Hobbes, the Scriblerians and the History of Philosophy by Conal Condren (review)

Thomas Hobbes’s place in the philosophical canon is sufficiently secure that it has spawned an entire secondary literature devoted to reactions to his philosophy, and specifically to his 1651 masterwork, Leviathan. With this book, Conal Condren extends the scope of critical reactions to Hobbes to include eighteenth-century responses, and specifically to the writings of the Scriblerius Club—an informal alliance of English men of letters that included Jonathan Swift, Alexander Pope, John Gay, John Arbuthnot, Henry St. John, and Thomas Parnell. The Scriblerians were satirists whose principal targets were the excesses of learned men, whether in the form of pretentious learning, pedantry, or attachment to ill-conceived philosophical schemes.

Condren is concerned not only with extending scholarly attention to eighteenth-century responses to Hobbes, but with examining reactions to the Hobbesian program that are not, by most current standards, strictly philosophical. The Scriblerians’ principal literary production was the Memoirs of the Extraordinary Life, Works, and Discoveries of Martinus Scriblerus, 1741. As Condren depicts the character, Scriblerus is a man “with his mind full of science for the betterment of the world,” and the Scriblerians employed this character humorously with the serious intent “to satirize the intellectual folly of the times” (79). A question that looms very large in Condren’s study is whether, and to what extent, employment of a satirical “philosophic persona” is a legitimate means of criticizing the doctrines of a philosopher.

In his first two chapters, Condren makes the case that satire in the style of the secondcentury Roman author Lucian was employed by both Hobbes and his opponents. As Condren documents, Hobbes regularly availed himself of satiric modes of expression in his battles against those who opposed his philosophical and political tenets. Likewise, his detractors often chose to combat the supposed Hobbist menace by humorously depicting the philosopher from Malmesbury as a vainglorious, pretentious, and ill-informed man whose embrace of materialism and political absolutism was more the product of libertinism or ambition than sober argument.

Part II of Condren’s study contains three chapters devoted to the Scriblerians (chiefly Swift, Pope, and Arbuthnot) and their invention of a demented philosophical persona in the form of the fictional Martinus Scriblerius. The confused (if not deranged) philosopher thus depicted in an enthusiast of modern science and its application to all aspects of human life. In obscure and muddled language Scriblerius portrays humans as purely material beings whose identities, obligations, and interests depend only upon the motion and collisions of the material particles of which they are composed. The Scriblerians’ satiric construction of this philosophical persona clearly had Hobbes’s philosophy as one of its chief targets, which Swift, Pope, et al. regarded as dangerous to morals, politics, and general good taste.

Condren contends that we misunderstand the context of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century philosophy if we ignore its satiric dimension. Although philosophers may imagine that their doctrines are supported by and ought only to be opposed by rational arguments, the fact remains that philosophers have often engaged in polemical writing that does not conform to this rarefied conception of the discipline. Hobbes may well be one of the best cases to consider in this context. As Condren amply shows, Hobbes was indeed an enthusiastic proponent of satire in the Lucianic style when it suited his purposes.

Although we may agree that there is a satirical dimension to seventeenth- and eighteenth-century discussions of philosophy, the fact remains that such devices as the Scriblerians’ “philosophic persona” do not necessarily constitute rationally compelling grounds for disputing the claims of a philosopher. The caricature of Hobbes crafted by the Scriblerians may be amusing, but it might amount to no more than a way of framing ad hominem arguments against the Hobbesian project. Condren’s concluding “Afterword” attempts to make the case that the very notion of philosophy as a purely rational activity untainted by satirical display or ad hominem argumentation involves the internalization of a very specific philosophic...