Hobbes, the Scriblerians and the History of Philosophy

HOBBES, THE SCRIBLERIANS AND THE HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY

HOBBES, THE SCRIBLERIANS AND THE HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY

by Conal Condren

london PICKERING & CHATTO 2012

Published by Pickering & Chatto (Publishers) Limited 21 Bloomsbury Way, London WC1A 2TH 2252 Ridge Road, Brookfield, Vermont 05036-9704, USA www.pickeringchatto.com All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise without prior permission of the publisher. © Pickering & Chatto (Publishers) Ltd 2012 © Conal Condren 2012 british library cataloguing in publication data Condren, Conal. Hobbes, the Scriblerians and the history of philosophy. 1. Hobbes, Thomas, 1588–1679. 2. Scriblerus Club. 3. Satire, English – History and criticism. 4. Philosophy, English – 17th century. 5. Philosophy, English – 18th century. I. Title 192-dc22 ISBN-13: 9781848932234 e: 9781848932241

∞

This publication is printed on acid-free paper that conforms to the American National Standard for the Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials. Typeset by Pickering & Chatto (Publishers) Limited Printed and bound in the United Kingdom by the MPG Books Group

CONTENTS

Preface Introduction Part I 1 Hobbes, Lucianic Humour and the Philosophic Persona 2 Hoisting Hobbes on the Satiric Petard Part II 3 The Seriousness of the Absurd: The Scriblerian Philosophic Persona 4 Identity, Materiality and the Language of Philosophical Absurdity 5 Hobbes and the Scriblerians Afterword: The History of Early Modern Philosophy: Method, Speech Act and Persona Notes Works Cited Index

vii 1 31 55 77 103 125 139 159 197 219

To Stephen Gaukroger & Ian Hunter

PREFACE

I am sufficiently instructed in the principal duty of a preface … Not so my more successful brethren the moderns; who will by no means let slip a preface or dedication, without some notable distinguishing stroke to surprise the reader at the very entry, and kindle a wonderful expectation of what is to ensue. Jonathan Swift, A Tale of a Tub, ‘Author’s Preface’

The principal duty is also the most pleasurable one: it is to give thanks to those who have helped in the process of writing. I have learned so much from my friends and collaborators Stephen Gaukroger (Sydney and Aberdeen universities) and Ian Hunter (University of Queensland) that this is in a sense as much theirs as they wish to own. We were generously supported by the Australian Research Council, and my work has been further aided by The Network of Early Modern Research, not least for putting EEBO on my desk. Peter Cryle and The Centre for the History of European Discourses (University of Queensland) have provided an always stimulating and friendly environment, travel support and incitement to talk about my work. Ethan Shagan at the Center for British Studies (Berkeley) generously invited me to give a seminar on one aspect of this work, in which its rough and ready state was greatly improved in discussion, in particular with Kinch Hoekstra (Berkeley). Similarly my thanks are due to Robert von Friedeberg and Jan Woszink of the Erasmus Centre for Early Modern History, University of Rotterdam. Themes from this work have also been aired at Humour Network symposia and at the conferences held by The Australian and New Zealand Association for Medieval and Early Modern Studies. On all occasions my thanks are due for hospitality, collegiality and the chance to learn. Others who in various ways have helped are Michael Bennett (University of Tasmania); Jessica Milner Davis (Sydney and the Humour Studies Network); Michael Hunter (Birkbeck, London); David Martin Jones (Queensland); Shannon Stimson, (Berkeley); and Richard Serjeantson (Trinity College, Cambridge). All in the best fashion have provided friendship, advice, information and insight. Additionally Justin Champion (London) and Dmitri Levitin (Trinity College, Cambridge) have kindly let me see valuable work ahead of its publication. I am grateful to Trinity College, Cambridge, for access to relevant – vii –

viii

Hobbes, the Scriblerians and the History of Philosophy

manuscript material; and to The Master and Fellows of Churchill College, Cambridge, and especially to Mark Goldie and Allen Packwood for their continuing friendship. Daire Carr of Pickering & Chatto has overseen the publication process with an appreciated professionalism, and the readers he chose did much to sharpen my focus. Averil Condren, with her customary expertise and good will has constructed the index, untangled some convolutions in my writing and put up with me in the process; Aoise Stratford Lloyd (Cornell) offered excellent suggestions, Allegra Zakis has tended my car with good grace and much polishing, leaving me free to enjoy the company of so many of the above. Prefaces, even modern ones are nothing without apologies. I am sorry for any mistakes that others have failed to purge. There may seem undue reference to some of my previous publications; the point of which has either been to tie threads together, or rectify previous error. The effect, of course, may be to perpetuate more of the same. The modern reader must judge. The Centre for the History of European Discourses, University of Queensland.

And Samson went and caught three hundred foxes, and took firebrands, and turned tail to tail, and put a firebrand in the midst between two tails. And when he had set the brands on fire, he let them go into the standing corn of the Philistines, and burnt up both the shocks, and also the standing corn, with the vineyards and olives. Judges 15:4–5

INTRODUCTION

The Scope of the Study This is a study of the seriousness of the absurd. It arises from attempts to re-conceptualize the history of early modern philosophy through explorations of the philosophic persona; a notion as pivotal in the past as it is marginal now.1 The principal proposition explored here is that due attention to this persona helps explain how satire could be an idiom of philosophizing, being used to shape and maintain an intellectual community. In Part I, I discuss Hobbes as a satirist and the manner in which he was hoist with his own petard. In Chapter 1 something of his persona is revealed through his satiric impulse and his adumbration of the qualities needed for philosophy. In Chapter 2 the contours and implications of this self-image become more apparent through the praise of him in the face of critique and through satiric critique itself. In Part II, I shift attention to those who came together as the Scriblerians, centrally Jonathan Swift, Alexander Pope and John Arbuthnot, and to their invention of a lunatic philosophical persona. The label ‘Scriblerian’ will need to be used with caution, but qualification will come in the context of argument.2 Chapter 3 outlines the Scriblerian features of the ‘modern’ philosopher; Chapter 4 concentrates on the specific issues explored through it, human identity, the language of philosophers and the materialism still strongly associated with ‘the monster of Malmesbury’. So in Chapter 5 I turn to the Scriblerians’ negative image of that quintessential modern philosopher, Thomas Hobbes, but also to the ground they shared with him in their attitudes to the importance of absurdity in marking the limits of philosophy, and the role of satire in exposing it. What follows is neither a continuous history of early modern philosophy, nor a study of satire as such. Within the limited context of discussing the contested nature of philosophy, the change of focus from Hobbes to the Scriblerians, is from satire as an occasional aspect of argument to being a full-scale means of raising philosophical issues. In effect, the case put forward examines two sides of the same coin: from endorsing those who would restore a satiric dimension to Hobbes, it supports those who would take the Scriblerians seriously.3 –1–

2

Hobbes, the Scriblerians and the History of Philosophy

It would, however, be remarkably heroic to extrapolate from this shift any grander pattern of development. Satire did not from sporadic beginnings become a fully-fledged form of philosophy. In antiquity, Lucian had very largely directed his satire towards intellectual folly, and those, like More and Erasmus, captivated by him in the Renaissance also philosophized through satire. Rather, I suggest that both Hobbes and the Scriblerians are to different degrees legatees of the Lucianic, and that the Scriblerian invention of deranged philosophical personae gives them some place in the history of Hobbes’s reputation; his self-image becoming symptomatic of the ills of modern philosophy and modernity as a whole. The persistency with which those claiming to be philosophers justified themselves in terms of human betterment, something affirmed by Hobbes himself and savagely exploited by the Scriblerians, guarantees that we are confronted by no neat or insulated intellectual context. The philosopher, howsoever fashioned as an image of an activity, also stood, if marginally, in realms in need of that putative betterment: in politics, religion, law, medicine, poetic creativity, history and philology. If this image presents the philosopher as some monstrous poly-pod, let it stand; the satire of philosophy would draw on the resources of monstrosity. Historiographically speaking, such variable and partial positioning for the philosopher prohibits the emergence of any simple picture of the scope and intellectual content of philosophy, let alone any straightforward developmental trajectory, deemed the history of early modern philosophy. This is a point to which I will briefly return in the Afterword. There I raise the question of whether and how far a systematically historical approach to the history of philosophy is of benefit to an activity that relies upon an abstracted developmental and instrumental conception of its past. At the risk of unnecessary rehearsal of what I, and others, have argued, and of undue anticipation, this Introduction outlines the themes that thread through the argument to follow.

Philosophy and Disciplinary History As it has generally been conceived, the history of philosophy is largely a retrospective doctrinal lineage used by philosophers to articulate and give force to their own positions.4 It narrates a world of error and anticipation, and is apt to assume that the word philosophy signifies a cohesive activity with a shared purpose and procedures for establishing propositional truth.5 The history of this activity is thus organized according the conceptual priorities of a contemporary academic discipline, albeit one in which there is internal controversy amongst competing schools and styles of argument.6 Indeed, these in turn assume their own shapes partly with the aid of contrasting images of the past and its major figures. The David Hume of a pragmatist lineage will be different from the one found in Kantian historiography; a post-structuralist Aristotle will be distinct

Introduction

3

from the one central to modern Thomism. Exposure to the history of philosophy broadly fitting this picture has certainly produced work of serious scholarship and acuity. At its best, it can provide a useful teaching device, offering students provisional orientation and some initial literacy in what is now taken seriously by philosophers. They in turn are given some idea of where they might stand on a range of issues of importance to them. A narrative overview has the additional convenience that significant names within the tradition can be reduced to adjectival form, standing as short-hands for specific patterns of proposition or theoretical disposition, sometimes only tenuously related to anything the original figures ever held. For all the advantages of shaping developmental narratives leading to the present, there is a price to pay. Insofar as a given historical figure’s work is described with the benefit of contemporary philosophical concepts, the cards are automatically stacked to ensure the relevance of modern priorities in the process of analysis. Effectively, description becomes translation. Moreover, irrespective of the conceptual massaging of texts in isolation, the narrative sequencing leading to the present constructs a systemically anachronistic context for the texts placed within it. Yet the historiographical cost of this may seem negligible and not just to philosophers. For, in its present-centred instrumentalism the history of philosophy belongs to a genre of academic lineage construction. It includes histories of international relations, English literature, historiography and political theory, which, as political philosophy, is ambivalently also a part of the history of philosophy.7 These are themselves adaptations of wider lineal preoccupations that help to sustain or qualify a conception of social place and belonging. Something needs to be said about this ubiquitous attitude to the past and its academic variants, which helps explain why studies such as this need to be written. Sam Newton has drawn attention to what may be taken as an extreme manifestation of lineal creativity for the sake of the present, in what he calls the ‘fourteen generation format’ found in Scandanavia and Anglo-Saxon England. In this, argues Newton, fourteen ancestors were selected to express contemporary alliances and were changed according to need; the mythical results were probably not, he remarks, meant to be chronologically accurate.8 The history of political thought did at one time come close to a fifteen-figure format;9 but by and large, academic genealogies are more flexible in terms of the number of ancestors included and the ways in which a specific lineage can be reshaped, the results of which give some impression of historical verisimilitude. Nevertheless, not unlike ancient genealogies, academic ones originated probably less as attempts to understand the past as such, than as projections to help consolidate and advertise in the present. They were the creations of fledging disciplinary arrangements within the very tangible economic, social, administrative and legal contexts of university organization.

4

Hobbes, the Scriblerians and the History of Philosophy

The history of political theory, for example, is a late nineteenth- to twentieth-century consolidation of the texts being taught in recently established departments of politics, texts familiar from departments of law, philosophy, classics and theology, and repackaged as an unbroken continuum of specifically political reflection going back to ancient Greece, and even to the archaic world of Homer.10 The resultant tradition was thus created by the projection of a reified conception of the political as a suitable and shared object of theoretical reflection; it was especially compelling for a discipline whose members then saw it as fundamentally historical.11 A similar point could be made about the history of English literature. Frequently taken as beginning in the vicinity of Beowulf, it is really only in the early modern period that we find arguments about poetics being stretched in the contestations about authentic English writing. That writing is firmly established as English literature during the nineteenth century, the object of study for departments of English. As with histories of political theory, not only does the present character of an activity provide a criterion for inclusion, but also contemporary qualitative criteria of assessment purport to filter those who really matter from those who do not.12 Similarly, the institutionalized study of international relations that began around the outset of World War I, has rolled out a history claiming Thucydides and Xenophon as founding fathers and has recaptured Hobbes, Grotius and what Jo-Anne Pemberton has called a ‘pantomime’ Machiavelli from the history of political thought.13 Such palimpsests of synthetic traditionality are indications of variable relationships between modern university departments as much as they are about anything in the past. In keeping with the rationale for such back projections, adjustments can be made to fit localized circumstances. In the history of political thought Machiavelli assumes even greater significance in Italian versions of the tradition than in Anglophone ones, and the Italian history of English literature has Italianate connections as a principal of selection, rendering it quite distinct, for example, from F. R. Leavis’s generational format of the ‘Great Tradition’. We need then, to keep in mind the uncertain relationship between those synthetic traditions that are a function of modern scholarship’s priorities, and those more autochthonous ones with which the writers in question were self-consciously engaged.14 Synthetic histories of canonic literature constitute almost a subgenre of academic study, in which the past is re-mythologized to keep up to date with the most recent foci of attention, much as, according to Thomas Kuhn, the history of mechanics needed to be cast afresh to endorse the latest scientific orthodoxy. In such narratives, the odd black sheep can be of exemplary value as to where we should now stand, and the importance of what we need to do; and no sheep is necessarily dyed in the wool. When feminist theory was consolidated in the academy during the 1970s it was only to be expected that the history of political thought and philosophy would be rewritten to express and help

Introduction

5

advance a new conceptual agenda. The names and texts remained the same, but the arc of narrative redefined their meaning and their failings leading to an unresolved problem in Western polities. The sheep became mostly black.15 Similarly, as Samuel Moyn has argued, the strikingly recent academic and political preoccupation with human rights has required the fanciful creation of a long tradition of struggle towards their triumphant disclosure.16 Over the last generation or so, synthetic academic traditions have been subjected to severe methodological and historiographical critique.17 They have even attracted the odd satirical squib,18 so I need say little more of them here, except to note that the history of philosophy may have been a model for such lineal creations. It can certainly claim longevity unmatched by most disciplines and departments of the modern university, and it shares their historiographical vulnerability. Living in a society prone to argue over and disinter the past, seventeenthcentury writers like Thomas Stanley, Gottfried Arnold and Christian Thomasius made sustained attempts to provide or exploit a doxography that offered doctrinal bearings for the present. Hobbes, albeit negatively, did something sketchily similar in the Decameron physiologicum. In early modern Europe, the informing rationality for giving philosophy a chronological dimension was complex and tied to confessional battles, processes of secularization, state formation and the roles universities played in these, as much as it was tied to what we might see as philosophical reasoning.19 Guillaume Du Val’s partial definition of philosophy prefacing his edition of Aristotle’s works in 1620 is instructive: philosophy is the ‘true salvation and panacea of souls … most certain governor of human life … mother of cities, indicator of virtue, expeller of vice, mistress of customs and of discipline’.20 Ian Maclean quotes Du Val, rightly to emphasize just how distant this is from contemporary academic conceptions of philosophy. Of course, one way of obscuring the difference is just to leave out philosophers like Du Val. However, his edifying inclusiveness, in its allusions to souls, salvation, virtue, discipline and civic significance, also indicates something of the confessional entanglements of his day, and of the need to appropriate a notion of philosophy to the requirements of specific groups. As I shall suggest, the satire of those claiming to be philosophers was a weapon in such processes of group formation, helping to create heterodoxies and orthodoxies that were more than simply analogous to confessional dispute. The accoutrements of martyrology, hagiography and the polemics that created demonized heresiarchs were shared by what we now more clearly distinguish as philosophy and religion. Shared also was the satire so often present in political and religious controversy. Indeed, the story of philosophy as a heroic unfolding of the truth exhibits much the same ahistorical pattern for time as theologically informed histories of ecclesiology. It would be strange if there were not a satiric dimension to early modern philosophy.

6

Hobbes, the Scriblerians and the History of Philosophy

Yet the attempts to co-opt the past to present needs during the post-Reformation period are as nothing compared to the manner in which Immanuel Kant and Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel effectively established a new shape for philosophy as an image of their own, still lingeringly confessional and political preoccupations. Their impact has been long-lasting and widespread. It is, for example, entirely conventional now to project the Kantian concerns with epistemology, ontology, the rational versus the empirical, and the moral autonomy of the individual into the distant past, so constructing a narrative that leads to his conceptual discoveries of their fundamental importance.21 Even where there is no projected lineal development, it has been a standard criticism of Plato, for example, that his theory of forms confused epistemology with ontology, definition and idealization.22 Again, when Michael Oakeshott wrote his magisterial introduction to Leviathan, he insisted that the proper context for the work needed to be the whole history of philosophy; but that totality was a highly schematic Hegelian model of philosophical development. For Oakeshott, Hobbes’s major significance lay in articulating a philosophy of Will and Artifice, an antithesis to Aristotelian Rationality and Nature which together would be synthesized in Hegel’s adumbration of the Rational Will and the state as its manifestation.23 Further lineal compression can even end in circularity. For Gary Herbert, Hobbes stands at the inception of a philosophical tradition leading to Hegel; and so much is Hobbes to be commended as Hegel’s precursor, that Hegel’s words can be used to explicate Hobbes’s true meanings, because Hobbes’s own vocabulary had been inadequate to the task.24 In and beyond the history of philosophy, the tactic of replacing an earlier writer’s conceptual vocabulary with that of a later writer remains an elegant way of insuring that a pedigree keeps a suitable shape. Although Hegelian commitments are far less common in philosophy than they once were, it remains the case that disciplinary orthodoxy is relied upon to maintain an appropriate philosophical past. Where contesting orthodoxies clash, as Maclean has illustrated with the disputes between analytic AngloAmerican and ‘Continental’ philosophy, sectarian identity can still be sustained through dialogues between the deaf.25 Dialogues with the dead can be a means to such solidifying ends. Reference to R. G. Collingwood emphasizes just how difficult it can be to avoid the gravitational pull of genealogy in writing a history of philosophy. Unlike most philosophers, Collingwood was a historian in his own right, with rigorous conceptions of what it was to be one. In this context, he insisted on the imperative of understanding the historical questions to which propositions could be seen as answers, and in his Autobiography (1939) portrayed himself as challenging implacable orthodoxy. In doing so, however, he paid scant attention to the questions of those who had failed to reach his philosophical conclusions; in reflecting on the history of philosophy, he did so more as philosopher than historian.

Introduction

7

For some philosophers none of this matters: history is the last few volumes of Analysis or Mind, but they are unlikely to have read this far. Some have held that the attempt to write a history of philosophy is philosophically impossible, as history deals with change and philosophy is universal thought;26 while others have argued like Collingwood, that philosophy is itself impoverished if not historicized.27 Irrespective of these positions within philosophy, it remains open to the historian to ask how is it that some sense of philosophical identity is shaped and reshaped over time:28 just how have we come so far from Guillaume Du Val? It is here that attention to the philosophic persona can have direct explanatory purchase. It provides one clue towards understanding the manner in which certain kinds of statement were legitimated or rejected as philosophy and the way in which the very name ‘philosopher’ could be shifted between approbation and dismissal. Whether the attempt to recover this history also has any direct philosophical dividend is a complex issue and will be held over. It needs, however, to be foreshadowed. Primarily, the Afterword of this monograph will outline the methodological terrain mapped by two propositions arising from a point of historiographical agreement. On the one hand, it can be held that recovering the significance of the persona to early modern debates about philosophy is now of philosophical interest only as a point of disciplinary contrast, for philosophy no longer relies upon this conception. Nevertheless, professional self-awareness is enhanced by realizing this, just as, for example, humans no longer need to protect themselves by wearing woad, but knowing that it was once believed necessary enhances our understanding of what it is to be human. On the other hand, it can be argued that the necessity of the persona has merely been displaced in the processes of disciplinary consolidation. The persona has not so much been jettisoned as ingested, its nature having become a part of the implicit knowledge of philosophizing. Recovering the importance of the persona in an earlier age becomes, therefore, a direct contribution to philosophical reflexivity now, as what purport to be contemporary philosophical statements about the world are often implicitly and partially still promotions of a distinct type of philosopher with the authority to interpret it. Strip the philosopher of the clothes of external reference and the skin beneath is blue. To make fuller sense of these positions we will need to look at the use of the notion of a ‘speech act’ as a model for explicating historical meaning, for much of what can be said of a philosophic persona as the maker of philosophical propositions can be reformulated through variant readings of a ‘speech act’.

Office and Philosophical Persona In the meantime, I need to sketch in a little of the specifically historical significance of the persona in arguments about philosophy in the early modern world, not least because its significance is to one side of the concern in literary studies

8

Hobbes, the Scriblerians and the History of Philosophy

with the question of whether early modern literary texts express the views and attitudes of real persons or are the result of someone assuming a mask.29 The focus here is not directly on dissimulation and role-play but upon the disputed matter of the qualities necessary in order to philosophize. Debates about personae in this sense are thus to be found within a broader ethical economy trading in questions of morality appropriate to specific forms of conduct. Within that broader context, accusations or suspicions of mere mask-wearing, to which for example Pope was vulnerable in assuming the persona of a patriot, concerned impropriety more than authentic agency.30 The issues canvassed here may cast light on the possibly mal-formed question of literary masks, but that is another matter.31 In antiquity, as Pierre Hadot has argued, and also in the early modern period, what was identified and promoted as philosophic activity was first taken as requiring the cultivation and presentation of a distinct persona, defined by those intellectual virtues and habits of mind necessary for the ends of the enterprise and authenticating received wisdom.32 The presentation might even have a physical, symbolically resonant aspect. The common image of the philosopher was of a scruff y, bearded figure with a perplexed and frowning countenance. The informing importance of the expressed and displayed ethos of a speaker was a major theme of Aristotle’s Rhetoric, but as I shall suggest in the Afterword, it has important implications for understanding the meanings of statements beyond what Aristotle took to be the genera of rhetoric. According to Menander it was only the speaker’s ethos that mattered in discourse; although for Plutarch, qualifying this extremity, it was the conjunction of ethos and logos, presented character and argument that proves convincing.33 Plato evidences much the same concern in devoting his attentions in The Republic to education. As J. E. Raven has remarked, Socrates is often coy and given to metaphorical deflection when central metaphysical propositions are approached too closely.34 In contrast, the voice of the scruff y, bearded Socrates goes into considerable detail when specifying the conditions needed for the creation of the persona essential for any properly philosophical conclusions. True philosophy is the child of the true philosopher. It is this that principally differentiates the unphilosophical but conventionally just man Cephalus and his definition of justice given at the beginning of The Republic, from the very similar formulation later provided by Socrates. At the end of the work, it is the conventionally just man who will choose to be a tyrant in another life. By contrast, it is the philosopher, Plato urged, who is the one uniquely capable of bettering society by ruling it, although he is likely to remain isolated or endangered. This was an ambitious claim, but one that retained a residual appeal for early modern philosophers when in need of asserting their direct value to the world, and proved occasionally useful to them if, like Hobbes, they were pessimistic about the constellations under which their truths might be born.35

Introduction

9

I have argued elsewhere that the philosophic persona’s promotion and defence was predominantly modelled through use of the adaptable vocabulary of officeholding.36 This centred on the notion of a legitimate realm of conduct within society, with a scope and rationale served by one whose duty it was to operate within the limits and further the ends of the activity. Such a persona for any office was an ethical abstraction; an idealized persona was an anthropomorphized office, such as the prince in the literature of de regimine principum. An adumbration of the qualities that fitted someone for responsibility did not preclude a physical being assuming multiple personae; in becoming a wife a woman did not cease to be a daughter. Each designation not only signified a formally legal status, but also marked a series of ethical expectations. These might be encoded in oaths sworn on the assumption of a given office announcing the new persona. With varying degrees of ingenuity, notions of office could be stretched from formally instituted officia, such as that of mayor, midwife or spouse, to the self-assumed ones of the intellectual world, such as poet and rhetor, thereby appropriating a defensible gravitas and the armoury of moral legitimacy to ways of working with words. So, Swift as a Church of England cleric also took on the office of the satirist to sanction his denunciations, not least of the modern office of the critic, the necessary persona for which had earlier been advanced by Ben Jonson and satirized by Samuel Butler as ‘severe in his supposed Office [crying] Woe to ye Scribes, right or wrong’.37 Pope’s Essay on Criticism (1711) would be the most relentless elaboration of this office and its abuse. Any talk of the satirist as having an office was likely to be defensive and certainly the Augustan world was one in which there was much animus to the satiric persona as malicious, libellous, socially disruptive and nefariously motivated. It was with some plausibility then, that any apology for satire required advertising an ethos of moral integrity and courage.38 It was because Pope and Swift took so seriously their associated conceptions of the satiric office as entailing such responsibility that an irritated Dr Johnson later accused them of imagining that they had engrossed all virtue to themselves.39 As one might expect, there was no neat or uniform dividing line between institutionalized and intellectual offices. Any firm division between them is far more a function of later theoretical modelling and social practice than of the protean vocabulary of early modern office-holding. To enter the priesthood or the law was to move into powerful and clearly circumscribed social offices, each with elaborate ceremonies of induction and semiotic presentation, and each having strong intellectual dimensions. These in turn informed further modes of discourse and debate. The Booke of Oathes (1649) lists over 270 oaths of varying sorts. To be sure, a few were historical curiosities by the seventeenth century, but most were not, and among them is the oath of a graduating doctor of divinity sworn as part of a rite of passage into an office with scope and purpose like any other and as philosophical as it was theological.40 Even, rather, especially, the

10

Hobbes, the Scriblerians and the History of Philosophy

humble shepherd or husbandman by virtue of being seen as official personae, could have a profound resonance for understanding offices as apparently discrete as ruling and philosophizing. The moral responsibility of a persona to philosophy was expressed most generally through the rhetorical notions of honestas and utilitas: the persona sought both the right or true and the useful, or beneficial.41 With this conventional and reassuring claim on moral status came an extensive vocabulary of defence and commendation, but also one of critique available to those hostile to ‘philosophy’ or specific conceptions of it. Whatever was asserted in positive terms, what I have elsewhere called the positive register of office, to sanction persona and conduct, could be verbally transformed by re-description (paradiastole) into the negative.42 It is here, incidentally, that much of the talk of writers posturing and wearing masks can be located, having less to do with dissembling a locus of genuine individuality than with allegations of abuse of responsibility. Thomas Hobbes’s much vaunted sense of the intellectual independence essential for philosophy will prove to be one obvious case of the way in which presented virtue is redescribed as vice inimical to true philosophy. As I shall argue below (pp. 17–18; pp. 134–6), the accusation of absurdity had a special place in the rhetorical economy of philosophical office-holding, marking the fundamental transgression from positive to negative register, from sense, to the realm of the systemically misguided and confused. Concomitantly, because the rhetorics of office-holding were so widely shared, differences between the poet, rhetorician and philosopher who used them could easily be clouded. Similarly, at the beginning of the eighteenth century, in terms of its promotion and defence, there might be little difference between the posited office of the satirist and that of the civic or moral philosopher. To note just one salient and promiscuous term, analogous to absurdity: tyrant and its cognates. Nowadays these terms are easily misconstrued as marking distinctly political concepts. They were, however, applied wherever personae might err; for tyranny was most generally taken as the violation of the scope of any office, a rapacious or licentious insensitivity to rational constraint, even a form of madness and moral monstrosity. Such associations lie behind the shrill assertions that the monstrous Hobbes begat a monstrous philosophy. It was the pleonexia Plato had argued to be definitional of all injustice.43 Fears and suspicions of tyranny shadow the debates between Hobbes and his enemies over the proper ends and limits of philosophy, no less than they dogged the conduct of his political masters, errant husbands, officious village constables and the bickering confessions of Christianity. Protests against tyrannous interference inform hostile reactions to the Augustan satirist as violating the proper ends of civil discourse.44 There was in a word, a resonant, if imprecise socio-linguistic context for the conception of a philosophic persona and its negative forms, providing the

Introduction

11

resources through which it was fought over, transformed and found in realms of intellectual activity we have come to distinguish more clearly and persistently from philosophy. The etymology of the word philosophy is symptomatic of the contention before us. Philo-sophos and philo-sophia were putatively Pythagorean neologisms whose meanings varied throughout antiquity as the terms were used by different sects and schools.45 The profligacy of love and lover of wisdom helps explain how Du Val could laud philosophy as the source of all good, but it tells us nothing as to the content of wisdom, the means for its acquisition, or even whether the love of wisdom involves any specific activity beyond appreciative contemplation. Not unreasonably, Cotton’s translation of De cive has Hobbes calling philosophy ‘a compendium of a word’.46 In all areas of philosophy, the very criteria that might be used to identify any discernible activity could overlap and diverge. There was an insistence on necessary procedure as a hallmark of philosophy, but this could be balanced, or opposed, by an emphasis on suitable subject matter, or on a purpose beyond propositional technique. Hobbes, in many eyes an icon of procedural purity, could in fact shift between emphasizing the rational content of discourse and a wider human benefit as criteria for identifying philosophy’s true practitioners.47 In the dedication prefacing De cive, he moves rapidly between these criteria; he defines wisdom (sapienta) as nothing but the process of establishing the truth in all matters. This scientia is the consequence of certain appellation and definition, the work of philosophy (Philosophiae opus est) is the persistent exercise of balanced reason (Rationis rectae). Then, after proclaiming how much geometricians (as philosophers) have achieved, he remarks that had philosophi morales more adequately fulfilled their duties there is no knowing just how much could have been added to human felicity.48 Much the same shift is found in De corpore, where the scope or end of philosophy (finis autem seu scopos philosophiae) in benefit and its utility (utilitas) are taken as virtually entailed by the philosopher’s endeavour to reason methodically through definition and rigorous causative analysis.49 The criteria, then, seem assumed to be unproblematically at one; but they nevertheless allowed Hobbes considerable room for manoeuvre when instructing philosophers as to what they should do. He could exclude metaphor from philosophy in one mood as an abuse of language, at odds with proper appellation and definition; yet in another, allow poetry a philosophical importance when philosophers (mainly the philosophi morales of De cive) had failed in their responsibilities. This alone may mean we have to increase the range of his philosophical works to include the unlikely, his translations of Homer (see below, pp. 45–52). In these he assumes the office of a poet to the philosophical end of putting poetry back in its place of being philosophically subordinate. In his own translations of Homer, the Scriblerian Pope would effectively pay Hobbes back in kind (see

12

Hobbes, the Scriblerians and the History of Philosophy

below, pp. 131–4). The unsettled relationships between the offices of philosopher and poet is a thread of continuity throughout what is to follow; both were subject to disputed demarcation in which images of absurdity and the weapons of satire played a part. These slippery relationships remained as important as those between the philosopher and natural philosopher. These, in turn, were unsettled and could overlap with that of the physician, potentially yet another ideal of the philosopher. Complicating matters further was the notion of philosophy as a body of received wisdom that might or might not require a specific or exclusive mode of argument for its transmission. In extremis the philosopher, lover of wisdom, might simply be one fully receptive to what others have established. This is perhaps an unfashionable view now, but is still residually present when philosophy is taught, with the history of philosophy being treated, effectively, as a reservoir of received wisdom and exemplary object lessons. The implications of the differing conceptions of philosophy for an appropriate persona were considerable. Put another way, specification and presentation of the persona could be a means by which differing understandings of philosophy were advocated and apostrophized. Thus for the Jesuits a distinctive philosophical persona was hardly necessary, because philosophy was principally a transmissive activity, for which the priest as mediator was sufficient. This belief in the primacy of a priestly office was thus a way of reaffirming the Thomistic principle that ultimately philosophy, per se, was a handmaid to theology. As René Rapin put it, true philosophy is the instrument of religion, its end lay in helping us to live virtuously.50 Conversely, figures like Francis Bacon and René Descartes argued that a precondition for sound knowledge lay in the formation of a distinct type of philosopher and they developed, as it were, idealized portraits to this end. In this way if in no other, they were heirs to writers such as Plato: to reform philosophy, the philosopher had to be remade. Descartes’ cogito was not simply a logical proposition, seen from a post-Kantian perspective as an epistemological one. The cogito was rather, an assertion of a need for philosophical purging, for the philosopher, the idealized honnête homme to have the discipline and courage to strip the mind in order to rethink in a certain way.51 Bacon’s ‘idols’ were the natural, linguistic and social barriers inhibiting the formation of the similarly abstracted figure of the natural philosopher.52 And, as I shall illustrate, Hobbes’s presentation of a philosophical persona, not dissimilar to those of Bacon and Descartes proved highly controversial, being defended by John Aubrey and yet rendering Hobbes vulnerable to ridicule and rejection. So far I have suggested that the ubiquitous and flexible vocabulary of officeholding helps entangle a diversity of intellectual and social activity and that we can expect the use of satire to play some part in philosophizing. I want now to explicate the more precise reason for there being a satiric dimension to early

Introduction

13

modern philosophy. As conceptions of philosophy and specific doctrines were advanced or sanctioned with reference to a legitimating persona, then conception, doctrine or persona were similarly fair game in matters of dispute. An unfitting persona, being a matrix of the wrong intellectual credentials, priorities and proclivities might be invoked to explain doctrinal error as much as propositional blunder; indeed more so, for awareness of such a persona gave effective advance warning of likely error and activated the armoury of doctrinal scepticism. It is in this way, as I have noted, that satire could be a weapon in the creation and destruction of reputation, of group consolidation and ostracism integral to what philosophers have considered as their history. As a corollary, reliance on rhetorical tropes typical of the satiric intent could all be brought to bear on a questionable philosopher: tropes of suggestion and insinuation, such as the barbed pun (aestismus), ironic inversion (litotes) and the formal openendedness of aposiopesis; of exaggerated colour (paralipsis), or of diminishing comparison (tapinosis). The general consequence of this was to ensure a closer relationship between rhetoric and philosophy than many might now find acceptable. Philosophy, in fact, and especially at the meta-level where its contentious nature was an immediate issue, could have a rhetorical dimension in which satire played a part, just as analogously works on rhetoric may be seen as examples of philosophizing about language. For Bacon, for example, philosophical reason and rhetoric were intimately related; rhetoric had an ‘office’, it was to apply reason to imagination ‘for the better moving of the will’.53 It was, in effect, the medium for cohering philosophical truth with human betterment. To write a history predicated on some clear-cut contest between philosophy and rhetoric in the early modern world, is to erect a modern disciplinary division on the unstable basis of a shared topos, and thus to distort everything. The result of such a bifurcation is to obscure the very means by which conceptions of philosophy could be established in the first place among the sceptical or ignorant, by persuasion. Rhetoric had been central to ancient legal dispute because wherever an argument could be made on both sides, ad utramque partem, then to clinch matters meant going beyond one side of a case. The contrasting registers of the ethics of office, and the mechanisms of re-description, of converting good into bad and so forth, explain why this dialogic principle remained in place in the early modern world.54 Thus, where what counted as philosophy could be argued ad utramque partem, the rhetorical dimension of disagreement could supplement or re-couch assertions as to the proper content and ends of philosophy. Even Hobbes, who differentiated his own conception of philosophy, ‘reason’ so firmly from eloquence, accepted that in writing Leviathan (1651) the two might stand well together.55 It was to endorse Bacon’s earlier conclusion. And nowhere was Hobbes a more impassioned rhetorician than when trying to purge

14

Hobbes, the Scriblerians and the History of Philosophy

rhetoric from the proper scope of philosophy. What we see, I suggest, with both philosophers is a recognition that the less that can be taken as given, the more persuasion is needed to establish common ground on which a group may stand. Such an appreciation of intellectual belonging or community requires some understanding of what, intellectually lies beyond, the absurd that fails to make philosophical sense. Attention to this was nothing more than an application of a truism of medieval and early modern semantics: discriminate meaning was a function of relationship with points of contrast. More specifically, as I shall also show with reference to Hobbes, we can help recover the rationale for satiric reductio of doctrine and ad hominem attack on philosophers, now philosophically illegitimate and so excluded from suitably laundered propositional histories.56 What might now be dismissed as an unbecoming and philosophically irrelevant personal attack on, or by Hobbes, is more adequately seen as a persona attack of much wider import. He was, for example, subject to refutation by straw-man arguments, in two senses of that expression. An argument might be attacked in less than its strongest form; or a reductio ad absurdum might be derived from it and directly attributed to him. No one, according to Michael Oakeshott, had been so bothered by ‘little men’ as Hobbes.57 But what might now be taken as the errors of the Lilliputian in dealing with Hobbes’s propositions fairly and squarely, may well have been aimed past logos to the ethos, to discrediting the persona he presented, and the sort of philosopher and the danger to society he represented. An attack on a persona could, in effect, be an idiom of social explanation, although it should be stressed, that scrutinizing the philosophic persona was not all that encouraged a shift to the ad hominem. What is called interest theory, popular in England from the mid-seventeenth century had as an imperative the exposure of interests that drive people and rationalize what they say. Broad accusations as to usually questionable interest are not a developed theme in what follows, but often enough a reference to interest in conjunction with the criticisms of philosophers should alert us to the ad hominem. Its importance did not subside with Hobbes’s death and it was hardly exclusive to attempts to purge a philosophic community. As we will see with the ridicule of Richard Bentley by Swift, William King and the Scriblerians, whose substantive arguments they very largely ignored, the question remained in part, ‘what kind of person does this sort of thing?’ And the sort of thing done is apt to take on an exaggerated or reductive colouring in order to impress upon the reader just how much is at stake. Pope’s The Dunciad, itself an attempt to purge a poetic community into a form of canonical correctness, and one touching on conceptions of philosophy, is similarly reliant on what many find distasteful and trivializing, reductive prejudicial images and ad hominem attack.58 He, like Hobbes was treated to the same.

Introduction

15

In short, with the frequently conjoined recourse to the reductive and ad hominem, we are confronted with habits of argument that reveal forms of mismatch between propositions actually put forward, and what they were taken to stand for or signify. Such putative implications could become the focus of critical attention, sometimes at odds with the evidence we have. So conjecture beyond the written word to an absent reality becomes rather difficult. More immediately to the point, a merely censorious reaction to unbecoming forms of argument, or the adjustment of favoured texts to conform to modern standards of intellectual decorum are alike unhelpful. Hobbes’s critics, then Swift and his friends are themselves diminished by seeing them through an anachronistic conception of what really counts as proper argument. Dr Johnson would dismiss the Scriblerians in tones that were as prophetic of their subsequent marginality, as they were indicative of his own priorities. As he remarked, the Scriblerians did little more than tend to intellectual obscurities and set up and attack absurdities that can hardly ever be found in fact.59 But the reductive and caricaturing tactics on which Johnson unsympathetically touched had as a corollary an implicit point of contrast with what was really required of a philosopher. The critique of any philosopher drew on an affirmed pattern of intellectual value and doctrinal decency for which the attacker stood. To generalize from Dr Johnson’s moral indignation at the Scriblerians, the satirist is apt to monopolize virtue in the very process of expressing disapprobation. To quote Sir Thomas Browne, ‘he who discommedeth others, obliquely commendeth himself ’.60 One trajectory leading from the early modern to the modern world of philosophy might even be plotted in terms of how a nexus was broken; how distinguishable statements about the world together with meta-statements about the status of propositions, were separated from statements about, displaying or fashioning the persona who uttered them. A clear separation has allowed the latter to be bracketed (rightly or wrongly) as irrelevant to the former, which thus freed from the entanglements of a persona, becomes an abstracted kind of proposition called philosophy, the butterfly free of its chrysalis. Hobbes himself attempted such a severance in insisting on a firm line between the abstraction philosophy proper, and the so-called philosophers, men of no worth, capacity and of dubious interests who deserved our scorn.61 Keeping this process of separation in mind, we may shed some light on how early modern and satirically informed disputes give philosophy the sort of shape now recognizable as almost modern. Indeed, there will even be instances of the satiric reductio ad absurdum becoming seriously entertained once abstracted from its polemical context and repositioned as pure proposition. In Thomas Shadwell’s The Virtuoso, the very idea that natural philosophy should be pursued for its own sake, and irrespective of any practical application is a satiric extrapolation from notions which many in the Royal Society wished to distance

16

Hobbes, the Scriblerians and the History of Philosophy

themselves; only later was it posited as the mark of pure science as opposed to technology.62 Roger Lund has drawn particular attention to the typically Scriblerian reduction of language to materiality as anticipatory of much seriously entertained structuralist and post-structuralist linguistic theory.63 In discussing the Scriblerians, I shall touch on materialist theories of the memory as functions of specific operations of the cerebral cortex, of the need to consider body weight when calculating doses of medicine, on doctrines of textual and political autonomy. These were all imaginative illustrations of what was urged to be a sort of philosophical lunacy. Swift’s apparent ideal of rational language made manifest in the discourse of the Houyhnhnms may well be a further example; and one might also note the second Samuel Butler’s later doctrine of crime as sickness in Erehwon (1872), for which there was there was already some precedent in the Utopian inversions of Richard Brome’s Antipodes (1640). The shock of recognizing the familiar where we do not expect it can require, then, the very amnesia of abstraction the historian seeks to alleviate. More specifically, in the light of this, we will be able to get a better view of Aubrey’s ‘Life’ of Hobbes, his ‘last Office to [his] honoured friend’. This is conventionally read as an anecdotal document informative, perhaps, by turns moving or historically unreliable but of no philosophical interest in itself.64 Its point, however, was fundamentally philosophical.

Satire and Humour Satire, like philosophy, was a term of varied use in the early modern world. At one extreme there were specific poems, imitative of Horace or Juvenal, called satires, at another, satire might be defined as any statement of sharp rebuke.65 A moral or censorious tone, and thus by contrast a suggestion of the satirist’s probity traversed these extremes. The associations that for us now predominate, of satire as being a form of humour, were important but neither so uniform nor dominant as they have become. This qualification notwithstanding, satire as marked by humour, by the attempt to ridicule, diminish by irony or provoke laughter at a victim, or class of victims, is what will be crucial here, but only, to repeat, where that class of victims had what was considered to be a philosophical significance. Satire then, it should not need to be said, can have a philosophic end, though, understandably, we are far more used to seeing it as principally about political corruption, social hypocrisy and religious mal-function. In these wide areas of interest, topicality alone can reduce much satire to almost complete opacity, as fugitive issues and personalities fragment or fade, a fate that is apt to stimulate rather than stymie academic attention. Curiously, however, until recently, it is almost as if philosophical satire has fallen between the cracks of modern disciplinary divisions; consigned to literary studies, conventionally chary of dealing with philosophers, satire has no legitimate place in philosophy’s self-perception.

Introduction

17

This absence serves the myth that superior rationality is sufficient to explain philosophical change and diminishes the diversity of ways in which people have engaged with and shaped what they have seen as philosophical issues. Yet, while this may help account for relative neglect, the problem goes deeper. Carrying a distinction between philosophy and literature back into the early modern world is itself historically corrosive, an exemplification of how the departmental and disciplinary divisions of the modern university can distort our knowledge of the past. While poetics had been a preoccupation since antiquity, there was, in the world of Hobbes and the Scriblerians, no firmly established area of study called literature in which satire could be situated. When T. J. Mathias produced his highly successful The Pursuits of Literature (1794–7) in the wake of the French Revolution, the notion of literature, what he regarded as the engine of cultural continuity or destruction, encompassed philosophy, natural, moral and metaphysical; and philosophical satire was thus central to the protection of civilization.66 What has since been tidied up as literature, with all its implications of exclusion and reliance on delineating genre, was a little like philosophy, an ill-defined field of battle on which learned armies often failed to clash, even in university faculties. The result is a certain arbitrariness of classification, naturalized by later institutional and intellectual habit. Notwithstanding serious divisions, the sprawling economy of the rhetorics of office, encouraged the presupposition that if philosophy was an activity, then it had to have some point or end and delineating perimeter which the philosopher served and worked within. Both for Hobbes and for the Scriblerians the notion of the absurd operated as such a criterion of philosophical demarcation. The accusation of absurdity reaffirmed an authentic intellectual community by ridiculing a philosopher or type of statement as beyond the pale; and so in a fashion, legitimated philosophical satire as integral to understanding. It is here that we can see the analogical relationship between tyranny and absurdity. Both could be styled forms of madness or monstrosity and were fundamentally transgressive. Yet each was conceptually necessary for any delineation of the legitimate. Concomitantly, neither could be rectified by a simple appeal to presupposed canons or protocols for what is right or rational, for to the absurd or tyrannous these can carry no authority. Democritus, it was said, considered laughing or crying at the world to be the only two philosophic responses to it. 67 It may even be that if the required philosophical response to tyranny is to cry, the response to absurdity is laughter. As we will see, Hobbes was careful to distinguish error from absurdity. Errors occur within an activity, they are procedural blunders and can be corrected or pointed out with reference to those procedures. Absurdity goes beyond procedural error and provokes ‘the passion of laughter [which] proceedeth from the sudden imagination of our own odds and eminence’.68

18

Hobbes, the Scriblerians and the History of Philosophy

Again, the full force of absurdity can only be seen in the conjunction of statement and persona. Whether one laughs with or at, however, depends very much on the act of the persona in making the absurd assertion. In this way, the chapters on the Scriblerian notion of the philosophical persona continue the themes of the chapters on Hobbes and his early satiric critics; for the personae of Cornelius and Martinus Scriblerus are nothing if not tottering confections of absurdity, by which to judge and critically laugh at the madness of the intellectual world. To the end of provoking laughter at philosophers, the Scriblerians, like Hobbes, drew, predictably, on an inheritance of rhetorical devices; on puns and paradox, including but going beyond formal semantic paradoxes; on litotes and aposiopesis to give an air of indirection. Their use of allusion and insinuation entice the reader to think beyond the text; similarly the oddities within it forms of incoherence and blatant propositional contradiction, the disingenuous digression and the misplaced preface, all invite critical engagement with what might really be going on. The provocation of laughter, then, had something game-like about it, aimed at ridicule, complicity and intellectual stimulation along with sheer fun.69 Not only do Hobbes and the Scriblerians have something in common in according a seriousness to the absurd, but Hobbes remains a significant target for them. In using satire as an idiom of philosophizing, he, his earlier critics and the Scriblerians were writing in the Lucianic style of serio ludere; and with some caution the Scriblerians may also be said, a little more precisely still, to be in some respects Menippean. However, before turning to these related notions, it is necessary to say a little to disengage the use of humour to the censorious ends of satire from its other functions. According to some, the smile as an expression of love and innocence might need distinguishing from the more problematic act of laughing. 70 Laughter was subject to much debate across a range of modes of enquiry, not least as the capacity to laugh was sometimes taken as a defining feature of humanity.71 The distinctions alluded to here are rudimentary but important, as the difficulty of applying them informs much of what follows. First there was the laughter that had been remarked upon by Ludovico Castelveltro in his commentary on Aristotle’s Poetics of 1570. Comedy arises from a natural proclivity to laugh, as indicated, for example, by that spontaneous emission of joy at the unexpected meeting of friends.72 During the sixteenth century medical humoural theory gave attention to the physical benefits of laughter;73 and Robert Burton in The Anatomy of Melancholy (1621) continued partially in this tradition. London, apparently, had laughing clubs, groups of men who would meet and stand around laughing to each other for amusement and physical well-being.74 Humour, wrote Swift, albeit a little disingenuously, was the most agreeable gift of human nature. At least for the superficial reader, the provocation of laughter ‘clears the breast and the lungs, is sovereign against the spleen, and the most innocent of all diuretics’.75 The association with inno-

Introduction

19

cence, as with the smile, had given considerable latitude to what could be said on stage by the boys’ companies of Jacobean England, youth provided an extenuating persona;76 and what was said only in jest, without malice or slanderous intent was effectively a claim on another sort of innocence and could more generally be a defence at law.77 The laughter associated with innocence could also be given a studied place in rhetoric independently of any eristic or forensic function, as a mode of discursive punctuation. Its provocation, as Thomas Wilson insisted, could help change the pace of discourse, to help refresh and maintain attention.78 The use of the natural proclivity of laughter, and the expression of good humour resulted in the kind of satire that, according to Swift, causes least offence.79 Beyond the possibilities of minimal offence there was the notion of laughter as expressive of ‘Christian joy’, entirely victimless and good for the soul.80 Finally, perhaps the extreme of this, we find delight at the creation of nonsense; as John Taylor wrote of his own work, it was to no point but for all to enjoy.81 His poems were ‘[W]ritten on purpose, with much study to no end, plentifully stored with want of wit, learning, Judgement, Rime and Reason’.82 All of these forms of humour may be said to be framed, in that they provide distinct moments predicated on a clear difference between the non-serious and serious. Indeed, it may be thought that framing is a condition for the identification of humour per se, to which end there are established markers, verbal, social, physiological and institutional. It is a cultural sensitivity to these that alerts us to the non-serious interlude.83 But in one way, to rely on a notion of framing for humour can be unhelpful or trivial, for anything that makes sense may be said to be framed. More importantly, the overtly framed is not exhaustive of humour. Given humour’s unobjectionable aspect, laughter could, as it still can, additionally function as a cloak to provide some protection for pretty well everything the provocateur has to say. Thus Anthony Gilby’s Pleasant Dialogue (1581) insinuates the joke that is no joke, suggesting the imperative of violence unless there is continued reformation.84

Serious Laughter: Lucian, Genre and the Menippean This brings us directly to serio ludere, the humour of serious intent, designed to provoke critical reaction to persona or proposition. This function was made explicit in Aristotle’s Poetics and in the rhetorical theories or philosophies of rhetoric developed by Cicero and Quintilian; laughter voiced a contempt for others or their failings. It was the humour of social aggression and moral seriousness, the ‘scornful tickling’, as Sir Philip Sidney would put it, that at its most extreme sought to isolate and humiliate, purge and reform by ridicule.85 It had therefore a more overtly social end, or functioning, than the laughter that expressed a joyous or wondering soul, or aided an individual’s physical well-being; it was satiric.

20

Hobbes, the Scriblerians and the History of Philosophy

Where the failings of the mind became the focus, the provocation of laughter carried a philosophical point, a conduit for the proposition rather than being framed by it. Belief in the importance of serio ludere had certainly taken root in England from the Renaissance. The wise man is known by his laughing, wrote John Donne in the beginning of the seventeenth century, and by it you know there are fools not that he is one. In reading this paradox, Donne concludes, the wise man will laugh at it and me.86 Enlisting Democritus in The Anatomy of Melancholy, Burton explicitly depicts laughter as the condemnation of the world’s follies, and in the same fashion, near the beginning of the eighteenth century, a paraphrase of Petronius baldly insisted that humanity is a standing jest; ‘the whole world is one great Farce … and those that acquit themselves with most applause render themselves the more eminently ridiculous’.87 No man laughs, wrote Butler, without baring his teeth, in a vivid reworking of Lucian’s remark that Menippus smiles as he bites.88 The critical and humorous are conjoined in a single action, the satiric grimace. From the most general of philosophical justifications for laughter can be explicated its more precise social function, to help form, consolidate or reform intellectual group identities. It is probable that in most societies laughter has played some part in establishing and shifting the limits of belonging. But in so far as they approach E. R. Dodds’s conception of a ‘shame culture’, one in which reputation is vital to standing and honour is bestowed only by judgmental peers, laughter can be expected to be a proportionately powerful mechanism of control.89 It was a point clearly recognized in the Scriblerian world, for as the Intelligencer remarked in praising Gay’s Beggar’s Opera, it is a high point of wisdom to get laughter on our side.90 We can see something of the instrumental use of humour to shape philosophical orthodoxy being played out in the controversies surrounding Hobbes and then those in which the Scriblerians were involved. It is noteworthy that Hobbes’s understanding of laughter as the ‘sudden glory’ at another’s defeat, although occurring first in The Elements of Law (1640) is elaborated in the section of Leviathan most concerned with true philosophy.91 Equally conventionally, Hobbes was fond of the metaphors of warfare for the cut and thrust of dispute and so we can expect the satiric provocation of laughter to have a serious and aggressive philosophical point. The unhelpfulness of seeing serio ludere as necessarily framed humour directly raises the problem of genre, both for satire and the more precise formulations of the Lucianic and Menippean relevant to this work. As we take the notion, a genre is a style marked by fairly strict features. Some are more flexible than others, but any genre exists only in patterns of use and as these change, a genre may become porous or incoherent, a new one may be formed. In fact, the broad notion of genre is directly analogous to traditionality. As we should not confuse autochonous traditions of activity with later synthetic ones of analytic

Introduction

21

or educational convenience, we should not make the same category mistake with genres. They may now be an analytic necessity for the literary scholar;92 but they are not transhistorical categories. Although there are such works as satires and there is a genre of verse satire modelled on the works of Horace and Juvenal, satire as such is not helpfully seen as a genre. It does, however, comply with what Stephen Orgel has identified as an older understanding of genre, an identifiable aspect of a larger whole. 93 Indeed, in order to sidestep misleading expectations, it might be better to avoid the designation ‘genre’ and to think of satire more in the adjectival than the abstract. For, reliance on the abstraction carries an almost irresistible drift to reification, making it difficult to avoid conflating the analytic importance of a category for a contemporary discipline with a description of the historical evidence. The consequence may also be to treat an abridgment of discernible patterns of activity (the postulated genre) as an agent or concept independent of use. As H. D. Weinbrot has shown of Mikhail Bakhtin’s formalistic depiction of Menippean satire, we have a concept projected as historically vital but impervious to evidential control.94 Hobbes’s Leviathan, then, is not an example of the satiric genre in operation, it is just philosophy with a satiric dimension, one sometimes marked by an apparent allusion to Lucian. Lucian’s name has been attached to a diverse if uncertain body of writings and his reputation has often suffered by his being taken as an indiscriminately negative scoffer. This, I shall suggest, is untrue, but he did unrelentingly direct his satiric impulse towards the follies of the intellectual world. An irreverent precedent had been set by Aristophanes, ridiculing Socrates and his phronesterion in The Clouds; but it was, above all, Lucian who used the philosophical dialogue as a medium for satirizing philosophers and the conventions of philosophical discourse. This involved a shift from mainly poetry, or prosimetrics, to prose satire for which he provided a name for later writers to conjure with.95 Histories of philosophy that ignore such a critical response to ‘philosophy’ itself, are marked by a certain historical unreality. As Lucian will be touched on only piecemeal and in passing in what follows, a little of his relevance needs to be outlined now. Lucian was much admired in Byzantium and Renaissance Europe, but his paraded outspokenness helped make him a controversial figure, being considered by some as irreligious and scandalous. As he proudly remarked in ‘The Double Indictment’, converting an activity into a persona, philosophical ‘Dialogue’ had been reduced to a skeleton through continual questioning, but ‘I got him into walking on the ground like a human being’ cleaned off the accumulated grime, made him smile, ‘I paired him with comedy’.96 What, he continues, philosophical ‘Dialogue’ most resented about him was the refusal ‘to sit and quibble’ over obscurities like the immortality of the soul and ‘how many pints of pure changeless substance [God] poured into the vessel when he concocted the universe’.97 Sometimes Lucian used or parodied a philosophical idiom in discuss-

22

Hobbes, the Scriblerians and the History of Philosophy

ing the ludicrously trivial, the incongruity between the vessel or form and the content poured into it generating the humour. Relying on straw-man caricature of philosophical types, sketchy abstractions from known schools and casually deployed jargon, his refusal to quibble nevertheless suggests a more thorough doctrinal knowledge than his satire requires.98 The same impression will be given by the Scriblerians. As I shall illustrate below, when touching on the Scargill affair, Lucian may raise an important philosophical issue, later developed by others, but no longer associated with him. There is frequently a disjunction between philosophic persona and expressed doctrine, a separation by which Lucian created images of charlatanry and destructive eristic pride. Sometimes the discrepancy was between professed morality and conduct, generating accusations of hypocrisy, to become characteristic of so much social satire since.99 In all these ways, Lucian provided a precedent for the controversies surrounding Hobbes in the seventeenth century. And regardless of philosophical sect, he sometimes suggests that for all its posturing, philosophy is incapable of surpassing the simple home truths of everyday life. Hobbes himself occasionally has recourse to the same point of appeal. Addressing the reader directly in De cive he insists that what he says about human nature is what we really know and explains our conduct. We show distrust and accuse humanity when we lock our doors and go about armed. Also for Hobbes, Christianity is at its best when a simple lived piety is uncontaminated by the doctrines of philosophical sects. Lucian’s Hermotinus had been made to come to similarly blunt conclusions about implicit diurnal knowledge, and vows to avoid all philosophers as he would mad dogs – some precedent for Hobbes’s sweeping dismissal of previous philosophy. Lucian is informal, colloquial and aggressively immediate in his love of parrhesia, the virtue of outspokenness.100 If we concentrate upon the presented persona we can see that, most generally, Lucian’s satire was not a merely negative scoffing. The moral dimension of satire can be disclosed as well as articulated. Thus, the relentless exposure of delusion, idiocy and superstition displayed the courage and outspokenness, appropriate to the philosopher, purging the activity from dross. That Hermotinus finally shaves off his philosophic beard symbolizes this process of philosophical self-realization. More specifically, the Lucianic persona is in significant ways at one with Hobbes’s selfimage, of being direct and independent (see below, p. 36). The reputations of both Hobbes and Lucian would follow similar paths in the seventeenth century, their names becoming emblematic of shared patterns of dangerous failings into which their proclaimed virtues were converted. I will need to touch again on Lucian and his more positive place in Hobbes’s circle when dealing with the Lucianic in Hobbes’s philosophy. A more extensive comment on the Menippean is required as a prelude to Scriblerian satire. Here again the specificity of designation carries misleading

Introduction

23

expectations of the tidiness we can expect from a genre.101 But the matter is complex and raises issues relevant to the whole volume. Menippean satire takes its name from the cynic philosopher Menippus of Gadara (fourth century bc), who used a mixture of prose and verse to excoriate his victims.102 This mixed mode was adapted by the Roman writer Varro but only fragments of his Saturae Menippeae survive. It was also taken up by the philosophers Seneca and Petronius, and then, during the Second Sophistic, Lucian spirited Menippus from the grave, a quasi-Socratic, scruff y, bearded and irascible philosophical persona. Thereafter, much Menippean satire can be taken as a variation of the Lucianic. In the Renaissance the relationship between Menippus and Varronian satire was important in the contested debates between neo-Latin scholars about etymology and thus, for people given to a prejudice in favour of the antique, the true nature of satire. Some held, following Quintilian, that satire, a metaphor from satura (a medley or stew) was a Roman invention, others that it was ultimately from the satyr plays that accompanied tragedies in the Greek theatre and then developed into independent Attic comedy. Lucian as a Menippean satirist becomes important in England in the world of Desiderius Erasmus and Thomas More. They translated a good deal of his work and some of Erasmus’s Colloquies and In Praise of Folly (1509) and More’s Utopia (1516) are exemplary works of Lucianic satire, much of which they took also to be specifically Menippean.103 More remarked of the creation process of Utopia, that he had been living with Menippus.104 Swift in particular would regard More as exceptional in his creative use of the legacy of antiquity, an ancient among the moderns. As Utopia noticeably informs Scriblerian satire, it is worth giving it some initial attention. However, the characteristics of the work that at once render it Menippean also illustrate the difficulties of containing the range of the concept and the historical dangers of relying too heavily on the notion of a genre. As a descant on Plato’s Republic, Utopia is clearly tied to the most high and serious traditions of philosophic speculation, but undercuts this by its Lucianic dialogue form dominated by the imperious and dogmatic Menippean philosopher, Hythlodaeus, the bearded wanderer and intermittent melancholic speaker of riddles or nonsense. The book itself, much like In Praise of Folly, offers a relentless critique of political and moral corruption and of the intellectual delusions, especially of priests and lawyers that serve them, yet is cloaked in jocularity. Utopia is full of puns and the litotic assertion through denial, extending to mock digression. Its governing trope, however, may be said to be the strategic openendedness of aposiopesis. The debate between Hythlodeaus, the knowing voice of contemplative philosophy, and Morus (the fool) engaged in the compromising world of the active life, is balanced to a nicety at the end of the first book. It is an epitome of argumentum ad utramque partem. At the end of the second book, Morus goes no further than to accept that Hythlodaeus’s account of Uto-

24

Hobbes, the Scriblerians and the History of Philosophy

pia has raised many issues that must be thought through. Ultimately, it is the reader who has to be sufficiently engaged in order to come to a conclusion. The account of Utopia given by Hythlodaeus with all the authority of the well-travelled philosopher’s unique expertise is contradictory, at times self-refuting (the dimensions of the island) at times a touch unlikely (men sitting to hatch hens’ eggs). The title, a Greek neologism followed by a Latin elucidation, punningly raises more questions than the text ever answers, Utopos/eutopos as the best place (commonwealth) or no place; the best, or no fit (topos) topic for discussion. This encapsulates a paradoxical absurdity to be taken literally by the interlocutors and given a spurious verisimilitude by the fictions of the parerga. These well known features of More’s text give a strong foretaste of Scriblerian satire, in the fakery to create verisimilitude; in the image of the bearded itinerant philosopher; in the preference for multilingual titles; in the attempt to cast a reductive web of absurdities, critical engagement with which is a philosophical response; and to end in various ways with the trope of aposiopesis. With Utopia one can see clearly how the Menippean can form an untidy cluster of often contingently related and sometimes optional characteristics; travellers’ tales of a frequently fantastic nature, digression, mock encomia, absurdity taken seriously and inherent contradiction overlooked, all techniques or motifs employed by Lucian to a critical end. And these motifs can be employed well beyond anything purporting to be philosophy. To avoid giving the impression of an abstracted tradition of high art and relentless philosophical focus, carried from Lucian to Swift and Pope via More, it does need stressing that works of a Menippean colouring were popular in seventeenth-century England. The successful plays of Richard Brome are a clear case in point. His Jovial Crew (1641/2) may have been a partial model for Gay’s Beggars’ Opera; the earlier and similarly successful Antipodes (1640) was full of utopian inversions and absurdities; and there is something at one with Menippean satire, even if it lacks satiric point, in much of Taylor’s nonsense poetry, in which we are even treated to glimpses of Utopian language.105 The Menippean is, then, a porous classification and it immediately raises the question of how useful it is, even if restricted to philosophical targets. Taken fully, it defies expectations of genre, yet the expectations persist and to different degrees can only be satisfied if the genre is reified as an independent abstraction intersecting with selected, sometimes arbitrary illustration. For W. Scott Blanchard Menippean satire is learned wit, paradoxically antiintellectual, a protean anti-genre defying boundaries; effectively the absence of a genre is a genre.106 The notion of anti-intellectual is also dangerous, it can itself be a prejudicial renaming of overt hostility to what Menippean satirists saw as the absurdity of misused intellect, but it does seem guaranteed to keep satire and philosophy apart.107 On such reasoning one might say that the Menip-

Introduction

25

pean Cunaeus is anti-religious because of his hostility to theologians; or that any philosopher, such as Hobbes, was anti-intellectual on the evidence of his deeming previous philosophers useless. Philosophical positioning becomes antiphilosophy. What we can rescue from Blanchard’s formulation is a reaffirmation of the Lucianic hostility to what, rightly or wrongly, is presented as pretension. Certainly what we will see with the Scriblerians is not anti-intellectualism but hostility to the lack of discrimination and irresponsibility that turns would be savants and philosophers into fools. For Gary Sherbert, the Menippean is a kind of intellectual prose satire that parodies prevailing forms of learned discourse and is marked by an exuberance of wit. This is helpful, but in a world in which people could shift easily between prose and verse, the restriction to prose seems arbitrary, certainly at odds with much earlier usage, and would thus exclude Varro. The restriction to prose means that there is no place for Hudibras or The Dunciad or Abraham Cowley’s poem ‘Of Wit’ on which Sherbert relies in his characterization of Menippean prose.108 It would seem odd to regard The Extraordinary Life … of Martinus Scriblerus as Menippean, but not his persona at work in improving the poetry of Virgil. His largest work, Peri Bathous, or The Art of Sinking in Poetry (1727), is in a perverted way a prosimetric satura. Although he does not deal with a number of the texts discussed in this study, no recent scholar has tackled the problem of Menippean satire as thoroughly as Howard Weinbrot and no one reading his work can fail to learn from it. Given the diversity of evidence he considers and his sensitivity to the transformative interplay between a putative genre and those who used it, he rightly emphasizes the need for flexibility. As I have already noted, he is acutely aware of the unhistorical reification of Bakhtinian theory. Yet he treats the Menippean as a genre with a defining trait and this remains sometimes problematic. On the one hand, the wealth of material deemed Menippean threatens the confines of a genre, so supplementary conceptions (voice, language) and differing manifestations (satire by incursion, annotation and addition, all either harsh or muted) are needed to maintain a sense of cohesion. It is a difficult task as the frequent celebration of contradiction and incoherence, is apt to eat away the genre from the inside. On the other, the drift towards abstractionism remains; the genre is close to being described as an agent, by turns using other genres, additional discursive phenomena and different historical periods.109 The defining trait is held to be the fear of an impending and unjustified orthodoxy. Yet feigned, hyperbolic or genuine fears of a wicked ascendancy were part of the small change of polemic and especially religious controversy across Western culture in the early modern world. They justified urgency of expression and going into print in the first place, and were hardly definitional of any apparent genre. The topos of unacceptable orthodoxy is valuably stressed, but there may be confusion between what defines with what informs. It may be, however, that we are meant to take the defining

26

Hobbes, the Scriblerians and the History of Philosophy

trait only within the context of that necessity of literary analysis, a genre. If so, we are left poised between faltering discrimination and circularity. It is the consequence of needing to put under one cohering rubric so much over such a long period of time; and it is all uncomfortably close to the crux confronting the historian of early modern philosophy. Historically speaking, however, we do not need to presuppose the necessity of genre any more than in the wider history of early modern philosophy we need to assume there is only one activity with a defining trait. We may have to accept that the Menippean, even if signalled by reference to Lucian or Menippus comprises a variable range of characteristics, the presence of only some of which in a piece of writing might be enough to deem it, or explain why it was called Menippean. For Eugene Kirk, the Menippean is a cluster concept, the use of which is sanctioned by little more than a family resemblance or contingent configuration of discursive features. Consequently, it is little wonder that Kirk’s catalogue of Menippean satire is so large. Lipsius, Rabelais, More, Swift, Fielding, Voltaire, Stern, the Scriblerians, Nabokov, Beckett and the Pythons can all be Menippean satirists and by virtue of no single shared feature. For the sixteenth-century scholar Passarat or Pithou (depending on who wrote the Satyre Ménippée) Rabelais was a Menippean satirist, yet he does not seem to have much in common with Justus Lipsius. So, there is value in recognizing the de facto abandon with which the names Menippus and Lucian might be evoked. In short, insisting on an essential feature may save the genre but warps the historical canvass; but the more a canvass is warped, the less reliance we can put on any portrait painted on it. In reacting strongly against all forms of ecumenical inclusiveness Ingid de Smet has argued that the Menippean should be limited to humanist self-understanding, and has attempted to restrict it to a highly specific genre deriving from Lipsius’s Somnium (1581) a work of clear relevance to Scriblerian satire. Written as a dream, Somnium came to be accepted as the archetypal Menippean satire.110 Lipsius recounts how Cicero, Sullust and Ovid in senatorial discussion condemn their treatment among modern philologists, but are eventually persuaded by Varro, to allow the work to continue.111 In 1612, Petrus Cunaeus presented a more elaborate and dramatic satiric dream in which Erasmus as well as Menippus figures on an island inhabited by the scholarly community (compare Swift and the Island of Laputa). Again modern scholarship is defended, this time by Pico della Mirandola in place of Varro, but all to no avail. Modernity is threatened with exile; there follows the chaos of attempted revolution when the island is invaded by criminals.112 Dream worlds and dreamed descents into the underworld and fantastic travellers’ tales get distant precedent from Homer and Aristophanes’s The Frogs, but more immediate satiric force from Seneca’s Menippean satire, Apocolocyntosis (The Gourdification of Claudius), in which the Emperor is rejected from Olym-

Introduction

27

pus and is consigned to become a slave to Menander.113 Lucian made much of such motifs, in the Dialogues of the Dead and Menippus, and again they become important in the More and Erasmus circle with [Richard Pace’s] Julius Exclusus. In this brutally cutting satire, Pope Julius II fails in a desperate bid to get to heaven.114 Lord Byron’s Vision of Judgement (1822) that would imagine a defunct British monarch at the rusty gates of Paradise, ‘What George? What Third?’ carries the tradition spiritedly into the nineteenth century.115 In making the Menippean conform to the rigidities of a very specific genre, de Smet, for all her detailed historiography and expert Latinity overlooked More and Erasmus, and the characteristics they associated with Menippus and Lucian, to say nothing of the wealth of putatively Menippean satire that lies beyond any engagement with learning and philosophy; her precision is at the cost of artificiality. It is noteworthy that in 1617, Erasmus’s In Praise of Folly was published as being at one with Lipsius’s Somnium and Cunaeus’s Sardi Venales, which indicates that the given motif of a dream could be less significant in the designation Menippean than the point of its use. Here Weinbrot’s emphasis on feared and corrosive orthodoxy is a valuable corrective.116 The dream was not a motif in Utopia but the satiric targets of More and Erasmus are much at one with those of Cunaeus and Lipsius. Similarly for King’s Lucianic Dialogues of the Dead (1699). But for living in Ireland and his death there in 1713 King was remarkably close to being a Scriblerian, and his Dialogues functioned to the Menippean end of ridiculing Hobbes and the snarling critic Dr Bentley, pre-eminent amongst the feared orthodoxy of the moderns. And for the Scriblerians themselves, what matters is not an imagined dream but the relationships between ancients and moderns so important to Lipsius and those immediately following his example.

The Paradox of Historical Relevance The effect of Smet’s analysis is the opposite of the reification of a transhistorical genre; it renders the Menippean largely unusable for later writing, and perhaps that is her point. We are presented with a microcosm of what may be called the paradox of historical relevance. It is a fitting place at which to close, for it is central to the Scriblerians’ perception of the relationship between ancients and moderns; it is arguably of explanatory significance to some of Hobbes’s work; and it marks the difference between the bulk of the argument here and the Afterword, in which again I will touch on the rhetoric of relevance. The paradox is familiar enough and may be expressed quite generally.117 One, some would say the only, reason for studying the past is to make it serve the present. The justificatory formulations of this are legion if not formulaic, even banal: history is philosophy teaching by examples (Vosius); understand the past that you may know the future (Acton); those who do not know the past are

28

Hobbes, the Scriblerians and the History of Philosophy

doomed to repeat its mistakes (Santayana); or the colloquial and ubiquitous ‘history shows … teaches … proves’. These are perhaps all testimonies to the persistent energies directed to such a utilitarian study of the past.118 And they make historiography strikingly analogous to early modern philosophy in its dual criteria of legitimacy; each relies on appeals to a form of propositional truth and a wider social benefit. Even those rejecting the instrumentalism inherent in so much historiographical justification often feel obliged to gesture in its direction; for the past may always be said at least to have for us, what I have called above, a contrastive value. Be this as it may, the detailed recovery of a past for the direct or vicarious benefit of the present can, as an unintended consequence, reveal a world that is alien, redundant or embarrassing. What was once taken as fact, like England’s Ancient Constitution, or the hundreds released at the fall of the Bastille, or the reliance on terra nullius arguments in early Australia, dissolves into myth. Philological endeavour designed to establish authentic texts can end up destroying their credibility. Sensitivity to such possibilities can stimulate a range of discursive strategies aimed rescuing a problematic past, conjectural reconstruction or reliance on only approximate and symbolic meanings, being the most obvious. It can also lead to a historiography of deliberate subversion. So de Smet’s recovery of Renaissance understandings of the Menippean is a deliberate challenge for a wider applicability. Hobbes’s attention to the history of the early Christian Church and the original meaning of the word heresy was designed to sabotage any clerical reliance on an authoritative past to reinforce its power in the present. As we will see, Pope suspected the motivations behind Hobbes’s translations of Homer, possibly made not to aid the relevance of the epics, or as Hobbes innocently claimed, simply because he had nothing better to do, but to harpoon their allegorical potential.119 Indeed, the allegorical treatment of the past is a last resort of those who are aware of the difficulties in keeping it relevant. Awareness of the paradox of relevance is an inescapable aspect of the Scriblerian treatment of the dispute between ancients and moderns, so brilliantly encapsulated in the contrasting absurdities of the personae of Cornelius and his son Martinus Scriblerus. Whatever the good intentions of the moderns, and the Scriblerians are parsimonious in according them any, their serious scholarship destroys a cultural resource through its relentless attention to detail, its obfuscating hypothetical reconstructions and pedantry in the name of authenticity. It is this that does so much to explain the Scriberlians’ sustained animus towards Bentley who took a source of ancient wisdom, the Epistles of Phalaris, and on the eve of a new edition to celebrate their enduring value, showed them unceremoniously to be spurious.120 A little history, or philology goes a long way, a lot goes too far. Consequently, the price for protecting antiquity is paid in the currency of sustaining and defending superficialities and making do with a kind of

Introduction

29

metaphorical applicability. Theirs was nothing if not an uncomfortable insight into cultural continuity of which any history of philosophy is only a part. But additionally, the weight of destructive scholarship required them to ask what is considered now an altogether less respectable question: what kind of person will want to undermine the value of an ancient inheritance? Answer: a certain sort of persona. Thus as I shall show, what might be kicked away with a Johnsonian boot as irrelevant ridicule and caricature, bequeathing only the abstracted image of mad modernity, was an attempt to disclose a source of social and philosophical corruption. Crucially for the argument throughout, the evidence of failings of the mind is invariably in the flailing of the mouth. It is the language of the law and religious discourse used to obfuscate which More and Erasmus criticized. It is excessive, arcane over-elaborated language about which Lipsius’s figure of Ovid complained. And it is the voice of Sophia (the true philosopher) through which Cunaeus attacked the misleading obscurities, superstitions and improper inferences of theology.121 These, in turn, are echoes of the language of philosophers, the beard-wearers Lucian ridiculed, parodied and had castigated by his imagined Olympian gods. All of this continuity concentrates on that satirically vulnerable juncture of persona and doctrine central to Hobbes, his critics and to the Scriblerians. The resulting persona and his misused or meaningless conceptual language is that of the philosophos gloriosus, a Martinus Scriblerus, or a monster from Malmesbury. What, then, I shall concentrate upon is the constellation of rhetorical tropes and textual features called Menippean loosely gathered in the untidy wake of Lucian, in so far as they are turned to the satire of philosophy. My focus is upon the philosophic persona and language as a tool in the crafting of a better philosophy from the verbal wreckage of a philosopher scoffed. This is enough for my purposes and it enables a brief encapsulation of the study as a whole: it operates at the variable juncture of the ad hominem and reductive as they are used for satiric and humorous effect on conceptions of an absurd philosophic persona to help establish or reform the nature of philosophy. It follows that my argument cannot pretend to completeness. It is not about Menippean satire as a whole, a fortiori satire as a literary form, if that notion makes good sense. It follows that I am making no claims about any wider significance for philosophical satire. Neither does it pretend to completeness with respect to philosophy. Even if philosophy were a tidier activity than it was, this is not to be taken as a history of it. I have, rather, written an essay intended to help explain how what counts as philosophy has altered, carrying the sub-text that one of the factors inhibiting our understanding of argumentative change lies in the very disciplines that, being so well established, have their features projected

30

Hobbes, the Scriblerians and the History of Philosophy

into the past in the name of self-understanding. It is a book on the avoidance of anachronism and circularity. Overall, I trust, the result provides a better glimpse of the disputatious subtleties of an intellectual culture that is only awkwardly assimilated to the clean doctrinal lines of what we have come to expect philosophy to be, serious and abstractedly propositional, a culture discrepant with academic divisions of labour on which we have more recently come to rely. For our expectations are apt to falsify. They barely capture Hobbes or his irritants, they undervalue those greatest wits of their age, the Scriblerians; but rectification of perspective is at a price: another variation of the paradox of relevance. If the history is more nuanced, may it end up of less value to the philosopher? If the philosophic persona is historically important, how much can we learn from the image of a failed one, a Martinus, or a negatively portrayed Hobbes? What we might learn from the recovery of the philosophic persona is not as straightforward as the Scriblerians would have us think; and so it will be left to last.

PART I

In my opinion the philosopher himself is a satirist. T. J. Mathias, The Pursuits of Literature

1 HOBBES, LUCIANIC HUMOUR AND THE PHILOSOPHIC PERSONA

Wit and Reason John Aubrey remarked on Hobbes’s addiction to emphatic oaths (expletives); recalled his dogged ingenuity in trying to square the circle and extolled the ‘reason’ by which he wished to be known.1 Yet what is striking about Aubrey’s account is the persistent emphasis on Hobbes’s wit and good humour: ‘pleasant facetiousness’, ‘wit and drollery’, the delightfulness of his ‘wit and smart replies’; his lack of rancour in debate, his twinkling hazel eyes. This ‘merry humour’ was not incidental to the ‘reason’.2 It tells us something about the character of Hobbes’s philosophy that has until recently been largely ignored.3 First, however, some of the slippery relationships between humour, wit, jesting, laughter and reason need comment. Wit was an elusive notion, as Cowley put it, ‘Comely in a thousand shapes’, ‘we only can by Negatives define’.4 It was associated with acuity of intellect and freshness of expression, but its elusiveness is illustrated in Hobbes’s differing discussions of it in The Elements of Law and Leviathan. In the earlier work Hobbes treats wit as a clear virtue of the mind, a ‘tenuity and agility of spirits’, its defining negative being ‘DULNESS’. In Leviathan, however, he distinguishes natural from acquired wit. Dullness and stupidity provide the defining contrast to natural wit, which ‘consisteth principally in … Celerity of Imagining … and steddy direction to some approved end’. 5 He then equates ‘Good Wit’ with ‘Good Fancy’, but in order to become an intellectual virtue, it has also to be joined with good – 31 –

32

Hobbes, the Scriblerians and the History of Philosophy

judgement. And clearly there can be a differing balance of dispositions; in poetry fancy dominates, in history, judgement. ‘In Demonstration, in Counsell, and all rigorous search of Truth, Judgement does all’, allowing only for the occasional apt similitude, but certainly excluding the exercise of wit through metaphorical dexterity (a view modified in other works).6 Acquired wit is a different matter; it comes from method and instruction and is reason.7 As he had written of an undifferentiated wit in The Elements, it is the means ‘by which men attain to exact and perfect knowledge’.8 Wit was, therefore, a necessary attribute of the philosophic persona. It remains unclear, however, whether the acquired wit of Leviathan is refined from or contradicts the earlier natural wit inclusive of fancy. More significantly, the common though asymmetrical relationships of wit with jesting allow some degree of humour to be carried into a conception of ‘reason’. In neither work does Hobbes explicitly discuss humour as manifesting wit, although in each the facial distortion of laughter is specified as expressing a ‘sudden glory’ at another’s defeat.9 In The Elements the victorious grimace is the sign of a passion that has no name, but what ‘moveth laughter … must be new and unexpected’.10 He denies that it is exclusively tied to wit, for we laugh where there is no jest (thus implicitly accepting the strong associations of wit with humour). In Leviathan, where these associations with wit are unmentioned, laughter is often the sign of small mindedness. Hobbes also explicitly regarded excessive levity as a mental defect betraying an uncontrolled mobility of spirits, with ‘every little jest or witty observation’ distracting from the ‘steddy direction’ of discourse.11 As the fault of levity lay in its excess, by implication a little might aid that ‘steddy direction’, and so ought not to be censured. Hobbes’s lack of specificity about humour in discussing wit and reason, was, I suggest, simply because a degree of philosophically directed humour, philosophical jesting, could be taken for granted. Humour might be analogous to, or exemplified in the occasional apt simile that furthers the ends of reason. It might, in short, be at one with Wilson’s notion (see above p. 19) that a fittingly placed jest can be a form of discursive punctuation, actually helping to maintain attention. But for Hobbes, as his own philosophical practice will show, humour, wit and jesting can be a means by which the acquired wit of reason could itself be directly advanced; it is philosophically sanctioned because it is satiric. As I shall argue, Hobbes’s self-image as a philosopher entailed that he be a satirist. In the meantime, it is noteworthy that Cowley praised Hobbes in much the same way that he characterized wit. Just as in wit ‘All things agree’, so in Hobbes’s philosophy, eloquence and wit creates a concord in variety.12 Where Cowley and Aubrey drew attention to Hobbes’s humour, modern scholarship has been apt to overlook it. One explanation for this may lie in a narrowing of the notion of wit, restricted to what Hobbes called ‘witty observation’, to levity and superficiality. More importantly, I suspect, is the common

Hobbes, Lucianic Humour and the Philosophic Persona

33

misconception, on which I have already touched (above p. 19), that all humour is necessarily framed in some way and so insulated from the serious.13 On such a basis, it can thus be discounted without apparent damage to the intellectual content of the work of a philosopher such as Hobbes, whose suitably filtered propositions can then take their places in the lineage of a modern discipline and its austere purposes of establishing analytic truth.14 However, in Hobbes’s day there was more involved than insulated patterns of proposition. In controversy, both the specification of responsibilities and the qualities needed for philosophizing could be stimulated and shaped through the exercise of satiric wit. It is precisely this that is encompassed by Hobbes’s praise of wit as ‘tenuity and agility’, an implicit acceptance of the legitimacy of argument serio ludere.

The Lucianic in Hobbes’s World Symptomatic of this missing dimension is the fate of the Democritan writer Lucian, who as I have also noted, claimed to have made the philosophical dialogue laugh.15 In the provocation of laughter at others, Lucian had capitalized on arguments found largely in the philosophy of rhetoric and poetics that gave humour a serious rationale.16 As an aspect of a speaker’s presented persona in argument, the ethos in Aristotelian terms, humour reached out selectively to an audience, signalling an appropriate response.17 This in turn, especially through overt laughter, could be a sign of argumentative success, the achievement of a common understanding, helping to create, or sustain a community by excluding those laughed at, scorned and diminished by it. Laughter could express an informed critical engagement, a sense of superiority.18 It was, as Wilson summarized, condemnation. This might make outright laughter ethically uncertain, as Hobbes himself recognized in associating so much of it with mean-spiritedness, but it insured the liaison between satire as moral critique and the humour given such a ‘steddy direction’. For Lucian, risible failings could be detected in discourse covering what we would now see as logic, metaphysics, moral and political theory and religious belief, so stretching in a virtually unbroken continuum from putatively bogus philosophy to the promotion of superstition and idolatry. Indeed, as Jones remarks, in Lucian’s work, philosophy and religion were intimately linked. In a number of his satires it is philosophers who defend the absurdities of religion, and occasionally it is the gods who look down upon the absurdity of philosophy.19 If the scope of philosophy is narrowed to be consistent with the sort of propositional economy now taken much for granted, this may seem odd, and may help to explain Lucian’s position somewhere near outer darkness; but if, as Kinch Hoekstra has shown, the scope of philosophy could be taken to embrace utilitas as human betterment, then the use of the Lucianic to puncture bladders

34

Hobbes, the Scriblerians and the History of Philosophy

puffed up with self-delusion and manipulative self-interest is in no way discrepant with what it was to be a true philosopher.20 This deflationary purpose is apparent in the seventeenth century, during which time the positive citation of Lucian is both an indication of discontent with religious practice and a sign that there is good philosophical reason to laugh at philosophers.21 Thus Samuel Butler in his character of ‘A Philosopher’ first dismisses philosophers in terms at one with Lucian and with Hobbes in his accounts of early Christianity. Philosophers discover nothing but their own mistakes and when there was money in the business, ‘maintained themselves and their Opinions by fierce and hot Contests’. Now, without credit they have collapsed into the single sect, he styles ‘Epicuro-Gassendo-Charltoniana’; its controversies are easily ignored. Butler then ridicules the very things Hobbes had ridiculed. The philosopher is confident of immaterial Substances and his Reasons are very pertinent, that is, substantial as he thinks and immaterial as others do. Heretofore his Beard was the badge of his Profession, and the length of that in all his Polemics was ever accounted the Length of his Weapon.

In Lucian’s time, he continues, ‘philosophers were commonly called BeardWearers; for all the Strength of their Wits lay in their Beards’.22 Lucian had taken the beard – long bushy, unkempt, and on one man weighing ‘three score ounces’ – as the hallmark of the philosophical type he satirized. In one case it was forcibly removed.23 In another, Hermotinus vowed to shave his own ‘big, shaggy beard’ to proclaim his rejection of philosophical dogma; in another sapience is accorded to Apollo, despite his lacking the usual facial foliage of philosophical standing.24 Hobbes’s philosophy, I would suggest, had a clear Lucianic dimension, sanctioned by his general views on wit and reason.25 To recognize this, as Butler appears to have done, and as Brian Duppa did, on the publication of Leviathan, is to enhance the context needed for understanding his thought.26 Quentin Skinner and Roger Lund have both rightly stressed the importance of recovering the wit of Hobbes’s works, most noticeably that of Leviathan, which each takes to be a watershed. However, there the agreement ends: Skinner at one point argued that Leviathan steps back to embrace the Renaissance theory of laughter (singular) because Hobbes came to believe that philosophy on its own was unpersuasive, an explanation predicated on philosophy and humour being then as distinct as they have since become.27 Rather, it may have been that the Lucianic, easily at one with philosophy or eloquence, encouraged the Hobbesian embrace of eloquence to a philosophically demonstrative end.28 It is perhaps worth remarking both that it was Lucian’s predecessor Bion who first conjoined eloquence and philosophy, according to Diogenes Laertus; and that Lucian was apt to run philosophy and rhetoric together by satirizing the personae of rhetori-

Hobbes, Lucianic Humour and the Philosophic Persona

35

cian and philosopher in similar terms. Each was subject to the same failings, each indifferently the butt of his humour.29 In contrast to Skinner, Lund has claimed that Hobbes introduced a new heterodox wit, to become typical of the Restoration and Augustan worlds. This will be discussed further when the satiric strain in Hobbes’s critics is addressed.30 In the meantime, either way, the contextual enrichment is hardly unproblematic given the often entangled functions of humour and laughter in early modernity (above, pp. 18–19) – to express wonder or joy, to aid good health, to sustain attention, as well as to criticize, scorn and condemn. Once we allow the possibility of humour to enter Hobbes’s texts, the differing rationalities for it become potentially destabilizing. When is humour invented or rediscovered, according to our convenience? We need to be armed with little more than a concept of irony to make almost any text say what we want.31 And how do we know the point of humour, where it stops and whether laughter is itself a sign of interpretative acuity? As Aubrey’s amplifications on Hobbes’s humour indicate, there can always be ‘merry humour’ beyond the philosophic requirements of serio ludere. It is a humour that laces his correspondence, much to the joy of his friends, one recalling the gaiety (la gayeté de toutes conversations) of Hobbes’s conversation.32 When Hobbes wrote to a friend that ‘I have a cold that makes me keepe my chamber, and a chamber, that makes me keepe my Cold’, we have something both benign and pretty quarantined from serious implications;33 but does the satire of priestcraft extend beyond a ‘pleasant facetiousness’ to a subversion of Christianity?34 If we see no humour in his theological and ecclesiological theories, he can seem entirely orthodox, a possibility that raises the question of why so many of his theologically informed contemporaries took offence.35 Conversely, if we see too much, he becomes the implausible caricature atheist presented by his more extreme English foes and at odds with so much circumstantial evidence.36 Yet, if in this way, the gap between the semantic meaning of a statement and the intended point of it is opened up so decisively by humour as Lund suggests, why is it that he and Hobbes’s seventeenth-century critics can come to broadly the same conclusions: namely, that Hobbes was responsible for something new and nasty? Before taking up these issues, a word is needed on the tantalizing presence of Lucian in Hobbes’s milieu. It may suggest why Hobbes could have taken the legitimacy of serio ludere much for granted when briefly outlining the relationships between wit and reason. Lucian, widely available from the sixteenth century had become a controversial figure by the mid-seventeenth century, but was a favoured author in the Cavendish circle of which Hobbes was the major figure. His work was apparently known off by heart by Hobbes’s close friend and French promoter, François Du Verdus.37 Andrew Crook, the printer of both The Brief of the Art of Rhetorique

36

Hobbes, the Scriblerians and the History of Philosophy

and Leviathan, and distributor of Hobbes’s works during the Restoration, went on to produce a Latin selection of Lucian’s work, and Charles Cotton, the probable translator of De cive, later wrote parodic versions of some of the dialogues.38 Admittedly, these are only straws in the wind, but both printers and translators tended to trade in works of congruent interests and intellectual affinity. Further, in 1638 Jasper Mayne, a protégé of William Cavendish, had translated a number of Lucian’s dialogues. These were published with a dedication to Cavendish in 1663. This prefatory material may have been written specifically for the act of publication. Like many, Mayne regarded Lucian as a peerless stylist, rhetorician and significant satiric philosopher but who had been inadequately translated by More, Erasmus and Melanchthon. These, he urged, had failed to capture the way in which Lucian’s lasting wit and reasoning power ran together.39 If this indicates the serio-ludere qualities that would, or were being accorded to Hobbes, Mayne also defended Lucian against the sort of charge that was beginning to haunt Hobbes by the early Restoration. Lucian, argues Mayne, was no atheist but a hater of idolatry, a satirist certainly but because of his passion for the truth.40 Further intriguing affinities become apparent later in the century. Charles Blount, the probable author of encomiastic broadsides following Hobbes’s death and the Hobbesian John Wagstaffe were also active promoters of Lucian in the face of serious denigration.41 It is possible to go a little further in identifying a certain consanguinity between Lucian and Hobbes. Reading Lucian provides a predominantly prejudicial picture of ancient philosophy as composed of trivializing and destructive sects; it is a dismissive and hostile conception for which Hobbes has become notorious and this outspokenness will shortly be illustrated. Lucian did, however, show some respect for Socrates and Plato, whom Hobbes also (sometimes) considered less dangerous than most ancient philosophers;42 while both he and Lucian had the highest regard for Thucydides. More generally, Lucian exhibited persistent suspicion of organized religion, and the fears and superstitions he took it to exploit. He exhibited a critical sympathy for Epicurianism. Hobbes became decidedly anticlerical, sceptical of religious dogma and prophesy and in his materialism, his explanatory emphasis on pleasure and pain was easily assimilated to an Epicurian tradition.43 Each prided himself on being direct and honest, given to the parrhesia specifically associated with Lucian’s frequent mouthpiece, Menippus, and more broadly in early modern England, with the freedoms necessary to give good honest counsel.44 As an office, counsel was as awkwardly entangled with philosophy as it was with rule. Hobbes, as I have quoted above, joins demonstration and counsel together as both being rigorous searches for truth and was not unusual in putting forth his work as counsel.45 By the use of serio ludere Lucian was vulnerable to the accusation of merely being a scoffer. Although the designation might amount to little more than an informal term for satirist (as

Hobbes, Lucianic Humour and the Philosophic Persona

37

in Cotton’s burlesque of Lucian), its fully accusative force could itself be close to the convenience of ad hominem dismissal. Effectively, Mayne defends Lucian against this charge by saying that the satire came from love of the truth. Hobbes would be charged with the same scoffing recourse to wit at the expense of reason.46 By the Restoration, if Lucian could be lauded as a debunker of false gods, he could also be accused of atheism. That charge was levelled at Hobbes, if only occasionally while he lived, more commonly after his death.47 Admittedly, these similarities are synoptic to the point of being glib and they are not mentioned in order to posit any exclusive or systematic influence. Rather, in the generalities of what each man admired or attacked and in the specific accusations to which each was subject, there was a family resemblance of which we have since lost sight. It gave rise to what I have noted as a suggestive configuration. If only at a superficial level, satiric wit, heterodoxy, intellectual independence, and the names Hobbes and Lucian ran together or could be forcibly conjoined.

The Uses of Lucian Hobbes rarely cites other authors with approval and so his few allusions to Lucian have more than passing significance. In his essay ‘Of the Life and History of Thucydides’ (1629) Hobbes commended Lucian for exemplifying the principles of good history with reference to Thucydides and then praised him for taking his precepts from the historian.48 Hobbes’s image of a people being chained by the ears to the mouth of the sovereign may be from Lucian’s description of the ‘Gallicus’ Hercules in Marseilles, perhaps via George Puttenham, a symbolic image of the power of rhetoric.49 His offhand remark that dancing could be worship might well have encompassed Lucian’s defence of the dance.50 And although once calling him a scoffer, Hobbes reiterates a conventional regard in the Latin edition of Leviathan, where Lucian is referred to as ‘a fine author of the Greek tongue’ (bonus author linguae Graecae).51 In De corpore, however, the fullest statement of his materialist science, Hobbes makes Lucian central to his dismissal of all previous philosophy and the need to replace it with what Tom Hobbes had written. In doing so, he initiates a pattern of allusion that will be all to the same effect. The reference comes immediately after an assertion as to his own significance as the inventor of civil philosophy, and precedes a polemically dismissive catalogue of previous fools and naves: But what? Were there no philosophers natural nor civil among the ancient Greeks? There were men so called; witness Lucian by whom they are derided (irrisi); witness divers cities, from which they have often been by public edicts banished. But it follows not that there was philosophy.52

38

Hobbes, the Scriblerians and the History of Philosophy

Hobbes had put De corpore aside to write Leviathan, and in this work too he rejected ancient philosophers in strikingly similar terms. What had been the use of all their disputations, ‘what Science is there at this day acquired by their Readings … ?’ Hardly anything is ‘more absurdly said in naturall Philosophy, than that which is now called Aristotles Metaphysics; nothing is more repugnant to Government than that he hath said in his Politiques; nor ignorantly, than a great part of his Ethiques’.53 Knowledge of ancient learning, he also remarked, had been very dearly bought. Later he would insist that it was above all the sects of Greek philosophy that had corrupted the simple common-sense piety of Christianity with egregious dogmatism. The image of coteries of ancient philosophers squabbling over trivialities and confusions, like Yeats’s weasels in a hole, is entirely Lucianic in its force, as is the contrast between philosophical doctrine and a simple lived piety.54 Indeed, it is at one with the rationale Lucian gives to Hermotinus for vowing to shave off his philosophical beard. Hobbes may allude to this in the Historica ecclesiastica where again he links spurious philosophy and verbal charlatanry with the corruption of religion, commending the witty Lucian for exposing pretension and absurdity and so ceasing to be a fool. Though no one, adds Hobbes, was adequate to the task at hand. If only, Hobbes laments in Lucianic style, Socrates’s mad wife had killed him when she bashed the philosopher’s ugly head (turpe caput), with a (chamber?) pot (matulâ).55 In his polemical disputes with John Wallis, Hobbes had also passingly enlisted Lucian in the process of deriding argument from authority and its consequent absurdities; there is no absurdity that has not been proclaimed by a philosopher.56 Hobbes generalized from such acid denunciations in the Decameron. He poses the rhetorical question of why some revere philosophy while others scorn it. The answer, he insists, lies in distinguishing philosophy itself from pretended philosophers, the ill-suited, incompetent and self-interested who deserve to be scorned. This, coming after sporadic proclamations of a need for a wholesale demolition of ancient philosophy as largely Byronic, ‘mad, bad and dangerous to know’, made derisive Lucianic humour against philosophers more than a grace note to propositional truth content. Rather, it legitimated the ad hominem and was partially constitutive of what it was fitting for a proper philosopher to say and how to exhibit that persona’s superiority over absurdity and corrosive error. As in Historia ecclesiastica, the dismissive characterization of false philosophers, their ignorance and motivations is at once vituperative and all encompassing.57 Mayne remarked with Lucian in mind and perhaps consciously quoting Hobbes, that lasting wit was not just cleverness or freshness of expression, but that it required reason, ‘Sharpe Iudgement to apply, and to shape and Square all to the present Subject, and Occasion’.58 And for Hobbes, that almost perpetual present required the promotion of philosophy by purging it of philosophers.

Hobbes, Lucianic Humour and the Philosophic Persona

39

The integration of humorous wit and reason helps explain why Hobbes could announce, in the preface to Human Nature, with outrageous cheek, or twinkling hazel eye, that political science began in 1642 with his own book De cive.59 It was a claim implicit in the more measured self-promotion of the earlier work and it would not be lost on his critics.60 In The Elements of Law, he appears disingenuously to claim a uniqueness for his conception of laughter, derived from well known theories that Skinner has recently suggested were even old-fashioned when Hobbes echoed them.61 If the critical and satirical conception of laughter was old-fashioned, it would remain so for a long time. Hobbes’s passing claim is nevertheless so striking that Skinner is right to draw attention to what he considers a noisy protestation of originality, indicating insensitivity to an audience, surely familiar with the theories Hobbes proclaims as his own.62 Possibly; but it may also be the case that Hobbes was joking. The status of The Elements as a manuscript not intended for the printing press is important.63 Hobbes’s assertion that the joy of laughter ‘hath not hitherto been declared by any’ may well have been an in- joke for the sort of gentlemen, not least his patron Cavendish and his immediate circle, amongst whom the work initially circulated. If Hobbes could assume their knowledge of the sort of theory he echoes, he could also assume their awareness of his allergy to Aristotle, the font et origo of such theory. The aside may have been at once a momentary parody of the intellectual independence Hobbes thought necessary for a philosopher and a paradoxical example of the role of the ‘new and unexpected’ in causing laughter on which he is about to insist. It was a point which itself was hardly new and for which there was an established term, admiratio.64 We will probably never know whether Hobbes’s claim to distinctiveness was effrontery, or the advance of an argument through a complex litotic jest. In Leviathan he remarks deliciously that human beings and animals are quite different for only humans are capable of absurdity, and those most subject to it ‘profess philosophy’.65 There is more than sarcasmus here. There is first an ironic expression of his beliefs in the less than absolute difference between humans and animals. Second, there is the inversion of the hallowed, and self-promotional philosophical nostrum (out of Plato and the despised Aristotle) that the philosopher’s life is the highest form of human existence. Third, we have a clear example of the way in which the accusation of the nonsense of absurdity, in contrast to mere error, operates as a Lucianic marker. Laughter may often be cruel or unseemly, but as Puttenham had assured his readers long before Hobbes, we may decently laugh at the absurd, even if at nothing else. In The Elements Hobbes had elaborated on just such a point. ‘Laughter without offence, must be at the absurdities and infirmities abstracted from persons, and where all the company may laugh together’.66 As Swift would have Gulliver reflect in true Lucianic

40

Hobbes, the Scriblerians and the History of Philosophy

mode after him, there is nothing ‘so extravagant and irrational which some Philosophers have not maintained for a Truth’.67 Hobbes’s linguistic dexterity well suited him for the Lucianic coalescence of humour and argument. For some writers laughter had its well-spring in the sense of wonder;68 and a sign of what was to come is found in De mirabilibus pecci, Carmen, [1627; 1636] a long Latin poem on an odyssey through Derbyshire, prima facie an unpromising topic. But the dominant trope, announced in the title, is paralipsis, the expression of wonder, defying description and so inviting not silence but amplification, through ingenious, witty, far-fetched and inappropriate comparison. The result is a classically structured work full of decorous Virgilian and Homeric allusion and laced with scatalogical puns and sexual imagery. It was popular (Isaac Newton bought it); however, according to Hobbes’s unbending critic John Wallis, it was ribald and obscene.69 Hobbes admitted to Wallis he was no poet. It was a confession marking a need perhaps to cut losses under pressure on the battlefront of mathematics, but more importantly it expressed a humility and modesty not usually associated with his persona. It also acted as a reminder that what was at issue between him and Wallis was not poetry but philosophy. Hobbes’s voice in Thomas Tenison’s informed and critical dialogue, The Creed of Mr Hobbes (1670) reiterates his expression of poetic inadequacy to his interlocutor, the ‘Student’ with whom he is sometimes quite testy;70 but the modesty touches on the false, for the poem was a display of considerable skills which thread through later work he was determined to defend. And Hobbes would go on to write a good deal of Latin poetry. John Hale has recently drawn valuable attention to the poetic acuity, even brilliance that marked Hobbes’s neo-Latin Vita.71 Historia ecclesiastica is a long and sustained verse dialogue on the corruption of Christianity and its contamination by spurious philosophy. The voice shared by the interlocutors is of poet and historian, a persona that does not exclude strong assertions of philosophic opinion and the tone is often satiric. But in his translations of Homer, Hobbes stood in the ambivalent if hallowed persona of the poet-philosopher. It is a point to which we will need to pay more detailed attention (below pp. 45–52). Hobbes had a gift for diminishing epigrammatic wit, as when he culminated a complex period on poetic pretension with the starkly wonderful simile that some poets sought to write from pure inspiration – ‘like a bagpipe’, or when, with possibly his own neologism, he dismissed the invented language of Scotan scholasticism as a gallimatium (from gallimaufry) and Ducocalanus (from passer du coq à l’âne).72 He was occasionally given to more or less innocent puns, as when he wrote that in government, ‘when nothing else turns up, clubs are trumps’. 73 But he relished the more satiric trope of aestismus, the exploitation of ambiguities to carry a dissonance between innocence and critique, or, as in De mirabilibus between innocence and sexual inuendo. In Historia ecclesiastica we

Hobbes, Lucianic Humour and the Philosophic Persona

41

are blandly informed, that men are rarely made all good or bad, wise or stupid by nature, it is teachers who perfect the work.74 Leviathan has a number of examples that enrich interpretative possibility, especially with respect to religion, around which they cluster. In some cases it must remain open whether their presence is a function of Hobbes’s satiric impulse, his recognition that humour may be needed to maintain the reader’s attention, or whether the text merely illustrates the multivalence of an expanding, unstable and still inadequately documented English. Writers do not always see the full punning implications of the words they use. Overall, this last possibility seems the least likely given the pattern of aestismus. It has been succinctly but finely discussed by Skinner, on whom the following comments largely draw. In the context of satirizing the Catholic clergy, Hobbes puns on profit (as monetary dividend and betterment) remarking, perhaps predictably, on how profitable purgatory had been. He would mine this rich source of association again in the Historia ecclesiastica referring both to popes profiting and Greek philosophers going to Egypt to gain or purchase (mercandum) knowledge, so tainting philosophy with sophistry from its origins.75 Again, in Leviathan he exploits what were then the opposing meanings of egregious as vile or excellent: Common men seldom speak insignificantly and so by schoolmen, ‘those other Egregious persons are counted Idiots’. This ambiguous usage would also be repeated in Historia ecclesiastica.76 He plays on the verb to forge, as to make or counterfeit in remarking on secular authorities allowing doctrines of papal supremacy ‘to be forged’ in their own universities.77 This may, like the pun on profit be drawing on a well-established pattern of monetary imagery used in satirizing the papacy. Earlier, when dealing with Protestant enthusiasts he punned on presumption as belief or impertinence when he wrote that when a prophesized event occurs it is considered to illustrate prudence, but it is really just presumption; in referring to the capacity for ‘true Prophesy’ as ‘also a Miracle’, he may be drawing on the meaning of miracle as monstrous or as the work of God.78 As Skinner also remarks, in describing the development of Christianity as wonderful, Hobbes could be intending what we now mean by wonderful, but according to seventeenth-century usage, he might also have been calling it disconcerting. That element of doubt about the force of the word in such a context is increased if we look forward to his Historical Narration and Historia ecclesiastica where the development of Christianity is clearly less than wonderful but certainly disconcerting for those who suffer the consequences of ecclesiastical power.79 Sometimes he resorts to incongruous lists of words that by elliptical and decontexualized juxtaposition (enumeratio) create a satiric effect, although there is no overt ‘framing’, that is, any clear point at which seriousness is sacrificed.80 Priests, he tells us in Leviathan, have got people to worship many things,

42

Hobbes, the Scriblerians and the History of Philosophy

and there is almost nothing that the gentiles had not turned into a god or devil. He then embarks on a continuum of gradually increasing absurdity. The unformed matter of the World, was a God, by the name of Chaos. The Heaven, the Ocean, the Planets, the Fire, the Earth, the Winds, were so many Gods. Men, Women, a Bird, a Crocodile, a Calf, a Dogge, a Snake, an Onion, a Leeke, Deified.81

Further detail indicates a bewildering ubiquity of imagined spirits, the ghosts of names. There were even temples built to accidents and qualities such as ‘Time, Night, Day … Rust, Fever and the like’. Then he concludes abruptly by repeating how almost nothing a poet might write was not converted into ‘a God or a Divel’. Innocently, Hobbes might say it was all true of antiquity and its characteristic confusions. Nevertheless, strategic silence and incongruity conspire to insinuate that gullibility, manipulative self-interest and philosophical absurdity were still present.82 As we will see with his later translations of Homer, the relationships between poetry and religion remained for him a source of suspicion. However, more immediately, with Hobbes’s evocative lists of holy objects and reified accidents and qualities, we may go further, for it is virtually a paraphrase of a significant passage from Lucian’s Zeus Tragoedus. In this satire partially about the poetic representation of providence, Zeus calls a meeting of the gods to discuss a worrying debate among mortals as to whether he and the pantheon of immortals actually exist. The matter is urgent because the gods’ human defender is losing support and needs arguments to come to his aid. This self-contradictory crisis provides the means by which Lucian satirizes idolatry, credulity and religion. Having called the meeting, Zeus is immediately perplexed at the range and diversity of gods appearing before him, a gathering of the partially monstrous and possibly nonexistent. Confused and clearly less than omnipotent, he then shows consternation at the demolition of a proof of divine providence from any pattern in nature. At the end, Damis, putative follower of the philosopher Apollonius of Tyana, underlines the severity of the crisis of belief on earth by listing the range of just what humans are prepared to worship: a scimitar worshipped by the Scythians, a day goddess by the Ethiopians, for the Assyrians a dove; fire, water, an ox, the onion, Ibis and crocodile, baboon, cat or monkey are all objects of devotion. He ends with more local specialities, the worship of the right or left shoulder, half a skull, an earthenware bowl.83 The structural similarities between this passage and the one cited from Leviathan are clear and sustained; each moves from catalogue to scornful detail; and as if to reinforce the descant on Lucian, Hobbes repeats some of the objects named by Damis, most strikingly, the onion and crocodile. Yet, as clear as the similarities are, what surely would have been apparent to some of Hobbes’s readers, not least the Lucianically literate of the Cavendish circle, is the discrepancy between the way in which the analogous passages continue. In Leviathan Hobbes turns

Hobbes, Lucianic Humour and the Philosophic Persona

43

to deal with ignorance as a cause of superstition. Lucian’s dialogue explores the consequences of idolatry: Zeus admits the need for reform, but then the poet Timocles rounds on Damis to accuse him of sacrilege and atheism.84 Read in juxtaposition to Zeus Tragoedus, Hobbes’s brisk change of tack may have carried a message about the courage needed for, and the dangers courted by any continuing reformation. Hobbes did, after all, assert in agreement with Lucian’s Zeus that new religions arose from the discreditation of the old. In short, an evocative paraphrase might have amounted to a form of aposiopesis; the use of Lucian can be construed as creating an unfinished statement that the audience is invited to complete, so becoming complicit in a play with social taboos. But this may be to read too much into what was simply an irresistibly elusive joke on a text that was part of the tacit knowledge of Hobbes’s world, a gesture to join author and audience through a jest about abstractions rather than particular people, and so allowing the whole company to laugh. Hobbes had a penchant for satirically slighting comparisons illustrating celerity of wit. To exemplify the compatibility of free will and causality he wrote of clerics being like spinning tops whipped along by boys, bouncing and careering into lucrative benefices; the whips of motivation explain what they nevertheless freely choose to accept – money.85 Again there is his sustained analogy between priests and fairies. Skinner has drawn particular attention to this example of aposiopesis in Leviathan; and it is a fine illustration of the sort of sexual allusion and innuendo found in De miribilibus pecci.86 The whole passage neatly illustrates Mayne’s (Hobbesian) understanding of wit, the capacity ‘to shape and Square all to the present Subject and Occasion’. Hobbes did not believe in fairies, yet explicitly accepting the authority of old wives, he embarks on a passage of metaphysical elegance through a series of ingenious and coherent comparisons between fairies and priests. It is punningly decorous, because he did not believe in priests much more than old wives, and certainly not in argument from authority. And in referring to priests as ghostly fathers he provides another direct example of aestismus, ghostly as devout or insubstantial.87 The comparisons are nicely rounded, rhythmically as well as figuratively: fairies and those ‘Spirituall men, and Ghostly fathers’ (priests) haunt churchyards at night; fairies have one king, ‘ecclesiastiques’ have one Pope; fairies steal children from their cradles and turn them to natural fools, ‘ecclesiastiques’ steal young men and make them useless by charms compounded of metaphysics, miracles, tradition and scriptural abuse. He then slips in a striking instance of aposiopesis: ‘Fairies marry not; but there be among them incubi that have copulation with flesh and bloud. The Priests also marry not.’88 And then without pause he returns to balanced comparison. Priests take the cream of the land, fairies skim the cream from milk. If this obvious, albeit unlaboured incompletion is not missed, it prepares the ground for something altogether more significant. In

44

Hobbes, the Scriblerians and the History of Philosophy

the peroration to the passage, Hobbes calls the Reformation an act of exorcism. But he believed in exorcism no more than he believed in ghosts and fairies, and so the implications of this equivocal metaphor were uncontrollably unsettling: how secure was the Reformation if left in the hands of any priestly sect? This is perhaps the principal embedded trope of aposiopesis for which the sexual joke paves the way, the ‘Subject and Occasion’ to which all is shaped and squared.89 If so, the grounding for it had been laid in the allusively Lucianic catalogue of chapter 12.

The Philosopher as Poet The squaring of subject and occasion were important to Hobbes’s understanding of poetry and the imaginative discretion or decorum it required; but discretion as a controlled imagination was a virtue that reached beyond poetry and was symptomatic of a degree of overlap between poetry and philosophy and the persona appropriate to each.90 In the Renaissance a philosophical seriousness was claimed for the poet, the maker from the term’s Greek etymology, its proponents drawing on the ambiguities of ‘truth’ as a function of proposition or as an extrinsic end to be discovered, irrespective of propositional form. The poet, like the philosopher, was deemed to hold an office with much of what that entailed concerning moral responsibility. Sidney’s An Apology for Poetry (1595), drawing on standard themes, is largely a defence of the poetic persona and its responsibilities to unite those of philosopher and historian. Hobbes’s best-known reflections on philosophy would seem to stand as the most straightforward repudiation of any such poetic ambition, and certainly they emphasize truth as something made, a function of rigorously established propositions. But this is not necessarily to the total exclusion of truth as something to be discovered. In De cive (see above, pp. 11–12) the two possibilities are merged. Philosophy is called the search for truth through sustained definitional energy and careful language. Again, in Leviathan we are told that truth ‘consisteth’ in the right ordering of names but immediately after that truth is something sought and so depends upon remembering what all names stand for.91 Since there was at the time no systematic distinction between what would later emerge as epistemology and ontology, the slippage between the source of truth in purely propositional making, and in the discovery of something extrinsic would have been easy and relatively unproblematic. Taken together these distinct sources of truth add plausibility to the conflation of philosophic activity with human betterment. For example, their conjunction allows Hobbes to see philosophy and counsel alike as rigorous searches for the truth where it is difficult to see good counsel, certainly a matter of human betterment, as being purely propositional truth.

Hobbes, Lucianic Humour and the Philosophic Persona

45

But the differing sources of truth also have diverging implications for how a philosopher might argue and they complicate the relationship between the philosophic and poetic persona, both of whom could be taken as making or discovering through words. Opportunistically or not, we find Hobbes exploiting two patterns of possibility. On the one hand, for Hobbes the constitutive understanding of truth prohibits the employment of metaphor. By definition, metaphors are for him equivocal, an abuse of language and so allow no proposition reliably to be said either to be true or false. Relying on them, the philosopher becomes the bird trapped in lime twigs. Thus, it seems that a firm line needs to be drawn between the reason of the philosopher and the fancy (imagination) of the poet. However, on the other hand, insofar as truth was to be discovered, Hobbes could accord a philosophical role to poetry that perforce employed fancy and the figurative as a means to that end.92 Indeed, having specified fancy or imagination as a ubiquitously informing decaying sense, he explicitly allows some subordinate role for discrete fancy in the philosophical process, albeit one subject to extravagance, for that signifies the absence of wit and is destructive of reason.93 There is, then, something very close to Bacon’s understanding of imagination as providing a common grounding for reason and poetry.94 And it was partially on this score that Hobbes was able to maintain that where philosophers have failed in their responsibilities, poets must do their work for them.95 Hobbes wrote this at about the time he was banishing the equivocal from the definitional rigors of philosophy in Leviathan, and, if one forgets the Baconian antecedent insistence on the dual functions of imagination and the responsibilities of philosophy, the most convenient way of dealing with Hobbes’s claim about the philosophical importance of poetry, is by bracketing the The Answer to the Preface before Gondibert (1651) as not serious.96 After all, we cannot have poetry in a history of philosophy. The ambiguities of truth, together with some shared reliance on imagination, however, helped create and attest to a more accommodating understanding of philosophic demarcation than we like to associate with such a heroic figure of analytic temper, offering an enhanced rationale for the calculated employment of satiric wit.97 Although it was no passing thought, praising Davenent as a philosophical poet gave an irresistible opportunity for a Parthian shot at philosophical dereliction of duty and hence by implication a reminder of Hobbes’s own extensive sense of intellectual office. Moreover, The Answer’s insistence that the poet takes up the baton dropped by the philosopher offers a clue to Hobbes’s translations of Homer, for these, like all translations of poetry, were creative. Good, bad or indifferent, the longest work of the philosopher Hobbes was poetry. There is ample evidence to suggest that Hobbes may have enlisted and adjusted Homer’s epics to buttress his own political doctrines, but more significantly in this context, he may also have assumed the office of the poet to fulfil the broader philosophic responsibility

46

Hobbes, the Scriblerians and the History of Philosophy

intimated in The Answer; specifically to counter the use of Homer as spurious philosophy.98 Hobbes was nothing if not resourceful. To this end the Homeric deities at times assume a Lucianic shape. If so, Hobbes embarked on a tricky balancing act. This may seem to be a curious claim about works that have been so generally ignored, and if true it was certainly something lost on some of his contemporaries, hostile enough to be suspicious of almost anything he did, so it warrants some elaboration.99 There is a further point of significance: the poems do much to link Hobbes to the Scriberians. Paul Davis has plausibly argued that Hobbes’s translations of Homer were not the feeble attempt of an eighty-year-old man suffering from Parkinson’s disease, but rather a deliberate exercise in diminution, even burlesque directed against the veneration of ancient authority and its allegorical adaptation.100 There is certainly precedent for playful and parodic poetic creativity in Hobbes’s world, and Howard Weinbrot has drawn attention to the role of satiric parody in the politics of Homer’s reputation in France.101 Charles Cotton later wrote burlesques of Virgil, but these were well signalled as affectionate fun, as was the anonymous Homer a la mode (1665) and as would be the Scriberian Parnell’s parodic translation of the archly tapinotic The Battle of the Frogs and Mice (1717).102 There is no overt sign of any such playfulness with Hobbes and so the hypothesis that the translations were partially a considered satiric subversion acutely raises the issue of the point at which an apparently bad line, crucial omission, or blunder in tone is really a deliberate act of witty tapinosis. Aware of such difficulties, Eric Nelson has nevertheless taken the matter much further, evidencing in detail omissions from, and crucially additions to, the Greek suggesting, to use Hobbes’s own terms, a ‘steddy direction’ to the ‘approved end’ of squaring the poems with his own doctrines.103 Ultimately, the issue must be left open, for individual vagaries of translation can be subject to a variety of layered explanations. But the fact that The Iliad is a story of almost perpetual war would have resonated for Hobbes’s contemporaries and might have proved irresistible to him as a vehicle for reiterating the imperatives of peace. Heroic virtue there is a plenty in his translations, but there is no shortage of wilful violence and brutal death with broken teeth, flapping skin and entrails in the air; and over the fallen and sometimes despoiled, the crowing of the bloody and victorious, persistently likened to animals. All this is in Homer, to be sure, as are the accompanying horrors of war, disease, desolation and the destruction of families; but the relative simplicity of Hobbes’s verse presents a stark and naked immediacy. Samuel Taylor-Coleridge later called the translations ‘homely’;104 and homeliness brings the violence home. And perhaps Odysseus could still be seen, as he had been by some at the Restoration, as a rough-hewn Charles II, Cowley’s ‘prudent Greek’ resilient, deft and finally victorious in regaining his kingdom and with divine help, restoring peace.105 In an opportunistic dedication of his own

Hobbes, Lucianic Humour and the Philosophic Persona

47

translation of The Iliad to Charles II, John Ogilby had claimed that Homer had been constant in asserting divine right and monarchical government, and so in turn, the poet might hope for patronage from ‘your Sacred Self ’, but the translation that follows gives indifferent support for any high monarchical reading.106 Hobbes would go much further and, as Nelson has argued, do much to bend the epics towards a respect for monarchs and dampen censorious judgement passed upon them in a way that other translations do not. I shall touch only on a couple of illuminating instances. Monarchs become distributors of Jove’s justice, at one point close to being called gods on earth. Hobbes injects a notion of sovereignty into the epics and thereby brings the poems into the modern conceptual world; at one point, where kings in general are criticized for unfairness, Hobbes translates and expands on the original to make resentment sound as little more than a reflection on sovereignty theory’s arcana imperii: kings prefer some to others, Hobbes adds, ‘without telling why’.107 There is distrust, or erasure of reference to popular assemblies; bad decisions are on occasion associated with rhetoric and ‘Parliament’, in accord with Hobbes’s distaste for both as having helped cause the Civil Wars.108 In terms of contemporary saliency then, there is one respect in which Hobbes wanted to sustain the relevance of the ancient world. With a striking but suggestive oversimplification Nelson claims that Hobbes’s Homer was Leviathan by other means.109 Thus far, Hobbes was willing enough ‘to use the help of similes’ as Bacon had put it, in cautiously accepting the value of allegory from antiquity. But Hobbes also sided with Bacon’s suspicions about the damaging nonsense peddled by allegorical readings.110 If Hobbes wanted poetry on his side, like Plato before him, he also undercut the authority of the poetic voice per se, to inhibit the exploitation of Homer’s prestige in the name of revelation and religious truth. Just so, in Leviathan, Hobbes had enlisted the authority of the Bible insofar as it could be used to support the imperatives of peace and obedience to sovereign power, but had wanted to undermine much else beside, extrapolating from the theological principle of an apophatic, unknowable God. Some purchase on these hypothesized strategies can be got from comparison with George Chapman’s earlier translations. These, I think it may be inferred, Hobbes was determined to displace, a difficult task and they were to remain popular into the nineteenth century. As John Keats would put it, Chapman’s voice was ‘loud and bold’, leaving the young poet staring as it were, ‘with wild surmise – / Silent, upon a peak in Darien.’111 Chapman’s translations were elaborate and expansive. By convention Homer (enjoying divine parentage) had been blind, as a sign of his capacity to see further than mere mortals, and so he coalesced poetic and philosophic personae, a discoverer of higher truth. For Chapman, Homer is inspired, making him, as Nelson remarks, divinely wise (Homeros Sophos), a conduit for revelation through allegorical application in clerical education.112

48

Hobbes, the Scriblerians and the History of Philosophy

Later translators in the century broadly follow Chapman when prefacing their works. Thomas Grantham calls Homer the light of the sun for all other poets, accentuating his stella status by deeming the rest as dogs, even at his vomit. He is similarly remarkable, for Ogilby, not least as carrying the flaming torch of monarchy from Alexander to Charles.113 By comparison, Hobbes’s introductory remarks ‘To The Reader’, focus on the qualities of an epic poem per se. After some sober comparisons between Virgil, Lucan and Homer, Hobbes does conclude that Homer is the finest, and surprisingly, the most discrete in antiquity, a point he states that has been questioned only recently by some. The comparisons, however, are specific and technical; Homer is not even used to illustrate them uniformly. Hobbes resists hyperbolic general praise. We are left with the impression that we are not dealing with a figure on the cusp of divinity, but with just an epic poet whose qualities, Hobbes modestly or disingenuously states, may be lost in his own translation. Within the poems, Chapman dwells on the semi-divine status of the office and persona of the poet. Hobbes’s predominant belief in the opacity of a divine order, the distance of human understanding from God, and his explicit account of the controlled exercise of the imagination – discretion – as the paramount virtue of an heroic poem, conspire to reject such adaptive exploitation. Regardless of truth, epic poetry must provide ‘an honest and delightful story’, fundamentally it had to be just a good tale well told, and all must be ordered to ‘the end and design of the poet’.114 It was an assertion at one with the insistence in Leviathan that the poet’s fancy, the use of metaphor and similitude. must serve the end of the poem, lest it degenerate into a kind of madness.115 Such views themselves go some way to explaining the translator’s poetic restraint. Certainly, Hobbes’s translations could never give us a holy text in the presence of which only humility and an appetite for spiritual or metaphysical decoding was due; and predictably, his workings of the originals are a striking contrast to Chapman’s. The Hobbesian Homeric voice is direct and colloquial. Indeed in some respects it is at one with Hobbes’s own claimed virtue of parrhesia, a virtue, incidentally given to Achilles in place of the eloquence accorded him in the Greek.116 Additionally, where Homer speaks in the first person it may be that the voice is distanced from any divine source of inspiration and so automatically undermines any posited authority. This would certainly be fitting for Hobbes’s persistent diminution of the standing of the poet within the epics, but the evidence here is not clinching.117 Nevertheless, his simple vocabulary makes the Homeric world more mundane. Thus, whereas for Chapman, Homer’s polis (town) of Ilium, Troy, usually retains the enhancing qualifications of the Greek, being well-raised, towered, or repeatedly ‘broad-wayed’,118 for Hobbes, indications of grandeur are omitted, Troy is just a town, Troy Town or Ilium.119 The effective editing rids the poem of the repetitive mnemonics and stock phrases

Hobbes, Lucianic Humour and the Philosophic Persona

49

of bardic recitation (there is relatively little of ‘rosy-fingered dawn’ and the like), to produce a poem more suitable for appreciation on the printed page. Hobbes’s reduction of Homer’s long non-rhyming catalectic hexameters, to Davenant’s shorter rhyming scheme may also explain such elisions.120 Either way, the effect is to lessen any ethos of sublimity so strongly associated with Homer. In keeping with Hobbes’s philosophical distrust of wayward metaphor, the translations are also metaphorically austere. The occasional one stands out as clearly as the ‘great Perriwig of Trees’ on the island of the Cyclops.121 In relative contrast, much of Homer’s less exploitable reliance on simile remains in tact. What Chapman calls Apollo’s ‘adder-fringed affrighting shield’, Hobbes simply calls his ‘great shield’; whereas for Chapman, ‘from th’Idaean height, / Like air’s swift pigeon-killer, stooped the far-shot God of light’; for Hobbes, Apollo is no longer far-shooting (hekaibolus) – he just comes down ‘to Troy from Ida hill, / As swift as a falcon flying at a dove’.122 The ship in which Telemarchus sails for news of Odysseus is at one point called by the distraught Penelope a ‘tub’.123 This colloquialism for the stock phrase of hollow, black ship (koilen … nea melainan) may be entirely fitting for her sense of the precariousness of life; but Hobbes also persistently translates lyre (kitharis or the seven stringed phorminx) with its associations of inspirational poetic gravitas as ‘fiddle’, or ‘ghitarre’.124 Reverential reference to the status of the poetic persona is usually omitted and when poets perform it is often as fiddlers. Chapman’s Apollo at Thetis’s ‘high nuptuals’ touched his ‘harp in grace’; Hobbes’s Apollo just took his fiddle to the wedding.125 His claim that his simple vocabulary was driven by the need to accommodate reading ladies who might be unfamiliar with more abstruse terminology may itself be disingenuous, or tongue in cheek.126 It is difficult to imagine the notion of a lyre, distressing the comprehension of a seventeenth-century woman able to read an epic poem and probably familiar with the harp or lute. Moreover, Homer’s Olympians who do so much to merge the human with the divine, as Chapman accentuates, are at times seen by Hobbes through a sceptically Lucianic eye. Where for Chapman, the gods ‘in Olympus’ tops sat silent and repined’ at Jove’s support for the Trojans, for Hobbes they ‘murmur’d’ on ‘Olympus Hill’.127 Later where Chapman has the gods simply deploring the plight of the Greeks, Hobbes translates to suggest a less laudible venality. They ‘Sate discontent in Heav’n, and full of spight’.128 Pallas (again with reference to her spite) and Juno ‘Grumble and plot’, the tone and terms being quite at odds with their lofty deliberative calm in the Greek, or in Chapman’s account.129 Neptune effectively accuses Jove of attempted tyranny, treating an equal ‘as if I were his slave’.130 He then dives back into the sea so abandoning the embattled Greeks he said he would protect. It is perhaps a passing shot at the rhetorics of tyranny and slavery so readily deployed in Hobbes’s own society, those who most easily mouth them are not to be trusted.131 Certainly Neptune’s jealousy and pique

50

Hobbes, the Scriblerians and the History of Philosophy

are less pointed in the original or in Chapman’s account, perhaps because of the sheer number of words, but only Hobbes has the hyperbole of Neptune, a god of wayward and awesome power, petulantly considering himself enslaved. Nelson remarks that when the poet Demodocus is introduced at the court of Odysseus’s host Alcinous, Hobbes for once allows some reference to his inspiration to stand. This, however, may be precisely because the poet’s main function is to dwell upon the farcical humiliation of some gods at the hands of others, as he sings at length of Vulcan’s entrapment of his unfaithful wife with Mars, and that model of discretion Odysseus laughs, like the assembled gods, at their exposure.132 Hence, even a poet may be allowed inspiration if he makes the gods look ridiculous.133 Generally, with Hobbes, Olympian bickering is more evident and analogous to the bloody constraint among humans than is the case with Chapman. And it is exactly the sort of satiric counterpoint on which Lucian relied in depicting gods and mortals. It is this diminished portrait of Olympian deity, fanciful images worshipped out of fear and ignorance that extends the Lucianic dimension of Leviathan, and that Hobbes needed to undercut reading the poems as religious allegory. When Odysseus visits Hades to talk with ghosts, a couple of them speak of being ‘Substances Incorporeal’; a little later the shade of Achilles echoes the phrase in bitterly remarking that he’d sooner be a clown on earth performing for bread than supreme head of ‘all things Incorporeal’; the very idea of incorporeal substance Hobbes had satirically dismissed as meaningless scholastic jargon, symptomatic of philosophical confusion.134 Hobbes also had little time for aristocratic honour and the violence of revenge so protective of it; consequently, what might be learned from the epics is, again as in Lucianic satire, more object lesson than spiritually up-lifting example, a point perhaps elliptically expressed in Hobbes’s introductory comments that judgement should be even-handed, that the value of epics lies in the display of qualities for contemplation, presented to us for our diversion. The opening incidents of The Iliad may be taken to illustrate some of the differences between the two translators, as well as what arguably was Hobbes’s attempt by turns to appropriate and subvert the epics themselves. Chryses, the priest of Apollo, comes to the Greek camp to plead for the return of his captured daughter. The Greeks are willing to comply, but Agamemnon overrides their unified voice and roundly dismisses the priest. Chryses flees in fear and prays to Apollo for revenge. The god duly obliges by visiting plague on the Greek camp. And, instead of the war ending, it rages destructively. Much, then, hinges on the incident.135 Following Homer, Chapman, like the later translators Grantham and Ogilby, makes explicit Agamemnon’s responsibility for what befalls the Greeks. It is ‘contumely’ shown to the priest that provokes the plague. The King wilfully ignores all the rest (alloi) of the gathered Greeks (they are not explicitly

Hobbes, Lucianic Humour and the Philosophic Persona

51

called an assembly) who, as one had sung out their enthusiastic willingness to respect the priest and return the girl for the gifts he offered. In effect they recognized a happy conjunction of what it was right to do (honestas) and what was to everyone’s advantage (utilitas). Not so for Agamemnon. Instead, Chryses is ‘viciously disgraced with violent terms’, and in the process Agamemnon calls him ‘Dotard!’ and dwells on his daughter’s bleak future far from home, labouring ‘Till age deflower her’. Chapman expands considerably on the seven-line speech given to Agamemnon in the original. With Hobbes, Agamemnon’s responsibility is toned down: what befell the Greeks was all the will of Jove and of Apollo, who was incensed at the wrong done to his priest Chryses, an elliptical statement. The wrong is passingly accepted but may imply a disproportionate response by the god who first made Agamemnon and Achilles ‘fall out’.136 A balance of responsibility is thus shifted. It is the princes (not all the rest of the Greeks) who give consent to Chryses’s plea. The line expressing their generosity of spirit to respect the priest and good sense in accepting his gifts is omitted, so minimizing the critical contrast to the ireful Agamemnon, who for the first time is called ‘best’ – an adjective Homer usually reserves for Achilles and never applies to Agamemnon.137 Perhaps Hobbes the epic poet is exercising the virtue of balanced judgement; but Hobbes the translator is betraying the text. At any rate, there is no further condemnation of Agamemnon, only passing mention of his ‘sharp language’. The blistering dismissal of Chryses is also less inflammatory and shortened (65 words to Chapman’s 105). 138 Hobbes’s translating geron as ‘Old man’ for the ‘Dotard!’ of Chapman (followed, minus exclamation marks, by Grantham and Ogilby) is technically correct but bland in its generality and out of keeping with Agamemnon’s wrath and the fear it generates.139 Hobbes also lays more stress on Chryses’s status as a suppliant father than upon his being a priest. Following Chryses’ appeal to heaven, Chapman’s Apollo ‘from the tops of steep heaven stooped’, a poetic heightening of the more prosaic Greek (Be de kat, marched down, or strode). ‘And vexed of heart’ (choomenos ker) his arrows ‘Rattled about him. Like the night he ranged the host and roved … terribly: with his hard-losing hand / His silver bow twanged; and shafts did first the mules command / And swift hounds’.140 All this is imperiously judgemental, and a sign of the proper and daunting mediating powers of the priest who called upon him. But not so clearly for Hobbes: Apollo descends silently: In likeness of the sable night unseen. His bow and quiver both behind him hang, The arrows chink as often as he jogs, And as he shot the bow was heard to twang, And first his arrows flew at mules and dogs.141

52

Hobbes, the Scriblerians and the History of Philosophy

Shared twanging aside (all the translators noted have the silver bow twanging), there is nothing of Apollo’s anger, his mode of arrival is transformed: for a swoop, a jog, if only to rhyme with dog. And yet, in the pared-down account there is just the suggestion of something impossible for Chapman’s seriously Olympian deity, whose arrows ‘command’ the animals of the camp: could it be that the plague starts among them because the jogging Apollo initially misses his mark? No other translation gives this fleeting whiff of ineptutude. As Davis notes, Pope suspected that Hobbes’s translations were deliberately subversive.142 If so, Pope’s own would be a riposte, a restoration of the allegorical scope he thought essential for epics. To make the point, I shall revisit this scene in Chapter 5 where again we will see the entanglements of poetic and philosophic responsibility. In the meantime, as Davis and Nelson have argued, whether by the good fortune of declining health, through calculation, or an indeterminable blend of each, Hobbes’s Homer was at one with his anticlericalism and the respect he thought properly due to rulers. I have dwelt on the matter, however, to show that the translations were not an exception to his suspicious attitudes to antiquity, or in any way at odds with his notion of philosophic duty. On the contrary, they were congruent with his attitude towards the continuing authority of ancient learning. With rare exceptions, he believed, its veneration was inimical to peace and philosophical progress and needed taming if not abandoning. Subjecting almost the whole of antiquity to Lucianic critique, domesticating or diminishing its authority by other, even poetic, means was, in short, a part of the philosopher’s responsibility; therein perhaps lay the ‘end and design’ of Hobbes the poet. The frontispiece of Leviathan depicts, under the figure of the sovereign, two parallel sets of lozenges, almost standing as foundational columns. In one lozenge directly under a canon, we see a diversity of weapons and the accoutrements of war, opposite it is a similar gathering, the framed symbolic images of forms of argument, grouped as weapons, such as the three pronged syllogism, the forked dilemma. Each gives an indication of the different means to be shaped and directed to the ends of the sovereign office by its ruling persona.143 This was entirely at one with inherited understandings of the scope allowed the rhetorician in persuasion. Lorenzo Valla had drawn a firm distinction between the philosopher and rhetor, likening the philosopher who relies on one kind of argument to the general who tries to make do with a single soldier, the rhetor, to the general who mobilizes the whole army to his case. Bacon made a similar point. If the scope of the rhetor’s office was to blend reason and imagination ‘for the better moving of the will’, to this end it was also necessary to vary argument according to the audience.144 This acceptance of argumentative ingenuity merged also with the common casuistic principle that with conduct in any office one should consider the scope of a responsibility and adjust action accordingly;

Hobbes, Lucianic Humour and the Philosophic Persona

53

as Prince Hal puts it, the end should ‘try the man’.145 Little wonder that Bishop Bramhall expostulated against Hobbes, ‘Will you hear what a casuist he is?’146 And so it was with the ‘reason’, the philosophy for which Hobbes wished to be known. It was centred on but unconfined by a propositional economy. What that ‘reason’ allowed could be tried by the ends of philosophy, truth and the human betterment that had been inhibited by bad philosophy, ancient authority and meddlesome priests. These true ends shaped a lozenge that might well contain a number of means, especially, as I have indicated above, because the notion of truth itself allowed a certain latitude and because human betterment was conditional upon a reliably peaceful society. Thus at odds with the dogmatic dismissal of metaphor from philosophy in Leviathan, Hobbes’s more measured assessments, before and after that work, suggested its validity be judged more pragmatically, according to the end of discourse that it was serving.147 Like the simile Hobbes insisted should be apt within the reasoning process, circumstances, the point of discourse was relevant to assessing the legitimacy and efficacy of its potential content. Whereas mere levity distracted from the ends of serious reasoning, humour serio ludere had a rational value. Hobbes did not defend this proposition explicitly, but it is consistent with the reflections on wit and reason with which I began, and was manifested in how he argued. So too, there was Cowley’s concord in diversity with Hobbe’s attitude to the persona of the poet, in extremis, he must take up the abandoned responsibilities of the philosopher. Within the compass of such attitudes Hobbes was thus able to assume the mantle of the poet to the end of protecting reason from poetic and theological pretension. There is, then, a unity in his philosophy, but it is to be found less in any specific pattern of proposition than in the crafting of what he took to be the responsibilities of the philosopher and the scope these allowed. It is to this persona and its defence and to its vulnerability to satiric critique that I shall now turn.

2 HOISTING HOBBES ON THE SATIRIC PETARD

New Wit for Old? In recent years the understanding of the relationships between Hobbes and his contemporaries has been substantially altered. The early works of Samuel Mintz concentrating on materialism and J. Bowle on politics have been complemented and superseded by Mark Goldie on the sticking points of religion and most recently by Jon Parkin, who has provided a thorough and invaluable chronological account of how the substantive discontents with Hobbes’s philosophy changed. Much has been achieved.1 The myth of Hobbes’s isolation in England has now been thoroughly exploded, while the exploration of his European standing has helped reveal a vicarious Hobbesian presence in England through the reception of politica writing. The perception and subtlety of many of Hobbes’s critics has been demonstrated.2 Nevertheless, the contested issue of Hobbes’s philosophical self-image and the concomitant question of the proper persona for a philosopher have received less sustained attention. This has also meant that the satiric dimension of antiHobbesian argument has been overlooked, or diminished as the personal attack of Oakeshott’s ‘little men’. Of course, in the broadest sense of satire, as any sharp rebuke, most of the guns levelled at Hobbes might be called satiric;3 but in the meaning specifically relevant to this study, of satire as ridicule or as the attempt to provoke amusement to a critical end, then the sporadic satire of Hobbes is a continuation of an idiom found in Hobbes’s own writings. This chapter touches on some slippery and intricately related themes, but as far as possible I wish to bypass the specific doctrinal content of Hobbesian criticism and concentrate instead on the outlines of the attacks upon, and defence of the author of the doctrines. In this way, diverging images of the true philosopher can be clarified and something of the more satiric aspect of Hobbist critique can be restored. The matter was important for there was a common acceptance of a sort of Gresham’s law of philosophy. ‘With the Introduction of False, we may joyn also the suppression of True Philosophy’.4 The problem lay in applying the generality, of – 55 –

56

Hobbes, the Scriblerians and the History of Philosophy

isolating and escaping the grasp of the false philosopher and to this ostracizing end satire was invaluable. Long before he wrote Leviathan, Hobbes showed explicit awareness of the dangers of the very satiric humour he would later employ. As he lectured the young Charles Cavendish, ‘avoyd … that Satyrical way of nipping that some use’. ‘Quipping’, he continued, is worse than being directly offensive ‘because being the same injury, it seemes to hide itself under a double construction, as if a man had a good reason to abuse another but were afraid to stand to it’.5 This illustrates an established consciousness of the Lucianic, its double-edged nature, and of the potential dangers in attacking a person or persona, through ambiguous tropes such as aestismus. I have noted in the first chapter that both Erasmus and More had been great admirers and promoters of Lucian. Each had made it clear that the provocation of laughter could be an effective instrument of philosophical and moral reform, partly because generality and open-endedness could provide a constructive indeterminacy as to target. Laughter at others or to abstracted follies might stimulate self-assessment, but reactions and results could not be guaranteed.6 Again, the fate of the poet Collingbourne in The Mirror for Magistrates, offers a succinct Tacitean rationale for serio-ludere humour quite at one with Lucian’s cynicism about court life and with Hobbes’s acceptance of the need for selective dissimulation in a good cause. In a tyranny, claimed Collingbourne, poets cannot be frank, but must ‘myxe theyr sharpe rebukes with myrth’, and be ‘plesaunt, not to playne’.7 With a well established rationale for serio ludere, the question becomes, why did Hobbes’s critics accuse him of being responsible for the evils of ‘heterodox drollery’, and if that was so dreadful why did they sometimes respond in kind? In a valuable and informative essay, Roger Lund, in fact, suggests that Restoration satiric drollery was composed of the characteristics of Hobbes’s new form of humour, defined by the use of inappropriate comparisons, pithy epigrams, litotes, paradox and equivocation, all to baffle and confuse the reader. Lund’s argument provides a useful way in to what is treacherous terrain on which to place straightforward conclusions about Hobbes’s humour.8 What Hobbes had already censured as the ‘quipping’ and ‘double construction’ that might open up a gap between propositional meaning and intended force, leaving the satirical quipper immediately open to the ad hominem attack of cowardice, were indeed sporadic features of Hobbes’s style; but Butler, at least, regarded them as conventionally Lucianic. His droll, whom Lund cites as an image of Hobbesian wit, is also one whose jest is earnest and whose earnestness is jest. 9 It reads as a clear allusion to the Lucianic, while the similarly double-edged trope of litotes had been favoured by More.10 Further, the apparent bafflement created by Hobbes’s wit could have been critically disingenuous; the knitted brow of perplexity was a mark of philo-

Hoisting Hobbes on the Satiric Petard

57

sophical seriousness (Lucian makes much of it of occasion);11 and for a writer who, like Lucian, prided himself on being direct, to be received with apparent confusion was implicitly to be accused of philosophical incompetence. It is, after all, the same sort of bafflement Hobbes conveys when alluding to the ‘canting of Schoole-men’, rote learned absurdity such as ‘hypostatical, transubstantiate, consubstantiate, eternal-Now’ (another decontexualized list),12 and other ‘insignificant Traines of strange and barbarous words’, the ‘Darknesse from Vain Philosophy’.13 Here is a statement at one with Lucian’s gods, or Lipsius’s or Cunaeus’s ancients castigating philosophers and theologians for their trivial disputes and meaningless invented language (see above p. 29).14 And it was a device that would be seized upon by John Bramhall as a scoffing affectation, a ‘lumping together of Scholastical terms with scorn’, which does not, he remarks sarcastically, stop Hobbes from being an excellent casuist, just like the schoolmen.15 As for paradox, Hobbes had certainly been more than content to see himself as a paradoxical writer, but in this there was nothing distinctive or disreputable. Even leaving aside the hallowed role for paradoxes in the history of logic, they were often a mechanism for provoking philosophical reflection, of forming and stimulating the philosophic persona, and could be a satiric means of reaffirming conventional morality as contrary to the wicked ways of the world. When Hobbes wrote to Edmund Waller in 1645 about the character of debate in which he was involved among the exiled Cavendish circle, he referred to the debater set against him as one who ‘knowes not my paradoxes’, and describes the gladiatorial combat in ways that suggest their educational value.16 Lund takes equivocation simply as a recognized feature of Hobbesian humour. Equivocation, however, carried a very apparent double meaning. As Henry Mason had put it at the beginning of the century, citing Aristotle: in one way, equivocation is a feature of language; words carry different meanings and linguistic competence allows us to negotiate between them.17 Equivocal arguments, then, could simply be poorly constructed propositions or, for example, opportunities for wit and punning. In Hobbes’s own best known doctrines of philosophy, as I have previously noted, such equivocation is impermissible. But equivocation could also be a matter of deliberate dissembling, such as the poetic jesting the poet Collingbourne thought necessary in a tyranny, or the satirical quipping, ‘the double construction’, about which Hobbes had warned the young Cavendish as cowardly and unfit for a gentleman. Equivocation in this second sense was (for a while) a Jesuitical doctrine condemned by Mason and others as a form of irreligion and lying. Again, there may have been something disingenuous about deeming Hobbes guilty of equivocation, a term associated both with inadequacy of argument and dishonesty of persona. As an accusation it was poised between the propositional and the ad hominem, and was itself therefore potentially equivocal.

58

Hobbes, the Scriblerians and the History of Philosophy

And it creates a further contextual complication. As Noel Malcolm has intimated, the demonization of Hobbes as licentious, atheistic and equivocal could act as a fundamentally equivocal surrogate for rebuking the Stuart court when it was risky to do so directly. The voice of the poet Collingbourne would have appreciated the difficulty.18 We can begin to suspect a rather complex rationale for attacking Hobbes with the very tools he was accused of inventing. If it is rash to say that all Hobbes’s critics were fools, an undeniable philosophical convenience were it true,19 we should still resist reading Hobbes off from the charges of those who did battle with him, by an inverted argument from authority. The one thing Lucianic philosophy tended to exclude was fairness. Hobbes himself is hardly a reliable guide to the ‘canting of Schoole-men’, or the character of ‘Aristotlety’. Overall, the cut and thrust of polemic and satire is a wayward guide to anything beyond its own conventions and the values it expresses; but what can be cautiously suggested from the eristic vortex around Hobbes and his English reputation is a confluence of feared heterodoxy, wit and drollery that could be packaged with reference to him and so by implication, allowing an accusation of atheism to be let loose. Wit misliked could be a mark of the wicked;20 and so Hobbes who wished to be known for his wit had it turned against him, a fate which in some eyes also tainted the reputation of Lucian.

Presenting the True Philosopher through the False Lund’s evidence regarding the use of humour in debate does not reliably indicate what Hobbes was actually responsible for, but it may well be a clue to the matter of intended audience. Those, like George Lawson and Henry More, trying to reach potential or convinced Hobbesians, were altogether more polite and less humorous than those writing for an audience already hostile to Hobbes. Shared hostility can encourage humour at the expense of the common target. What matters is less a specific case or accuracy than affirmation and strengthening of communal integrity. It is a point implicit in Hobbes’s own discussions of the social and critical functions of laughter (see above pp. 31–2). And it is here that the disputed understanding of the philosophic persona becomes most apparent; what seems like personal attack can be persona attack. That is, the negative vocabulary of accusation carries, by implied contrast, the positive register in terms of which the authentic persona can be presented. As Hobbes had asked rhetorically in The Elements, how are we not recommending ourselves ‘by comparison with another man’s infirmities or absurdity?’21 And as Sir Thomas Browne more elegantly remarked, ‘he who discommendeth others, obliquely commendeth himself ’. Even the discretely silent man ‘is not without loud Cymbals in his breast’.22 Additionally, however, that shift of attention to the ad hominem could also be a remarkably convenient means of explaining what was deemed

Hoisting Hobbes on the Satiric Petard

59

wrong about a doctrine. Nowhere are these aspects of dispute more at one than in Bishop Bramhall’s effective treatment of Hobbes as if he were himself Leviathan. In discrediting the propositions in the book, he attacked the overweening author who could write such stuff, and vice versa.23 Indeed, what might appear to be unseemly debates, degenerating into personal attack between Hobbes and Bramhall and Hobbes and Wallis were at least in part demarcation disputes approached through the question of the appropriate philosophical persona and its relationship to Christian virtue. This was a good deal less straightforward than those appealing to it were apt to indicate and a word is needed here to note some of the main permutations. Longstanding difficulties had been generated by the awkwardness of the relationship of Christianity and the pagan world from which it grew, not least concerning the value of ancient Greek and Roman philosophy. As part of a strategy for reconciling antiquity with Christianity, Thomas Aquinas had urged that the ambitions of pagan philosophic contemplation could only be realized through living the monastic ideal. Conversely, there were some unwilling to grant any standing to pre-Christian philosophers, while others denigrated the monastic ideal. Even when found in its purest form, it was according to Lorenzo Valla, an inferior realization of Christianity. Some, of course, had sought to recover the richness of pagan antiquity that it might be of greater service to Christianity, so returning us to the paradox of relevance (see above pp. 27–30), for the clean lines of continuity and consanguinity became more problematic as a result. The full texts of Aristotle’s works were more difficult to assimilate to Christianity than an inherited gathering of doctrinal fragments, a principal challenge for Aquinas. For a few, the discrepancies had to be accepted without rejecting the truths of either, a position sometimes referred to as the Averroist two truths doctrine. After the complete text of Plato’s Republic became available in the fifteenth century Pico della Mirandola resorted to allegorical readings to provide a unifying rescue. The devout Christian could also be a Platonist because of the inherent or figurative Christianity of Plato’s metaphysics: forms were transformed into angels, the good into God. The Pomponazzi controversy on the eve of the Reformation again canvassed the possibility of a stark incoherence between philosophy and theology, with clear implications for the character of the philosophic persona.24 But from the Reformation onwards, the slippery issue of how far being a good Christian was a condition for being a good philosopher acquired a decidedly confessional edge. At one Thomistic extreme, as the Jesuits seemed to hold, a priestly persona was sufficient for mediating an external philosophical truth; at another, to paraphrase Hobbes, discourse of God was none of our business.25 Such positions and the extensively disputed modifications between them conspired to make the relationships between any philosophic community and wider cultural values and practices similarly open to argument.26

60

Hobbes, the Scriblerians and the History of Philosophy

I have stressed the significance of this background because it provided an inheritance of debate overlapping with that between ancients and moderns. This will become central in the following chapter, with Hobbes styled as the arch modern. In the meantime, it remained a variably exploitable resource for those who did battle with one who wished to consign most of the wisdom of antiquity and early Christianity to history and to allow only a very limited scope to anyone occupying a priestly office. The resonant if uncontrollable background of ancient philosophy and the question of what makes a philosopher also cast direct light on the notorious Daniel Scargill affair of 1668–9. Scargill, a young Cambridge Fellow, pointedly defended some controversial theses strongly associated with Hobbes: that the origins of the world could be explained purely materialistically; and that (like Lucian) a pattern in the universe cannot be used to infer the existence of God. That second proposition would later become Hume’s riposte to William Paley’s defence of the ‘pattern maker’ proof of God’s existence, Paley’s case being just what Lucian’s Zeus had needed.27 Scargill was hounded and forced to recant, which in a spiritedly disingenuous fashion he did, but as much time was spent on destroying his reputation as discrediting his arguments and exposing his inadequate knowledge of philosophy. To an extent, as Jon Parkin states, this seems to have been personal, but it was also a considered rehearsal of the characteristics held to be unsuitable for philosophy, and an elaboration on the unchristian, arrogant Hobbesian persona, which helped to explain the dreadful doctrinal content of Scargill’s work. The lad was singular and vainglorious, an atheist, and, predictably, a roaring young libertine and drunkard. Hobbes, as Lawson had earlier feared would be the case, was a corrupter of youth.28 Thomas (later Archbishop) Tenison had been Scargill’s tutor and in 1670 would bring out his highly critical The Creed of Mr Hobbes. It is in such a context of accusation and with this much of the negatively reconstrued Hobbesian persona before us that we can return to Aubrey’s ‘Life’ of Hobbes.29 Aubrey had reflected seriously on the different offices of panegyrist and historian, and took writing a life to be a small history. As Michael Hunter states, this meant typically that the life had to be instructive, serving a moral end.30 Aubrey was, moreover, known to be close to Hobbes and some of those wanting copies of Hobbes’s works before they might be burnt contacted Aubrey for help in acquiring them. What he decided to write was, argues Hunter, a stimulus for the larger project of the Brief Lives (1898).31 Aubrey, then, had reason to consider his life of Hobbes as one of his more important works, albeit one he was sure would be unpopular with the doctors at the universities.32 We should expect then, more than anecdote or a simple record of a friend. He fashions an image of an authentic philosophic persona, even to the point of omitting Hobbes’s previous lowly status as a page. Aubrey effectively surrounds Hobbes

Hoisting Hobbes on the Satiric Petard

61

with a clutch of authoritative witnesses to attest to his philosophical standing. Hobbes aided Bacon, who loved to converse with one who actually understood him. He befriended and admired Galileo, who was physically like him. Hooke ‘loved him’, the mathematician Jonas Moore venerated him and William Harvey remembered him in his Will. Between Hobbes and Descartes there was a mutual respect, and for his part, Hobbes thought well of the Royal Society. Clearly it was only personal animus and eccentricity that could possibly explain his exclusion. Dr Wallis, Mr Boyle and ‘Sir Paul Neile, who disobliges everybody’, were implacably hostile to his election.33 There is, however, more than a gathering of testimonials to stand against a tawdry vindictiveness; the Hobbes described is largely a philosophic persona. The emphasized features of his character are rebuttals, or laudatory re-descriptions of the popular image. Hobbes was ‘Sanguineo-melancholicus, which physiologers say is the most ingeniouse complexion. He would say that there might be good wits of all complexions; but good-natured, impossible’.34 Aubrey has already informed us that Galileo had just the same sweet temper and manners from his ‘melancholique-sanguine’ nature, and had similarly been persecuted by clerics.35 Melancholia was almost universally taken as a precondition for the philosophical persona, consider Jacques, the self-proclaiming image of a philosopher in As You Like It, sucking melancholy from a song, like a weasel at an egg.36 Hobbes, states Aubrey, was curious and courageously independent. He was dedicated, keeping fit in order to work and having a daily routine that was carefully structured. As a part of this regime he was abstemious and self-disciplined. He rarely got drunk (but did it properly, think of that other corrupter of youth, Socrates); and as noted earlier, Aubrey stressed how much Hobbes had been a man of wit and good humour.37 Aubrey also records that among his few books, Homer and Virgil were always on his table. This is more than a recollection of personal taste. It is emblematic of the importance of independent reflection over mere learning and it softens the unfortunate (albeit largely self-inflicted) image of Hobbes as the hater of antiquity. Moreover, given the partially philosophic functions of Hobbes’s translations of Homer, the detail may attest to Aubrey’s own appreciation of Hobbes’s sense of the scope of philosophy. Hobbes, Aubrey was at pains to point out, also showed great kindness and generosity, qualities almost universally held to be at odds with the atheism insinuated of the monster of Malmesbury. The point is intimated by his unreciprocated good will towards the Royal Society; but it is fully illustrated by a recalled conversation with the Rev. Jasper Mayne. There is a risk of reading too much into this anecdote, but it is tantalizingly suggestive in the context of Hobbes’s embattled philosophic self-image. Hobbes had given generously to an old beggar, beholding him ‘with eies of pitty and compassion’; and Mayne asked Hobbes if he would have been so charitable but for Christ’s commands. Hob-

62

Hobbes, the Scriblerians and the History of Philosophy

bes replied that he would, for he was in pain at the plight of the man and giving relief helped the beggar and so eased his own distress. In effect, his generosity was informed only by mutual benefit and common sympathy. The passage displays Hobbes’s open lack of rancour in debate with one of the very class of men Aubrey regarded as given to persecuting him. It hints at an explanation for social co operation and cohesion independent of religious conviction. Fascinatingly, however, it is at one with the very grounds on which Mayne himself had postulated the possibility of something almost universally denied, a coherent atheistic society.38 A country of atheists may have sufficient morality to be a people, a ‘society of Citizens’ and ‘without Religion … for mere utility and safeties sake, to observe the Law of Nations.’39 What Aubrey presents as an instance of Hobbes’s virtues and demeanour in discussion may well have been a glimpse of on-going friendship between the philosopher and the translator of Lucian.40 And, in what was a clear reference to Lucian’s beard wearers, Aubrey insists that Hobbes wanted to be known for his reason, and not his beard.41 Hobbes’s own neo-Latin poem, Vita, carries precisely this defensive force against his detractors: it presents a philosophical persona not least in its generosity to a man of the cloth (Mersenne) who, remarkably was a true philosopher.42 John Hale has demonstrated just how far the Vita is a philosophical self-portrait. Written in sustained counterpoint to Ovid’s own poem of exile, Tristia, it plays with the paradoxes of physical and intellectual isolation and belonging.43 As a philosopher Hobbes is truly at home only in the constellation that orbits Mersenne. His reluctant return to England, in abysmal weather on a recalcitrant horse, to humiliate himself before Oliver Cromwell and his army is the nadir of life’s trajectory.44 Home is intellectual isolation caused and sustained by merely personal hostilities and ad hominem attack, simulacra of more literal backstabbing.45 Yet he maintains the intellectual courage and resilience to remain true to his work. ‘Nam mea vita meis non est incongrua scriptsis’ (‘Indeed, my life has hardly been at odds with my writing’).46 In an inverted fashion, Hobbes’s critics might well have agreed with this, as I have indicated, the conjunction of persona and doctrine was precisely the precondition needed to justify ad hominen rebuttal. Re-describing proclaimed virtue as vice was at the heart of this. Hence the most philosophically important and plausible of the accusations: that he was immodest, dogmatic and singular. Unlike his ‘atheism’, vigorously denied by Hobbes and Aubrey, here we see his proclaimed intellectual virtues turned upside-down, allowing an apparent charge of hypocrisy; he practised the intellectual pride against which he preached.47 This question of his arrogant and/or bogus singularity now needs explicating, for around it more than any other characteristic gathered the antiHobbist satiric momentum. To this end I want first to flesh out the pattern of intellectual virtues that were transformed into vice.

Hoisting Hobbes on the Satiric Petard

63

Monstrous Singularity I have drawn attention to Stephen Gaukroger’s argument that Bacon’s vision for natural philosophy first required the cultivation of a new rigorously independent philosophic persona.48 And as Richard Serjeantson has shown, Hobbes, like Descartes, sought to be a philosopher in the Baconian idiom, a novator.49 To recall an earlier suggestion, Hobbes’s claim to have invented a theory of laughter with which his immediate audience would have been familiar may have been a joke at the expense of his philosophical self-image. And certainly, insistence on his singular significance is a repeated prefatory blast, especially incongruous where protestations of modesty were, and still are, the expected norm.50 But the signal importance of intellectual independence infused the substance of his work. Everything, he insisted in Leviathan, with no sense of jocularity or hyperbole, had to be tested, and ‘fetched … from the first Items in every Reckoning’, that is, ‘the signification of names settled by definitions’, and (insistently) with no reliance on established authority.51 The disciple is never properly a philosopher. There is no shelter. Even his elliptical comment that, in contrast to philosophy, history is a register of fact may properly be read with this inflection.52 With this image of independence went vulnerability to the accusation of arrogant singularity, and so the virtue of the novator required the correlative parrhesia the forthright speech on which Lucian had prided himself, unbuttressed and disguised by the argumentum artificiale of others’ sanctioning words, the blind leading the blind, the money of fools, ‘the authority of books’, ‘an Aristotle, a Cicero, or a Thomas or any other Doctor whatsoever, if but a man’.53 This was the courage to stand alone, like Menippus, armed albeit embattled, as Lucian portrayed himself at his trial. Hobbes was fairly cognizant of the difficulties involved in the arduous endeavour to become a proper philosopher. In a few succinct pages at the beginning of De corpore he first accepts that claiming to have initiated civil philosophy will be an incitement to his detractors (obtractatores mei), then asserts that as philosophy is pure rationality and all are born to some extent rational, anyone might potentially be a philosopher. What is required is that unadorned and methodical reason comprising discrimination, definition and the search for causes must necessarily drive our thinking. Difficult though it is to purge the mind of opinion, the benefits of well-founded knowledge are widespread and profound. Conversely, ignorance and want of philosophy has even been a cause of civil war.54 As noted, Hobbes was fond of the entirely conventional imagery of warfare for philosophic discourse and it can now be seen as directly related to his persona. Julie Cooper has pointed out that he was quite explicit about the defensive justification of what seemed like untoward pride. Aggression could be casuistically sanctioned as a philosophical self-defence, a case of meeting force with force, quite congruent with an appropriate modesty in unthreatening circumstances.55

64

Hobbes, the Scriblerians and the History of Philosophy

Hobbes’s memorable image in the Vita as being like other philosophers, content in orbit around Mersenne’s star affirms this in one way. His correspondence does so in another. There is far less of the combustible Hobbes when he was dealing, not just with friends, but with genuine puzzles or enquiries about his work.56 In his dialogue between Hobbes and a student, Tenison lets the voice of Hobbes make the point about hostile provocation explicit. Hobbes denies being peevish and in ad hominem fashion blames instead others whose vanity leads them to attack him.57 But his own vanity is gradually revealed, justifying the scepticism of the truth-seeking student concerning the man and his unravelling creed. The philosophic necessity of independence and the virtues of courage and forthrightness to sustain it formed the rationale behind Hobbes’s witty bravado in stating that if he’d read as much as other men, he’d know as little.58 This was to insist that in a context of philosophical endeavour the innovative spirit was a force for good. By the late seventeenth century, the point was hardly idiosyncratic. Cowley, in an ode prefacing Thomas Sprat’s History of The Royal Society (1722), extols Bacon’s vision of the philosopher, his recognition of the snares of language and the subsequent work of the Royal Society, insisting that authority is the enemy of philosophy, the only heir of human knowledge.59 More specifically he would cut the same cloth of philosophical virtue to fit Hobbes. All ancient philosophy is now dead or exhausted, leaving nothing but words ‘all barb’rous too’ while Hobbes stands victorious, having discovered, ‘planted and peopled’ a golden ‘land of new philosophies’.60 A black-edged Elegy upon Mr Hobbes announcing his death has the same clear themes of a unique and profound wit triumphing over the ‘blind jargon’ of the schools and pushing Greek and Roman scribblers ‘Towards the brink of dark Oblivious Tyde’. Further, in a dismissive allusion to other philosophers and their ‘idols of the brain’, it fleetingly links Hobbes to Bacon’s demand for a new type of philosopher.61 This anonymous elegy should be grouped with two broadsides of the following year, backing up the image of the great independent philosopher with often terse and witty aphorisms abstracted from his work.62 Although anonymous, Charles Blount may have had a hand in their production.63 The bulk of the seventy-eight selected sayings focus on the dangers of priest-led religion, so targeting the insinuated disruptive interests of a major source of hostility to Hobbes; and some, as Justin Champion has noted, re-appropriate assertions that Tenison had used to create his damning ‘creed’ of Mr Hobbes.64 Such testimonials, at a time of heightened religious controversy, align Hobbesian philosophy with the cause of further reformation and the enemies of priest-craft; but they also give an indication of how exposed Hobbes might be made to appear. Cowley’s verses on Hobbes were parodied in The True Effigies of the Monster of Malmesbury (1680), in which Hobbes is depicted as leading us into the dark to rummage over rub-

Hoisting Hobbes on the Satiric Petard

65

bish, being grossly inferior to Aristotle and with a ‘wit ten times worse than mad’. Hobbes’s philosophy mocks God, and to praise it is blasphemous.65 On all sides, the religious and philosophical could no more easily be kept apart in Hobbes’s day than in Lucian’s. The common propensity to argue from and concentrate on extrapolated implication was an easy bedfellow with reductive presentation of argument. Together they helped insure a slippage from philosophy to religion and not just for those hostile to Hobbes. Blount, attracted to Hobbes’s satirically couched anticlericalism, cut this from the wider issues with which Hobbes was engaged. It could only have encouraged Hobbes’s more orthodox critics. John Wagstaffe would be similarly selective in applying abstracted Hobbesian propositions. Both were also admirers and promoters of Lucian.66 Bount in his own common-place book had digested a good deal of Hobbes and had written to him in 1678 with a learned and complimentary discourse on Hobbes’s An Historical Narration on Heresy (c. 1666). Blount expressed his sympathy for one whose reason was met by ad hominem abuse and he quoted from The Elements of Law a dictum that would appear two years later in the anticlerical The Last Sayings (1680): ‘In matters of Right or Interest, where Reason is against a man, a man will be against Reason’.67 In context the men against reason are priests. Wagstaffe’s acquaintance may have been more direct though is less tangible.68 In a determined attack on the plausibility of witchcraft accusations, he insisted he was no materialist; but he did take up specific arguments at one with, or even derived from (the judiciously unmentioned) Hobbes. He assumed much the same philosophic persona in his dismissal of argument from authority (philosophical proof is not the testimony of men), his rejection of Bacon’s ‘tyranny’ of custom, his concomitant reliance on independent reason and his occasional employment of a scoffing anticlerical and anti-scholastic wit.69 A passing quip on heathen ‘pretended philosophers’, has them ‘full of words and beards’, and Lucian is commendable for the sport he had with them. It brings to mind Hobbes’s own commendation of Lucian’s ridicule of philosophers in De corpore, and Butler’s beard-wearers of antiquity.70 Wagstaffe concludes his work with a translation of a Lucian’s dialogue ‘The Lover of Lies’. This is intended to show how little the world has changed, except, he remarks, for the size of beards, and so how important it remains to combat superstition, folly and fear with (as the dialogue ends) ‘truth and right reason’. It is the assertion of a satiric imperative. And Wagstaffe ends as he began, by heading off any accusation that a denial of witchcraft implied atheism.71 His explanation for the appended translation is at one with Jasper Mayne’s defence of Lucian, and the translation has been identified as by Mayne.72 The reference to More’s appreciation of Lucian is pointed: Lucian is no atheist (would More of all people have translated one?) but a writer adept at

66

Hobbes, the Scriblerians and the History of Philosophy

exposing dishonesty with exquisite art and wit. What happened was that Wagstaffe was attacked in terms that were persistently used to denigrate Hobbes.73 For as the satiric critique of philosophy easily enveloped institutionalized religion, so any conception of the independent and innovative philosophical persona was easily metamorphosized: such a figure (a Wagstaffe, a Scargill or a Hobbes) was singular, proud and arrogant. Behind any of them, at a variable distance, might be seen that first rebel and tyrant in his singular pride, Satan. As a corollary, established learning was not, as Cowley had put it ‘barb’rous’ and tumbled in ruin on the field, a mere catalogue of the panagyrist’s ‘idols of the brain’. It was an inheritance of wisdom to be respected and employed. Indeed, arguments on the question of intellectual independence in the seventeenth century reconfigured older ones about sola scriptura and the consolidated wisdom of a church, the ‘Tradition’ at which Hobbes sneered in comparing ‘eclesiastiques’ with fairies. Put another way, the attacks on Hobbes’s persona provide evidence for the difference between philosophy as the transmission of truth and as the creation of a ‘golden land’ through wit and right reasoning. To be sure, what might be operatically presented as polar opposites through starkly contrasting personae, in fact required a degree of bi-conditionality, something which on its own helps explain why debates on such a matter as philosophic independence were inconclusive. Certainly, the Hobbesian view of the philosopher’s responsibility to take everything back to first reckonings is literally an impossible requirement, and to be part of an intellectual culture requires taking some things for granted. Yet, in such contexts of argument, if words like newness and innovation were hardly absolutes, they were surface guides to the contested persona of the philosopher and so intrinsic to debates about the nature and limits of intellectual activities. It is a point clearly illustrated by Sir Matthew Hale’s critique of Hobbes’s understanding of law. For Hale, what ultimately is wrong with Hobbesian jurisprudence is philosophical interference with the domain of the judge; and so, as David Saunders argues, the Hobbesian philosophical persona is used negatively to reassert the independent integrity of the judicial one. The misguided philosopher would apply a single universal system of principles in ignorance of relevant particulars and circumstance of the sort the legal persona is trained to comprehend. This intellectual impertinence and attempted tyranny, is a kind of deductive madness and such ridiculous lunacy can only be overcome by taking seriously the very things Hobbes was apt to dismiss, ‘habituateing’ oneself to the relevant cultures and traditions of law, by ‘Readeing, Study and observation’.74 This is a theme to which I will return in the context of the Scriblerian play with the topos of the ancient and moderns and in particular, with what will also be deemed the madness of Martinus Scriblerus who would apply the principles spun out of his own brain indiscriminately to everything (below pp. 97–8).

Hoisting Hobbes on the Satiric Petard

67

One consequence of Hobbes’s disregard for tradition, as critics like Tenison and Lawson correctly urged, was the exaggeration of his own distinctiveness, a charge to which Hobbes was particularly, and given his conception of true philosophy, predictably sensitive.75 He fell out with Descartes over questions of originality and insinuations of plagiarism;76 and he certainly would not have appreciated Lawson’s faint praise, that where Hobbes had done well many before have done so too, where badly, he was on his own.77 Alexander Ross drew out as with a hook and line a whole string of isms, ists and ians that had anticipated Hobbes. In any case, the Muslims had spawned all this wickedness first. Having translated the Koran, Ross could speak with authority and this helped set on its way one aspect of Hobbes as ‘the Turkish philosopher’. Ralph Cudworth provides a further variation, for he at once wants to explain Hobbes while disclosing his claims to distinctiveness as undue pride. To these related ends he situates Hobbes and Leviathan in the wide context of the history of philosophy. The philosophical, hypostatical atheism of the work derives from a refusal to accept that the material world can only be explained with reference to a non-material, spiritual first cause. The error of thinking otherwise springs directly from misunderstandings in ancient Greek philosophy and part of Cudworth’s strategy in attacking these is to diminish Hobbes by a form of tapinosis. More immediately, however, it was Descartes who mistakenly opened the way for ‘a late writer of politicks’ whose ‘new modle of Ethicks’ has been intruded upon the world with such ‘Fastuosity’. It is, he continues, only Democritus revived, ‘a cheat subverting morality’. For Cudworth, Hobbes was basically a follower of Democritus, Epicurus and Lucretius, the ‘Cabal’ of philosophical atheism, amounting to a form of madness. Something so patently dreadful needs explanation, hence the easy shift from proposition to the ad hominem. The design of Hobbes’s work could only be ‘to debauch the World’.78 In all, Cudworth provides a multilayered satirically toned assault on Hobbes’s self-image. To be seen as dependent on Descartes would have been bad enough but to be classed among the ancients as a purveyor of error and insanity was significantly worse. Hobbes’s only originality lay in the enormity of a new model so gross that only someone evil could spawn it. Re-assimilating Hobbes to tradition, then, was not just a matter of pointing to doctrinal similarities, it was also a critique of Hobbes’s self-delusions and inadequate conception of philosophy.79 It could even consign him to the antiphilosophical domain of the lunatic. If Hobbes inadvertently aided this line of attack by his claims about the uniqueness of his theory of humour, it was made additionally easy by satiric reductio of his arguments. In the popular imagination, Hobbes’s belief in the revolutionary nature of De cive became emblematic of a kind of absurd posturing at one with his being a teacher of tyranny and rebellion.80 Nathaniel Ingelo’s romance, Bentivolio and Urania (1660), was dedicated

68

Hobbes, the Scriblerians and the History of Philosophy

to William Brereton, it made much of his virtues as a philosopher and dwelt on the character of philosophers and the dangers of atheism and epicurianism.81 It had as a usurping and tyrannous villain, the Hobbesian Antitheus who held that the principles of true (that is wicked) policy were no older than his own books. That Antitheus was a ruler de facto was also fitting, for Hobbes was subject to the unjustified slur of being a theorist of de facto rule.82 For John Eachard, in a more openly satirical vein, it was Hobbes’s ‘starched mathematical method’ that amounted to a ‘counterfeit novelty and singularity’.83 In his popular and reprinted Lucianic dialogues, Hobbes appears as an argumentative and timorous old fool, beardless maybe, but straight out of Lucian. The scene is set by Eachard (or his bookseller) who lurches between nonsense and satiric ridicule in brilliantly promoting the work to follow. It is a parody of Hobbes’s self-assessments of De cive, his attitudes to reading other authors and his materialism. This, we are told, is but a book. ‘But why do I call it a Book: what am I mad? For in reality ’tis all Books’, and this will do everything, from giving a history of the world to predicting the future, it furnishes all divinity and civil law. ‘The twelve Tables were stolen out of this Book last week … And besides, it doubles Cubes and Squares, Circles (better than Mr. Hobbs) only with an Oyster shell and a pair of Tobacco Tongs’. To read a few pages secures against illness. ‘Chomp three or four lines of it in a morning; it scours … the Teeth … settles the Jaws’. It brews, bakes, rocks the cradle, pays the servants and is never out of breath. A full answer to all blasphemous and heretical books, it so routs the ‘silly-phantastical opinions of Mr. Hobbs, that he’l be ashamed … to owne any one opinion again’. In this book Hobbes’s philosophical language, mathematics and divinity are brought to unheard of and unimaginable absurdities. If ever the Dutch are beaten, it will be by this book, as it ‘has slain the Leviathan.’ With this book you need no other. Whether it is worth reading is another matter, but that is its virtue, ‘the meer buying of it will do all … And therefore lay down your money’.84 But the money is not paid for a joke, the context makes it clear enough, Hobbes is dangerous, depicting men as rational rebels or atheists, the opinions of this ‘haughty-conceited-philosopher’ are wicked and mischievous.85 Another aspect of the accusations of singularity was fear of a socially destructive cult of innovation that was not just anathema in religion but at odds with the co-operative (and orthodox) spirit the Royal Society was promoting as needed for natural philosophy. The appropriate persona was one exhibiting modesty and lack of singularity. Deductive systems were at a discount, looking suspiciously like the sort of dogmatism and laziness that Sir Matthew Hale had considered so unfitting for the jurisprudential persona, and which Samuel Butler had scorned as rendering the philosopher like a tailor, relying on his own hypotheses and cutting the world to fit them.86 For Hobbes’s critic Robert Boyle, the true philosopher was an eclectic who did not theorize in advance of his own hard empirical

Hoisting Hobbes on the Satiric Petard

69

work and who was always willing to learn from that of others, including the ancients.87 True philosophy, although involving discovery, built upon a receptiveness to transmission, openness and curiosity. Such a persona arose naturally from a melancholic humour.88 It was also a persona increasingly appropriated to authentic Englishness. The confessedly melancholic Walter Charleton distinguished his own philosophic persona from the ‘hot and testy’ dogmatics of Europe.89 Henry Oldenberg, writing to Augustin Butens, explained the power of English chemistry in terms of its being studied by men of sense and openness of attitude lacking Continental dogmatism.90 The diversity of attacks on Hobbes’s character expose tensions in the conceptual make-up of the philosophical persona, to which Hobbes himself was not immune. The division between the requirement for curiosity and modesty and the rejection of authority, ambivalently conjoined in the Baconian vision, was itself gaining authority for the Royal Society, which ipso facto became vulnerable to satiric reductio of its activities.91 Charles II’s support for what he called his ‘ferrets’ was not necessarily to be relied upon; he had provided no endowment, and so for subscriptions’ sake the wealthy were encouraged to seek membership, even if they had no clearly developed philosophical interests or acumen. Meanwhile those with such interests in all their variety also presented easy, if contradictory targets. Shadwell’s relentless satire of what he took to be the Society’s irrelevance, obscurantism and the gathering of pointless triviality, proved extremely popular, and almost interchangeable comic figures of antiquary and natural philosopher crowded onto the post-Restoration stage.92 The resources of satiric prejudice were easily adapted from one to the other, for as Samuel Butler remarked, they are much the same, the antiquary, a ‘frippery-Philosopher’ fusses in pedantry over words, the natural philosopher over things. The philosopher and mathematician were similarly exchangeable, the imperious system builder remained open to scorn as we will see in Swift’s The Battle of the Books (1704) and in the character of Martinus Scriblerus.93 Just prior to the Scriblerians, and indeed pre-empting something of their satiric style, Swift’s friend William King produced parodies of the Royal Society’s Transactions, with particular attention to the rules necessary to maintain a useless unintelligibility.94 Despite, then, the often distorting self-promotional eloquence and longterm success of writers like Sprat, having Hobbes become a fellow ferret would have exacerbated the Society’s vulnerability. Excluding Hobbes as un-philosophic, even un-English was a more general affirmation of intellectual integrity. There was then, much at stake in the considered attempt to render Hobbes both un-philosophic and a stranger in his own land, old-fashioned, foreign and (hopefully) alone. John Wallis, himself to become prominent Fellow of the Royal Society, and Hobbes’s mathematical bête noir, explained matters thus: now Hobbes has only himself to talk to, hence he writes philosophical dialogues in which

70

Hobbes, the Scriblerians and the History of Philosophy

‘Thomas commends Hobs and Hobs commends Thomas, and both commend Thomas Hobs as a third Person’.95 This suggests a veritable trinity of disrepute designed to exclude and so consolidate a developing philosophical orthodoxy.

Escaping the Monster Despite promoting a myth of isolation (at last, something on which Hobbes and Wallis could agree) Hobbes was less an exile at home than he lamented and Wallis celebrated.96 In Europe his reputation was relatively secure, and in England a number of his works were available through the distribution of copied manuscripts. The market price for copies of Leviathan rose strikingly during the Restoration, and not just because of the deep pockets of his admirers.97 Wagstaffe and Blount were not alone in selective use. Samuel Parker, overtly hostile to the ‘Malmsbury Philosophy’ as being responsible for the fanatic rabble of nonconformists, relied on Hobbes’s erastianism, and possibly some Hobbesian theories of language (safely attributed to Bacon) to defend the Restoration Church of England against those ‘Brain-sick People’.98 In turn, he was accused of being a young Leviathan, and Andrew Marvell produced what effectively was a satiric parody of the controversies that had surrounded Daniel Scargill, treating Samuel Parker as an unabashed Hobbist.99 At the same time, Andrew Marvell, perhaps reliant on common sources, presented a history of ecclesiastical aggrandisement and corruption almost entirely at one with Hobbes’s understandings of the trajectory established Christianity. To add to what looks like the demonization of Hobbes to balance opportunistic use of his work, some writers systematically hostile to him found it difficult to avoid his embrace. His early critic Lawson, who had feared that Hobbes was becoming popular, supported his point by sometimes sounding rather like Hobbes when developing his own political theories. Others were closer to him than they were prepared to admit. Noel Malcolm has argued that such discomfort helps explain Hobbes’s exclusion from the Royal Society. Hobbes’s claims to be a natural philosopher were better than most, all the more reason to make sure there was no taint by association. Jon Parkin has shown that James Harrington and John Locke were victims of insinuated Hobbist contaminations. Locke in particular, who owned some of Hobbes’s works, was acutely conscious of similarities and even of some shared views between his own and Hobbes’s philosophies.100 Locke was even accused of plagiarizing from Hobbes his belief in how little it was necessary to accept for salvation; this, despite the fact that such credal minimalism was an extrapolation from Lutheranism and was shared by writers like Lawson (whose works Locke also owned) and some Restoration Latitudinarians.101 If the credal minimalism was really the propositional target, it was remarkably convenient to have Hobbes proclaiming it.

Hoisting Hobbes on the Satiric Petard

71

Entanglement with Hobbes, however, was bound to be a danger when his habit had been to draw paradoxical conclusions from shared principles, or to explain shared conclusions in paradoxical fashion. Ironically, the twists and turns of transmitted knowledge were a problem for those who were determined to flee from any Hobbist contagion. And this has resulted in some historiographical confusion. It has been too easy to conclude, as Dimitri Levitin has recently demonstrated, that because people might sound a little like Hobbes and so be accused of following him, they actually did. The result of not seeing a polemical convenience of condemnation by association has been to collapse quite different traditions of argument into one and so create a fiction of a single Hobbes and Harrington centred discourse of erastian and republican civil religion from legalistic, parliamentarian and even anti-Hobbist writings.102 The difficulty of argumentative disengagement from the sweep of Hobbes’s theories might also help explain his critics’ resort to ad hominem attack and the reductive distortion of doctrine to which Hobbes and those like him never did subscribe (good and evil are illusions, everyone is wicked, rulers and subjects can do as they please, rebellion is justified, he is just an Epicurean, a scoffer, a new stoic).103 On the one hand, such straw-man reductions (‘rebellion’ was not something one justified) made for an easy denial of Hobbist sympathies and helped maintain a protective distance from what he actually wrote. Hobbes himself could be much closer to the scholastics, the derided ‘schoolmen’ in his nominalism and Scotan voluntarism, and as Bramhall noted, in his casuistry, than his satiric expostulations might suggest. Yet, on the other hand, once words like Hobbist and Hobbism became labels, the disembodied relics of satiric distortion, they were available for wide and indiscriminate distribution. And of this, later scholarship, enthusiastically studying Hobbes simply as an important philosopher and keen to attach abstracted propositions to names, has been insufficiently suspicious.104 For Richard Bentley, in delivering the first Boyle Sermons against the enemies of Christianity, and popularizing Newton in the process, Hobbes was an arch atheist and the eminence grise behind the atheism infecting England from the taverns upward.105 Atheism, he concludes, like Cudworth, is ‘mad philosophy’.106 But the persona was almost inevitably as much a target as ‘the formidable name of Leviathan’ or any specific proposition in it. For atheism was taken to be so dangerous precisely because of what atheists necessarily are, unreliable in any capacity, and so never to be trusted, because they recognize nothing superior to themselves.107 This was the extreme extrapolation from Hobbesian singularity. Hardly surprisingly, Hobbes’s theories of sovereignty were, according to Bentley, dishonest and immoral, little more than an attempt to bribe rulers into tolerating the evil of atheism in the body politic; they were to use Cudworth’s expression, a design to debauch.108 To demonstrate this in the absence of hard evidence, ad hominem

72

Hobbes, the Scriblerians and the History of Philosophy

argument from rather loose implication tied to general reference to Hobbes and Hobbism, and not always that, was often sufficient.109 Bentley appears to have been unaware of Jasper Mayne’s considered views of atheism, or otherwise his friendship with Hobbes would have become a telling proof of the reach of the Hobbesian virus, even into the Church. The atheistic slur, however, was sufficient to buttress the propositional reliance on the argument from Newtonian design. Bentley was not one who believed that satiric raillery was appropriate to the sermon or indeed, so he would claim, to the priestly persona itself;110 but that he could sermonize against Hobbes as he did, had partly been made possible by those who had treated Hobbes’s arguments in the style of Hobbes’s own dismissive wit, so creating a demonized image of the anti-philosopher as the explanation for mad philosophy. In one of those cruel and considered ironies the satirist clergyman Swift would shortly have fun in roping Hobbes and Bentley together as quintessential and equally dreadful ‘moderns’ (see below, pp. 87–8). I have argued that the satirical vein in the critique of Hobbes was designed to isolate through ridicule and it did so by attention, of sorts, to both doctrine and persona. A noticeable aspect of this was to consign both to a world of absurdity and insanity. A number of the works noted above insist on a philosophical lunacy and one way of insinuating this as waywardly dangerous more than silly was through the compressed figurative associations of madness and monstrosity. To note something of this here is to touch upon the more outré expressions of hostility to Hobbes. It is, however, also to prefigure the satire of the Scriblerians, where I will need to say more about the resources of monstrosity they thoroughly exploit in the exposure of absurdity. Hobbes evoked such imagery when disparaging others; his battles with antiquity were with phantasms.111 In the relatively unpolemical De cive he warns of the dogmata illa Philosophorum moralium biformia, translated as ‘hermaphrodite opinions of moral philosophers’, partim recta & speciosa, partim bruta & farina ‘partly right and comely, partly brutall and wilde’, this is at one with his imagery of centaurs in the same passage.112 But it is worth noting, again to prefigure the Scriblerians, that Hermaphrodite myth had been much explored and allegorized in the Renaissance, re-working the story of human creation given to Aristophanes in Plato’s Symposium, and the myth told by Ovid in the Metamorphoses. The meanings of what Lauren Silbeman fairly calls a complex web of tradition, were largely biological, or moral.113 What we see with De cive is an application of hermaphrodite mythology to philosophy, turned predictably against ancient philosophy. But it was in naming two works, Behemoth and above all Leviathan, after biblical monsters that he left himself vulnerable to elaborations on a theme loaded with intimations of tyrannous abuse and moral depravity. While this might superficially suggest the operatic and empty, or the paranoia of the easily threatened, it may also simply have been a matter of the associations of the

Hoisting Hobbes on the Satiric Petard

73

title taking on an irresistible momentum of their own. Something of this Hobbes seemed to accept in his Vita where he looks back on the notoriously named (notus nomine) Leviathan. When printed, the title provided an arresting paradox, for the argument was designed to render such a terrifying monster a rational human creation and guarantor of civilisation, not by extracting its teeth but by utilizing its strength. For Hobbes’s critics, however, it proved a paradox too far. To put it crudely, if Leviathan was a book of mad and monstrous doctrine, its father had to be mad and monstrous too. Few could resist making some mileage out of the monster on the title page. Hobbes’s belief that in assessing moral propositions we must look into, or read ourselves (scito tiepsum), arguably did not help. Henry Grove as the Spectator would consider it an unlucky principle, remarking that if Hobbes proposes men to be in no way better than beasts, it was presumably a judgement based on self-knowledge.114 As I have illustrated above, for Bentley and Cudworth making little sustained difference between persona and doctrine, all Hobbesian thought was monstrosity and madness. For Eachard, Hobbes was a monster of wit, for John Whitehall, as there were monsters in nature, so Hobbes was one of policy – an artificial monster, like the artificial man of sovereignty.115 For the author of the True Effigies, and the list is hardly exclusive, a work so full of madness and folly, made Hobbes indeed ‘the monster of Malmesbury’, and the best that could be hoped was that, having lived so long, he would shortly meet the worms.116 Hobbes had died by the time Aubrey wrote his last ‘office’ to his friend. And with the fuller picture of the monstrous anti-philosopher now in place, this requires one last word. I have said that Aubrey’s is a portrait of a philosophic persona, but there are some qualities, not least Hobbes’s kindness, that seem to stand beyond what is required of a philosopher, as ambivalently the wit and good humour stretch beyond the requirements of intellectual virtue.117 Given, however, the lurid colours of the countervailing image, the emphasized humanity of Hobbes may be seen as playing its part in defending the persona that had been subject to such dehumanizing denigration. Jon Parkin has clearly shown that over his long life, different aspects of Hobbes’s philosophy were found particularly obnoxious: his absolutism in the 1640s; his hostility to those Trojan horses of instability and bad philosophy, the universities, just when, during the 1650s there was talk of reforming them. His heterodoxy and acceptance of the Cromwellian Republic during the Restoration led to his being tarred with the brushes of rebellion, tyranny and de factoism. His sovereignty theory, materialism and the sense of philosophical demarcation, that was tantamount to denying intellectual legitimacy to theology, all conspired to provide equivocal grounds for suspicions of atheism during his final years, and repeated accusations of it so common after his death. Some discussed all these aspects of his work and perhaps the main fire behind the smoke was his

74

Hobbes, the Scriblerians and the History of Philosophy

increasingly explicit anticlericalism, the reddest of rags to the insecurities of the ecclesiastical bovines. His erastianism had caused clear discomfort from the 1640s but his position hardened. In The Elements, and De cive of 1642, he still accepts some very narrow compass for ecclesiastical independence; but this has been erased with the uncompromisingly erastian Leviathan. Priests are allowed only to set a moral example in their daily conduct, and in their acquiescence to sovereign power. None of these alterations, however, amounted to any purely doctrinal watershed.118 Nevertheless with Leviathan, Hobbes’s egregious views were expressed more polemically, derisively and satirically, as both Skinner and Lund have emphasized. With the exception of Lucian, as Brian Duppa wrote to Justinian Isham, none had ever been ‘so gamesome in religion’, and this, as I have indicated for both Lucian and Hobbes flowed into being gamesome with philosophy. Leviathan was intended as a persuasive tour de force displaying the wit and provocation of the laughter of serio ludere within philosophical endeavour. In 1650 Hobbes, looking for a passport home may have thought that wit at the expense of a common foe, Catholic priests, was an emblem of belonging and that his satire would touch common ground with his countrymen without causing unnecessarily divisive offence. Such an optimism was what Pope would later call a ‘safe form of fighting’.119 Pope was hardly alone in thinking that satiric humour was safe unless isolating and shaming a specific victim. Swift, and before him Butler, had remarked on the good reception satire has in the world where people can enjoy wit at the expense of others.120 Hobbes, at least in this respect, had gone further, to endorse the views of Erasmus on the matter. ‘Laughter without offence, must be at absurdities and infirmities abstracted from persons, and where all the company may laugh together’.121 But to seek safety in generalized satire was always a precarious strategy, especially when addressing a ‘company’ as wide and diverse as Hobbes sought to reach in writing a printed book in English. The generalized, or abstracted satire Pope dismissed can be decidedly unsafe. The colourful paint of Hobbes’s anti-Catholic and scholastic palette flowed over to smear Protestant scholasticism and the interests of Protestant priests, who sought, like the old to be, the arbiters of orthodoxy. The problem with indirection, suggestion, equivocation, paradox, the metaphors on which Hobbes heavily relied, and the informing provocation of laughter he intermittently sought, is that the uptake is difficult to control, the residues are dense. And the more they are pressed between the pages of a book, the more the author is bound with them as a hostage to fortune. The written joke easily backfires. As Skinner pointedly remarks, when Hobbes printed the Latin version of the work, most of the satire and humour were left out.122 The laughing philosopher knew himself to be vulnerable and exposed; he had perhaps learned the lesson about satirical quipping that he had tried to teach the young Charles Cavendish.

Hoisting Hobbes on the Satiric Petard

75

Conclusion These two chapters invite a more general conclusion about the satiric treatment of the philosophic persona and its strong but contingent relationships with the expression of humour. Central to Wilhelm Dilthey’s seminal early twentieth-century discussions of the difference between historical and scientific understanding, was the conception of the hermeneutic circle. Whereas, he argued, the aim of science is to establish generalized explanatory regularities for the particular; history aims at understanding the meaning of the particular and does so through processes of contextualization, moving from specific to general, text to context and back again.123 This circle of understanding rather than formal explanation has given some philosophic grounding for what is widely accepted among historians – that, to put it crudely, establishing the right and a sufficiently detailed context solves problems of interpretation; conversely the point of interpretation is to close down potential contexts. This has assumed an almost axiomatic status in what is sometimes called the ‘new’ intellectual history.124 At a microcosmic level an insistence on the necessity of contextualization has a logical solidity to it of which no one in the seventeenth century would have needed persuading. The contextual relationships given to words by their antonyms were taken as a precondition for meaning. But with the complex history of texts the matter becomes more tricky. Contexts, after all, are not given, but rather are creatures of the questions we ask; neither are they neatly self-contained: they may flow into each other, resulting, to use Jacques Derrida’s expression, in a form of différance for the particular situated within any one of them. They are in the argot of analytic philosophy, unstable classifiers, decidedly porous at the margins. And indeed, the more closely we look at texts, the greater the number and the diversity of questions that rear up before us, and so the greater number of contextual possibilities that are generated by them. Their exuberance, as Ortega y Gasset puts it, increases the difficulty of reading.125 The humour of Hobbes and his works and the occluded Lucianic tradition of argument in which they may partially be placed amounts to a case just of this sort. The paradox being that enhanced contextualization disrupts certainty of reading. Even to read a work as philosophy and to place it within the context of a history of philosophy is a partial abstraction. The hermeneutic circle comes close to being vicious; it is a pity that Hobbes is not here to swear at us all, and to square it for us.

PART II

Upon my word, Philosophy is a very pleasant thing, and has various uses; one of the best is, it makes us laugh sometimes. T. J. Mathias, The Pursuits of Literature

3 THE SERIOUSNESS OF THE ABSURD: THE SCRIBLERIAN PHILOSOPHIC PERSONA

Martinus and the Scriblerian Corpus We first meet Martinus Scriblerus lurking around St James, London, having fled from Spain and a jealous husband. He had been spying on the Spaniard’s wife while she bathed, trying to verify the presence of a strange mark on the inside of her thigh; shaped like a pomegranate, it was rumoured to blossom and ripen in due season. The husband had surprised the philosopher in observational mode. The advancement of natural philosophy had its perils. Now we see Martinus in the shadows, desperate for an audience with Queen Anne, but alas shortly to be hurried on again by her unappreciative ministry with all the delicacy of nightclub bouncers. He stands tall and long-faced, black browed, olive skinned with hollow, piercing eyes and aquiline nose. His unkempt beard is flecked with grey, his whole countenance melancholic. He is, after all, a philosopher. Although English, the travel-worn Martinus looks alien, like a decayed Spanish gentleman, a Jesuit perhaps, or a rabbi: an exile in his own land. With straight black wig, long sword and cloak to the ground, he waits, silent as Pythagoras, motionless as Pyrrho, austere as Zeno. But for wig and sword, he seems to hang, figuratively speaking, in the Prado Museum of Madrid, framed as Diego Velazquez’s portrait of Menippus.1 Yet beneath his disconcertingly ‘macerated form’ lies a mind brimming with science, zealous for human betterment, and so proudly independent that he accepts no charity, so abstemious he often goes without food or drink. It – 77 –

78

Hobbes, the Scriblerians and the History of Philosophy

is only because a manuscript drops from under his cloak one dinner-time as he walks his lonely way along the Mall that an account of his Extraordinary Life, Works and Discoveries can be related. This Menippean magus is an outcome of a continuity of intellectual satire noticeable from the Restoration, drawing on classical models and with striking antecedents in the Erasmus circle’s use of the broadly Lucianic. Charles KerbyMiller has emphasized the importance for the Scriblerians of Butler’s popular poem Hudibras, hypothesizing that they may also have known some of his ‘characters’ in manuscript form, the bulk not being published until 1759.2 Also of direct relevance were the controversies surrounding Dr Woodward’s theories of the flood, the satiric image of the Royal Society, extended from the Hudibrastic, and the ridicule of Dr Richard Bentley’s brilliant and embarrassing philology by the ‘Oxford wits’, notably Francis Atterbury and William King. Such largely academic interests were sustained in a vibrant and varied discursive environment centred on London. Newspapers, magazines and journals flourished. By 1700, the city and its suburbs had a population of 575,000 when its nearest rivals, Norwich and Bristol, could muster only 40,000 between them.3 Its presence was so dominant that it was readily associated with that greatest of ancient cities Rome; it was ‘New Rome’, Nova Augusta or less pretentiously, ‘Romeville’.4 It was peppered with inns, taverns, coffee houses, markets and open spaces suitable for meeting and conversing. Censorship, proving persistently ineffective, had been abolished in 1695, and parliaments were regular from the Triennial Act. There was, in short, much bustle. Levels of literacy were high, and a burgeoning industry of cheap print associated with the ‘Grub Street’ press (less prejudicially professional writing) catered for demands for news, gossip, entertainment, information (advertising took up much of the space in newspapers) and additionally offered informal, popularized education.5 This is all sufficient to have suggested that we are witnessing what cannot be accommodated by the Hobbesian state: the emergence of a ‘public sphere’.6 The clamour cannot be doubted, but debate illustrative of the Habermasian theoretical model of a ‘public sphere’ can hardly be expected.7 The search for this, pressed ever deeper into the early modern world has proved a largely confused enterprise, sustainable only by effectively emptying all theoretical content from Habermas’s model of rational debate and its necessary conditions.8 What is important here, however, is contemporary fretting over discourse strikingly at odds with that of the putative ‘public sphere’, irrational, ill-informed, ill-educated, widespread and socially destructive. The Civil Wars and Interregnum had exacerbated older fears of the wayward nature of the printed word. At the Restoration, William Cavendish had gone so far as to advise Charles II to restrict the publication of theological controversy to Latin, to exclude the excitable and irrational mob.9 Those who would, for a while, become the Scriblerians were heirs to such concerns

The Seriousness of the Absurd

79

and believed themselves to be witnessing a collapse of standards, the integrity of intellectual traditions and a descent into linguistic and cultural vulgarization. Martinus Scriblerus with his mind full of science for the betterment of the world would be the creation of these anxieties, a philosopher for the dregs of ‘Romeville’. What would later be known as the Scriblerus Club, was formed by Swift, Pope and Arbuthnot in 1713. Kerby-Miller has meticulously plotted the complexities of politics, taste and friendships in the social life of London that established the group, a considered amalgamation of those in the ambit of Swift (principally Arbuthnot and Parnell) with Pope and Gay.10 Swift had been entertaining the possibility of establishing an academy, like the Académie française, to help halt what he saw as deleterious change in language, partly driven by bad poetry. This was hardly an eccentric enterprise, having for some time been aired by members of the Royal Society.11 Yet he was relatively isolated in London and politically estranged from his whig companions in his hostility to the war with France.12 Pope, not yet properly established, was pondering the idea of a satiric monthly journal on the works of the unlearned, for which he had got some support from Swift’s erstwhile friends, Joseph Addison and Richard Steele. The result of Swift’s enthusiastic response to Pope’s idea was the Scriblerus project.13 Arbuthnot had recently emerged as a remarkably gifted satirist;14 he was also the Queen’s personal physician, her adviser on Scottish affairs, as well as a leading mathematician and Fellow of the Royal Society. He hosted the meetings of the group in his rooms in the Palace of St James until Queen Anne died in August, 1714. It was as close as Swift would get to being accepted at court; and at odds with government policy, he would leave London two months before the Queen’s death.15 Other members of the group, or occasional attendees at its meetings, in addition to Gay and Parnell, were Francis Atterbury, Joseph Addison, and Robert Harley, Earl of Oxford, ever sensitive to the propagandistic value of satire, who from 1710–14 was the dominant figure in the very ministry that would so rudely see Martinus on his way. The group met in friendship and conviviality, as the rhyming couplets of invitation and acceptance indicate;16 but along with the mutual enjoyment of food, wine and good company, went the serious purpose to satirize the intellectual folly of the times. Kerby-Miller has warned against treating the Scriblerian with a definitional rigidity. The associations and friendships of the group’s members lasted beyond their formal meetings but not without tensions and a diversity of disparate interests.17 Indeed, the later designation of a ‘Scriblerus club’ and more significantly, the ease with which the adjectival form Scriblerian has been deployed can create the impression of cohesion and continuity from something more tensile and fugitive. 18 The egos and ambitions of Swift and Pope pulled in different directions. The principal user of the fiction of Martinus was Pope, and the issues that attracted the group overlapped more than they sustained a sin-

80

Hobbes, the Scriblerians and the History of Philosophy

gle cohesive enterprise.19 Although there was for a while a project to instantiate Swift’s and Pope’s similar understandings of the wide-ranging office of the satirist, even this did not hold fast. And neither were the conceptions and practices of satire uniform among those who for a while were Scriblerians.20 This is not to say that the label Scriblerian is entirely without value, and it is most helpful in encapsulating a cohering unease about philosophy. My purpose is restricted to exploring this principally through the creation of Martinus as a philosophical persona. Given the contested nature of philosophy and ipso facto the uncertain range of the epithet ‘philosopher’, what is encompassed will need to be treated flexibly. Importantly for Swift, the personae occupying the offices of modern philosopher and modern critic had much the same negative characteristics, being differentiated mainly by their subject matter. The critic dealt with poetic texts, the philosopher with metaphysics, the human and the natural world. Consequently, if Martinus was the image of a modern philosopher, he was also something of a modern critic; he was additionally a philosophical physician and a philologist. Polymath as he was, Martinus he did not exhaust the Scriblerian appetite for philosophical lunacy, and this requires attention to the group’s other satiric personae functioning as he did. That attention will in turn underline the extent to which the reputation of Hobbes remained grist to the satiric mill (see below, pp. 125–38). Initially, however, a little needs to be outlined about the Scriblerian corpus broadly understood. The Memoirs were central.21 Additionally, there were to be fully-fledged examples of Martinus’s stupendous output; there might also be threatened lawsuits for plagiarism by or on behalf of Martinus against any genuine author the satirists judged to have produced work of Scriblerian awfulness. The Memoirs also includes ad hoc revelations that books already published under other names, were really by Martinus (Richard Bentley would be a victim of this ploy). According to Kerby-Miller, in a similar idiom, William King had published a philological parody to show that Bentley’s proof that the Epistles of Phalaris were spurious was itself a fake (see below, pp. 87–91).22 Most of the satire is of uncertain compositional date and was printed with late adjustments in 1741.23 There is less of it than the initial enthusiasm of the group might lead us to expect. Apart from the Memoirs themselves, we have [Arbuthnot’s] Virgilius restauratus, a fragment of obtusely corrected Virgil, in the idiom of Bentley; Annus mirabilis, an astrological essay on the conjunction of planets; Martinus’s account of the origin of the sciences, attributed to Parnell and Pope, and Martinus’s definitive manual on how to write genuinely bad poetry, Peri Bathous, or The Art of Sinking in Poetry, published in 1727. It is formally accredited to Pope, although I believe it should be to Pope and Arbuthnot. Therein Martinus functions in the closely related personae of philosopher and critic. The Dunciad elaborated on Peri Bathous, and reworked Virgilius restauratus for the

The Seriousness of the Absurd

81

variorum edition of 1742.24 In this, Martinus provides a prolegomenon, including a mindless set of contradictory notes towards Pope’s biography, and he shares disputatious footnoting space with a peevish Dr Bentley, the critic John Dennis and with Pope’s own voice occasionally commenting on the others. The invention of the footnote is used to recast Menippean prosimetric satire. Peri Bathous and most of The Dunciad are taken up with denuncations of bad writing and writers tangential to the focus of this essay, but book 4 of The Dunciad inserted in 1742, rehearses already established Scriblerian attitudes to philosophy. More clearly peripheral is Stradling versus Stiles, a parody of legal argument;25 and the unusually gentle and slightly sad Memoirs of P. P. Clerk of this Parish, a satire on the unreliability of and self-importance expressed in what later became called autobiography. Additional to this corpus are several pieces which anticipate or flesh out, respectively, the Scriblerian critique of philosophy. Swift was initially the presiding eminence of the group and A Tale of a Tub (1704) and The Battle of the Books, initially printed with The Mechanical Operation of the Spirit (1704) do much to explain his standing. I cannot pretend to an account of these intricately playful and much controverted satires.26 The first, however, intersperses a satiric allegory of the history of Western Christianity with digressions adopting the persona of the modern philosopher, shifting occasionally into the adjacent voices of critic and historian.27 The second is a fantastical and luridly violent descant on the disputes between the ancients and moderns. The third is a non-conformist’s account of a modern enthusiasm as an effect of nature. As I have suggested in the Introduction, the topos of the ancients and moderns had been central to some earlier Menippean satire, and debate had been rekindled in England by arguments between Sir William Temple, sometime Swift’s employer, and William Wotton. More will be said about this below, as it is so central to the manner in which the Scriblerians shape a philosophical persona. It is enough here to state that Swift’s battle is disingenuous in its descriptions of an inconclusive war between the volumes in St James’s Library, for it is largely an ad hominem dismissal of modern philosophy and scholarship, reductive visions of which had been provided in A Tale of a Tub. This is Swift as Menippus, smiling as he bites. At the end the moderns, Wotton and Bentley lay impaled on the same spear cast by the heroic Charles Boyle.28 The Mechanical Operations of the Spirit, however, is testimony to a feared victory of modernity in the world at large, for it puts before us a befuddled popularization of philosophical materialism that becomes ridiculous in being applied to spirituality.29 On the eve of the formation of the group, Arbuthnot’s Pseudologia Politike, or The Art of Political Lying (1712) effectively answered the call in A Tale of a Tub for a modern systematization of all state arcana.30 It purports to encourage subscription for the publication of a two-volume treatise that has reduced politics to a universally applicable set of rules that anyone can learn. These concern the laws

82

Hobbes, the Scriblerians and the History of Philosophy

and conventions of mendacity. The anonymous ‘Author’ of the tome is Martinus, as it were, in embryo, the great systematiser of, and improver upon, the mere fragments of wisdom the ancients had managed to leave.31 In the Memoirs it is remarked of Martinus that in politics his writings were ‘for the most part ironical’, their drift delicate, refined and beyond vulgar comprehension.32 Although this is keyed to Swift’s A Modest Proposal (1729), so opportunistically roping that satire into the Scriblerian corpus, it would do more fittingly for The Art of Political Lying, which exhibits most of the characteristics that would help characterize the Scriblerian. As Swift himself had indicated in The Journal to Stella (1766), it was an exceptionally fine and subtle work;33 and it was a probable stimulus for Scriblerian activity. Arbuthnot’s John Bull satires of the same year, political allegories of the War of the Spanish Succession, giving more gentle and nuanced support for Swift’s recent anti-whig propaganda are of far less relevance to this study. Three Hours After Marriage (1717), by Gay, Pope and Arbuthnot, extends the philosophic persona independently of Martinus to embrace that of the physician, in a way only analogically hinted at in A Tale of a Tub.34 The play was a notorious farce, about the attempts of two city blades to bed the bride of an aging physician/philosopher; it also puts on stage a thinly disguised John Dennis and so parades the persona of the modern critic. It managed to offend almost everyone and everything except the Aristotelian verities of space, time and place. Despite initial success and potential for brilliant stage realization, it has hardly been performed since its first week at Drury Lane. Two years later, appeared Ars Pun-ica, or The Art of Punning (1719), another art reduced to a formula for universal betterment, this time Martinus is replaced by ‘Tom Pun-Sibi’. Supposedly the pamphlet was by Swift, then in Ireland, but it was mainly by his friend the linguist and theatrical impresario Dr Thomas Sheridan, the grandfather of Richard Brinsley.35 The Scriblerian image of misconceived philosophy has a clear echo in Swift’s Travels into Several Remote Nations of the World (Gulliver’s Travels) and is rehearsed briefly in Pope’s The Dunciad, as noted. The Memoirs relates that the Free Thinkers of Nuremburg have constructed an artificial man capable of reasoning as well as most country parsons and the artificial persona of Martinus, especially if considered along with the other Scriblerian philosophic personae, was something of a Frankensteinian monster of the intellect, constructed from the verbal detritus of diverging conceptions of philosophy and the breadth of its potential subject matter.36 This is signalled at the outset when he is depicted as empirical observer, innovator, alien and priestlike. He will later style himself a Philomath. At this stage, it is possible to give the gist of specific characteristics justifying by family resemblance, the epithet ‘Scriblerian’. They come largely within what I have outlined as the range of the Lucianic and Menippean. But more precisely,

The Seriousness of the Absurd

83

one major feature of Scriblerian work is the Latin or Greek title followed by the English subtitle. The use of this established convention is thematically fitting; it represents ancient and arcane learning as suitably digested for the modern English ‘Everyman’. The propagation of knowledge, then, is a formulaic reduction that Swift and his friends associated with ‘Grub Street’. It is a theme heralded in A Tale of a Tub in which Swift had asserted a bogus affiliation with Grub Street in order to satirize ‘easy wisdom fraudulently begotten’.37 Swift was as much concerned with the vulgarization of knowledge as with the wayward and perplexing directions philosophy was taking, and concomitantly as distressed as the young Pope by the apparent dissipation of standards and traditions of critical learning in the Grub Street environment of cheap and popular print.38 Things have changed dramatically since antiquity, wrote Swift in his modern persona, ‘we of this age have discovered a shorter and more prudent method to become scholars and wits, without the fatigue of reading or of thinking’.39 The juxtaposition of ancient and modern tongues, the exclusive and the available, high art and the teachable crib, and the arcane language defining the pretentious and self-deluding persona encapsulate a continuity of Scriblerian preoccupations. In providing a universally learnable system and its jargon, the modern persona becomes the modern philosopher. The potently symbolic titles preface texts that also reveal that figure at work: portentous authorial claims to staggering originality and improvement on the mere fragments or scattered remarks of the past are persistently undercut by the evidence of the texts, giving an impression of the philosopher’s ignorance.40 The presentation of what purports to be an easily learned systematically reduced body of knowledge, sufficient for all purposes, is similarly subverted by the author’s entanglement in his own abstruse jargon, his falling foul of paradox and simple contradiction. Relentless enthusiasm for gathering more facts to complete the system and optimism about the good he is doing make him oblivious to such incoherence, but give a zealous energy in projecting often trivial research schemes for a better world. Scriblerian grantsmanship would be impressive. The schemes have a counterpoint in what Swift calls the modern way of seeking publication, by subscription, which indeed is what his modern author intends for his mooted three-volume tome on zeal.41 Predictably, there is a failure to deliver everything, or even anything that is promised, the work on zeal remained hot air. A Tale of a Tub has a number of self-advertising allusions to the author’s achievements, and it ends with the voice of Swift’s modern philosopher listing his spurious, never to be delivered works in progress, at which point ‘Here ends the manuscript’.42 The Battle of the Books is also based on an incomplete manuscript. The Mechanical Operation of the Spirit carries a lacuna at which point the reader is assured that there was a whole scheme of spiritual mechanism, deduced from great reading, but which is unsafe

84

Hobbes, the Scriblerians and the History of Philosophy

to print. The satire stops only because the post is about to leave, though there is much more the author wishes to say. He has already suggested obliging the world by reducing the art of canting to ‘certain adequate rules’, to be considered philosophically, physically and musically.43 The Art of Political Lying is an account of only one volume of a work to be published by subscription; the Memoirs ends with the first book, listing further works by Martinus that never saw the light of published day. ‘Tom Pun-Sibi’ promises a further set of rules on punning. Of course, the Scriblerians did not invent the incomplete work and the impossible undertaking. Before they started to meet, John Dunton produced a book of 139 paradoxes, threatening a further 2,000, from which the world was spared.44 The Scriblerians, however, proved relentless in making the unfulfilled promise a feature of their satires, a necessary consequence of the absurdity of the projects, but something of a convenience for the casually written. It could be rather difficult to provide a tidy conclusion for works of studied incoherence. Just as persistently they disrupt expectations of discursive order. The Menippean digression is crucial to the momentum of The Battle of the Books. A Tale of a Tub has a digression in praise of digressions, a conclusion preceding a history, itself broken up by a final digression. Martinus in The Dunciad is superficially a digressive rumble. Overall, none of these digressions are what they seem. The Ars Pun-ica ends with a third preface, which is entirely at one with the spirit of Swift’s digression on prefaces halfway through A Tale of a Tub.45 Such examples of textual disjunction and the aposiopesis of incompletion, in most cases symbolize intellectual overreaching and inherent confusion. They all invite the reader to contemplate new-found lands of rolling absurdity, and what we do get is wrapped in fanciful parerga and false provenance, not unlike those that had been provided for Utopia. So the Memoirs begins with a story of a dropped manuscript, of secrecy and subterfuge appropriate to the paranoia of the persecuted hero; at the end, Martinus tries to destroy his political works by consigning them to ‘a Bog-house near St. James’s’. Some, however, are successfully fished out.46 The Mechanical Operation of the Spirit has a spurious bookseller’s provenance, followed by the author’s pretence of its being a letter to a friend. The Art of Political Lying was advertised twice as if there were a genuine subscription afoot. The books themselves are rarely what they pretend. Much of the central persona’s over-ambition and charlatanic posturing remains identifiable, if dissipated in later larger works. Kerby-Miller suggests that Gulliver is a transformed Martinus. Chapter 13 of the Memoirs outlines four voyages much as Gulliver would take, and it is possible that Swift’s work had one point of origination in the Memoirs.47 Gulliver is a Lucianic traveller and teller of tall tales and like such Menippean figures he exhibits a deadly plain honesty and innocence. Yet, he is certainly not Martinus renamed and neither, for the most part, does he have the impervious arrogance of Martinus,

The Seriousness of the Absurd

85

or of More’s Hythlodaeus. He is rather a witness to lunatic enquiry.48 And the direct relevance of Gulliver’s travels to Scriblerian motifs of philosophical delusion is therefore limited. It is The Grand Academy of Lagardo that is populated by fragments of the original Martinus as exuberant as he in their philosophical delusions.49 Only when Gulliver finally returns after his experience with the philosophical horses, images of unrelieved rationality, does it appear that he might be genuinely deranged. At least he must appear so to the outside, when he also acquires the Hythlodaeian distaste for engagement with the practicalities of life and destructively opts out of his responsibilities, for the company of his stablemates. As it had been remarked in A Tale of a Tub, the bearers and creators of new philosophy have to have something awry in the mind.50 That the persona might be alienated because the world is mad is a motif familiar enough. Hobbes’s image of philosophic exile in his own land is an immediate case in point. Shakespeare too had drawn on such images of dislocation in King Lear, when, in a brutally hostile environment, the feigning mad Edgar, as ‘Poor Tom’ is repeatedly addressed as ‘Philosopher’ by the arguably mad Lear. This play, with the tensions between belonging and philosophical isolation suggesting insanity takes us back further, past Swift’s much admired More, to Plato’s cave, in which a Socratic traveller could only appear a dangerous fool.51 In such a world, Martinus is busily at home, decorating. Yet with a slightly different inflection we may be taken back no further than to Erasmus’s employment of the topos of the world as a stage, for this was a direct challenge to the exonerating image of Socrates in the cave. If the world is a stage, the real fool is one who would leap upon it and interfere. That fool is also Martinus, determined to make the world a better place, a descendent of one of the bearded mad dogs Lucian’s Hermotinus vows to shun having seen what a lunatic sham philosophers are. Given the elaborate syndrome of preoccupations and textual features making up Scriblerian satire, it is to be expected that it can partially be seen in a range of subsequent works within the serio ludere. Arguably to be listed here is the slim pamphlet by ‘D. S—t’ devoted mainly to the education of Timothy Scriblerus, a work if not by Swift, is by one very familiar with Scriblerian motifs but remarkably gnomic in its allusions to them. What this and subsequent pamphlets suggest, however, is that the perpetually transmogrifying Scriblerus, takes on, as it were, an independent life, with a diminished, even negligible role in raising questions about the nature of philosophy. To make the point and conclude these preliminaries, something of this later career needs mentioning. It flourishes in a wider context of reference and allusion to notions of the Scriblerian. Besides Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels there is more than a touch of the Scriblerians in that most digressive of novels, Tristram Shandy, especially in Tristram’s education. Fielding referred to himself as Martinus Secondus. Sheridan’s grandson Richard Brinsley in his comedy The Critics, would provide manifestly jargonistic rules

86

Hobbes, the Scriblerians and the History of Philosophy

for promoting plays and a few for writing genuinely bad tragedy, an application of Peri Bathous to the stage; so here philosophy played its part in what has since become canonic literature.52 Thomas Cook, as Scriblerus Quartus in The Scribleriad provided a direct response to The Dunciad. Cook also engaged in an occasional serio-ludere idiom in his short lived monthly journal The Comedian or Philosophical Enquirer. The work is serious popular theology plus additional curiosities, news, obituaries and poems to entice potential purchasers. It is serio plus ludere.53 In fairly short order, we also find Scriblerus Maximus, Colly Cibber writing as Scriberlus Tertius, and Stephanus Scriblerus (Martinus’s brother). Martinus Scriblerus revived in 1769 as did a further Scriblerus Secundus, and there was Simon.54 The name Scriblerus sometimes signals disputes about dramatic poetry and the stage, the preoccupation with which Peri Bathous concludes; it might also be cued to a crazy proposal or experiment of the sort alluded to in the Memoirs.55 So, Martinus Scriblerus the younger, yet to understand the difference between human and natural law proposes legislation to replace natural birth with egglaying and incubation, replete with parliamentary hatching seats. If this alludes to the incubational duties of Utopian men, it also nods clearly in the direction of Swift’s A Modest Proposal, for it has rules to control eating the offspring. 56 The Marrow of the Tickler’s Works (1748) satirizes Paul Hiffernan’s popular wisdom by reducing it further to ballardic banalities that, we are assured, even admirers of Samuel Richardson’s novel Clarissa (1748) might comprehend. The Ratland Feast (1820) is an allegorical critique of corrupt civic politics prefaced by a false provenance similar to that provided for the Memoirs.57 The Menippean dream motif is used in Somnium academici Cantabrigiensis, but with notes veering between the fatuous and barbed.58 This, perhaps, recalls the voice of Martinus in The Dunciad.59 The Hard Us’d Poet’s Complaint (1750) laments trying to blend ancients and moderns and warns against being learned. At the end of the century Martinus is a pseudonym for some rather un-Scriblerian reflections on topics as diverse as fashion and religion. The justification for the name lies principally at the outset, where the author claims to be by metempsychosis the third incarnation of Martinus, now a woman, having previously been a crow and then a goose both of whose quills were used for scribbling.60 As we will see, this and the other works are appropriate to some aspects of the protean identity of Martinus, but the tenuous relationships that these Scriblerian reincarnations have with the philosophic persona important to the original enterprise may indicate that philosophic activity has been sufficiently stabilized to make the absurdities of Martinus of diminishing value in its exploration. At any rate, Martinus claims to be a philosopher less and less. A name unleashed does not, then, necessarily signify any single type of activity; it may only create the impression of naming something that is not quite there, an example of what Jeremy Bentham

The Seriousness of the Absurd

87

would refer to as a spurious certificate, more so than when applied to the original Scriberus group. Putting aside this digression on the afterlife of Martinus, I shall now turn to the tensile conceptions of philosophy from which he was initially constructed. They were brought together and shaped largely through the debates between ancients and moderns. We have, in line with the arguments earlier surrounding Hobbes, philosophy as transmitted truth, or as singular propositional creation; as observation and experimentation, or as the application of deductive explanatory principles. After sketching the Scriblerian treatment of these diverging conceptions, in the remainder of this chapter I shall examine the doctrinally specific satire on the questions of mutable personality, rigorous materialism and finally, language in the creation of a persona. It is the means by which the philosopher manqué hurtles into absurdity. This will lead directly in Chapter 5 to explication of the Hobbesian aspect of the Scriblerian image of the philosopher.

Ancients and Moderns Martinus and his education carried the heavy burden of the debate between the ancients and moderns. But to see how the Scriblerian use of this topos becomes a reductive caricature of philosophical propensities, something needs to be said about it first. The contrast between modernity and anciennité61 offered a remarkably longstanding and flexible way of organizing cultural reflection, from gardening to the studia humanitatis.62 But it is easy to conclude that the revitalization of this theme in late seventeenth-century England was at once arch and a little passé, or even inexplicable.63 Sir William Temple expatiated fulsomely on the ancient wisdom contained in the Epistles of Phalaris, a work attributed to a legendary Sicilian tyrant of about the time of Solon. Temple was aware that some considered the Epistles to be fakes, possibly written by Lucian, and he dismissed the idea as preposterous; they were as genuine as they were brilliant and wise, and in his experience unequalled in antiquity or the modern world. The Hon. Charles Boyle, grand-nephew of Robert Boyle and then a student at Christchurch, was delegated by his college to bring out a new edition of this ancient text.64 Dr Richard Bentley, sometime Keeper of the library at St James, produced an argument to show that the Epistles were indeed spurious. He was roundly attacked and Boyle claimed that Bentley had withheld a manuscript in the library that he had needed for his work. In 1699, the incandescent Bentley produced a full and detailed defence of his own conduct, a damning indictment of Boyle and the Bookseller with whom he was associated, in addition to a polished and devastating argument to demonstrate the inauthenticity of the Epistles.65 Temple, it transpired, was right in one respect: they were certainly not by Lucian, who if he knew of them, stated Bentley, rightly deigned to ignore them,

88

Hobbes, the Scriblerians and the History of Philosophy

for they are as foolish as they are bogus, a dull ‘fardle of commonplaces’.66 Works of dubious standing are, he conceded, to be expected from antiquity and not necessarily the result of questionable motivation. Copying and emulating could be educational exercises with no intent to deceive. Such generosity of spirit is not, however, to be extended (perhaps unfairly) to the sophist fabricator of Phalaris. Bentley’s case relied upon a blend of material and textual history, phonetics, grammar and semantic change; a number of towns mentioned in the Epistles were yet to be founded; Phalaris like the rest of Sicily would have used Doric dialect, not the Attic of the Epistles. Phalaris is made to take phrases from later writers like Herodotus and Euripides, he uses the words ‘tragedy’ (yet to appear in Greek) and ‘philosopher’, the most recent and unfamiliar of neologisms, as if they were well established usages.67 The grammar and structure of the alphabet date from later times. In response, but for the future Scriblerian Atterbury, there was little direct defence of the Epistles’ authenticity.68 But Boyle, heavily ghosted by him, changed tack by ridiculing Bentley; and King, who would prove tenacious with any Bentleyan bone, created a set of Lucianic dialogues, including one between Phalaris and the Sophist. These made light of Bentley’s industry, disparaging him and his motivations, on the basis of a detailed knowledge of the controversy.69 The attacks on Bentley were personal, but they also fashioned by lampoon and caricature a boorish, bad tempered, arrogant and singular modern persona. In the midst of this, enter Swift with A Tale of a Tub and The Battle of the Books. These are intricate and much controverted satires, and Robert Phiddian cautions that we take the ‘tubbian status’ of A Tale seriously; it bobs around distractingly, is resistant to reductive attempts to grasp its essence, and is capable of being filled with what we like.70 It has, for example, been rather easily concluded that Swift was not really engaged with the issues, or that like the ancients Atterbury, King and Boyle, the irrefutable power of Bentley’s case escaped him.71 But this, I think, on all counts is doubtful. We are not simply dealing here with an invariant issue of who was on the right lines;72 nor with the specific truth or falsity of a bald proposition, ‘x is a fake’, but on one side of the argument, with the conjunction of proposition and persona. The question that bobs up and down in Swift’s A Tale, was what sort of person makes that kind of attack on an ancient text to undermine its usefulness? To expose that sort of person went to the heart of the matter. And perhaps part of what was concerning about Bentley’s case was the indecorum of unleashing it in English, rather than presenting it to the closed elite of the Republic of Letters through Latin. The controversy intimates a thematic unity to A Tale, a concern with a generalized, pervasive threat, and provided the issue with which the Scriblerians would be preoccupied, the persona appropriate for intellectual activity. Bentley, in short, was made to represent the critical, philosophical modern that by its very arrogance and attitudes threatened

The Seriousness of the Absurd

89

to erode civilized Christian society. Tubs do bob about, but in a strong sometimes visible current. As Haugen rightly remarks, the complexities of the controversy attracted attention because the issues had wide-ranging significance.73 That Bentley was Low Church and his antagonists were of High Church persuasion suggests a further undercurrent to dispute. Nor is it accidental, I think, that at the time Swift was penning The Battle of the Books, Hobbes’s diminishing translations of Homer were proving popular. Modernity was a challenge well beyond the standing of one text. I have already indicated that Bentley would not have been happy to be roped with Hobbes. Tying them by the tail and setting them into the fields of philistine modernity with its tares of atheism in the bounty of scholarship was important to Swift and, as I shall argue, would be so for the Scriblerians. Of course, as the issue had become that of an abstracted persona and its dangers to civilization as we know it, the lines of debate would be drawn in appropriately reductive ways. And as one might expect, the reality was a good deal more nuanced than the satiric abstraction of a type would have us believe.74 Hobbes and Bentley might be seen as leading in the same destructive direction and opening the door to vulgarized rote learning and worse, but their attitudes to antiquity were rather different. Few among the moderns were, in fact, as hostile to antiquity as the ancients were to them.75 It is on this score that, as I have suggested, it is not Bentley or Wotton but Hobbes who comes closest to being a parody of the feared implications of modernity, by linking the veneration of antiquity both to bad philosophy and the very thing the ancients most feared: social instability. In relative contrast, Wotton, despite his destiny to be associated with Richard Bentley on the same ancient spear in The Battle of the Books, held that as human nature is pretty invariant, those who reflected on it first had established so much in politics and morality that moderns were left with little to do but emulate and transmit. In this respect, he was an ancient, and decidedly un-Hobbesian. Conversely, as mathematical and scientific knowledge has been slower to develop (again decisively un-Hobbesian) he argued that we should expect the ancients to be superseded, not least by scholastic philosophers, who with their ‘Methodical Exactness’, hardly an expression Hobbes would have used, were arguably the first moderns.76 Bentley’s views were in general at one with those of his friend. Newton certainly surpassed anything in antiquity, but this did not commit Bentley to a belief in any uniform pattern of progress. This brings us directly, however, to what I have called the paradox of historical relevance (above, pp. 27–9). That is, the very impulse behind the work of so many scholars from Petrarch through to Lipsius and then Bentley was to recover the past, especially its texts, that it might have more reliable authority in the present. This, however, could be as contingently counter-productive as the sort of systematic subversion we find with Hobbes’s attentions to the original meaning of the word heresy, and arguably in his translations of Homer.77 Bentley insisted

90

Hobbes, the Scriblerians and the History of Philosophy

in the same idiom as Lipsius, that modern knowledge of language provided the most reliable versions of ancient texts and the modern scholar was therefore enhancing the value of antiquity by sifting the genuine from the false. If it was valuable it had to be got right and placed where it really belonged. Where philologically speaking there are problematic lacunae, conjectural reconstruction, in the names of accuracy and/or decorum becomes necessary.78 But the attack on Phalaris was much more than a matter of phonetic and philological technicality; it used a range of detailed evidence to discredit by relocation away from antiquity.79 He also used his scholarly authority to insist on the work’s worthlessness and superficiality; similarly with regard to Aesop, what we have is both unauthentic and the worst of what had been written.80 The corollary was that proper transmission of a smaller number of worthy texts now needed to be on modern terms. It was a telling point that would be acknowledged only obliquely and side-stepped by Swift, in having his battle fought between the books themselves, modern artifacts.81 Because the justification for Bentley’s scholarship was in an established idiom of reform for the sake of relevance, its critique could also be along familiar lines, for a critical sensibility to the disruptive dangers of scholarship had gone hand in hand with the development of Renaissance historiography and philology. It had been a theme central to the Menippean satires of Lipsius and Cunaeus (see above pp. 26–7). Sir Philip Sidney had satirized the historian as a ‘fusty pedant’, ‘loaded with Mouse-eaten records’, lost in particularities and incapable of inculcating virtue.82 It was more broadly the belief that the ultimate end of history was to teach virtue that allowed it to be seen as philosophy teaching by example. Implicitly this was to subordinate the historian’s or philologist’s accuracy to philosophic purpose.83 Hence in this tradition, the sustained animus of King, Swift and Pope to the dull trivialities of philology, or of Addison to historiographical precisionists; for the Whigs as well as the Tories good history is a good story with a clear moral wrapped in decent expression. Ancient rhetoric provides the best form, Livy the best example.84 It was, as the ancients seemed intuitively to realize, the moderns’ mode of affection for antiquity that was so dangerous. Bentley did not use the term anachronism, which was at the time a new and occasional coinage. He did, however, distinguish the ‘blunders in chronology’, or the ‘prophetical anticipation’ of the author of the Epistles of Phalaris from the rhetorical trope of prolepsis.85 The latter was a preference for a later rather than an earlier term when both were available to the speaker. Thus we might say Caesar was in France rather than Gaul; but to put the word France in the text of Caesar’s Gallic Wars would be ‘prophetical anticipation’. Bentley’s distinction was important but easily overlooked and prolepsis has since been assimilated to anachronism, the term around which would coagulate the insistence on strict chronology in order to understand the past as such. It was to become a bone

The Seriousness of the Absurd

91

of contention whenever discreditation through temporal misplacement jarred with the usefulness of a received past and the accepted duty of the historian to act as handmaid to true philosophy by inculcating virtue. In the face of the condemnation of anachronism as myth-making, ancienneté needed to displace the significance of the accusation, or diminish the accuser in the name of a higher truth and intellectual office. Thus it is the puffed-up modern critic Sir Tremendous with his system of rules for writing who in Three Hours After Marriage expostulates ‘Ah! Anachronism!’ Inflicted with a reading of Phoebe Clinket’s Greek tragedy in which she has her heroine erroneously wearing stays, he decrees stays to be ‘a modern habit and against the rules of tragedy!’86 With a case like Phalaris, it is true that the ‘ancients’ could not dispute effectively on modern learning’s own terms; 87 but to make that point is to privilege modern historiographical priorities aimed at diminishing anachronism and make us fellow-travellers with Sir Tremendous. For the ancients, if getting things right confused or undermined the value of a cultural inheritance, then the price was too high; more detailed attention could simply exacerbate the problems that modern pedantry had created. What they could do was to exploit the Achilles heel of necessary conjecture, on which anyone dealing with the past has at some point to rely. The result could be to create the new in the name of the old. This crux of continuity was not restricted to the distant classical past. The more recent iconic texts of English identity, the plays of Shakespeare and the poetry of Milton were similarly subject to controversies of authenticity and adaptation. Pope was embroiled on most fronts. His own editorial practices were much like Bentley’s.88 Notwithstanding, the evil of conjectural distortion was a repeated motif in Scriblerian satire. Parodied in Virgilius restauratus, in Peri Bathous, and Ars Pun-ica it is a necessary rule for the modern world (below, pp. 120–2).89 The resort to such ploys was, to be sure, in one sense an expression of defeat and of double standards. In another it attested to different, philosophical priorities that scholarly integrity was failing to serve: however odd it may sound to us, the satire of scholarship was a philosophical move. There were various means of sustaining some semblance of the ancient in the overly critical modern world. Leaving aside Bentley’s lubricant of philological conjecture, leading to changes in the letter to maintain the spirit, there might be overtly allegorical and symbolic readings. There could be reliance on the Lucianic fiction of imaginative dialogues with the dead. King re-employed this topos. By marginal extension during the seventeenth century, we have pamphlets purporting to be by ghosts and others being spurious last wills and testaments. The ultimate reductio of such adaptive veneration, its strategies of accommodation and the Lipsian bad dream in which ancients fret at what moderns do to them, is found in The Battle of the Books, where ancient books as rational agents project themselves at their modern, equally autonomous foes.

92

Hobbes, the Scriblerians and the History of Philosophy

In A Tale of a Tub, the interplay of past and present is a cohering principle, interlacing the allegory of the Roman abuse of an authoritative past as justifying the Reformation, with that of the voice of the modern philosopher rejecting the whole inheritance, baby with bathwater. Each theme raises the same general question: does tradition imprison and delude, or enable? And, expressed at this level, it could be as confessional as it was philosophical. The extreme reaction of Jack (Calvinism) to the corruptions of Peter (Rome) is certainly analogous to the wholesale rejection of inheritance by the modern philosopher.90 There could be a very uncertain line between the authority of ancient wisdom and the authority of an established church such as Rome, or even the Church of England, as it relied upon episcopacy being embedded in antiquity. The line between the modern shunning of such authority to discover truth unencumbered by superstition and the doctrine of sola scriptura, could be similarly permeable. I am certainly not saying that ancients were Catholics, and moderns Protestants, but rather that cultural, philosophical and educational arguments had denominational implications or opportunistic confessional applications. To recognize the point reveals a suggestive thematic unity rendering the advertised digressions of the text a little disingenuous.91 The play with uncomfortable associations, the refusal to quarantine one aspect of a cultural inheritance from another, was the truly disquieting feature of Swift’s early work. Atterbury and the wits of Oxford University who so applauded Swift’s attacks on the moderns, were decidedly uncomfortable with his linking cultural transmission and religious practice, especially through the indecorum of serio ludere.92 Atterbury was intensely and polemically involved in arguments about patristic history and the authenticity of an independent clergy and probably saw the allegory of the history of Western Christianity as more than a distracting tub cast into the oceans teeming with what have later been deemed larger issues. Indeed, it would have been for many a theme considerably more important to the whole work than the apparent digressions on modernity on which I need to concentrate.93 The digressions are dominated by Swift’s modern voices and the implications for mapping and appraising the intellectual world and its personae were direct and considerable. To reiterate, any notion of ancient authority in the present required the cultivation of a disposition of reverence and modesty; of skills in emulation, and the acceptance of the duty to transmit and foster. As a consequence specific forms of intellectual office, such as that of poet, rhetor or historian, as well as philosopher or critic, could be blurred by drawing on shared rhetoric of an appropriate persona for the appreciation and inculcation of ancienneté. In sum, as poets and orators had claims to having been the first philosophers, it could be a moot point how far the philosopher, critic or historian were engaged in different activities if, as I have indicated in the Introduction, the necessary persona for each could be couched in the same terms, to the same

The Seriousness of the Absurd

93

end of transmitting wisdom from some hallowed centre of authority. In contrast, a modern disposition resulted in, or helped create an insatiably curious and independent persona with an assumed duty to explore, challenge and then teach the new wisdom. Not surprisingly, the well-contested rhetoric of innovation and emulation in which Hobbes had been entangled remained central in the Scriblerian universe. Swift himself was sensitive to accusation of plagiarism and at the same time relentlessly exaggerated the intellectual independence of the modern philosopher as a mode of critique, not least because the innovative spirit might contaminate belief. He was not alone in fearing that new science could mean new religion.94 In debates touching religion, law and moral conduct innovation could still be anathema and modern virtue, Christian vice; so in A Tale of a Tub, the wandering sons of the father, the allegorical figures of the Western Church, are prohibited from augmenting the coats he has bequeathed them. Conversely, approbation or defence continued to be characteristically expressed in a vocabulary of conservation and recovery, albeit sometimes tearing the limits of plausibility; the first alterations Peter makes to his coat are made in the name of not really changing anything. In natural philosophy, however, departure from the inherited was increasingly becoming an emblem of intellectual significance and responsibility. Discoveries as such had something new about them, even if they only uncovered to human eyes stable aspects of God’s universe. A tolerance of innovation was implied by the success of the Baconian rejection of argument from authority and Newton’s Principia was a serious and largely ignored challenge to an indiscriminate faith in established wisdom. Certainly, the Hobbesian imperative to take everything back to first reckonings was far less questionable at the beginning of the eighteenth century than it had been when Hobbes first nailed his colours to the mast.95 An encomiastic biography of Descartes boasted that his chief intellectual virtue had been his courageous questing after the new.96 And thus also the combative young George Berkeley wrote: As for the characters of novelty and singularity, which some of the following notions may seem to bear, ’tis, I hope, needless to make any apology … He must surely be very weak, or very little acquainted with the sciences, who shall reject a truth, that is capable of demonstration for no other reason but because it’s newly known and contrary to the prejudices of mankind.97

With non-natural philosophy and with poetry, philosophy’s traditional competitor as an arbiter of truth and conveyor of wisdom, the situation was decidedly unsettled; the Scriblerian Parnell insisted that poetry depends upon imitation which is not stealing if taken from the ancients, but invention such as Milton’s is above the virtue of emulation.98 Beyond the Scriblerian circle, for Thomas Cook,

94

Hobbes, the Scriblerians and the History of Philosophy

the philosopher was principally a conduit for ‘things as they really are’.99 For him, transmissive duty went with the serio-ludere obligation to entertain and so his presented philosophic persona is uncertainly distinguished from poet or priest. And indeed, there is a complicating clerical sub-text here. At the end of the seventeenth century some Church of England clerics were intent on re-establishing a philosophical seriousness for the pulpit, in partial reaction to the sort of Epicurian materialism that would deny their office much intellectual scope. Bentley’s anti-Hobbist Boyle Lectures have already been noted in their attempts to get theological mileage out of Newton; Archbishop John Sharp had a particular interest in mathematics and probability, and both Joseph Butler and Samuel Clarke used sermons to debate issues of moral and natural philosophy, presenting modern Christianity (almost Thomistically) as a consummation of ancient natural philosophy.100 Yet, it remained the case that innovation and transmissive emulation were not really polar opposites. Rather, we have shades of emphasis presupposing a degree of bi-conditionality between two general images of the philosopher as legatee or discoverer, each open to prejudicial rhetorical re-description. The spiritual exercise of purging the mind of preconceptions and faith in authority could be taken as wilful amnesia, the abandonment of culture in the name of progress: ‘the severe reader’, wrote Swift in the guise of the modern philosopher, ‘may justly tax me as a writer of short memory, a deficiency to which the true modern cannot but of necessity be a little subject … [T]he learned in our illustrious age’, he continues, ‘deal entirely with invention, and strike all things out of themselves’. Thus forgetfulness becomes a condition for great wit. Again, ‘the freshest modern’ has an ‘absolute authority’, ‘a despotic power’ over all previous authors.101 So the opposition between innovation and inheritance if slippery, was not unaffected by polemical opportunism and confessional fear. This, in turn, could destabilize the concomitant accusations about plagiarism that seem to dog the uncertain status of originality, a point we will see exploited in Ars Pun-ica. The plagiarist was a ‘contemptible’ philosophical fraud, a thief in the night purporting to be holding forth the light;102 yet he could seem close to being only the modest and faithful servant of the established truth. In the first decade of the eighteenth century, the claims and counter-claims are particularly apparent in disputes over the direction of medicine and the responsibilities of the physician. Medicine had been profoundly text-driven and bound by learned authority, and although often marked by highly subtle and sophisticated theories of inference, frequently at a considerable distance from an empirical grounding in cases.103 The work of the Baconian Sydenham had done something to change this by bringing methodical examination within the scope of practice, and he was apparently so dismissive of learned authority that his recommended medical text was Don Quixote. The tensions, easily subject to

The Seriousness of the Absurd

95

being stretched on the rack of ancients and moderns, are captured most obviously in controversies over variolation for smallpox. 104 Ancients like Dr John Freind were suspicious of smallpox treatments that were alarmingly at odds with the wisdom of Hippocrates.105 As Philip Hilton has pointed out, even Galen had preferred the ancients to his own contemporaries.106 Moderns, however, embraced the treatment. But for a natural philosopher to advocate variolation does not give reliable indication of modernist leanings on other matters. Both the ‘Whig’ Bernard de Mandeville and the ‘Tory’ Arbuthnot were, as physicians, convinced moderns but with respect to other issues, Arbuthnot was happy to pillory moderns like Bentley and the critic Dennis for their Icarian pretension.107 We are still some years from Edward Young’s unqualified insistence that originality is the mark of genius as such.108 Be this as it may, in disputes about the practice and persona of the physician also lay the grounds for a further recasting of the philosophic persona. The claims and intellectual positioning of physicians such as Sydenham and Baglivi prepared the way for arguments such as Diderot’s, that the good physician was the true philosopher.109 These issues concerning departure from the authoritative, usually housed in the ubiquitous book, additionally help explain how the ancients’ and moderns’ topos overlapped with the theme of the pastoral and the moral duties of the poet cum philosopher. Patricia Carr Brückmann has emphasized the independent importance of the pastoral to those who came together as the Scriblerians, endorsing Paul Alpers view that the pastoral ideal was not simply modern urbs versus ancient rus, but was defined by the environment fit for the good shepherd, an exemplum of wisdom and virtue.110 Thus the dichotomy at the heart of the pastoral remains one of implied abuse or execution of office, and therefore it could be mapped onto the conceptions of intellectual office separating ancients from moderns, poets from philosophers, or indeed could function to reassert that the shepherd poet was a true philosopher.111 In the last analysis, then, chronology could be made a secondary issue in the distinction between ancients and moderns; to be subordinated to diverging conceptions of the intellectual persona, of the philosopher as transmitter, or as creator of truth. This is why in Gulliver’s Travels the only admired (chronological) modern is More, whose Utopia was ancient Platonic wisdom mediated in an ancient Lucianic idiom for the new world.112 I have dwelt on the intricacies and implications of the ancients and moderns dispute because it is a dominant theme of the Memoirs, used explicitly to create complementary reductive caricatures of the misguided philosophic persona. Yet, here the topos, is handled with an evenness quite absent in Swift’s The Battle of the Books; in the Memoirs, the Scriblerians created a balance of philosophical absurdity between which the reader is left with room for a critical engagement. Martinus’s father, Cornelius is a parody of the most dogmatic and recidivistic ancient, a man of such a superstitious veneration for antiquity that any contradic-

96

Hobbes, the Scriblerians and the History of Philosophy

tion between its texts was resolved simply by believing the last one he had read. If that had been the Epistles of Phalaris, he would have sounded like Sir William Temple.113 Cornelius’s attitude extended impartially to all spheres of knowledge: from education and philosophical doctrine, to diet and health. Hippocrates could never be mistaken. Hobbes had ruefully remarked that Harvey was perhaps unique in living to see his hypothesis about the circulation of the blood universally accepted, but Hobbes had known nothing of the ancient Scriblerus.114 It might be the case, concedes Cornelius, that the blood does now actually circulate around the body, but these are modern times. Moderns have extended the gut with gluttony and moderns have diminished the liver through drink; so it is still possible to ‘believe with Hippocrates, that the blood of the Ancients had a flux and a reflux from the heart, like a Tide’,115 obviously a much more satisfactory arrangement than the vulgar modern pumping of modern blood.116 With this typically Scriblerian overextension of insight into an egregious absurdity also goes an appropriate innocence about the authenticity of antiquity.117 The most unlikely artefacts are talismanic relics in a modern world that hardly exists for Cornelius except as an irritant and source of decadence. He has a shield of awesome age. It is locked in a cupboard in order to prevent the destruction of its ancient ‘Aerogo’ (i.e. rust) with modern rust (i.e. aerogo), or its removal by ‘Modern Polishing’; but he gets it out at the birth of his son, because Theocritus had said that the cradle of Hercules was a shield. He drops both it and young Martinus, crying only ‘My shield, my shield’, when he realizes that some modern busy-body maid has cleaned it. That the gleaming relic turns out to be nothing more than a damaged sconce or basin, only serves to make matters worse.118 Here, perhaps, is an indirect or grudging acceptance that Richard Bentley’s quest to sift out the spurious from the authentic, had, for all its dangers in execution, genuine validity. For Cornelius, ancient texts outweigh nursing experience on childbirth and infant nutrition.119 Games are restricted to those he believes were invented by the Lydians to distract children from the pangs of hunger.120 Learning to write was contingent on mastery of ‘Fabius’ Waxen Tables’.121 Cornelius’s persona then, is an extreme expression of what Paul Blum has helpfully called schulphilosophie, so important in the confessionally pure universities of Europe.122 The Scriblerian’s scholastic metaphysician is another example, one who bows to authority and stands, as John of Salisbury had put it, and Sir William Temple reiterated, like the dwarf upon the shoulders of giants.123 Truth is external, and having been discovered, intellectual integrity lies in its careful mediation. Taken to the Cornelian extreme, proper imitation is not creative emulation or adaptation, but ritualistic replication and defence against any alteration. There is learning enough in Cornelius, but neither judgement nor wisdom; he is more priest than philosopher, a Jesuit to the holy texts of Greece and Rome.

The Seriousness of the Absurd

97

The confessional association is significant, for it is the Jesuit and historian of philosophy René Rapin who, while formally denying mere servitude to antiquity (as one would, and he did not much like Homer), sounds uncomfortably close to Cornelius.124 Copernicus was worthless, Galileo a mere emulator of Aristotle. Descartes and Hobbes have but ‘rak’d together old fragments of Philosophy’; and Descartes must be respected only because of the eminence of those who have protected him. As a whole, modern philosophers are half-witted and destructive of morality and religion. Physics is a modern whim, natural philosophy a delusion; man can understand only what he has made, not God’s creation. What man makes par excellence is ancient books – it is a sign of evil not to trust ‘what is commonly receiv’d’.125 The tragi-comic aspect of this is that even in continuity there is change; the modern invention of the book in which the ancient can be preserved, is, as Swift had recognized, an invitation to read in new ways, or not really to read at all; the index both gave access to, and avoidance of, ancient wisdom.126 I have noted that as it was the volumes themselves that fought each other in the library of St James, any ancient victory was, by implicitly on modern terms.127 Keeping this in mind, it is little wonder that for all the ancients’ dominance, The Battle Fought Last Friday ends not with victory but with the outcome unknown. Martinus, first dropped on his head, and then the creation of his father’s manic enthusiasm for the antique, is very much a reactive modern; father and son express the contradictions of cultural continuity that can see an inversion of values. It is a theme as old as Plato’s Republic in which the decline of the ideal polis into tyranny is explained by just such generational counter-reactions to the persona more suited to ruling it. Martinus, hid his treatise on modern poetry (Peri Bathous) from Cornelius for some years because of his father’s predilection for the ancients.128 He is certainly prepared to use antiquity, but his assumption seems always to be that of a giant leaving his boot marks on the heads of dwarves as he marches off to discover new lands and invent new theorems. His intellectual ambition remains largely unfulfilled; for, on the one hand, he wants to reduce all knowledge to communicable principles for general human betterment, yet on the other, he has a mind that struggles helplessly to comprehend more than disjointed material particulars. It is the very failing of which Sidney had accused the historian. Thus as a lad, Martinus had an immediate appreciation of individual lord mayors, but the idea of a lord mayor was beyond his grasp. This conceptual myopia anticipates one of the principal aspects of his philosophical mal-functioning, his reduction of metaphors to material particulars. Exacerbating the disjunction, Cornelius instructed him that as a logician he must forget what must be learned in natural philosophy – a Scriblerian attestation to a world of contradictory philosophical priorities and procedures, one in which natural philosophers seemed indifferent to providing the cohering explanatory principle for their work demanded by metaphysicians.129

98

Hobbes, the Scriblerians and the History of Philosophy

Cornelius hires Conradus Crambe as a companion for his son, by which the Scriblerians effectively complete their negative image of modern philosophy. If Martinus comprehends only individual things, Crambe understands only the words and is satisfied if he can play with them and cannot fathom or recognize the particular. This may, as I have indicated, allude to the difference between conveying general, philosophical wisdom and being trapped in the philological detail of modern scholarship, but it has also been taken as playing with the impasse between realism and nominalism, res and verba. More immediately, it may have been Berkeley’s recent critique of Lockean language theory, and the pathology of abstraction that drove Cornelius to distraction.130 If, as John Sitter argues, the problems of comprehending a Lord Mayor do refer to Lockean philosophy, it suggests that in his failure to master the abstract concept, Martinus is at least free of this worst of Berkeleyan philosophical sins. 131 With serio-ludere humour it is not always possible to be sure of the target. But, to use Berekeley’s apposite image, given the dust that philosophers kick up into their own eyes only to complain they cannot see, it is little wonder that the old and well-worn Martinus, to whom we are initially introduced, is a victim of the philosophical pathology of melancholia.132 Desperate to advance humanity through his schemes, Martinus is isolated; and imagining himself as the sum of teachable knowledge, is unable to sort wood from trees; he is, in Hobbesian terms, a bird entrapped in lime-twigs.133 There is, of course, a Scriblerian explanation for the balance of intellectual inadequacy personified by Martinus and Crambe, and it extends from the plausible into the absurd. Just as people who have one damaged sense enjoy compensating strength in others, so it is with the mental faculties. We are reassured that this is no bad thing, unless the afflicted try to make any sort of judgement, the faculty of which, by implication, is at the unteachable centre of true philosophy.134 In sum, between father and son, the philosophic persona is a transmutation of the hidebound into the hubristic. To appreciate them as tragi-comic figures is itself to attest to a philosophical awareness, for they map the borders of philosophy from beyond its margins, secure in the delusion that they occupy the epicentre.

Modern Philosophic Propensities Much the same image of the ancient is developed to help shape the persona of Dr Fossile in Three Hours After Marriage, though his function is also to satirize additional dimensions of philosophy. Fossile is based on the collector and virtuoso Dr Woodward who did indeed proudly possess an ancient shield (at the time, at least a hundred years old) and whose theories of God’s planting fossils to provide an aerogo of age to the world had earlier been demolished with a merciless courtesy by Arbuthnot.135 Fossile is himself an ancient bachelor who

The Seriousness of the Absurd

99

lives with his niece, Phoebe Clinket, an ink-stained, quill-sprouting compulsive poet, (Susanna Centlivre?) who scribbles her stuff on a desk carried on the back of her servant and is desperate to impress the city’s leading modern critic, Sir Tremendous ( John Dennis).136 Fossile wants a son only as a legatee for his collection of objects. Clinket needs something to write about. On stage then, are parodic personae of philosopher–physician, poet and critic, and the dialogue carries various allusions and references to philosophers ancient and modern.137 The modern world invades Fossile’s house immediately after his marriage in the form of Plotwell and Underplot, two young men in competition to bed the bride, Mrs Townley before Fossil does. Mrs Townley, a party to their schemes, is herself an image of modern moral laxity, already being married and with a child, of whom her new husband knows nothing. As Fossile vacillates between jealous panic and besotted naiveté, the young men manage to intrude themselves disguised as Trojan monsters for the collection, Underplot as a very mobile stuffed alligator or crocodile (he is called both), Plotwell as a perambulating Egyptian mummy. Fossile has trouble unmasking either. But rest assured, the play has a happy ending, as he is left holding the baby – for the collection. Phoebe Clinket finally finds something worth writing about: the plot for the play that has just ended.138 The epilogue reconciles the audience to the play in the modern, as opposed to the ancient way. The indiscriminate gathering of what purports to be ancient is treated as a manifestation of the wider propensity towards eclecticism that itself could take differing forms: collecting all information as a sort of under-labouring for more philosophical endeavour ( John Aubrey); using differing theories depending on circumstances and problems (Walter Charleton); and dealing with natural phenomena on a case by case basis, the inductive experimentation that regards most theories as premature, and the search for underlying principles as beyond the scope of natural philosophy (Robert Boyle).139 Earlier satire of the Royal Society, mostly in the wake of Hudibras had exploited its diversity of activity and approaches to natural philosophy, and in making no discriminations between forms of eclecticism, the Scriblerians operated in the same way, though without really targeting the Society itself. What they did was to create, as it were, an omnium gatherum persona, industrious, curious, fetishistic and uncritical. Fossile has his collection of antiquities to be sure, ‘the spoils of Quarries and Coal-pits’; but he also has serpents, salamanders and a crocodile, or thinks he has, and also thinks he has no rope, just when he needs it. Only a curiosity will find a place simply because he finds it curious.140 What he has is not a collection but a heap. He is also a modern physician, keen enough on seeing his patients, if only he could make the time, but when he cannot, confident in prearranged treatments (‘Give them all Quieting Draughts’) that can be used to cure in advance of any

100

Hobbes, the Scriblerians and the History of Philosophy

knowledge of cases; an amalgam of Dr Woodward, the iatro-mathematician Dr Cheyne, and perhaps that other bachelor, physician philosopher, John Locke.141 But the abstract model of a type is more important here than tentacles of personal allusion. Where he needs to be more empirically attuned, Fossile relies on the authority of a formula. As with Martinus, an eclectic curiosity is tied to a simple faith in a priori principles. Fossile is then, an intellectual contradiction, as a collector an unprincipled eclectic, as physician an impatient and a priori dogmatist. Thus he brings together the diverging propensities of philosophy prejudicially deemed modern. Fossile’s style of practice might even have been learned from Martinus, who boasts in the Memoirs, it was he who first taught modern physicians to cure patients by intuition, at a distance or ‘without looking on them at all’.142 Martinus by the very range of his interests and discoveries, from the construction of giant lighthouses measuring longitude and the transportation of fresh air aiding health, to the uncovering of the cause of all causation, shows himself to be an innocent theoretical gatherer with as much faith in astrological conjunctions as he has in his theories of anatomy and poetic truth. By the time we reach The Dunciad, the figure of Martinus has changed a little. He is not alienated, as he is at the beginning of the Memoirs; he revels in his ideal environment, an empire of intellectual ineptitude in parody of Virgil’s The Aeneid. Still an enthusiastic modern, given to fantastical and confused explanations, Martinus also occasionally takes on a more positive role in Pope’s attack on the modern scholarship that threatens a dark cosmos of impending dullness.143 Martinus makes comments on contemporary dunces that render them comically mythic, or almost nonexistent.144 He offers to ensure poetic immortality by elucidating (at predictable length) any obscurities in the poem, for ‘a dull poet can never express himself otherwise than by halves, or imperfectly’.145 It is possibly a play on the Greek adage pleon hemisu pantos, and provides an inverted recognition of the importance of aposiopesis. He worries at philological niceties, not quite grasping the point of what he discusses; and despite numerous earlier disagreements with Bentley, Martinus ends up as his admiring commentator.146 In dullness misplaced learning and misused philosophy are united. In book 4, Pope’s verse condemnation of the strands of modern philosophy come together. On the one hand, there is mindless narrow empiricism: I tell the naked fact without disguise, And to excuse it need but shew the prize.

And: O! would the Sons of Men once think their Eyes And Reason giv’n them but to study Flies! See Nature in some partial narrow shape, And let the Author of the whole escape:

The Seriousness of the Absurd

101

On the other, We nobly take the high Priori Road, And reason downward, til we doubt of God: Make Nature still incroach upon his plan; And shove him off as far as e’er we can: Thrust some Mechannic Cause into his place; 147

A few lines later ‘the learned Scriblerus produces a ‘very whimsical’ accusation that priestcraft is to blame for the depredations of modern education. It is a prelude to Pope’s own belief that education is corrupted by being limited to words in schools, systems in universities and party-labels in the world, all ‘concurring’ in narrowing understanding and inducing intellectual slavery.148 That education should be moral and humane, suited for engagement in a rich culture and for continuing civil intercourse is a clear implication from what, according to Pope, it is not.149 What matters in this context, however, is less the particulars of educational reform than, as Maynard Mack has indicated, the proper end that Dullness would obscure and destroy.150 Dullness would obliterate any intellectual activity worthy of the name. Martinus the polymath needs to be just that to make clear the spreading blanket of cultural decadence. As Martinus and what he stands for merges bad writing with bad philosophy, Pope is able to deploy the techniques of reductio ad absurdem and ad hominen dismmissal to the reform of overlapping fields of activity. Through all this Scriblerian play with ancient authority, modern inquisitiveness, eclecticism and speculative enquiry, we are led to the question of what philosophical knowledge amounts to, by what means is it to be transmitted and to whom and at what price. Here we approach what has been given most attention in Scriblerian philosophic satire.

4 IDENTITY, MATERIALITY AND THE LANGUAGE OF PHILOSOPHICAL ABSURDITY

Identity, Persona and the Scope of Office The Scriblerian satire of the philosophy of human identity has been beautifully explicated by Christopher Fox.1 But what he treats as a playful engagement with Locke’s conception of the person need situating in a wider, if nebulous, context of debate that itself helps explain philosophy’s uncertain and contested shape in the early eighteenth century, and the entanglements with what are now distinct disciplines. The very notion of a philosophical persona occurred against the background of a widespread conception of the moral and social world as constituted by personae with spheres of responsibility (above, pp. 7–11). Some of the uncomfortable implications of this now need explicating. The reliance on a conditional and contextual identity rather than an absolute, fixed and, in Berkeley’s expression, abstracted one, constituted a world of what Samuel Pufendorf had called entia moralia. It was a world exhibiting a distrustful awareness of wayward mutability, for a persona was distinct from the relative solidity of physical individuality. On the one side, there was the fear that anyone might make a fraudulent claim on official being and on the other, the belief that people failing in their various personae suffered a radical moral and conceptual transformation. As a corollary, the authority or validity of what one said was frequently a function of an official standing: speaking was speaking as. In many cases, a persona’s authority to act could be located within stable institutional environments. But these and the reassuring trappings of social office, such as ceremony, regalia and oath, were never totally secure. Monarchs could be deposed, wives divorced and justification for such actions was through much the same critical vocabulary (see above, pp. 9–10). Concomitantly, conduct in one office could be fluently discussed by reference to another. Thus, in his John Bull satires, Arbuthnot had used marriage and infidelity as an elaborate parodic metaphor for contractarian political rhetoric and what is now deemed resistance theory; and as we will see, the account of Martinus’s own marriage was used as a synecdoche for problems of office and the inadequacies of philosophy in dealing with them.2 – 103 –

104

Hobbes, the Scriblerians and the History of Philosophy

Because posited intellectual offices were identified largely through the sort of discourse appropriate to them, a readily available bogus and obscurantist technical vocabulary could be the sign of protean illegitimacy. What was crucial, yet so troublesome, was the matter of distinguishing and keeping stable moral personae without separating them from, or mistaking them for, the physical beings that manifested them. Locke had moved comfortably within this world of official personae. He had regarded Cicero’s De officiis, a paradigmatic discussion of officia and personae, as a model of moral reasoning, and much of the Second Treatise of Government is about the transformation of the persona of the ruler into the tyrant/rebel and presenting the casuistic case of what might be done about it: whereas the magistrate or prince justly demanded obedience, in becoming a tyrant rebel, all right was lost. Similarly for Locke, central to the question of human identity was the importance of not confusing the general categories in terms of which specific identities were discussed; physical, material identity needed to be distinguished from moral being, for what might be said of an individual under the aegis of one, might not hold for the other. His theory of the self, the person, as the sum of propensities held together by a spatio-temporal consciousness, and as conceptually distinct from the human body, as a more stable physiological system was, then, a partial specification; and it proved disturbing in a world of acute sensitivity to moral mutability, as it could be seen as exacerbating the socially unreliable aspects of what it was to be human.3 To complicate matters further he also wrote, conventionally enough, of the soul as some inner core of humanity. Thus there was a perceived tension or ambivalence of relationship between distinct ways of conceiving human individuality, as physical being, and/or soul or conscious self, raising the question of whether a soul could be shared by two physical beings.4 The established concern with human transformation and the contingency of legitimate being meant that reflections and apparent allusions to Locke during the early 1690s might actually have been to others, including his erstwhile medical tutor Thomas Willis, to Montaigne or to Sextus Empiricus. Thus the author of Scarronnides remarked on our being ‘such motly pie-bald things’ in our actions and conceptions that ‘we differ as much or more from ourselves than we doe from others’, a fact that has led some to believe we have two souls.5 But for the reference to two souls (postulated by Willis), this reads like a direct quotation from Montaigne, who himself invokes the authority of Seneca.6 But Locke’s theories became a more persistent point of reference through the Clark–Collins debate of the early eighteenth century. What might have been an allusion to Montaigne in the 1690s could, a decade or so later, be directed to Locke. His popularizer Anthony Collins held that as consciousness varied on a daily basis, so too did identity, to which Samuel Clarke responded that this was to make identity both unacceptably unstable and

Identity, Materiality and the Language of Philosophical Absurdity

105

external to being.7 The details and precise meaning of Locke’s theory, and the occasional confusion of the categories through which it was discussed are not directly the issues here, but rather, its general suggestiveness for the Scriblerians. For the topos of human identity and mutability, physical, official and psychological proved an irresistible Ovidian opportunity for them. Its centrality is even acknowledged in the much later transformations of Martinus into crow, goose and woman.8 It is a correlate of their preoccupation, to which I will shortly turn, with materialism; the material world was matter in motion. Swift, for example, who played much with multiple personae, including the ethical persona of the satirist, touches presciently on protean instability in elaborating on the importance of fashion in society: the clothes we wear move independently and are the reality of being.9 So too, Scriblerian satire presents much of reality as an arbitrary confection of what can be encoded in words. This is manifest in Three Hours After Marriage, a play that Brückmann has called ‘a tissue of Ovidian allusion’, driven by linguistic confusion, and in which the assumed costumes of crocodile and mummy are taken, by Fossile, to be the reality the audience knows they are not. The play’s editors have also rightly emphasized an almost surrealist presence of metamorphosis.10 Mutability is also ironically celebrated through the analysis of mendacity in The Art of Political Lying. Yet Annus mirabilus is, perhaps, the most informative, if laboured, Scriblerian fragment in this context. In one way, it concerns the double standards of socialized sexuality, in a more focused fashion than in Three Hours After Marriage. Changes in almost everything are enthusiastically awaited by Martinus as a necessary effect of the conjunction of Jupiter, Mars and Saturn. The ‘philosophy of this transformation’ (presumably code for the creation myths of Plato and Ovid) recognizes that humans began as hermaphrodites, and following the planetary conjunction, the sexes will be transposed: ‘the slighted maid shall grow into an imperious gallant, and reward her undoer with a big belly and a bastard’. This will usher in a redress in the unbalanced treatment of the sexes. ‘It is hardly possible to imagine the revolutions that this wonderful phaenomenon will occasion over the face of the earth’. Vows of chastity made under the auspices of one sexual identity will be nullified, an allusion to the much debated casuistry of oath-taking, and the doctrine that obligation was contingent on the official identities of the relevant parties to an oath. Again, the Turkish harem will become a court of admiring young men and ‘The Pope must undergo a new groping’. The implications of these physical changes for relationships of office and moral personae do not, then, escape Martinus’s joyous gaze, for whom transformations are largely for the better, the ‘solemn operations of nature are subjects of contemplation, not ridicule’. Prelates will nurse and hang linen, such offices must be occupied with the people of greatest probity. As it stands, the clergy will have no trouble coping with petticoats, but men in general should remember

106

Hobbes, the Scriblerians and the History of Philosophy

that ‘they are become retromingent and [should] not by inadvertency lift up against walls and posts’.11 In this most thorough liquifaction of material identity, language and textual instability are both untouched, but as I shall illustrate below, in Ars Pun-ica, the function of punning is to ensure constantly adaptive change, both in spoken words and with respect to the apparent fixity of language in texts.12 Virgilius Resturatus also illustrates the illusion of a fixed textual identity. Martinus’s own Bentleyan restoration of the true Virgil is little less than a creation. He, being an ‘excellent critic’, will recover The Aeneid to its original sense by removing the countless defects and the spurious readings in almost every verse in every bound version he has ever set eyes upon.13 He proceeds to offer a foretaste of what becomes a new and bizarre poem announced by the inadvertent scatological pun on fato/flatu suggesting not that providence but flatulence blew Aeneas to Italy.14 So the implications of Bentleyan philological principles (to be called golden laws in the Ars Pun-ica) are made manifest: in the name of preservation and discovery of an essence is the erosion of meaning and the destruction of the past’s value for the future. The exploitation, then, of some of the imagined implications of Locke’s theories of identity and the debates about them fits into a broader pattern of social awareness and a ready appreciation of the symbolic associations of human instability. The Scriblerians prefigure the centrality of the issue in the Memoirs. Martinus flees to London because of his fascination with a seasonally changing birthmark. Crambe then happily argues and puns, probably with Locke more than Montaigne in mind, that ‘Individuality could hardly be praedicated of any man, for it was commonly said that a man is not the same as he was, that madmen are beside themselves, and drunken men come to themselves; which shews, that few men have that most valuable logical endowment, Individuality’. 15 Later still, the Scriblerians report on Martinus’s quixotic quest after the seat of the soul in various parts of the anatomy in order to cure insanity.16 It is in the context of this pursuit of madness by the arguably insane, that the Free Thinkers (Collins is certainly a partial target here) write to him, drawing explicitly on doctrines of continuity of office and of variable official standing to outline common confusions between conceptual and physical identity. They remark on ‘the great noise about this Individuality: how a man is conscious of himself that he is the same Individual as he was twenty years ago; not-withstanding the flux state of the particles of matter that compose his body’.17 The ground is well prepared for the most bizarre and notorious episodes of Martinus life, (tastefully omitted from later printings of the Memoirs);18 they recount his falling in love, his marriage and its subsequent dissolution in which soul, personal, corporeal and moral identity collide.19 And at the epicentre of

Identity, Materiality and the Language of Philosophical Absurdity

107

this whirling confusion stands Martinus, the young modern philosopher, as victim and hopeless guide. In 1708 Judith and Helena, a pair of young Siamese twins joined at the back, had been brought to London for display in a freak show and for a while were the talk of the town, as they had been of Europe.20 This point of verisimilitude gives a particularly unsettling flavour to the inventive unreality of Martinus in love. It is accentuated further by the whole episode of courtship being related in a pretentiously high style, dripping with laboured allusions to ancient poetry and mythology and studded with portentous exclamations (‘Alas!’ ‘O ye spirits of Antiquity’, ‘Heavens’ ‘behold a new Disaster!’).21 The exclamation mark is worn to a thread as subject matter and the incongruity of burlesque bring together again the ancients and moderns.22 At an unspecified date ‘our youthful philosopher’, wandering in the vicinity of Whitehall, gains access to Mr Randal’s curiosity show replete with lions, leopards, a porcupine from the land of Prester John, a ‘Negroe Prince’ (Ebn-HaiPaw-Waw) on a palfrey, a Dwarf and sundry monsters from antiquity, including ‘the Man-mimicking mantegers’. There Martinus beholds Indamora and Lindamira ‘Bohemian Sisters, whose common parts of Generation, had so closely allied them, that Nature seem’d here conspired with Fortune, that their lives should run in an eternal Parallel’.23 Initially, he is transported by both. What others paid to ogle as a monstrosity, Martinus perceives as a profusion of beauty.24 As he is shortly to write to Lindamira in trying to persuade her to withdraw from Mr Randal’s show and the gaze of the vulgar, ‘Nature forms her wonders for the Wise, and such a Master-piece she could design for none but a Philosopher’.25 Martinus’s intentions to marry, however, constitute a threat to Mr Randal’s income from what he regards as his property, his monstrous slaves. In writing to Lindamira, Martinus is betrayed by his intermediary, Randal’s ‘perfidious Dwarf ’ and led into a trap. Entering a dark room and hoping to be embraced by the four arms of his lover, he is instead confronted by two balls of fire, the eyes of a Cat-a-mountain, which attacks him, then ravages the twins when they bravely attempt a rescue.26 Their courage notwithstanding, the damage done to their noses is enough to keep them out of the exhibition for three weeks. To cut an elliptical story short, Martinus gets away and, from then on, is able to send letters to Lindamira, fully expressing his love. This, however, provokes deep distress in Indamora, with whom he has become altogether less enamoured. She then, paradoxically, is obliged to promote her sister’s lover out of her own passionate jealousy. Thus, states the narrative, we have ‘as extraordinary a Conjunction of Passions as of Persons: Love had reconcil’d himself to his mortal foes, to Philosophy in Martin, and to Jealousy in Indamora’.27 An escape from Randal’s imprisonment is planned. In the process, however, the mantiger attempts to rape the women as, in déshabillé they are stuck in a window try-

108

Hobbes, the Scriblerians and the History of Philosophy

ing to get onto a rope ladder Crambe has provided. A desperate fight between Martinus and the ‘Sylvan Ravisher’ ensues, each throwing portions of animals or mythic beasts (unicorn, antilope and elk) at the other. Despite the monster wielding the ‘pond’rous Thigh-bone of a Giant’, Martinus is eventually victorious. He hurls the hand of a great sea-monster at the mantiger and kills it. The manner of the killing is reminiscent of the way in which John Bull murders his first wife in Arbuthnot’s earlier allegorical satire (a wine bottle to the head in a domestic dispute); and it prefigures the more important parallel between the satires. Meanwhile as the stricken monster dies, the fenestrated women watch, like Helen we are told, overseeing a contest for her love before Troy.28 At this point in the adventure we must pause for a word on Martinus, the monstrous and what Swift had called the ‘monster-mongers’.29 This has been touched on as a figurative encapsulation of the evils and absurdity of Hobbesian philosophy. But more needs saying in the present context for monstrosity carries such a weight of satiric invention and metaphorical association for the Scriblerians. Fear of human alteration through abuse of office could conventionally be depicted through a symbolic attribution of monstrosity; the office-holding persona turned tyrant was a hideous moral malformation, a point on which writers like Edward Sexby and John Milton had dwelt at length.30 The Scriblerians provide a curious counterpoint to this. Allusions and references to, and a superficially innocent acceptance of the reality of monstrous curiosities, is an interlaced motif in their work. Consider Fossile and his collection and the origin of the species in hermaphroditism, a theme we will see played with again in the Ars Pun-ica. Broadly, we may say that at one extreme, a belief in monsters expressed a fascination with the alien, exotic and curious, where putative monstrosity could be a function of one’s ignorance and inadequate descriptive vocabulary. At the other, we find the monstrosity of physical mutation or unnatural construction. At both extremes, the topoi of ancients and moderns, science and superstition played an evocative part. Antiquity had bequeathed a pantheon of monsters that could be rendered coherent with rationality principally by being chained to a symbolic plane of discourse, a point recognized by the Scriblerians in making the linguistically obtuse Martinus insist upon ‘a literal application’.31 Travellers’ tales had added to the mix, while modern discovery was at once engaged in debunking and construing the alien in monstrous terms. Just before the Scriblerians set to work, William Dampier’s A Voyage to New Holland (1703–9) and A New Voyage Around the World (1697) had been printed. In publishing them, Dampier assumed the persona of the natural philosopher, writing at one with the descriptive principles of Royal Society language, collecting fossils, some to be given to Dr Woodward, yet also relying on the familiar trope of paralipsis, the expression of almost uncomprehending wonder to convey the alien, to create interest in new lands, and no doubt in his own work.32

Identity, Materiality and the Language of Philosophical Absurdity

109

It is in a perversion of this adventuring philosophical inquisitiveness that Martinus operates – recall his unfortunate spying on a thigh for a transforming pomegranate. We are given only glimpses of his travels and geographical discoveries; yet as Gulliver’s would be, his are populated with the strange and monstrous, paralipsis reinforces the tension between his scientific pretensions and his gullibility. For Michel de Montaigne, the notion that other animals might have been the first philosophers was a symbolic affirmation that philosophy begins in contemplation of the strange.33 For Martinus, however, in what would be his Account of the Origins of the Sciences, an account, it should go without saying, ‘that is entirely my own’, the hypothesis that the beginnings of all learning and philosophy lay with a range of creatures, part beast and human, is to be taken literally. There is a specific target here, directly relevant to the question of the physiological dimension of human identity. It also illustrates the thin line between satirizing someone and taking them seriously. In a curious admixture of natural philosophy and philology, Edward Tyson had set out to explore the ‘Nexus of the Animal and Rational’, to compare the anatomies of homo sapiens, pigmies, apes and the orang-utan (the wild men of Borneo).34 Published (hardly coincidentally) in the very year Martinus set out on his travels, discovering the lost empire of the Pygmies, Tyson’s anatomy was a path-breaking and largely ignored work; but it carried as an appendix a philological essay in Bentley’s idiom. Tyson was under no illusions about the difficulties in sifting ancient myth from knowledge, for the ancients had referred indiscriminately to satyrs, pygmies, drills, sphinges and apes.35 His modesty notwithstanding, an almost Cornelian faith in ancient wisdom led him to conclude that the ancients knew directly of sphinges (really ‘Apes or Monkey-kind’) and half-human, thus part rational satyrs.36 All these creatures were to prove fair game for the Scriblerians (perhaps additionally because Tyson’s work was dedicated to the whig Lord Somers). Richard Nash argues that the whole point of Tyson’s analysis, to distinguish the rational from the animal, is parodically inverted through the Scriblerian focus on ‘monstrous alterity’.37 This perhaps is a shade unfair to Tyson, whose anatomy stresses similarity and whose ‘Dedicatory Epistle’ insists on continuities of form and identity of humans, even with plants. The Scriblerians were, however, decidedly unfair, but so blandly straight-faced is the satiric reductio of innocent inferential muddle that according to Nash, Ashley Montague, in promoting Tyson’s significance, cited the Scriblerians’ Origin of the Sciences as taking Tyson seriously.38 The anatomy might well have been taken seriously; but the philology was taken as a gift. As Martinus had discovered (no trace of Tyson’s modesty here), all the sciences that might putatively define a uniquely human capacity, Tyson’s ‘Reason’, were really the creation of freaks and monsters. Among the originators are man-tigers and the tailed, hirsute (therefore obviously bearded) Sylvans who philosophize without language, being all semi-human persona and

110

Hobbes, the Scriblerians and the History of Philosophy

no proposition, the oddity of which the breathless Martinus never pauses to consider.39 Philosophy begins, as it may end in absurdity. This resonates directly with the episode at which we paused. The scene for the young philosopher’s sexual awakening was a curiosity show populated by the merely exotic, the physically malformed, and the charlatanically fabricated, all being exhibited by Randal, ‘The Monster-master’, on an equal footing before the enraptured young enquirer. The show was a veritable exhibition of Tysonian philology, or perhaps a symbolic representation of the mixed inheritance of antiquity, in which damaged, difficult and fabricated texts might lie side by side in a modern library. Be this as it may, all aspects of monstrosity are brought together at the climax of the philosopher’s escape from Mr Randal’s exhibition. As his betrothed and her sister watch, Martinus kills one monster, a descendent of the first philosophers, with a portion of another, dredged from the seas over which the philosopher must travel to discover. There is a decidedly absurdist irony in his victory being over myth, superstition and physical impossibility. Martinus does escape, carrying the twins to a clergeyman in The Fleet and is married that evening, only to have Randal take him to court. What follows owes something to Lucian’s ‘Double Indictment’, in which Lucian as ‘The Syrian’ is tried for abusing oratory and philosophical dialogue, but the whole is more focused.40 The descent into the pits of the law allows all established dimensions of issues of identity to be used to parody both the workings of the courts and philosophical enquiry. Even the soul, that putatively stable essence of the human being, mutates through division. For in the court, the ancient doctrine of traducianism (that the soul of the father is divided and transmitted in procreation, like a sort of theological gavelkind) is treated as an established fact of nature.41 Issues from various forms of discourse are as hopelessly interwoven as the characters themselves, the plausible being taken as seriously as the discredited.42 Can slaves marry without the consent of their masters? Does monstrosity incapacitate a marriage? If Martinus is married to Lindamira, does he rape Indamora? If so, any attempt to fulfil connubial duty is an abuse of marital office. Is a wife obliged to live with a concubine? Randal’s counsel fails to make a case on all counts and so Randal institutes proceedings against Martinus for what again is an entailed abuse of office in the attempt to adhere to its requirements: either Martinus commits bigamy or incest. Simultaneously, Randal designs to alienate Indamora from Martinus, even marrying her while she sleeps, to one of his own creatures, ‘the black Prince’ Ebn-Hai-Paw-Waw. Thus Martinus turns plaintiff.43 It is during these proceedings that Martinus’s enquiries into the soul become vital. Drawing on his converse with Free Thinkers, he argues on his authority as a philosopher that the soul is located in the generative organs and thus Indamora–Lindamira is in the truest sense ‘one individual Person’; this most obvious allusion to Locke, or debates about him, is followed by the broader play on the

Identity, Materiality and the Language of Philosophical Absurdity

111

problematics of the fugitive persona. If the twins are two persons, they nevertheless make one wife.44 Effectively, this is to treat marriage as a synechdoche for the problems of office as such, and may hark back as much to Arbuthnot’s allegorical use of marriage to discuss politics, as it does to Locke. Either way, Randal’s counsel is outraged: to locate the rational soul in the organ of generation would (as the Scriblerians distorted Tyson) identify humanity with bestiality, confusing a pre- with a post-lapsarian condition. Moreover, if one soul is common to both, then consent to the marriage makes Martinus a bigamist, if there is not a double consent, a rapist; the strict semantic paradox of marital office restated. The initial judgement was that both Martin’s and the black Prince’s marriages were sound, but as this pleased neither Martinus, nor Randal (as if that would matter in a court of law), on appeal both marriages were dissolved on the grounds of natural and legal absurdity.45

Materialism Martinus’s determined search for the physical location of the soul brings us directly to the fear of materialism, the modern Epicureanism, as Thomas Burnet called it, that Brean Hammond and Atillio Brilli have both shown to be anathema to the Scriblerans. For them, the world consisted of more than could ever be reduced to its material constituents.46 The philosopher’s responsibilities, therefore, went beyond material or mechanical causal analysis, propositions advanced through the satiric affirmation of their materialist antitheses. Thus Martinus attempts to deal with moral and social failings as effects of physiological malfunctioning or malformation. The cringing and bowing of flatterers is apparently caused by overdeveloped flexor muscles and can be remedied ‘by being tied down upon a tree by the back, like the children of the Indians.’47 Poor reasoning is attributed by the Free Thinkers to blockages in the syllogistical canals of the brain, for they argued, the various intellectual faculties were located in its different sections – hypotheses which now removed from their satiric point are important in physiological epistemology and neurology. So a simple idea is moved by the animal spirits from one canal into another, and when two such ‘Canals disembogue themselves into one’, they form a proposition and when ‘two propositional channels empty themselves into a third, they form a Syllogism or a Raciocination’. The memory operates in another distinct department.48 A further materialistic fantasy was mooted by Arbuthnot to Swift: Martinus could be made to invent a pathological cartography in which diseases are placed like cities on a map, with symptoms being streets and suburbs.49 Perhaps most importantly for the Scriblerians was the concern that materialism bred an unnecessary scepticism and encouraged the slide into atheism.50 This might not take the form of an actual disbelief in God’s existence, but was a

112

Hobbes, the Scriblerians and the History of Philosophy

rejection of human dependence on divinity that the philosopher should always recognize, accepting God’s relevance to philosophical enquiry. The Dunciad has already been cited as articulating this mix of anxieties. Berkeley’s Principles ends by couching the matter in the vocabulary of office; contemplation of the immaterial, of God and our duty is the end (that is telos) of philosophy.51 Arbuthnot in a late poem ruminates on ‘worldly sages’ like Zeno and Epicurus whose systems were false and delusory because the ‘towring thoughts of vain philosophy’ neither recognized nor accepted a dependence on immaterial, mysterious divinity.52 It was a restatement of the Erasmian paradox of philosophic wisdom as folly. There is then, more than a matter of ignoratio elenchi in Martinus’s Epicurian search for the physical location of the soul; it is an enterprise of both theological and philosophical enormity. Having no better conception of the immaterial, rational soul, or philosophy than he does of the abstract concept of a Lord Mayor, all he can do is rummage though human anatomy. Descartes’s argument about the significance of the pineal gland will come to mind as the butt of this satire and indeed Martinus hypothesizes on the various shapes the gland must assume depending on the sort of soul inside it. Yet there is more at stake than a parody of Cartesianism. John Sitter has suggested that central to the Scriblerians satire of materiality is Berkeley’s forthright critique of a ‘doctrine of abstraction’. Berkeley argued that the notion of pure substance was as arbitrary as the reification of accidents independently of substance that the materialists had dismissed, and in Hobbes’s case, ridiculed.53 And Berkeley had deftly explained the incoherence as a consequence of linguistic confusion typical of philosophers and Locke in particular.54 This has a contextual immediacy as Berkeley became a protégé of Arbuthnot’s, but the implications go further, as both Locke’s and Berkeley’s arguments abridged longstanding problems.55 There was an established tradition of Christian Epicurianism and the Scriblerians touched on theological and philosophical propensities to reification that went well beyond it. Attempts to predicate the soul had persistently treated it as an object, or even a socialized identity having an office within the body, such as that of a judge or an inner philosopher. The misleading inadequacies of the language traditionally used to make conjectures about the soul are inevitably subject to the gravitational pull of the Scriblerian intellect, and so Martinus takes them with an ingeniously dumb literality; linguistic ‘abstractions’ are physical realities. Sometimes he believed that the soul was in the brain, sometimes the stomach or the heart. Afterwards he thought it absurd to confine that sovereign Lady to one apartment, which made him infer that she shifted it according to the several functions of life: The Brain was her Study … the Stomach her Kitchen. But as he saw several offices of her life went on at the same time, he was forc’d to give up this Hypothesis also. He now

Identity, Materiality and the Language of Philosophical Absurdity

113

conjectured it was more for the dignity of the Soul to perform several operations by her little Ministers, the Animal Spirits56

Absurdity begets absurdity; what, by implication, is needed is a rejection of a materialist hypothesis in order to contemplate a conception of the soul and a recognition of the inherent inadequacy of the language used to do so. For the Scriblerians, Epicurian materialism encouraged a further philosophical error that returns us to their play with eclecticism and ‘the high Priori Road’. Philosophy as merely material gathering and analysis led to the dangerous misconception that theoretical and practical knowledge could be collapsed into naming, and naming sold as understanding, taxonomy as truth. In drawing attention to this fallacious trajectory, they also provided satiric counterpoint to contemporary understandings of artistic criticism, and even what had been promoted in the newspapers of the time. The correct technical terms and only technical terms should be used for all purposes, from advertising for lost dogs to admiring a painting.57 Public discourse, as John Dunton had put it, should be one extended syllogism.58 Because philosophical argument was always appropriate and knowledge of philosophy always sufficient, it could become an eminently saleable commodity, to be peddled in a way not dissimilar to Lucian’s conceit of a market place for philosophies. The Scriblerian reductio of materialism, very much like Eachard’s parody of Hobbes, now reads as a prophetic synopsis of some of the more foolish hyperbole of management theory: the right principles have only to be learned and applied irrespective of experience and organizational environment. Just read this book and you too can do it.59 If the book, as a material object becomes a universal panacea, it can be so only because the nature and limits of the language it contains have been misunderstood. It is at the risk of an undue disengagement of materiality and the language creating the philosopher that we can now turn.

Jargon and Philosophic Identity The ridicule of reductive systematization, as nothing more than a material package, a crib posing as full knowledge, to allude to Oakeshott’s formulation of ‘rationalism’, was made by the Scriblerians with ‘Grub Street’ vulgarization in mind. But it expressed a more general belief that the nature and scope of philosophy itself had been misconceived – an error at the heart of Pope’s impending Empire of Dullness in The Dunciad. Any lack of discrimination and judgement beyond the application of a formula, will result in the delusion that the transmission of a catechistic jargon to all and sundry is philosophical knowledge. This possibility is expressed through the satire of arcane conceptual language, together with the Scriblerians’ own reliance on a vocabulary that is appropriately obscure or precious – arietation, contentation, hebitate, vectitation, disembogue,

114

Hobbes, the Scriblerians and the History of Philosophy

one of Swift’s favourites, and of course aerogo. King’s creation of an obscurantist vocabulary for the learned, and the unnecessary refinement and verbosity of Royal Society prose had carried much the same force.60 In such satires, we have at the same time an impressionistic caricature of doctrines, and a play with the fugitive nature of the philosophical persona. Parodying Locke’s understanding of identity through consciousness, the Scriblerians offer identity through utterance. In the Memoirs, we are told, there was once ‘a Project to banish metaphysics out of Spain’, to be effected simply by banning ‘any compound or Decompound of the Substantial Verbs … for … if you debar a Metaphysician from ens, essentia, entitas subsistentia, &c. there is an end of him’. Again, in a reductio of the materialist philosophy, in which, as Gulliver will discover, words become physical objects, we are informed that the technical words are to be taken literally as both armour and weapons. Without the armour, another’s weapons cut deep and draw blood. In keeping with this, the ornatus of argument can always be worn or put aside, like the sartorial presentation that might be a sign of being a philosopher. Crambe would promise not to use simpliciter & secundum quid, provided Martin would part with materialiter & formaliter.61 Arbuthnot had remarked to Swift on how ‘copious’ a subject was the ‘ridicule of Medicin’ and in Three Hours we get a good idea of what the Scriblerians understood by the rhetorical notion of the ‘copious’.62 Dr Fossile’s medical persona is little more than the mangled language of the physician. Establishing his credentials with a feigning-sick Plotwell (alias a bogus Polish philosopher Dr Lubomirski, soon to become the Egyptian mummy), Fossile counsels ‘Emmeticks’, ‘Clysters’, ‘strong Hydroticks’ ‘Paregoricks’, ‘scarrifications’ and depuration of the blood’s ‘Faeculencies by Volatiles’, ‘Blisters and potential Cauteries’. Reassuringly he adds, ‘I consult my Patient’s ease: I am against much Physick – he Faints, he is Apoplecktick, bleed him this moment.’63 The court scene in the Memoirs is at times heavy with legalese, largely derived from Roman Law and the Jesuit philosopher and canon lawyer Thomas Sanchez, which in being decontextualized to form lists of terms, becomes quite meaningless.64 Arbuthnot’s John Bull had earlier made the Scriblerian point, and with the same reliance on enumeratio about such scientific language use: ‘Prothonotaries, Philizisers, Chirographers … Recoirdats, Nolli Prosequi’s … Supercedeas … Verily, says John there are a prodigious Number of learned Words in this Law, What a pretty Science it is!’ Declaiming thus, he sinks into the ‘bottomless pit’ of litigation.65 The capacity to abuse language to fool others and fall into self-delusion is crucial to the philosopher manqué Martinus symbolizes, regardless of the sort of philosophy targeted. The clearest manifestation of this is Martinus’s incapacity to recognize or understand a metaphor, so making the sort of joking category mistake characteristic of earlier nonsense poetry do serious satiric work.66 In one

Identity, Materiality and the Language of Philosophical Absurdity

115

way, then, the Scriblerians engage with what has been a powerful theme of philosophical critique and self-understanding from Bacon to Ludwig Wittgenstein: words, the necessary tools of philosophy, wise men’s counters, are the philosopher’s enemy, the money of fools. Consequently, much of the philosopher’s real work is to untangle linguistic confusion: to stop kicking sand in one’s own face (Berkeley); or to let the fly out of the bottle (Wittgenstein); free the bird from lime-twigs (Hobbes); explicate the category mistake (Ryle). Thomas Sheridan, at the least a Scriblerian fellow traveller, put the point succinctly: ideas, words, language, including grammar and style and knowledge, were all so intimately interconnected that confusion with respect to any of them had consequences for the rest.67 Here then, the confusion of words with things, or the free-floating independence of the verbal have, for the Scriblerians, much the same result: the creation of an absurdist identity through meaningless jargon. It does much to explain what Lund calls ‘the shock of recognition’ in reading structuralist and post-structuralist linguistics, with their common reliance on metaphors of materiality and autonomous agency for language.68 The Scriblerians’ serio-ludere coalescence of the language of persona and proposition, however, not only obscures any philosophical identity with adjacent intellectual personae, but also runs together the rather divergent understandings of philosophy under attack. Put the other way round, the virtuoso philosopher physician Martinus has also a touch of Berkeleyan particularity about him, and is also an Epicurian reductivist, with faith in his possession of a systematic body of principles that can be conveyed to anyone, like a box of tricks. Once the box is opened and the words mouthed, the requisite persona is established. The disturbing feature of this philosophical confection is that the fully-fledged theories have some plausibility; but this we might expect, for the intimation of the absurd must needs stem from what is recognized as insight, truth or sense; it marks a journey strewn with ‘learned Words’ from the meaningful to a philosophical abyss of Scriblerian profundity. The coalescence of persona and proposition, words and material reality, are prominent both in The Art of Political Lying and in Peri Bathous, each of which elaborates learned Greek conceptual taxonomies and universal laws that might just be strung together to create surface glitter of philosophical meaning. The Art of Political Lying as a pretext of Scribleran satire, promotes a treatise, as I have already indicated, that has reduced the whole of politics to a simple set of rules and learnable principles, mastery of which is enough for any aspiring politician. The material constituents are the various types of lie, given Greek names, such as the prodigious and the proof. They are abstracted objects susceptible to the vocabulary of physics, velocity and narrowness of vortex; or as solid as coins subject to clipping, circulation, hoarding and distribution, or cards to be played in a game with its own rules. Indeed, the result is to reify the political as an

116

Hobbes, the Scriblerians and the History of Philosophy

autonomous realm, distinct from morality. This discovery and codification, we are told, is the triumph of the anonymous ‘Author’, the ‘Genius’ who has transformed the scattered theorems of antiquity into a science. Presented as an absurd reductio, the strict separation of politics and morality has since been mistaken as Machiavelli’s particular achievement. The work, although with characteristic Lucianic internal contradiction with respect to its number of chapters (two chapter eights), is full of incidental insight. Moreover, in being a carefully crafted example of its own subject matter, fitting its own technical categories, it is an authentic and distinct variant of the paradox of the liar, a Lucianic ‘True History’. It is what I have previously called the entailed liar. That is, rather than taking the explicit Epimenidean form (‘All Cretans are liars’, said Epimenides the Cretan) the paradox is entailed in the act of putting the statement about the inescapable ubiquity of lying into the world it describes.69 The advertisement also fits both definition and function of its own concept of a ‘Proof Lie’, defined as a lie which when swallowed allows everything else to follow. The example given is belief in transubstantiation, but if to begin with we accept that the advertisement is genuine, we have perforce no grounds on which to doubt the contents of the advertised work, excepting the number of chapters in the first volume. In this way, the whole text relies upon the notion that the meaning of a statement is a function of the identity and action of the stator in making it. Just what is being done, by whom in putting forward this advertised proposal for a subscription publication? Superficially this might seem anachronistically to rely on later Austinian and Strawsonian conceptions of meaning; but in fact it is at one with the serio-ludere presupposition that persona and proposition are joined, and at one also with more general statements about language as a form of action enunciated by Hobbes and Berkeley. Behind all this lies Aristotle’s understanding of the relationships between ethos and logos, to which I shall return in considering the speech-act in intellectual history (see below, pp. 149–50). As I have suggested above, the play with the paradoxes of strict or entailed contradiction create many of the perplexities of Martinus in love and at law, and evidence a particularly concentrated form of the Scriblerian penchant for the reflexivity on which semantic paradoxes depend.70 The most extensive example of the amalgam of proposition and persona, however, is in Peri Bathous, or The Art of Sinking in Poetry, the clear echo of The Art of Political Lying can hardly be accidental. As poetry was often considered a form of lying, this might be expected and in both cases we have a theory of rhetoric, of how to create and transform identity through words alone. Peri Bathous, however is not a mendacious report, it is in its own right a treatise, a parody of Longinus on The Sublime (Peri Huplous) and with a good deal of hard evidence for its main propositions.

Identity, Materiality and the Language of Philosophical Absurdity

117

A complete account of this work is beyond the scope of this monograph, but it does reveal something of the failed philosophical persona at work. The titular pun on profundus is a clear instance of aestismus and probably alludes to Swift’s brief play with profundity and obscurity in the A Tale of a Tub.71 The Latin profundus had initially a physical reference, as in deep pit, and only gradually was extended or metaphorically transferred to the less tangible processes of the intellect. In English, however, the word ‘deep’ already meant physically profound when the Latin profundus was introduced and so, according to the OED, the initially derivative associations with intellectual significance could easily assume prominence. Mechanical philosophy, in particular, insisted that to understand the world properly meant grasping its smallest components and their inter-reactions, reducing or getting down to irresolvable physical parts. At the same time, the increasingly fashionable aesthetic category of the sublime, that expression which was indescribably and mysteriously higher than others (and so could be roughly grasped only through paralipsis), made possible a contrasting association for the metaphorically deep, the bathetic. This is the counterpoint exploited by Pope and Arbuthnot.72 If profundity, in one familiar sense, could be expected of the true philosopher, profound as merely obscure and low could be associated with the charlatan counterpoint. The characteristic means by which the authors did this was to have Martinus treat intellectual qualities as physical objects. In being reified, the profound was returned to its physical origins. The difference then, between what might be expected of the true and ludicrous philosopher lay in exploiting a well-established example of metaphorical transference. The re-descriptive English subtitle reinforces the point; what some might see as a penetrative achievement of the intellect, becomes the ‘Art of Sinking’. The metaphorically obtuse Martinus cannot tell profundity from bathos, but it is appropriate to the slipperiness of philosophic identity that he philosophizes on the character of poetry, providing rules for writing reams of the most awful stuff. If poetry retained a claim to being philosophy, it is laid bare as the means of plumbing the depths. From the outset, Martinus reiterates claims to significance typical of the Scriblerian philosopher. He stands as a modern, doing for modern poetry what others had done for antiquity. And as modern poetry is clearly so much an improvement on antiquity in its deepness, it is all the more important that he bring together the (familiar) scattered theorems to produce an infallible system, a new model, that anyone can employ and so be guaranteed of sinking: considering … how many promising geniuses of this age are wandering, as I may say, in the dark without a guide, I have undertaken this arduous but necessary task, to lead them, as it were, by the hand, and step by step, the gentle downhill way to the bathos, the end, the central point, the non plus ultra, of true modern poetry.73

118

Hobbes, the Scriblerians and the History of Philosophy

Here then, is the Ophean inversion, the escape from Parnassus, or the philosopher whose duty it is to lead us down to the cave. That duty is also a patriotic one as the repeated reference to the readers as ‘my dear countrymen’, makes clear. The neologism ‘patriotism’ makes one of its earliest appearences in this treatise, so we have a modernity that is truly English. The philosopher is also something of the physician or midwife, tending to the ‘morbid secretions of the brain’. Hardly any human creature does not suffer from the need for ‘poetical evacuation’ that may ‘properly’ be called ‘the titillation of the generative faculty of the brain’. What a person so conceives must be brought forth (again the familiar metaphors of procreation). ‘I have known a man’, remarks Martinus, melancholic and raving who became ‘lightsome and cheerful’ on discharging ‘purulent metre’. Untimely death can be caused without ‘this laudable vent of unruly passion’. From this it follows that the ‘suppression of the very worst poetry is of dangerous consequence to the state’.74 The pseudo-materialist definition that promises a causal and physiological understanding of poetry is but a prelude to the enthusiastic insistence on the encouragement of the execrable, and the gift of infallible rules that allow everyone to sink to the lowest common denominator.75 Bad poetry is a necessity, social, political, physical, its development is a part of the human betterment that is the end of philosophy. The work merges the personae of poet and philosopher by setting down the universal principles of awfulness, replete with copious illustration from contemporary poets, so supporting Swift’s earlier insistence that the modern world is devoid of good poetry.76 Again, if the presentation seems absurd, it can be read, as both Pope and E. L. Steeves have suggested, as a serious and instructive rhetoric.77 Given the conflation of poetry and philosophy, Martinus’s persona remains that of the philosophos gloriosus: he is confident, dogmatic, relentlessly serious and innocent. What perhaps is important here, however, is a subtle change of emphasis. In the Memoirs we have, to be sure, no shortage of satire at the expense of proposition and philosophic sect, but there is much attention to the development and clear specification of the philosophical persona appropriate to lunatic theory. Once established, in Peri Bathous the persona can display doctrinal absurdity, and as his rules are illustrated by genuine poets Martinus can be as much vehicle as target.78 He becomes literally what he says he is, a guide. Moreover, language is yet again made material and the individual components of bad poetry can be kept in a physical box, pulled out from their appropriate drawers and combined as needed.79 This, as with The Art of Political Lying, is all presented with an assiduity that is at once incongruous with the arguments and with the Scriblerian serio-ludere conception of the philosopher. That we should find it absurd, should tell us where philosophy stops and the persona of the philosopher be put aside.

Identity, Materiality and the Language of Philosophical Absurdity

119

Much of the Scriberian thematic can be illustrated by a little discussed, but typically Scriblerian work, the Ars Pun-ica. The questionable 1723 addendum to the Memoirs clearly regards it as a Scriblerian piece.80 Cornelius Scriblerus had once sacked Crambe for punning, and Ars Pun-ica is a fantasy on the aestismus so loved by Hobbes and many of his generation. More immediately, it may be regarded as Crambe’s last stand, although the author is ‘Tom Pun-Sibi’. The pamphlet is a satire on propositional clarity and as an extension from this, on proposals and theories about the value of establishing a univocal and universal language, arguments about which had been canvassed for a good while.81 From the mid-seventeenth century, the need for precision in language, certainly if it were to be used for scientific purposes, had become imperative. Hobbes had argued that there is scarce any word that is not made equivocal by ‘divers contextures of speech, or by diversity of pronunciation and gesture’. The purging of equivocation from language was itself ‘understanding’.82 This view was at one with Sprat’s defence of the activities and language use of the Royal Society, and it had been taken to be a sign of true modernity by Wotton, who, as previously noted, praised the linguistic exactitude of the scholastics.83 Ripped from its scholastic associations, the vision of language as a pellucid and stable universal sign-system had been clarified and partially illustrated particularly by John Wilkins; and as a precondition for natural science, had been authoritatively and subtly explored by Locke.84 Whether the aim is for a universal language or a philosophically reliable one, through such writers we are returned to the central doctrine that the meaning of words depends much on clear referents, be they material objects or concepts. This relationship not only made words useful in the world, it also provided a criterion by which to judge misuse. Any confusion in such an ideal relationship was damaging, and nothing so obviously as puns indicated confusion. Addison’s Spectator had taken a disapproval of punning so far as to advocate its eradication.85 It may be, in fact, that there was something approaching an Augustan attack on punning, an old fashioned and somewhat metaphysical conceit. For whatever reason, the critique of punning exploited an age-old fear of ambiguity, traditionally associated with dishonesty and in the seventeenth century with Jesuitry. It was treated less a feature of language than a matter of nefarious motivation. Among the Augustans, this has most to do with the pollutions of language that inhibit science, philosophy and pure simple communication in a decently Protestant world. Certainly in robust counterpoise, Swift’s A Tale of a Tub had been full of the multivalent inventiveness of punning, used in part to show that the world could not be contained in mechanical precision, and to display modern language close to insanity.86 Ars Pun-ica elaborates a whole counter-theory from what would be given little more than passing mention in Peri Bathous, the ‘paramanasia or pun’.87 It

120

Hobbes, the Scriblerians and the History of Philosophy

was called in one unfriendly broadside that ‘Famous Punning Art / The Benefit of Piss and Fart’.88 The pamphlet’s attribution to Swift has a rough justice. It was, however, apparently written mainly by his friend Thomas Sheridan and this gives a linguistic authority carried lightly. We are offered a suitably Scriblerian mythic origin in the prefatory poem, reworking as an image of serio ludere what would have been familiar myths out of Plato and Ovid. Jove made a pun of flesh and blood, creating two joined bodies. Unlike the Siamese twins with whom Martinus fell in love, however, these are male and female, the function of each being to turn to jest what the other pronounces in all seriousness. Punning, proclaims the author, is the creative means by which language is kept flexible and words gain augmented value. So rather than richness of vocabulary allowing greater precision, it affords enhanced opportunity for equivocal use in celebration of the cornucopia at our lips. Put the other way round, while precision or descriptive necessity can act as a philosophical criterion for the augmentation of language, for new things necessitate new names, the argument of Ars Pun-ica is the reverse. Multivalence increases the usefulness of what we already have; it is like gold that can be cashed across frontiers, while precision diminishes and parochializes words. It is the multivalency of punning that universalizes, not the fantasy of single meanings tied exclusively to single words. It thus subverts the very idea of universal clarity. Unlike all other arts and sciences, punning has no boundaries and demands the true virtues of the philosopher:89 poignant, fruitful wit, understanding clear and distinct, an imagination delicate and cheerful, the soul elevated, and the expression vivacious, graceful, beauteous, robust and sweet. All should conspire to create sentiments ‘noble and sublime’.90 Indeed, we are informed, philosophy and punning are complementary and it was Pythagoras who brought the art from Egypt to Greece. Bentley had claimed that Pythagoras had invented the word philosophy. Fittingly, according to ‘Tom Pun-Sibi’ philosophers with Pythagoras’s gift were characteristically punsters.91 Exploiting the richness of language, and by formal or logical definition being relational, the pun, as its mythic origin in conjoined bodies anticipates, is itself assimilated to the serio-ludere tradition. Just as, according to Lucian, Menippus smiles as he bites, so punning ‘tickles as it kills’, its multivalence wounding and praising simultaneously.92 Punning as aestismus is close to being justified in the vocabulary of office, entirely appropriate to what is offered as punning’s moral definition, it is a virtuous practice that promotes the end of good fellowship, laughing.93 It is a specified purpose that itself sits uneasily with the masked aggression of serio-ludere humour. Having said all this and so effectively aligning punning with Aristotle’s dictum that metaphor in its creativity is the one thing that cannot be taught, we are solemnly given to believe that from the rudimentary intimations of antiquity (naturally nothing better can be expected from that quarter), punning has now been abstracted into a mechanical science that must be imparted to all. ‘Hail to

Identity, Materiality and the Language of Philosophical Absurdity

121

the sage, who from his Native Store / Produc’d a Science, never known before’.94 With an air of spurious scientism, reminiscent, like so much else in it, of The Art of Political Lying, punning is, in its physical definition, a ‘harmonious jingling upon Words, which passing at the Ears and falling upon the Diaphragma excites a titillatory Motion in those Parts, and this being convey’d by the Animal Spirits [yes, they are with us still] into the Muscles of the Face, raises the Cockles of the Heart’.95 A few years later the Peri Bathous may have alluded to this fellow piece of Scribleriana in taking the titillation of the brain as the cause of creative energy. The science having been founded will no doubt benefit from improvements and with a most un-Scriberlian touch of modesty, may yet await its Sir Isaac Newton.96 Although, it is remarked, as the German philosopher Alsted has already anticipated a central theory (in his third tome, p. 71), the author has had his own hopes for distinctiveness dashed. Alsted will stand in his stead. Tom PunSibi will be accused of plagiary and will write no more, which, he immediately proceeds to do.97 Notwithstanding such contradictions, the seventy-nine rules have now been formulated. We are spared all but thirty-four but given the typically Scriblerian promise of a further volume to make manifest the last forty-five rules. Those we are given come dressed in the ‘Quibble Jargon’, it was sneeringly remarked, in which Swift had made his creature Sheridan an expert:98 rules of alienation, retrospection, naturalization, concatenation, inoculation; there is the salic pun, the brazon, and the Rule of ‘Train’ and of scandal – never speak well of another punster. But the most valuable pun is any pun on punning; it exhibits the zenith of linguistic reflexivity (punning contests may be called Cathaginian). Here once more we enter Brückmann’s Scriberlian universe of games.99 There is, finally (rule thirty-four) the golden rule of transformation, directly analogous to what would shortly be the golden rule of rhetorical transformation in Peri Bathous which has given us the word ‘patriotism’.100 That rule would involve a moral re-description, paradiastole, the wrecking of ethical standards by terminological conversion of vices into virtues. This amounts to the transformation of language itself through the alteration of words, common in translation and the assimilation of foreign terms (mouton/mutton, beoff/beef ). It is the rule apparently discovered by Alsted and it is one that is applied through the philological adjustments exercised by scholars like Richard Bentley to make their theories fit the facts – a Parthian shot at that large and much arrowed Scriblerian target.101 In its revelling in multivalence, Ars Pun-ica is a reductive Berkeleyan response to what is itself a reductive image of the arguments of writers like Hobbes and Locke. Language, Berkeley had held, cannot be narrowed to the univocal communication of ideas in the service of philosophy, with the plodding representationalism of words as labels becoming an undiscerning ideal of usage. Locke, who evinced a respect for non-philosophical language and ‘rustick Reason’, is

122

Hobbes, the Scriblerians and the History of Philosophy

perhaps treated a trifle unfairly;102 but as a synoptic account of the importance of creativity and imagination and the overrated reliance on definition, Berkeley’s negative case was as powerful as anything before the contemporary ‘linguistic turn’ in philosophy itself. In its own perversely creative fashion, Scriblerian satire endorsed and illustrated Berkeley’s argument. Locke had certainly seen the free association of ideas as a barrier to philosophical achievement, and this would shortly become transformed by David Hartley into the necessary adjunct to Newtonian vibrations and vibratiuncles as the cause of all human understanding.103 Ars Pun-ica stands, as it were, between the two versions of ideational association. We are confronted, then, with a typical reductio ad absurdum of the philosophy of language but this obscure ripple of Scriblerian humour tapped into what has remained a familiar philosophical impulse to reform, standardize, purify and simplify. In some cases, as I have indicated, there was the hope of creating a rational universal language.104 And there was an austerely instrumentalist, if utopian tradition of philosophic improvers from Sprat to Hartley who would glance with a certain longing at the very purifications Swift had Gulliver witness.105 It should be noted too, however, that to provide a utopian counterpoint to the linguistic corruptions he saw around him, in which language allowed everything to be disputed ad utramque partem, Swift had his philosophical horses discourse, with unrelieved purpose, all according to the ‘Rules of Reason’, obviating any need for dispute. This had been Dunton’s dream of discourse as one continual syllogism. Whether Swift has Gulliver placed between the unpalatable linguistic extremities of the yahoo and houyhnhynm, to make us think, at the risk of sending us mad, or whether Swift as much as Gulliver was beguiled by the equine ideal, is another matter.106 Swift’s involvement with Ars Pun-ica provides a little support for his hostility to the houyhnhynm ideal; but if houyhnhynm discourse is indeed not to be emulated, once abstracted from its satiric point Swift too is swept into a traditional current of linguistic purification. In this bob Leonard Bloomfield, Paul Grice and Jürgen Habermas with, respectively, their rules for scientific precision at all times (drinking scotch and H2O), conversation (of all things) as a well conducted philosophy seminar, and the conditions for ideal communication – the conditions for sustaining Habermasian dicta of Enlightenment rationality. Certainly, however, with Berkeley, the Ars Punica affirms that there are and should be more words and meanings and more functions to language than philosophers in this idiom will allow. As Berkeley implied, mistaking their blinkered perceptions for the whole, philosophers are impertinent in wanting to dictate common speech. Language amuses, instructs, raises passions, effects dispositions and as indeed Hobbes put it, is a form of action, with a principal function of getting get things done.107

Identity, Materiality and the Language of Philosophical Absurdity

123

The tactics and conventions for punning in Ars Pun-ica traverse this shifting ground. Yet the pamphlet reduces everything to a set of general rules, laid out like grammatical declensions that should be learned by rote, one a day, and mechanically taught, like the catechism first by husband to wife, then by wife to children and by head servant to the rest. It is a straightjacket of linguistic spontaneity, quite at odds with the stupendous requirements for the persona of the true punster. In ending with the last of three prefaces the text heralds a brave new conversational world in which everyone can aspire to being a sort of Conradus Crambe. The implication appears to be that as everyone must be a punster, presumably no one can be spoken well of, the rule of slander being a discursive necessity. Conceptually we are not that far from The Art of Political Lying. The serio in the ludere is neverthless quite clear: language in use cannot and should not be as philosophers would idealize it for their own limited purposes; and the attempt to erase creativity from a conception of language renders them absurd. The same motif is an interlaced feature of Gulliver’s Travels. The model of houyhnhnm discourse has already been noted, but it exists in the context of others overtly held up to ridicule. Famously, there is Sprat’s notion that the language of the Royal Society as so plain, simple and mathematically pure that almost as many things can be as conveyed in as many words.108 So Gulliver, in that famous Berkeleyan nightmare, hears of a project to have men labouring under the weight of great sacks from which they take things rather than creating sentences to do all that naming cannot. Elsewhere it is suggested, that if words are but names for things, language would be improved by dispensing with verbs and participles. In the academy of Lagardo a philosopher and his students have created what would now be called a jargon generator, but is possibly a parody of John Wilkins’s schematic conceptual language.109 What Gulliver sees is a physical frame with concepts on rods and levers that are pushed and shoved until they come into some sort of profound alignment to discover the grand theory of everything.110 With the aid of such a tool, practical and speculative knowledge can at last be made to cohere, and anyone ‘may write Books in Philosophy, Poetry, Politicks, Law, Mathematics and Theology, without the least Assistance from Genius or Study’.111 It is the ultimate modern machine. Reductive rule-mongering erasing judgement has its counterpart in the reductive materialism that erases God. The result is a milieu fitting alike for the professional writer and the modern philosopher. All in all, the Scribleran understanding of Epicurian materialism and its reductive corollary of words as objects is of a world sapped of mystery, creativity and genuine expertise. It is literally soulless, requiring only a mechanical application and a persona of unselfconscious arrogance; ironically, an insubstantial confection of words misused.

5 HOBBES AND THE SCRIBLERIANS

The Ghost in the Texts If Hobbes had not lived, the Scriblerians would have needed to invent him. Their personifications of errant philosophy are partial continuations of the satire to which Hobbes had been subjected, and that had already shaped an image of him very much to Scriblerian needs. On the cusp of the eighteenth century William King featured the philosopher in conversation with the poet Bays in the fourth of his Lucianic Dialogues of the Dead. Hobbes describes himself as a parcel of atoms ‘jumbled’ by chance, but a very considerable animal, ‘the greatest Philosopher that ever was’. Bays states that he knows who he is by his atoms and vanity. Hobbes crossly abuses Bays as a trifler, admits that he is no poet and reaffirms his philosophic infallibility. A pity about the poetry, replies the poet, for if his Godless theories had been presented as verse, poetic licence might have excused them. Hobbes blusteringly insists that he has demonstrated all he has argued, that he has not denied God but only his relevance to understanding the world; Bays asserts that in denying dependence on God, the demonstrations are worthless. Hobbes has fraudulently set himself up for a wit with false ware. The gravity of his face and beard will get him hooted at, for he has simply stolen from philosophers like Lucretius whom he decries as asses.1 It is superficial and sketchy to be sure, but authentically Lucianic in its satirically pointed doctrinal minimalism; it skims, not always unfairly, over what Hobbes had actually claimed and deftly abridges the alleged implications issuing from the philosopher’s gargantuan effrontery. Far more crudely and on the eve of the Scriblerian experiment, Benjamin Hoadly was attacked through a Lucianic letter by the ghost of Hobbes written from his dwellings in Hell. Hoadly is damned by association with his correspondent, the co-conspirator from Malmesbury and his roistering friends, (Loyola, Guy Fawkes, Hugh Peters, Cromwell and Algernon Sidney) all busy in the promotion of anarchy, rebellion and irreligion.2 In this there is just an echo of the secret history satires of the early seventeenth century, one of which Hobbes had partially translated, but in contrast to such works, there is no pretence to literality;3 it is a crude personal smear, some distance from King’s dialogue. – 125 –

126

Hobbes, the Scriblerians and the History of Philosophy

It does however, show that the popular image was still alive and well, and doing polemical duty. The reductio could function in the easiest processes of ad hominem discreditation. For the Scriblerians to allude to Hobbes was, then, neither forced nor abstruse. To begin with, there is even something Hobbesian in the physical description of Martinus Scriblerus. Tall and black-browed, as Hobbes had been, the philosopher is singular, isolated, an alien in his own land, an egregious, if abstemious modern. As it becomes clear, he is a system builder and materialist who would, like Hobbes, banish all reliance on God in causal explanation.4 He is mad in the way Sir Matthew Hale had considered Hobbes to be intellectually deranged, imagining he can spin out from his brain a handful of universal principles as sufficient to comprehend everything. But there is more than the convenient caricature to form such a large part of the Scriblerians’ Frankenstienian monster of philosophy. It must be stressed that considered individually, many of the Hobbesian mnemonics amount to little, and that much of what we might identify with Hobbes had become widely disseminated, some of it also associated with Locke, Sprat and Descartes. For the Scriblerians created a Menippean hat large enough for many a modern philosopher to be forced to wear. That it could prove so serviceable they would no doubt have taken to show the dangerous significance of modern philosophy rather than disclose their own imprecise theorizations. Nevertheless, considering their work as a whole, there is a pattern of allusion to, and vicarious engagement with ‘the monster of Malmesbury’ himself. It is a development and application of his own Lucianic understanding of the philosopher’s duty to expose absurdity. That seminal founding text of the Scriblerian moment, A Tale of a Tub, is framed by allusions to Hobbes. The author’s preface recounts a meeting at which the meaning of his title was discussed. Much was made of the tubs, sailors are said to cast out towards whales to distract them. So the work was interpreted to refer to Hobbes’s Leviathan, which tosses and plays with all schemes of religion and government, whereof a great many are hollow, and dry, and empty, and noisy, and wooden, and given to rotation: this is the leviathan, whence the terrible wits of our age are said to borrow their weapons.5

At the end, Swift assumes the shape of that terrible wit, the modern philosopher and calls for the sort of work that in parodying Hobbes, Eachard had claimed to have written – one that knows and does everything. The author projects a future volume in praise of humanity, which by its phrasing and Epicurian thesis, purports to be an ironic rewriting of Leviathan, with its war of all against all and its rights of each to take what he wishes in the natural condition. It will be a veritable ‘Panygeric on Mankind’.6 Indeed, Hobbes’s outspoken pride in the

Hobbes and the Scriblerians

127

importance of De cive, together with Eachard’s satiric parody of it, thoroughly inform Swift’s voice of the modern philosopher. Eachard’s work was republished shortly before Swift wrote A Tale of a Tub, and thus was part of that background of anti-Hobbism against which A Tale may partially be placed.7 Between these book-ends, there is first a reference to those who listen to orators, imagining them as standing mouths agape, connected by a perpendicular line to the centre of the earth. It is like Hobbes’s Lucianic image of subjects chained to the mouth by the oratorical authority of the sovereign.8 Later there is an extremely fitting extended parody of the introduction to Leviathan: To conclude from all, what is Man but a Micro-Coat … Is not Religion a Cloak, Honesty a Pair of Shoes, worn out in the Dirt, Self-love a Surcoat, Vanity a Shirt, and Conscience a Pair of Breeches, which tho’ a Cover for Lewdness as well as Nastiness, is easily slipt down for the service of both.9

Alan Fisher has suggested that whole digression on madness was a subversive response to what he calls the rickety juggernaut of Leviathan, a discomforting yet irresistible new paradigm of reasoning. Hobbes’s Leviathan as a new paradigm is hyperbole, but there is something intuitively close to the mark in Fisher’s argument. The ignis fatuus of Hobbesian caricature flickers through much of Swift’s text, for he placed Hobbes at the heart of a demonized modernity.10 The Mechanical Operation of the Spirit provides reinforcement. In this satire Swift assumes the voice of a naive nonconformist enthusiast, given to taking Hobbesian materialism for granted, as Samuel Parker had argued earlier that the nonconformists swallowed Hobbes whole. The human brain is likened by Swift’s nonconformist to the image of the sovereign on the frontispiece of Leviathan, being said by the virtuosi to be ‘only a crowd of little animals, but with teeth and claws extremely sharp’.11 Erhenpries notes a passage strikingly analogous to Hobbes’s parallelism between the kingdoms of fairies and of darkness, and remarks that the point had been to suggest that the nonconformists Hobbes so hated were his greatest admirers; enthusiasm, materialism and incipient atheism being seen as mutually complicit. In intimating as much, Swift employed the same disruptive tactic as he did by forcing Hobbes and Bentley onto the same modern bedstead.12 In The Battle of the Books that saw so many tomes from antiquity and the postReformation world hurling themselves across the library, there are overtly only a couple of passing references to Hobbes. Part of the initial problem that triggered the battle lay in the library’s Keeper (surely not Dr Bentley?) mis-shelving: he had clapped ‘Des Cartes next to Aristotle; poor Plato had got between Hobbes and the Seven Wise Masters’.13 And with Descartes and Gassendi, Hobbes is called a valiant leader of the moderns.14 This may have been a fleeting acknowledgement of Sir William Temple’s concession that in philosophy only Hobbes and Descartes might ‘pretend’ to matching Plato, Aristotle or Epicurus.15 But given

128

Hobbes, the Scriblerians and the History of Philosophy

Hobbes’s notoriety, and the ground prepared in A Tale of a Tub, a hint was as good as a volume. There is also more than initially meets the eye. For The Battle of the Books begins with a reference to a state of war.16 The description of the battle reads not unlike a parody of Hobbes’s translation of the first set battle in The Iliad. There is, moreover, the curious fable of the spider and the bee. Whilst the tomes are hurtling across the library, high in a window sits an old spider in his web ‘swollen up to the first magnitude by the destruction of infinite numbers of flies’.17 Into his elaborate ‘castle’ buzzes an errant bee whose weight breaks the web apart, so above the turmoil another altercation begins. To an extent, this may read as an allegory of poetic inspiration as opposed the mechanical application of neo-Aristotelian rules of composition, but its import is wider than this. As Swift through the voice of Aesop partially decodes the episode, we are presented with an allegory of the different strands of philosophic modernity.18 The bee stands for the principles of ancient enquiry in modernity, travel, observation and experimentation, his findings are the wax and honey that may well aid the hive, giving sweetness and light, providing, in short, the human betterment that distinguishes true from false philosophy. The bee, says Aesop, is an advocate retained by the ancients. By contrast, the old spider goes nowhere, spinning his hypotheses from himself. Michael Seidel states that the spider is Bentley.19 Erhenpries has fleetingly suggested Sir Roger L’Estrange before backing away from a specific allusion.20 Yet on both counts the fit is less than glove-like and in all salient details the badtempered spider sounds far more like the received image of Hobbes. Bentley, like Hobbes, could be decidedly testy when crossed, but unlike Bentley the spider scorns any intellectual dependence or need for cooperation. His own native wit is sufficient and, predictably, the bee accuses him of the overweening pride routinely attributed to Hobbes. Looking at his broken web, the spider knows a good cause from its effects; central to Hobbes’s whole and controversial conception of philosophy was the analysis of causation, his emphasis on method in establishing it, and on both in the artifice of political society. The bee alludes directly to the critical rejection of these Hobbesian concerns. In surveying the wreck of the web, the bee twice calls attention to the exaggerated claims for method, and artifice in building, contrasting them with the undervalued virtues of matter and duration.21 The spider is said to be, again unlike Bentley, a great mathematician. By this time Hobbes’s own, once significant reputation as a mathematician was as tattered as the spider’s web. The spider is also a mighty boaster, he loves a fight, a paradox, and as we have seen, Hobbes characterized his work in terms of paradoxes; and finally the spider is given to ‘wrangling’ and the ‘satire’ that Bentley considered beneath the dignity of a clergyman and for which Hobbes was taken to task.22 The spider peppers his discourse with expletives, the one point at which there may also be a nod in the direction of L’Estrange because his transla-

Hobbes and the Scriblerians

129

tions of Aesop’s Fables employed such informalities.23 But as I have cited Aubrey, Hobbes was known to be habituated to the emphatic oath. The possibility that the allegory might be both about philosophy and poetics is strengthened if the spider is largely Hobbesian, for in The Answer to the Preface before Gondibert, he had presented an argument about the importance of rules and decorum to order the poetic imagination, and conjoined the ends of poetry and philosophy. As Erhenpreis notes, the spider image was widespread, (Hobbes himself used it) being employed by Locke in self-defence against Stillingfleet. Earlier Samuel Butler had Hudibras remarking on ‘Those Spider Saints, that hang by Threads / Spun out of th’Entrails of their Heads’.24 Hudibras is immediately told by his interlocutor that the image applies just as aptly to nonconformists like him.25 The imagery is also present in Davenant’s Preface before Gondibert, a work dedicated to Hobbes. Behind these is Bacon’s extended ‘Aphorism’, situating the bee (apis vero ratio media est) as a mean between the dogmatic spider and the mindless empiricism of the ant. Swift omits the ant, but his characterization of spider and bee are so like Bacon’s that it seems to be Baconian text that we are principally meant to keep in mind.26 Yet in the last analysis to tie the spider down to any one historical personage is probably to impoverish the allegory. Swift’s purpose was to fashion a modern persona as an extension of the modern philosopher; and to this end, as I have suggested, it was important to keep Hobbes and Bentley together to exemplify the danger that persona presented. The allegory might well have been designed to entangle each with the other. The terrible modern wits, as A Tale of a Tub put it, had taken their weapons from Hobbes, and modern learning applied them. What may also be present, especially keeping Hudibras in mind, is a further dab of the brush that tarred Hobbes with the singularity and enthusiasm of nonconformity.27 Moreover, given the preciseness of the parallel between Swift and Bacon on the contrast between spider and bee, what is also before us is an attempt to isolate Hobbes and all he stood for from the virtues and values of natural philosophy. That neither Hobbes, Bentley, nor nonconformity would have appreciated the forced ménage, nor Hobbes the divorce from the Baconian philosophic persona, would only have added to Swift’s relish in rearranging matters. Other broadly Scriblerian works play with the now notorious Hobbesian boasts of distinction. The ‘Author’ in The Art of Political lying, like that of De cive, is said to have invented a true political science; ‘Tom Pun-Sibi’ is also initially confident of his modern importance in creating a definitive system of punning from the scatterings left by antiquity. His physical definition of a pun, quoted above, may be a parodic elaboration of Hobbes’s physical definition of laughter as a ‘distortion of the countenance’ or ‘those Grimaces called laughter’.28 Later Martinus similarly announces that he has invented an infallible system for poetry. The accusations, sustained by reductive readings that Hobbes’s distinctiveness

130

Hobbes, the Scriblerians and the History of Philosophy

lay in both boasting and being bogus become abstracted into a standard Scriblerian motif. Additionally, the recurrent imagery of monstrosity and madness in the Scriblerians’ work may also invite us to keep Hobbes in mind. His greatest affront to orthodoxy and decorum was the book that with the name of that great monster of the deep emblazoned on its title page, it had been ritually burnt on a pyre for modern Epicurianism in 1685. The almost routine accusations of the conjunction of lunacy and malformation on which I have touched are turned to serious effect in A Tale of a Tub in which modern philosophy itself is depicted as a form of madness that, to repeat, has taken its weapons from Hobbes. The general themes of madness and monstrosity need no further labouring, but two particulars do need noting in this context. In Annus Mirabilus and Ars Pun-ica, there are jokes about hermaphroditism and in the second, the joke is a philosophical one about language. The ultimate derivation from Plato and Ovid would have been familiar, but in hermaphrodite imagery being used to make a point about philosophy and language, it is difficult not to see close up a partial allusion to Hobbes’s claim in De cive that moral philosophy is an engendered hermaphrodite. More substantively, scattered through the Memoirs are intimations of Hobbesian theory and dicta. Martinus’s conception of philosophy with its emphasis on teaching, betterment and causation is at one with Hobbes. We are told of the artificial man of the Free Thinkers, just after their letter has outlined an Epicurian view of the body reminiscent of the introduction to Hobbes’s own ‘artificial man’, the sovereign of Leviathan, with its reference to the heart as but a pump, the nerves and muscles as springs and wheels. Among Martinus’s most outlandish claims are that he is the philosopher of ultimate causes, and that ‘by a Sagacity peculiar to himself he hath discover’d effects in their very Cause; and without the trivial helps of Experiments, or Observations, hath been the Inventor of most of the modern Systems and Hypotheses’.29 Immediately following this mnemonic of the bee and the spider, we are told that Martinus has ‘enrich’d Mathematics with many precise and geometrical Quadratures of the Circle’.30 Only Hobbes thought so many times (around a dozen) that he had squared the circle.31 Only Hobbes was so derided for failing to do so. Amongst what he had earlier referred to as fanatic enquiries, Swift listed squaring the circle, along with the search for the philosopher’s stone, the elixir of life and the foundation of Utopias.32 Kerby-Miller even identifies a Hobbesian element in Martinus’s education, conveyed through Cornelius’s instructions concerning the doctrine of secondary characteristics, a concept Hobbes, calling it a paradox, had advanced along with Descartes.33 Martinus is taught that colours, tastes, smells, hot and cold are not real but ‘phantasms of our brains’.34 Given all this, it is even possible that the hand of the sea monster Martinus casts to kill the man-tiger is a piece of that mightiest monster of the deep, broken up in Psalms 74, Leviathan.35

Hobbes and the Scriblerians

131

Crambe too has something Hobbesian about him, as he is decidedly enraged that the Free Thinkers, no less, have stolen, he believes, his unique copulation theory of the syllogism.36 The belief that the soul was created in procreation, Hobbes’s materialist version of traducianism, is taken with a ponderous seriousness in Martinus’s trial.37 It is a much needed precondition for fashioning a caricature of Lockean identity theory. Hobbes’s already famous image of words as the money of fools, is evoked to remark on the loquacious Crambe’s wealth in that regard and in context the whole passage might be a partial allusion to Hobbes’s discussion of universals and particulars, over which ‘names’, his unfortunate shorthand for language, people tumble into confusion.38 It is, of course, the Scriblerian treatment of names as the literal totality of language that generates so much of their satire on philosophical language. In the same passage there may be an invocation of Hobbes’s image of the mind as a ranging spaniel. Crambe hypothesized that in a philosopher’s mind ‘Ideas rang’d like many animals … copulated and engender’d Conclusions’ and might beget ‘absurdities’.39 In Hobbes’s terms, metaphor is an abuse of language, to be expunged from philosophy if from nowhere else and the Scriblerians fittingly expunge it from Crambe’s, or indeed Martinus’s, comprehension of philosophy; metaphor, especially the worst, was to be commended, and excruciating examples were provided in Peri Bathous. In the same work, it is shown how an epic poem can be created with a recipe of ingredients kept in a box of counterfeit rhetorical tricks. This confusion of words and things through an incapacity to understand metaphor seems additionally to echo Hobbes’s own hyperbolic praise of William Davenant’s Gondibert, in the course of which Hobbes scornfully dismissed those (so unlike Davenant) who relied on counterfeit boxes of inspiration. Alas, Davenant was widely recognized, to Hobbes’s own embarrassment, as an appalling poet, so bored with his epic he did not finish it.40

A Response to Hobbes’s Homer I have already mentioned the suspicion that Hobbes deliberately diminished Homeric epics.41 The plausibility of the case is increased when Hobbes and his Homer are put in a Scriblerian context of intellectual responsibility. In France, where Hobbes had been intellectually so at home, there had been clear hostility to Homer in the seventeenth century. As Howard Weinbrot points out, even ‘ancients’ such as René Rapin had found his narratives incoherent, his morality objectionable. By the early eighteenth century both in France and England, Homer had additionally been subjected to parody; not all of this was overtly satiric, but the effect was arguably discrediting.42 It may even be that for some, like Rapin, to jettison Homer was the price to be paid for maintaining anciennité. And certainly, Homer was also at risk to the attentions of the moderns in that

132

Hobbes, the Scriblerians and the History of Philosophy

their criticism and philological exactitude might help undermine a continued authority. Thus in A Tale of a Tub, Swift protected Homer with bobbing distractions of misplaced faith in what we might learn from him.43 Among Homer’s manifest defects are his ignorance of English law and the Church of England, and so like all ancients he is justly censured by ‘my worthy and ingenious friend Mr. Wotton, Batchelor of Divinity’. And although we must acknowledge that Homer invented the compass and the circulation of the blood, (Cornelius Scriblerus seems to have missed something), nowhere does he give ‘a complete account of the spleen’, and what could be more defective than his ‘dissertation on tea?’44 Hobbes’s love of Homer may have seemed similarly, or even more blatantly subverting than modern scholarship, given his repeated insistence on the evils of ancient relevance and hostility to the sort of adaptive allegorical readings that might enlist Homer to the cause of clerical authority. When Pope translated Homer, I suggest, he was effectively attempting to erase a translation he thought contemptible, though this was but one aspect of a complex enterprise, situated in a web of reactions to the putative father of poetry and learning. Pope had already parodied The Iliad in The Rape of the Lock (1711), and encouraged Parnell in his translation of the Homeric parody, The Battle of the Frogs and Mice.45 Pope’s translation of the epic was prefaced by a thoughtful essay of considerable acuteness. It required a selective distancing from the poet in order to distil a fundamental spiritual, poetic and philosophical value. Indeed, despite his acid criticisms of Chapman’s loose fustian, Pope was returning to something more Chapmanesque in elevating the mysteries of poetic inspiration, in rescuing the epics as allegories for the present, in seeing them explicitly as analogous to the inspired simplicity of the Bible, and in transforming a laundered aspect of The Iliad into an heroic trajectory of self-understanding. In all this, Homer again resumed something of his divine shape, an ultimately mysterious amalgam of spiritual insight and philosophical wisdom fit for a serious poet like Pope.46 In this enterprise, as he generously accepted, Pope was heavily reliant upon Anne Dacier’s French prose translation, itself designed to recapture Homer from his detractors and show his spiritual and philosophical value for the present. Dacier became caught in a schism among the ancients, and in disputes between some of them and the moderns at about the time the Scriberus group was active.47 By misunderstanding the metaphors in which Pope couched his praise of the sublime poet, as wild and untamed, she would consider Pope disloyal to the cause.48 But not least in his attempt to remove Hobbes from the scene, he remained on the side of the angels of antiquity and as he would later insist, he was only a faithful translator.49 To revisit one salient detail at the outset: the treatment of the priest Chryses by Agamemnon and Apollo’s visiting plague upon the Greek camp. Hobbes records Chryses ‘priestly dignity’ with his ‘golden sceptre and crown of bays’

Hobbes and the Scriblerians

133

but, to reiterate, gives virtually no condemnation of Agamemnon’s peremptory dismissal of him. For Pope, the incident has a contrasting import. What is conveyed is not just priestly dignity, but Chryses’s abject and impassioned plea to treat his innocent daughter mercifully. To this end he also brings rich gifts. This offer Hobbes’s translation retains, but whereas Hobbes’s Chryses had simply concluded that to accept the gifts was to respect the god, Pope’s Chryses ends his speech with a veiled threat to use his own powers to call upon Apollo for divine vengeance: ‘If mercy fail, yet let my presents move, / And dread avenging Phoebus, son of Jove’.50 Immediately, ‘The Greeks in shouts their joint assent declare / The priest to reverence, and release the fair’.51 Agamemnon, however, disdainful of the priest and his office proves unmerciful and impervious to the effective counsel of the Greeks. He is condemned by Pope and the whole war given a most un-Hobbesian explanation; ‘The king of men his [Apollo’s] reverent priest defied, / And for the king’s offence the people died’.52 Weinbrot suggests that Pope decorously avoided drawing attention to Agamemnon’s lust to explain his refusal to give up Chryses’s daughter, seeing the recalcitrance instead as an exercise of kingly prerogative, a reading arguably closer to Hobbes than Pope.53 It is, no doubt, part of Pope’s endeavour to rescue Homer by making him more decorous and with a heroic gentleman at the centre.54 But placed against the Hobbesian alternative there is much more at stake. Hobbes’s emphasis on violence had been to insist on the imperatives of peace under a sovereign, the necessary and sole mediator of divine order. Unusually, he had also regarded counsel, good or bad, as optional advice for a sovereign, in no way compromising prerogative. It was a minority view: to ignore good counsel was usually regarded as foolishness to the point of office abuse; and prerogative was most easily defended when exercised in the name of mercy. Thus for Pope to put before us mercilessness where discretion is to be expected, a refusal to be ruled by good counsel, a disregard for priestly office and its independent potency in being able to summon divine retribution, is not so much an exercise of prerogative as calamitous abuse of position. It stemmed from ‘kingly pride’.55 This was the direct cause of the horrors of war and Pope’s account a contradiction of what Hobbes had tried to make of Homer, in his own Hobbesian pride. There is an irony here in that Pope’s self-evident philosophic intention in poetic translation was to assume the very compound persona Hobbes had once insisted it necessary to adopt if philosophers should fail in their duties. The end, however, is to undo Hobbes’s diminution of poetic inspiration, and his elevation of rule by appropriating to it the public functions of priestly office. Unsurprisingly, Pope’s ancient adaptation partially dependent on Dacier’s French, proved vulnerable to modernist standards of authenticity. Dacier had insisted that a prose translation was less of a betrayal of the original than a verse one, that might capture form only to sacrifice spirit. Prose at least could keep for the pre-

134

Hobbes, the Scriblerians and the History of Philosophy

sent a mummification of a once lithe being.56 Pope had bravely gone where she feared to tread, offering a living body of wise beauty, and so was doubly exposed to that nemesis of anciennité, Richard Bentley. He would leave only a series of notes towards an edition of his own focused on the conjectural necessity of the digamma.57 But as he witheringly wrote to Pope about what he patronizingly conceded was a pretty poem, ‘the best that can be said is that this is ‘Homer modernized’, but as a translation from ‘French Prose, by a Woman too, how the Devil should it be Homer?’ As for the Greek, he continued, ‘you know nothing of it … You can barely construe Latin’.58 Hobbes, no doubt to Bentley’s discomfort, would have seen himself as something of a Bentleyan fellow-traveller.

The Seriousness of the Absurd Despite Hobbes being an easy if indirect target, he and the Scriblerians did have things in common and it was still possible for people, despite their best endeavours, to end up sounding a little like him. The Scriblerians share with Hobbes a dismissive attitude to scholasticism.59 More importantly, they had much the same understanding of philosophical absurdity. As I indicated at the outset, Hobbes carefully distinguished error, as a mistake that anyone might make, from absurdity, the use of words beyond philosophical sense. That is, trains of thought that stem from philosophical endeavour, lead beyond it and occupy a contrasting realm that defines the shape of true philosophy. Error, we might say, can be explained internally by reference to the shared conventions of a form of discourse; ‘2+2=5’ is a mistake, but to refer to a square circle, or triangular quadrangle appears to go beyond error into absurdity and nonsense. Two brief points can be made here. The absurd as beyond the bounds of intellectual propriety constituted a subset of the ridiculous, that which deserved ridicule. Bacon in line with many others made the point specifically with respect to excessive boldness becoming vanity and so laughable; the excess that goes beyond bounds requires a negative re-description and a moral response of ridicule in order to reaffirm those bounds. Therein lay the core of the moral defence of satire.60 Second, mere error can more easily be explained by mal-function of procedures or ignorance than can absurdity or the ridiculous that may require further explanation. For both Hobbes and the Scriblerians, the persona inappropriate to philosophy may provide the explanans. Certainly Hobbes, with the surprising exception of Mersenne, thought the personae of priest and philosopher incompatible and the passing instances he gives of absurdity are of the linguistic results of philosophy touched by priestly ambition. The Scriblerians were hardly insensible to the abuse of priestly office; it had been a central theme of A Tale of a Tub. But because their understanding of philosophy was vigorously opposed to the Hob-

Hobbes and the Scriblerians

135

besian methodical analysis of material causation, their counter was to create a partially Hobbesian persona as appropriate to the philosophy they lampooned. For Hobbes, by implication, the shift into absurdity marks the point at which only ridicule, derision, and that form of grimace called laughter remain the proper philosophical responses. The importance of absurdity adds unusual weight to the adage that the authentic philosophical reaction to the world is to laugh at it. This is not mere impatience, nor is it unserious or simply joyful. Because for Hobbes philosophy was predominantly a socially transmitted and an inculcated kind of reasoning; it could carry little authority in its own terms for those who have either abandoned it, or for whom it is not really intelligible. All that is left is the shared laughter of a community at the expence of the excluded, ostracized and incapable; and so it reinforces a sense of belonging and superiority. The Scriblerians’ attitude to philosophy and the world was at this most general level much the same.61 The differences lay not with the socializing functions of laughter at absurdity, but in what should be laughed at and how and where the criteria for philosophical belonging could be drawn. Hobbes had believed that as a mode of conduct in the world that of the philosopher could and should be taught, but the recognized differences in human capacity were not of salient interest to him, and in human rationality there lay a potential for philosophy. There was then, a thin edge of philosophical inclusiveness about his thought. Part of the Scriblerian response lay in a reductive extension of the emphasis on teaching to become a simple doctrine that whole systems could be learned by rote by anybody and so alarmingly allow the trespasses of the vulgar. The legitimacy of ridicule began with those who lacked both reverence and the judgement of a cultural elite. Moreover, Hobbes gave six main causes of absurdity: lack of method, the confusion of bodies with accidents, of internal with external qualities, of things with names, of predication with identity and the use of metaphors for ‘words proper’. Scriblerian satire illustrates each of these though not as separate categories.62 Martinus’s incapacity to understand the contexts that might give words different meanings, together with the addiction of the inveterate punster Crambe to the free association of words, ensure an easy slippage between Hobbes’s causes of absurdity. Thus Crambe’s Treatise of Syllogisms is not just an elaborately extended metaphor about reason from sexual intercourse (of the sort for which Hobbes himself showed a partiality), it is indeed a tour de force of paradiastole; confusing words with things and internal with external qualities.63 All syllogistic rules (naturally) are said to follow from it, thus an enthymeme is a secret marriage, a false inference is a bastard and absurdity itself is defined as an engendered monster.64 Recall here also that the twins whom Martinus marries, as one person, are seen by everyone but the philosopher as monstrous and the marriage is dissolved as a legal and natural absurdity. Hobbes, too, treated the invention of ‘mongrill

136

Hobbes, the Scriblerians and the History of Philosophy

Gods’ as the most absurd consequence of superstitious veneration.65 Crambe’s Treatise does not illustrate lack of method, for metaphor determines an ordered understanding, but then there are always the pilloried virtuosi, men like Fossile who might be made to stand for any residual form of absurdity. The point here has not been to posit any exclusive set of textual interrelationships and, on its own any one of these apparent allusions to Hobbes is of little consequence. Considered cumulatively, however, they do deepen a relevant context of philosophical style and seen in conjunction with Hobbes, Scriblerian satire illustrates some of the wayward complexities of philosophical controversy. In addition to there being confrontational schools of philosophy, there are likely to be personal attacks on philosophers insofar as it is taken for granted that a philosophical persona is a sine qua non for, or might even be a cause of, good philosophy. So too, the necessary virtues for the integrity of the activity were contested and converted into vices by the operations of the golden law of transformation – a principle of re-description with which Hobbes was all too familiar.66 The general vocabulary of philosophic virtue, like that required to legitimate anything approaching an office, needed to be cashed into more specific moral economies of enquiry and was just as easily subject to re-description into the negative register of critique. In this way, the Hobbesian intellectual honesty of independent raciocination had been made into a form of mendacity and purblind pride: the modern is doomed to reinvent and square the wheel if not the circle. Similarly, the forensic resources of humour used to expose absurdity, could be transmuted into a mere scoffing avoidance of genuine argument, mere ‘satire and wrangling’. All of this was inescapably carried in language not as meaning but as expressive of something about its users, and of what they hoped to promote or discourage. Not surprisingly, then, philosophical battalions often failed to meet in the dusk of the early modern world, and disputes could be drawn out long beyond the point at which we may think they should have been settled. The conditions for argumentative buoyancy have been more difficult to see as the serio-ludere tradition itself, a principal vehicle for the linguistic confluence of doctrine and risible personae, has largely faded from philosophical respectability. Decent philosophers like Hobbes have as a consequence been effectively subjected to Berkeley’s ‘doctrine of abstraction’, and removed to sit like so many spiders above the unseemliness of more personalized disputes. With this loss, it has become so much easier to take seriously something presented as jest – like Arbuthnot’s morally autonomous domain of the political as an object of science, or Swift’s modern reader as the wilful despot over the written word. These have become seriously entertained philosophical propositions that may have begun life as proofs of the frailties to which the philosopher was prone. ‘[There] is nothing’, to repeat the words of a melancholic Gulliver, ‘so extravagant and irrational which some Philosophers have not maintained for a Truth’.67 Conversely, the

Hobbes and the Scriblerians

137

erasure of the serio ludere from the body of philosophy lets us see only humour in what was also deadly earnest. For the Scriblerians, unless the philosopher understood both the procedures and appropriate subject matter of the activity, intellectual busyness demanded ridicule. And to repeat Hobbes on that shared Lucianic principle: the necessary corollary of humanity’s capacity to reason is its subjection to absurdity, ‘And of men, those are of all most subject to it, that professe Philosophy’.68 The Scriblerians would at least have agreed with that.

AFTERWORD: THE HISTORY OF EARLY MODERN PHILOSOPHY: METHOD, SPEECH ACT AND PERSONA

Discipline and History This monograph has attempted to illustrate the historiographical importance of early modern animadversion around conceptions of a philosophic persona. The very need to recover this dimension of debate attests to how points of intellectual demarcation have changed since the end of the seventeenth century. The historiographical difficulty has been in thinking outside the confines of disciplinary pedigrees developed in aid of contemporary institutional identities and wider preconceptions of how the world is intellectually structured. Specifically important here has been the treatment of satire as a literary phenomenon with satirists becoming appropriated by the histories of national literatures, and excluded from philosophy; English literature gets Pope, philosophy gets Hobbes. Once attention is given to the status of the philosophic persona, we can see why satire could be an idiom of philosophizing and why forms of argument now excluded from philosophy had some legitimacy. For the historian recognition of this may be quite sufficient, with the relative foreignness of the past having a fascination of its own, and the task of reaching up to a horizon of understanding proving sufficiently Syssiphean. How far the patterns of relative contrast are also philosophically enlightening is a more troublesome matter. It raises most generally a question about the wider relevance of historical enquiry in the context of which the more problematic relationships between history and philosophy can be situated. It is certainly possible that what a historian says about something will prove serendipitously significant for others. In this respect we cannot double guess what might be taken from historiography, reshaped in a context of differing priorities and found useful, or conversely dangerous and counter-productive. It may also be that a perfectly rigorous line of historical enquiry has been initially stimulated by a contemporary concern. But all such imponderables are to one side of a stronger case that enlightenment beyond historical discourse is a dividend – 139 –

140

Hobbes, the Scriblerians and the History of Philosophy

to be expected from, or even a criterion for, undertaking historical enquiry in the first place. At one level, this might merely be a habitual evocation of the hallowed rhetoric of relevance on which historians have relied in the causes of self-defence and self-promotion. For many historians, not to be relevant to a community beyond fellow specialists is to be consigned to a backwater of triviality and mere antiquarianism. It has become almost a trope of early modern intellectual history to end with a more or less plausible gesture in the direction of contemporary relevance. And it is not beside the point to note the institutional pressures reinforcing conventional wisdom. Nowadays with the usefulness of whole fields of the humanities being questioned, some dependence on the rhetoric of relevance is almost inevitable among academics struggling for research support. Not to make use of it is to be condemned as, well, unfundable. Predictably, among funding bodies, a conception of history as understanding the past and its value for the present is more likely to be seen as a truism than fudged formulation. A similar synoptic account of philosophy and its wider value to society could as easily be given, and might start with Plato’s argument that only philosophers are really fit to rule everyone else. It might end with saving the planet through metaphysics, or more modestly and reasonably with the argument that we need moral philosophers to help draw up codes of conduct for professions like medicine, engineering and law as much as we need the expertise of practitioners. Hobbes, as we have seen, could urge on occasion that good philosophy had its end in human betterment; to have suggested that both philosophy and counsel were rigorous enquiries after truth may have intimated that good philosophers made good counsellors for the sovereign. The Scriblerians parodied such ambitions through Martinus, ever industrious in trying to reduce philosophy to a learnable set of rules that anyone could simply apply to solve all problems; but they certainly did not eschew the idea that the good philosopher was indeed of wide-reaching value to society. There is, then, both in historiography and philosophy a similar continental drift towards questions of extrinsic value. It has no doubt helped some imagine an almost unproblematic harmony between philosophy and history. In Thomasius’s edifying metaphor, they are eyes in the head of wisdom.1 For Collingwood, as I have indicated, such a unity was imperative. But if one looks in a more focused fashion, the rhetoric of relevance may be seen to involve serious claims about the interrelationships of two ambivalently complementary and at times incommensurable activities. To generalize about such an issue is to step onto hazardous terrain, but attention to the philosophic persona reveals a glimpse of a more uneasy relationship than affirmations about a seamless interdisciplinarity and a shared wider significance would lead us to expect. The historiographical drive to recapture the place of the persona in philosophy carries the corollary that we need to consider previous conceptions of

Afterword

141

the character of philosophy regardless of their contemporary saliency; and the strictest requirements of historiography would seem to demand we start from the evidence of the words ‘philosopher’ and ‘philosophy’, as well as those gathered about them. The difficulty, however, is that such terms were used so diversely, that if we do not assume something of modern established philosophical activity to shape a sense of the past, writing a discriminate history of what we now call philosophy is compromised from the outset. The best we might manage is a dictionary on legs, a philological exploration of a sub-set of a vocabulary from the compound philo-sophos. Conversely, relying on the contemporary cognitive shape of philosophy to structure a history will stitch into the fabric of the narrative the very kind of distortion the historian tries to avoid. The upshot is a variation on Meno’s paradox concerning the primacy of definiens and definienda. Ultimately, it raises the possibility that the philosophical and historical requirements of a history of philosophy are conjoined, not like eyes in the head of wisdom, but like a pair of Samson’s foxes; with a burning issue between them, they are bound at some point to pull in different directions. Put crudely, how historical do we want the history to be, and in what capacity do we answer such a question? With this in mind I want to turn directly to what I left in abeyance in the Introduction, to the question of what value, if any, is there for philosophy now in the recovery of the previous importance of the philosophical persona. If it is the case that, historically speaking, what has been overlooked is still philosophically present, there follows the methodological injunction; philosopher, scito ti ipsum by reading your past: the value of a better history of philosophy might simply be better philosophy.2 But if the present centred justification for history is a cause of poor history in the first place, we are left uncomfortably close to a paradox. I propose to sketch briefly something of the methodological landscape over which these possibilities take us. This, as it were, is not to follow the philosophic persona on a clear path to a satisfactory destination and a resolution of contradictory imperatives, but to map the difficulties of the terrain that causes a good deal of inconclusive discussion. To do this, it is necessary to start neither with philosophy nor history, but with methodology.

Method, Models and Speech Acts There are some sorts of methodological discourse that may be considered entirely technical in that they work within the terms of an established activity, and assume common ends and practices to guide and help the relatively uninitiated. Much quantitative method in the social sciences is of this sort. The methodologies used to train archivists and laboratory-based scientists are other cases. Methodology is a digest of what is involved in being methodical in a given practice. But if only in a piecemeal or graduated way, methodological reflection

142

Hobbes, the Scriblerians and the History of Philosophy

can move to offer more general and often contentious guidance. Insofar as an established practice is unclear, insecure, institutionally ambitious, or internally divided, methodological discourse in this sense is likely to be widespread, as it was in the hey-day of behaviouralism in American political studies, in sociology in the 1950s, and in departments of English and in the history of political theory in the 1960s and 1970s.3 Instead of an ordered set of principles applied for agreed ends, methodology becomes a matter of providing guiding principles for given activities, adumbrated with the purpose of reform, or consolidation in the face of threat. Methodology becomes a vehicle for formulating normative theoretical models of, and for, practice. It can descend towards a jargonistic reductivism, not untouched by the spirit of Martinus Scriblerus or Tom Pun-Sibi; and those attracted to its admonitory or legislative style have, like the reforming philosophic persona of the early modern world, been subject to satiric caricature.4 Models are developed within the immediate context of the theoretical enterprise they are designed to aid, but their purpose is also to be applied and so give coherence to a body of data beyond it. Thus they manifest both a drive to the elegance and simplicity of a set of defining principles or parameters, and a countervailing propensity to adjust to the evidence; the result is a constant oscillation between differing criteria of judgement by which models are at once always defensible and simultaneously open to critique, depending on the criterion being privileged.5 This tension is a feature of the meta-discourse of methodology. Very briefly, I shall take Austinian speech act theory as an example, partly because it has been used in attempts to reform the historiography of early modern political philosophy in the 1960s and 1970s, but also because it might help clarify the question of the place of the persona in philosophy now. John Austin developed his analytic model principally with reference to microscopic and paradigmatic examples of direct verbal communication, ubiquitous in everyday speech: we are, for example, in a room and I say to you, (A) ‘It is four o’clock’, or (B) ‘I bet she is going to be late.’ For Austin, understanding such statements revolved around questions of action and response.6 At its simplest his analytical model processed them through three interrelated categories, locution, illocution and perlocution. For example, one apparent difference between statements (A) and (B) might be taken to be that, in Austin’s earlier terms, locution (A) is a constative; having a clear reference function, it purports to state a fact about the world. Given Austin’s adherence to a correspondence theory of truth, it may also be said to be true or false. Statement (B), however, is what he initially called a performative, and what he would come to designate an illocutionary act. The act of making the statement creates something and carries an illocutionary force, or intended point, and so is apt

Afterword

143

to change the situation in which it is uttered. It may not make much sense to ask if it is true or false. The illocutionary force may be accompanied by further appropriate alterations in the situation, constituting the statement’s perlocutionary force, how it is taken up, or what action stems from it. The verb ‘to bet’ has been classed as one of a large number of ‘illocutionary verbs’, such as to swear, rebut, agree and accuse, and they have been seen as constituting a natural kind of language use.7 Yet, in practice, statement (A) may function in the same way. ‘It is 4 o’clock’ can have a point additional to, or at odds with formal meaning as a statement of fact. Evidence of adequate comprehension of statement (A) may require, among other possibilities, that I make a cup of tea, or leave the room. In doing so appropriately, I am evidencing the perlocutionary force of (A). In all such cases, the result is to treat a constative as an illocutionary act. Hence understanding requires both an appreciation of intentionality in uttering and adherence to some pre-existing socialized convention in language.8 A detailed examination of a range of cases may suggest that the distinction between locution and illocution is unsustainable, or that notion of an illocutionary act is, per se, redundant, or that what is required is the supplementary concept of an indirect or implicit speech act.9 It may need further refinements to deal with a range of simple situations, such as a distinction between intention to utter and to communicate.10 This further suggests that there are forms of language use, such as statements intended to impress or deceive, in which the auditor’s understanding the agent’s statement is precisely not what the agent intends.11 And again, while for some philosophers the relationships between illocution and perlocution are central to the model, for others they are marginal.12 So, although the model of analysis provides a way of organizing data and a means of generating hypotheses about socially situated language use, it has, in keeping with so many theoretical models, become increasingly complicated and qualified as it has been tested.13 Austin expressed doubts about it and some linguists have found it too general to be helpful, or inadequate when too specific.14 John Searle, who has done much to develop speech act theory, at one point regarded the meaning of speech acts and sentences as synonymous; but has more recently emphasized the restricted explanatory range of the speech act and the difficulty of extending it even to embrace conversations.15 Nevertheless, as Walter Cerf has remarked, the ‘speech act’ become a hallmark of Austin’s philosophy.16 As such it has proved a suitable item for export. From the mid-1960s, the speech act model made the vocabulary of analytic philosophy available to those wanting to insist upon the centrality of specific conventions in understanding social and historical problems; as such, it reinforced the thrust of some of Collingwood’s work and the later and increasingly fashionable philosophy of Wittgenstein that had already been adapted to social anthropology.17 The notion of the speech act has not, to use Austin’s expression,

144

Hobbes, the Scriblerians and the History of Philosophy

had an even uptake across the humanities, and as David Schulkwyk has claimed, its use in English literature has been inhibited by the polemics of the Searle/ Derrida debate;18 but quite early a number of historians of early modern political theory and philosophy turned to Austin’s model. They had been dissatisfied by what they took to be the ahistorical idiom in which intellectual history was written: too easily it had been assumed that previous political writers had been addressing the same set of issues in much the same way, aiming at the same general propositional outcomes and so were all subject to much the same criteria of assessment – a starting point at one with this study. Instead, it was urged that it was necessary to focus on an array of questions directed towards discovering the range of discursive conventions shaping intentionality in the action of writing and modes of reception. Before the complicating refinements to which it has since been subject, Austin’s model offered a plausible, philosophically legitimating rubric through which to organize such enquiries. To be sure, there was no uniform or mechanical application of the model; but it was broadly evoked or relied upon as providing a dramatically improved historical understanding of early modern political theory and philosophy, what J. G. A. Pocock cautiously referred to as being a disciplinary ‘revolution’ in a Kuhnian sense.19 Although Pocock has been chary of claiming any sort of philosophical gain from a methodological reform of the history of political thought, for Quentin Skinner, speech act theory played a vital part in the argument that a better historical account of a philosopher like Hobbes was also a contribution to philosophical understanding.20 Some came to take the model as sufficiently established for texts simply to be understood as speech acts and once perceived thus, their meanings could be made clear in terms of illocutionary force.21 Yet, just as use of the model has required increasing qualification and complexity of presentation to respond to critique and deal with the range of verbal utterance (the exploration of its formal logical properties has come close to being an end in itself ), so it has needed adaptation for the complex texts inherited from the past. Taking the model in a fairly rudimentary state was an aid to application, but disciplinary reorientation meant alteration. How far the result has been to empty it of philosophical value is a moot point.22 To begin with, written words are not in all respects the same as spoken ones. Many of the differences are so familiar we are apt to ignore them, and although some, if taken singly, can be quite trivial, en masse they have a cumulative significance for the methodological utility of the speech act model. With the spoken word, before the invention of telecommunication, the speaker was normally a literal presence. The historical agent, however, is absent, existing as an entailed extrapolation from what we have concluded is a rationally created text. Habitual shorthands such as ‘what Locke is saying’ or ‘Aristotle is telling us’ used in the interpretation of texts can easily help obscure the difference. If it is overlooked,

Afterword

145

uncritical or unqualified reliance on the model can become spuriously referential. I am certainly not dismissing the importance of intentionality, but drawing attention to its characteristic status in explicating texts. In reading texts, we do not refer directly to intending agents, Locke is not now saying anything; rather, we infer agency from and in order to support a reading. Indeed, it is only in some circumstances or phases of interpretation that we need to rely upon ‘speaker/ author’ as an implication, usually in order to clarify a difficulty or some sort. Statements of the form ‘What Locke was intending by this was’ announce ways of defending a reading, often by tying the text to a selective context. Similarly, authorial meta-statements within a text such as ‘What I shall show is’ are still features of a given work, often, we conjecture, placed to anticipate points of difficulty or help reorientate the reader. As can be appreciated by reading Richard Bentley and the Scriblerians’ reactions to his work, an element of conjectural completion, either to historical or unhistorical effect is inherent in interpretation. To present intentions in speaking as directly available can be to disguise its slippery significance. Again, with a speech act, it is common for the dress (say gown and wig, or policeman’s helmet), or physical context (say pulpit), to supplement the words spoken, so providing some of what Austin called the felicity conditions that aid an appropriate response. Some of this a-tuning visual environmental context is absent with the indirection of radio transmission, and I understand that on one occasion, the British prime minister, Stanley Baldwin, began a broadcast not with words but by striking a match and lighting his pipe. Presumably it was intended to bring to mind a physical symbol, the pipe with which he was identified and provide an illusion of overcoming distance and formality, encouraging trust of an avuncular semi-presence in the living rooms of the listeners. Similarly, the written word does not automatically carry with it such clues to aid and direct audience response. In late antiquity punctuation became a sign-system to compensate for the missing rhythms of direct speech; and then the world of print rapidly developed a range of semiotic mechanisms to compensate for authorial absence from the book. The elaborate frontispiece, costly folio, the use of foreign languages, different fonts, printed marginalia, the index, or other scholarly apparatus might all carry some compensating force to create an illusion of authoritative presence, or at least some physical conditions to aid an appropriate response to the content. But overall, the initial directive contexts for any given speech act on which we rely in everyday life evaporate with the inherited written word to leave contextualization as a creative aspect of reading. Authorial specifications intrinsic to an inherited text have also provided the impression of an informing agent as a persona whose voice was within it. The text might be written by ‘A Lady’, ‘A Gentleman’, ‘A Lover of his Country’, ‘A Priest of the Church of England’ or ‘A Traveller from Abroad’. Complete anonymity adds

146

Hobbes, the Scriblerians and the History of Philosophy

a further complication.23 It may, of course, be accidental, a matter of what I shall call contingent anonymity; but the absence of a name might be an expression of a persona, and may become a masking anonymity. To use speech act terminology, the absence of an agent might be an indirect illocutionary act, such as the intention to communicate gentle status. Or, in the idiom of the Royal Society, anonymity might be an expression of modesty and cooperation appropriate to natural philosophy. Anonymity might even be an insinuated demonstration of the argument – those claiming to be suffering from persecution in a wicked world might reinforce the point by staying out of the text, yet manifesting the virtues of courage, honesty and responsibility by writing it. As (the anonymous) Roger Palmer, Lord Castelmaine lamented, it was necessary to write incognito in his own land. The prophet might need to be cloaked in anonymity. This posture has been frequently adopted by satirists, and were we to take them all literally, we would have to conclude that satire was a highly courageous and risky business in an oppressive and corrupt environment.24 I shall return briefly to the difference between contingent and masking anonymity when I revisit the speech act in the context of the philosophical persona. In the meantime, there are other features of a text that complicate its being seen literally as a speech act: it might not have a single agent; consider the role of printers, editors, translators and booksellers. That last possibility on its own allowed both Swift and Eachard to play with the authorial persona presented to the reader, so raising again the question of the difference between mask and persona. It allowed Henry Neville and his printer John Starkey to provide a false provenance for a spurious letter aimed at accommodating Machiavelli’s ‘satyr’ of princely government to the monarchy of Charles II.25 There might be no single or cohesive audience to which the acts of writing and or printing were addressed. A dedication to a patron is not just a personal direct communication; it makes other readers flies on the wall, getting some taste of what is to come and witnessing the grace of the author and the virtues of the dedicatee. Swift’s comment on the ‘modern preface’, prefacing my own, makes the point. Hobbes dedicating a work to William Cavendish is not just the statement of a philosopher, it is philosopher as servent for the instruction of the reader. Despite the conventions of compliment and flattery, there is much room to react in different ways. And an audience does not necessarily, perhaps cannot, read as it might listen – differences that greatly exercised the imagination of Montaigne. There may be no uniformly anticipated process of uptake.26 Irrespective of intellectual content, buying a text may be uptake enough, a possibility parodied in Eachard’s satire of Hobbes.27 Moreover, the text itself is unlikely to be simply a print version of a single speech act (‘I bet she will be late’) but a complex argument or set of them, making specification of any one act in the physical text problematic; a text may be constituted by hundreds of acts, identification of which is itself less a given

Afterword

147

than the result of detailed interpretation.28 To see even a fourteen-line Shakespearean sonnet as a speech act is not to apply but greatly stretch the model. It is precisely for this sort of reason that Searle has been reluctant to apply the ‘speech act’ to conversations. By the time we reach the possibility of republication as yet another speech act,29 the Austinian conception has been lost and the discriminations of the model attenuated or abandoned. Overall, although the authority of Austin’s model has been sustained, his distinction between illocutionary and perlocutionary has languished, and that between a performative, illocutionary act and a constative statement has had largely to be blurred because in one weak, even trivial sense, any text once created is a performative act, but its intellectual content might be largely constative; a ‘speech act’ may end up as a stylistic redundancy, only being synonymous with anything said, or word as used (parole) rather than linguistic system (langue).30 None of this is to say that, even handled loosely, the model has been inconsequential.31 Applied to English studies, it has helped accommodate a commitment to Foulcauldian metaphysics to the wayward intricacies of evidence.32 Conversely applied to intellectual history, it has provided a valuable synoptic argument for a more rigorously historical approach to the resources used by an author and at least partially shared with an audience; it has encouraged a more careful attention to agency and intentionality in a way that under-cuts reliance on social contexts as explanatorily adequate, and bypasses the dogma of the socalled, or poorly named ‘intentionalist fallacy’, found in some ahistorical spheres of literary criticism.33 It has also provided a means of challenging the assumption that the issues of the history of political theory and or philosophy are invariant, and independent of conventional mutation.34 It has encouraged an increased sensitivity to the way in which the same words could suffer shifts of meaning, even in being repeated in different contexts, as is often the case with republication of texts, by the original or different agents. Moreover, the model works plausibly enough when applied to texts more or less conforming to the electoral literature with which we are all familiar. ‘Vote for me, Joe Bloggs, your local candidate’, where, the verb to vote is a performative with a clear illocutionary force. Yet, even in the analysis of manifestoes, where the model is least problematically used, the results can be uncertain, as Mark Knights has shown in discussing the pamphleteering of Sir Roger L’Estrange.35 The cohesive body of literature generated by the Engagement of Loyalty required by Cromwell and the Council of State in 1649 provides a larger illustration of the limits of the Austinian model. The demand that clergymen and other formal office-holders ‘Engage’ with the new Commonwealth, seems to invite the use of speech act theory to clarify what was at stake. For, on both sides of the debate there were straightforward imperatives and a clear directive force concerning the same performative verb, to engage, a verb remarkably, for some

148

Hobbes, the Scriblerians and the History of Philosophy

suspiciously, like the verb to swear. Skinner used Austin in the process of arguing that this controversy formed the ideological context for Leviathan and that to understand its illocutionary force with respect to the question of obligation was to dispel the miasma of post-Kantian perplexities that had formed around Hobbes’s philosophy of obligation, perplexities also absent from the immediate uptake of Hobbesian theory. It was principally on this basis that Skinner concluded that better history resulted in better philosophy; the simplicity of Hobbes’s de facto theory of obligation and his ideological alignment with others who shared the same political commitment let the philosophical fly out of the bottle. But the matter has not proved as clear-cut as the speech act model might suggest it should; the bounds and relevance of the context have been effectively cast into doubt; the fault-lines of debate, and so the nature of any ‘speech acts’ themselves, arguably misconstrued.36 If the application of the model to the analysis of polemical pamphlets is at least of uncertain help, it is problematically used for works that might not be governed by any one act, or urge any one line of action by way of responding to specific illocutionary force. Theological texts, paradox literature, the cento, or nonsense poetry, those clarifying the nature of an existing body of law, or exploring a logical proposition, many works of dialogic form, the intellectual content of dramas performed on the stage, which at best mimic speech acts, those inviting a range of possible responses and those texts that come to us incomplete or as notes, are all hard to confine within the terms of the model. This, of course, is to test it against the field of literature under discussion, and precisely in this light it might be urged that the model has limitations and that if these are not recognized, that field is unduly narrowed or oversimplified. If a text is a speech act, what act does Leviathan perform? The difficulty in answering that question is not a problem with Hobbes’s work, and he had a most clear understanding of the performative dynamics of language, but with the model through which a text is reduced to an illocutionary act, as being simpliciter, an utterance. In response, the model might be taken at a more abstract level, reformulated to a greater elegance – to wit, all that is required is recognition of an agent, irrespective of specific personage (Plato), or persona (‘An honest citizen’, ‘Anon.’) using a range of conventionally organized verbal and conceptual resources to produce an artefact (text) in order to elicit one or more responses. It can thus be applied to anything from a summa to a graffito. It allows us to say that to call something a text is to attribute to it some form of rationality, to see it as an expression of meaningful conduct, and therefore identifying or hypothesizing the nature of the agency involved is to give an account of it.37 Thus the elementary continuum (Figure 1): Resources Writer/s — Text — Audience/s — Response/s

Afterword

149

We have already come some way from Austin, but this, however, rescues the model by making it so general as to offer little by the way of informing methodological injunction.38 Almost everything that is interesting about a graffito or a summa requires that we distinguish them, not lump them together. Indeed, with minor adjustment the reformed model (Figure 1 above) may even encompass the sort of theorizing (structuralist and post-structuralist) that formally denied the importance of intentionality and human agency in reading texts by transferring agency and intentionality to the resources, placing them in the structure of language itself, so making the writer a mere conduit or cadaver. Thus (Figure 2): Resources/Writers — Text — Audience/s — Responses (of the resources) The reshaping of the model does, however, make clear a second dimension of the methodological. Austin’s original theories were an attempt to redirect the focus of philosophy and they did so by echoing or adapting Aristotle’s philosophy of rhetorical discourse, on which I touched in the Introduction. For Aristotle, the principle components of any rhetorical situation were provided by the interrelationships of ethos, logos and pathos, and the primary building block with which the rhetor sought to make a persuasive case through logoi was the enthymeme. This was the rhetorical equivalent of the syllogism (though sometimes taken as both Hobbes and the Scriblerians did, as a compressed syllogism). The enthymeme as the rhetorical equivalent of the syllogism was the form through which the commonplaces, topoi, of shared knowledge in a given culture were organized along with a range of conventionalized tropes to elicit a given response.39 Aristotle was exploring the necessary implications of probabilistic reasoning as preconditions for acting. Indeed, the political was largely constituted by such rhetorical situations, societies too large for direct communication could hardly have politics. The strictly Aristotelian implication of this would seem to be that the mountains of printed literature written for unseen audiences now called political theory and philosophy have been misnamed. Be this as it may, Austin is not as restrictive, though far narrower in his field of interest, but a schematic compound of the two can make clear the similarities (Figure 3): Austin: Resources (conventions) Speaker/s — Statement — Audience/s — Response/s Aristotle: (enthymeme, commonplaces and tropes) rhetor/ethos — logos — pathos

150

Hobbes, the Scriblerians and the History of Philosophy

Both assume the direct communication of the spoken word, both recognize three parameters with more or less shared resources and that things can go wrong for all concerned. There can be miscommunication, lack of uptake, an absence of Austin’s felicity conditions and so forth. Above all, both attempt a general description of what seems to be going on when we use words intrinsic to a given state of affairs and because we want something done in an environment of contingency. We recognize enquiry into such situations as a certain sort of philosophy, the philosophy of action. The point of this is simply to illustrate that methodology has one foot in, or spills over into the philosophical. Hence to raise methodological issues is always to go half way to privileging philosophy over the other activity concerned and as the points just made have threatened to do, it may also be to leave the activity, in this case intellectual history, altogether. The result is to make methodology systemically complex and unstable. In sum, thus far: if a theoretical model (such as the model of the market) is a schematic abstraction of certain features of the world to be tested against the intricacies of that world and conversely also judged in terms of a certain theoretical elegance; then methodology may be seen as a model with the additional feature of a degree of entailed philosophical judgement. With competing criteria of judgement it is never likely to be entirely satisfactory, or indefensible. There is always, to borrow C. Wright Mills’s expression, a ‘methodological inhibition’ about taking matters too far in any direction.40 It may certainly be postulated that philosophy itself provides a limiting case. Philosophical methodological discussion, what is called meta-philosophy may involve no such tensions between theoretical injunction and established practice; it may rather constitute a heightened form of reflexivity. Where it is stimulated, however, it may be precisely where there are differing understandings of what philosophical practice should be. Insofar, however, as there is a difference between philosophy and the subject activity provoking methodological attention, differences of aims, techniques, questions, criteria of judgement, in a word the broad set of conventions making up an established practice, then the tensions between, as it were, the target activity and the pull to philosophy, may reveal a significant incommensurability. Insofar as the activities concerned are themselves variable, or have little real claim to disciplinary uniformity (the study of a national literature, arguably the history of political thought itself ); we may not be able to draw any global conclusions with confidence about what is the case and what should be done. So, to consider the activities of philosophy and history: although both as established disciplines have high degrees of discursive uniformity, neither is entirely conventionally monochromatic and neither is coextensive with the institutional demarcations of university life. The nature and limits of philosophy remain disputed as they were in the early modern world; and the history of historiography

Afterword

151

is at the least a continuing story of contentiously changing limits, not just a question of ‘that’s wrong’ but of ‘that’s not really history’. This is not to say that philosophy and history are as such incompatible or mutually hostile, but that what is accepted by practitioners in one activity from the other requires a shift in a frame of reference and has its significance, or even its meaning, altered in transference. The historian and philosopher may well agree on an account of something in the past but find it interesting or valid for different reasons. Thus there is nothing perverse in a philosopher finding a historically unacceptable reading of a previous writer more worthwhile than a more plausible one. Agreements are therefore likely to be contingent and fortuitous, attitudes instrumentalist rather than required by systematically shared procedures and aims. In fact, methodology is apt to obscure this, precisely because those committed to it already see historiography partially through a philosophical lens. Indeed, when the philosophical concept of a speech act was used to re-describe historical data, the ground was prepared for assimilating history to philosophy, despite the fact that the overt aim was to replace philosophical treatments of the past with more rigorously historical ones. I shall now touch on the sticking points of anachronism, and the nexus of statement and stator. This is to step back into the world of speech act theory as a way of reconsidering the relationships between persona and proposition in the history of philosophy.

Anachronism, Again The imperative to avoid anachronism carries a greater weight for the historian than for the philosopher, something I have illustrated by discussing the controversies surrounding The Epistles of Phalaris. To be sure, the contrast is not in practice absolute. And, indeed, initially it might seem adequate to say that as the historian writes about the past from the present anachronism is inescapable. This may disguise a somewhat incoherent imperative that the historian should embrace and advance present values – which if they are inescapable is of questionable helpfulness. It may take us not very far from the early eighteenthcentury irritation, in the name of higher values, with philological and historical precision, a part of Pope’s impending empire of pedantry and dullness. It is also in the present context, fatuous. First, because what identifies the historian is not achievement or use of materials, but a general disposition towards them. Part of this, as there need not be for anyone else, is the drive to minimize or eradicate anachronism. Second, that need is itself, of course, a present value, which would seem to indicate that present values are neither monolithic nor equally inescapable. The case for the inescapability of present values may boil down to the case for the historian adhering to the right values, or alternatively just the requirement to make clear what (usually political or moral) values the historian holds.

152

Hobbes, the Scriblerians and the History of Philosophy

Nevertheless the matter is not straightforward, partly because of the differing idioms of historiography and partly because of the augmented slipperiness of anachronism. Together these can easily entangle historiographical with philosophical priorities. The historian, like the philosopher, employs explanatory idioms as well as descriptive, or narrative ones; and in historical explanation there is manifestly a greater tolerance of, even a need for anachronistic categories than there is when narrative descriptions are attempted. The status of an anachronism is, then, partially a function of the historiographical idiom in which it occurs. The complicating factor here is that the shift to explanation is characteristically made to rectify an incoherence, or elucidate difficulties arising from description; ipso facto, descriptions can be seen as standing for explanations. Additionally, a term or expression used commonly in a given field of historiography may be technically anachronistic as a descriptor, but so acclimatized, divorced from its origins, that like a ‘dead metaphor’, its use no longer significantly distorts.41 Thus the points at which anachronism, or what Bentley called ‘prophetical anticipation’ is necessarily a sin, are not always self-evident.42 Qualifications aside, within historical writing there is a presupposed and principled hostility to anachronism, a professional prejudice far less characteristic of philosophy and so sufficient for us to expect a degree of incommensurability between historical and philosophical priorities in accounts of the philosophical past. To risk an overly schematic summation, hostility to anachronism is a major constituent of historiography’s defining economy of values, an economy that is coextensive neither with philosophy, nor with the considerably more diverse patterns of value in everyday life. Up to a point anachronism is simple enough: it is the mis-location of an event in a temporal sequence.43 Phoebe Clinket in Three Hours After Marriage put the wearing of stays in mythic antiquity, at which enormity Sir Tremendous explodes. But from such a paradigmatic example that all historians would take to mark the difference between history and myth, there has developed a broader conception of historiographical legitimacy. A little trickier than the habit of stays is the question of whether Wellington ordered the advance at Waterloo before Blucher’s arrival, for there is more than timing of a simple event involved. What counts as arrival and does knowledge of impending arrival amount to much the same thing? Historical practice and reflection has gradually extended the implications of temporal misplacement and it is, I think, possible to identify six principal kinds of anachronism alluded to or invoked in the literature.44 There may be cases where the question of anachronism is in principle irresolvable; but if we reach a point at which, paradoxically, acceptance of anachronism may be a precondition for historians to be able to write at all, we have one way of defining a limit to historical understanding.

Afterword

153

Irrespective of this, in exploring the types of anachronism it is easy to reach the point at which the philosopher’s use of the past becomes evidence. For, to repeat, the philosopher is typically interested in how an established discipline came to be as it is, and of what use (the instrumentalism) a better history can be for philosophy. Indeed, why should the philosopher, qua philosopher, be interested in a historical account to one side of this? But it is difficult to see how concern with philosophical origination does not involve a thin end of anachronism, predicating the past in terms of what contingently is yet to come; a search for origins is to shape matters according to later situations and priorities.45 Two things need noting here: first, this would not bother all historians, many of whom write books about the origins of this or that. Francis Oakley, for example, has accepted that if we want to write a developmental history, then a degree of anachronism, prolepsis, may be needed; a history of logic that gives Gottlob Frege his nineteenth-century level of recognition is going to be inadequate given his significance now. From this, it seems implied, we have to overlook or override Frege’s lower profile in the past because of his stature now. If so, this is a confused argument, and a curious invitation to mythologizing.46 Nevertheless, it does illustrate that historiography, containing a range of tolerances for degrees of anachronism is itself not a uniform activity. Second, and more importantly, there is a difference between an initial interest being generated by a concern with origination, and the use of the present as a principle of evidential selection and conceptual ordering, in which case, a sense of present will necessarily predicate and shape the past, allowing us, through Oakley’s prolepsis, to see things developmentally, and return us to history as lineal consolidation. Intellectual history is particularly subject to this sort of shaping for, as I have argued before, there is a highly unstable line to be drawn between predication and attribution. We may predicate an apple green, unripe or bruised without altering its defining apple-ish characteristics, its identity as a false fruit. With ideas and concepts it easily becomes more tricky to maintain the distinction, re-predication can change identity. A chair turned upside down is still a chair; Hegel turned upside down is Marx (so we were told). Ideas then, can be more elusive and protean than events, even when time is not a significant factor. As I have suggested, if the speech act model is an idea (and if so it is one of a relatively stable type) its application beyond the philosophy of action is a transformation despite continuities of vocabulary. Certainly, historically speaking, whether Antoine Lavoisier or Joseph Priestly first developed the concept of oxygen is not as simple as dating the invention of stays, or even determining whether Blucher first arrived or Wellington first ordered. In intellectual history, there can be little difference between some forms of anachronism and simple myth-making. Part of the reason for this is the often misleading way in which ideas, historically speaking, are taken as hard facts, like the arrival of the Prussians at Waterloo,

154

Hobbes, the Scriblerians and the History of Philosophy

or treated as a quasi-Platonic realm of cosmic artefacts to which we strive to gain access. This is intimated, for example, in the obfuscating rhetoric of people having grasped the concept though wanting the words in which to express it (above, p. 6). Looking at the ways in which historians resort to the notion of a concept or idea may indicate something problematic about surviving language use. A postulated idea can belong to the same class of meta-statements about a point of difficulty in a text as the inference of an agent’s intentions. That is, the idea with which the historian presents the reader is typically a conjectural completion or clarification of evidence. Completing the evidence in different ways and often with later preconceptions easily alters something that is less stable than the requirements of narrative structure encourage us to believe: the words may remain the same, but the intellectual historian uses them to evidence differing ideas. In Collingwoodian terms, this applies just as much to a postulated problem as it does to the idea used to answer it; to make clear or reformulate the problem addressed may be to invent it. So we can see that to predicate ideas in terms of later identities or explicate problems to which the ideas seem to be answers, can rapidly become a matter of anachronistic characterization; the attribution of a concept to a writer who did not have the words in which to express it can be little more than ventriloquism. Such dangers stretch beyond what we might say of a given historical concept. Once we attempt a narrative, linking a range of concepts over time with reference to a later or present outcome, it is difficult to avoid the inherently anachronistic sequencing of genealogy; the process of developmental change itself becomes linear, progressive if not teleological. We are returned, for example, to the historically nugatory and circular process of explicating Hobbes’s ideas by replacing his language say, with Hegel’s (above, p. 6). If we can with confidence identify a shared end and a range of limited means that define a simple problem, this may be the right way to proceed. It is difficult to see how else a history of safety on the nineteenth-century railways could be written; but it is also precisely along this track that we can locate conventional histories of philosophy. The stress Stephen Gaukroger, Ian Hunter and I have all placed on the centrality of the persona can be seen in this context of difficulties as a variably robust means of confronting the history of philosophy as imagined to be like the history of safety regimes on the railway. The conditions under which this analogue for the history of philosophy might seem appropriate would exist only where we have small subgroups of philosophical activity operating cohesively over the short term. It is unduly optimistic or parochial to imagine that such a state of affairs could be true of something as semi-disciplined and contentious as early modern philosophy. Having looked at speech act theory as a sort of methodological model, I want now to return briefly to it, to see how, treated in the most

Afterword

155

general terms, it can help clarify the question of the contemporary value of attention to the philosophical persona.

The Philosophical Value of the Persona I have argued that for the speech act to be applied to the history of complex texts it has to be compromised, the model oscillates between an elegant simplicity and a description of real works in real historical controversies; while to remain valid as a general description of what was going on, the model needs to be more schematic and taken to a level of abstraction that largely empties it of methodological force. In making this move, it becomes clear that one of its principal components (speaker) has a changed status. In the light of this, is the historical recovery of the philosophic persona still of direct philosophical relevance? To address the issue I shall principally keep in mind hypothetical situations of direct philosophical utterance, of the sort found in seminars, lectures and so forth where there is literally a speaker. At one extreme, it might be said that what characterizes both modern philosophy and modern science is the very capacity to dispense with any persona. It may have been important in the philosophical past, but we do not need to know anything about the creator of the proposition before us to understand and assess it. We need only adequate familiarity with the conventions of the relevant activity: 2 + 2 = 4 even if we do not know the engine driver’s name, hence the irrelevance of the ad hominem. What helps give the imprimatur of science is precisely the routine application of procedures and replication of results. It would warm the cockles of Martinus Scriblerus’s heart. Indeed, in science, if an author’s status or interest is found relevant, research findings can be seen as compromised. Thus the need to discount the persona is analogous to the fact of contingent anonymity. We may know nothing about the Norman Anonymous, but the work carrying that name exemplifies intentional human agency in a surviving manuscript and it is only on this that we can concentrate. On this score then, the philosophical value of reinstating the persona into the history of philosophy is reduced to a point of illuminating contrast; it cannot be expected to have any greater impact on philosophical self-awareness and practice, except as reassurance that the present is an improvement on the past. This is not entirely to escape the present centred instrumentality of conventional histories of philosophy, but it would seem to minimize it. At another extreme, it can be said that such propositional isolation from a (redundant) persona is a delusion brought about by the attempt to cultivate a highly specific, professional persona; the anonymity and inter-changeability of the modern scientist or philosopher is itself the result of a certain sort of education, the cultivation of certain intellectual virtues, and thus rather than the

156

Hobbes, the Scriblerians and the History of Philosophy

persona being jettisoned, it has been ingested.47 The anonymous philosopher standing before us, a locus of pure proposition, is a model of how we too should comport ourselves as philosophers. The relative absence of ad hominen argument from academic philosophy could then be explained in terms of a changed philosophic persona taken as uniformly appropriate to the sorts of things philosophers should say. The persona, not the person, has a sort of masked anonymity. One reading of the persona’s significance might liken it to a booster rocket, necessary for getting into orbit, but to be jettisoned once there; the other would see the booster as integral or orbit delusional. The plausibility of each extreme may depend partly upon the sort of discourse we are talking about. But also important is the level of abstraction at which we are taking the speech act. Where we can rely on the authority and meaning of the agreed conventions relevant to any statement, the stator is superfluous to requirements; assuming our intellectual competence, the statement itself is of sufficiently focused rationality for us to understand. Most forms of science and technical philosophy constitute such tightly textured patterns of convention, while some forms of metaphysics aspire to a similar condition by reliance on identifying patterns of imagery and specialized vocabulary. 48 In its most schematic and generalized form, the speech act only requires the notional entailment of agency for anything called a statement. But this stator or hypothetical creator of the statement may have no features, moral, physical or otherwise, may be little more than a name like Homer standing for an unknown number of contributors to a surviving artefact. The postulation of such an agent is simply a way of identifying a statement as a result of some sort of rational, intentional act having meaning within the conventions of the activity concerned.49 Insofar as we look at speech acts in this way it does seem plausible to say that a persona can be irrelevant to the identification of anything as a statement. With the Norman Anonymous thinned out to a notional precondition for a rationally created artefact (text), we are not far from language itself as agent, language thinking itself through a quill. Indeed, it is here that the post-structuralist displacement of agency to system has most plausibility; here too we might find the metaphysician as a conduit for the moment of truth. Conversely, where persuasion remains important, matters are more openended: who states in what capacity, exhibiting what sort of expected competence may itself give suasive credence, or necessary reassurance, and be a means of orientation for assessing the statement. This is why policemen have uniforms and badges, and why the blandishments of television advertising require scientists in white coats, and not revolving bow ties. Such sensibility was implicit in Aristotle’s whole discussion of ethos and is probably a point that has never been lost; it does seem particularly relevant to the contingencies of civil philosophy. If we move back to the more socially embedded understanding of a speech act, we may well need to

Afterword

157

know quite a bit about the stator in order to understand the statement fully and act appropriately. This is to re-conjure a persona from a locus of agency. And, once we predicate the statement as a philosophical one, that persona begins to take shape; the more elaborate the discourse, say the performance in a seminar or lecture theatre, the more it may be plausible to see it as expressing characteristics of a persona, an economy of values helping to identify a given statement as part of an activity. The upshot is that if specificity gives a strong continuity to the notion of the persona, it is indeed reasonable to see the history of the philosophic persona as directly relevant to the continuing practice of philosophy; but this, of course, would be to make a claim that is present-centred and instrumental, returning us with a contradiction to our point of departure. Methodology describes a circle, the point, however, as Hobbes might have said, is to square it.

NOTES

The following abbreviation has been used throughout the notes: Opera latina

Thomas Hobbes Malmesburinsis opera philosophica quae latine scripsit omnia

Introduction 1.

2.

3.

4.

5. 6.

See C. Condren, S. Gaukroger and I. Hunter (eds), The Philosopher in Early Modern Europe: The Nature of a Contested Identity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), pp. 1–16, and the contributions throughout; C. Condren, S. Gaukroger and I. Hunter, ‘The Persona of the Philosopher in the Eighteenth Century’, Intellectual History Review, special issue, 18:3 (2008), pp. 315–7; I. Hunter, Rival Enlightenments; Civil and Metaphysical Philosophy in Early Modern Germany (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001); I. Hunter, ‘The History of Philosophy and the Persona of the Philosopher’, Modern Intellectual History, 4:3 (2007), pp. 571–600; S. Gaukroger, Francis Bacon and the Transformation of Early-Modern Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001); S. Gaukroger, The Emergence of a Scientific Culture: Science and the Shaping of Modernity, 1210–1685 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2006), pp. 196–239. A. Marshall, ‘The Myth of Scriblerus’, Journal for EighteenthCentury Studies, 31 (2008), pp. 77–99, for salutary scepticism about how much weight can be put on the classification. See Q. Skinner, Reason and Rhetoric in the Philosophy of Hobbes (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996); R. D. Lund, ‘The Bite of Leviathan’, English Literary History, 65 (1988), pp. 825–55; C. Fox, Locke and the Scriblerians: Identity and Consciousness in Early Eighteenth Century Britain (Berkeley and Los Angeles, CA: University of California Press, 1988); B. Hammond, ‘Scriblerian Self-Fashioning’, Year Book of English Studies, 18 (1988), pp. 108–24. The themes of this section are more fully outlined in the introduction to Condren et al. (eds), The Philosopher; see also K. Haakensson, ‘The History of Eighteenth-Century Philosophy: Philosophy or History’, in K. Haakensson (ed.), The History of EighteenthCentury Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), pp. 1–25. K. Hoekstra, ‘The End of Philosophy (The Case of Hobbes)’, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society (2006), pp. 25–62, especially pp. 27–30. For a similar thrust of argument, see L. Jardine, ‘Lorenzo Valla: Academic Scepticism and the New Humanist Dialectic’, in M. Burnyeat (ed.), The Skeptical Tradition (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1983), pp. 253–86, on pp. 253–4, specifically criti– 159 –

160

7.

8. 9. 10.

11. 12.

13.

14. 15. 16.

17.

Notes to pages 2–5 cizing W. Kneal and M. Kneal, The Development of Logic (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1962). Formative examples are G. Saintsbury, A History of English Literature (London: Macmillan, 1887); R. H. Fletcher, A History of English Literature (1918; Whitefish, MT: Kesinger Publications, 2004); the monumental Cambridge History of English Literature, ed. A. W. Ward et al., 15 vols (1907–21; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1933). The days of ‘apprenticeship’ were over with Beowulf, vol. 1, p. 1; W. Dunning, A History of Political Theories (1902; New York: Macmillan, 1905); H. E. Barnes, A History of Historical Writing (1937; New York: Dover Publications, 1962). S. Newton, The Origins of Beowulf and the pre-Viking Kingdom of East-Anglia (1993; Woodbridge: D. S. Brewer, 2004), pp. 57–61. A. Hacker, Political Theory: Philosophy, Ideology, Science (New York: Macmillan, 1961), p. viii. For rich discussions on the background to the establishment of political science as a university discipline in Britain and the United States of America, respectively, see S. Collini, D. Winch and J. Burrow, That Noble Science of Politics: A Study in Nineteenth-Century Intellectual History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983); R. Adcock, ‘The Emergence of Political Science as a Discipline: History and the Study of Politics in America 1875–1910’, History of Political Thought, 24:3 (2003), pp. 481–508. Ibid., pp. 483–7. These matters are easily conflated, especially where qualitative criteria are porous or illdefined; but Salieri is not less a part of a tradition of music-making because he is now less significant than Mozart. Recognition of this would make academic traditions unmanageable, so to be effective in the present, present values or the rhetorics of value functioning to exclude must be made to work; ‘development’ can hardly be imagined otherwise. For an example, showing perhaps a little momentary queasiness about the historiographical integrity of the enterprise, see T. L. Knutsen, A History of International Relations Theory (1992; Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1997), pp. 11–12. For comment see D. Boucher, ‘Political Theory, International theory and the Political Theory of International Relations’, in A. Vincent (ed.), Political Theory: Tradition and Diversity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), pp. 193–213; J.-A. Pemberton, ‘Towards a New World Order: A Twentieth Century Story’, Review of International Studies, 27 (2001), pp. 265–72, on p. 265; for an open acceptance that what is being established is a canon of good writers for teaching purposes see C. Brown, T. Nardin and N. Rengger (eds), International Relations in Political Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), pp. 3–12. C. Condren, The Status and Appraisal of Classic Texts (Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press, 1985), pp. 63–6. See, for example, S. M. Okin, Women in Western Political Thought (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1979). S. Moyn, The Last Utopia: Human Rights in History (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010); see also R. A. Primus, The American Language of Rights (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999). N. Frye, The Anatomy of Criticism (1957; Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1971), p. 23; J. Gunnell, Political Theory: Tradition and Interpretation (Cambridge, MA: Winthrop, 1979) at length on the mythic tradition of political theory, in part drawing on the influential critiques of John Pocock and Quentin Skinner.

Notes to pages 5–8

161

18. H. D. Rempel, ‘Six Generations of Plock Scholarship: A Concise History of the History of Political Thought’, Politics, 11:2 (1974), pp. 157–8; F. Crews, The Pooh Perplex: A Student Case Book (1963; London: Baker, 1972) the satire of F. R. Leavis (Simon Lacerous) is directly to the point and in its caricature of ‘real’ literature being about ‘reality’ harks back to Fletcher, A History of English Literature. 19. T. Stanley, The History of Philosophy, 4 vols (London: Printed for Humphrey Moseley and Thomas Dring, 1655–60); G. Arnald, Unpartheyische Kirchen-und Ketzerhistorie (1699) and the various political writings of Thomasius, on which in this context see I. Hunter, The Secularisation of the Confessional State: The Political Thought of Christian Thomasius (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), pp. 51–83; T. Hobbes, Decameron physiologicum: or, Ten Dialogues of Natural Philosophy (1678), in The English Works of Thomas Hobbes, ed. Sir W. Molesworth, 11 vols (London: Bohn, 1839–45), vol. 7, pp. 69–77. 20. G. Du Val, quoted in I. Maclean, ‘Un dialogue de sourds? Some Implications of the Austin–Searle–Derrida Debate’, Paragraph, 5 (1985), pp. 1–26, on p. 1. 21. See for example, J. B. Schneewind, The Invention of Autonomy: A History of Modern Moral Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998). 22. R. C. Cross and A. D. Woozley, Plato’s Republic: A Philosophical Commentary (London: Macmillan, 1964), pp. 180–90; this instance is noted because the authors are in many ways attentive to Plato’s vocabulary. 23. M. Oakeshott, ‘Introduction’, in T. Hobbes, Leviathan (1651), ed. M. Oakeshott (Oxford: Blackwell, 1960), pp. vii–lxvi; I. Tregenza, Michael Oakeshott on Hobbes: A Study in the Renewal of Philosophical Ideas (Exeter: Imprint Academic, 2003), p. 11. 24. G. B. Herbert, Thomas Hobbes: The Unity of Scientific and Moral Wisdom (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 1989). 25. Maclean, ‘Un dialogue de sourds’. 26. G. Graham, ‘Can There be a History of Philosophy?’, History and Theory, 21 (1982), pp. 37–52. 27. R. Rorty, J. B. Schneewind and Q. Skinner (eds), Philosophy in History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), pp. 1–16; M. Burnyeat, ‘Introduction’, in B. Williams, The Sense of the Past: Essays in the History of Philosophy, ed. M. Burnyeat (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006), pp. xiv–xv, and the essays throughout. 28. For elaboration, Condren et al., The Philosopher, pp. 3–7. 29. H. D. Weinbrot, Eighteenth-Century Satire: Essays on Text and Context from Dryden to Peter Pindar (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), pp. 34–49; A. S. Fisher, ‘An End to the Renaissance: Erasmus, Hobbes and A Tale of a Tub’, Huntington Library Quarterly, 38 (1974), pp. 1–3. 30. Weinbrot, Eighteenth-Century Satire, discusses accusations of false patriotism surrounding Pope in terms of masks and authenticity. A more promising avenue for analysis would seem to lie in the ambit of the longstanding contested appeals to being a patriot as an assertion of moral office. It may not be incidental that the Scriblerian use of this neologism takes it as a euphemism for corruption. 31. For some sense of the implications of this difference, see C. Condren, ‘Understanding Shakespeare’s Perfect Prince: Henry V, the Ethics of Office and the French Prisoners’, in G. Bradshaw, T. Bishop and L. Wright (eds), The Shakespearean International Yearbook (Surrey: Ashgate, 2009), vol. 9, pp. 196–8. 32. P. Hadot, Philosophy as a Way of Life (Oxford: Blackwell, 1995); P. Hadot, What is Ancient Philosophy? (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002).

162

Notes to pages 8–12

33. Plutarch, Moralia: Precepts in statecraft (Politike paraggelmata), trans. H. N. Fowler (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1960), pp. 174–5. 34. J. E. Raven, Plato’s Thought in the Making (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1965), pp. 66, 144. 35. T. Hobbes, Leviathan (1651), ed. R. Tuck (Cambridge: University Press, 1991), p. 491. 36. C. Condren, Argument and Authority in Early Modern England: The Presupposition of Oaths and Offices (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006). 37. E. W. Rosenheim Jr, Swift and the Satirist’s Art (Chicago, IL: Chicago University Press, 1963), p. 6; on the caricatured office of the critic, see J. Swift, The Tale of a Tub and The Battle of the Books [1704] and Other Satires, with an introduction by Lewis Melville (London: Dent, 1963), pp. 63–6; see also B. Jonson, ‘What is a Poet?’, in Timber, or Discoveries Made Upon Men and Matter (1641), in Works, ed. C. H. Herford and P. Simpson, 11 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1954) vol. 8, pp. 635–49, especially p. 640; S. Butler, Characters, ed. C. W. Daves (Cleveland, OH: Case Western Reserve University Press, 1970), p. 182; See also Sir W. Temple, ‘Some Thoughts upon Reviewing an Essay on Ancient and Modern Learning’, in The Works of Sir William Temple, 2 vols (London: Printed for T. Woodward et al., 1750), vol. 1, p. 299, where critics are brokers without stock. 38. P. Elkin, The Augustan Defence of Satire (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1973), ch. 4. 39. S. Johnson, Lives of the Poets, ed. E. S. Hill, 3 vols (New York: Octagon, 1967), vol. 3, p. 61; cited in L. Bredvold, ‘The Gloom of the Tory Satirists’, in J. Clifford and L. Landa (eds), Pope and his Contemporaries (New York: Oxford University Press, 1949), pp. 1–19, on p. 10; the discomfort continues, see for example Fisher’s discussion of Swift’s presentation of himself as ambivalently arrogant and justly proud, ‘An End to the Renaissance’, pp. 1–4. 40. Anon., The Booke of Oathes (1649; London, 1689), ‘Doctor of Divinity according to the University of Basill’, p. 105, corrected as p. 173. 41. Condren, Argument and Authority, pp. 116–23; Condren, ‘The Persona of the Philosopher’, 42. On the importance of re-description see especially, Skinner, Reason and Rhetoric, pp. 142–53, 161–80. 43. Plato, Republic, on which see G. Vlastos, ‘Justice and Happiness in the Republic’, in G. Vlastos (ed.), Plato: A Collection of Critical Essays, 2 vols (New York: Doubleday, 1971), vol. 2, pp. 66–95. 44. For the range of critique see, Elkin, The Augustan Defence of Satire, ch. 4 45. F. E. Peters, Greek Philosophical Terms: A Historical Lexicon (New York: New York University Press, 1967), pp. 156–7. 46. T. Hobbes, Philosophicall Rudiments Concerning Government and Society (London, 1651), A5r. The phrase is absent from the Latin text of De cive (1642 and 1647 editions), in Opera latina, ed., Sir W. Molesworth, 5 vols (London, 1839–45), vol. 2, pp. 133–432. 47. Hoekstra, ‘The End of Philosophy’, pp. 27–30. 48. Hobbes, De cive, ‘Epistola dedicatoria’, pp. 136–7. 49. Hobbes, De corpore, in Opera latina, vol. 1, pp. 1–6; Hobbes, The English Works of Thomas Hobbes, vol. 1, pp. 6–7. 50. I. Hunter, ‘The University Philosopher in Early Modern Germany’, in Condren et al. (eds), The Philosopher, pp. 35–65, on pp. 48–9; R. Rapin, ‘Reflections on the Use of Philosophy in Religion’, in The Whole Critical Works, ed. B. Kennet (1706) vol. 2, p. 509.

Notes to pages 12–18

163

51. J. Cottingham, ‘Descartes as Sage: spiritual askesis in Cartesian Philosophy’, in Condren et al. (eds), The Philosopher, pp. 182–201, on pp. 196–201; S. Gaukroger, ‘The Persona of the Natural Philosopher’, in Condren et al. (eds), The Philosopher, pp. 17–34, on pp. 30–2. 52. Gaukroger, ‘The Persona of the Natural Philosopher’, pp. 24–34. 53. F. Bacon, The Advancement of Learning (1605), in Works, ed. B. Montagu, 16 vols (London: Pickering, 1825), vol. 2, pp. iii–lxxi, 1–317, on p. 209. 54. Skinner, Reason and Rhetoric, for example pp. 15–16, 27–8. 55. Hobbes, Leviathan, ‘Review and Conclusion’, pp. 483–4. For this and all subsequent editions I cite the 1991 Cambridge edition, edited by Tuck. 56. No respectable philosopher would capitalize on the fact that Louis Althusser killed his wife with an axe, that A. J. Ayre supported Tottenham Hotspur, or suggest that the doctrine of the death of the author was invented to cover the tracks of a fellow-travelling Nazi; that argument has been left to a novelist, G. Adair, see the scintillating The Death of the Author (1992; London: Minerva, 1993). In the seventeenth century such quirks of conduct would have been grist to the mill of doctrinal destruction. 57. Oakeshott, ‘Introduction’, p. l; see also, A. P. Martinich, The Two Gods of Leviathan: Thomas Hobbes on Religion and Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), pp. 355, 361. 58. B. Hammond, Professional Imaginative Writing in England, 1670–1740: ‘Hackney for Bread’ (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997), pp. 195–205. 59. Johnson, The Lives of the Poets, vol. 3, p. 181. Johnson found Arbuthnot the least offensive of the Scriblerians. 60. Sir T. Browne, Religio Medici together with A Letter to a Friend and Christian Morals, ed. H. Gardiner, 8 vols (London: Pickering, 1845), vol. 1, p. 278. 61. Hobbes, Decameron physiologicum, in The English Works, vol. 7, pp. 69–177, dialogue 1, pp. 69–88. 62. The distinction reworks the more hallowed metaphysical one between philosophy as pure contemplation and as a form of engagement with the world. 63. R. D. Lund, ‘“Res et verba”: Scriblerian Satire and the Fate of Language’, Bucknell Review: Science and Literature, 27:2 (1983), pp. 63–78. 64. J. Aubrey, Brief Lives, ed. O. L. Dick (1898; Harmondsworth: Peregrine, 1962), p. 83. All subsequent quotations are cited from this 1962 Peregrine edition. 65. See J. Hall, Satires (1597), ed. S. W. Singer (London: Whittingham, 1824); N. Bailey, Universal Etymological Dictionary, 7th edn (London: J. J. and P. Knapton, D. Midwinter et al., 1735). 66. T. J. Mathias, The Pursuits of Literature, 14 edn (1794–7; London, 1808), for example pp. 106–7, 244–5. 67. M. de Montaigne, ‘Of Democritus and Heraclitus’, in Essays, trans. D. Frame (1965; Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1992), pp. 220–1; C. M. Curtis, ‘From Sir Thomas More to Robert Burton: The Laughing Philosopher in the Early Modern Period’, in Condren et al. (eds), The Philosopher, pp. 90–112, on pp. 94–5, 99. 68. T. Hobbes, The Elements of Law (c. 1640), ed. F. Tönnies, with an introduction by M. M. Goldsmith (London: Frank Cass, 1969), pt. 1, p. 42. 69. P. C. Brückmann, A Manner of Correspondence: A Study of the Scriblerus Club (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1997), pp. 125–8. 70. Q. Skinner, ‘Why Laughing Mattered in the Renaissance: The Second Henry Tudor Memorial Lecture’, History of Political Thought, 22:3 (2001), pp. 418–47, on pp. 418, 424–5.

164

Notes to pages 18–20

71. Ibid., p. 418. 72. L. Castelvetro, Poetica d’Aristotele vulgarizzata et sposta (Vienna, 1570), part 2, pp. 34b– 62; S. Attardo, Linguistic Theories of Humour (Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, 1994), p. 42. 73. T. Bright, A Treatise of Melancholie (London, 1586). 74. In southern Japan there is an ancient tradition passed down through select families of similar ritualized occasions, where after the most formal of meals, the tables become warai no ba, laughing places, as each participant, in turn, puts on an exhibition of laughing. On the framing importance of laughing places, see A. Goh, ‘A Ritual Performance of Laughter in Southern Japan’, in J. M. Davis (ed.), Understanding Humour in Japan (Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press, 2006), pp. 37–50. 75. Swift, A Tale of a Tub, pp. 21, 117. 76. P. J. Finkelpearl, ‘The Comedian’s Liberty: Censorship of the Jacobean stage Reconsidered’, English Literary Renaissance, 16 (1986), pp. 123–38. 77. C. M. Curtis, ‘Richard Pace on Pedagogy, Counsel and Satire’ (PhD dissertation, Cambridge University, 1996), pp. 261–86; C. S. Clegg, Press Censorship in Elizabethan England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997); I. Maclean, Interpretation and Meaning in the Renaissance: The Case of Law (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), pp. 200–2; and more broadly on the conceptual difficulties of reading intent, pp. 186–02. 78. T. Wilson, The Art of Rhetoric (1560), ed. G. H. Mair (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1909), book 1. 79. J. Swift and T. Sheridan, Intelligencer, 3 (1728), p. 4. 80. D. Farley-Hills, The Benevolence of Laughter: Comic Poetry of the Commonwealth and Restoration (London: Macmillan, 1974), quoting J. Straight, The Rule of Rejoycing or a Direction of Mirth (London, 1671) along with Isaac Barrow and Samuel Pepys, pp. 11–12. 81. N. Malcolm, The Origins of English Nonsense (London: Fontana, 1997), p. 150. 82. J. Taylor, Sir Gregory Nonsense His Newes from No Place (London, 1622), reprinted in Malcolm, The Origins of English Nonsense, p. 152. 83. See for example, G. Bateson, Steps to an Ecology of the Mind (New York: Ballentine, 1972), pp. 173–92; P. H. Grice, ‘Logic and Conversation’, in P. Cole and G. Morgan (eds), Syntax and Semantics, vol. 3: Speech Acts (New York: Academic Press, 1975), pp. 41–59; a discussion of the signalled joke (often taken to be paradigmatic of humour) as a violation of maxims of seriousness, see Attardo, Linguistic Theories of Humour, pp. 271–92. 84. A. Gilby, A Pleasaunt Dialogue Between A Soldier of Berwicke and an English Chaplaine (London, 1581); see also Weinbrot’s discussion of the Satyre Ménippé (originally 1594) and its English translation A Pleasant Satyre or Poesie (1595) both devoted to the horrific dangers of Catholicism, Menippean Satire, pp. 86–100. 85. Sir P. Sidney, Apology for Poetry (1595), in E. Jones (ed.), English Critical Essays. Sixteenth, Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1956), pp. 1–54, on p. 47; Skinner, ‘Why Laughter mattered’, and in Reason and Rhetoric Skinner provides excellent overviews of this theoretically dominant understanding. 86. J. Donne, Paradoxes, Problemes, Essayes, Characters, trans. J. Maine [Mayne] (London: Printed by T:N: for Humphrey Moseley at the Prince’s Armes in St Pauls Churchyard, 1652), paradox 10, pp. 29–32. 87. Anon., Scarronnides, or Virgil Travestie (London, 1692), ‘Preface to the Reader’, n.p.

Notes to pages 20–7

165

88. Lucian, ‘The Double Indictment’, see C. Robinson, Lucian, His Influence (London: Duckworth, 1979), p. 9. 89. E. R. Dodds, The Greeks and the Irrational (Los Angeles, CA: University of California Press, 1951). 90. Swift and Sheridan, Intelligencer, 3 (1728), p. 5. 91. Hobbes, Leviathan, ch. 6, p. 43. 92. Weinbrot, Menippean Satire, p. 4. 93. S. Orgel, ‘Introduction’ to Shakespeare’s The Tempest (c. 1611) (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987), pp. 4–5; S. Orgel, ‘Shakespeare and the Kinds of Drama’, Critical Inquiry, 6:1 (1979), pp. 10–23. 94. Weinbrot, Menippean Satire, pp. 12–16. 95. D. Marsh, Lucian and the Latins: Humour and Humanism in the Early Renaissance (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 1998), p. 10; See for example, C. M. Curtis, ‘From Sir Thomas More to Robert Burton’, pp. 90–112; W. S. Blanchard, Scholars’ Bedlam: Menippean Satire in the Renaissance (Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 1995); J. Relihan, Ancient Menippean Satire: An Annotated List of Texts and Criticism (New York: Garland Press, 1980). 96. Lucian, ‘The Double Indictment’, in Works, trans. and ed. A.W. Harmon (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1921, 1960), vol. 3, pp. 148–9. 97. Ibid., alluding to Plato, Timaeus, 35A, 41D. 98. Robinson, Lucian, on ‘The Parasite’, pp. 26–7 99. Ibid., pp. 29–32, 50–2. 100. Ibid., part 1; Marsh, Lucian, pp. 10–12. 101. On Menippean satire generally see Blanchard, Scholars’ Bedlam; I. A. de Smet, Menippean Satire and the Republic of Letters, 1581–1655 (Genève: Droz, 1996); G. Sherbert, Menippean Satire and the Poetics of Wit: Ideologies of Self-Consciousness in Dunton, D’Urfrey and Sterne (New York: Peter Lang, 1996); Wienbrot, Menippean Satire. 102. Smet, Menippean Satire, p. 23. 103. For brief but perceptive remarks, Sr G. Thompson, Under Pretext of Praise: The Satiric Mode in Erasmus’ Fiction (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1973), pp. 22–4. 104. For a thorough exploration of this topic see Curtis, ‘Richard Pace’. 105. Taylor responded in his own Utopian to Henry Peacham, see Malcolm, Origins of English Nonsense, pp. 14, 19, 129, 139. 106. Blanchard, Scholars’ Bedlam, p. 14. 107. It has been a well-established prejudice, see for example, R. F. Jones’s characterization of satire as an undervaluing of reason in ‘The Background to the Attacks on Science in the Age of Pope’, in Clifford and Landa (eds), Pope and His Contemporaries, pp. 96–113, on p. 111. 108. Sherbert, Menippean Satire, p. 1; see also E. Kirk, Menippean Satire an Annotated catalogue of Texts and Criticism (New York: Garland, 1980), p. x. 109. Weinbrot, Menippean Satire, pp. xi, 5–7, 110. 110. C. Matheussen and C. L. Heersekkers, Two Neo-Latin Menippean Satires (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1980), pp. 10–11. 111. J. Lipsius, Somnium (1581), reprinted in Matheussen and Heersekkers (eds), Two NeoLatin Menippean Satires, pp. 25–78. 112. P. Cunaeus, Sadi venales (1612), reprinted in Matheussen and Heersekkers (eds), Two Neo-Latin Menippean Satires, pp. 79–191. 113. Smet, Menippean Satire, p. 24

166

Notes to pages 27–33

114. Curtis, ‘Richard Pace’, pp. 198–200. 115. Lord Byron, The Vision of Judgement (1822), in The Poetical Works of Lord Byron, ed. E. H. Coleridge (London: Murray, 1905), pp. 516–31, verse 18, p. 520. 116. D. Erasmus, Ecomium Moriae sive Des. Eras. Roterod. Declamatio, In laidem Stulticiae. Iusti Lipsi Satyra Menippea. Somnium.Lusus in nostri aevi Criticos. P. Cunaei Sardi Venales. Satyra Menippaea In huius saeculi homines plerosque inepte eruditos (Lugdin Batavorm: A. I. Marci, 1617). See Matheussen and Heersekkers (eds), Two Neo-Latin Menippean Satires, p. 19. 117. J. G. A. Pocock, ‘The Origins of the Study of the Past, A Comparative Approach’, Comparative Studies in Society and History, 4:2 (1962–3), pp. 209–46, for a classic exploration. 118. G. H. Nadel, ‘The Philosophy of History Before Historicism’, in G. H. Nadel (ed.), Studies in the Philosophy of History (New York: Harper Row, 1965), pp. 49–73, reprinted from History and Theory, 3:3 (1964), pp. 291–315. 119. P. Davis, ‘Thomas Hobbes’s Translations of Homer: Epic and Anticlericalism in late Seventeenth century England’, Seventeenth Century, 12:2 (1997), pp. 231–55; E. Nelson (ed.), ‘Introduction’, in T. Hobbes, Translations of Homer, 2 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2008), vol. 1, pp. xi–lxxvii. 120. R. Bentley, A Dissertation upon The Epistles of Pharlaris (1699); also in A. Dyce (ed.), The Works of Richard Bentley, 2 vols (London: MacPherson, 1836), vol. 2, pp. 130–81. 121. Smet, Menippean Satire, p. 21; Lipsius, Somnium, XV.26, pp. 54–6; Cunaeus, Sardi Venales, XVIII.72–XXXIII.88, pp. 150–60.

1 Hobbes, Lucianic Humour and the Philosophic Persona 1. 2. 3. 4.

5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15.

Aubrey, ‘Thomas Hobbes’, in Brief Lives, pp. 230–3. Ibid., pp. 322–3. Notable exceptions (see below) are Skinner, Reason and Rhetoric; Lund, ‘The Bite of Leviathan’. A. Cowley, ‘Of Wit’ (1656), in The Complete Works in Verse and Prose, ed. A. B. Grosart, 2 vols (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1881), vol. 1, pp. 135–6; justification for Cowley’s view is provided by the range of meanings found in Jonson, Timber, pp. 570, 584–8. Hobbes, The Elements of Law, p. 50; Hobbes, Leviathan, pp. 50–1. Hobbes, Leviathan, pp. 51–2. Ibid., p. 53. Hobbes, The Elements of Law, p. 50. Ibid., p. 41; Hobbes, Leviathan, p. 43. Hobbes, The Elements of Law, p. 41. Ibid., p. 50. See Cowley, ‘Of Wit’, with ‘To Mr. Hobbes’, 1. ll. 12–13; 4., ll. 56–63, in The Complete Works, vol. 2, p. 19. See, for example, Bateson, Steps to an Ecology of the Mind, pp. 173–92; Grice, ‘Logic and Conversation’. Hoekstra, ‘The End of Philosophy’, pp. 25–62, especially pp. 27–30. For Lucian’s sense of what he achieved, see ‘To One Who Said You’re A Preometheus in Words’, in Works, ed. A W. Harmon, trans. K. Kilburn, 8 vols (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1959), vol. 6, pp. 418–27. For an overview of his use see Robinson,

Notes to pages 33–5

16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23.

24.

25.

26.

27.

28. 29. 30. 31.

32.

33. 34.

167

Lucian; C. P. Jones, Culture and Society in Lucian (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1986), pp. 24–32. Aristotle, Rhetoric, trans. R. Roberts, in Rhetoric and Poetics (New York: Random House, 1954), book 3, 1419b. For Aristotle’s systematic discussion of this see Aristotle, Rhetoric, book 2, 1377b–91b. See Skinner, Reason and Rhetoric, pp. 198–211, and specifically on Hobbes, pp. 390– 425; Skinner, ‘Why Laughter Mattered’. Jones, Culture and Society, pp. 24, 33–45. Hoekstra, ‘The End of Philosophy’, pp. 27–30. Jones, Culture and Society, p. 33. Butler, ‘A Philosopher’, in Characters, pp. 94–5. Lucian, ‘Charon and Mercury’, in Lucian’s Dialogues Selected by Duggard and Leeds (Dublin, 1772), p. 22; see also ‘The Fisherman’ p. 229, where true philosophy is a goddess; J. Mayne, Part of Lucian Made English from the Original (London, 1663), p. 57 has the weight as five pounds. Lucian, ‘Hermotinus’, in Works, trans. K. Kilburn, pp. 414, 415; Lucian, ‘Zeus Tragoedus’, in Works, trans. H. W. and F. G. Fowler (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1905), vol. 3, 26, p. 92. This has been touched on before, see P. Spingborg, ‘Hobbes and Religion’, in T. Sorrell (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Hobbes (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), pp. 346–80, on p. 352; C. Condren, ‘Curtailing the Office of the Priest: Two Seventeenth-Century Views of the Causes and Functions of Heresy’, in I. Hunter, J. Christian Laursen and C. Nederman (eds), Heresy in Transition: Transforming Ideas of Heresy in Medieval and Early Modern Europe (Aldershott: Ashgate, 2005), pp. 115–28, on pp. 121–2. ‘Brian Duppa to Justinian Isham’, in The Correspondence of Bishop Brian Duppa and Sir Justinian Isham 1650–1660, ed. G. Isham (Northampton: Northampton Record Society, 1951); see J. Parkin, Taming The Leviathan: The Reception of the Political and Religious Ideas of Thomas Hobbes in England 1640–1700 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), p. 99. Skinner, Reason and Rhetoric, for example pp. 5, 426–7; but he has since amended his views; see ‘Hobbes and Laughter’, in T. Sorell and L. Foisneau (eds), Leviathan After Three Hundred and Fifty Years (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2004), pp. 139–66. S. Isjelling, Rhetoric and Philosophy in Conflict (The Hague: Nijhoff, 1976) for a survey of debates on this topic. Weinbrot, Menippean Satire, p. 25; G. Anderson, Lucian: Theme and Variation in the Second Sophistic (Lugdini Batavorum: E.J.Brill, 1976), pp. 67–8. Lund, ‘The Bite of Leviathan’. R. Bedford, ‘Historicizing Irony: The Case of Milton and the Restoration’, in P. Kelly (ed.), The Touch of the Real: Essays in Early Modern Culture (Perth: University of Western Australia Press, 2002), pp.65–72. See N. Malcolm (ed.), The Correspondence of Thomas Hobbes (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994), general introduction, pp. xl–xli, quoting ‘Samuel Sorbière to Hobbes’, 21 June/1 July 1664, letter 166, vol. 2, pp. 617–8. ‘Hobbes to the Earl of Newcastle’, 25 December 1636/4, January 1637, letter 24, in The Correspondence of Thomas Hobbes, vol. 1, p. 41. Aubrey, ‘Thomas Hobbes’, in Brief Lives, p. 233; the question is pointedly raised by Parkin, Taming the Leviathan, pp. 99–101.

168

Notes to pages 35–7

35. Skinner, Reason and Rhetoric, p. 409, note commenting on Martinich’s reading of Hobbes as an orthodox Jacobean theologian, in The Two Gods of Leviathan. 36. The accusations were largely English, the French were less inclined to confuse anticlericalism with atheism, and too many of his personal friends were clerics, Huguenot and Catholic; see for example Malcolm (ed.), The Correspondence of Thomas Hobbes, introduction, pp. xxxiii–xxxiv. 37. Ibid., vol. 2, p. 909; on Du Verdus, see Q. Skinner, ‘Hobbes and His Disciples in England and France’, in Hobbes and Civil Science, Vision of Politics Series (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), vol. 3, pp. 308–23, on pp. 315–23. 38. Lucian, Luciani Samosatensis dialogorum selectorum (London: A. Crook, 1664); C. Cotton, Burlesque upon Burlesque, or The Scoffer Scoft (London, 1675); for Cotton as the translator of De cive, see, N. Malcolm ‘Charles Cotton Translator of De cive’, in Aspects of Hobbes (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2002), pp. 234–58. 39. Mayne, ‘Epistle Dedicatory’, in Part of Lucian, A2v–A4v. 40. Ibid. 41. I am grateful to Justin Champion for drawing my attention to Blount; and Michael Hunter for pointing to the Wagstaffe connection, and through his paper ‘The Decline of Magic’ drawing my attention to Obadiah Oddy, who, despite being a protégé of Richard Bentley also fits the Hobbist/Lucianic bill; Weinbrot, Menippean Satire, pp. 63–5 for the division of opinion on Lucian. 42. Hobbes, Leviathan, p. 461. 43. Jones, Culture and Society, pp. 26–8; J. Glanvill, Philosophia pia (London, 1671), p.1; R. Cudworth, The True Intellectual System of the Universe (London, 1678), pp. 655–7; on Epicureanism and seventeenth-century natural science, see Gaukroger, The Emergence of a Scientific Culture, pp. 202–3, 262–76, 459–62. 44. On the importance of Mennipean parrhesia in England see Curtis, ‘From Sir Thomas More to Robert Burton’, pp. 103–6; and beyond satire, see D. Colclough, Freedom of Speech in Early Stuart England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), pp. 12–76. 45. Hobbes, Leviathan, pp. 51–2. Insofar as he did counsel, his critics would re-describe him as a flatterer, in the rhetoric of office, flattery was the principal negative reformulation of counselling; see at length Colclough, Freedom of Speech; Condren, Argument and Authority, pp. 162–71. 46. J. Bramhall, The Catching of Leviathan, or the Great Whale, appendix to Castigations of Mr. Hobbes His Last Animadversions in the Case Concerning Liberty and Universal Necessity (1658), ‘To the Christian reader’, on his ‘petulant scoffs’ and ‘empty brags’ Gg2; E. Hyde, Lord Clarendon, A Brief View and Survey of the Dangerous and pernicious Errors to Church and State, In Mr Hobbes’s Book Entitled Leviathan (Oxford, 1676), pp. 16–18. 47. G. Lawson, An Examination of the Political Part of Mr. Hobbs his Leviathan (London, 1657) p. 22, for an early and explicit charge. 48. T. Hobbes, The History of the Grecian War. Written by Thucydides (1629; London: Printed for G. & W. B. Whittaker, J. Parker, & R. Bliss,1823), including ‘Of The Life and History of Thucydides’, pp. xxiii–xxiv. 49. G. Puttenham Arte of English Poesie (1589), ed. G. D. Willcock & A. Walker (1936; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970), bk 3, p. 142; see Skinner, Reason and Rhetoric, pp. 92, 3, 232, 390; Malcolm, Aspects of Hobbes, p. 224. 50. Hobbes, Leviathan, p. 457; Lucian, ‘On The Dance’, in Works, trans. Harmon, vol. 5, pp. 210–89; but see also Sir T. Elyot, The Book Named The Govenor (1531), ed. S. E. Lehmberg (1907; London: Dent, 1962), pp. 69–71.

Notes to pages 37–40

169

51. T. Hobbes, Leviathan (Amsterdam, 1668), appendix, p. 346; reprinted in Opera latina, vol. 3, pp. 1–569. 52. T. Hobbes, De corpore (1655), in Opera latina, vol. 1, ‘Epistle Dedicatory’, n.p.; quotation from The English Works, vol. 1, ‘Epistle Dedicatory’, p. ix. 53. Hobbes, Leviathan, pp. 461–2. 54. T. Hobbes, An Historical Narration Concerning Heresy and the Punishment Thereof (c.1666), in The English Works, vol. 4, pp. 389–408, on p. 390. 55. T. Hobbes, Historia ecclesiastica carmine elegiaco concinnata (1688), in Opera latina, vol. 5 pp. 341–408, ll. 439–40, 359–60; J. Champion (ed.), Hobbes’s Restoration Writings on Religion (Oxford: Clarendon Press, forthcoming). I am grateful to Professor Champion for letting me see this prior to publication. 56. T. Hobbes, Lux mathematica excussa collisionibus Johannis Wallisii, in Opera latina, vol. 5, pp. 89–150, on p. 148. 57. Hobbes, Decameron physiologicum, pp. 2–10. 58. Mayne, Part of Lucian, ‘Epistle Dedicatory’; T. Hobbes, The Answer to the Preface Before Gondibert (1651), in The English Works, vol. 4, p. 450; Hobbes, De cive, ‘Epistle Dedicatory’. 59. T. Hobbes, De corpore politico (1650), A2v–A3r, also see Human Nature, in The English Works, vol. 4, pp. xiii–xiv, Bii–v; Hobbes, De corpore, ‘Epistle Dedicatory’, p. ix. 60. T. Hobbes, De cive, ‘Epistle Dedicatory’, pp. 137–8; Praefatio ad lectores, pp.141–5 dismissing ancient philosophy, pp.145–7 on his own foundational method; Philosophicall Rudiments, ‘Epistle Dedicatory’ and ‘Preface to The Reader’, B1–2. 61. See Skinner, Reason and Rhetoric and Skinner, ‘Hobbes and Laughter’, p. 155. 62. Skinner, ‘Why Laughter Mattered’, pp. 429, 425. It is possible, as Skinner notes on p. 431 that Hobbes’s claim may have referred less to the functioning of laughter than to the causal analysis of it and its internal source. He seems sceptical of this, as am I. Hobbes’s claim is simply that the theory has not been declared, this may mean explained or demonstrated, but it seems unlikely. 63. D. Baumgold, ‘The Composition of Hobbes’s Elements of Law’, History of Political Thought, 25:1 (2004), pp. 16–33, on pp. 23–4. 64. Hobbes, The Elements of Law, p. 41. 65. Hobbes, Leviathan, p. 34. 66. Hobbes, The Elements of Law, p. 42. 67. J. Swift, Travels into Several Remote Nations of the World (1726), with an introduction by Peter Quennell (London: Collins, 1953), p. 205; see also Puttenham Arte of English Poesie, bk 3, p. 291; see also Hobbes, Leviathan, p. 23 on the absurdity of deceived and deceiving philosophers and Schoolmen; Hobbes, Lux mathematica, p. 148 cited above, with its explicit reference to Lucian. 68. Skinner, ‘Hobbes and Laughter’, pp. 140–5 ; and, indeed it might be conceded now that it is only through philosophical reasoning that the absurd can be defended, and if adequately defended, might cease to be quite so absurd. 69. J. Wallis, Due Correction for Mr Hobbes (Oxford, 1656), p. 3. 70. T. Tenison, The Creed of Mr Hobbes Examined in a Feigned Conference Between Him and a Student of Divinity (London, 1670), p. 72. 71. J. K. Hale, ‘Thomas Hobbes’ poem of Exile: The verse Vita and Ovid’s Tristia 4.10’, Scholia: Studies in Classical Antiquity, 17 (2008), pp. 92–105.

170

Notes to pages 40–6

72. Hobbes, The Answer to the Preface Before Gondibert, p. 448; Hobbes, Historia ecclesiastica, ll. 1883, 1884. The French, to go from cock to donkey, refers to incoherent conversation. The English translation kept the barnyard associations (‘cock and bull’). 73. T. Hobbes, A Dialogue Between a Philosopher and a Student of the Common Laws (1681), in The English Works, vol. 6, pp. 1–160, on p. 122. 74. Hobbes, Historia ecclesiastica, ll. 89–90. 75. Ibid., ll. 1479–80, 164. 76. Hobbes, Leviathan, pp. 426, 59; Skinner, ‘Why Laughter Mattered’, draws attention to these examples, pp. 443–4; Hobbes, Historia ecclesiastica, l. 172. 77. Hobbes, Leviathan, p. 478; Skinner, Reason and Rhetoric, p. 410. 78. Hobbes, Leviathan, p. 84; Skinner, Reason and Rhetoric, p. 409. 79. Skinner, Reason and Rhetoric, p. 411. 80. Hobbes, An Historical Narration Concerning Heresy, in The English Works, vol. 4, pp. 385–408, on p. 393; for discussion see Condren, ‘Curtailing the Office of the Priest’, pp. 118–20. 81. Hobbes, Leviathan, p. 79. 82. See Lucian on the troop of spurious divinities on Olympus, including an eagle, a man in a turban, an Egyptian ‘Dog Face’, divine by barking, ‘The Council of the Gods’, in Dialogues, Selected by Duggard and Leeds, p. 92; see also, ‘The Parliament of the Gods’, in Works, trans. Kilburn, vol. 5. 83. Lucian, ‘Zeus Tragoedus’, in Works, trans. Fowler and Fowler, vol. 3, pp. 100–1. 84. Ibid. 85. T. Hobbes, Questions Concerning Liberty, Necessity and Chance (1656), in The English Works, vol. 5, pp.1–455, on p. 55 86. Skinner, Reason and Rhetoric, pp. 419–20; Hobbes, Leviathan, pp. 480–2; this however was a pronounced trope in The Historical Narration Concerning Heresy. 87. Skinner, Reason and Rhetoric, p. 410. 88. Hobbes, Leviathan, p. 480–1. 89. It may hint at the sort of Lutheran extremity voiced by P. Hickeringill, The Vindication of the Naked Truth, The Second Part (London, 1681), p. 17, the very notion of a clergy is a shadow of popery. 90. See crucially on this linking role for the imagination, Bacon, The Advancement of Learning, pp. 174–6. 91. Hobbes, Leviathan, p. 28; see also Nelson, ‘Introduction’, pp. xxxviii–xli. 92. Hobbes’s most famous and dismissive statement on metaphor is itself not typical. In Leviathan he was rejecting its role in philosophy per se, not all forms of discourse. The point had been more subtly developed in the Anti-White (1643), Critique du De mundo de Thomas White, ed. J. Jacquot and H. W. Jones (Paris: Vrin-CNRS, 1973) and would be qualified significantly in De corpore, 1.2.12. 93. Hobbes, Leviathan, pp. 15, 52; Nelson, ‘Introduction’, in Hobbes, Translations of Homer, pp. xxxiv–v. 94. Bacon, The Advancement of Learning, p. 174 95. Hobbes, The Answer to the Preface Before Gondibert, pp. 449–50. 96. M. Reik, The Golden Lands of Thomas Hobbes (Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press, 1977), pp. 145–6; C. Condren, Thomas Hobbes (New York: Twayne, 2000), pp. 106–7. 97. Skinner, Reason and Rhetoric, pp. 359–60. 98. Nelson, ‘Introduction’, pp. xxxiv–xli.

Notes to pages 46–8

171

99. Anon., The True Effigies of the Monster of Malmesbury, or Thomas Hobbes in His Proper Colours (London, 1680) concludes by stating that at least Hobbes has given up searching for truth, and lamenting that he had not spent all his time on ‘hard translation, and in Rhyme’, sect. 5. This adds passing support to Eric Nelson’s suggestion that Hobbes’s forays into Homeric translation were well received. Nelson, ‘Introduction’, p. lxxix. 100. Davis, ‘Thomas Hobbes’s Translations of Homer’. 101. Weinbrot, Eighteenth-Century Satire, pp. 101–3. 102. C. Cotton, Scarronnides, or Virgil Travesty on the First and Fourth Books of the Aeneid (London, 1665), and reprints through to the eighteenth century. 103. Nelson, ‘Introduction’, and in numerous supporting notes throughout the texts of The Iliad and The Odyssey; all references are to this 2008 Clarendon edition. References to G. Chapman’s translation of The Iliad are to G. Chapman (trans.), Homer’s Iliad (1609) (1875; London: Routledge, 1884). 104. Cited in Nelson, ‘Introduction’, p. xv. 105. Nelson, The Odyssey, note to p. 319; A. Cowley, ‘Upon His Majestie’s Return and Restoration’, in The Complete Works, vol. 1, pp. 159–63, at p. 162. The allusion is entangled with patterns of reference to the The Aenead and the Bible. 106. J. Ogilby, Homer His Iliads Translated, Adorn’d with Sculpture and Illustrated with Annotations (London, 1660), dedication. 107. Hobbes, Translations of Homer, vol. 1: The Iliad, bk 4, p. 26, ll. 174–5; and Nelson’s note; Hobbes, Translations of Homer, vol. 2: The Odyssey, bk 4, p. 60, ll. 651–2 and note; see on these matters Nelson, ‘Introduction’, pp. lv–lxviii. 108. Nelson, ‘Introduction’, p. lxi. 109. Ibid., p. xx 110. F. Bacon, On The Wisdom of the Ancients (1610), in Works, vol. 3, pp. 1–lii, i–viii, 1–99, see preface and pp. vi, ii. 111. J. Keats, ‘On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer’ (1816), in John Keats’s Poems, ed. G. Bullett (1944; London: Dent, 1961), p. 35, ll. 13–14; it was his old headmaster at Enflield Grammar School who would introduce Keats to Chapman. 112. Nelson, ‘Introduction’, p. xlv. 113. T. Grantham, The Firste Book of Homer’s Iliads (London, 1660), ‘To the Reader’, A2; Ogilby, Homer His Iliads, dedication. 114. Hobbes, Translations of Homer, vol. 1: The Iliad, ‘To the Reader: Concerning the Vertues of an Heroique Poem’, on pp. xcii–xcix, especially pp. xcviii–xcix. 115. Hobbes, Leviathan, p. 51. 116. Nelson, ‘Introduction’, p. lviii. 117. The opening of both The Iliad and The Odyssey begin with a request of the muses, not an appropriation of their powers. ‘Tell me, O Muse, th’ adventures of the man’ (The Odyssey, bk 1, l. 1). But this is formulaic and a straightforward translation. Pope who did believe the poet to be divinely inspired would use similar, grammatically distancing phrases. At one point, Chapman’s The Iliad only indicates through paralipsis, his less than god-like descriptive capacity: ‘Had I the bosom of a God, to tune to life and sing’. Giving an account of the same battle scene, Hobbes’s unadorned directness seems more distancing, but may simply be a function of less obvious paralipsis. ‘I cannot like a god relate it all’(Chapman, The Iliad, bk 12, p. 159; Hobbes, The Iliad, bk 12, p. 190, l. 173). At another, where Chapman’s Homer poses a rhetorical question concerning just how many Hector has killed, and proceeds to answer it, Hobbes’s Homer asks for information, ‘But tell me, Muse’. This is possibly a minor but subtle separation of poetic voice from some-

172

Notes to pages 48–52

thing higher; but the fallen are nevertheless immediately listed by Homer. (Chapman, The Iliad, bk 11, p. 144; Hobbes, The Iliad, bk 11, p. 172, l. 269; also bk 14, p. 232, l. 471). 118. Chapman, The Iliad, bk 2, pp. 22–3, l. 9ff ; and bk 4, p. 51, l. 22. 119. Neither translated polis to mean a political society, this was not established until well after the poems were written; J. L. Myres, The Political Ideas of the Greeks (1927; New York: Greenwood Press, 1968), pp. 68–70. Hobbes had, however, translated Thucydides’s polis as state. He may have avoided calling Ilium a state as a war between states would have weakened any analogy between the Homeric contest and the British Civil Wars. 120. Nelson, ‘Introduction’, p. xxx. As Nelson points out, the choice of rhyme or blank verse could have a clear political resonance, pp. xxx–xxxi. 121. Hobbes, The Odyssey, bk 9, p. 116, l. 196. 122. Chapman, The Iliad, bk 15, p. 195; Hobbes, The Iliad, bk 15, pp. 238–9, ll. 198, 206–7. 123. Hobbes, The Odyssey, bk 4, p. 63, l. 769. 124. Arlene Saxonhouse draws particular attention to this vocabulary in her review of Eric Nelson’s edition of Hobbes’s translations of Homer in History of Political Thought, 30:3 (2009), pp. 565–8, on p. 567. A guitar was usually a four-stringed street musician’s instrument, still playing second fiddle to the more cultivated lute, making the diminution even more decisive. 125. Hobbes, The Iliad, bk 24, p. 387, ll. 58–9; Chapman, The Iliad, bk 24, p. 307, l. 71. 126. Hobbes, ‘To the Reader’, p. xciii. 127. Hobbes, in fact, generally used hill, a word that could mean either hill or mountain, but he resists any qualification that might indicate great height. 128. Chapman, The Iliad, bk 11, p. 141, ll. 70–1, and bk 12, p. 159; Hobbes, The Iliad, bk 11, p. 166, ll. 77–8, and bk 12, p. 191, l. 179. 129. Hobbes, The Iliad, bk 4, p. 56, ll. 17–21; Chapman, The Iliad, bk 4, p. 50, ll. 12–20. 130. Hobbes, The Iliad, bk 15, p. 238, l. 182. 131. Nelson, note 275 to p. 238 of Hobbes, The Iliad. 132. Hobbes, The Odyssey, bk 8, pp. 97–105, ll. 60–347. 133. See Hobbes, Historia ecclesiastica, l. 350, where the entangled Mars is said to be a ridiculous god. 134. Hobbes, The Odyssey, bk 11, pp. 147, 155, ll. 206, 275–8; points emphasized by Davis, ‘Hobbes’s Translations of Homer’, pp. 234–5; Nelson, The Odyssey, notes to pp. 147, 155. 135. Dustin Gish has argued that the opening passages of The Iliad are particularly significant for political theory, D. Gish, ‘Nascent Federalism and Political Crisis in The Iliad’, History of Political Thought, 31:1 (2010), pp. 1–7. The argument requires later conceptions to be read back into Homer’s language, but Hobbes did this too. 136. Hobbes, The Iliad, bk 1, p. 4, l. 8. Apollo’s responsibility for the discord is in the form a rhetorical question. 137. Hobbes, The Iliad, bk 1; see Nelson’s note to p. 4. 138. Chapman, The Iliad, bk 1. p. 9–10; Hobbes, The Iliad, bk 1, p. 5, especially ll. 26, 28. 139. Grantham, The Firste Book, p. 2; Ogilby, Homer His Iliads, p. 2. 140. Chapman, The Iliad, bk 1, p. 10, ll. 43–9. Vexed should be taken in the strong older sense of wrathful. 141. Hobbes, The Iliad, bk 1, p. 5, ll. 47–52; original line indentations restored. 142. Davis, ‘Thomas Hobbes’s Translations of Homer’. 143. C. Condren, ‘On the Rhetorical Foundations of Leviathan’, History of Political Thought, 11:4 (1990), pp. 703–20.

Notes to pages 52–6

173

144. Bacon, The Advancement of Learning, p.209; Condren, ‘On the Rhetorical Foundations of Leviathan’, pp. 718–9; for the ubiquity of such attitudes see B. Shapiro, Probability and Certainty in Seventeenth-Century England (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1983), p. 229. 145. W. Shakespeare, Henry IV Pt. II, a2.sc.2. 146. Bramhall, Castigations, p. 515; see M. Sampson, ‘“Will You Hear What a Casuist He Is?” Thomas Hobbes as Director of Conscience’, History of Political Thought, 11:4 (1990), pp. 721–36. 147. This dogmatism has alas encouraged similarly simplistic accounts of his views of metaphor, per se, with the conclusion that Leviathan is in this respect simply a contradiction in terms. I have been subject to this overly brisk view myself, and for a recent restatement reliant on a series of reductive inaccuracies about philosophy, logic, epistemology, metaphor and topology see the nevertheless interesting R. E. Stillman, ‘Hobbes’s Leviathan: Monsters, Metaphors and Magic’, English Literary History, 62:4 (1995), pp. 791–819.

2 Hoisting Hobbes on the Satiric Petard 1.

2.

3. 4. 5. 6.

7.

S. Mintz, The Hunting of Leviathan: Seventeenth Century Reactions to the Materialism and Moral Philosophy of Thomas Hobbes (Cambridge: University Press, 1962); J. Bowle, Hobbes and his Critics: A Study in Seventeenth Century Constitutionalism (1951; London: Frank Cass, 1969); M. Goldie, ‘The Reception of Hobbes’, in J. Burns (ed., with the assistance of M. Goldie), The Cambridge History of Political Thought, 1450–1700 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), pp. 589–615; Parkin, Taming the Leviathan. J. Parkin, ‘Taming the Leviathan: Reading Hobbes in Seventeenth Century Europe’, in T. Hochstrasser and P. Schroder (eds), Early Modern Natural Law Theories: Contexts and Strategies in the Early Enlightenment (Dordrecht and London: Kluwer Academic, 2003), pp. 31–52; N. Malcolm, ‘Hobbes and the European Republic of Letters’, in Aspects of Hobbes, pp. 457–545; Skinner, ‘Hobbes and His Disciples in France and England’, pp. 308–23; I. Hunter and D. Saunders (eds), The Whole Duty of Man, According to Samuel Pufendorf, trans. Andrew Tooke (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 2003), pp. ix–xviii; and D. Saunders and I. Hunter, ‘Bringing the State to England: Andrew Tooke’s Translation of Samuel Pufendorf ’s De Officio Hominis et Civilis’, History of Political Thought, 24:2 (2003), pp. 218–34. Bailey, Universal Etymological Dictionary. Hobbes, Leviathan, p. 473. Hobbes, ‘Letter to Hon. Charles Cavendish’, 22 August – 1 September 1638, in The Correspondence of Thomas Hobbes, vol. 1, p. 52. Curtis, ‘From Sir Thomas More to Robert Burton’, pp. 103–6; Thompson, Under Pretext of Praise, pp. 6–14; D. Grace, ‘Utopia: A Dialectical Interpretation’, in C. Murphy, H. Gibaud and M. Di Cesare (eds), Miscellania Moreana: Essays for Germain Marc’hadour, Moreana, 100 (Binghampton, NY: Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies, 1989), pp. 273–302; D. Grace, ‘Utopia and Academic Scepticism’, in D. Grace and A.D. Cousins (eds), More’s Utopia and the Utopian Inheritance (New York: University Press of America, 1995), pp. 1–21, on pp. 14–17. L. D. Campbell (ed.), ‘Howe Collingbourne was cruelly executed for making a foolishe rime’, in The Mirror for Magistrates (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1938), especially pp. 352–5, quotations from p. 352, ll. 141, 145; see also Curtis, ‘From Sir Thomas More to Robert Burton’, pp. 90–1.

174

Notes to pages 56–61

8. See at length, Lund, ‘The Bite of Leviathan’. 9. Butler, ‘A Droll’, in Characters, p. 227. 10. E. McCutcheon, ‘Denying the Contrary: More’s use of Litotes in Utopia’, in Murphy et al. (eds), Miscellania Moreana, 31–2, pp. 107–21. 11. Lucian, ‘Charon and Mercury’, in Lucian’s Dialogues Selected by Duggard and Leeds, p. 22 ‘But for God’s sake who is that grave personage? He is very pensive, knits his brows’. 12. Hobbes, Leviathan, p. 35 an elaboration of p. 23. 13. Ibid., pp. 472, 458. 14. Lucian, ‘Counsel of the Gods’, in Lucian’s Dialogues Selected by Duggard and Leeds, p. 96 15. Bramhall, Castigations, p. 334; see Sampson,‘“Will you Here What a Casuist He Is?”’, p. 734; Hobbes, A Dialogue Between a Philosopher and a Student, pp. 65–7 for a succinct justification of casuistry. 16. Hobbes, ‘To Edmund Waller’, letter 39, 29 July/8 August 1645, in The Correspondence of Thomas Hobbes, vol. 1, p. 124 17. H. Mason, The New Art of Lying (London, 1624), ch. 1. 18. N. Malcolm, ‘Hobbes and the Royal Society’, in G. A. J. Rogers and A. Ryan (eds), Perspectives on Thomas Hobbes (Oxford: Blackwell, 1988), pp. 43–66. 19. Martinich, The Two Gods of Leviathan, pp. 36, 38; Oakeshott was similarly dismissive of those who criticized the real philosopher, Oakesott, ‘Introduction’. 20. In a letter to Tenison dated 30 November 1680, John Wallis with Hobbes in mind, referred to the profanities that ‘Atheistical persons call Witt’, cited in M. Hunter, Science and the Shape of Orthodoxy: Intellectual Change in Late Seventeenth-Century Britain (Woodstock: Boydell, 1995), p. 239. 21. Hobbes, The Elements of Law, p. 43. 22. Browne, Religio Medici together with A Letter to a Friend and Christian Morals, pp. 278– 9. The point might be taken from, or just as well illustrated by Lucian, the catalogue of things he hates, is an implicit defence of his integrity at his mock trial. 23. Bramhall, Castigations, on Hobbes being ‘over weening’ p. 506; Lawson, An Examination, prefatory note by ‘T.G.’ on Hobbes’s pride, A4v. 24. Gaukroger, The Emergence of a Scientific Culture, pp. 83–6, 101–6. 25. Hobbes, De corpore, in Opera latina, in The English Works, 1.1.8. 26. P. Harrison, ‘The Natural Philosopher and the Virtues’, in Condren et al. (eds), The Philosopher, pp. 206–19; Hunter, ‘The University Philosopher’. 27. Parkin, Taming the Leviathan, pp. 244–252; Lucian, Zeus Trageodus, 38, p. 98. 28. Lawson, An Examination, preface. 29. This discussion of Aubrey’s ‘Life’ elaborates on Condren, ‘The Persona of the Philosopher’, p. 83–4; C. Condren, ‘Specifying the Subject in Early Modern Autobiography’, in R. Bedford, L. Davis and P. Kelly (eds), Early Modern Autobiography (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2006), pp. 38–40. 30. M. Hunter, John Aubrey and the Realm of Learning (New York: Science History Publications, 1975), p. 79. 31. Ibid., pp. 55–6. 32. Ibid. 33. Aubrey, ‘Thomas Hobbes’, in Brief Lives, pp. 236–7; that this may be simplistic or disingenuous is discussed by Malcolm, ‘Hobbes and the Royal Society’ (see below). 34. Aubrey, ‘Thomas Hobbes’, in Brief Lives, p. 233. 35. Ibid., p. 236; Hobbes suggests a similar pattern in the transmission of true philosophy in An Historical Narration.

Notes to pages 61–4

175

36. W. Shakespeare, As You Like It (c. 1598/9), ed. M. Hattaway (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), p. 128, a.2, sc.5. 37. Tenison, The Creed of Mr Hobbes, also makes play with Hobbes’s caution in the face of alcohol: beer is not very appropriate for philosophers, but as a means of letting the student attack his materialism, p. 104. 38. D. Wootton, ‘The Fear of God in Early Modern Political Theory’, in Historical Papers (Vancouver: Canadian Historical Association, 1983), pp. 56–80; for a clear example R. Bentley, The Folly and Unreasonableness of Atheism (1693) discussed below, pp. 36–7, on the Newfoundland Indians as a whole nation of atheists, so having no effective society. 39. J. Mayne, Ochlo-machia: Or, The People’s War, Examined According to the Principles of Scripture & Reason (Oxford, 1647), pp. 24–5; see G. Burgess, ‘Royalism and Liberty of Conscience in the English Revolution,’ in J. Morrow and J. Scott (eds), Liberty, Authority, Formality: Political Ideas and Culture, 1600–1900 (Exeter: Imprint Academic, 2008), pp. 9–28, especially pp. 9, 19–22. 40. Mayne, Oclo-machia; for Mayne as the interlocutor see A. Clark, ‘Brief Lives’, Chiefly of Contemporaries, Set Down by John Aubrey (Oxford, 1898), 1, p. 352; see Burgess, ‘Royalism and Liberty of Conscience’, pp.18–23. 41. Aubrey, ‘Thomas Hobbes’, in Brief Lives, p. 233. 42. John Hale notes that the original manuscript emphasizes the unexpected conjunction of the priestly and philosophical in a way lost in the inferior published version. Hale, ‘Thomas Hobbes’ Poem of Exile’, p. 98. 43. Ibid., pp. 92–3, 100–3. 44. Ibid., pp. 100–3. Hale points to the intellectual significance as well as the beauty of the Latin. 45. Ibid., p. 100. Hale notes Hobbes’s allusions to the murder of Anthony Ascham. 46. T. Hobbes, Thomae Hobbesii Malmesburiensis Vita (1679), p. 14; T. Hobbes, The Life of Thomas Hobbes of Malmesbury (London, 1680), p. 18. 47. J. E. Cooper, ‘Thomas Hobbes on the Political Theorist’s Vocation’, Historical Journal, 50:3 (2007), pp. 519–48. 48. Gaukroger, Francis Bacon, pp. 101–31. 49. R. Serjeantson, ‘Hobbes, the Universities and the History of Philosophy’, in Condren et al. (eds), The Philosopher, pp. 113–39. 50. See, for example, the front matter of De cive; Philosophicall Rudiments; De corpore politico; De corpore; and hitherto unmentioned, Of Libertie and Necessity (London, 1654), Epistle, sig.A6r. 51. Hobbes, Leviathan, p. 33. 52. Ibid., pp. 60, 35. 53. Ibid., p. 28–9. 54. Hobbes, De corpore, in Opera latina, vol. 1, Epist. Ded; and The English Works, vol. 1, pp. ix, xiv, 1.1, pp.1–2. 55. Cooper, ‘Hobbes on the Political Theorist’s Vocation’, pp. 523, 534–45; her point is supported by much of Hobbes’s correspondence. 56. Malcolm, The Correspondence of Thomas Hobbes, introduction, p. xxxi. 57. Tenison, The Creed of Mr Hobbes, pp. 6–7. 58. Aubrey, ‘Thomas Hobbes’, in Brief Lives, p. 234. 59. A. Cowley, ‘To The Royal Society’, ll. 1–12, 38–9, 69–75, in The Complete Works, vol. 1, pp. 167–9; F. Boyle, ‘Old Poetry and New Science: Swift, Cowley and Modernity’,

176

60. 61. 62.

63. 64. 65. 66.

67.

68. 69.

70.

71. 72.

73. 74.

75. 76. 77. 78. 79. 80. 81.

Notes to pages 64–8 1650–1850: Ideas, Aesthetics and Inquiries in the Early Modern Era, 4 (1998), pp. 252– 68, on pp. 252–9. Cowley, ‘To Mr. Hobbes’, stanza 2, ll. 30–1, stanza 4, ll. 56–63, in The Complete Works, vol. 2, p. 19. Anon., Elegy Upon Mr Hobbes (London, 1680), ll. 5, 12, 31–2, 39–40. Anon., The Last Sayings, or, Dying Legacy of Mr Hobbs of Malmesbury who Departed this Life on Thursday Deemb 4 1679 (London, 1680); Anon., Memorable Sayings of Mr Hobbes in his books and at the Table (London, 1680). Malcolm, The Correspondence of Thomas Hobbes, pp. 790–5. Champion (ed.), Hobbes’s Restoration Writings on Religion, ‘Hobbius de se: Last and Memorable Sayings, 1680’ (Oxford: Clarendon Press, forthcoming). Anon., The True Effigies of the Monster of Malmesbury, although written before Hobbes’s death, unpaginated with erratic sections, quotation from sect. 4, see also ‘To the Reader’. J. Champion, The Pillars of Priestcraft Shaken: The Church of England and its Enemies, 1660–1730 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), pp. 133–7; Hunter, Science and the Shape of Orthodoxy, pp. 286–307, especially p. 294. ‘Charles Blount to Thomas Hobbes’, 1678, letter 201, 1678, in The Correspondence of Thomas Hobbes, pp. 759–66; see also pp. 790–5; Champion, The Pillars of Priestcraft, pp. 134–7. Wagstaffe’s estates were in the Cavendish heartland in Derbyshire. I am grateful to Professor Michael Hunter for this information. J. Wagstaffe, The Question of Witchcraft Debated (1669; Londonm, 1671), pp. 146, 148; Hunter, Science and the Shape of Orthodoxy, ch. 14, especially pp. 293–307 on Wagstaffe, The Question of Witchcraft Debated, 1669 and 1671 editions. Wagstaffe, The Question of Witchcraft, pp. 130–1; at another point, in asking who benefits from witchcraft accusations (usually an ambitious priesthood and those in search of heresies) he seems to paraphrase the opening of Leviathan, ch. 47, where Hobbes too asks, ‘cui bono’: who benefits? Wagstaffe, The Question of Witchcraft, pp.150, 198; Hunter, Science and the Shape of Orthodoxy, pp. 294, 300. G. Pursglove and K. Williamson, ‘Prose Fiction and Fable’, in S. Gillespie and D. Hopkins (eds), The Oxford History of Literary Translation in English, Volume 3, 1660–1790 (Oxford: University Press, 2005), p. 301. Hunter, Science and the Shape of Orthodoxy, p. 295. See D. Saunders, ‘The Judicial Persona in Historical Context: The Case of Sir Matthew Hale’, in Condren et al. (eds), The Philosopher, pp.140–59, especially pp. 156–9, and quoting M. Hale, Reflections on Mr Hobbes his Dialogue of the Lawe. See for example, Tenison, The Creed of Mr Hobbes, pp. 162, 105 ‘Hobbes to Marin Mersenne’, 20/30 March 1641, letter 34, in The Correspondence of Thomas Hobbes, p.102–3. Lawson, An Examination, p. 78. Cudworth, The True Intellectual System of the Universe, quotations from p. 53. See also Malcolm, ‘Hobbes and the Royal Society’ on John Wilkins’s deflation of Hobbes’s claims to novelty, p. 325. Tenison, The Creed of Mr Hobbes, pp. 161, 157. N. Ingelo, Bentivolio and Urana, in Four Books (London, 1660) with reprints in 1669 and 1673, ‘Epistle Dedicatory’, A3v, bk 6, pp. 120–6.

Notes to pages 68–70

177

82. Parkin, Taming the Leviathan, pp. 203–4; Ingelo, Bentivolio and Urana, Parkin’s paraphrase of the reductive popular Hobbism comes from book 6; on de factoism not as a theory advanced but an accusation denied on both sides of the Engagement controversy, see Condren, Argument and Authority, pp. 290–313. 83. Cudworth, The True Intellectual System, pp. 656–7; see the discussion by Parkin, Taming The Leviathan, pp. 322–34; J. Eachard, Mr Hobbes State of Nature Considered in a Dialogue between Timothy and Philautus (1671), in The Works of John Eachard, 3 vols (London, 1673), vol. 2, pp. 1–130, especially p. 21 where the value of Lucianic critique is made explicit; and J. Eachard, Second Dialogue (1673), in The Works of John Eachard, vol. 3, ‘Epistle Dedicatory’. 84. Eachard, Second Dialogue, ‘The Book-seller to the Reader’, pp. A4v–a4v (erratic pagination). 85. Ibid., ‘Epistle Dedicatory’, pp. A4v, A3v-A4. 86. Butler, ‘A Philosopher’, in Characters, p. 94. 87. R. Boyle, The Sceptical Chymist (London, 1661). 88. E. Booth, ‘“A Subtle and Mysterious Machine”: Walter Charleton’s Medical World’ (PhD dissertation, La Trobe University, 2002), pp. 52–4 and throughout on the selfimage of the philosopher physician. 89. Ibid., p. 56, quoting W. Charleton, The Immortality of the Human Soul (1657); see also p. 62, quoting W. Charleton, Delirimenta Catarrhi (1650). 90. H. Oldenburg, The Correspondence, ed. A. R. and M. B. Hall, 5 vols (Madison, WI: Wisconsin University Press, 1965–8), vol. 3, p. 590, 11 November 1667; Booth, ‘A Subtle and Mysterious Machine’, p. 55. 91. Butler, ‘The Elephant in the Moon’ and ‘A Satire upon the Royal Society, a Fragment’, in Poetical Works of Samuel Butler, Aldine English Poets (London: Pickering, 1835) vol.2 p123–156, 156–8. 92. Gaukroger, The Emergence of a Scientific Culture, pp. 36–8; J. M. Levine, Dr. Woodward’s Shield: History, Science and Satire in Augustan England (1977; Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1991), pp. 124–5. 93. Butler, ‘An Antiquary’, in Characters, p. 76; see also Butler, ‘A Pedant’, in Characters, pp. 187–8; Levine, Dr. Woodward’s Shield, p. 124. 94. W. King, Useful Transactions in Philosophy and Other Sorts of Learning (1709), in The Original Works of William King, LL.D, 3 vols (London, 1776), vol. 2, pp. 57–178; for brief comment with respect to the Scriblerians, see C. Kerby-Miller (ed.), The Memoirs of the Extraordinary Life, Works and Discoveries of Martinus Scriblerus (1950; New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), pp. 71–2; Levine, Dr. Woodward’s Shield, pp. 247–51. 95. Parkin, Taming the Leviathan, p. 219 96. There is a Gibbonian evidential paradox here. Gibbon suggested both the early Christians and the occasionally persecuting Romans had a shared interest in emphasizing the popularity of Christianity; opposing interests may have agreed on the same falsification. 97. Malcolm, ‘The Printing of the ‘Bear’, in Aspects of Hobbes, p. 343. 98. S. Parker, A Discourse of ecclesiastical politie (London, 1670), pp. ii–iii, xxv; G. Schochet, ‘Between Lambeth and Leviathan: Samuel Parker on the Church of England and Political Order’, in N. Phillipson and Q. Skinner (eds), Political Discourse in Early Modern Britain (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), pp. 198–202. 99. Ibid., p. 205; A. Marvell, The Rehersal Transpos’d, or, Animadversions upon a Late Book (London, 1672); Parkin, Taming the Leviathan, pp. 299–301.

178

Notes to pages 70–7

100. Malcolm, ‘Hobbes and the Royal Society’, pp. 328–35; Parkin, Taming the Leviathan, pp. 120, 177–85, 397–402. 101. [Richard Willis], Occasional Paper, 1 (1697); R. West, Animadversions on a Late Book Entituled, The Reasonableness of Christianity as Delivered in the Scriptures (London, 1697); Parkin, Taming the Leviathan, pp. 400–1. 102. D. Levitin, ‘Matthew Tindal’s Rights of the Christian Church (1706) Reconsidered’, Historical Journal (forthcoming). 103. Parkin, Taming the Leviathan, pp. 133–5, 202–3; Tenison, The Creed of Mr Hobbes, p. 105. 104. Levitin, ‘Matthew Tindal’s Rights of the Christian Church’. 105. Bentley, The Folly and Unreasonableness of Atheism, especially sermon 1, The Confutation of Atheism from the Structure and Origin of Human Bodies. 106. Bentley, The Folly and Unreasonableness of Atheism, p. 40. 107. Ibid., pp. 35, 38–9. 108. Ibid., pp. 34–40; Parkin Taming the Leviathan, pp. 391–6. 109. Parkin, Taming the Leviathan, pp. 395–6. 110. Bentley, A Dissertation on the Epistles of Phalaris, preface, p. xli. 111. Stillman, ‘Hobbes’s Leviathan, pp. 792–3. 112. Hobbes, De cive, Praefatio, p. 145 ;Philosophicall Rudiments, ‘To the Reader’, B2. 113. L. Silbeman, ‘Mythologic Transformation of Ovid’s Hermaphrodite’, Sixteenth-Century Journal, 19:4 (1988), pp. 651–2. 114. Spectator, 4:588 (September 1714), p. 112. 115. Eachard, Second Dialogue, p. 29; J. Whitehall, Leviathan Found Out (London, 1679). 116. Anon., True Effigies, ‘To the Reader’, sect. 5 (final). 117. Samuel Sorbière also floridly emphasizes Hobbes’s virtues beyond the requirements of being a philosopher, ‘Sorbière to Hobbes’, 21 June and 1 July 1664, letter 166, The Correspondence of Thomas Hobbe, pp. 617–8. 118. On some of the differences, see Baumgold, ‘The Composition of Hobbes’s Elements’, pp. 31–3. 119. ‘Alexander Pope to John Arbuthnot’, 26 July 1734, in Correspondence of Alexander Pope, ed. G. Sherbourne, 5 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1956), vol. 3, p. 419. 120. J. Swift, The Battle of the Books, ‘Preface of the Author’, p. 144; Farley-Hills, The Benevolence of Laughter, p. 53. 121. Hobbes, The Elements of the Law, p. 42; for a discussion of Erasmus’s similar sense of non-alienating generality, see Thompson, Under Pretext of Praise, pp. 13–14, 45–8. 122. Although to be sure, aestismus is unlikely to transfer between the two languages. 123. W. Dilthey, Ideas Concerning a Descriptive and Analytic Psychology (1894); The Understanding of Other Persons and Their Expressions of life (c. 1910), trans. K. L. Heiges and R. M. Zaner (The Hague: Nijhoff, 1977). 124. R. Wokler, ‘The Manuscript Authority of Political Thoughts’, History of Political Thought, 20:1 (1999), pp. 107–24, on p. 108. 125. Ortega y Gasset, ‘The Difficulty of Reading’, Diogenes, 28 (1959), p. 2; Wokler, ‘The Manuscript Authority’, pp. 109, 115–18.

3 The Seriousness of the Absurd 1.

Weinbrot, Menippean Satire, jacket illustration.

Notes to pages 78–9 2. 3. 4.

5. 6.

7.

8.

9. 10. 11.

12.

13.

179

Kerby-Miller (ed.), The Memoirs, pp. 73–4, 114. A. McInnes, English Towns (London: The Historical Association, 1980), pp. 2–4. I. Ehrenpreis, Swift the Man, his Works and the Age, vol. 1: Mr Swift and His Contemporaries (London: Methuen, 1962), p. 229; on the sustained associations, H. Erskine-Hill, The Augustan Idea in English Literature (London: Edward Arnald, 1983); F. Grose, Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue (1811), forward by R. Cromie (Chicago, IL: Follet, 1971) shows that the thieves cant ‘Romeville’ survived into the nineteenth century. See Hammond, Professional Imaginative Writing, for a valuable account of its haunting significance for the Scriblerians. J. Habermas, Strukturwandel der Öffentlicheit (1962), trans. T. Burger and F. Lawence, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society, trans T. Burger & F. Lawrence (London: Polity Press, 1989), pp. 18–45. Habermas’s argument concerned what he took to be the contradictions of capitalism and how it had moved further away from rational debate, hence his need to make some gesture towards a time when the sphere was healthier. But the sphere itself specified the conditions for post-Enlightenment secular rational debate: equality and reliability of information, equality of voice and the capacity of those populating the sphere to form and decide issues for themselves, hardly features of a society of erratic flows of information and in which clerics from the pulpit and elsewhere were so dominant in setting agendas of debate. The confusion between theoretical model building and historical description was inherent to his enterprise, though he was a good deal more cautious historiographically than have been his enthusiasts. The model has largely been abstracted from the Marxist theory that originally provided its rationale and its content has been diluted partly by taking the metaphor of a ‘sphere’ to be a physical location and partly by replacing the emphasis on rationality of discourse with the number of voices to be heard. Wherever people might gather to talk might become a sign of the ‘public sphere’. The model, once confused with the evidence has been easily reified and historiographical enquiry has become for some a matter of looking for it and filling in gaps. As will be seen from Martinus Scriblerus’s own modus operandi, its fate has been remarkably Scriblerian. For a critique of the notion’s misuse in recent historiography see, C. Condren, ‘Public, Private and the Idea of the “Public Sphere” in Early-Modern England’, Intellectual History Review, 19:1 (2009), pp. 15–28; G. Kemp, ‘L’Estrange and the Publishing Sphere’, in J. McElligott (ed.), Fear, Exclusion and Revolution (Aldershott: Ashgate, 2006), pp. 67–90, especially for detail on the popularity of the notion. W. Cavendish, Duke of Newcastle, ‘Letter of Advice’, Clarendon MS 109, Bodleian Library, Oxford. Kerby-Miller (ed.), The Memoirs, preface, pp. 2–5. J. Swift, A Proposal for Correcting, Improving and Ascertaining the English Tongue (London: Printed for Benjamin Tooke, at the Middle-Temple-Gate, Fleetstreet, 1712); on Royal Society interest see B. Shapiro, John Wilkins 1642–1672: An Intellectual Biography (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1969), pp. 206–7. He had become an outspoken supporter of the Tory ‘peace’ party associated with Harley and Bolingbroke; see for example, J. Swift, The Conduct of the Allies and of the ministry in beginning and carrying on the present war (1711) it rather burnt his boats with the Whigs. Kerby-Miller (ed.), The Memoirs, preface, pp. 7–20.

180

Notes to pages 79–82

14. J. Arbuthnot, Pseudologia Politike, or The Art of Political Lying (London, 1712); J. Arbuthnot, The History of John Bull (1712) in G. Aitken (ed.), The Life and Works of John Arbuthnot (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1892), pp. 193–290; Arbuthnot, Pseudologia Politike, pp. 293–303. 15. Kerby-Miller (ed.), The Memoirs, pp. 36–9. 16. Ibid., appendix 1, pp. 351–59. 17. For a study of the Scriblerians after the diaspora see Brückmann, A Manner of Correspondence. 18. Marshall, ‘The Myth of Scriblerus’. Reference to the ‘Club’ as author is retained only for bibliographical convenience. 19. Kerby-Miller (ed.), The Memoirs, preface, p. 1. 20. Hammond, Professional Imaginative Writing, on Pope and Swift; and Pope’s Epistle to Dr Arbuthnot sets out some of the differences between the two friends. 21. Pope, Correspondence, vol. 1, letter dated 28 June 1714, p. 231. There was an addendum, just possibly by Swift, giving something of a linage for the Scriblerus family and concentrating on Timothy Scirblerus, a Scribner, and his education. See Scriberlus Club, The Memoirs, appendix 6, pp. 374–85. 22. Scriberlus Club, The Memoirs, p. 129; on the scope of the project, see at length KerbyMiller’s preface, pp. 31–41; Levine, Dr. Woodward’s Shield, p. 248; King did discuss the Phalaris question and produced a series of dialogues of the dead with it as a principal theme but it falls short of such a claim; W. King, Dialogues of the Dead, Relating to the Present Controversy concerning the Epistles of Phalaris, in The Original Works of William King, vol. 1, pp. 133–86. 23. I have used the Edinburgh edition of 1768, vol. 6, devoted to the work of Swift and his friends. 24. E. L. Steeves estimates about half the gazetted poets are common to both works, ‘Introduction’, in A. Pope, The Art of Sinking in Poetry: Martinus Scriblerus’ Peri Bathous: A Critical Edition, ed. E. L. Steeves (New York: Columbia University Press, 1952), pp. xlvi–xlvii, l–li; Kerby-Miller (ed.), The Memoirs, p. 269 notes, for the attribution of Virgilius restauratus to Arbuthnot. 25. See also Swift, Travels, pt 4, pp. 267–8. 26. For a helpful discussion, see Weinbrot, Menippean Satire, pp. 116–64. 27. See at length, F. N. Smith, Language and Reality in Swift’s Tale of a Tub (Columbus, OH: Ohio State University Press, 1979). 28. Swift, The Battle of the Books, pp. 144, 168. 29. See Weinbrot, Menippean Satire, pp. 164–92. 30. Swift, A Tale of a Tub, sect. 1, p. 50; it is also broadly Lucianic in its fascination with dishonesty, see for example, Lucian, ‘A True Story’ (I and II), in Works, ed. and trans. Harmon, vol. 1. pp. 248–347; Lucian, ‘Slander’, in Works, ed. and trans. Harmon, vol. 1 pp. 360–93; Lucian, ‘The Parasite’, in Works, ed. and trans. Harmon, vol. 3, pp. 236–317; Lucian, ‘The Lover of Lies’, in Works, ed. and trans. Harmon, vol. 3, pp. 320–81. 31. Arbuthnot had tried the jape of a false subscription before, with some success on the Queen’s ladies-in-waiting, but there is no record of anyone being fooled about the authenticity of Political Lying until the literary critic Robert M. Adams seriously lamented the loss of the two volumes in Bad Mouth: Fugitive Papers on the Dark Side (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1977), p. 43. The narrator of A Tale of a Tub, similarly intended a multi-folio subscription-driven enterprise on Terra Australis incognita.

Notes to pages 82–6

181

32. Scriberlus Club, The Memoirs, ch. 14; J. Swift, Works, 13 vols (Edinburgh: Printed by A. Donaldson, 1768), vol. 6, p. 67. 33. J. Swift, Journal to Stella, ed. H. Williams, 2 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1948), vol. 2, December 1712, p. 579; and October 1712, p. 562. 34. J. Gay, J. Arbuthnot and A. Pope, Three Hours After Marriage (1717), ed. R. Morton and W. M. Peterson (Ohio: Lake Erie College Studies, 1961); Swift, Tale of a Tub, section 9, p. 111. 35. T. Sheridan, Ars Pun-ica, sive Flos Linguarum; The Art of Punning; or The Flower of Languages; In Seventy Nine Rules; For the Farther Improvement of Conversation, And Help of Memory. By the Labour and Industry of Tom Pun-Sibi, &c. (Dublin and London, 1719). 36. I am grateful to Aoise Stratford-Lloyd for making this association. 37. Rosenheim, Swift and the Satirist’s Art, pp. 88–9. 38. W. Keithley, ‘Jonathan Swift as Grub Street Hack and the Problem of the Popularization of Science’, Swift Studies, 20 (2005), pp. 51–69; A. D. Chalmers, Jonathan Swift and the Burden of the Future (London and Newark, NJ; Associated University Presses, University of Delaware Press, 1995), p. 31. 39. Swift, A Tale of a Tub, p. 91. 40. See additionally to the Scriblerian corpus Swift’s Tritical Essay Upon the Faculties of the Mind, effectively a cento presented as ‘being entirely new’, in A Tale of a Tub … and Other Satires. 41. Swift, A Tale of a Tub, p. 90; he and Pope were very much part of the world they disdained; subscription publication would make Pope a rich man. 42. Ibid., pp. 40–1, 140–1; Smith, Language and Reality, pp. 73–4, 95–113–4. 43. Swift, A Discourse Concerning the Mechanical Operation of the Spirit, in A Tale of a Tub … and Other Satires, section 2, p. 181. 44. J. Dunton, Athenian Sport (London, 1707). 45. Swift, A Tale of a Tub, pp. 85–6. 46. Scriberlus Club, The Memoirs, p. 169. 47. Ibid., ch. 13, Swift, Works, vol. 6, pp. 62–3; Kerby-Miller notes Richard Owen Cambridge, The Scribleriad, giving an account of Martinus’s travels in couplets, The Memoirs, p. 65. 48. Swift, Travels, pt 3, pp. 201–5. 49. See for example, Lund, ‘“Res et verba”’, pp. 65–7. 50. Smith, Language and Reality, pp. 95–114. 51. Plato, Republic, ed., P. Shorey (1895; Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1970), vol. 2, bk. 7, pp. 128–8. 52. See R. B. Sheridan, The Critic (1779; London, 1781), in Sheridan’s Plays, intro. L. Gibbs (1906; London: Dent, 1960), act 1, scene 2, pp. 327–30 for the ‘scientifically treated’ rules of ‘puff ’, the ‘direct’, preliminary’, ‘oblique’ and the ‘puff collusive’, also an echo of Shakespeare’s rules for giving the lie in As You Like It. 53. T. Cook, The Battle of the Poets (London, 1725); T. Cook, The Bays Miscellany (London, 1731); T. Cook, The Comedian; or A Philosophical Enquirer, Eight Discourses (1732; London, 1733). 54. Scriberlus Maximus, The Art of Scribling (London, 1733); Simon Scriblerus [cousin], Whistoneutes: Or Remarks on Mr Whiston’s Historical Memoirs of the Life of Dr Samuel Clarke &c. (London, 1731); Anon., The Scribleriad (London, 1742); Scriblerius Tertius (Colly Cibber), The Hard Us’d Poet’s Complaint (London, 1750); Stephanus Scriblerus, The Censor (London, 1755); Martinus Scriblerus, An Ode Upon Dedicating a Building (London, 1769); Scriblerus Secundus, The Lamentation of a Dog (London, 1796).

182

Notes to pages 86–9

55. Stephanus Scriblerus, The Censor, reports on a dissection of someone executed for murdering common sense and proposes an academy to teach people to mimic song birds, so that the birds might not be kept in cages. 56. Martinus Scriblerus (The Younger), An Essay on Increasing the Inhabitants and Riches of Ireland and Propagating Mankind by Incubation (London, 1747), p. 11. 57. Martinus Scriblerus, The Marrow of the Tickler’s Works, or Three Shillings worth of Wit for a Penny in a Ballard (to the Tune of Derry-Down) (London, 1748); Martinus Scriblerus, The Ratland Feast, an historico-ludicro-comico Poem translated out of the Latin of Marcus Valarius Martialis (Cambridge, 1820). 58. Martinus Scriblerus, Somnium academici Cantabrigiensis (London, 1768); thus to a statement that the time has come, a note remarks that it is past; to the praise of peaceful academic pursuits, the voice of Martinus glosses peaceful as resulting in ease, like hunting and whoring, for which Cambridge is famous, pp. 7–8. 59. See also, Martinus Scriblerus, An Ode on Dedicating a Building; Scriblerus Secundus, The Lamentation; Scriberlus Stephanus, The Censor has remarks by Martinus, p. 13. 60. Anon., The Unsuspected Observer in the Spirit of the Late Famous Martinus Scriblerus, 2 vols (London, 1792), vol. 1, pp. 3–6. 61. In using the French ancienneté for which there is no elegant English equivalent, I am following J. M. Levine, The Battle of the Books: History and Literature in the Augustan Age (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1991). 62. John Evelyn in many ways an ancient, in Sylva wrote a work that could be taken to show the superiority on modern theories and practice of gardening; the belated importation of Italian classicism by Jones and above all Wren could be taken as a form of modernity or anciennité. J. M. Levine, Between the Ancients and the Moderns: Baroque Culture in Restoration England (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1999), pp. 3–32, 182–209; on theatre see his discussion of Francois Hédelin, abbé d’Aubignac, Pratique du theatre (1657), trans. The Whole Art of the Stage (1684), pp. 119–27; Levine, Dr. Woodward’s Shield, pp. 19–21. 63. K. L. Haugen, Richard Bentley: Poetry and Enlightenment (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011), p. 110. 64. Ehrenpreis, Swift the Man, p. 227; Weinbrot, Menippean Satire, pp. 164–7, 173–80. 65. Bentley, A Dissertation on the Epistles of Phalaris. 66. Ibid., p. 171; as Haugen points out, however, this is a little unfair, the Letters are remarkably polished, satiric and funny, Richard Bentley, pp. 111–2. 67. Bentley, A Dissertation on the Epistles of Phalaris, pp. 141–2, 158–60, 154, 156–7; Haugen, Richard Bentley, pp. 113–4, 118–9, for further examples. 68. Haugen, Richard Bentley, pp. 114–17. 69. King, ‘Dialogue 2’, in The Original Works of William King, vol. 1, pp. 248–9; see also ‘Dialogue 4’, pp. 153–5. 70. R. Phiddian, Swift’s Parody (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), p. 197. 71. Rosenheim, Swift and the Satirist’s Art, pp. 112–15; neither is it right to suggest that Bentley and Swift failed to engage because each was operating in a different literary genre, or exploring a different rhetorical genus, the Aristotelian genera were hardly mutually exclusive; see J. F. Tinkler, ‘The Splitting of Humanism: Bentley, Swift and the English Battle of the Books’, Journal of the History of Ideas, 49 (1988), pp. 462–5. 72. Levine, Dr. Woodward’s Shield, pp. 291–2. 73. Haugen, Richard Bentley, p. 123. 74. Levine, Between Ancients and Moderns, pp. 161–209.

Notes to pages 89–93

183

75. See for example, R. Rapin, The Whole Critical Works, ed. B. Kennet, 2 vols (London, 1706), vol. 1, pp. 321, 485. 76. W. Wotton, Reflections Upon Ancient and Modern Learning, 3rd edn (London, 1705), p. 376; see A. L. Williams, Pope’s Dunciad: A Study in its Meaning (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1955), pp. 109–10. 77. Hobbes, An Historical Narration, pp. 387–8. 78. Perhaps predictably Temple claimed not to know what to make of philology, or how it came to be a science. Temple, ‘Some Thoughts’, p. 299. 79. Haugen, Richard Bentley, rightly reacting against inflated enthusiasm for Bentley’s historiographical significance posits an unhelpful dichotomy in claiming that his approach was literary and philological. This is at once to narrow a concept of history, project that of literature and overlook the Dissertation, see pp. 118, 232–5. 80. Bentley, A Dissertation on the Epistles of Phalaris, pp. 171–2; ‘Of Aesop’s Fables’, in Works, vol. 2 p. 223. 81. I think it unnecessary to suggest that the inconclusiveness actually alludes to the peace settlement after the War of the League of Augsberg, see Ehrenpreis, Swift the Man, p. 228; it may do, but in the absence of evidence, the logic of Swift’s conceit is sufficient. 82. Sidney, An Apology; on this point see, A. F. Kinney, ‘Inhabiting Time: Sir Thomas More’s Historia Richardi Tertii’, in A.D. Cousins and D. Grace (eds), A Companion to Thomas More (Madison, WI: Fairly Dickinson University Press, 2009), pp. 114–26, on pp. 114– 5. 83. Ehrenpreis, Swift the Man, p. 231 where he remarks that Swift’s concern was the separation of scholarship from the ends of wisdom. 84. J. Addison, Spectator, 420 (2 July 1712); see Levine, The Battle of the Books, pp. 284–5. 85. Bentley, A Dissertation on the Epistles of Phalaris, pp. 172, 153. 86. Gay et al., Three Hours, act 1. p. 20; this, I think, is the first use of the word anachronism on stage, and is a good indication of its general currency by the early eighteenth century. 87. Levine, The Battle of the Books, pp. 47–84 88. Haugen, Richard Bentley, pp. 156–60. 89. Bentley’s edition of Paradise Lost would take conjectural alteration sufficiently far to make Scriblerian parody seem prophetic, see Haugen, Richard Bentley, pp. 219–29. 90. Williams, Pope’s Dunciad, pp. 104–5, collapses all into one perennial issue; Weinbrot, Menippean Satire, pp. 138–54, for the interplay of ‘literary’ with religious concerns and on thematic coherence. 91. The non-juror George Hickes was in scholarship of a modern disposition and a champion of Anglo-Saxon studies, see Levine, The Battle of the Books, pp. 352–67; Weinbrot, Menippean Satire, pp. 116–21. 92. Levine, The Battle of the Books, p. 121 where it is suggested this cost Swift clerical advancement; R. D. Lund, ‘A Tale of a Tub, Swift’s Apology and the Trammels of Christian Wit’, in A. J. Rivero (ed.), Augustan Subjects: Essays in Honor of Martin C. Ballestin (Newark: Delawar, 1997), pp. 87–109. 93. For a fine account of how important such preoccupations were and for an indication of Atterbury’s involvement in them see Levitin, ‘Matthew Tindal’s Rights of the Christian Church’. 94. Weinbrot, Menippean Satire, pp. 170–1. 95. See Gaukroger, ‘The Persona of the Natural Philosopher’, pp. 24–9; Gaukroger, Francis Bacon, pp. 104–14. 96. The Life of M Descartes, trans. S. R. (London, 1693), pp. 151–2.

184

Notes to pages 93–6

97. G. Berkeley, The Principles of Human Knowledge (1710), in Works, ed. A. A. Luce and T. E. Jessop, 2 vols (1949; London: Nelson, 1967), vol. 2, pp. 19–113, preface, p. 23. 98. T. Parnell, An Essay on the Different Stiles of Poetry (London, 1713), preface, unpaginated. 99. Cook, The Comedian, discourse 1, p. xii. 100. J. Schmitt, ‘An Order of Philosophers? Samuel Clarke’s Moral Theory and the Problem of Sacerdos in Enlightenment England’, Intellectual History Review, 18:3 (2008), pp. 361–74. 101. Swift, A Tale of a Tub, sect. 6, p. 88; and sect. 5, p. 85; Swift, The Battle of the Books, p. 150, The satiric reductio was reinvented as a serious proposition by Roland Barthes in Critique et Verité (Paris: Seuil, 1966). 102. Swift, A Tale of a Tub, sect. 1, pp. 17–18; on some of the wider significance of accusations of plagiarism in poetics, Hammond, Professional Imaginative Writing, pp. 83–104 103. I. Maclean, Logic, Signs and Nature in the Renaissance: The Case of Learned Medicine (Cambridge: University Press, 2002), ch. 8. 104. Levine, Dr. Woodward’s Shield, pp. 9–17. 105. Ibid., pp. 9–10, 301 for the anecdote about Sydenham and Don Quixote, citing Sir Richard Blackmore, A Treatise on the Smallpox (1723), p. 11; modern treatment remained controversial, see D. Hartley, Some Reasons Why the Practice of Inoculation Ought to be Introduced into the Town of Bury at Present (London, 1733). 106. P. Hilton, ‘Bitter Honey: The Disillusioned Philosophy of Mandeville’s Satiric Treatise’ (PhD dissertation, UNSW 1999), p. 198 note, and pp. 197–9 on Mandeville’s subtle play with the typology. 107. For Mandeville’s ironic employment of the ancient and moderns topos, P. Hilton, Bitter Honey: Recuperating the Medical and Scientific Context of Bernard Mandeville (Bern: Peter Lang, 2010), pp. 143–6. 108. E. Young, Conjectures on Original Composition (1759), in Jones (ed.), English Critical Essays, pp. 270–311. 109. Hilton, Bitter Honey, pp. 41–61; Gaukroger, The Emergence of a Scientific Culture, pp. 350–1; J. H. Zammito, ‘Médecin-philosoph: Persona for Radical Enlightenment’, Intellectual History Review, 18:3 (2009), pp. 427–40. 110. Brückmann, A Manner of Correspondence, pp. 24–57; P. Alpers, ‘What is Pastoral?, Critical Inquiry, 8 (1982), pp. 437–60, especially pp. 457–60. 111. Brückmann, A Manner of Correspondence, p. 119. 112. Swift, Travels, pt 3, p. 214; Brückmann, A Manner of Correspondence, p. 16. 113. Scriberlus Club, The Memoirs, p. 124. 114. Or, for that matter Sir William Temple, who expressed his doubts in ‘Essay upon Ancient and Modern Learning’ (1690), in The Works of Sir William Temple, vol. 1, pp. 151–169, on p. 162. He did allow some interesting modern wits; Machiavelli, Sarpi, Bacon, Montaigne and Selden among them, p. 166; see also, Temple, ‘Some Thoughts’. 115. Scriberlus Club, The Memoirs, p. 124; Swift, A Tale of a Tub, sect. 5, p. 84 refers to the circulation of the blood as a modern invention along with gunpowder and the compass. 116. Martinus Scriblerus (The Younger), An Essay, takes this further. The body has dramatically changed over the centuries, the heart has moved, parts of the brain have been inverted. Harvey invented circulation of the blood, it having previously been a stagnant pool. No one yet knows who invented nerves, p. 8. 117. Another instance that did not find its way into the The Memoirs is given briefly by Arbuthnot. Martinus wishes to establish a method for calculating the physical weight of

Notes to pages 96–9

185

the ancients according to the doses of medicine they took. The notion, he says, is derived directly from a recent treatise arguing that body weight is relevant to the size of any medicine to be prescribed. See J. Swift, Correspondence, ed. H. Williams, 5 vols (Oxford: Calendon Press, 1963), vol. 2, ‘Arbuthnot to Swift’, 26 June 1714, p. 42. 118. Scriberlus Club, The Memoirs, p. 104; the motif had been used by William King in his Journey to London in the Year 1698 (London, 1698) and then by Lewis Theobold, The Censor (1715), see Levine, Dr. Woodward’s Shield, p. 250. The whole episode is developed from the shield purchased by Woodward and believed by him to be ancient but which turned out probably to be sixteenth-century German. It is now in the British Museum, Kerby-Miller (ed.), The Memoirs, p. 206 notes. 119. Scriberlus Club, The Memoirs, ch. 4. 120. Ibid., ch. 5. 121. Ibid., p. 108; Quintilian (Marcus Fabius), Institutio oratoria, trans. H. E. Butler , 4 vols (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1980), vol. 4, p. 223; ch. 2 concerns memory training. 122. See Hunter, ‘The University Philosopher’, pp. 43–50. 123. Temple, ‘Essay upon Ancient and Modern Learning’, p. 152. 124. R. Rapin, ‘A Comparison of Homer and Virgil’, in The Whole Critical Works, vol. 1, pp. 116–210. 125. Rapin, The Whole Critical Works, vol. 1, pp. 321, 485–6; R. Rapin, ‘Reflections upon Metaphysicks’, in The Whole Critical Works, vol. 2, pp. 384–5; Levine, Between Ancients and Moderns, p. 53. 126. R. D. Lund, ‘The Eel of Science: Index learning Scriblerian Satire and the Rise of the Information Culture’, Eighteenth-Century Life, 22:2 (1988), pp. 18–42. 127. Swift, A Tale of a Tub, section 7, pp. 94–5; Swift, The Battle of the Books, ‘Bookseller’, p. 144. 128. Scriberlus Club, The Memoirs, p. 118; a joke, perhaps about Arbuthnot’s dilatoriness. 129. Ibid., pp. 119–20. 130. Ibid., pp. 118–19, 127–8; Lund, ‘“Res et verba”’; J. Sitter, Arguments of Augustan Wit (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), p. 147; H. Dawson, Locke, Language and Early-Modern Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006). 131. Berkeley, Principles, introduction, sect. 6, p. 27, sects 7–10, pp. 28–30. 132. Ibid., sect. 3 p. 26; see also sect. 1, p. 25, where it is implied that if philosophers did their work competently they would be undisturbed by melancholic perplexity; see also Butler’s character of a philosopher as one who discovers only his own mistakes, Characters, p. 94. 133. Hobbes, Leviathan, p. 28. 134. Scriberlus Club, The Memoirs, pp. 118–9. 135. J. Arbuthnot, An Examination of Dr Woodward’s Account of the Deluge (London, 1697). Levine, suggests this was written in some collaboration with William Wotton in Dr. Woodward’s Shield, p. 40. 136. Hammond, Professional Imaginative Writing, pp. 205–6, for the target being Centlivre. 137. Much of the interplay between them was prefigured in an epigraph alluding to Jonson’s Poetaster in Brückmann, A Manner of Correspondence, p. 117 quoting ‘Rumpatur, quisquis rumpitur invidia’: let he who bursts, burst (Martial), as the concluding classical quotation in Jonson’s play. 138. Gay et al., Three Hours; on the play and its circumstances, see D. Nokes, John Gay: A Profession of Friendship (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), pp. 233–49.

186

Notes to pages 99–105

139. M. Hunter, Robert Boyle (1627–91): Scrupulosity and Science (Woodbridge: Boydell, 2000); Gaukroger, The Emergence of a Scientific Culture, pp. 218–19, 223–4. 140. Gay et al., Three Hours, act 1, p. 9. 141. Ibid., act 1, p.11. 142. See also Scriberlus Club, The Memoirs, p. 168. 143. V. Rumbold notes the shift from complacency and hair-splitting to something less ‘clear-cut’ as Pope focuses properly on his own reputation. A Pope. The Dunciad, ed. V. Rumbold (London: Longmans, 1999), p. 43. 144. Williams, Pope’s Dunciad, pp. 68–71. 145. A. Pope, The Dunciad, ed. J. Sutherland, 5 vols (1963; London: Methuen and Yale University Press, 1965), vol. 5, p. 4 and note. 146. Weinbrot, Menippean Satire, p. 262. 147. Pope, The Dunciad, ed. Sutherland, bk 4, pp. 383, 385, ll. 433–4, 453–6; and bk 4, pp. 386–7, ll. 471–5. 148. Ibid., remarks, p. 391; M. Leranbaum, Alexander Pope’s ‘opus magnum’ 1729–1744 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1977), pp. 133–7; G. S. Rousseau, ‘Pope and the Tradition in Modern Humanistic Education’, in G. S. Rousseau and P. Rogers (eds), The Enduring Legacy: Alexander Pope tercentenary essays (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,1988), pp. 199–239. 149. Williams, Pope’s Dunciad, p. 108; Rousseau, ‘Pope and the Tradition’, p. 208. 150. M. Mack, Alexander Pope: A Life (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1986), p. 52.

4 Identity, Materiality and the Language of Philosophical Absurdity 1. 2. 3.

4.

5.

6.

7. 8. 9.

Fox, Locke and the Scriblerians. Arbuthnot, ‘Mrs Bull’s Vindication’, in The History of John Bull, pp. 214–17. For an overview, U. Thiel, ‘Personal Identity’, in M. Ayers and D. Garber (eds), The Cambridge History of Seventeenth-Century Philosophy, 2 vols (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 19), vol. 1, pp. 888–904. J. Locke, An Essay on Human Understanding (London, 1690); T. Burnet, Remarks Upon John Locke with Locke’s Replies (1697–9), ed. G. Watson (Doncaster: Brynmill Press, 1989), pp. 26–31, 35–6, 44–7, 77–82; on the possibility of the shared soul, Locke, An Essay, p. 23; Fox, Locke and the Scriblerians, p. 35. Anon., Scarronnides, or Virgil Travestie (London, 1692), ‘Preface to the Reader’ n.p.; T. Willis, Two Discourses Concerning the Soul of Brutes, Which is that of the Vital and Sensitive Man (London, 1683); see Hilton, Bitter Honey, pp. 25–40; the interplay between rational and sensitive soul may also have been taken up from the medical writings of Jean Baptiste von Helmont; see Swift, Correspondence, vol. 2, ‘Arbuthnot to Swift’, 26 June 1714, p. 42. M. de Montaigne, Essais (1580), ed. P. Villey, 3rd edn, 2 vols (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1978), vol. 1, p. 337. Florio translated as humans being made up of ‘shreds and patches’; E. J. Trenchmann has made up of bits, both have ‘there is as much a difference between us and ourselves as between us and other/s’. See M. de Montaigne, Essays, trans. E. J. Trenchmann (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1972), p. 326. See S. Clarke, The Works of Samuel Clarke, 4 vols (London, 1738), vol. 3, in which both sides of the argument are reprinted. Anon., The Unsuspected Observer, vol. 1, pp. 3–6. Swift, A Tale of a Tub, pp. 56–7.

Notes to pages 105–9

187

10. Brückmann, A Manner of Correspondence, pp. 126, 135; Morton and Peterson ‘Introduction’, in Gay et al., Three Hours, ed. Morton and Peterson, xi–xiv. 11. Annus Mirabilis, in Swift, Works, vol. 6, p. 145–7, 146, 148, 149. 12. Sheridan, Ars Pun-ica, prefatory poems, no page numbers. 13. Virgilius restauratus, in Swift, Works, vol. 6, pp. 128–33. 14. Weinbrot, Menippean Satire, p. 238: Virgilius, see l. 2 ‘Italiam, fato profugus’ with l. 6 ‘Italiam, flatu profugus’ , Swift, Works, vol. 6, p. 128. 15. Scriberlus Club, The Memoirs, p. 119. 16. For an account of the diagnostics of insanity, see B. de Mandeville, A Treatise of Hypochondriack and Hysterical Diseases, in Three Dialogues (London, 1730). 17. Scriberlus Club, The Memoirs, p. 140. 18. In The Pursuits of Literature Mathias calls it ‘very indecent’, and the volume in which it appeared, ‘scandalous’, p. 413. 19. The chapters are absent from Swift, Works, vol. 6, and from Aitken, The Life and Works. 20. P. Rogers, Literature and Popular Culture in Eighteenth Century England (Sussex: Harvester, 1985); Kerby-Miller (ed.), The Memoirs, pp. 294–9 notes; J. Hawley, ‘Margins and Monstrosity: Martinus Scriblerus his “Double Mistress”’, Eighteenth-Century Life, 22 (1998), pp. 35–40. 21. Scriberlus Club, The Memoirs, pp. 147, 152. 22. Parnell would provide the most extreme form of this incongruity in his translation of Homer’s Battle Between the Frogs and Mice; it is also a strong feature of Gay’s Beggars’ Opera. 23. Scriberlus Club, The Memoirs, p. 146; see also, at length Hawley, ‘Margins and Monstrosity’, pp. 31–49. 24. Scriberlus Club, The Memoirs, pp. 143–8. 25. Ibid., p. 149. 26. Ibid., p. 150. 27. Ibid., p. 152. 28. Ibid., pp. 152–3. 29. Swift, A Tale of a Tub, p. 85; see also Hawley, ‘Margins and Monstrosity’, pp. 41–3. 30. E. Sexby, Killing No Murder (London, 1658); J. Milton, Eikonoclastes (1649/50), in Complete Prose Works, vol. 3, ed. M. Y. Hughes (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1962), pp. 337–601. 31. Parnell and Pope [M. Scriblerus], Origin of the Sciences, in Swift, Works, vol. 6 p. 137. 32. Levine, Dr. Woodward’s Shield, p. 97; on paralipsis, see A. Fitzmaurice, Humanism and America: An Intellectual History of English Colonialism, 1500–1625 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), pp. 122–8. 33. Parnell and Pope [M. Scriberlus], Origin, p. 142; see Montaigne’s ‘Apology for Raymond Sebond’, where Democritus is first credited with the belief that the animals originally taught most of the arts and sciences. Montaigne, Essays, trans. Frame, p. 340. 34. E. Tyson, Orang-Outang, sive Homo Sylvestris: or, the Anatomy of a Pygmie compared with that of a Monkey, An Ape and Man. To which is added a Philological Essay Concerning the Pygmies, the Cynocephali, the Satyrs and Sphinges of the Ancients (London, 1699), Ep. Ded. n.p. 35. Ibid., ‘Anatomy’, pp. 1–2. 36. Ibid., pp. 45–55, quotation from p. 56.

188

Notes to pages 109–15

37. R. Nash, ‘Satyrs and Satire in Augustan England’, in K. Coombe and B. Connery (eds), Theorizing Satire (Basingstoke: St Martins Press, 1995), pp. 96–102, quotation from p. 98. 38. Nash’s ‘Satyrs’ names ‘Montagu’, p. 101 (no references). This also may be a touch reductive. Montagu, noting the Scriblerian ‘skit’ and aware that Tyson had apparently enjoyed being satirized, states only that the Scriblerians make serious reference to him, p. 404. 39. Parnell and Pope [M. Scriberlus], Origin, pp. 136, 137–43. 40. Lucian, ‘Double Indictment’, in Works, vol. 3, pp. 84–151. 41. R. D. Lund, ‘Martin Scriblerus and the Search for the Soul’, Papers on Language and Literature, 25:2 (1989), pp. 135–50 on the Hobbesian variation. 42. Kerby-Miller (ed.), The Memoirs, p. 313 notes. 43. Ibid., ch. 15. 44. Ibid., pp. 157, 159. 45. The double identity of Mrs Townley in Three Hours is a less outré variation on the theme. 46. A. Brilli, Retorica della satira con il Peri Bathous, o L’arte d’inchinarsi in poesia di Martin Scriblerus (Bologna: Il Mulino, 1973), pp. 50–6; Hammond, ‘Scriblerian Self–Fashioning’, pp. 108–24. 47. Scriberlus Club, The Memoirs, p. 132 48. Ibid., p. 141. 49. Swift, Correspondence, vol. 2, ‘Arbuthnot to Swift’, 26 June 1714, p. 42. 50. See, for example, Berkeley, The Principles of Human Knowledge, vol. 2. sect. 23, pp. 81–2; and sect. 101, p. 5. 51. Ibid., para. 156, p. 113. 52. J. Arbuthnot, ‘Gnothi Seauton. Know Yourself ’, autograph MS copy, British Museum, in Aitken (ed.), The Life and Works, pp. 441, 442. 53. Berkeley, The Principles, sects. 6–10, pp. 27–30; and sect. 23, pp. 81–2. 54. Berkeley, The Principles, sects. 18–23, pp. 36–9. 55. Sitter, Arguments of Augustan Wit, pp. 143–52. 56. Scriberlus Club, The Memoirs, p. 137. 57. Ibid., p. 121, an advertisement for a stolen dog should read ‘An irrational animal of the Genus caninum, &c’. 58. Dunton, Athenian Sport, pp. 499–500. 59. J. J. McCarthy, Why Managers Fail ... and What to Do About It (New York and Sydney: Hamlyn, 1979), p. x. 60. King, Useful Transactions, no. 6, pp. 86–91; King, The Transactioneer; with Some of His Philosophical Fancies, in Two Dialogues (1700), in The Original Works of William King,, vol. 2, pp. 3–53. 61. Scriberlus Club, The Memoirs, pp. 124, 123; Tom Stoppard takes up this theme in Rosencrantz and Gildenstern Are Dead. 62. ‘Arbuthnot to Swift’, 26 June 1714, in Swift, Correspondence, vol. 2, p. 42. 63. Gay et al., Three Hours, act 2, p. 36. 64. T. Sanchez, Disputationen de Sancto Matrimonii, libri tres (Genoa, 1592), see KerbyMiller (ed.), The Memoirs, pp. 308–10 notes. 65. Arbuthnot, The History of John Bull, p. 212. 66. Malcolm, The Origins of English Nonsense, p. 11–12; on metaphorical blindness as a typically Scriblerian satiric mechanism, see Lund, ‘“Res et verba”’, pp. 64–5. 67. T. Sheridan, British Education (London, 1756), pp. 217, 220; cited Williams, Pope’s Dunciad, p. 113.

Notes to pages 115–21

189

68. Lund, ‘“Res et verba”’, pp. 64, 70, on Jacques Lacan, p. 75, Julia Kristeva, p. 76. 69. C. Condren, Satire, Lies and Politics: The Case of Dr Arbuthnot (Basingstoke: Macmillan Press, 1997), pp. 144–58; see also Swift, Travels, pt. 4, p. 268; ‘Gay to Swift or Arbuthnot’, 16 August 1714, in Swift, Correspondence, vol. 2, pp. 105–7. 70. There is, for example, the absurdist reflexivity of Phoebe Clinket getting the plot for Three Hours at the end of the play; and irrespective of details, it is a structural feature of Tristram Shandy, a novel about trying to write about one’s own life; and The Critics, a play about putting on a play; see also below on Ars Pun-ica. 71. Swift, A Tale of a Tub, ‘The Conclusion’, p. 131. 72. The text is conventionally ascribed to Pope alone; but to some extent it was a joint effort in the Scriblerian idiom. Pope had got tired of waiting for Arbuthnot, and produced a work that was methodically organized from Arbuthnot’s notes. My guess would be that we can detect signs of a clearer division of labour. Pope with his relentless antipathy to modern poetry collected and provided the evidence (so much of which reappears in The Dunciad); Arbuthnot provided the abstract conceptual schema into which the examples fitted and which follows, in its exploitation of reifications taken literally, much in the style of The Art of Political Lying, and prefigures those parts of Gulliver’s Travels with which he has been suppositionally associated. 73. Pope, Peri Bathous, ch. 1. 74. Ibid., ch. 3. 75. Ibid., ch. 2. 76. Swift, A Tale of a Tub, p. 30. 77. Steeves, ‘Introduction’, pp. xxiv–v. 78. I. Yasuo, ‘Martinus Scriblerus his Character as Satirist’, Bulletin of the Department of Commerce ( Japan) recorded in Scriblerian, 2:2 (1970), p. 43. 79. Pope, Peri Bathous, ch. 14. 80. Scriberlus Club, The Memoirs, appendix 6, p. 383. 81. Shapiro, John Wilkins, pp. 206–23. 82. Hobbes, The Elements of Law, p. 21 83. Wotton, Reflections Upon Ancient and Modern Learning, p. 376; see Williams, Pope’s Dunciad, pp. 109–10. 84. For Wilkins, see Shapiro, John Wilkins, pp. 206–23; the most recent and thorough treatment of Locke’s philosophy of language, see Dawson, Locke. It does not however, deal with the philosophical satire of language. 85. Brückmann, A Manner of Correspondence, pp. 133–4. 86. Smith, Language and Reality, pp. 36–43, 95–114. 87. Pope, Peri Bathous, p. 3; a point apparently alluded to in Ars Pun-ica in reference to the tongue of a starling, prefatory poem, n.p. 88. Anon., Tom Pun-Sibi Metamorphosed: or The Giber Gibb’d (Dublin, 1724), one page. 89. Sheridan, Ars Pun-ica, introductory poem, n.p. 90. Ibid., p. iii 91. Ibid., p. v. 92. Ibid., introductory poem. 93. Ibid., pp. 2–3. 94. Ibid., introductory poem. 95. Ibid., p. 2. 96. Ibid., concluding preface, n.p.

190

Notes to pages 121–6

97. Ibid., pp. 25–6; presumably the reference is to J. Alsted, Encyclopaedia (Herbon, 1630) but in the only one to which I have had access, 1649, the point is far more relevant to vol. 2, bk 5, pp. 127–8, than to the loci ethici of vol. 3. The voluminous Alsted interchanged titles and content, see H. Hodson, Johann Heinrich Alsted, 1588–1638: Between Renaissance, Reformation and Universal Reform (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), p. 8. 98. Anon., Tom Pun-Sibi Metamorphosed. 99. Brückmann, A Manner of Correspondence, p. 15. 100. Pope, Peri Bathous, ch. 14. 101. Sheridan, Ars Pun-ica, pp. 21–4. As quoted, Alsted’s point is indeed that minor changes in names and places generate ambiguities, but my impression is that his inclusion is as much for the opportunity for feeble punning as for a display of learning and mock shame at not being original. 102. For brief discussion see, R. Yeo, ‘John Locke and Polite Philosophy’, in Condren et al., The Philosopher, pp. 269–71; see also at length, Dawson, Locke. 103. D. Hartley, Observations on Man, his Frame, his Duty, and his Expectations (London, 1749), sect.1, propositions 1–26, pp. 1–129. 104. M. J. Croghan, ‘Savage Indignation: An Introduction to the Philosophy of Language and Semiotic in Jonathan Swift’, Swift Studies (1990), pp. 11–38. 105. Hartley, Observations, proposition 84, pp. 315–6; Sheridan would be part of this in his A Rhetorical Grammar of the English Language (London, 1781). It laments the lack of order that makes English difficult to learn, blames this on an outdated educational fixation with Latin (preface) and sets out to repair the damage with respect especially to pronunciation and public speaking, offering rules for expressing each emotion, pp. 180–204. 106. J. Goldberg, hopes it is the former, see ‘The Houynhyhnm Subtext: Moral Conclusions and Linguistical Manipulation in Gulliver’s Travels’, 1650–1850: Ideas, Aesthetics and Inquiries in the Early Modern Era, 4 (New York: AMS Press, 1998), pp. 269–84. 107. Hobbes, The Elements of Law, p. 68. 108. Lund, ‘“Res et verba”’, isolating the importance of Sprat for Swift, pp. 65–8. 109. J. Wilkins, An Essay Towards a Real Character and a Philosophical Language (London, 1668). 110. On jargon generators, such as the instant sociological matrix, see D. Bolinger, Language The Loaded Weapon (1980; New York: Longmans, 1983), pp. 127–9. 111. Swift, Travels, pt 3, p. 201.

5 Hobbes and the Scriblerians 1. 2. 3.

4.

[William King], Dialogues of the Dead in Imitation of Lucian, and the French (London, 1699), pp. 7–10, on p. 7. Anon., Advice from Shades Below, or A letter from Thomas Hobbes of Malmsbury to his Brother B–n H–Dly (London, 1710), pp. 3–11. On the secret history literature, see N. Malcolm, Reason of State, Propaganda, and the Thirty Years’ War: An Unknown Translation by Thomas Hobbes (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2007), pp. 16–60. T. Hobbes, Critique du De mundo de Thomas White (1643), ed. J. Jacquot and H. W. Jones (Paris: Vrin–CNRS, 1973), pp. 367–72; Hobbes, The Elements of Law, pt 1, ch. 2, sects 2–3; Hobbes, Questions Concerning Liberty, vol. 5, pp. 442–3; V. Chappell (ed.), Hobbes and Bramhall on Liberty and Necessity (Cambridge: Cambridge University

Notes to pages 126–30

5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10.

11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27.

28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33.

191

Press, 1999), for extracts from the debates; A. Pacchi, ‘Hobbes and the Problem of God’, in G. A. J. Rogers and A. Ryan (eds), Perspectives on Thomas Hobbes (Oxford: Blackwell, 1988), pp. 171–87. Swift, A Tale of a Tub, ‘Author’s Preface’, p. 33. Ibid., pp. 33, 136–7. A. S. Fisher, ‘An End to the Renaissance: Erasmus, Hobbes and A Tale of a Tub’, Huntington Library Quarterly, 38 (1974), pp.1–20. Swift, A Tale of a Tub, p. 46. Ibid., p. 56; Rosenheim, Swift and the Satirist’s Art, pp. 123–4; for Swift as parodist, see Phiddian, Swift’s Parody. Fisher, ‘An End to the Renaissance’, pp. 10–20. There was a clear continuing interest in Hobbes during the early eighteenth century. Pufendorf ’s work provided a more palatable version of Hobbesian sovereignty theory, while the anticlericalism remained appealing to some and Historia ecclesiastica was published in translation in 1722. Swift, A Discourse Concerning the Mechanical Operation of the Spirit, sect. 2, p. 179. Ehrenpreis, Swift the Man, pp. 240–6. Swift, The Battle of the Books, p. 150. Ibid., p.156 Temple, ‘Essay Upon Ancient and Modern Learning’, p. 162; Levine, The Battle of the Books, p. 18. Swift, The Battle of the Books, p. 145. Ibid., p.151. This image has been discussed by E. Tuveson, ‘Swift and the World–Makers’, Journal of the History of Ideas, 11:1 (1950), pp. 54–74. C. Hinnant, ‘The Fable of the Spider and the Bee and Swift’s Poetics of Inspiration’, Colby Library Quarterly, 20 (1984), pp. 129–36. M. Seidel, The Satiric Inheritance, Rabelais to Sterne (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1979), p. 240; see also Weinbrot, Menippean Satire, p. 185 for the ‘Bentley–spider’. Ehrenpreis, Swift the Man, p. 231. Swift, The Battle of the Books, p. 153. Ibid., p.155; on the Baconian allusion, see K. Williams, Jonathan Swift and the Age of Compromise (Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 1959), p.125–6. Ehrenpreis, Swift the Man, p. 231. Ibid., p. 233. S. Butler, Hudibras (1663–78), in The Poetical Works of Samuel Butler, 3. canto I, ll. 1461–8. F. Bacon, Novum Organun (1606), in Works, vol. 14, pp. 1–212; ‘Aphorism’, 95, in Works, vol. 9, p. 252. It is an association to which J. G. A. Pocock has cautiously pointed in discussing Hobbes and Cudworth in ‘Thomas Hobbes: Atheist or Enthusiast’, History of Political Thought, 11:4 (1990), pp. 737–49. Hobbes, The Elements of Law, p. 41; Hobbes, Leviathan, p. 43. See Scriberlus Club, The Memoirs, p. 383 where the atheistic implications of this are explicit. Ibid., p. 167. H. Grant, ‘Hobbes and Mathematics’, in T. Sorrell (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Hobbes (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), pp. 108–28, 119. Swift, A Discourse Concerning the Mechanical Operation of the Spirit, sect. 1, p. 172. Hobbes, The Elements of Law, pp. 3–7.

192

Notes to pages 130–4

34. Kerby-Miller (ed.), The Memoirs, p. 120, p. 252 notes, where Kerby-Miller makes clear that such new philosophy was not unique to Hobbes and for many had become common-place. 35. Job 41:1; Psalms 74:14. 36. Scriberlus Club, The Memoirs, p. 142. 37. Lund, ‘Martin Scriblerus and the Search for the Soul’. 38. Kerby-Miller (ed.), The Memoirs, p. 118; Hobbes, Leviathan, p. 26. 39. Kerby-Miller (ed.), The Memoirs, p. 121. 40. For Hobbes’s defensiveness on this see Correspondence, vol. 2. ‘Hobbes to the Hon. Edward Howard’, 24 October/3 November 1668, letter 184, p. 704. 41. Davis, ‘Thomas Hobbes’s Translations of Homer’. 42. Weinbrot, Eighteenth-Century Satire, pp. 101–4; Anon., Homer a la mode: A Mock Poem upon the First and Second Books of Homer’s Iliad (Oxford, 1665); ‘Nickydem’, Homer in a Nutshell; or, The Iliad of Homer in Immortal Doggerel (London, 1715). 43. Swift, A Tale of a Tub, pp. 82–3. 44. Ibid., p. 84. 45. Kerby-Miller (ed.), The Memoirs, p. 47. 46. F. Rosslyn, Alexander Pope: A Literary Life (London: Macmillan, 1990), pp. 64–9; P. Connolly, ‘The Ideology of Pope’s Iliad’, Comparative Literature, 40 (1988), pp. 358–83; Pope’s remarks on Hobbes and Chapman as translators are in the preface to his own translation. 47. A. Le Fevre Dacier, L’Iliade d’Homère, Traduite en François avec des Remarques Par Madame Dacier (Paris, 1711); F. Moore, ‘Homer Revisited: Anne Le Fevre Dacier’s Preface to her Prose Translation of the Iliad in Early Eighteenth-Century France’, Studies in the Literary Imagination, 33:2 (2000), pp. 87–107. 48. Moore, ‘Homer Revisited’, p. 101; Weinbrot, Eighteenth-Century Satire, p. 108; H. D. Weinbrot, ‘Alexander Pope, Madame Dacier’s Homer: Conjectures Concerning Cardinal Dubois, Sir Luke Schaub and Samuel Buckley’, Huntington Library Quarterly, 62:1/2 (1999), pp. 1–23. 49. Weinbrot, ‘Alexander Pope, Madame Dacier’s Homer’, p. 22; Weinbrot also suggests (p. 1) that where Dacier saw Homer in philosophical terms, Pope saw him as a poet. The distinction is too simple. 50. A. Pope, The Iliad of Homer (London, 1715–20), bk 1, verse 4, ll. 3–4. 51. Ibid., bk 1, verse 5, ll. 1–2 (omitted by Hobbes). 52. Ibid., bk 1, verse 2, ll. 5–6. 53. Weinbrot, Eighteenth-Century Satire, p. 109. 54. H. Mason, To Homer Through Pope: An Introduction to Homer’s Iliad and Pope’s Translation (London: Chatto & Windus, 1972), pp. 114–139, for the hero as gentleman. 55. Pope, The Iliad of Homer, bk 1, verse 5, l. 3. 56. Moore, ‘Homer Revised’, pp. 98–100. 57. R. Bentley, Trinity College MS, B.17.17, held at Trinity College, Cambridge. This manuscript covers the first six books of The Iliad, but with cross-reference to passages in The Odyssey and supporting evidence for the existence of the missing Greek letter. 58. R. Bentley, A Letter to Mr Pope Occasioned by Sober Advice from Horace (London, 1735), p. 14; see Levine, The Battle of the Books, pp. 222, 240–1. 59. Kerby-Miller (ed.), The Memoirs, pp. 124, 259–60 notes. 60. Bacon, ‘Of Boldness’, in Essays, in Works, vol. 1, pp. 37–42, on p. 39; I have taken this example from a number given by Skinner, ‘Why Laughter Mattered’, pp. 432–4.

Notes to pages 135–43

193

61. But see also, Scarronidies, ‘Preface to the Reader’, for a similar attitude to philosophers. 62. Hobbes, Leviathan, pp. 34–5. 63. Kerby-Miller (ed.), The Memoirs, pp. 121–2; Arbuthnot, Pseudologia Politike, Pope, Peri Bathous and ‘Mrs Bull’s Vindication’ in The History of John Bull are replete with the same techniques that make me suspect Arbuthnot’s hand was predominant. 64. With respect to the enthymeme, this is effective, only for the less significant of Aristotle’s definitions (a statement involving a hidden minor premise), but it is also the meaning Hobbes took from The Rhetoric. The enthymeme as a probabilistic imperative analogous to the syllogism was untouched. 65. Hobbes, Leviathan, p. 81. 66. Pope, Peri Bathous, ch. 14; see Hobbes, Leviathan, in which tyranny is but monarchy misliked, anarchy a similar transformation of democracy; on the importance of redescription and Hobbes’s theories and practice of it see at length, Skinner, Reason and Rhetoric. 67. Swift, Travels, p. 205. 68. Hobbes, Leviathan, p. 34.

Afterword 1.

2. 3. 4. 5.

6.

7. 8.

9.

Nadel, ‘Philosophy of History before Historicism’; on Thomasius see Hunter, The Secularisation of the Confessional State, pp. 58–73; D. R. Kelley, ‘History and/or Philosophy’, in J. B. Schneewind (ed.), Teaching New Histories of Philosophy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004), pp. 345–59, on p. 346. R. G. Collingwood, Autobiography (1939; Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1967), chs 4–5. Gunnell, Political Theory; C. W. Mills, The Sociological Imagination (1959; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1967), pp. 50–75. Crews, The Pooh Perplex, pp. 87–99; H. Sockett, Microcosmographia Academica Americana (Lulu Press, 2003), pp. 31–1 on the persona of ‘Professor Ignatia’. J. A. Barnes, Models and Interpretations (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), especially pp. 215–26; Condren, ‘Public, Private and the Idea of the “Public Sphere”’, pp. 15–16. J. L. Austin, How to do Things with Words (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1962); valuable discussions of this are to be found in K. T. Fann (ed.), Symposium on J. L. Austin (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1969), especially L. W. Forguson, ‘Austin’s Philosophy of Action’, pp. 127–47, on pp. 143–7; and W. Cerf, ‘Critical Review of How to do Things with Words’, pp. 351–79. S. Levinson, Pragmatics (1983; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), pp. 227–40, 245–7. J. R. Searle and D. Vanderveken, The Foundations of Illocutionary Logic (1985; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), p. 179. R. M. Hare, ‘Austin’s Distinction between Locutionary and Illocutionary Acts’, in Practical Inferences (London: Macmillan, 1972), pp. 101–4 on the need to shift from performative/constative to locution and illocution. Hare, Practical Inferences, pp. 112–14; Mats Fuberg, ‘Meaning and Illocutionary Force’, in Fann (ed.), Symposium on J. L. Austin, pp. 447–9; arguably this is to rescue the model by abandoning Austin’s theory, see J. Cohen, ‘Note’, in Fann (ed.), Symposium on J. L. Austin, p. 468; Searle and Vanderveken, The Foundations of Illocutionary Logic, pp. 9–10.

194

Notes to pages 143–6

10. J. Searle, ‘Individual Intentionality and Social Phenomena in the Theory of Speech Acts’, in Consciousness and Language (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), pp. 143–4. 11. P. F. Strawson, ‘Intention and Convention in Speech Acts’, Logico-Linguistic Papers (London: Methuen, 1971), pp. 161–3. 12. See Hare, Practical Inferences, p. 100; J. O. Urmson, The Emotive Theory of Ethics (London: Hutchinson, 1968). 13. Searle and Vanderveken, The Foundations of Illocutionary Logic. 14. J. L. Austin, ‘Performative Utterances’, in J. O. Urmson and G. J. Warnock (eds), Philosophical Papers (London: Oxford University Press, 1961), pp. 233–53; Levinson, Pragmatics sometimes gives this ambivalent impression; the theory is largely bypassed in J. Wilson, Politically Speaking: The Pragmatic Analysis of Political language (Oxford: Blackwell, 1990). 15. Searle, ‘Speech Acts’, p. 18; and ‘Conversation’, in Consciousness and Language, p. 180. 16. Cerf, ‘Critical Review’, p. 351. 17. P. Winch, The Idea of a Social Science (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1958); R. Prokhovnik, ‘An Interview with Quentin Skinner’, Contemporary Political Theory, 10:2 (2011), pp. 273–85, on pp. 274–5. 18. D. Schulkwyk, Speech and Performance in Shakespeare’s Sonnets and Plays (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), pp. 1–2; and pp. 29–59 for a spirited attempt to combine the model with Foucauldian metaphysics. 19. J. G. A. Pocock, Politics, Language and Time: Essays on Political Thought and History (London: Methuen, 1972), p. 3, employing Austin’s terminology, p. 25. 20. Q. Skinner, ‘The Ideological Context of Hobbes’s Political Thought’, Historical Journal, 9 (1966), pp. 286–317; for a recent overview of Skinner’s use of Austin and its role in establishing ideological contexts, see H. Hamilton-Bleakley, ‘Linguistic philosophy and the Foundations’, in A. Brett and J. Tully (eds), with H. Hamilton-Bleakley, Rethinking the Foundations of Modern Political Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), pp. 20–33. 21. For the best sustained advocacy of the model, see Q. Skinner, ‘Meaning and Understanding in the History of Ideas’, History and Theory, 8 (1969), pp. 3–53; rewritten in Regarding Method, Visions of Politics Series (Cambridge: University Press, 2002), vol. 1, pp. 57–89; Skinner, ‘Interpretation and the Understanding of Speech Acts’ in Visions, pp. 103–2; see also J. Dunn, ‘The Identity of the History of Ideas’, Philosophy, 164:43 (1968), pp. 85–104; I. Hampsher-Monck, ‘On Not Inventing the English Revolution: The Radical Failure of the 1790s as Linguistic Non-Performance’, in G. Burgess and M. Festenstein (eds), English Radicalism, 1550–1850 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), pp. 135–56. 22. The situation is strikingly parallel to the fate of the Habermasian theoretical model of a public sphere (above p. 179); both in being enthusiastically taken up by early modern historians have largely been emptied of meaning. In both cases the problem is less a function of evidence than of misunderstanding the nature and limitations of theoretical models. 23. More than half of the books and pamphlets printed in the seventeenth century were in one way or another anonymous, for discussion in the context of text as speech act, see M. Knights, ‘Roger L’Estrange, Printed Petitions and the Problem of Intentionality’, in Morrow and J. Scott (eds), Liberty, Authority, Formality, pp. 113–30, on pp. 126–7.

Notes to pages 146–52

195

24. R. Palmer, Lord Castelmaine, The Englishman’s Allegiance (London, c. 1690); on Castlemaine’s authorship, see C. Erwin, ‘Bookish Plots’, E&S, 66: 3 (2003), pp. 32–7; for a wordy determination of a satirist to remain masked, Mathias, The Pursuits of Literature, pp. 284–6. 25. H. Neville, The Works of the Famous Niccolo Machiavelli (London, 1675). 26. For an exploration of some of these problems, see W. Boucher, ‘Unoriginal Authors: How to Do Things with Texts in the Renaissance’, in Rethinking the Foundations, pp. 73–92. 27. Eachard, Mr Hobbes’s State of Nature, preface; Pocock’s Politics, Language and Time touches on such issues of multivalence, p. 23. 28. C. D. Tarlton, ‘Historicity, Meaning and Revisionism in the Study of Political Thought’, History and Theory, 12 (1973), pp. 307–28. 29. Knights, ‘Roger L’Estrange’, p. 126. 30. J. G. A. Pocock, ‘The Concept of a Language and the métier d’historien: Some Considerations on Practice’, in A. Pagden (ed.), The Languages of Political Theory in Early-Modern Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), pp. 29–35; Colclough, Freedom of Speech, pp. 6, 15. 31. In fact, its application to the written word minimized a crucial area of philosophical difficulty surrounding a degree of asymmetry between agency and intentionality; if all intentional acts are by agents, not all the acts of agents are helpfully deemed intentional, despite being integral to the circumstances of a speech act. With the written text, barring deviant phenomena such as printing and scribal errors, this is not so crucially the case, because we are not dealing directly with agents, but with the residues of intentional action that together constitute the focus of analytic attention, such as an argument. See for example I. Thalberg, ‘Comments’, in R. Binkley, R. Bronaugh and A. Marras (eds), Agent, Action, Reason (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1971), pp. 158–60. 32. Schulkwyk, Speech and Performance. 33. W. K. Wimsett, The Verbal Icon: Studies in the Meaning of Poetry (1954; London: Methuen, 1970), pp. 3–18; see P. D. Juhl, Interpretation: An Essay in the Philosophy of Literary Criticism (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1980), pp. 49–65. 34. D. Davidson, ‘Agency’, in Binkley et al. (eds), Agent, Action and Reason, pp. 3–25, on p. 5. 35. Knights, ‘Roger L’Estrange’, pp. 123–30. 36. Condren, Argument and Authority, ch. 14. 37. The word text, however, may from here be given even greater extension, to refer to any material object of interpretation or reading. This may be to treat a non-human object, say a rock, as if it were a text in a narrower sense. To explore this matter would be to go beyond the scope of this essay. 38. Gunnell, Political Theory, pp. 102, 116–7. 39. Aristotle, Rhetoric, trans., R. Roberts in Rhetoric and Poetics (New York: Random House, 1954), ethos, logos and pathos are introduced as distinct modes of argument at 1356a, but are subsequently treated as more or less complementary aspects of argument; on the enthymeme, 1354a, 13–15; 1355a, 1356b, 1395b, 1400b. 40. Mills, Sociological Imagination, pp. 20, 50–55. 41. On the idea of a relatively harmless anachronism, Williams, The Sense of the Past, pp. 6–7, citing the use of the term metaphysics for Aristotle’s ‘first philosophy’. 42. Bentley, A Dissertation on the Epistles of Phalaris, p. 152.

196

Notes to pages 152–6

43. The mislocation can be a matter of prochronism, identifying something too late, as in thinking that disinterring ancient citizenship came with the French Revolution. 44. C. Condren, ‘Political Theory and the Problem of Anachronism’, in A. Vincent (ed.), Political Theory: Tradition and Diversity (Cambridge: University Press, 1997), 45–66, on pp. 53–5; C. Condren, ‘A Reflection on the Problem of Anachronism in Intellectual History’, Scientia Poetica Jahrbuch für Geschichte der Literatur und der Wissenschaften, 8 (2004), pp. 288–93; but see also the discussions of the issue in Scientia Poetica, 9 (2005). 45. For the most extreme example of such austerity, see M. Oakeshott, ‘The Activity of Being and Historian’, in Rationalism in Politics and Other Essays (London: Methuen, 1962), pp. 137–67. 46. F. Oakley, ‘In Praise of Prolepsis: Meaning, Significance and the Medieval Contribution to Political Thought’, History of Political Thought, 27:3 (2006), pp. 419–22; the argument clouds the distinct idioms of historiography; and presupposes that a narrative of development towards us is what the historian wants, and so necessarily starts from contemporary priorities beyond those designed to minimize anachronism. 47. I. Hunter, ‘The History of Theory’, Critical Inquiry, 33 (2006), pp. 78–84. 48. Ibid. 49. P. F. Strawson, ‘Meaning and Truth’, in Logico-Linguistic Papers, pp. 170–89.

WORKS CITED

Primary Sources Addison, J., and R. Steele, Spectator (1711–12), ed. G. G. Smith, 4 vols (London: Dent, 1907). Aitken, G., The Life and Works of John Arbuthnot (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1892). Alsted, J., Encyclopaeia (London: Herbon, 1649), 3 vols. Anon., The Booke of Oathes (1649; London, 1689). —, Homer a la mode: A Mock Poem upon the First and Second Books of Homer’s Iliad (Oxford, 1665). —, Elegy Upon Mr Hobbes (London, 1680). —, Memorable Sayings of Mr Hobbes in his books and at the Table (London, 1680). —, The Last Sayings, or, Dying Legacy of Mr Hobbs of Malmesbury who Departed this Life on Thursday Deemb 4 1679 (London, 1680). —, The True Effigies of the Monster of Malmesbury, or Thomas Hobbes in His Proper Colours (London, 1680). —, Scarronnides, or Virgil Travestie (London, 1692). —, Advice from Shades Below, or A letter from Thomas Hobbes of Malmsbury to his Brother B—n H—Dly (London, 1710). —, Tom Pun-Sibi Metamorphosed: or The Giber Gibb’d (Dublin, 1724). —, The Scribleriad (London, 1742). —, The Unsuspected Observer in the Spirit of the Late Famous Martinus Scriblerus, 2 vols (London, 1792). Arbuthnot, J., An Examination of Dr. Woodward’s Account of the Deluge (London, 1697). —, The History of John Bull (1712), in G. Aitken (ed.), The Life and Works of John Arbuthnot (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1892), pp. 193–290. —, Pseudologia Politike, or The Art of Political Lying (London, 1712). Aristotle, Rhetoric, trans. R. Roberts, in Rhetoric and Poetics (New York: Random House, 1954). Aubrey, J., Brief Lives, Chiefly of Contemporaries, Set Down by John Aubrey, ed. from the author’s manuscripts by A. Clark, 2 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1898). – 197 –

198

Hobbes, the Scriblerians and the History of Philosophy

—, Brief Lives, ed. O. L. Dick (1898; Harmondsworth: Peregrine, 1962). Bacon, F., Works, ed. B. Montagu (London: Pickering, 1825–34). —, ‘Of Boldness’, in Essays, in Works, vol. 1, pp. 37–42. —, The Advancement of Learning (1605), in Works, vol. 2, pp. iii–lxxi, 1–317. —, Novum Organon (1606), in Works, vol. 14, pp. 1–212. —, On The Wisdom of the Ancients (1610), in Works, vol. 3, pp. 1–liii, i–viii, 1–99. Bailey, N., Universal Etymological Dictionary, 7th edn (London: J. J. and P. Knapton, D. Midwinter et al., 1735). Bentley, R., Trinity College MS, B.17.17, held at Trinity College, Cambridge. —, The Folly and Unreasonableness of Atheism (London, 1693). —, A Dissertation on the Epistles of Phalaris with an Answer to the Objections of the Honorable Charles Boyle (1699), in The Works of Richard Bentley, ed. A. Dyce, 2 vols (London: MacPherson, 1836), vol. 2, pp. 130–81. —, A Letter to Mr Pope Occasioned by Sober Advice from Horace (London, 1735), p. 14. Berkeley, G., The Principles of Human Knowledge (1710), in Works, ed. A. A. Luce and T. E. Jessop, 2 vols (1949; London: Nelson, 1967), vol. 2, pp. 19–113. Boyle, R., The Sceptical Chymist (London, 1661). Bramhall, J., Castigations of Mr. Hobbes His Last Animadversions in the Case Concerning Liberty and Universal Necessity, with the appendix The Catching of Leviathan, or the Great Whale (London, 1658). Bright, T., A Treatise of Melancholie (London, 1586). Browne, Sir T., Religio Medici together with A Letter to a Friend and Christian Morals, ed. H. Gardiner, 8 vols (London: Pickering, 1845). Burnet, T., Remarks Upon John Locke with Locke’s Replies (1697–9), ed. G. Watson (Doncaster: Brynmill Press, 1989). Butler, S., The Poetical Works of Samuel Butler (London: Pickering, 1835). —, Characters, ed. C. W. Daves (Cleveland, OH: Case Western Reserve University Press, 1970). Byron, Lord, The Vision of Judgement (1822), in The Poetical Works of Lord Byron, ed. E. H. Coleridge (London: Murray, 1905), pp. 516–31. Campbell, L. D. (ed.), The Mirror for Magistrates (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1938). Castelvetro, L., Poetica d’Aristotele vulgarizzata et sposta (Vienna, 1570). Cavendish, W., Duke of Newcastle, ‘Letter of Advice’, Clarendon MS 109, Bodleian Library, Oxford. Chapman, G. (trans.), Homer’s Iliad (1609) (London: Routledge, 1884). Chappell V. (ed.), Hobbes and Bramhall on Liberty and Necessity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999).

Works Cited

199

Charleton, W., Delirimenta Catarrhi (London, 1650). —, The Immortality of the Human Soul (London, 1657). Clarke, S., The Works of Samuel Clarke, 4 vols (London, 1738), vol. 3. Cook, T., The Battle of the Poets (London, 1725). —, The Bays Miscellany (London, 1731). —, The Comedian; or A Philosophical Enquirer, Eight Discourses (1732; London, 1733). Cotton, C., Scarronnides, or Virgil Travesty on the First and Fourth Books of the Aeneid (London, 1665). —, Burlesque upon Burlesque, or The Scoffer Scoft (London, 1675). Cowley, A., The Complete Works in Verse and Prose, ed. A. B. Grosart, 2 vols (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1881). —, ‘Of Wit’, in The Complete Works, vol. 1, pp. 135–6. —, ‘To Mr. Hobbes’, in The Complete Works, vol. 2, p. 19. —, ‘To The Royal Society’, ll. 1–12, 38–9, 69–75, in The Complete Works, vol. 1, pp. 167–9. —, ‘Upon His Majestie’s Return and Restoration’, in The Complete Works, vol. 1, pp. 159–63. Cudworth, R., The True Intellectual System of the Universe (London, 1678). Cunaeus, P., Sadi venales (1612), in Matheussen and Heersekkers (eds), Two Neo–Latin Menippean Satires, pp. 79–191. Dacier, A. Le Fevre, L’Iliade d’Homère, Traduite en François avec des Remarques Par Madame Dacier (Paris, 1711). Dilthey, W., Ideas Concerning a Descriptive and Analytic Psychology (1894); The Understanding of Other Persons and Their Expressions of life (c.1910), trans. K .L. Heiges and R. M. Zaner (The Hague: Nijhoff, 1977). Donne, J., Paradoxes, Problemes, Essayes, Characters, trans. J. Maine (Mayne) (London: Printed by T.N.: for Humphrey Moseley at the Prince’s Armes in St Pauls Churchyard, 1652). Dunton, J., Athenian Sport (London, 1707). Eachard, J., Mr Hobbes State of Nature Considered in a Dialogue between Timothy and Philautus, in The Works of Dr. John Eachard, 3 vols (London, 1673), vol. 2. pp. 1–130. —, Some Opinions of Mr. Hobbs Considered in a Second Dialogue between Philautus and Timothy Works, in The Works of Dr. John Eachard, vol. 3, pp. xvii–xxviii, 1–246. Elyot, Sir T., The Book Named The Govenor (1531), ed. S. E. Lehmberg (1907; London: Dent, 1962). Erasmus, D., Ecomium Moriae sive Des. Eras. Roterod. Declamatio, In laidem Stulticiae. Iusti Lipsi Satyra Menippea. Somnium. Lusus in nostri aevi Criticos. P. Cunaei Sardi Venales. Satyra Menippaea In huius saeculi homines plerosque inepte eruditos (Lugdin Batavorm: I. Marci, 1617). Evelyn J., Sylva: A Discourse of Forest-Tree, and the Propagation of Timber in His Majesties Dominions (London, 1664).

200

Hobbes, the Scriblerians and the History of Philosophy

Gay, J., J. Arbuthnot and A. Pope, Three Hours After Marriage (1717), ed. R. Morton and W. M. Peterson (Ohio: Lake Erie College Studies, 1961). Gilby, A., A Pleasaunt Dialogue Between A Soldier of Berwicke and an English Chaplaine (London, 1581). Glanvill, J., Philosophia pia (London, 1671). Grantham, T., The Firste Book of Homer’s Iliads (London, 1660). Grose, F., A Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue (1811), forward by R. Cromie (Chicago, IL: Follet, 1971). Hall, J., Satires (1597), ed. S. W. Singer (London: Whittingham, 1824). Hartley, D., Some Reasons Why the Practice of Inoculation Ought to be Introduced into the Town of Bury at Present (London, 1733). —, Observations on Man, his Frame, his Duty, and his Expectations (London, 1749). Hickeringill, P., The Vindication of the Naked Truth, The Second Part (London, 1681). Hobbes, T., The History of the Grecian War. Written by Thucydides (1629; London: Printed for G. & W. B. Whittaker, J. Parker & R. Bliss, 1823). —, The English Works of Thomas Hobbes, ed. Sir W. Molesworth, 11 vols (London, 1839–45). —, Philosophicall Rudiments Concerning Government and Society (London, 1651), —, Questions Concerning Liberty, Necessity and Chance (1656), in The English Works, vol. 5, pp. 1–455. —, An Historical Narration Concerning Heresy and the Punishment Thereof (c. 1666), in The English Works, vol. 4, pp. 387–8. —, The Answer to the Preface Before Gondibert (1651), in The English Works, vol. 4, pp. 441– 58. —, Human Nature, or the Fundamental Elements of Policy (1640), in The English Works, vol. 4, pp. xiii–xvi, 1–76. —, A Dialogue Between a Philosopher and a Student of the Common Laws (1681), in The English Works, vol. 6, pp.1–160. —, An Historical Narration Concerning Heresy (c. 1666), in The English Works, vol. 4, pp. 385–408. —, Decameron physiologicum: or, Ten Dialogues of Natural Philosophy (1678), in Hobbes, The English Works, vol. 7, pp. 69–177. —, Of Libertie and Necessity and Chance (1654), in The English Works, vol. 5. —, Opera philosophica quae latine scripsit omnia, ed. Sir W. Molesworth (London, 1839–45). —, De corpore (1655), in Thomas Hobbes Malmesburinsis opera philosophica quae latine scripsit omnia, vol. 1. —, De cive (1642; London,1647), in Opera latina, vol. 2. pp. 133–432. —, Leviathan (Amsterdam, 1668), in Opera latina, vol. 3. —, De miribilibus carmen, pecci, in Opera latina, vol. 5, pp. 322–40.

Works Cited

201

—, Lux mathematica, excussa collisionibus Johanni Wallisii, in Opera latina, vol. 5, pp. 89–150. —, Historia ecclesiastica carmine elegiaco concinnata (1688), in Opera latina, vol. 5, pp. 341– 408. —, Philosophicall Rudiments (London, 1651). —, Critique du De mundo de Thomas White (1643), ed. J. Jacquot and H. W. Jones (Paris: Vrin–CNRS, 1973). —, Leviathan (1651), ed. M. Oakeshott (Oxford: Blackwell, 1960). —, Leviathan (1651), ed. R. Tuck (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991). —, The Elements of Law (c. 1640), ed. F. Tonnies, with an introduction by M. M. Goldsmith (London: Frank Cass, 1969). —, Translations of Homer, ed. E. Nelson, 2 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2008). —, An Historical Narration on Heresy and the Historica Ecclesiastica, ed. J. Champion Hobbes’s Resoration Writings on Religion (Oxford: Clarendon Press, forthcoming). —, Thomae Hobbesii Malmesburiensis Vita (London, 1679). —, The Life of Thomas Hobbes of Malmesbury (London, 1680). —, The Correspondence of Thomas Hobbes, ed. N. Malcolm, 2 vols (Clarendon Press: Oxford, 1994). Hyde, E., Lord Clarendon, A Brief View and Survey of the Dangerous and pernicious Errors to Church and State, In Mr Hobbes’s Book Entitled Leviathan (Oxford, 1676). Ingelo, N., Bentivolio and Urana, in Four Books (London, 1660). Isham, G. (ed.), The Correspondence of Bishop Brian Duppa and Sir Justinian Isham 1650– 1660 (Northampton: Northampton Record Society, 1951). Johnson, S., Lives of the Poets, ed. E. S. Hill, 3 vols (New York: Octagon, 1967). Jonson, B., Timber, or Discoveries Made Upon Men and Matter (1641), in Works, ed. C. H. Herford and P. Simpson, 11 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1954), vol. 8, pp. 555–650. —, ‘What is a Poet?’, in Timber, or Discoveries Made Upon Men and Matter (1641), in Works, ed. C. H. Herford and P. Simpson, 11 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1954), vol. 8, pp. 635–49. Keats, J., John Keat’s Poems, ed. G. Bullett (1944; London: Dent, 1961). Kerby-Miller, C. (ed.), The Memoirs of the Extraordinary Life, Works and Discoveries of Martinus Scriblerus (1950; New York: Oxford University Press, 1988). King, W., Journey to London in the Year 1698 (London, 1698). —, The Original Works of William King, LL.D, 3 vols (London, 1776). —, Dialogues of the Dead, Relating to the Present Controversy Concerning the Epistles of Phalaris, in The Original Works of William King, vol. 1, pp. 133–86. —, The Transactioneer; with Some of His Philosophical Fancies, in Two Dialogues (1700), in The Original Works of William King, LL.D (London, 1776), vol. 2, pp. 3–53. —, Useful Transactions (1709), in The Original Works of William King, vol. 2, pp. 57–178.

202

Hobbes, the Scriblerians and the History of Philosophy

[King, W.], Dialogues of the Dead in Imitation of Lucian and the French (London, 1699). Lawson, G., An Examination of the Political Part of Mr. Hobbs, His Leviathan (London, 1657). Lipsius, J., Somnium (1581), in Matheussen and Heersekkers (eds), Two Neo-Latin Menippean Satires, pp. 25–78. Locke, J., An Essay on Human Understanding (London, 1690). Lucian, Works, trans. H. W. and F. G. Fowler, 4 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1905), vol. 3. —, Works, ed. and trans. A. W. Harmon, 8 vols (1921; Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1960), vols 1, 3. —, Works, ed. A. W. Harmon, trans. K. Kilburn, 8 vols (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1959), vol. 6. —, Luciani Samosatensis dialogorum selectorum (London: A Crook, 1664). —, Lucian’s Dialogues Selected by Duggard and Leeds (Dublin, 1772). Machiavelli, N. Il Principe (1513) trans and ed. R. Price and Q. Skinner (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988, 1994). Mandeville, B. de, A Treatise of Hypochondriack and Hysterical Diseases, in Three Dialogues (London, 1730). Marvell, A., The Rehearsal Transpos’d, or, Animadversions upon a Late Book (London, 1672). Mason, H., The New Art of Lying (London, 1624). Matheussen, C., and C. L. Heersekkers (eds), Two Neo-Latin Menippean Satires (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1980). Mathias, T. J., The Pursuits of Literature, 14th edn (1794–7; London, 1808). Mayne, J., Part of Lucian Made English from the Original (1638; London, 1663). —, Ochlo-machia: Or, The People’s War, Examined According to the Principles of Scripture & Reason (Oxford, 1647). Milton, J., Eikonoclastes (1649/50) in Complete Prose Works, vol. 3, ed. M. Y. Hughes (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1962), pp. 337–601. Montagu, A., Edward Tyson, MD, FRS 1650–1708 and the Rise of Human Comparative Anatomy: A Study in the History of Science (Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 1943). Montaigne, M., de, Essays, trans., D. Frame (1965; Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1992). —, Essais (1580), ed. P. Villey, 3rd edn, 2 vols (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1978). —, Essays, trans. E. J. Trenchmann (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1972). Neville, H., The Works of the Famous Niccolo Machiavell (London, 1675). ‘Nickydem’, Homer in a Nutshell; or, The Iliad of Homer in Immortal Doggrel (London, 1715). Ogilby, J., Homer His Iliad Translated, Adorn’d with Sculpture and Illustrared with Annotations (London, 1660). Palmer, R., Lord Castelmaine, The Englishman’s Allegiance (London, c. 1690).

Works Cited

203

Parker, S., A Discourse of ecclesiastical politie (London, 1670). Parnell, T., An Essay on the Different Stiles of Poetry (London, 1713). —, Homer’s Battle of the Frogs and Mice (London, 1717). Plato, Republic, ed. and trans. P. Shorey (1895; Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1970). Plutarch, Moralia: Precepts in statecraft (Politike paraggelmata), trans. H. N. Fowler (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1960). Pope, A., The Iliad of Homer, 6 vols (London, 1715–20). —, The Art of Sinking in Poetry: Martinus Scriblerus’ Peri Bathous: A Critical Edition, ed. E. L. Steeves (New York: Columbia University Press, 1952). —, Correspondence of Alexander Pope, ed. G. Sherbourne, 5 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1956). —, The Dunciad, ed. J. Sutherland, 5 vols (London: Methuen and Yale University Press, 1965). —, The Dunciad, ed. V. Rumbold (London: Longmans, 1999). Pufendorf, S., De officio hominis et civis (1673) trans A. Tooke (1691) The Whole Duty of Man According to the Law of Nature, ed. I. Hunter, and D.Saunders (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 2003). Puttenham, G., Arte of English Poesie (1589), ed. G. D.Willcock and A. Walker (1936; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970). Quintilian (Marcus Fabius), Institutio oratoria, trans. H. E. Butler, 4 vols (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1980). Rapin, R., The Whole Critical Works, ed. B. Kennet, 2 vols (London, 1706). —, ‘A Comparison of Homer and Virgil’, in The Whole Critical Works, vol. 1, pp. 116–210. —, ‘Reflections on the Use of Philosophy in Religion’, in The Whole Critical Works, vol. 2, p. 509. —, ‘Reflections upon Metaphysicks’, in The Whole Critical Works, vol. 2, pp. 384–5. S. R. trans., The Life of M Descartes (London, 1693). Scriblerus Club, The Memoirs of the Extraordinary Life, Works and Discoveries of Martinus Scriblerus (1741), ed. C. Kerby-Miller (1950; New York: Oxford University Press, 1988). Scriblerus, Martinus (The Younger), An Essay on Increasing the Inhabitants and Riches of Ireland and Propagating Mankind by Incubation (London, 1747). Scriblerus, Martinus, The Marrow of the Tikler’s Works, or Three Shillings worth of Wit for a Penny in a Ballard (to the Tune of Derry-Down) (London, 1748). —, Somnium academici Cantabrigiensis (London, 1768). —, An Ode on Dedicating a Building (London, 1769). —, The Ratland Feast, an historico-ludicro-comico Poem Translated out of the Latin of Marcus Valarius Martialis (Cambridge, 1820). Scriblerus, Maximus, The Art of Scribling (London, 1733).

204

Hobbes, the Scriblerians and the History of Philosophy

Scriblerus Secundus, The Lamentation of a Dog (London, 1796). Scriblerus, Simon, Whistoneutes; or Remarks on Mr Whiston’s Historical Memoirs of the Life of Dr. Samuel Clarke &c. (London, 1731). Scriblerus, Stephanus, The Censor (London, 1755). Sexby, E., Killing No Murder (London, 1658). Sidney, Sir P., An Apology for Poetry (1595), in E. D. Jones (ed.), English Critical Essays. Sixteenth, Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1956), pp. 1–54. Shakespeare, W., As You Like It (c. 1598/99), ed. M. Hatterway (Cambridge: University of Cambridge Press, 2009). —, The Tempest (c. 1611), ed. S. Orgel (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987). Sheridan, R. B., The Critic (1779; London, 1781), in Sheridan’s Plays, intro. L. Gibbs (1906; London: Dent, 1960), pp. 308–53. Sheridan T., Ars Pun-ica, sive Flos Linguarum; The Art of Punning; or The Flower of Languages; In Seventy Nine Rules; For the Farther Improvement of Conversation, And Help of Memory. By the Labour and Industry of Tom Pun-Sibi, &c. (Dublin and London, 1719). —, British Education (London, 1756). —, A Rhetorical Grammar of the English Language (London, 1781). Stanley, T., The History of Philosophy, 3 vols (London: Printed for Humphrey Moseley and Thomas Dring, 1655–60). Straight, J., The Rule of Rejoycing or a Direction of Mirth (London, 1671). Swift, J., The Tale of a Tub and The Battle of the Books [1704] and Other Satires, with an introduction by Lewis Melville (London: Dent, 1963). —, The Conduct of the Allies and of the Ministry in Beginning and Carrying on the Present War (London, 1711). —, A Proposal for Correcting, Improving and Ascertaining the English Tongue (London: Printed for Benjamin Tooke, at the Middle-Temple-Gate, Fleetstreet, 1712). —, Travels into Several Remote Nations of the World (1726), with an introduction by P. Quennell (London: Collins, 1953). —, Works, 13 vols (Edinburgh: Printed by A. Donaldson, 1768), vol. 6. —, Journal to Stella, ed. H. Williams, 2 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1948). —, Correspndence, ed. H. Williams, 5 vols (Oxford: Calendon Press, 1963). —, The Origins of the Sciences, in Swift, Works, vol. 6, pp. 134–44. —, Annus Mirabilis, in Swift, Works, vol. 6, pp. 145–51. —, Virgilius restauratus, in Swift, Works, vol. 6. pp. 128–33. Swift, J., and T. Sheridan, Intelligencer, 3 (1728). Taylor, J., Sir Gregory Nonsense His Newes from No Place (1622), reprinted in Malcolm, The Origins of English Nonsense, p. 152.

Works Cited

205

Temple, Sir W., ‘Essay upon Ancient and Modern Learning’ (1690), in The Works of Sir William Temple, 2 vols (London: Printed for T. Woodward et al., 1750), vol.1, pp. 151–69. —, ‘Some Thoughts upon Reviewing the Essay on Ancient and Modern Learning’, in The Works of Sir William Temple, vol. 1, pp. 290–309. Tenison, T., The Creed of Mr Hobbes Hobbes Examined in a Feigned Conference Between Him and a Student of Divinity (London, 1670). Tyson, E., Orang-Outang, sive Homo Sylvestris: or, the Anatomy of a Pygmie compared with that of a Monkey, An Ape and Man. To which is added a Philological Essay Concerning the Pygmies, the Cynocephali, the Satyrs and Sphinges of the Ancients (London, 1699). Wagstaffe, J., The Question of Witchcraft Debated (1669; London, 1671). Wallis, J., Due Correction for Mr Hobbes (Oxford, 1656). West, R., Animadversions on a Late Book Entituled, The Reasonableness of Christianity as Delivered in the Scriptures (London, 1697). Whitehall, J., Leviathan Found Out (London, 1679). Wilkins, J., An Essay Towards a Real Character and a Philosophical Language (London, 1668). [Willis, R.], Occasional Paper, 1 (London, 1697). Willis, T., Two Discourses Concerning the Soul of Brutes, Which is that of the Vital and Sensitive Man (London, 1683). Wilson, T., The Art of Rhetoric (1560), ed. G. H. Mair (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1909). Wotton, W., Reflections Upon Ancient and Modern Learning, 3rd edn (London, 1705). Young, E., Conjectures on Original Composition (1759), in Jones (ed.), English Critical Essays, pp. 270–311.

Secondary Sources Adair, G., The Death of the Author (1992; London: Minerva, 1993). Adams R. M., Bad Mouth: Fugitive Papers on the Dark Side (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1977). Adcock, R., ‘The Emergence of Political Science as a Discipline: History and the Study of Politics in America 1875–1910’, History of Political Thought, 24:3 (2003), pp. 481–508. Alpers, P., ‘What is Pastoral?, Critical Inquiry, 8 (1982), pp. 437–60. Anderson, G., Lucian: Theme and Variation in the Second Sophistic (Lugdini Batavorum: E. J. Brill, 1976). Attardo, S., Linguistic Theories of Humour (Berlin and New York: Mouton de Gruyter, 1994). Austin, J. L., ‘Performative Utterances’, in J. O. Urmson and G. J. Warnock (eds), Philosophical Papers (London: Oxford University Press, 1961), pp. 233–53. —, How to do Things with Words (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1962). Barnes, J. A., Models and Interpretations (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990).

206

Hobbes, the Scriblerians and the History of Philosophy

Barnes, H. E., A History of Historical Writing (1937; New York: Dover Publications, 1963). Barthes R., Critique et Vérité (Paris: Seuil, 1966). Bateson, G., Steps to an Ecology of the Mind (New York: Ballentine, 1972). Baumgold, D., ‘The Composition of Hobbes’s Elements of Law’, History of Political Thought, 25:1 (2004), pp. 16–33. Bedford, R., ‘Historicizing Irony: The Case of Milton and the Restoration’, in P. Kelly (ed.), The Touch of the Real: Essays in Early Modern Culture (Perth: University of Western Australia Press, 2002), pp. 65–84. Blanchard, S. W., Scholars’ Bedlam: Menippean Satire in the Renaissance (Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 1995). Bolinger, D., Language The Loaded Weapon (1980; New York: Longmans, 1983). Booth, E., ‘“A Subtle and Mysterious Machine”: Walter Charleton’s Medical World’ (PhD dissertation, La Trobe University, 2002). Boucher, W., ‘Unoriginal Authors: How to do Things with Texts in the Renaissance’, in Brett and Tully (eds), with Hamilton-Bleakley, Rethinking the Foundations, pp. 73–92. Boucher, D., ‘Political Theory, International theory and the Political Theory of International Relations’, in A. Vincent (ed.), Political Theory: Tradition and Diversity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), pp. 193–213. Bowle, J., Hobbes and his Critics: A Study in Seventeenth Century Constitutionalism (1951; London: Frank Cass, 1969). Boyle, F., ‘Old Poetry and New Science: Swift, Cowley and Modernity’, 1650–1850: Ideas, Aesthetics and Inquiries in the Early Modern Era, 4 (1998), pp. 252–68. Brett, A., and J. Tully (eds), with H. Hamilton-Bleakley, Rethinking the Foundations of Modern Political Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006). Brilli, A., Retorica della satira con il Peri Bathous, o L’arte d’inchinarsi in poesia di Martin Scriblerus (Bologna: Il Mulino, 1973). Bredvold, L., ‘The Gloom of the Tory Satirists’, in J. Clifford and L. Landa (eds), Pope and His Contemporaries (New York: Oxford University Press, 1949), pp. 1–19. Brown, C., T. Nardin and N. Rengger (eds), International Relations in Political Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002). Brückmann, P., A Manner of Correspondence: A Study of the Scriblerus Club (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1997). Burgess, G., ‘Royalism and Liberty of Conscience in the English Revolution’, in J. Morrow and J. Scott (eds), Liberty, Authority, Formality: Political Ideas and Culture, 1600–1900 (Exeter: Imprint Academic, 2008), pp. 9–28. Cerf, W., ‘Critical Review of How to do Things with Words, in Fann (ed.), Symposium on J. L. Austin, pp. 351–79. Chalmers, A. D., Jonathan Swift and the Burden of the Future (London and Newark, NJ: Associated University Presses, University of Delaware Press, 1995).

Works Cited

207

Champion, J., The Pillars of Priestcraft Shaken: The Church of England and its Enemies, 1660– 1730 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992). —, Hobbes’s Restoration Writings on Religion (Oxford: Clarendon Press, forthcoming). Clegg, S., Press Censorship in Elizabethan England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997). Cohen, J., ‘Note’, in Fann (ed.), Symposium on J. L. Austin, p. 468. Colclough, D., Freedom of Speech in Early Stuart England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005). Collingwood, R. G., Autobiography (1939; Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1967). Collini, S., D. Winch and J. Burrow, That Noble Science of Politics: A Study in NineteenthCentury Intellectual History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983). Condren, C., The Status and Appraisal of Classic Texts: An Essay on Political Theory, Its Inheritance, and the History of Ideas (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1985). —, ‘On the Rhetorical Foundations of Leviathan’, History of Political Thought, 11:14 (1990), pp. 703–20. —, Satire, Lies and Politics: The Case of Dr Arbuthnot (Basingstoke: Macmillan Press, 1997). —, ‘Political Theory and the Problem of Anachronism’, in A. Vincent (ed.), Political Theory: Tradition and Diversity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), pp. 45–66. —, Thomas Hobbes (New York: Twayne, 2000). —, ‘A Reflection on the Problem of Anachronism in Intellectual History’, Scientia Poetica Jahrbuch für Geschichte der Literatur und der Wissenschaften, 8 (2004), pp. 288–93. —, ‘Curtailing the Office of the Priest: Two Seventeenth-Century Views of the Causes and Functions of Heresy’, in I. Hunter, J. Laursen and C. Nederman (eds), Heresy in Transition: Transforming Ideas of Heresy in Medieval and Early Modern Europe (Aldershott: Ashgate, 2005), pp. 115–28. —, ‘Specifying the Subject in Early Modern Autobiography’ in R. Bedford, L. Davis and P. Kelly (eds), Early Modern Autobiography: Theories, Genres, Practices (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2006), pp. 35–48. —, Argument and Authority in Early Modern England: The Presupposition of Oaths and Offices (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006). —, ‘The Persona of the Philosopher and the Rhetorics of Office in Early Modern England’, in Condren et al. (eds), The Philosopher, pp. 66–89. —, ‘Public, Private and the Idea of the “Public Sphere” in Early-Modern England’, Intellectual History Review, 19:1 (2009), pp. 15–28. — , ‘Understanding Shakespeare’s Perfect Prince: Henry V, the Ethics of Office and the French Prisoners’, in G. Bradshaw, T. Bishop and L. Wright (eds), The Shakespearean International Yearbook (Surrey: Ashgate, 2009), vol. 9, pp. 195–213. Condren, C., S. Gaukroger and I. Hunter (eds), The Philosopher in Early Modern Europe: The Nature of a Contested Identity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006).

208

Hobbes, the Scriblerians and the History of Philosophy

— (eds), ‘The Persona of the Philosopher in the Eighteenth Century’, Intellectual History Review, special issue, 18:3 (2008), pp. 315–17. Connolly, P., ‘The Ideology of Pope’s Iliad’, Comparative Literature, 40 (1988), pp. 358–83. Cooper, J., ‘Thomas Hobbes on the Political Theorist’s Vocation’, Historical Journal, 50:3 (2007), pp. 519–48. Cottingham, J., ‘Descartes as Sage: Spiritual askesis in Cartesian Philosophy’, in Condren et al. (eds), The Philosopher, pp. 182–201. Crews, F., The Pooh Perplex: A Student Case Book (1963; London: Baker, 1972). Croghan, M. J., ‘Savage Indignation: An Introduction to the Philosophy of Language and Semiotic in Jonathan Swift’, Swift Studies (1990), pp. 11–38. Cross R. C. and A. D. Woozley, Plato’s Republic: A Philosophical Commentary (London: Macmillan, 1964). Curtis, C. M., ‘From Sir Thomas More to Robert Burton: The Laughing Philosopher in the Early Modern Period’, in Condren et al. (eds), The Philosopher, pp. 90–112. —, ‘Richard Pace on Pedagogy, Counsel and Satire’ (PhD dissertation, Cambridge University, 1996). Davidson, D., ‘Agency’, in R. Binkley, R. Bronaugh and A. Marras (eds), Agent, Action, Reason (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1971), pp. 3–25. Davis, P., ‘Thomas Hobbes’s Translations of Homer: Epic and Anticlericalism in late Seventeenth-Century England’, Seventeenth Century, 12:2 (1997), pp. 231–55. Dawson, H., Locke, Language and Early-Modern Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006). Dilthey, W., Ideas Concerning a Descriptive and Analytic Psychology (1894); The Understanding of Other Persons and Their Expressions of life (c. 1910), trans. K. L. Heiges and R. M. Zaner (The Hague: Nijhoff, 1977). Dodds, E., The Greeks and the Irrational (Los Angeles, CA: University of California Press, 1951). Dunn, J., ‘The Identity of the History of Ideas’, Philosophy, 164:43 (1968), pp. 85–104. Dunning, W., A History of Political Theories (1902; New York: Macmillan, 1905). Ehrenpreis, I., Swift the Man, his Works and the Age, vol. 1: Mr Swift and His Contemporaries (London: Methuen, 1962). Elkin, P., The Augustan Defense of Satire (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1973). Erskine-Hill, H., The Augustan Idea in English Literature (London: Edward Arnald, 1983). Erwin, C., ‘Bookish Plots’, E&S, 66:3 (2003), pp. 32–7. Fann, K. T. (ed.), Symposium on J. L. Austin (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1969). Finkelpearl, P., ‘The Comedian’s Liberty: Censorship of the Jacobean stage Reconsidered’, English Literary Renaissance, 16 (1986), pp. 123–38. Farley-Hills, D., The Benevolence of Laughter: Comic Poetry of the Commonwealth and Restoration (London: Macmillan, 1974).

Works Cited

209

Fisher, A. S., ‘An End to the Renaissance: Erasmus, Hobbes and A Tale of a Tub’, Huntington Library Quarterly, 38 (1974), pp. 1–20. Fitzmaurice, A., Humanism and America: An Intellectual History of English Colonialism, 1500–1625 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003). Fletcher, R., A History of English literature (1918; Whitefish, MT: Kesinger Publications, 2004). Forguson, L. W., ‘Austin’s Philosophy of Action’, in Fann (ed.), Symposium on J. L. Austin, pp. 127–47. Fox, C., Locke and the Scriblerians: Identity and Consciousness in Early Eighteenth Century Britain (Berkeley and Los Angeles, CA: University of California Press, 1988). Frye, N., The Anatomy of Criticism (1957; Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1971). Furberg, M., ‘Meaning and Illocutionary Force’, in Fann (ed.), Symposium on J. L. Austin, pp. 445–68. Gasset, O y., ‘The Difficulty of Reading’, Diogenes, 28 (1959), pp. 1–17. Gaukroger, S., Francis Bacon and the Transformation of Early-Modern Philosophy (Cambridge: University Press, 2001). —, The Emergence of a Scientific Culture: Science and the Shaping of Modernity, 1210–1685 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2006). —, ‘The Persona of the Natural Philosopher’, in Condren et al. (eds), The Philosopher, pp. 17–34. Gish, D., ‘Nascent Federalism and Political Crisis in The Iliad’, History of Political Thought, 31:1 (2010), pp. 1–7. Goh, A., ‘A Ritual Performance of Laughter in Southern Japan’, in J. Milner Davis (ed.), Understanding Humour in Japan (Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press, 2006), pp. 37–50. Goldberg, J., ‘The Houynhyhnm Subtext: Moral Conclusions and Linguistical Manipulation in Gulliver’s Travels’, 1650–1850: Ideas, Aesthetics and Inquiries in the Early Modern Era, 4 (New York: AMS Press, 1998), pp. 269–84. Goldie, M., ‘The Reception of Hobbes’, in J. Burns (ed. with the assistance of M. Goldie), The Cambridge History of Political Thought, 1450–1700 (Cambridge: University Press, 1991), pp. 589–615. Grace, D., ‘Utopia: A Dialectical Interpretation’, in C. Murphy, H. Gibaud and M. Di Cesare (eds), Miscellania Moreana: Essays for Germain Marc’hadour, Moreana, 100 (Binghampton, NY: Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies, 1989), pp. 273–302. —, ‘Utopia and Academic Scepticism’, in D. Grace and A. D. Cousins (eds), More’s Utopia and the Utopian Inheritance (New York: University Press of America, 1995), pp. 1–21. Graham, G., ‘Can There be a History of Philosophy?’, History and Theory, 21 (1982), pp. 37–52 Grant, H., ‘Hobbes and Mathematics’, in T. Sorrell (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Hobbes (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), pp. 108–28.

210

Hobbes, the Scriblerians and the History of Philosophy

Grice, P. H., ‘Logic and Conversation’, in P. Cole and G. Morgan (eds.), Syntax and Semantics, vol. 3: Speech Acts (New York: Academic Press, 1975), pp. 41–59. Gunnell, J., Political Theory: Tradition and Interpretation (Cambridge, MA: Winthrop, 1979). Haakensson, K., ‘The History of Eighteenth-Century Philosophy: Philosophy or History’, in K. Haakensson (ed.), The History of Eighteenth-Century Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), pp. 1–25. Habermas, J., Strukturwandel der Öffentlicheit (1962), trans. T. Burger and F. Lawrence, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society (London: Polity Press, 1989). Hacker, A., Political Theory: Philosophy, Ideology, Science (New York: Macmillan, 1961). Hadot, P., Philosophy as a Way of Life (Oxford: Blackwell, 1995). —, What is Ancient Philosophy? (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002). Hale, J., ‘Thomas Hobbes’ Poem of Exile: The Verse Vita and Ovid’s Tristia 4.10’, Scholia: Studies in Classical Antiquity, 17 (2008), pp. 92–105. Hamilton-Bleakley, H., ‘Linguistic Philosophy and the Foundations’, in Brett and Tully (eds), with Hamilton-Bleakley, Rethinking the Foundations, pp. 20–33. Hammond, B., ‘Scriblerian Self-Fashioning’, Year Book of English Studies, 18 (1988), pp. 108–24. —, Professional Imaginative Writing, 1670–1740: ‘Hackney for Bread’ (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997). Hampsher-Monck, I., ‘On Not Inventing the English Revolution: The Radical Failure of the 1790s as Linguistic Non-Performance’, in G. Burgess and M. Festenstein (eds), English Radicalism, 1550–1850 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), pp. 135–56. Hare, R. M., Practical Inferences (London: Macmillan, 1972). —, ‘Austin’s Distinction between Locutionary and Illocutionary Acts’, in Practical Inferences (London: Macmillan, 1972), pp. 101–4. Harrison, P., ‘The Natural Philosopher and the Virtues’, in Condren et al. (eds), The Philosopher, pp. 206–19. Hawley, J., ‘Margins and Monstrosity: Martinus Scriblerus his “Double Mistress”’, EighteenthCentury Life, 22 (1998), pp. 35–40. Haugen, K. L., Richard Bentley: Poetry and Enlighenment (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011). Herbert, G. B., Thomas Hobbes: The Unity of Scientific and Moral Wisdom (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 1989). Hilton, P., ‘Bitter Honey: The Disallusioned Philosophy of Mandeville’s Satiric Treatise’ (PhD dissertation, UNSW, 1999). —, Bitter Honey: Recuperating the Medical and Scientific Context of Bernard Mandeville (Bern: Peter Lang, 2010). Hinnant, C., ‘The Fable of the Spider and the Bee and Swift’s Poetics of Inspiration’, Colby Library Quarterly, 20 (1984), pp. 129–36.

Works Cited

211

Hodson, H., Johann Heinrich Alsted, 1588–1638: Between Renaissance, Reformation and Universal Reform (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000). Hoekstra, K., ‘The End of Philosophy (The Case of Hobbes)’, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society (2006), pp. 25–62. Hunter, I., Rival Enlightenments; Civil and Metaphysical Philosophy in Early Modern Germany (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001). —, ‘The History of Theory’, Critical Inquiry, 33 (2006), pp. 78–84. —, ‘The University Philosopher in Early Modern Germany’, in Condren et al. (eds), The Philosopher, pp. 35–65. —, The Secularisation of the Confessional State: The Political Thought of Christian Thomasius (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007). —, ‘The History of Philosophy and the Persona of the Philosopher’, Modern Intellectual History, 4:3 (2007), pp. 571–600. Hunter, I., and D. Saunders (eds), The Whole Duty of Man, According to Samuel Pufendorf, trans. Andrew Tooke (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 2003). Hunter, M., John Aubrey and the Realm of Learning (New York: Science History Publications, 1975). —, Science and the Shape of Orthodoxy: Intellectual Change in Late Seventeenth-Century Britain (Woodbridge: Boydell, 1995). —, Robert Boyle (1627–91): Scrupulosity and Science (Woodbridge: Boydell, 2000). Ijsselling, S., Rhetoric and Philosophy in Conflict (The Hague: Nijhoff, 1976). Iwasaki Y., ‘Martinus Scriblerus his Character as satirist’, Bulletin of the Dept of Commerce ( Japan) recorded in Scriblerian, 2:2 (1970), p. 43. Jardine, L, ‘Lorenzo Valla: Academic Scepticism and the New Humanist Dialectic’, in M. Burnyeat (ed.), The Skeptical Tradition (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1983), pp. 253–86. Jones, C. P., Culture and Society in Lucian (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1986). Jones, E. (ed.), English Critical Essays (Sixteenth, Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries) (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1956). Jones, R. F., ‘The Background to the Attacks on Science in the Age of Pope’, in Pope and His Contemporaries, pp. 96–113. Juhl, P. D., Interpretation: An Essay in the Philosophy of Literary Criticism (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1980). Keithley, W., ‘Jonathan Swift as Grub Street Hack and the Problem of the Popularization of Science’, Swift Studies, 20 (2005), pp. 51–69. Kelley, D. R., ‘History and/or Philosophy’, in J. B. Schneewind (ed.), Teaching New Histories of Philosophy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004), pp. 345–59. Kemp, G., ‘L’Estrange and the Publishing Sphere’, in J. McElligott (ed.), Fear, Exclusion and Revolution (Aldershott: Ashgate, 2006), pp. 67–90.

212

Hobbes, the Scriblerians and the History of Philosophy

Kinney, A. F., ‘Inhabiting Time: Sir Thomas More’s Historia Richardi Tertii’, in A .D. Cousins and D. Grace (eds), A Companion to Thomas More (Madison, WI: Fairly Dickinson University Press, 2009), pp. 114–26. Kirk, E., Menippean Satire an Annotated catalogue of Texts and Criticism (New York: Garland, 1980). Kneal, W. and M. Kneal, The Development of Logic (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1962). Knights, M., ‘Roger L’Estrange, Printed Petitions and the Problem of Intentionality’, in Morrow and J. Scott (eds), Liberty, Authority, Formality, pp. 113–30. Knutsen, T. L., A History of International Relations Theory (1992; Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1997). Leranbaum, M., Alexander Pope’s ‘opus magnum’ 1729–1744 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1977). Levine, J. M., Dr. Woodward’s Shield: History, Science and Satire in Augustan England (1977; Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1991). —, The Battle of the Books: History and Literature in the Augustan Age (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1991). —, Between the Ancients and the Moderns: Baroque Culture in Restoration England (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1999). Levinson, S., Pragmatics (1983; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987). Levitin, D., ‘Matthew Tindal’s Rights of the Christian Church (1706) Reconsidered’, Historical Journal (forthcoming). Lund, R. D., ‘Martin Scriblerus and the Search for the Soul’, Papers on Language and Literature, 25:2 (1989), pp. 135–50. —, ‘A Tale of a Tub, Swift’s Apology and the Trammels of Christian Wit’, in A. J. Rivero (ed.) Augustan Subjects: Essays in Honor of Martin C Ballestin (Newark: Delaware, 1997), pp. 87–109. —, ‘“Res et verba”; Scriblerian Satire and the Fate of Language’, Bucknell Review: Science and Literature, 27:2 (1983), pp. 63–78. —, ‘The Bite of Leviathan’, English Literary History, 65:4 (1988), pp. 825–55. —, ‘The Eel of Science: Index learning Scriblerian Satire and the Rise of the Information Culture’, Eighteenth-Century Life, 22:2 (1988), pp. 18–42. Mack, M., Alexander Pope: A Life (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1986). Maclean, I., ‘Un dialogue de sourds? Some Implications of the Austin–Searle–Derrida Debate’, Paragraph, 5 (1985), pp. 1–26. —, Interpretation and Meaning in the Renaissance: The Case of Law (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992). —, Logic, Signs and Nature in the Renaissance: The Case of Learned Medicine (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002). Malcolm, N. (ed.), The Correspondence of Thomas Hobbes (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994).

Works Cited

213

—, The Origins of English Nonsense (London: Fontana, 1997). —, ‘Hobbes and the Royal Society’, in G. A. J. Rogers and A. Ryan (eds), Perspectives on Thomas Hobbes (Oxford: Blackwell, 1988), pp. 43–66. —, Reason of State, Propaganda, and the Thirty Years’ War: An Unknown Translation by Thomas Hobbes (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2007). —, Aspects of Hobbes (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2002). Marsh, D., Lucian and the Latins: Humour and Humanism in the Early Renaissance (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 1998). Marshall, A., ‘The Myth of Scriblerus’, Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies, 31 (2008), pp. 77–99. Martinich, A. P., The Two Gods of Leviathan: Thomas Hobbes on Religion and Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992). Mason, H., To Homer Through Pope: An Introduction to Homer’s Iliad and Pope’s Translation (London: Chatto & Windus, 1972). McCarthy, J., Why Managers Fail ... and What to Do About It (New York and Sydney: Hamlyn, 1979). McCutcheon, E., ‘Denying the Contrary: More’s use of Litotes in Utopia’, in Murphy et al. (eds), Miscellania Moreana, 31–2, pp. 107–21. McInnes, A., English Towns (London: The Historical Association, 1980). Mills, C. W., The Sociological Imagination (1959; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1967). Mintz, S., The Hunting of Leviathan: Seventeenth Century Reactions to the Materialism and Moral Philosophy of Thomas Hobbes (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1962). Montagu, A., Edward Tyson, MD, FRS 1650–1708 and the Rise of Human Comparative Anatomy: A Study in the History of Science (Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 1943). Moore, F., ‘Homer Revisited: Anne Le Fevre Dacier’s Preface to her Prose Translation of the Iliad in Early Eighteenth-Century France’, Studies in the Literary Imagination, 33:2 (2000), pp. 87–107. Moyn, S., The Last Utopia: Human Rights in History (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010). Myres, J .L., The Political Ideas of the Greeks (1927; New York: Greenwood Press, 1968). Nadel, G. H., ‘Philosophy of History before Historicism’, History and Theory, 3:3 (1964), pp. 291–315; reprinted in G. Nadel (ed.), Studies in the Philosoophy of History (New York: Harper Row, 1965), pp. 49–73. Nash, R., ‘Satyrs and Satire in Augustan England’, in K. Coombe and B. Connery (eds), Theorizing Satire (Basingstoke: St. Martins Press, 1995). Nelson, E., ‘Introduction’, in Hobbes, Translations of Homer, ed. Nelson, vol. 1, pp. xi–lxxvii. Newton, S., The Origins of Beowulf and the pre-Viking Kingdom of East-Anglia (1993; Woodbridge: D.S. Brewer, 2004).

214

Hobbes, the Scriblerians and the History of Philosophy

Nokes, D., John Gay: A Profession of Friendship (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995). Oakeshott, M., ‘Introduction’, in T. Hobbes, Leviathan (1651), ed. M. Oakeshott (Oxford: Blackwell, 1960), pp. vii–lxvi. —, ‘The Activity of Being and Historian’, in Rationalism in Politics and Other Essays (London: Methuen, 1962), pp. 137–67. Oakley, F., ‘In Praise of Prolepsis: Meaning, Significance and the Medieval Contribution to Political Thought’, History of Political Thought, 27:3 (2006), pp. 377–406. Okin, S. M., Women in Western Political Thought (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1979). Oldenburg, H., The Correspondence, ed. A. R. and M. B. Hall, 5 vols (Madison, WI: Wisconsin University Press, 1965–8). Orgel, S., ‘Shakespeare and the Kinds of Drama’, Critical Inquiry, 6,.1 (1979), pp.10–23. —, ‘Introduction’, W. Shakespeare, The Tempest (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987), pp. 4–5. Pacchi, A., ‘Hobbes and the Problem of God’, in G. A. J. Rogers and A. Ryan (eds), Perspectives on Thomas Hobbes (Oxford: Blackwell, 1988), pp. 171–87. Parkin, J., ‘Taming the Leviathan: Reading Hobbes in Seventeenth Century Europe’, in T. Hochstrasser and P. Schroder (eds), Early Modern Natural Law Theories: Contexts and Strategies in the Early Enlightenment (Dordrecht and London: Kluwer Academic, 2003), pp. 31–52. —, Taming the Leviathan: The Reception of the Political and religious Ideas of Hobbes in England, 1640–1700 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007). Pemberton, J.-A., ‘Towards a New World Order: A Twentieth Century Story’, Review of International Studies, 27 (2001), pp. 265–72. Peters, F. E., Greek Philosophical Terms: A Historical Lexicon (New York: New York University Press, 1967). Phiddian, R., Swift’s Parody (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995). Pocock, J. G. A., ‘The Origins of the Study of the Past, A Comparative Approach’, Comparative Studies in Society and History, 4:2 (1962/3), pp. 209–46. —, Politics, Language and Time: Essays on Political Thought and History (London: Methuen, 1972). —, ‘The Concept of a Language and the métier d’historien: Some Considerations on Practice’, in A. Pagden (ed.), The Languages of Political Theory in Early-Modern Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), pp. 29–35. —, ‘Thomas Hobbes: Atheist or Enthusiast’, History of Political Thought, 11:4 (1990), pp. 737–49. Primus, R. A., The American Language of Rights (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999). Prokhovnik, R., ‘An Interview with Quentin Skinner’, Contemporary Political Theory, 10:2 (2011), pp. 273–85.

Works Cited

215

Pursglove G., and K. Williamson, ‘Prose Fiction and Fable’, in S. Gillespie and D. Hopkins (eds), The Oxford History of Literary Translation in English, Volume 3, 1660–1790 (Oxford: University Press, 2005), pp. 291–308. Raven, J. E., Plato’s Thought in the Making (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1965). Reik, M., The Golden Lands of Thomas Hobbes (Detroit, MI: Wayne State University, 1977). Relihan, J., Ancient Menippean Satire: An Annotated List of Texts and Criticism (New York: Garland Press, 1980). Rempel, H. D., ‘Six Generations of Plock Scholarship: A Concise History of the History of Political Thought’, Politics, 11:2 (1974), pp. 157–8. Robinson, C., Lucian, His Influence (London: Duckworth, 1979). Rogers, P., Literature and Popular Culture in Eighteenth Century England (Sussex: Harvester, 1985). Rorty, R., J. B. Schneewind and Q. Skinner (eds), Philosophy in History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984). Rosenheim E. W. Jr, Swift and the Satirist’s Art (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1963). Rosslyn, F., Alexander Pope: A Literary Life (London: Macmillan, 1990). Rousseau G. S., ‘Pope and the Tradition in Modern Humanistic Education’, in G. S. Rousseau and P. Rogers (eds), The Enduring Legacy: Alexander Pope Tercentenary Essays (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), pp. 199–239. Saintsbury, G., A Short History of English Literature (London: Macmillan, 1888). Sampson, M., ‘“Will You Hear What a Casuist He Is?” Thomas Hobbes as Director of Conscience’, History of Political Thought, 11: 4 (1990), pp. 721–36. Saunders, D., ‘The Judicial Persona in Historical Context: The Case of Sir Matthew Hale’, in Condren et al. (eds), The Philosopher, pp. 140–59. Saunders, D., and I. Hunter, ‘Bringing the State to England: Andrew Tooke’s Translation of Samuel Pufendorf ’s De Officio Hominis et Civilis’, History of Political Thought, 24:2 (2003), pp. 218–34. Saxonhouse, A., ‘Review’, History of Political Thought, 30:3 (2009), pp. 565–8. Schmitt, J., ‘An Order of Philosophers? Samuel Clark’s Moral Theory and the Problem of Sacerdos in Englightenment England’, Intellectual History Review, 18:3 (2008), pp. 361–74. Schneewind, J. B., The Invention of Autonomy: A History of Modern Moral Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998). Schochet, G., ‘Between Lambeth and Leviathan: Samuel Parker on the Church of England and Political Order’, in N. Phillipson and Q. Skinner (eds), Political Discourse in Early Modern Britain (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), pp. 189–208. Schulkwyk, D., Speech and Performance in Shakespeare’s Sonnets and Plays (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002). Searle, J., Consciousness and Language (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002).

216

Hobbes, the Scriblerians and the History of Philosophy

—, ‘Individual Intentionality and Social Phenomena in the Theory of Speech Acts’, in Consciousness and Language (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), pp. 143–4. Searle J. R., and D. Vanderveken, The Foundations of Illocutionary Logic (1985; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987). Seidel, M., The Satiric Inheritance, Rabelais to Sterne (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1979). Serjeantson, R., ‘Hobbes, the Universities and the History of Philosophy’, in Condren et al. (eds), The Philosopher, pp. 113–39. Shapiro, B., John Wilkins 1614–1742: An Intellectual Biography (Berkeley, CA: University of Califorina Press, 1969). —, Probability and Certainty in Seventeenth-Century England (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1983), Sherbert, G., Menippean Satire and the Poetics of Wit: Ideologies of Self-Consciousness in Dunton, D’Urfrey and Sterne (New York: Peter Lang, 1996). Silbeman L., ‘Mythologic Transformation of Ovid’s Hermaphrodite’, Sixteenth-Century Journal, 19:4 (1988), pp. 643–52. Sitter, J., Arguments of Augustan Wit (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991). Skinner, Q., ‘The Ideological Context of Hobbes’s Political Thought’, Historical Journal, 9 (1966), pp. 286–317. —, ‘Why Laughing Mattered in the Renaissance: The Second Henry Tudor Memorial Lecture’, History of Political Thought, 22:3 (2001), pp. 418–47. —, ‘Meaning and Understanding in the History of Ideas’, History and Theory, 8 (1969), pp3– 53; reprinted and revised in Q. Skinner, Regarding Method, Visions of Politics Series (Cambridge: University Press, 2002), vol. 1, pp. 57–89. —, ‘Interpretation and the Understanding of Speech Acts’, in Skinner, Regarding Method, pp. 103–27. —, Reason and Rhetoric in the Philosophy of Hobbes (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996). —, ‘Hobbes and His Disciples in England and France’, in Hobbes and Civil Science, Visions of Politics Series (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), vol. 3, pp. 315–23. —, ‘Hobbes and Laughter’, in T. Sorell and L. Foisneau (eds), Leviathan After Three Hundred and Fifty Years (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2004), pp. 139–66. Smet, I. A. de, Menippean Satire and the Republic of Letters, 1581–1655 (Genève: Droz, 1996). Smith, F. N., Language and Reality in Swift’s Tale of a Tub (Columbus, OH: Ohio State University Press, 1979). Sockett H., Microcosmographia Academica Americana (Lulu Press, 2003). Springborg, P., ‘Hobbes and Religion’, in Sorrell (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Hobbes, pp. 346–80. Steeves, E. L., ‘Introduction’, in Pope, The Art of Sinking in Poetry, ed. Steeves, pp. xi–lxix.

Works Cited

217

Stillman, R. E., ‘Hobbes’s Leviathan: Monsters, Metaphors and Magic’, English Literary History, 62:4 (1995), pp. 791–819. Strawson, P. F., ‘Intention and Convention in Speech Acts’, Logico-Linguistic Papers (London: Methuen, 1971), pp. 149–69. —, ‘Meaning and Truth’, in Logico-Linguistic Papers, pp. 170–89. Tarlton, C. D., ‘Historicity, Meaning and Revisionism in the Study of Political Thought’, History and Theory, 12:3 (1973), pp. 307–28. Thalberg, I., ‘Comments’, in Binkley et al. (eds), Agent, Action and Reason, pp. 158–60. Thiel, U., ‘Personal Identity’, in M. Ayers and D. Garber (eds), The Cambridge History of Seventeenth-Century Philosophy, 2 vols (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ), vol.1, pp. 888–904. Tinkler, J. F., ‘The Splitting of Humanism: Bentley, Swift and the English Battle of the Books’ Journal of the History of Ideas, 49 (1988), pp. 453–72. Thompson, Sr G., Under Pretext of Praise: The Satiric Mode in Erasmus’ Fiction (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1973). Tregenza, I., Michael Oakeshott on Hobbes: A Study in the Renewal of Philosophical Ideas (Exeter: Imprint Academic, 2003). Tuveson, E., ‘Swift and the World-Makers’, Journal of the History of Ideas, 11:1 (1950), pp. 54–74. Urmson, J. O., The Emotive Theory of Ethics (London: Hutchinson 1968). Vlastos, G., ‘Justice and Happiness in the Republic’, in G. Vlastos (ed.), Plato: A Collection of Critical Essays, 2 vols (New York: Doubleday, 1971), vol. 2, pp. 66–95. Ward, A. W., et al. (eds), The Cambridge History of English Literature, 15 vols (1907–21; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1933), 15 vols. Wienbrot, H. D., Eighteenth-Century Satire: Essays on Text and Context from Dryden to Peter Pindar (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988). —, ‘Alexander Pope, Madame Dacier’s Homer: Conjectures Concerning Cardinal Dubois, Sir Luke Schaub and Samuel Buckley’, Huntington Library Quarterly, 62:1/2 (1999), pp. 1–23. —, Menippean Satire Reconsidered (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005). Williams, A. L., Pope’s Dunciad: A Study in its Meaning (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1955). Williams, B., The Sense of the Past: Essays in the History of Philosophy, edited and with an introduction by M. Burnyeat (Princeton, NJ: Prnceton University Press, 2006). Williams, K., Jonathan Swift and the Age of Compromise (Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 1959). Wilson, J., Politically Speaking: The Pragmatic Analysis of Political language (Oxford: Blackwell, 1990). Wimsett, W. K., The Verbal Icon: Studies in the Meanming of Poetry (1954; London: Methuen, 1970).

218

Hobbes, the Scriblerians and the History of Philosophy

Winch, P., The Idea of a Social Science (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1958). Wokler, R., ‘The Manuscript Authority of Political Thoughts’, History of Political Thought, 20:1 (1999), pp. 107–24. Wootton, D., ‘The Fear of God in Early Modern Political Theory’, in Historical Papers (Vancouver: Canadian Historical Association, 1983), pp. 56–80. Yeo, R., ‘John Locke and Polite Philosophy’, in Condren et al., The Philosopher, pp. 254–75. Zammito, J. H., ‘Médecin-philosoph: Persona for Radical Enlightenment’, Intellectual History Review, 18:3 (2009), pp. 427–40.

INDEX

absurdity, notion of, 17–18, 72–3, 134–7 academic lineages, 3–5, 139, 150–1 ad hominem argument, 14, 29, 37–8, 58, 71–4, 81, 101, 126, 136, 155–6, see also reductive argument Addison, Joseph, 79, 90 The Spectator, 119 Aesop, 128, 129 Alpers, Paul, 95 Alstead, J. 121, anachronism, 90–1, 151–4 ancient philosophy, rejection of, 37–8 ancients and moderns, 27–9, 81, 87–101, 117, 127–8, 131–4, and ‘modern’ persona, 83, 88–9,91,93– 4,127–8, 131–4 see also Swift, Jonathan Anne, Queen, 77, 79 Annus mirabilus, (Scriblerians), 80, 105, 130 anonymity, typology of, 146–7 Answer to the Preface Before Gondibert, (Hobbes) 45, 129 Aquinas, St Thomas, 59 Arbuthnot, Dr John , 79–84, 95, 98–100,111–12, 114, 117, 136, Art of Political Lying, 81–2, 84, 105, 115–16, 118, 121, 123, 129, History of John Bull, 103, 108, 111, 114 Aristophanes, 21, 26 Aristotle, 8, 19, 39, 59, 65, 116, 120, 156 Rhetoric, 149 atheism, 36, 111 Atterbury, Francis, 78, 79, 88, 92 Aubrey, John, 31, 35, 60–2, 73, 99, 129 Austin, John, 142–3, 149–50

Bacon, Sir Francis, 12–14, 45, 47, 52, 63, 64, 115, 129, 134 Bakhtin, Mikhail, 21, 25 Baldwin, Stanley, 145 beards, philosophic, 22, 29, 34, 38, 62, 65, 85, 109 Bentham, Jeremy, 86–7 Bentley, Dr Richard, 14, 28, 78, 80, 81, 87–8, 120, 121, 134, 145, 152 and Hobbes, 71, 89, 127–9 see also Epistles of Phalaris Berkeley, Bishop George, 93, 98, 103, 112, 116, 121, 122, 136 Blanchard, Scott, 24–5 Bion, 34 Blount, Charles, 36, 64, 65 Blum, Paul, 96 Booke of Oathes, 9 booksellers, 146 Bowle, John, 55 Boyle, Charles, 81, 87–8 see also Epistles of Phalaris Boyle, Robert, 61, 68, 87, 99 Bramhall, Bishop John, 53 Brereton, Sir William, 68 Brilli, Atillio, 111 Brome, Richard, 16, 24 Browne, Sir Thomas, 15, 58 Brückmann, Patricia Carr, 95, 105, 121 Burnet, Thomas, 111 Burton, Robert, 18, 20 Bulter, Samuel, (Erewhon), 16 Butler, Samuel, 34, 65, 78, 94 Hudibras, 99, 129 Byron, Lord George, 27

– 219 –

220

Hobbes, the Scriblerians and the History of Philosophy

Casteveltro, Ludovico, 18 Catholic Church, 91 causation, 128, 130, 135 Cavendish, Charles, 36, 57, 74 Cavendish circle, 35, 39, 42, 57 Cavendish, William, Duke of Newcastle, 36, 39, 78, 146 censorship, 78 Cerf, Walter, 143 Champion, Justin, 64 Chapman, George, 47–52, 132 Charles II, King, 46, 47, 48, 69, 78, 146 Charleton, Walter, 69, 99 Christianity and antiquity, 38, 40, 59–60, 94 Chyne, Dr George, 100 Cibber, Colley, 86 Cicero, De officiis, 104 civil wars (British), 78 Clarke, Samuel, 94, 104 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 46 Collingbourne, Sir William, ‘the poet’, 57, 58, 59 Collingwood, R. G., 6–7, 140, 143, 154 Collins, Anthony, 104, 106 Cook, Thomas, 93–4 Cooper, Julie, 63 Cotton, Charles, 11, 36, 37, 46 counsel, office of, 36, 44, 133, 140 Cowley, Abraham, 25, 31, 32, 46, 53, 64, 66 Crambe, Conradus, 98, 106, 119 Treatise of Syllogisms, 131, 135–6 critic, office and persona of, 9, 80, 81, 82 Cromwell, Oliver, 62, 147 Crook, Andrew, 35 Cudworth, Ralph, 67, 71, 72, 73 Cunaeus, Petrus, 24, 27, 28, 29, 57, 90

Descartes, René, 12, 61, 63, 67, 93, 112, 126, 127, 130 Diderot, Denis, 95 Dilthey, Wilhelm, 75 Dodds, E. R., 20 Donne, John, 20 Du Val, Guillaume, 5, 11 Du Verdus, Francois, 35 Dunton, John, 84, 113, 122 Duppa, Bishop Brian, 34, 74

Dacier, Anne, 132–4 Dampier, William, Voyages, 108 Davenant, Sir William, 45, 129, 131 Davis, Paul, 46, 52 De cive, (Hobbes), 11, 39, 127, 129 De corpore, (Hobbes), 37 Democritus, 17, 20 De mirabilibus pecci, Carmen, (Hobbes), 40 Decameron physiologicum, (Hobbes), 5, 38 Dennis, John, 81, 82, 95, 99 Derrida, Jacques, 144

Gaukroger, Stephen, 63, 154 Gay, John, Beggar’s Opera, 20, 24, 79, 82 see also Three Hours After Marriage genre, 20–1 God, 112, 123, 125–6 Goldie, Mark, 55 Grantham, Thomas, 48

Eachard, Dr John, 68, 73, 113, 126–7, 146 eclecticism, 99 education, 101 Elegy on Mr Hobbes, 64 Elements of Law, The, (Hobbes) 20, 31–2, 39 engagement controversy, 147 entia moralia, see office epicureanism, 36, 37, 68, 112, 130, 126, 130 see also materialism Epistles of Phalaris, 28, 80, 87–91, 96, 151 see also Bentley, Dr Richard, and Boyle, Charles equivocation, 56–7, 119 Erasmus, Desiderus, 23, 27, 78, 85, 112 Erhenpries, Irvin, 127, 128 fairies, 43–4, 127 Fielding, Henry, 85 Fisher, Alan, 127 footnotes, 81 Fox, Christopher, 103 France, 131 Free Thinkers, (of Nuremburg), 106, 111, 130, 131 Frege, Gottlob, 153 Freind, Dr John, 95

Habermas, Jürgen, 122 Hadot, Pierre, 8 Hale, John, 40, 62

Index Hale, Sir Matthew, 66, 68, 126 Hammond, Brean, 111 Harley, Robert, Earl of Oxford, 79 Harrington, Sir James, 71 Hartley, David, 122 Harvey, William, 96 Haugen, K. L., 98 Hegel, G. W. F., 6, 153, 154 Herbert, Gary, 6 hermeneutic circle, 75 Hiffernan, Paul, 86 Hilton, Philip, 95 Hippocrates, 95–6 Historia ecclesiastica, (Hobbes), 38, 40–1 historian, office of, 151–4 historiography and relevance, 139–40 see also paradox of Hoadly, Bishop Benjamin, 125 Hobbes, Thomas, 96, 116, 119, 121–2 anti-clericalism of, 28, 35, 74 conception of philosophy, 11, 13, 44–6, 87, 140 contemporary use of, 70–1 correspondence of, 5, 6, 35, 57, 57, 64, 65 as exile, 62, 70, 85 modern interpretations of, 6, 55, 154 persona of, 32, 40, 63–5, 73–5, 128–9 philosophy of obligation, 148 as satirist, 1–2, 80 satiric attacks on, 22, 71–2, 125–31, 134–7 and Scriblerians 123–31 and wit and humour, 20, 40–4 works, see under title Hobbism, accusation of, 71–5, 94 Hoekstra, Kinch, 33 honestas/utilitas, 10 human identity, 1, 103–11, 131 see also mutability Human Nature, (Hobbes), 39 Hume, David, 60 humour, as framed, 19–20 and laughter, 17–20, 32–9, 74, 129, 135 serio-ludere, 53, 85, 115, 120, 123, 136–7 and wit, 31–3, 94 see also satire Hunter, Ian, 154 Hunter, Michael, 60

221

Ingelo, Nathaniel, 67–8 innovation, 63–6, 93–4, see also philosopher, office and persona intellectual history, 140, 147, 153–5 interest theory, 14 John of Salisbury, 96 Johnson, Dr Samuel, 15 Jones, C. P., 33 judgement, 31, Kant, Immanuel, 6 Keats, John, 47 Kerby-Miller, Charles, 78, 79, 84, 130 King, Dr William, 27, 69, 78, 80, 88, 90, 91 Dialogues of the Dead, 125 Kirk, Eugene, 26 Knights, Mark, 147 L’Estrange, Sir Roger, 128–9, 147 language and philosophy, 1, 16, 29–30, 113–23, 131 see also metaphor Lavoissier, Antoine, 153 law, 110–11, 114–16 Lawson, George, 58, 60, 67, 70 Leviathan, (Hobbes), 20, 31–2, 38, 39, 53, 126–7, 130, 148 frontispiece of, 50, and religion, 41–5, 74 title of, 72–3 wit and humour in, 34–5 Levitin, Dmitri, 71 Lipsius, Justus, 26–7, 29, 89–90, 91 literature (English) as discipline, 8, 17 Locke, John, 70, 100, 126, 129 and human identity, 103–6, 110, 114, 131 language, 98, 112, 119, 121–2 London, 18, 78–9 Longinus, The Sublime, 116 Lucan, 46 Lucian 2, 21–2, 33–8, 56, 65–6, 74, 87, 113 and Hobbes, 37–44 works: Double Indictment, 21, 110 Hermotinus, 22, 34, 85 True History, 116 Zeus Tragoedus, 42–3 see also satire Lund, Roger, 16, 34–5, 56–8, 74, 115

222

Hobbes, the Scriblerians and the History of Philosophy

Machiavelli, Niccolo, 116, 146 Mack, Maynard, 101 Maclean, Ian, 5 madness, 48, 85, 126, 130, Malcolm, Noel, 58, 70 Mandeville, Bernard de, 95, marriage, office of, 110–11 Marvell, Marvell, 70 masks and personae, 8 materialism, 1, 111–23 see also epicureanism Mathias, J. T., 17 Mayne, Jasper, 36–7, 38, 62, 65, 72 melancholia, 23, 61, 69, 77, 98, 118, 136 Memoirs of PP, Clerk of this Parish, (Scriblerians), 81 Memoirs of the Extraordinary Life, Works and Discoveries of Martinus Scriblerus, (Scriblerians), 80, 82, 84, 86, 95, 100, 106, 114, 118, 130 Menippus/menippean satire, 20, 22–7, 78, 81, 82, 90, 120 Mersenne, Marin, 62, 64, 134 metaphor, 45, 49, 53, 117,131, 135, 139 methodology, 141–55 Mills, C. Wright, 150 Milton, John, 91, 93, 108 Mintz, Samuel, 55 Mirandola, Count Pico della, 26, 59 models, theoretical, 142, 150 monstrosity, 10, 72–3, 107–11, 126 and Hobbes, 1, 10, 29, 61, 73, 126 Montague, Ashley, 109 Montaigne, Michel de, 104, 106, 109, 146 More, Henry, 58 More, Sir Thomas, 2, 26, 27, 29, 36, 56, Utopia, 23–4, 84–5, 95 mutability 105–6 104–11, see also human identity Nash, R., 109 natural philosophy, 77, 93 Nelson, Eric, 46–52 Neville, Henry, 146 Newton, Sam, 3 Newton, Sir Isaac, 40, 89, 93, 94, 121–2

Oakeshott, Michael, 6, 55 Oakley, Francis, 153 office, 9–16, abuse of, 95, 108, 103–4 intellectual, 9–11, 88, 92–5 rhetorics of, 17 see also specific offices, tyranny Ogilby, John, 47, 48, 50, 51 Orgel, Stephen, 21 Origins of the Sciences, an Account of, (Scriblerians) 109 Ovid, 105, 120, 130 Pace, Richard, 27 Paley, William, 60 Palmer, Roger, Lord Castlemaine, 146 paradox, 18, 57, 84 of historical relevance, 27–8, 89–90 of the Liar, 116 Meno’s, 141 Parker, Samuel, 70, 127 Parkin, Jon, 55, 60, 70, 73 Parnell, Thomas, 46, 79, 93, 132 pastoral, 95, Peri Bathous, see Pope, Art of Sinking in Poetry Petronius, 20, 23 Phiddian, Robert, 88 philosopher, office and persona of, 1–2, 7–8, 10–12, 53, 80, 103, 139–41, 154–7 and proposition, 13, 15, 18, 22, 115–19, 134–7 see also innovation philosophy, history of, 1–7, 15–17, 21, 29, 97, 140–1, 152–7 and methodology, 150 moral, 11, 130 as term, 11–16, 141 usefulness of, 140 physician, office and persona of, 94–5, 114 physiology, 111 Plato, 59, 85, 105, 120, 130, 140 Republic, 8, 97 Pocock, J. G. A., 144 poet, office and persona of, 13, 95, 133 and philosophy, 12, 44–53 politica writing, 55, political theory, early modern, 144

Index Pope Alexander, 28, 90, 91 Art of Sinking in Poetry, 80–1, 86, 91, 97, 115, 116–18, 119, 121, 131 Dunciad, 14, 80–1, 82, 84, 86, 100, 112, 113, 151 Essay on Criticism, 9 Rape of the Lock, 132, translations of Homer, 52, 132–4 priest, office of, 12, 60, 64, 94, 101, 132, 134 Priestley, Joseph, 153 professional writing, (‘Grub Street’), 78, 83, 113 ‘public sphere’, myth of, 78–9 Pufendorf, Samuel, 103 punctuation, 145 punning, 119–23 see also rhetoric, aestismus Puttenham, George, 39 Quintilian, 23 Rapin, René, 12, 131 Raven, J. E., 8 reason, 13, 16, 53, 85 reductive argument, 14,15, 65, 109, 113–14, 121 see also ad hominem argument religion, 33, 36, 64, 68, 91–4, 97 and philosophy, 65–8 see also priest, office of rhetor, office and persona of, 10, 13, 34–5, 52 rhetoric, 13, 19, 90, 118 admiratio, 39 aposiopesis, 13, 24, 43–4, 84, 100 aestismus, 13, 41–3, 56, 117, 120 enumeratio, 41–2, 57, 114 litotes, 13, 23, 39, 56 paradiastole, 10, 121, 135 paralipsis, 13, 40, 108, 109, 117 sarcasmus, 39 tapinosis, 13, 46, 67 Ross, Alexander, 67 Royal Society, The, 61, 64, 79, 99, 108, 119, 123, 146 satire of, 15–16, 68–70, 78, 114

223

Sanchez, Thomas, 114 satire, 16–17 dangers of, 56, dream motifs in, 26–7, 86, 91 as idiom of philosophy, 1–2, 12–13, 139 Lucianic/Menippean, 23–9, 78, 91, 120, 125–6 see also humour, serio-ludere see also Scriblerians satirist, office of, 9, 80 see also office, intellectual Saunders, David, 66 Scargill, Daniel, 60, 70 Schulkwyk, David, 144 schulphilosophie, 96 Scriblerians, 1–2, 78–82, 101, 111–23, 140 corpus, features of, 83–4 and Hobbes, 125–37 language use of, 16, 18, 105–6, 131, 142 philosophic personae, 81–2, 86, 98–9 subsequent evocations, 86–7 Scriblerus, Cornelius, 95–8 Scriblerus, Martinus, appearance and persona of 66, 77–80, 84, 100–1, 109, 126 education of, 87, 97–8, 130 marriage and divorce, 103, 106–8, 110–11, 116, 135 works, see under title Searle, John, 143–4, 147 secondary characteristics, doctrine of, 130 Seidel, Michael, 128 Seneca, 26, 104 serio-ludere, 85, 115, 120, 123, 136–7 Serjeantson, Richard, 63 Sexby, Edward, 108 Sextus Empiricus, 104 Shadwell, Robert, 15, 69 Shakespeare, 91, 147 As You Like It, 61 King Lear, 85 Sharp, Archbishop John, 94 Sherbert, Gary, 25 Sheridan, Dr Thomas, 82, 115, 120 Ars Pun-ica, 84, 91, 94, 106–8, 119–23, 129, 130 Sheridan, R. B., 85–6 Siberman, Lauren, 72

224

Hobbes, the Scriblerians and the History of Philosophy

Sidney, Sir Philip, 19, 44, 89 Sitter, John 98, 112 Skinner, Quentin, 34–5, 39, 41, 144, 148 smallpox, 95 Smet, Ingrid de, 26–7 Society of Jesus ( Jesuits), 12, 57 soul, 110–13, 131 speech act theory, 142–51, 153, 154–7 spoken versus written word, 144–7 Sprat, Thomas, 64, 122, 126 History of the Royal Society, 119, 123 squaring the circle, 130 Starkey, John, 146 Steele, Richard, 79 Steeves, E.L., 118 Sterne, Lawrence, Tristram Shandy, 85 Stillingfleet, Edward, 129 Stradling versus Stiles, (Scriberians), 81 Swift, Jonathan, 9, 14, 18, 23, 39–40, 79, 105, 108, 111, 114, 118, 120, 130, 146 fable of spider and bee, 128–9 modern persona of 126–9 and Hobbes, 126–30, Homer, 132 works: Battle of the Books, 81, 83, 84, 88–9, 91, 95, 97, 127 D. S-t, 85 Gulliver’s Travels, 82, 84–5, 95, 109, 114, 122 Journal to Stella, 82 Mechanical Operation of the Spirit, 81, 83–4, 127 Modest Proposal, 82, 86 Tale of a Tub, 81–2, 83, 84, 85, 88, 91–3, 117, 119, 134 Sydenham, Thomas, 94

Temple Sir William, 81, 87, 96, 127 Tenison, Archbishop, Thomas, 40, 60, 64, Three Hours After Marriage, (Scriblerians), 82, 91, 98–100, 105, 108, 114, 152–3 tradition, 3–6, 20, 67, 71, 92 Translations of Homer, Iliad and Odysseys, (Hobbes), 45–52, 89, 128, 131–4 see also Chapman, Dacier, Grantham, Ogilby and Pope True Effigies of the Monster of Malmesbury, 64–5 truth, conceptions of, 44–5, 59, 87 tyranny, 10–11, 17, 73, 104, 108 see also office, abuse of Tyson, Edward, 109, 111 Valla, Lorenzo, 52, 59 Varro, 23 Virgil, Aeneid, 46, 106 Virgilius restauratus, (Scriblerians), 80–1, 91, 106 Vita/Life of Thomas Hobbes, 40, 62, 64 Wagstaffe, John, 36, 65 Waller, Edmund, 57 Wallis, John, 38, 40, 69–70 war/civil war, 46–7, 63, 133 Waterloo, Battle of, 152, 153 Weinbrot Howard, 21, 25, 46, 131 Wilkins, Bishop John 119 Willis, Thomas, 104 Wilson, Thomas, 19, 32, 33 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 115, 143 Wonder, sense of, 40 Woodward, Dr, John, 78, 98–100, 108 Wotton, William, 81, 89, 119, 132 Young, Edward, 95