
“Leviathan Book 1” by Thomas Hobbes (1651)
Introduction
- Nature can create things through man
- If life is but the moving of limbs, everything that comes as a consequence is artificial life
- Even further than man’s physical creations is the Leviathan of State – greater than a state of nature
- It provides an artificial being that protects & defends man, & an artificial soul to give life & motion to the body of people
- Officers of the State serve the people’s safety, memory, reason, will, etc.
- Book investigates this artificial man
- Part 1 – the matter & artificer that is man
- Part 2 – how it is made, rights & just power of authority of a sovereign, what preserves it & what dissolves it
- Part 3 – Christian Commonwealth
- Part 4 – Kingdom of Darkness
- It’s said that wisdom is acquired not by reading books but by reading men
- Many of those who say that use it as an excuse for slander & backbiting, & then calling themselves wise for it
- The saying, “know thyself” works better
- Men have a lot of similarities & if you looking within yourself, you can understand others through understanding yourself
- You’ll be able to detect in others all the good AND bad that you see in yourself
- It might not be perfect but it can give you a decent insight of mankind as a whole
Chapter 1 – Of Senses
- We’ll start with senses because that’s where all concepts in a man’s mind begin
- Might not be directly relevant to the rest of this work but it’s the place where it starts
- External things exist outside of us & our sensory organs tell our brains what they are picking up – images, smells, sounds, tastes & feelings
- This processing of all these things is sense & allows us to understand the world around us
Chapter 2 – Of Imagination
- People know a thing will sit still until it’s moved but don’t think a thing will stay in motion until it’s stopped because people get tired after moving & they think the object will get tired just like they would
- When a body moves, it moves until stopped but it isn’t done instantly. It takes time & effort to slow it down, then to stop it
- You can see that with wind & water slowing & stopping things.
- If you close your eyes, you keep the image of a thing in your mind
- This is a form of decaying sense found in men & animals
- When an object moves from our eyes, it shifts from our immediate sense to our imaginations
- When it falls out of our minds from sense & imagination over time, it weakens with the passage of time & distance
- It’s a form of decay. The shift from sense to imagination is in a form of memory
- Memories of things are called experience of things once sensed & passed into imagination
- Memory can be compounded with other memories/imaginations/experiences of seeing the same thing or person in different situations
- Shapes, colors, warmth, etc. can have forms of memory for us
- It may be difficult to distinguish between dreams & memory
- Senses can be confused by the circumstances
- Your memories & imagination can have an influence on your present by reminding you of something or give you ideas coming from other areas of your experienes
- Sometimes dreams are called prophecies or prognostics
- Teachers receive knowledge & it becomes memory/experience/imagination & they pass it on to student
- This is called understanding once it becomes a custom
Chapter 3 – Of the Consequence or Train of Imaginations
- One thought leads to another [mental discourse]
- Once you start thinking, the next thought may or may not be related to the last one
- 2 types of mental discourse
- 1 – Unguided – without design or is inconstant
- No passionate thought to govern or any specific goal or purpose to move toward
- Thoughts wander as if in a dream [day dream]
- May or may not be connected to the next thought
- 2 – Regulated by a desire or a design. Impression is stronger & more permanent – so strong it can wake you up or keep you from sleeping
- 2a – When we plan to make it happen [men & animals both do this]
- 2b – We imagine what we can do with it once we have it [only man does this]
- Discourse of mind in design is seeking, hunting out & the effects of that hunt
- Seeking lost things is based in remembrance
- 1 – Unguided – without design or is inconstant
- Sometimes a man will know the place where his thoughts seek something & he’ll search that place
- Sometimes he’ll try to find what he needs to do by thinking of past actions to apply to his goal
- Can be called foresight, providence, prudence, wisdom – but it can be wrong
- Present only exists in nature
- Past only exists in memory
- Future is a fiction based on past & imagined through prophecy & guessing
- A sign is an antecedent of what’s to happen in the future
- Some animals show more prudence than children do
- Prudence is a presumption of the future based on past experiences
- Our imaginations are finite – no possibility of picturing infinite time, space, force, etc.
- Only God can do that
- Can be called foresight, providence, prudence, wisdom – but it can be wrong
Chapter 4 – Of Speech
- The printing press wasn’t as ingenious as the written word
- Allows for continuation of memories beyond region & time
- Comes from speech which uses the mouth, tongue, lips & palate to make noises that mean something
- Without speech, there’d be no society or government – we’d be like animals
- First user of speech was God who taught Adam the names of the animals. But the Bible says no more than that
- Adam may have created the rest of language – general, special, affirmative, negative, interrogative, etc.
- Adam & co. worked on it until it was lost at the Tower of Babel where God dispersed people into different parts of the world because they rebelled & now there are many languages
- Purpose of language is to transfer mental discourse verbally or to turn train of though into train of word – sharing memories
- Names trigger people’s memories of things & people
- Signs show the causes of things
- We can show others our wills & purpose & to please ourselves & others with word play or fanciness
- Words can be used to deceive others & yourself
- Can be put into metaphors & to hurt one another
- Names can be proper to a person, common to many things or universal words for things with similar traits
- They might have mutual comprehension
- Words have consequence
- A triangle is defined as a polygon with 3 sides & angles adding up to 180°
- Universal rule or law – always true under any circumstances
- A triangle is defined as a polygon with 3 sides & angles adding up to 180°
- Words might have categories containing other categories
- A man is a living creature -> If he’s a man, he has to be a living creature
- “True” & “False” are attributes of speech, without speech, there is no “True” or “False”
- Man seeks truth in remembering meanings & when he fails he becomes entangled in words
- The true words are definitions
- Any man who aspires to true knowledge should explore an author’s “definitions”
- When mistakes are made, in defining things, men are ultimately led into absurdities
- A man is a living creature -> If he’s a man, he has to be a living creature
- First use of speech is in the right definition
- When it’s wrong, everything that follows is wrong too
- If what you read is wrong, you can only learn what’s true by understanding through words & speech. Also, when you’re wrong, it is the surest way to become foolish
- When it’s wrong, everything that follows is wrong too
- Words’ interpretation depends on what language you’re using. The Greek word “logos” translates into English as “word” or “reason”
- Diversity of words can be described
- 1 – Word for matter/body – living, sensible, rational, hot, etc.
- 2 – Accident/quality we think of it being – being moved, being hot, being alive. Living implies life. Being moved implies motion, etc.
- 3 – Properties of our own bodies – things seen by us, colors seen by us, ideas heard by us
- 4 – Qualities of names themselves & types of speech – affirmation, interrogation, syllogism, sermon, commandment.
- Negatives symbolize what a thing is not
- Diversity of words can be described
- Words are invented all the time but are meaningless to most people – “round square”, etc.
- Understanding others comes from reading or hearing
- False affirmations don’t provide understanding
- In reasoning, man must know that meanings of words aren’t always the same for 2 different people
- Even more complicated in metaphors
Chapter 5 – Of Reason & Science
- When a man reasons, he’s calculating – adding, subtracting, dividing, multiplying – literally with numbers, as well as putting words & ideas together to make a syllogism & then a demonstration
- Political writers do this by adding men’s duties, lawyers put laws & rights together to judge what’s wrong or right in men’s actions
- Sometimes reason has no role in any of this
- Political writers do this by adding men’s duties, lawyers put laws & rights together to judge what’s wrong or right in men’s actions
- “Reason” is just reckoning of the consequences of the names & markings agreed upon by ourselves & others
- Both learned & unlearned men may deceive themselves with false premises, ending up with false conclusions
- Lots of room for error – no man is infallible or certain in his reasoning
- Many men agree on something, giving it the illusion of being true. It’s hard when there’s no “natural” arbiter of reason & men, thinking they are wise, say something is true without must behind it. Often, it’s very convenient for their line of “reasoning” to be called true
- We use reason not to find one thing that’s true but to find the most basic building blocks of understanding & proceed from them
- We can’t be any more certain of the last conclusion if its premises aren’t well-grounded
- Reasoning is founded on the last & first conclusions equally
- When we reckon without words, we guess what may have happened before & what’s likely to follow
- If what’s likely to follow doesn’t actually follow, or what’s likely to have happened doesn’t actually happen, this reckoning is an error, something that happens to even the wisest men
- When we reason with words & come to a false inference, it might be an “error” but in speech, it comes out nonsense or bullshit
- Error is a deception in presuming the past or future
- “Round triangle”, “free will” or any contradiction – absurd
- We reduce consequences to “theorems” or “aphorisms”
- A man can reason numbers & sequences using these
- But only men can fall prey to absurdities, especially philosopher, because definitions give seem indisputable but they still can be wrong:
- 1 – The method is off. The names don’t match objects in explaining things in assertions
- 2 – Absurd assertions – made without proof & end up being wrong
- 3 – Using descriptions that are subjective
- 4 – Using general adjectives for specific things
- 5 – Using the nature of a thing as its definition – tautologies
- 6 – Using metaphors, figures of speech instead of actual, proper words
- 7 – Using words that mean nothing
- If you can avoid these, it’s easy not to talk nonsense – just don’t go on & on about a subject
- Men can reason well if they avoid mistakes & stick to principle. If mistakes aren’t detected early, everything based on them will be mistakes too
- Keeping honest & mistake-free is science – the correct knowledge of consequences
- Children aren’t used to reason, especially if they can’t speak. That comes slowly but surely with speech
- Men can reason well if they avoid mistakes & stick to principle. If mistakes aren’t detected early, everything based on them will be mistakes too
- Men can get a hold of reason but often they have little use for it in their lives. They see it as magic or trickery
- Men without contact with science are better off than those with bad reasoning or reliance on wrong facts regularly
- Ignorance doesn’t establish bad habits but bad habits & methods lead to cemented & repetitive miscalculations
- The mind can work properly but often leads to mistakes when given bad information or using false premises
- “Prudence” & “Sapience”, through Latin, translate to “wisdom” but they do have different meanings
- “Prudence” is knowing how & when to act & behave – relies on judgment
- “Sapience” is knowing what to do – relies on knowledge
- “Prudence” & “Sapience”, through Latin, translate to “wisdom” but they do have different meanings