Hobbes on the Perturbation of Reason

Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679) repeatedly describes reason as fragile, easily “perturbed” or disturbed by the passions, especially fear, vanity, and the desire for power. In Leviathan (1651), he argues that human beings in the state of nature are roughly equal in body and mind, but their judgments are constantly warped by self-interest and emotion:

• “The secret thoughts of a man run over all things, holy, profane, clean, obscene, grave, and light, without shame or blame” — reason is overwhelmed by appetite.
• Pride and vainglory are the chief perturbators: men overestimate their own wisdom (“every man is contented with his share of wit, and thinks he wants none”), which makes impartial judgment almost impossible.
• Fear is the most powerful perturbator of all. In the state of nature, the perpetual fear of violent death disturbs reason so violently that men cannot trust one another’s words or covenants. Even in civil society, sudden terror (war, rebellion, plague) can instantly dissolve rational obedience and plunge the commonwealth back into chaos.
• Hobbes therefore insists that true reason only becomes operative when a sovereign power removes the greatest cause of perturbation — the fear of violent death — by monopolising violence and enforcing peace. Only under the sword of the Leviathan can reason function steadily and publicly (through laws, science, and education).

Key passages:

• Leviathan, ch. 13: the equality of ability produces “diffidence” (distrust), and from diffidence war.
• Leviathan, ch. 17: men surrender their natural right because “the passions that incline men to peace are fear of death…” — fear is paradoxically both the great perturbator and the only force strong enough to discipline the passions and stabilise reason.
• De Cive (1642), ch. 3: “The cause of the coherence or consequence of words [i.e. rational discourse] is their first coherence in the mind… but men’s passions make their thoughts inconstant.”

In short, for Hobbes reason is never autonomous; it is always threatened by affective perturbation, and only an absolute, terror-backed political order can keep those perturbations at bay.

Virilio’s Direct Echo and Radicalisation of Hobbesian Perturbation

Virilio never wrote a systematic commentary on Hobbes, but his late work is saturated with a distinctly Hobbesian anxiety about the technological perturbation of reason — only now the primary perturbator is no longer the fear of violent death in the state of nature, but the fear induced by absolute speed and real-time media in the “state of emergency” of hypermodernity.

1. From the fear of violent death to the fear of instantaneous accident Hobbes’s ultimate perturbator is the ever-present possibility of violent death. Virilio updates this: in the dromocratic age, the ultimate perturbator becomes the ever-present possibility of the instantaneous integral accident (nuclear flash, stock-market flash crash, viral pandemic in real time, cyber-attack, etc.). → Virilio’s “original accident” (2007) is the technological successor to Hobbes’s “violent death”: both are the absolute horizon of fear that organises (or disorganises) all social and cognitive order.
2. The new “war of all against all” is a war of images and nerves Hobbes’s state of nature is a war of every man against every man. Virilio’s “pure war” (with Sylvère Lotringer, 1983) is a permanent technological state of emergency in which perception itself has become the battlefield. Live feeds, 24/7 news, drones, and algorithmic propaganda perturb reason far more efficiently than any pre-modern passion because they operate at the speed of light and bypass deliberation altogether.
3. The Leviathan becomes the “Vision Machine” / Globalitarian State Hobbes needs an absolute sovereign to stabilise reason by monopolising legitimate violence. Virilio sees the emergence of a new absolute sovereign: the military-industrial-media complex that monopolises legitimate perception. Surveillance capitalism, real-time control rooms, and pre-emptive policing constitute a techno-Leviathan whose function is no longer to pacify bodies but to pacify minds by saturating them with fear and preventing any slow, reflective reason from emerging. → See The Administration of Fear (2012, with Bertrand Richard): “Fear is now administered in real time… We are no longer in the age of Hobbes’s Leviathan, we are in the age of the synchronization of emotions.”
4. Polar inertia and the end of deliberative reason Hobbes believed that once the sovereign removes the fear of violent death, men can finally deliberate and use reason. Virilio’s diagnosis is the exact opposite: the technological removal of geographical distance and delay (what he calls “polar inertia”) abolishes the very interval in which deliberation used to take place. Reason is now permanently perturbed because there is no longer any temporal gap between stimulus and response. The subject is reduced to a reflex embedded in the global nervous system.

In short, Virilio radicalises Hobbes: Hobbes thought an artificial sovereign could finally de-perturb reason by neutralising the fear of violent death. Virilio replies that the new artificial sovereign (the techno-military-media complex) has become the ultimate perturbator, producing a permanent state of emergency in which reason is chronically short-circuited by the speed and terror of the integral accident.

Virilio’s hypermodern subject is therefore a post-Hobbesian subject: no longer capable of the slow, geometric reason Hobbes dreamed of, but trapped in an accelerated state of nature where the war of all against all has migrated from the plains and forests into the optical nerve itself.