Thomas Hobbess Leviathan: a Grin Without a Cat1

Eduardo Sabrovsky
eduardo.sabrovsky@mail.udp.cl

Wordkeys: The Leviathan Paradox Sovereign Author Decision

As most of you may have realized, the title of this paper has been borrowed from Lewis
Carrolls Alice in Wonderland; more precisely, from one of Alices encounters with the
enigmatic and always vanishing Cheshire Cat. In this encounter the Cat, admonished by
Alice not to keep appearing and vanishing so suddenly, does it quite slowly, until only its
grin remains visible for a while. And Alice, so we are told, says to herself: Well! Ive often
seen a cat without a grin; but a grin without a cat! Its the most curious thing I ever saw in
all my life. (100)
Though Hobbess Leviathan is rather an Artificial Man than a cat, and though his
expression, in the image Hobbes designed for the frontispiece of his treatise may hardly be
considered a grin, I would like to argue that there is something of Carrolls Cheshire Cat in
it. But, before developing my argument, a review of the problems that Hobbes appeal to
the image of the mythical monster Leviathan has raised to his readers may be convenient.
In fact, since 1651, the year of Leviathans publication, scholars, critics, political friends
and enemies have dealt with the enigmatic character of this creature, as it appears in the
Bible and in ancient Near East myths a sea monster, a serpent, a dragon and have
wondered why did Hobbes choose such an inauspicious title, that dreadful Name, as he
says in his autobiographical poem, for a work that was controversial enough without it.
Besides, what is this dubious image doing in the frontispiece and title of a treatise that,
given Hobbes emphatic rejection of metaphor and myth, is supposed to do away with
them, at least in philosophy and politics?

This text was read in spanish the November 26th 2013 in the International Colloquium Poltica Arte,
Literatura, Lenguaje: de Carl Schmitt a Jacques Rancire. This colloquium was organized by the Instituto de
Humanidades of the Universidad Diego Portales (November 28th to 29th). The text that follow is a translation
of that reading.

This latter question can be explored without any assumptions about Hobbes psychology
and intentions. And I agree with John Tralau who, writing in The Cambridge Companion to
Hobbes Leviathan, argues that Hobbes transgression of his own interdict is precisely the
reason why we should look closely for something interesting in it. He writes:
[] the mythological image is [] not merely a superfluous, accidental ornament but
serves a theoretical purpose in Hobbes argument. Moreover, we will see that his use of
the image, which contradicts his own principles regarding method in philosophy, is in a
sense a theoretical and political necessity for him (Tralau 2007, 61).
Besides being a transgression, what is interesting in it, deserving a close look? Tralau draws
a parallel between Hobbes Leviathan and Dionysus and Medusa. What they have in
common is their inherent paradoxical nature. Based in ancient documents and contemporary
interpretations2, Tralau concludes that Medusa is ugly, yet beautiful; female, yet male;
human, yet a beast; young, yet old; mortal, yet intimately related to immortality. And, in
Euripides Bakchai, we learn, so Tralau tells us, that Dionysus is no less paradoxical: male
and female; terrible and lenient; god and monster; even whoever he is.
And what about Hobbes Leviathan? In the Hebrew Bible, the word Leviathan is used only
a few times. In Psalm 104, that highlights the playfulness of the divine order, it is a creature
made for Gods gratification, as are the taninim, the great sea monsters created on the fifth
day of creation (Genesis 1: 21). But, in Psalm 74, that laments the destruction of Jerusalem
by the Babylonian army in 586 B. C. E, it is mentioned, along with the dragon and the
taninim, as one of the ancient enemies God had to defeat to establish his order; in Isaiah,
Leviathan, described as a fleeing and twisting serpent, and as a sea monster, is yet to be
defeated.
But the most disturbing Leviathan, and the one Hobbes more explicitly refers to is Jobs.
Job 41. 24, in the Vulgate version (non est super terram potestas quae conparetur ei) is
engraved in the frontispiece; then, at the end of Chapter 28, (Of Punishments and
Rewards) Hobbes explains what he means by Leviathan quoting Job 41:33-34: There is

Mainly Apollodoros Library, and Jean Pierre Vernant and Franoise Frontisi-Ducroix.

nothing on earth to be compared with him. He is made not to be afraid. He seeth every high
thing below him, and is king of al the children of pride. And, in fact, the image engraved in
the frontispiece is that of a giant, seeing

every high thing below him, even, and

purposefully as Hobbes direct participation in the design of the frontispiece certainly

implies the cathedral, the largest building in the city, and upon which the Mortal Gods
shadow falls.
In the Hebrew Bible, Job is a parable on the omnipotence, and thus, the radical Otherness of
God regarding human justice and reason. He is presented as perfect and upright, and one
that feared God, and eschewed evil (Job 1, 1), so perfect and upright that even God,
assembled with his sons, Satan included, brags about him: Hast thou considered my
servant Job, that there is none like him in the earth, a perfect and an upright man, one that
feareth God, and escheweth evil? (Job 1, 8). But his virtues notwithstanding, he is the
caught in the web of divine laws (read: inhuman laws) Borges, in one of his most
outstanding nominalist fictions, Tln, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius and doomed to every
conceivable punishment. And, although he retains his faith, he deems himself innocent. But
that is the whole point: he claims to know right from wrong: he was righteous in his eyes
(Job 32 , 1). Finally God himself, speaking out of a whirlwind, admonishes him: Wilt thou
also annul My justice? Wilt thou condemn Me, that thou mayest be justified? (40, 8). And,
as for an omnipotent God, might makes right, He parades his power: Canst thou draw out
Leviathan with a fishhook? Or tie down his tongue with a cord? (41, 1). Indeed, the whole
paragraph 41 is dedicated to display the powers of Leviathan, till we are led to understand
that what is being praised is nothing but God himself: None is so foolhardy that dare stir
him up. Who then is able to stand before Me? (41,10; 41,2 in the Hebrew version).
Hobbes God, regardless of his own private beliefs, is precisely this omnipotent God,
whose designs must be considered beyond the scope of human reason and moral judgment.
In the Latin version of L 31, 5 (On the Kingdom of God by Nature) he is quite explicit:
To an omnipotent nature, which cannot be resisted, both reign and dominion over the
whole human race naturally belong. And this is the foundation of the right by which God
afflicts whom he will, and pardons whom he will [] not, as many have thought, the

sins of men3
With this and similar statements; also, with his position on universals: [] there being
nothing in the world universal by names; for the things named are every one of them
individual and singular. (L 4, 4), Hobbes, as many of his readers have recognised, proves
himself a nominalist. Universals in re, universals out there, in things themselves, were in
fact the key elements in the Medieval Scholastic power- knowledge apparatus: realism
guaranteed that the Creation would be a rational Cosmos, an order that, with a certain
degree of support from Divine Grace a Grace administered by the same institution in
which Scholasticism was raised and thrived could be translated into naturalised political
and morals laws. In other words, for the Medieval world there was a bridge connecting
heaven to earth, so that earthly life became, somehow, sacralised. But bridges can be
crossed in both directions, so that the sacralisation of earthly life can be understood so it
was, by the Nominalist theologians and, later on, by the Reformation as a profanation of
the sacred. God is not our debtor, wrote William of Ockham, perhaps the most
outstanding of the late Middle Age Nominalist theologians. A God commensurable with
human reason would be nothing but a human construct, an idol.
Now the question of realism vs. nominalism, that bears on the relation between reason and
reality, cannot be solved by reason. Because it would entail a second order reason, to which
the same problem would be presented, and so on. This stairway to heaven can only be
interrupted by a decision, which would then be exempted from the requirements of reason
though, being its foundation, neither alien to it. A sovereign decision, then, both within and
without reason. And a decision understood, not as the expression of an individual will in
Hobbes account, that would be nothing but the last appetite in deliberating (L 6, 53) but
in its etymological sense (from the Latin de-caedere, to cut), as an interruption or
bifurcation in historical time, related not only to changes in ideas and mentality, but also to
decisive transformations in the material realm; to the emergence of modern capitalism, that

In this section, Hobbes deals specifically with Job. Regarding the question Why evil men often prosper, and
good men suffer adversity, he writes: This question, in the case of Job, is decided by God himself, not by
arguments derived from Jobs sin, but his own power.

commands that reality be, not a pre-ordered Cosmos, but a neutral, non-teleological
(disenchanted) space. Because only in such a void a will-to-order, expressed in the global
techno-scientific enterprise and market rationality; in a constructive, perspectivist
understanding of language and last but not least in modern political sovereignty, can be
deployed so as to build a humanized world Elaborating on Hobbes dark view of the
world, M. A. Gillespie writes:
[Hobbes] dark view of the world is the result of his acceptance of the basic tenets of
nominalism, especially as it is received and transmuted by the Reformation. [] Hobbes
transforms this thought in essential ways. Luther and Calvin sought to show that nothing
we do on earth can affect our chances of salvation, which depend solely on divine
election. Hobbes accepts this doctrine of unconditional election, but he turns it on its
head. If nothing we do on earth affects our salvation, then there is no soteriological
reason to perform any earthly action. Properly understood, the nominalist doctrine of
divine omnipotence and the Calvinist notion of election that follows from it thus
undermine the authority of religion in secular affairs. Therefore, it is not the rejection of
religion that produces modern natural and political science but the theological
demonstration of religions irrelevance for life in this world (Gillespie 2008, 209-210).4
But not only the authority of religion has been undermined. The Reformation made the
individuals conscience the privileged locus for transcendence, now turned opaque, to be
heard. In Hobbes writings we witness his painstaking efforts to deactivate this time bomb
threatening each and every political power. He does it by establishing an economy of
power, based on a distinction between the inner and the outer: For internal faith is in its
own nature invisible, and consequently exempted from all human jurisdiction. (L 42, 42).
And, in the very delicate political question of miracles, to which he dedicates Chapter 37 of
his Leviathan (On miracles and their use), though asserting that the sovereign, as the
embodiment of public reason is, in this and in every cognitive matter, the supreme judge
(so, a sort of lightning rod, preventing so said miracles to disturb the commonwealth), he
4

On Hobbes nominalism, Gillespie adds: What is immediately clear is that Hobbes thought is deeply
indebted to nominalism. He accepted nominalisms basic tenets: that God is omnipotent, that only individuals
exist, and that the meanings of words are purely conventional. (Gillespie 2008, 228).

asserts that A private man has always the liberty (because thought is free) to believe or not
believe, in his heart, those acts that have been given out for miracles.
This distinction between public confession and inner, private belief was understood by Carl
Schmitt, in his much discussed The Leviathan. The State Theory of Thomas Hobbes as a
fatal crack in Hobbes state design; a crack through which those who claim a source of right
external to the commonwealth would be able to instil their venom. In the spirit of the times
the book was published in 1938 Schmitt blames Jewish thinkers, from Spinoza to
Mendelsohn and beyond, for this. But, if we go back to Hobbes, it was not Jews he had in
mind, but mainly Puritans. But again, Puritans were only a radical faction of Protestantism:
it is not, then, a foreign venom, but the privileged role assigned by the Reformation to
subjectivity, to inner conviction, that Hobbes is trying to deactivate, not by denying it, but
by confining it to the space of privacy. So, the distinction of inner and outer is not a defect
in Hobbes Artificial Mans design: on the contrary, it is its main constructive principle. In
the Hobbesian Commonwealth, every substantial conviction has to be turned into private
belief(or maybe better: value) that can be sustained in the interiority of ones heart, or
within a community of believers, with the only condition that it should not interfere with
public reason. And, though this process of neutralization starts with religion, it does not
have to stop there. In fact, it wont: even now it is at work, turning what used to be
substantive political convictions into aestheticized life styles. This is the work of the
astonishingly consistent [] systematics of liberal thought (Schmitt, in The Concept of
the Political), that replaces the conflictivity of the political with the rule of law and technoscientific administration.
Now, I can come back to Leviathans image in the frontispiece of Hobbes controversial
book. Where is he, really? Will he stay there forever? Or is on the move, arriving or,
maybe, leaving? Leviathan is a sea monster, England is an island. So, I suggest, he is
coming from the sea, having shed his monstrous features in favour of a human form. But, as
we know from Schmitt, sovereignty is a borderline concept. So there in principle he
should stay, in the border between the humanized world and the state of nature.
Emmanuel Kant, in his First Critique, at the beginning of the chapter titled Of the Ground
of the Division of all Objects into Phenomena and Noumena offers a very powerful image

of this world (an island) and what lies beyond:

This land, however, is an island, and enclosed in unalterable boundaries by nature itself. It is
the land of truth (a charming name), surrounded by a broad and stormy ocean, the true seat or
illusion, where many a fog bank and rapidly melting iceberg pretend to be new lands and,
ceaselessly deceiving with empty hopes the voyager looking around for new discoveries,
entwine him in adventures from which he can never escape and yet also never bring to an end
(KrV A 235 / B 294-5).5

Invoking Kant here is not out of place here, because it is mainly in his name that efforts
have been made by liberal thinkers to replace the uncomfortable person of the sovereign,
and the even more uncomfortable notions of exception and decision, with the impersonal
rule of law. But, to say there is nothing but the law is to incur in a paradox of selfinclusion, such as Bertrand Russell had to face in his attempt, at the beginning of the XXth
Century, to ground mathematics in logic. Russell attempted to straight things out with his
theory of types, a theory that prescribes that self- inclusive statements, that refer to
themselves through a totality (the law), are to be considered as belonging, not to that
totality, but to a meta-level. In that way, he established a hierarchy of levels and metalevels, a stairway to heaven (remember the differend between realism and nominalism!) that
can only be interrupted precisely by what it aims to avoid: a sovereign decision that, at a
certain level (the second, no more are necessary) absorbs into itself the paradox. In the case
of the law, this would mean that the proposition there is nothing but the law raises that
nothing to the level of the sovereign. But that is precisely what happens with sovereignty
under the pressure of the astonishingly consistent [] systematics of liberal thought: far
from being wiped out, it can now, devoid of the ontic features that used to burden it, rule
unlimited.
The example of science may clarify what I am saying. In Hobbes account (L 5, 3), science
is not an uncontroversial discipline: no mans reason, nor the reason of any number of
men, makes the certainty, so that, there will be occasions in which some arbitrator or
judge to whose sentence they will both stand will be required. And the last word, we

Kant, Immanuel. Critique of Pure Reason. Cambridge Edition, USA, 2000.

understand, would be the sovereigns. But this is just the beginning of modern science, with
Hobbes as one of its pioneers. After that first impulse, science runs by itself: it does not
require the sovereigns decision because, in a fundamental way, it has internalized its
innermost substance, the disenchantment of nature that is its Commandment.
So, what we have is, to paraphrase an expression coined by Georgio Agamben, the
sovereign as gesture: a grin without a cat. Agamben is elaborating on a well-known
conference pronounced by Michel Foucault, What is an author (1969). This conference
contains several statements worth remembering, and Agamben does not fail in driving our
attention to them. I will just quote one: The mark of the author is reduced to nothing more
than the singularity of his absence; he must assume the role of the dead man in the game of
writing. And Agamben concludes: The author is only present in the text as a gesture.
It is odd that Agamben does not perceive that the structure that he, through Foucault, is
unveiling, is the same logical structure of sovereignty. In fact, there is a long tradition that,
through etymological speculation a style of thinking very dear to Agamben establishes a
close link between authority and authorship, with Agambens fellow countryman, Dante
Alighieri, as a relevant representative of that tradition6.
But, in Hobbes case, the relation he establishes between his authorship and sovereign
authority is closer. In the Introduction to Leviathan, Hobbes says that, to know men and
that knowledge is the basis for describing the nature of this artificial man, Leviathan, you
have to begin by knowing yourself: nosce te ipsum, read thyself. And this is especially
important in the case of the sovereign:
He that is to govern a whole nation must read in himself, not this or that particular man,
6

In fact, Dante Alighieri, dedicated part of his Convivio (The Banquet), written in the threshold of the modern
era, to emphasize, via a clever reading of Medieval sources, that closeness; more precisely, he stresses the
double derivation of the word auctor: from the Greek auieo, to tie together (so that the poet ties together
words, as the very form of the word, composed only of vocals would suggest), and also from the Greek
autentin. He writes: [T]he other source from which author as Hugutio bears witness in his
Derivationes descends is a Greek word autentin, which in Latin means worthy of faith and obedience. As
thus derived, author refers to every person worthy of being trusted [worthy of faith] and [of being] obeyed.
From this comes the word with which we are concerned now, namely authority, so we see that authority
is equivalent to an act worthy of faith and obedience. Whence, given that Aristotle is most worthy of faith
and obedience, it is obvious that his words are the supreme and highest authority. (4, 6, 5) Quoted by Russell
Ascoli, (Russell Ascoli 2007, p. 55).

but mankind, which though it be hard to do, harder than to learn any language or science,
yet when I shall have set down my own reading orderly and perspicuously, the pains left
another will be only to consider if he not find the same in himself. For this doctrine
admiteth no other demonstration.
What are we supposed to do with this? On the one hand, Hobbes is placing himself as the
sovereigns closest advisor. But what Hobbes offers us in the following pages is not a first
person account of man if that is ever possible but a third person account according to
which human beings would be nothing but mechanic automata: automata provided with
what nowadays we would call an internal program (the heart, a spring; the nerves, strings;
the joints, wheels) that receives mechanical stimuli through the sense organs and responds
to them mechanically, so that all the knowledge we might get, even though it can be
elaborated into trains of thought, memory and words we may use to recall and communicate
it, would be, in the final analysis, nothing but fancy. This account holds as an extreme, and
politically inspired, critique of reification: not only there are no universals in re, but no rei,
no things at all we might know about.
I cannot elaborate further on this here (the elaboration would lead us to recognize how
Hobbes, through the role of language and through his famous definitions, has to reintroduce intentionality into his account of the behaviour of human beings). The final
question I want to raise is the following: if we accept human beings are causal automata, as
Hobbes seems to think, what happens with Hobbes himself? Is he also an automaton?
Again, we are faced with Russells paradox. Lets fly away from Hobbes 17th Century and
get back to our 21st. The name of the game now is not mechanics, but neurophysiology.
Explaining human behaviour in neurophysiological terms means that, albeit in a complex
way, we should be able to map each and every human behaviour into a region of the human
brain. But, what happens with the human behaviour consisting in drawing causal maps? Is it
also causal? And what, then?
For Hobbes, geometry was the only science that it had pleased God hithertho to bestow on
mankind (L 4, 12). And also the skill of making and maintaining commonwealths
consisteth in certain rules, as doth arithmetic and geometry (L, 20, 19). So Leibniz, who

was a great admirer of Hobbes (in a letter, he told Hobbes that he considered him above
Descartes, to whom he attributed a superhuman intellect) may have been thinking in
Hobbes when, in a brief essay (On the Radical Origination of All Things) he gave an
example of what he meant by the principle of sufficient reason.
Let us suppose that the book containing the Elements of Geometry exists since the
beginning of time and that a new book has always been copied from a former one. It should
be clear that, although we can always give reason of the present book referring it to the
former from which it was copied, we would never reach a perfect reason, even though we
might cover, in a regression, as many books as we wished. In fact, it will be always
legitimate to ask, with amazement, why do those books have always existed, why precisely
books, and what is the reason for them to have been written in such a way as they have.
For Leibniz, causal explanations have to be grounded in something he, very fittingly calls
Dominating Unity, related to an absolute, metaphysical necessity. The figure of Author /
Sovereign may be reduced by its immersion in the highly corrosive medium of rationality;
in other words, he may be retreating back to his noumenal stormy ocean, leaving space for
the ever-growing rationalised human world. But the metaphysical grin lingers on.