Richard Woodfield, 'Thomas Hobbes and the formation of Aesthetics in England' more

THOMAS HOBBES AND THE FORMATION OF AESTHETICS IN ENGLAND Richard Woodfield In a previous article1 I concurred with the views expressed by Jerome Stolnitz in his seminal essay 'On the Origins of "Aesthetic Disinterestedness" ',2 and argued that developments on the European continent created the necessary conditions for the emergence of philosophical aesthetics in England. At the end of my article I wrote 'an account of the ways in which the artistic and theological issues generated by the cinquecento became absorbed into philosophical literature and resulted in an autonomous province of intellectual enquiry will have to be left to another occasion'.3 It was optimistic of me to believe that one occasion would be sufficient for me to honour my promise; the subject is too substantial. But I would like to start to settle the matter by addressing one question: `How did the theology of iconoclasm enter English philosophical literature?' Possibly because it was beyond the scope of his article, Stolnitz did not explore the extent of Shaftesbury's hostility towards Hobbes; as Shaftesbury's disinterestedness matched Hobbes's egoism, Shaftesbury's attachment to the painted image constituted a polar opposite to Hobbes's hostility. There is a fine irony in the difference between Shaftesbury and Hobbes: while Shaftesbury was party to the Neoplatonic tradition,4 Hobbes's views on the painted image echoed those of Plato himself, though he was far from being a Platonist. Shaftesbury seemed to see himself as a latter-day version of the Xenophonic Socrates, working with artists and transforming their practice according to the best principles of antique thought,5 while Hobbes as the protector of rationality and true religion would have cast them out of his state. Hobbes's views on the visual arts, or the visual arts as he found them, are located in a chapter of Leviathan entitled 'Of Daemonology, and other Reliques of the Religion of the Gentiles'; 6 in the 'Review and Conclusion' of the work he wrote, 'I think it may be profitably printed, and more profitably taught in the Universities'.7 He did not consider that a study of theology, or religious practice, was beyond the veil of philosophical thought, and later generations of scholars and intellectuals did not disagree. The significance of his discussion of the visual arts is that while he shared a common antipathy towards religious art, and was party to the iconoclastic movement, he moved theological discussions into the more general arena of philosophy and into epistemology in particular; it is possibly more culturally significant that he used epistemology to criticize religious beliefs. The poet Duke of Buckingham wrote: While in dark ignorance we lay afraid Of fancies, ghosts, and every empty shade; Great Hobbs appear'd, and by plain reason's light Put such fantastick forms to shamefull Flight.8 'On the Emergence of Aesthetics', British Journal of Aesthetics, Vol. 18 (1978). Stolnitz, Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism XX (1961). 3 'On the Emergence of Aesthetics', op. cit., p. 226. 4 See E. Cassirer, The Platonic Renaissance in England, 1953. 5 See E. Wind, 'Shaftesbury as a Patron of Art', Journal of the Warburg Institute, II (1938). 6 Leviathan, ed. W. G. Pogson Smith, 1965; hereafter, Lev. 7 Ibid., p. 556. 8 The Works of John Sheffield, ... Duke of Buckingham, 1726, p. 97. 2 1 The history of the English iconoclastic movement has recently been explored by John Phillips in his study The Reformation of Images (1973), and the more general social changes by Keith Thomas in Religion and the Decline of Magic (1971). It is not my purpose to summarize complexities of history but, rather, to consider Hobbes's attack on Christian figurative art. While there are points of contact between Hobbes's iconoclastic stance and the arguments of earlier theologians his iconoclasm assumes a greater interest within the context of his philosophy as a whole. As I have argued before, the pre-modern attitude towards the figurative arts was that they constituted a phenomenal extension of the real world, an attitude which Hobbes did not miss: ... at this day, the ignorant People, where Images are worshipped, doe really beleeve there is a Divine Power in the Images; and are told by their Pastors, that some of them have spoken; and have bled; and that miracles have been done by them; which they apprehend as done by the Saint, which they think either is the Image it self or in it.9 He treated this as a specific instance of the more general phenomenon of daemonology, which he argued to be unfounded in reason and the result of aberrations of thought originating in antiquity: This nature of Sight having never been discovered by the ancient pretenders to Naturall Knowledge; much lesse by those that consider not things so remote (as that Knowledge is) from their present use; it was hard for men to conceive of those Images in the Fancy, and m the Sense, otherwise, than of things really without us.10 It was through people's misunderstanding of the workings of their perceptual systems, the use of their gullibility by the `Governours of the Heathen Common-Wealths'11 to manipulate them into obedience and the use of fear of the unknown by the mediaeval Roman church to do the same that led to a belief in the existence of demons. Hobbes was aware of the Papacy's continued use of the figurative arts to capture the public's imagination with visions of saints in heaven, and of the role of inspiration and fantasy in the workings of radical Protestantism; given the popular power of religion he attacked its irrationalities in the interest of founding a rational state.12 Hobbes opened his account of daemonology by reminding readers of his analysis of perception: The impression made on the organs of Sight, by lucide Bodies ... produceth in living Creatures ... an Imagination of the Object, from whence the Impression proceedeth; which Imagination is called Sight; and seemeth not to bee a meer Imagination, but the Body it selfe without us; ... 13 He laid stress on the body's importance in determining man's perception of the world; the body could, by physical disorder, generate appearances which were only attributable to itself: in the same manner, as when a man violently presseth his eye, there appears to him a light without, and before him, which no man perceiveth but himselfe; because there is indeed no such thing without him, but onely a motion in the interiour organs, pressing by resistance outward, that makes him think so.14 Lev., pp. 513-14. Ibid., p. 498 and see also p. 507. 11 Ibid., p. 499. 12 I have discussed the rationality of Hobbes's commonwealth in A Study in the Logic of Hobbes' Social Contract, Master's dissertation, Hull 1970. 13 Lev., p. 498. 14 Ibid. 10 9 Moreover dreams, which were but the inward workings of a man's experience, could be attributed the status of reality, of a visionary perception of the super-mundane, by a failure to recognize their physical cause and a failure to distinguish between dream-states and waking life: We read of Marcus Brutus ... how at Philippi, the night before he gave battell to Augustus Caesar, hee saw a fearfull apparition, which is commonly related by Historians as a Vision; but considering the circumstances, one may easily judge to have been but a short Dream. For sitting in his tent, pensive and troubled with the horrour of his rash act, it was not hard for him, slumbering in the cold, to dream of that which most affrighted him; which feare, as by degrees it made him wake; so also it must needs make the Apparition by degrees to vanish: and having no assurance that he slept, he could have no cause to think it a Dream, or any thing but a Vision.... From this strong ignorance of how to distinguish Dreams, and other strong Fancies, from Vision and Sense, did arise the greatest part of the Religion of the Gentiles in time past, that worshipped Satyres, Fawnes, Nymphs, and the like; and now adayes the opinion that rude people have of Faynes, Ghosts and Goblins; and of the power of Witches.15 Hobbes argued that by their failure to understand man's perceptual life, the ancients created a framework of thought which led to a misinterpretation of sensory experience unwarranted by a true interpretation of the Scriptures. Hobbes was plagued by a concern with the misuse of figurative imagery within the church; he reminded his readers of St. Paul's often quoted remark: Wee know that an Idol is Nothing: Not that he thought that an Image of Metall, Stone, or Wood, was nothing; but that the thing which they honoured, or feared in the Image, and held for a God, was a meer Figment, without place, habitation, motion or existence, but in the motions of the Brain.16 This sounds uncannily like an echo to Theseus's speech in A Midsummer Night's Dream: The Poets eye, in a fine frenzy rolling, Doth glance from heaven to earth, from earth to heaven; And as the imagination bodies forth The forms of things unknown, the poet's pen Turns them to shapes, and gives to airy nothing A local habitation, and a name. Such tricks bath strong imagination.17 Hobbes was certainly familiar with the powers of `strong imagination'; a susceptibility to visions characterized the religious fanatics of his day.18 Francis Bacon, unaware of the future tumult which was to follow the fall of Charles I, wrote sympathetically: Not that divine illumination tests in the imagination; its seat being rather in the very citadel of the mind and understanding; but that divine grace uses the motions of the imagination as an instrument of illumination, just as it uses the motions of the will as an instrument of Ibid., pp. 16-17. Mediaevalists have pointed to a connection between the imagery of visionary experiences, recounted in the lives of the saints, and their concrete existence in figurative images; see S. Ringbom, Icon to Narrative, 1965. 16 Ibid., p. 504. 17 Act V, Scene 1. 18 See C. Hill, The World Turned Upside Down, 1975. 15 virtue; which is the reason why religion ever sought access to the mind by similitudes, types, parables, visions, dreams.19 Hobbes was not in a position to be as sympathetic to the workings of the imagination as Shakespeare or Bacon; his hostility towards its products should be well known to his readers. One of the more familiar passages from his reflections upon the Christian Commonwealth concerns the way in which God makes his Word known to man: To say that [God] bath spoken to him m a Dream, is no more then to say he dreamed that God spake to him; which is not of force to win beleef from any man, that knows dreams are for the most part natural, and may proceed from former thoughts; and such dreams as that, from selfe conceit, and foolish arrogance, and false opinion of a man's own godlinesse, or other vertue, by which he think% he bath merited the favour of extraordinary Revelation. To say he bath seen a Vision, or heard a Voice, is to say, that he bath dreamed between sleeping and waking: for in such manner a man doth many times naturally take his dream for a vision, as not having observed his own slumbering. To say he speaks by supernaturall Inspiration, is to say he finds an ardent desire to speak, or some strong opinion of himself, for which he can alledge no naturall and sufficient reason.20 A painted image was a fairly good substitute for a vision or a dream, and Hobbes was well aware of the power of painting to `penetrate the inmost affection'; as Sir Ernst Gombrich has pointed out: `The rational distinction between symbol and reality, between subjective vision and objective fact, appears almost deliberately to be blurred in the great Baroque ceiling paintings.'21 The practice of art depended upon a rational exploitation of irrationality: `the aim of painting is at once to enlighten the mind and delude the eyes, and ... this illusion which is caused in the eyes is based on their very functioning; the eyes themselves have learnt how to be deceived.'22 In the seventeenth century `the ignorant people' would have tended to believe that they were witness to a reality in the same way that we believe that we are when we see a photograph; the experience has upon it the stamp of authenticity. Like Erasmus before him,23 Hobbes challenged the notion that the artist could produce an authentic representation of a spiritual, non-terrestrial world: `there can bee no Image of God; nor of the Soule of Man; nor of Spirits; but onely of Bodies Visible, that is, Bodies that have light in themselves, or are by such enlightened.'24 It may be coincidental, but it is significant, that the great Protestant artist Rembrandt experienced difficulty, if not a crisis in conscience, in portraying angels.25 Artists and poets may imagine phenomena; they may imagine 'Centaures, Chimaeras, and other Monsters never seen' by compounding elements from individually observable phenomena and then render images of those compounds: `these are also called Images, not for the resemblance of any corporeall thing, but for the resemblance of some Phantasicall Inhabitant of the Brain of the Maker.'26 Bacon, De Augmentis Scientiarum, 2, XII, 1. An example of the way in which Bacon worked out his theory in practice is to be found in De sapientia veterum. 20 Lev., p. 288. 21 E. H. Gombrich, 'Icones Symbolicae', p. 155, in Symbolic Images, 1972. 22 Rubens, quoted in my previous article, p. 226. 23 Ibid., pp. 224-5. 24 Lev., P. 507. 25 See F. Saxl, 'Continuity and Variation in the Meaning of Images', pp. 10-11, in Lectures, 1957. 26 Lev., p. 507. 19 Thus it would be a fundamental mistake to believe that a painted image bore any equivalent relation to reality: `the Materiall Body made by Art, may be said to be the Image of the Phantasicall Idoll made by Nature.' 27 By the very nature of his activity the artist cannot represent nature but only his perception of it. Catholics believed that it was the business of the artist to transport the spectator into a spiritual world manifest to vision. But if the Catholics confused the world of fantasy with the world of fact, Hobbes both denied the existence of a spiritual world and relegated the world of art, in toto, to the world of fantasy, of unreality. Certain Protestant reformers had attacked the portrayal of unseeable phenomena but had allowed portrayal of historical events, of events which, in past time, would have been experienced as part of actual life. Hobbes believed that this was as dangerous as the portrayal of spirits; after all, images of the saints and the Virgin played a central role in Catholic ritual.28 He pointed out that representations of the Virgin and the saints were all dissimilar: `at this day we see many Images of the Virgin Mary, and other Saints unlike one another, and without correspondence to any one mans Fancy.'29 If artists claimed to portray the Virgin and the saints, and worshippers believed that in perceiving the images of them that they saw them, how could they account for the divergent nature of the representations? In the same way today, it only needs an adult to point out to a growing child the divergent appearances of the plurality of Father Christmasses that occupy shops from November for the child's faith in their functional efficacy to be eroded. In view of the dangerous nature of religious imagery, Hobbes argued: `Christian Sovereigns ought to break down the Images which their subjects have been accustomed to worship; that there can be not more occasion of such Ido latry.'30 Although Hobbes's views might, on the surface, sound remarkably like Plato's there is a major difference between the two in respect of the epistemological systems they brought to bear on their critiques of the visual arts. Plato was a metaphysician who thought in terms of the ultimate reality of the world of Ideas, a world which the artist was incapable of depicting; Hobbes was profoundly opposed to Plato's epistemology, regarding it as the product of a general misunderstanding of processes of perception and the root of a superstitious regard for visual imagery. It is an ironical fact that in the passage of time, Plato's doctrine of Ideas formed a basis for the theory of art which became enshrined in Bellori's L'Idea del Pittore, Dello Schultore e Dell'Architetto, Scelta Delle Bellezze Naturali Superiore Alla Natura, a cornerstone of classicist theory.31 Some forty-four years after the publication of Leviathan, Hobbes's friend Dryden introduced Bellori's doctrine of the Idea into England.32 The furore of iconoclasm had passed and a taste for paintings was, once again, fashionable along with a taste for continental art criticism and theory. But the influence of Hobbes's critique of the visual arts remained. Dryden opened his abridgement of Bellori by saying it 'cannot be unpleasing, at least to such who are conversant in the philosophy of Plato' and concluded it: 'In these pompous Expressions, or such as these, the Italian has given you his Idea of a Painter'. In the eighteenth century, English writers remained unconvinced that paintings could provide divine illumination or have any metaphysical or religious significance; instead they Ibid. See E. Mâle, L'art religieux aprés le Concile de Trent (Paris, 1932). 29 Lev., p. 508.. 30 Ibid., p. 513. 31 See E. Panofsky, Idea (Columbia, U.S.A., 1968). 32 In a 'Parallel between Poetry and Painting' published originally as a prefatory essay to his translation of Du Fresnoy's De Arte Graphica, 1695. 28 27 turned to an investigation of the workings of the imagination in relation to the visual arts. Even Shaftesbury, who vigorously rejected the empirical philosophy of Hobbes and Locke, maintained tha t a proper response to works of art should be disinterested and believed that superstition should be met with ridicule.