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Hobbes, Selfishness, and the Limits to Cooperation

THE FIRST ANNUAL THOMAS HOBBES OF MALMESBURY SYMPOSIUM ABBEY HOUSE, MALMESBURY Saturday 7th October 2017

THOMAS HOBBES, SELFISHNESS AND THE LIMITS TO COOPERATION

Thomas Hobbes, England’s  rst and foremost political philosopher, erected the edi ce of his thought on the premise that in a state of nature human beings act sel shly largely because in a world of scarcity individuals live in a situation of constant competition with one another. In order to overcome their insecurity, people entered into a Social Contract. Rousseau also posited the idea that humans lived in a State of Nature and that they entered into a Social Contract. Our three speakers will examine these key concepts and the divergent interpretations of them within the framework of the theme of the symposium.

10.30 – 11.30 Dr. Finn Spicer Choosing to Cooperate in Hobbes’s World 11.30 – 11.45 Co ee break 11.45 – 12.45 Dr. Naomi Goulder Hobbes and Self-interest 12.45 – 14.00 Lunch

14.00 – 15.00 Dr. Seiriol Morgan Rousseau and Property as the Source of all Evil 15.00 – 15.15 Tea break 15.15 – 16.15 All three speakers Final panel discussion

The Speakers

Naomi Goulder, Head of Faculty and Senior lecturer in Philosophy at the New College of the Humanities, London.

Seiriol Morgan, Senior lecturer, Department of Philosophy, University of Bristol Finn Spicer, Lecturer in the Department of Philosophy, University of Bristol

Tickets

Tickets for the day cost £18 or £15 for members or students (tea/co ee included) Available at hobbes.eventbrite.com

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The Pursuit of Knowledge returns to Worksop College! This unique Philosophy conference will be held at Worksop College between the 2 – 4 November.

The event will feature distinguished keynote speakers such as:

Naomi Goulder Jenny Saul Angie Hobbs Timothy Williamson Stephen Law The conference will be an exciting mix of interactive workshops, innovative seminars and the chance to be part of a Philosothon.

Hosted in conjunction with Philosophy in the City and The Royal Institute of Philosophy, the conference will promote critical thought and a love of knowledge of philosophy.

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LOVE (full text)

Neuroscientists connect erotic desire with high dopamine levels in the brain, but they tell us that after years in a relationship those levels tend to decline. The relationship is sustained, apparently, not so much by passion-related dopamine, as by commitment-inducing oxytocin instead.

Are passion and commitment fundamentally so distinct? Is it futile to seek a kind of love that’s both immediate, physical, particular and immutable, meaningful, ideal? If recent scientific findings have initiated a crisis of confidence in romantic love, philosophy offers a (slightly) different perspective.

In Plato’s dialogue the Symposium (385-370 BC), erotic love (personified in the daemon, Eros) is presented as the passion that connects the fleeting and physical with the eternal and meaningful. The lover wants the beloved in respect of fine, admirable, or beautiful features. Although initially captivated by a particular body, the lover’s gaze ascends naturally to ‘that which is beautiful by itself alone’. By internal logic, beauty itself (the archetype of all the particular beautifuls) turns out to be the ultimate object of desire.

This account of erotic love, relayed to Socrates by a female philosopher, Diotima, is (deliberately) strange.

First, there is the idea that the proper object of erotic desire is not a person at all, just the (collection of) immutable, repeatable, qualities they happen to exhibit. Love mediates between the lover’s physical, sensory, response to a particular body and his intellectual apprehension of beauty or goodness itself. When you love a particular person, you love them for the qualities they fleetingly instantiate; not for who they are ‘in themselves’.

Second, there is Diotima’s amazing confidence in the absolute value of the objects of erotic desire. When we love someone, she seems to say, we’re necessarily in love with what is beautiful and fine about them. We might think we love an immoral streak (for example), but what we love in that case is really independence or authenticity or some unequivocally admirable trait.

(So, it doesn’t matter who you fall for. If your attention is clear then your emotions will be purified and what is valuable will be revealed.)

Third, this account of erotic love plays havoc with our ordinary notions of beauty, goodness, and reality. What Diotima means by (what may be translated as) ‘the fine, admirable, or beautiful’ needs to be understood in light of the role it plays in her tale. We cannot assume that she thinks love is directed at what’s conventionally admired (facial symmetry, selfless generosity, or whatever). If we take seriously her claim that love is always for the beautiful, that requires us to reflect anew on what (for us) beauty really is.

Plato had no confidence in the ability of artists to produce anything of value. It is no accident that he proposed mostly to banish them from his ideal republic. Plato ‘wants to cut art off from beauty, because he regards beauty as too serious a matter to be commandeered by art’ (Iris Murdoch The Fire & the Sun: Why Plato Banished the Artists, 1977). Beauty exists on the cusp between the sensuous and the intellectual.  In his ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn’, Keats cites ‘Beauty is truth, truth beauty’; he sighs elsewhere for ‘a Life of Sensations rather than of Thoughts’.

What about reality? We ordinarily think of our physical environment as a paradigm of the real, but Diotima invites us to think it the opposite – as nothing in itself but a location for fleeting glimpses of qualities that are immutable and abstract. (Similarly, in Plato’s Republic, the physical world is flickering shadows thrown by a fire onto a cave wall.)

Fourth, the tale presents the beloved as of only instrumental – more exactly, incidental – value. She or he is merely a stage on the way to something purer and higher (ultimately, to contemplation of beauty or goodness itself, the vocation of philosophers or – one might think, despite Plato – of genuine artists). You thought you loved the angle of your lover’s cheek, the colour of her lips; but what you loved was – strictly – an angle, a colour! If the ultimate objects of love are immutable and abstract, each particular beloved is replaceable in favour of one who exhibits the valuable qualities to a higher degree.

Fifth, according to the account, true love is (for human beings) always unfulfilled and unrequited. Beauty itself, what all the beautifuls have in common, cannot be known (possessed) by a finite, physical, being. (It is pointless to try to capture it physically; it can be approached only through the intellect, and for physical beings looking directly into the sun is hard.)

Plato sometimes wonders how we could recognize glimpses of beauty or goodness around us at all if we had never apprehended pure beauty or goodness itself. (How can we identify goodness anywhere, if we don’t know what the essence of goodness is?) We must have encountered the beautiful and the good directly once, he speculates, outside space and time; so, then, the glimpses we get in erotic desire are a kind of ‘recollection’ of that encounter. Love and nostalgia are, metaphysically, the same.

Perhaps the philosopher’s ancient story of erotic love is only interestingly wrong. We might speculate that those who relate it to us – Socrates, the gadfly, and Plato, architect of the original 'beautiful lie’ – intended it that way.

The tale reminds us, however, to think about romantic love as (in part) a passion towards meaning. That’s something unlikely to be found in dopamine or oxytocin alone.

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research leave (May - September 2016)

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Debate

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Debate

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Short article