Hobbes On Scientific Happiness

Abstract Many consider Hobbes the father of political individualism, claiming that his new conception of happiness involved abandoning its metaphysical dimension, which had been central in ancient times and in the Middle Ages. Highlighting previous commentators’ inattention to the link between scientific knowledge and happiness in Hobbes’s thought, I demonstrate the inaccuracy of considering him the founder of a new ideal of happiness grounded in individual experience. Hobbes adopts the ancient principle that man’s happiness is necessarily conditional upon his submission to a normative system derived from the truth regarding his nature. His originality lies in an innovative understanding of human nature and scientific truth. This article suggests that progress in a person’s life, which is possible only in the realm of pleasures of the mind, is an objective element of Hobbes’s notion of happiness, which derives from his definition of humans as rational and curious beings. Leaving the state of nature freed man from the misery that results from constant war and the horror of violent death that accompanied it, but not from the misery whose source is ignorance regarding the purpose of life.