Hobbes and Bunyan

Hobbes – Empiricism, legalism – we can’t know anything other than what we pick up with our senses. All of our knowledge comes from our senses, though this is limited at times – “all their appearance is to us a fancy”. Imagination and other mental faculties are just slowly fading imprints in our mind of what our senses have been able to discover.

Life of man is ‘solitary poor nasty brutish and short.’ This is because man is always in a state of war, all against all – man is always driven by appetite, rather than by reason (Hobbes shuts down the possibility of real reason early on). Theoretically this could be linked up to capitalism, which also is dependant upon the rise of the independent sign and driven by peoples’ appetites. Because war is the natural order of man, there is need for a social contract. This is because people always do things in their own self-interest, and peace is in every man’s self-interest. In entering into the social contract, man lays down his freedoms, except for the right to life, which is the only inalienable right man has. Freedom is the order of the natural state; liberty is the state within the social contract. There must be a sovereign, who gets all the power from the rights which men have given up – the sovereign of the commonwealth ensures that there are no disputes and is the final decider (and only decider) on everything (which is why this system has to be a monarchy – people could never be trusted in a democracy because they can’t be trusted to vote other than in their self interests, which is harmful to the commonwealth).

The law creates the political subject, and the law is created by the sovereign. People who refuse to participate in the commonwealth and the social contract must needs be shunned and thrown out of society since they can’t be trusted to act in accordance with the good of the commonwealth – they would only act in their own self-interest, which is driven by their appetites. Fear is what motivates people to become part of society, and the sovereign must be relied on to instill that sense of fear. The only time a subject may disobey the sovereign is when a new sovereign with greater power comes around.

All of this is why Hobbes can’t or won’t write in allegory – metaphors are misuses of language. Rochester seems to say the same thing in the “Satyr against Mankind and Reason.”

Contrast to Milton – humanity is rational and can be generally trusted to act virtuously rather than being driven by their appetites, meaning that political subjects can be trusted to know good laws and bad laws (which are transgress-able) through their virtue, and don’t need to follow mere custom. Criticisms are generally that this could lead to licentiousness. Defense from Milton is that if everyone would follow Reason, everyone would do the same thing – Reason is transcendent.

Bunyan – Legalism, which is so important to Hobbes, doesn’t matter at all here – witness the poor Quaker at the end of Part one. Virtue matters, right living matters, and being elect matters. By writing in Allegory, Bunyan is reminding people of abstraction, which is opposed to Hobbes in that it forces us to understand that things have meanings beyond their surfaces. The sinners in Bunyan are almost inevitably those who can’t read allegory – see Vanity Fair – no one can see beyond the literal and don’t understand allegory. Part of the cultural work this text is then doing is trying to help people learn to read the world in an allegorical fashion. Politically, this means that someone must have the rational capacity (and virtue) to be able to read beneath surfaces, which then presumes that there is more than just appetite to a human subject, or that subjects have rational capacities which are denied them in Hobbes’ world.

The interesting bit of Bunyan is that he’s writing allegory and teaching how to read allegory to un-intellectual audiences – this may account for why the allegory is fairly non-complex.

Issues: Where’s the love? Where’s the charity? Entrance into the Wicket Gate is being greeted by Interpreter, who is the teacher of allegorical reading (which Christian is unable to do until his walk through the Wicket Gate) – thus anyone who doesn’t go through the Wicket Gate is unable to read signs correctly.