Hobbes and Sexual Desire
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Hobbes has long been associated with the sexual ‘libertinism’ of the Restoration period. The connections that are commonly made are crude, misrepresenting his philosophy; moreover, the attitude to sexual matters expressed in many of his published works was quite puritanical. Yet there are elements of his thought that could be taken to support a libertine agenda: hostility to Augustinian teaching on lust and chastity; the idea that marriage laws are merely human; a recognition of self-regarding elements in sexual psychology; and the idea that desires in themselves are not sins. On this last point, however, Hobbes’s distinction between desires and intentions to act, combined with his account of the role of imagination in desire, does make it possible to attribute to him a distinctly non-libertine theory of how sexual behaviour is modified in civil society.
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3
Cited in ibid., p. 308.
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22
Ibid., ii, p. 172.
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25
Ibid., iii, p. 1110. Hobbes had made both points more briefly in ch. 12: ‘For who is there that does not see, to whose benefit it conduceth, to have it believed … That a King, if he be a Priest, cannot Marry? That whether a Prince be born in lawfull Marriage, or not, must be judged by Authority from Rome?’ (ii, p. 186).
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26
Ibid., iii, p. 1122.
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30
Ibid., i.10, note, pp. 95–6; iii.27, note, p. 118 (giving the example of acts of cruelty).
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38
Hobbes, Anti-White, xviii.7, pp. 416 (‘gaudium, sive delectationem animi … carnis & organum titillatione’), 418 (‘animi gloria est, consistitque in eo quod arbitrantur se aliis placuisse, id est militasse non sine gloria’).
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45
Ibid., ii, p. 84.
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46
Augustine, ‘Contra Julianum’, iv.4–5 (paragraphs 34–5), in J.-P. Migne, ed., Patrologia latina, 221 vols. (Paris, 1844–55), xliv, col. 756: ‘ideo sub diabolo sunt, qui de corpore commixtione nascuntur, antequam per spiritum renascantur; quia per illam nascuntur concupiscentiam, qua caro concupiscit adversus spiritum’ ; ‘malae sunt, quas ratione frenamus, contra quas mente pugnamus.’
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48
Augustine, ‘De civitate Dei’, xiv.21, in Migne, ed., Patrologia latina, xli, col. 428: ‘Post peccatum quippe orta est haec libido; post peccatum ea natura non impudens, amissa potestate cui corpus ex omni parte seruiebat, sensit, attendit, erubuit, operuit.’
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50
Ibid., ii, p. 452. By putting the argument here in terms of contempt of the legislator, Hobbes may seem to have been concerned with revealed divine law as opposed to natural law; yet two paragraphs later (p. 454) he wrote that ‘because the Law of Nature is eternall, Violation of Covenants, Ingratitude, Arrogance, and all facts contrary to any Morall vertue, can never cease to be Sinne.’ Much may depend here on what exactly he meant by ‘know’ when he wrote such a phrase as ‘till they know a Law that forbids them’.
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65
Hobbes, Anti-White, xxxvii.4, pp. 404 (‘prout ab experientia & memoria eventuum bonorum & malorum ab obiecto simili’), 405 (scales).
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Hobbes and Sexual Desire
In: Hobbes StudiesSearch for other papers by Noel Malcolm in
Current site
Google Scholar
PubMed
Hobbes has long been associated with the sexual ‘libertinism’ of the Restoration period. The connections that are commonly made are crude, misrepresenting his philosophy; moreover, the attitude to sexual matters expressed in many of his published works was quite puritanical. Yet there are elements of his thought that could be taken to support a libertine agenda: hostility to Augustinian teaching on lust and chastity; the idea that marriage laws are merely human; a recognition of self-regarding elements in sexual psychology; and the idea that desires in themselves are not sins. On this last point, however, Hobbes’s distinction between desires and intentions to act, combined with his account of the role of imagination in desire, does make it possible to attribute to him a distinctly non-libertine theory of how sexual behaviour is modified in civil society.
| All Time | Past 365 days | Past 30 Days | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Abstract Views | 754 | 70 | 3 |
| Full Text Views | 312 | 5 | 0 |
| PDF Views & Downloads | 143 | 20 | 1 |