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

This is not a book for the faint-hearted: complex language is used to address difficult philosophical issues and their historical position. It requires concentration, and sometimes an etymological dictionary, if the propositions are to be understood. It is, however, worth the effort, for Conal Condren has important things to say about avoiding anachronism in trying to comprehend how philosophy was perceived in the past. These go far beyond the particular aspects of Thomas Hobbes he seeks to elucidate, critical as Hobbes is in the history of philosophy. Condren focuses on the various ways that writers used to ridicule the pretensions of those described as philosophers, although finding contexts and contextualising a problem, because contexts are not ‘neatly self-contained’ and ‘decidedly porous at the margins’ (p. 75) which complicates his search.

While many researchers seek to recover authorial intention, Condren deconstructs the over-rigid structure of contemporary academic disciplines that separates philosophy and history, which he has elsewhere described as corrosive. His aim is to reform our present-day reading of earlier texts to enable us to at least attempt to read as our ancestors would have done, and so with an understanding of how past ideas and values are recorded in words whose meanings have since shifted. Hobbes himself is held to have taken a familiar language and transformed it. It was no easy task and his approach was derided, especially by clerics, as ludicrous. Mockery was a favourite method of bringing down one who had exceeded his ‘office’, and to claim to be a philosopher was to claim an office with the status, rank, universality, and permanence that that implied. The Scriblerians, a club founded in 1713 by Pope, Swift, Fielding, Gay, and others, wrote satirically about contemporary modern philosophers to undermine their auctoritas. Their main creation was a shoddy, imaginary philosopher, one Martinus Scriblerus, and although they never name Hobbes, Scriblerus indirectly was a caricature of Hobbes. Condren claims that ‘if Hobbes had not lived, the Scriblerians would have needed to invent him’ (p. 125).

Condren’s core contention is that before the shifts now embedded in our present post-Kantian approach, the subject of the philosophical persona and his auctoritas and dignitas had, from classical times, been a serious matter inextricably linked to philosophical knowledge; that it was contested and that appreciating what intellectuals expected of this persona at the time is essential for a balanced insight. This book develops a particular aspect of Condren’s earlier work on Arbuthnot and Satire, and his study of oaths and offices called Arguments and Authority in Early Modern England (Cambridge University Press, 2006), which is almost required prior reading.

The message is that the absurd must be taken seriously. It was an integral part of the assessment of how satisfactory a philosophical argument was. The almost universal seventeenth-century opposition to Hobbes was in part the result of his sense of his own superiority as an independent and original thinker and his claims to have recreated philosophy. Laughter was thought the appropriate response. Condren examines the problem of context in history as a paradox parallel to the quantum physics problem of superposition – what today is often thought of as the paradox of Schrodinger’s cat.

This is not a broad study of Hobbes’s philosophy and although he is concerned with the way in which writers in the seventeenth and early eighteenth century borrowed from the Greek philosopher Lucian, who made extensive use of paradox and ridicule, Condren does not otherwise consider Hobbes’s position in European philosophy or even such matters as his theory of knowledge or his attitude to scepticism. The book is tightly focused on the philosophical value of the ‘persona’. Its wider focus is on the question of how important the historical context is to present-day philosophical use of past arguments given that context is a slippery and variable construct. Condren’s analysis of the degree...