The Mundane Comedy of Thomas Hobbes

• In Event: The Politics of Wit II

Abstract

This essay reads Hobbes’s philosophy in light of Aristotle’s treatment of the virtue of wit in the Nicomachean Ethics and his treatment of comedy in the Poetics. Hobbes’s teaching looks like a secularization of Christianity when read as a comedy. The idea that human beings, as Hobbes describes them, naturally vicious, civilized only through fear and compulsion, lacking nobility, their courage discouraged, are apt for prosperity and theoretically everlasting peace is highly comical (and therefore unjust) from a classical perspective. Hobbes portrays it as rational and right so successfully that latter-day Hobbesians regard the anticipation of realistic utopias as reasonable. Hobbes often deploys wit to discredit those whose worldviews conduce to conflict and misery. But within Hobbes’s system, wit would be suppressed, as laughter is contrary to the conditions of peace. Hobbes therefore articulates the conditions under which humor becomes recognized only as an instrument of war and acceptable only on behalf of those endeavoring to engineer an imminent, immanent peace.

Author

• Travis D. Smith, Concordia University