would be nothing further to desire.”7 It is also significant that all this applies mainly to the present time events: “directing too much care and attention to the future is self-defeating.” This is easy to understand for the simple reason that to take care of the future is often incompatible with enjoying of what you have here and now. Any worries about the future tend to destroy, or at least postpone, the present enjoyment.
Hedonism may also lead to pessimism, namely, you calculate and compare the ratio between pleasure and pain, and you notice a systematic bias towards pain. What can you do? Obviously your life is not worth living. You have basically two alternatives, try ataraxia or commit suicide. Of course, one should try the first alternative first and then, if it does not work, reject hedonism altogether. An interesting philosopher in this respect is the Cyrenaic Hegesias “The Death-Persuader” who wrote a book named The Man Who Starved Himself to Death, obviously to avoid a life with a surplus of pain and misery. It is said that Hegesias was banned from teaching philosophy in the Ptolemaic Alexandria because people committed suicides after listening to this teaching. It is of
It is difficult to know how much weight one can put on the stories like this, but at least we can say that hedonism can be a dangerous philosophy of life and it was traditionally understood as such. What about ataraxia, which was later developed in its fullest by Epicurus and his school? Hegesias recommends autonomy and autarky as medicine against unhappiness. If you are independent and self-sufficient you need not worry. Other people’s opinions cannot shake you and your resources suffice to repel need and vacuous desire. The result is the feeling of indifference: “Slavery is just as indifferent as freedom to the measure of pleasure.”9 This is not easy to accept, I admit, but the main message is clear: it does not matter if you are a slave or a free person, the pleasure or its lack is still of a similar type. What you feel does not depend on who you are or what you are. Here autonomy and self-sufficiency mean indifference to external conditions, such as slavery. If you need and desire nothing, nothing can shake you. You stay beyond the pleasure-principle; but are you still a hedonist?
I have sketched above two main theories of happiness, virtue theory and hedonism. The former is quite demanding as it requires virtue in the holistic sense: a cardinal virtue can be ascribed to a person only on the condition that the person possesses each one of the set of virtues. Otherwise you will meet the Platonic “Courageous robber” paradox. In other words, a virtuous person is born at the moment when the last of his missing virtues is added to the totality of his good character traits. The set of virtues is meaningful as long as each virtue in the set is individually meaningful. Moreover, its parts are called potestative: “A person in possession of the virtue itself possesses all the capabilities of all that virtue’s parts.”10 Very few of us can even dream of being virtuous in this all-inclusive sense. Happiness obviously belongs to a mature sage only. The sufficient conditions of virtuousness seem too demanding to be realistic. The hedonist theory, on the other hand, is dangerous. A true hedonist may find out that she will be unhappy the rest of her life, which is to say that her life is totally meaningless from now on. What should she do? Is a meaningless life worth living in the long run? Of course a hedonist may focus on this moment now, but when she looks back only to find unhappy moments and memories what should she think?
Happiness and Desire
Thomas Hobbes draws a difference between happiness in this life and eternal happiness in the Christian heaven. “What kind of felicity God hath ordained to them that devoutly honour Him, a man shall no sooner know, than enjoy; being joys, that now are as incomprehensible, as the word of school-men beatifical vision is unintelligible.”11 For instance, when is God happy? Can we make him happy? This is certainly a traditional question. For instance, George Berkeley struggles with the problem of earthly happiness in this Vale of Tears and Misery as late as in the middle of 18th century.12 According to some reports, early Christian thinkers did not tolerate earthly happiness at all before Albertus Magnus or so. Let us see what Hobbes has to say about the heaven.
Furthermore, concerning attributes of happiness, those are unworthy of God which signify sorrow (unless they be taken not for any passion, but, by a metonymy, for the effect); such as repentance, anger, pity. Or want, as appetite, hope, concupiscence, and that love which is also called lust; for they are signs of poverty; since it cannot be understood that a man should desire, hope, and wish for aught, but what he wants and stands in need of. Or any passive faculty; for suffering belongs to a limited power, and which depends upon another. When we therefore attribute a will to God, it is not to be conceived like unto ours, which is called a rational desire; for if God desires, he wants, which for any man to say, is a contumely; but we must suppose some resemblance which we cannot conceive.13
This quotation is highly revealing as to our human desires and happiness, too. God cannot have what are traditionally called irascible feeling and emotion and the same applies to concupiscent feelings, or something we want in the positive sense. Hobbes applies here the rhetorical trope of metonymy, as he says, or the replacement of a whole with a part or the other way round. God is totally autonomous and autarchic – but for some reason not indifferent – which is to say that we can only talk about His actions and their effects on us and the world. These we can observe.
Hobbes says here that man wants what he is missing; God does not want so he does not miss anything, and consequently he cannot desire anything.
In the quotation above, Hobbes makes it clear that we must desire, we cannot avoid that. He also talks about rational desire, which refers to and rests on deliberation. Rational desires depend on deliberation unlike irrational desires that function independently. When my tooth aches more or less intolerably my relevant desires may not be rational at all: they are not reason based. However, I need to think what to do next in order to get rid of that irascible desire, and this is a rational process that brings about rational desires. This is not to say that my rational desires are always optimally good; they are just rational. If I deliberate on the matter and decide not to go and see a dentist, my solution is not optimal but it is still rational due to the preceding deliberation.
Let us next look at some well-known paragraphs of Leviathan on desire and happiness. These texts are so well-known that it is more or less unnecessary to repeat them here, but let me do it for the reference’s sake so that we can discuss some of their details. To put it simply: “Continually to be out-gone, is misery. Continually to out-go the next before, is felicity.”14 Hobbes seems to say here that a winner is happy, which sets the path for his subsequent ponderings on happiness or felicity. The following three lengthy quotations make it perfectly clear how Hobbes handles the theory of happiness. Clearly, he is a desire theorist. His is also a value neutral theory as he does not take a stand on the relative merits of virtue and pleasure based desires. However, he seems to be closer to the hedonist theories simply because he fully recognizes the danger inherent in seeking happiness. Happiness flirts with anxiety, a truth that is totally foreign to any proper virtue theory. A sage is never anxious. At the same time, the Hobbesian style of happiness is open to anyone almost on any basis, when virtue theory is open to a limited number of the members of the moral and religious elite. In this sense Hobbes’s theory is radical and in many respects novel as well – in the case of Hobbes we are used to such creativity.
He breaks away from the virtues theories without lapsing to full hedonism, or the theories of living a pleasant life here and now. Hobbes also sternly
Continual success in obtaining those things which a man from time to time desireth, that is to say, continual prospering, is that men call felicity; I mean the felicity of this life. For there is no such thing as perpetual tranquillity of mind, while we live here; because life itself is but motion, and can never be without desire, nor without fear, no more than without sense.15
The main points are: an agent desires things, or a desired object, a desideratum. When he satisfies his desire, this is called success. One single success may not yet entail felicity or happiness, which is an intuitive condition. I may say, “I am so happy I got the job,” but this alone does not mean that I am happy. I may be delighted, but that is all. Hence, happiness results from a series of satisfactions. The next relevant point is that Hobbes refers to his mechanistic world view – life is a motion and motion implies restlessness, which again implies lack of tranquillity, peace of mind, or ataraxia. It is indeed interesting that desire is intrinsically a restless state of mind, and yet, desire we must. Hobbes seems to be saying that one can be happy even without ataraxia. In this sense, his is a dynamic theory of happiness. We now go to the next quotation.
To which end we are to consider, that the felicity of this life, consisteth not in the repose of a mind satisfied. For there is no such finis ultimus, (utmost aim,) nor summum bonum, (greatest good,) as is spoken of in
the books of the old moral philosophers. Nor can a man any more live, whose desires are at an end, than he, whose senses and imaginations are at a stand. Felicity is a continual progress of the desire, from one object to another; the attaining of the former, being still but the way to the latter. The cause whereof is, that the object of man’s desire, is not to enjoy once only, and for one instant of time; but to assure for ever, the way of his future desire.16
Hobbes says there is no greatest good, and here he says he is no hedonist. Pleasure as such is only one of the possible goals in life, nor is a promise of eternal life the ultimate good in “this life.” What we have is a plurality of goods in a seemingly idiosyncratic fashion. A philosopher cannot say much of them; at most, one should pursue goals that strengthen one’s vital motion and in this way makes one stronger – and happier. Such things are good things and as such worthy of pursuing as objects of one’s desires. Another key point is that a satisfied desire has its double nature: it is at the same time a conclusion and a beginning. I desire in order to get something, or to satisfy my desire. This is a logical point concerning the nature of desire. However, at the same time it is a starting point for a new desire, or actually all kinds of desires. The problem is, as it is easy to see, that the more one desires and the more one gets, the more one must desire. If every satisfied desire brings about a number of new desires, the final number must be very large. This is what Plato worries as a problem of excess, or pleonexia; we will return to this problem. Hobbes continues,
So that in the first place, I put for a general inclination of all mankind, a perpetual and restless desire of power after power, that ceaseth only in death. And the cause of this, is not always that a man hopes for a more intensive delight, than he has already attained to; or that he cannot be content with a moderate power: but because he cannot assure the power and means to live well, which he hath present, without the acquisition of more.17
We can wonder whether the Hobbesian kind of felicity or happiness is what it should be, or happiness as we normally understand it. Happiness, according to him, is always mixed with anxiety and fear and this must be taken very seriously. Happiness is a precarious thing always haunted by uncertainly, fear, anxiety, and distress. It is a kind of maelstrom where we all endlessly whirl around. The more we want to be happy the more we desire and the more we
One is, with a good reason, afraid that the next step of the progress of desire will be a failure or even something worse. However successful one is it is never enough, and this is a troubling thought. Perhaps we also can read Hobbes as follows. My desire can be read both in de dicto and de re modes. The continuous progress of desire can be understood accordingly. My desire entails a mental representation of the desideratum in question. This is what it is, sometimes realistic sometimes not, socially meaningful or idiosyncratic etc. Such a de dicto object is my own free creation, which is constrained by the world as it is. Many de dicto objects are impossible de re. In many cases the de re characterizations of the de dicto object are untrue. I may want to see a centaur but all the de re representations of a centaur are false. There are no centaurs in this world. Now, whatever object a Hobbesian agent desires, he cannot get them all. One often desires the wrong thing, for instance, when the cause of desire is the combination of imagination and human vanity. This does not promise any good for the agent.
Basically, if I want something I want it all, all of it, and ceteris paribus nothing less suffices. I maximize. However, as we know, I never get what I want because now I already want something else and more of it. Where is my happiness, then? At the same time I am, indeed, successful. Hobbes talks about “continual success” that makes me satisfied and happy, as if there could be such success in any demanding sense of the term. At most, we can say the thought of continuous success makes me happy. In this way desire is Janus faced entity: it is satisfiable and unsatisfiable at the same time, and it depends on you how you view it, either as an optimist or pessimist. However, ultimately pessimism seems to win because, even when you are satisfied and happy, you must go on towards new desires and struggles. This is to say that your optimism is here-and-now but pessimism is forever. Perhaps it is a question of time perspective: now you see your happiness, then you do not – and forward must you go. In this sense life is a motion, process, and struggle that has no designated end.
You take what you can get and you call this happiness, if you succeed often enough and perhaps even systematically. To do that requires the proper means, which means power. In this sense, Hobbes is an instrumentalist happiness
Pleonexia
The logic of desire dictates that one desires everything that is good from one’s own personal point of view. Ceteris paribus, desire is an essentially maximizing attitude. Of course I am so adapted to the real world constraints on my desires and their desiderata that I may want to deny this fundamental truth. But think of the direction-of-fit argument as it applies to beliefs and desires as propositional attitudes.20 When I believe that Mars is a planet, all is fine because my belief fits the facts. When I think that moon is cheese, this is not the case; I must correct my belief. When I desire your love, I want to live in a world where you give me what I want, that is, your love. In a successful and happy case the world fits my desires, that is, you love me. However, I do not want love simpliciter, I want tender, all-encompassing, eternal, unconditional love, and in this sense my desire is essentially immodest. I want it all, even if the real world is so obviously recalcitrant. It never, or very seldom, delivers all I desire, which is an additional cause of anxiety. The following quotation clarifies the situation, in connexion of Plato and his Republic.
Elementary natural needs such as drinking and eating are not of the same order as those that are concerned with possession and are not necessary to survival. The ‘vehement gang’ of terrible desires (see Rep. 573e), wild and unbridled, belong to registers that are sometimes mutually different, including the imaginary. It wakes up when the rest of the soul is asleep, in our dreams. Let us say that the epithymetical part is, in this topic of the soul, the seat of desires that are as irrational as they are abundant and polymorphous. Hence their heterogeneity is a source of constant confusion. We may also wonder how devoid of all cognition these desires actually are. Does not any desire suggest some activity of the mind: memories of pleasures past, anticipation of forthcoming pleasures as well as imagination of a state of affairs whose realisation feels desirable?21
Hobbes certainly realizes all of this, in his own way, and his solution rests on his idea of deliberation. He says we are dealing with “rational desires,” not with irrational impulses or drives; hence, we must take a look at Hobbes’s theory of deliberation.22
The most famous idea concerning deliberation is, of course, this: The last act of deliberation is what we call the will. When you read it the first time, you may think it solves the problem of pleonexia or uncontrollable desire and greed. Alas, this is not so. The impression is false. The last act of deliberation, or the will, can be anything, as it is easy to see. Suppose a particular process of deliberation is a long one; when and where does it stop? It is easy to think that it has a natural or inherent stopping point, for instance, at the point when the best alternative and solution is found. The process of deliberation would be inherently optimizing in nature. However, Hobbes does not say anything like this. The context is not intensional in the sense that it aims at the best possible solution, where it is designed to stop so that the will may initiate the relevant action. On the contrary, the context is extensional in the sense that the will emerges wherever the process of deliberation happens to stop. Perhaps we can call this an early instance of behaviourism, too.
This makes sense, no doubt about it, because Hobbes just wants to give a definition of the will and he wants to do it without postulating any mysterious, new mental faculty called the will. In this way he also avoids the notorious problem of the free will. But he also misses something with respect of the
We can find a wonderful analogy of this problem of the correct stopping point in medieval philosophy. As Edward Grant explains, the problem is this: “Can God always reward the meritorious and punish the unmeritorious?”23 Suppose death approaches at the time point t. Next, suppose that the agent is during his last hour alternatively meritorious and not. During the last half an hour the same is repeated and so on at each similar division of time. In every half-time his merits vary. In this way his life approaches the time point t without ever reaching it. Now, the death comes and cuts his life short but it is impossible to determine whether the agent was meritorious or not at his last moment – simply because there is no such moment: “the instant of death does not form part of the infinite series of decreasing proportional parts of the man’s final hour.” The idea that the agent is rewarded on the basis of the last act of the judgement of his merits does not work, according to this rather fanciful but valid argument. In the same way, the last act of deliberation as the sole determinant of the will does not make sense. In both case one misses the desideratum, that is, the proper verdict of what to do and why.
Actually, Hobbes has several different models of deliberation but I pay attention only to two of them. In The Elements of Law, after saying that “In deliberation the last appetite, as also the last fear, is called will, (viz.) the last appetite will to do; the last fear will not to do, or will to omit,” he then writes,
Voluntary also are the actions that proceed from sudden anger, or other sudden appetite, in such men as can discern of good and evil; for in them the time precedent is to be judged deliberation. For then also he deliberateth in what cases it is good to strike, deride, or do any other action proceeding from anger or other such sudden passion.24
First Hobbes utilizes an extensional model of deliberation as a weighting process of some motion promoting or hindering physiological impulses. They stop wherever it happens to stop, for whatever reasons this may take place. This is the will. But then his tone of voice changes and he introduces an intensional context where the agent aims at his personal good and considers the best time
Once we recognize this crucial ambiguity, our problem of the Hobbesian pleonexia is solved, as if automatically. The agent is bound to see that those reckless and ever expanding desires, even if there were a natural impulse to follow them, are not feasible, if understood in the light of deliberation in its value laden intensional context. In that context deliberation can aim at something and this something is what the agent himself thinks is good. No rational agent would ever be inclined to continue on the road to full pleonexia, except perhaps in some very special circumstances. One could suggest that a person who is going to die soon and knows it would maximize his or her desires for the last time and live those last days with a maximal recklessness. Normally this does not happen as the person still deliberates in terms of her own good in the usual restricted and restricting manner. This may look irrational as the extended time perspective, against which all deliberation takes place, is now missing. Nevertheless, this seems to be a hard, empirical, psychological fact. In normal life, people’s deliberation may occasionally fail, it may be erroneous in many ways, but the truth is that it stays there. This logically entails that people have some good idea of the means by which they can handle and control their desires without lapsing into the abyss of pleonexia.
Desire and Its Intentionality
Luc Foisneau has beautifully explained the mechanistic psychology of desire in Hobbes. I do not have anything to add to his basic account.25 However, there is a possibility of a serious misunderstanding, as follows, “Appetites and aversions have what one could call an intentional object. Hobbes expresses this intentionality when he says that an endeavour, ‘when it is toward something which causes it, is called appetite, or desire.’”26
This is what an endeavour is for Hobbes: “These small beginnings of motion, within the body of man, before they appear in walking, speaking, striking, and other visible actions, are commonly called endeavour.”27 Hence, when I see, say, a lovely bottle of wine my attention and appetite are directed to it, as the
We have already seen that Hobbes is vague and ambiguous in his discussion of the intensional context in the case of deliberation. Concerning desires, he appears to have the same kind of problem. His account in De Corpore of appetite and aversion, or desire, is basically mechanistic: a good thing is what makes the animal spirits move faster and expands one’s heart, which one experiences as rewarding, pleasant and in general positive. This is how desire as appetite, a concupiscent feeling, works. The case of irascible feelings works in an analogous manner. The animal spirits slow down, etc. This makes you weak. Let me remark about one problem, though. Irascible feelings and negative desires of course lead to avoidance and refusal to act, but that is not all. Often when one encounters something bad, one tends to attack and thus reacts fast with great vigour and determination. How is this possible when the heart shrinks, the vital motion is slow, and animal spirits passive? In the case of plain fear such passivity makes sense, but not in the case of rage, anger, and, say, revengeful emotions. We also know, though, that once a person is in great danger and his relevant beliefs concerning survival are negative, he lapses into apathy. He cannot act. But if one believes that there is a way, the person may well act with a greater vigour than in the case of positive expectations.
Be this as it may, we should not think and admit that the mechanistic account can handle the case of desire as it should be handled. Desires are through and through intentional since they have an intentional object – actually they have two, namely, a de dicto and a de re object. It is of course true that Hobbes himself tries to get rid of this problem, if he sees it at all having been blinded by his own fervent anti-scholasticism. Hence, it is a mistake to identify intentionality of desire with its object directedness, and it is hard to see how and why Apeldoorn sees it appropriate to repeat Hobbes’s own words here as if they presented a solution to the problem. Even Foisneau struggles with this problem.
Fundamentally, animal motion is oriented motion and orientation necessarily implies an aim. However, because the final cause is systematically reduced to the efficient cause, the aim is less important here as a
cause than as a function of the evaluation by which a subject represents this or that aim as desirable.29
I think the first sentence is the main problem, as I try to explain. Moreover, I do not know how to reduce a final cause to an efficient cause; I presume this is impossible. All the four Aristotelian causes are supposed to be logically independent of each other, or you cannot eliminate the teleological cause by referring to the efficient cause. And finally, the function of evaluation is presumably deliberation in its intentional sense in an intensional context, in which case intentionality is just assumed to be there. In this way, the notion of deliberation is divided into two different types, namely, mechanistic and intentional. The problem then is that Hobbes’s analysis is no longer consistently mechanistic, which is of course understandable because we now discuss intentionality in an intensional context.
There may be no solution because no reduction of intentionality to mechanism may work. It is like saying that one wants to reduce the theory of intensionality to that of extensionality, as if intensional language would be an aspect of some luxuriating and overblown language usage. When you think of it, it is clear that these two sentences differ from each other in the relevant sense:
I threw the ball aiming at the bull’s eye and it hit where it should.
The ball went in the direction of the bull’s eye and hit it straight on.
From the fact that the ball went in a certain direction we cannot infer anything about any desire, aim, or value. It just went that way because of some antecedent causally relevant factors and events. To be directed “toward something which caused it” suffers from the same malady because it refers to an extensional context. One should reformulate the whole issue to make sense of it. Hobbes himself writes,
These words, appetite and aversion, we have from the Latins; and they both of them signify the motions, one of approaching, the other of retiring. So also do the Greek words for the same, which are {orme} and {aphorme}. For nature itself does often press upon men those truths, which afterwards, when they look for somewhat beyond nature, they stumble at. For the Schools find in mere appetite to go, or move, no actual motion at all: but because some motion they must acknowledge, they call
it metaphorical motion; which is but an absurd speech: for though words may be called metaphorical; bodies and motions cannot.30
Here Hobbes says it clearly: directedness is the key, either towards or away when a target exists. Here we know what the target is by looking at the motion, when in the case of desire we should know the direction by looking at the target, or the aim or object of desire. What we have here are causa efficiens and causa finalis at work. Also, Hobbes typically attacks the Scholastic theory trying to make it look ridiculous. Yet it is true that desires have their own internal dynamism, namely, when you desire an object, the object as a desideratum attracts you (a concupiscent case) and as if draws you towards itself. This is, in a sense, a motion within the soul, even if it is not real motion.
Desire is an intentional state. As a state of mind it is about something that has its desirable object or desideratum understood either de dicto or de re. In other words, the agent thinks of an object so that the object forms the content of his thought. In this sense, the thought and the corresponding desire are about the de dicto object. If the agent is in a position to act on her desire she must have good reasons to do so, after which a corresponding intention to act emerges. Notice that not all desires allow the agent’s actions: I desire your love, but there is no single action that would help me there. If I want wine, normally I can go and fetch some. Again, the object is something the agent aims at in the sense that it should fit the desire in question. If it does, the desire is satisfied, and a good string of satisfactions means the agent is happy. Now, my own key idea here is that a desire is always about an object or object representation in the mind; this is an a priori truth.
For this very reason, you cannot infer from directionality to intentionality. When a ball moves towards a target, we mention the target metaphorically. Wherever the ball hits, that is its target – notice the analogy with the mechanistic reading of the notion of deliberation above. It is only if the ball is aimed at something by an agent that we may call it literally a target. The agent thought about it. Hence, to be a target proper logically entails a desire and intention as well as an intensional context of our language. In the same way the goodness oriented process of deliberation is intentional. Nothing is good or proper in an extensional context. Nothing is good without the potential or actual presence of a thinking mind. In sum: Where the ball lands depends on its direction of motion, but whether the place where it lands is its target or not depends on the spot being intentionally set or at least seen and understood as the target in question.
Egoism
Finally, let me say something about Hobbes’s egoism.31 Is his idea of happiness egocentric or is it not? Many readers have seen and still see Hobbes as a strict egoist because his account of desire and its good is so person-centred. Every person desires and aims at his or her own good. Here is a simple argument that casts a shadow over this standard view.
An agent necessarily desires what appears to be good for him. (No egoism)
An agent necessarily desires his own good, or what is good for him. (Egocentrism)
An agent necessarily only desires his own good. (Egoism)
An agent does not want something if it is good for others (Negative Egoism)
In all these cases a person aims at a target object that is good and, consequently, forms a corresponding desire (that is about the object), whose satisfaction systematically and often enough justifies us calling him happy. In the first case above, many things may appear good to me, including social and other-regarding good. Our view on these matters may be wide and sympathetic of other people. In the second case, we may well want everything that is good for us but this certainly leaves room for other-regarding desires as well. Of course, if one is keen on one’s own desires and their number and scope are large, one is an egocentric or perhaps even an egomaniac person, but this is not egoism proper. In the third case, such a person is an egoist in the proper sense of the term. In the fourth case the agent is a misanthrope. My own view is that Hobbes’s texts are ambiguous here and, hence, the problem may well be unresolvable. However, any accusation of egoism is hard to support on these grounds. A careful textual analysis is needed to clarify the issue. My conjecture is that Hobbes may well be a fake egoist in the sense indicated in the first sentence above. A person can, in that case, be and become happy together with other people and not only alone.
∵
De Cive, 1642, Ch. 3, Sec. 31. All references to Hobbes’s works are to the standard Molesworth edition.
See J. Casey, Pagan Virtue, An Essay on Ethics. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991.
S. Breuninger, Recovering Bishop Berkeley: Virtue and Society in the Anglo-Irish Context. Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2010, pp. 18, 19.
N.E. Lombardo, The Logic of Desire: Aquinas on Emotion. Washington, D.C.: The Catholic University of America Press, 2010, p. 107.
S.B. Cunningham, Reclaiming Moral Agency: The Moral Philosophy of Albert the Great. Washington, D.C.: The Catholic University of America Press, 2008, p. 261.
See T. Airaksinen, “Desire and Happiness,” Homo Oeconomicus 29 (2012), 393–412.
K. Lampe, The Birth of Hedonism: The Cyrenaic Philosophers and Pleasure as a Way of Life. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2014, p. 88.
See F.C.S. Schiller, Our Human Truths. New York: Columbia University Press, 1939, p. 140.
Lampe, 2014, p. 129.
M.J. Tracey, “The Moral Thought of the Albert the Great.” In Companion to Albert the Great,” I.M. Resnick (Ed.). Leiden: Brill, 2013, pp. 347–379, p. 360. Also, Cunningham, 2008, pp. 104ff.
Leviathan, 1651. Part 1, Ch. 6.
T. Airaksinen, “In the Upper Room: Metaphysics and Theology in Berkeley’s Ethics,” Philosophy & Theology 27 (2015), 427–456, pp. 448ff.
De Cive, Ch. 15, Sec. 14.
The Elements of Law, 1640, Part 1, Ch. 9, Sec, 21.
Leviathan, Part 1, Ch. 6.
Leviathan, Part 1, Ch. 11.
Ibid.
On how to recruit followers, see B. Frischer, The Sculpted Word: Epicureanism and Philosophical Recruitment in Ancient Greece. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982.
See P. Caws, Ed., Causes of Quarrel. Boston: Beacon Press, 1989.
See M. Smith, The Moral Problem. Oxford: Blackwell, 2000, Ch. 4.7.
A. Castel-Bouchouchi, “Plato and the Causes of Excess,” Homo Oeconomicus 31 (2014), 463–478, p. 467.
See S.A. Lloyd, Ed., The Bloomsbury Companion to Hobbes. London: Bloomsbury, 2012, pp. 119ff.; and J. Lemetti, Ed., Historical Dictionary of Hobbes’s Philosophy. Lanham: Scarecrow Press, 2012, pp. 101–102.
E. Grant, The Nature of Natural Philosophy in the Middle Ages. Washington, D.C.: The Catholic University of America Press, 2010, p. 302.
The Elements of Law, Part 1, Ch. 12, Sec. 2 and 4. Original italics.
L. Foisneau, “Hobbes on Desire and Happiness,” Homo Oeconomicus 31 (2014), 479–489.
L. van Apeldoorn, “Reconsidering Hobbes’s Account of Practical Deliberation,” Hobbes Studies 25 (2013), 132–142, p. 38.
Leviathan, Part 1, Ch. 6.
T. Hobbes, De Corpore. Elementorum philosophiae sectio prima. Ed. K. Schuhman. Paris: Vrin, 1999, x, 7, p. 103.
Foisneau, 2014, p. 484.
Leviathan, Part 1, Ch. 6.
B. Gert has famously and persistently defended the view that Hobbes is not an egoist, see his Hobbes: Prince of Peace. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2010. I tend to agree with him.