From the Political Animal to Human Nature
In his « little Treatise in English» on Human Nature (1640), and, later, in Leviathan (1647-1650), Thomas Hobbes examines and redefines the passions. Basing his thought upon the concept of motion, he conceives them as thoughts : passions are nothing but perceptions which transit through the brain, and then move towards the heart. There they cause various sensations of pleasure or pain, by helping or hindering « vital motion ». Anger, he claims, is a break-through in front of a sudden opposition, not the response to an outrage, as the Ancients erroneously put it. This criticism of the classical definition of anger is highly significant. Because orge, understood as the grief for an undeserved slight, joint to the wish to retaliate, was for Aristote the political passion par excellence. It is because we are insulted that we revolt, and that our revolt is justified. It is in anger that we mobilize ourselves in a just war. Be it a tumultuous explosion or a longlasting grudge, ire is by definition the reasoned answer of a social actor, who suffers in her body as well as in the social image that she created for herself, and on behalf of justice : one does not recognize this person for that which she wants to be considered. What are the consequences of this criticism, which consists in disconnecting anger from justice, for a theory of the state of nature, of civil society, and of the state as protector of human security? In the transition from a theory of the political animal, naturally inclined to sociability (Aristote), to a mechanist vision of human nature, made up of movement and competition (Hobbes), it is the anthropological underpinnings of politics which come to be rethought. The interlacing of rights, habits and body, which framed the complexity of emotions in the classical past, is now undone. The case of anger illustrates this dislocation.