“Leviathan Book 1” by Thomas Hobbes (1651) – Introduction to Chapter 5

“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
• 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

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
• 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
• 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
• 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
• 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
• “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 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