Thomas Hobbes: Behemoth or the Long Parliament (review)

454 JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY 30:3 JULY ~992 worse than nothing. Marion carries on this tradition of concern, informed by the methods of contemporary continental phenomenology in the wake of Heidegger. Many Anglo-American philosophers are ignorant of this continental tradition. (Marion, on the other hand, is well-informed about analytic philosophy.) It would be easy for an analytic philosopher to say that the most visible and vulnerable Achilles heel in Marion's work is his taking metaphysics itself to be a meaningful subject matter. Even if talk of God were not nonsense (and Marion agrees, with the proper qualifications , that it is), then the notion of transcendental knowledge of Being, whose existence is proved just because there is no concept of it and just because we cannot understand it, surely is nonsense. Marion believes that philosophy--or metaphysics--culminates (or even begins) at those limits of human certainty and understanding that Descartes reaches in the Meditations, limits even Locke understood, limits pushed successively by Kant, Hegel, and Heidegger. For such metaphysicians as Marion, God is not dead; God is neither alive nor dead; God--or Being--is ineffably on the other side. Since Kierkegaard and Heidegger, no philosopher has probed that boundary of metaphysical understanding more persistently, and no one in our time in more accessible language , than Jean-Luc Marion. Those of us who find transcendental metaphysics truly incomprehensible must contend with the mystery of how one of the most educated, intelligent, and intellectually sophisticated philosophers of our time can find the incomprehensible to be the threshold of the only inquiry truly worthwhile. RICHARD A. WATSON Washington University Thomas Hobbes: Behemoth or the Long Parliament. Edited by Ferdinand T6nnies. With a New Introduction by Stephen Holmes. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 199o. Pp. 1 + 2o4. Paper, $1~.95. "The principal and proper work of history," wrote Hobbes, is "to instruct and enable men, by the knowledge of actions past, to bear themselves prudently in the present and providently toward the future"; and histories do this best when they take for their topic some calamity that men have brought upon themselves, for "men profit more by looking on adverse events, than on prosperity," and "their miseries do better instruct, than their good success. ''~ It is no wonder then that Hobbes should have sought to reinforce the conclusions of his theoretical masterpiece, Leviathan, by writing his own history of the causes of the English Civil War, which, happily, is now available in an attractive new paperback edition with an excellent introduction by Stephen Holmes. Despite the differing historical circumstances surrounding Hobbes's composition of the two works, Holmes's contention that Behemoth can aid us in understanding Leviathan is surely plausible, since a history of the causes of a particular political conflict and a general theoretical treatment of disorder occasioned by that very conflict may J Hobbes's translation of Thucydides' History of the Peloponnesian War, ed. Richard Schlatter (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, x975), 6, ~o. BOOK Rs 455 reasonably be expected to share underlying conceptions of human motivation, interests , and weaknesses. It is to the Behemoth's characterization of these underlying conceptions that Holmes draws our attention, and that is what makes his introduction so useful. According to Holmes, Hobbes takes the causes of the English Civil War to have been psychological and ideological, the war having resulted from men's irrational passions and doctrinal errors. Both kinds of cause were exhibited in the religious struggles that stood at the core of the war. Hobbes, he persuasively argues, viewed religion as "a potent amalgam of opinion and passion, with an almost irresistible power to shape and misshape human behavior" (xxxiv). Holmes reminds us that for Hobbes, "human behavior is largely determined by beliefs" (xlix), and disagreement in religious beliefs or doctrines "engenders civic discord because parties coalesce around ideas" (xxvii).' Moreover, the passions exploited by religion, most notably fear of God's wrath, can wreak havoc with all arrangements that depend for their stability on merely human sanctions, because "human beings fear dishonor and damnation much more than they fear death" (xi). Close attention to the Behemoth's discussion of religion explodes the...