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Hobbes greets readers of De Corpore with a bold claim. His philosophy can teach one how to imitate God: Philosophy, therefore, the child of the world and your own mind, is within yourself; perhaps not fashioned yet, but like the world its father, as it was in the beginning, a thing confused. Do, therefore, as the statuaries do, who, by hewing off that which is superfluous, do not make but find the image. Or imitate the creation: if you will be a philosopher in good earnest, let your reason move upon the deep of your own cogitations and experience; those things that lie in confusion must be set asunder, distinguished, and every one stamped with its own name set in order; that is to say, your method must resemble that of the creation.1 Discovering philosophy within oneself may mean following the example of “statuaries” (sculptors), who claim to “find” their object in the raw material by removing the superfluous, but to be what Hobbes would consider a “philosopher in good earnest” one must learn to do as God did. One must imitate creation. One must make order out of confusion, and it is the capacity to do this that Hobbes seems to promise his readers. Such promises do not sit comfortably with conventional views that assign Hobbes a role typically more modest than imitator of the omnipotent.2 We have learned to think of Hobbes as a student of the natural order, and of human nature in particular, not as a creator. He is said to have grounded his systematic political philosophy in assumptions that posit permanent human characteristics. To better their condition, he did not seek to craft or create humans, but strove to compensate for, and accommodate, them.3 The conventional understanding of this process of accommodation and compensation is roughly captured by the notion of “constraints that enable.” The constraints are most often associated with Hobbes’s laws of nature. 3 constraints that enable the imitation of god 36 p mortal gods They enable us to overcome and even take advantage of even the undesirable characteristics of human nature. We follow our self-interest and seek our own survival, and we are willing (and in the state of nature, even entitled) to do this at great cost to others. When unconstrained, the way we pursue these goals gets in the way of our capacity to cooperate with one another. Such a life has, famously, “no account of time; no arts; no letters; no society; and which is worst of all, continual fear, and danger of violent death,” and the life of man is “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.”4 These would seem to be the conclusions of a detached observer of humanity, of a thinker content to work with our inconvenient characteristics. The constraints we impose are designed with these root-level motivations in mind. We try to channel them toward more productive ends (sometimes promising to turn disadvantages into advantages). They count on our reasoning, perhaps our self-interest, or our selfishness, but most important, they modify the rewards and punishments that attend loyalty or the temptation to betray. The constraints, therefore, do not modify basic human nature (however conceived). Instead, they create the circumstances under which beings assumed to have these characteristics can be predicted to cooperate with one another. Against this perspective, I want to focus on a different set of constraints and a different set of promises to enable. The laws of nature are undoubtedly important, but there are more constraints in Hobbes’s philosophy. Instead of working around an inviolable subject (who must bounce and rebound off the institutional structures of the state according to scientific prediction, but who remains whole and essentially unchanged), the constraints that Hobbes proposes are like those imposed by the hands of a craftsman. They are designed to refashion the subject. Those who submit themselves to Hobbesian constraints are to be crafted into forms suitable to a well-ordered commonwealth. They can be compared, as Hobbes indeed does, to the stones made to fit together by a mason into a well-constructed building—if our sharp edges and odd shapes prove too hard to trim, the stonemason may throw us away as useless.5 Indeed, Hobbes not only does not think the subject inviolable, but alterable, and radically so: “The common people’s minds, unless they be tainted with dependence on the potent, or scribbled over with the opinions of their doctors , are like clean...

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