A prominent motif in Hobbes’s Leviathan is the question of “incorporeal bodies,” an important idea in Catholic belief. Hobbes uses the belief in “incorporeal bodies” as an example of confused or erroneous thought at multiple different points in the book. In his discussion of the ways in which unclear language leads to mistakes in our thinking and in philosophy, Hobbes writes:
Another, when men make a name of two Names, whose significations are contradictory and inconsistent; as this name, an incorporeall body, or (which is all one) an incorporeall substance, and a great number more. For whensoever any affirmation is false, the two names of which it is composed, put together and made one, signifie nothing at all. For example, if it be a false affirmation to say a quadrangle is round, the word round quadrangle signifies nothing; but is a meere sound.
Among the various errors of language he outlines in this section, he highlights self-contradictory phrases that combine two ideas that are logically opposed. His principal example of this error, here and elsewhere in Leviathan, is an “incorporeal body”—or, in other words, a “spiritual body” as opposed to a physical one. Various examples of non-physical bodies are important in Catholic belief, such as the Holy Ghost. For Hobbes, this phrase is a logical contradiction: a body is, for Hobbes, that which has mass and takes up space, but something that is “incorporeal” has no matter by definition. He will continue throughout the book to use “incorporeal bodies” as a common motif, exemplifying a theological idea that is erroneous from the perspective of his own materialist philosophy.
An important motif in Hobbes’s Leviathan is bodily deformity. Because Hobbes imagines, throughout the book, the state as a “body politic,” he accordingly describes forms of government that he disapproves of as misshapen or deformed bodies. Describing a state in which a King, a general assembly, and some other public assembly all share power, Hobbes writes:
And therefore if the King bear the person of the People, and the generall Assembly bear also the person of the People, and another Assembly bear the person of a Part of the people, they are not one Person, nor one Soveraign, but three Persons, and three Soveraigns.
Here, he imagines three people sharing one body, each one directing the body in different or even conflicting manners. Further developing this motif, he writes:
To what Disease in the Naturall Body of man, I may exactly compare this irregularity of a Common-wealth, I know not. But I have seen a man, that had another man growing out of his side, with an head, armes, breast, and stomach, of his own: If he had had another man growing out of his other side, the comparison might then have been exact.
Here, Hobbes also uses some startling imagery, imagining a man “that had another man growing out of his side” and then yet “another man growing out of his other side.” This kind of bodily deformity, Hobbes suggests, is mirrored in a state that is not lead by one sole ruler who can direct the “body politic” in one, clear direction. This motif of bodily deformity is central to Hobbes’s critique of various forms of government in which power is shared between multiple parties or branches.
