The Scandal of Insensibility; or, The Bartleby Problem

I N THE FIRST PART OF LEVIATHAN, “OF MAN,” BEFORE HOBBES DEFINES a commonwealth and prophesies the philosophical “Kingdome of Darknesse” into which it can descend (956), he proclaims that “to have no Desire, is to be Dead” (110). As a motto for the passions, the phrase resonates as a defense of desire, a call to understand strong feelings as on the side of life. To have no desire is to be dead or as good as dead. Of course, in Hobbes’s philosophy, it means to be clinically dead, since life is deined as a state of motion, and desires (into which all passions can be distilled) are “the Interiour Beginnings of Voluntary Motions,” the very irst stirrings of action that move us either toward objects that are good for us or away from objects that are bad (78). In opposition to a scholastic view of sense perceptions as taking place within the immaterial soul, Hobbes redeined all interior responses (thoughts and feelings) as physical movements. Put simply, emotions are motions. As homas Spragens writes, “Not only are the passions motions, in Hobbes’s view, but cognition also can be conceived as a form of motion. hat is, the intellectual faculties as well as the emotional strivings of living creatures are, at bottom, nothing but motion” (71).1 In this ontology of life, cognition, emotion, and action are continuous and inseparable phenomena. hus, what I am calling insensibility—the absence of interior motions, or feelings, that arrests the possibility of action—would appear impossible to conceive except as death. “For there is no such thing as perpetuall Tranquility of mind,” writes Hobbes, “because Life it selfe is but Motion, and can never be without Desire, nor without Feare, no more than without Sense” (Leviathan 96). Susan James observes that for Hobbes “we can never be without a susceptibility to passion,” and “[w] hen the internal motions that are our appetites and aversions cease, we die, and become corpses rather than human beings” WENDY ANNE LEE is an assistant professor