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Analogy and Equivocation in Hobbes

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  25 February 2009

S. Morris Engel
S. Morris Engel
Affiliation:
University of Southern California.
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Extract

The failures of a philosophic system (like the failures and set-backs in the life and career of a person) are often a good deal more revealing than its successes, for such failures (like those in real life) test its strength and mark the limits of its endurance. Yet if these failures disclose any uniform pattern they are not only revealing but instructive and can be turned to good account.

Type
Articles
Information
Philosophy , Volume 37 , Issue 142 , October 1962 , pp. 326 - 335
Copyright
Copyright © The Royal Institute of Philosophy 1962

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References

page 327 note 1 El.of L., pp.18–19. (The texts of Hobbes 's works used in this paper are those edited by Sir William Molesworth, The English Works of Thomas Hobbes (published in 1839). Quotations from Human Nature, however, are taken from Tönnies edition (The Elements of Law Natural and Politic, Cambridge University Press, 1928) and will be abbreviated to El.of L.).

page 329 note 1 See his remarks about the divisions of the De Corpore in the ‘Epistle Dedicatory’ to Human Nature.

page 329 note 2 ‘Although Sense and Memory of things, which are common to man and all living creatures, be knowledge’, he says in this connection, ‘yet because they are given us immediately by nature, and not gotten by ratiocination, they are not philosophy’. {E.W., I, 3.)

page 330 note 1 E.W., I, xii.

page 330 note 2 E.W., I, 10–11.

page 330 note 3 See E.W., I, 6; 70–73; 140; but especially his full statement in E.W., VII, 184 (‘Epistle Dedicatory’ to the Six Lessons to the Professors of the Mathematics (1656). Hobbes declares himself on p. 242 of this work to have been ‘the first that hath made the grounds of geometry firm and coherent’).

page 330 note 4 Kant's Critique of Pure Reason. Translated by Norman Kemp, Smith. London: Macmillan and Co., 1953, p. 20 (‘Preface to Second Edition’).Google Scholar See also p.23 where Kant states that ‘we can know a priori of things only what we ourselves put into them’.

page 331 note 1 E.W., I, 94.

page 331 note 2 E.W., I, 93.

page 331 note 3 E.W., I, 92.

page 331 note 4 E.W., I, 108.

page 331 note 5 E.W., I, 3.

page 332 note 1 E.W., III (Leviathan), 23–4.

page 332 note 2 E.W., VII, 184.

page 332 note 3 E.W., I, 108; 102.

page 332 note 4 See E.W., I, 42; 43–4; 122–3.

page 332 note 5 Brandt, who comments on Hobbes's identification of these two categories, writes about Hobbes's attempt as follows: He makes a remarkable, and as far as our reading extends, unique attempt in De Corpore to fuse real and formal knowledge, so that the resulting knowledge, for which the history of philosophy has not framed any special name, retains the certainty of formal knowledge, while at the same time it obtains, as it were, a character of reality. (Thomas, Hobbes'sMechanical Conception of Nature. London: Librairie Hachette, 1928, p. 241). It is remarkable that Brandt's reading did not extend to Kant!Google Scholar

page 333 note 1 El. of L., p. 18. If Hobbes believes that he has performed a successful connection of his two kinds of knowledge on the basis of the common use of the word ‘experience’ he is obviously mistaken. The two usesto which he puts the word are as unrelated as the two types of knowledge to be related, and no advance has been made beyondstating that both types of knowledge involve ‘memory’. While ‘experience’ (or remembrance) may determine our actions (not going out without a rain-coat after seeing clouds in the sky) it does not determine our understanding of the proper use of words. One doesn't learn to make proper sentences or do a theorem in geometry because of ‘experience’. This is not an appropriate word for such activities, and it is not appropriate because something more than the mere remembering or experience of having heard proper sentences or seen the proper way of doing theorems in geometry is required in order to perform such activities oneself.

page 333 note 2 E.W., I, 389; El. of L., p. 6. ‘He that perceives that he hath perceived’, he says, ‘remembers’ (Nam sentire se sensisse, meminesse est) [L.W., I, 317], which is obviously an equivocation upon ‘perceive’ (sentire). A distinction is here intended, I think, between such statements as ‘to perceive a man’ (which is to have a sensation) and ‘to perceive that an object is a man’ (which is a secondary statement and not just a sensation). Hobbes here unconsciously admits into his system an introspective faculty his mechanism or materialism is unable to justify. A similar ‘con-fusion’ is contained in the phrase ‘by what sense shall we take notice of sense?’ which should be read in the context of the remark made in Human Nature: ‘For as sense telleth me, when I see directly, that the colour seemeth to be in the object; so abo sense telleth me, when I see by reflection, that colour is not in the object’. (Ibid.) The double use of the word ‘sense’ in this remark is explicated by a similar use of the word ‘see’.

page 333 note 3 Here again Hobbes is not very convincing. He would be convincing and ‘civil philosophy’ would be demonstrable if a ‘commonwealth’ could be ‘made’ under the same conditions in which geometry is ‘made’, but since a commonwealth is constituted by the practical and (thus) unpredictable (human beings)and not, like geometry, by the intelligible and ideal (motions in space), his analogy here between the two sciences is not a sound one. Furthermore, the ‘motions’ involved in making geometry are totally different from the motions constituting the system of causes and effects in the mechanical universe. And the only thing which the making of geometry, the making of a commonwealth, and the making (production) of causes and effects in nature share in common, as someone once remarked, is the word ‘making’. To think that because they are all instances of activity of one kind or another, therefore the activity is all of one kind, is to resolve differences by simply ignoring them.

page 334 note 1 E.W., I, 82–3. See abo pp. 311–12.

page 334 note 2 E.W., I, 388; De Homine {L.W., II), 93–4; E.W., VII, 184.

page 334 note 3 E.W., 1,531.

page 335 note 1 I should perhaps add in conclusion that although I have said that the De Corpore is a remarkable anticipation in miniature of the Critique of Pure Reason I am fully aware of the vast differences between the standpoints of the two works on certain fundamental issues (e.g., whether the ultimately real—bodies in motion in Hobbes and things-in-themselves in Kant—is knowable or not, etc.). Still their similarities in approach, considered broadly, are so great that something is gained, I believe, in viewing the one in terms of the other. We can judge the ‘miniature’ a good deal better, I have been suggesting when, as Plato would have put it, we see it ‘writ large’. I have not tried to show how Kant avoided the inconsistencies and failures (if, in fact, he did!) to which Hobbes's work is subject. To have done so would have been both gratuitous (since my purpose was simply to show that Hobbes's failures become much more intelligible when viewed against the greater canvas of the Critique and not how he could have avoided them) and impracticable—considering the limits I set myself.