Hobbes’s theory of experience extended to the expression of thought, to language. He was here inserted in, and apt heir of, a line of English philosophers that constituted the medieval via moderna in response to the metaphysical excesses of realism. Hence certain tenets of the Venerabilis Inceptor, William Ockham, were recuperated, “…nihil esse genericum neque universale praeter nomina…”(1) The Aristotelian solution to Platonic idealism, based on the division of matter and form, did not apply to the res anymore. The material aspect gives real consistency, the formal one is cognitive, therefore individual, framed by the use of language.
Nominalism became the hallmark of Hobbes’s metaphysical conception, it contained the central considerations he extended to other domains of knowledge, “there is a certain philosophia prima, on which all other philosophy ought to depend, and consiteth principally, in right limiting of the significations of such appellations, or names, as are of all others most universals…”(2) Nominalism entrenched a fissure within the given plane of construction; the individuality of experience, the separation between word and object, and the constructed, man-made, character of universal terms. Nominalism extended to classical schoolmen concepts like accident; they were no longer understood as an abstract property anymore, but as a linguistic sign that exhibited the modifications produced on a body.(3)
Nominalism also conveyed the destitution of language as a privileged emplacement to reveal truth; it stood as a symbolic human system that contained the historical and contingent evolution of marks,(4) unrelated immediately to the world. Nominalism unveiled Bacon’s idols of the market, those features in language that impeded communication and produced false conceptions: “This universality of one name to many things, hath been the cause that men think that the things themselves are universal.”(5) This peculiarity of words made error possible and sometimes impeded its counterpart, -understanding. The place of this fatal mistake remained in our current use of language and, more specifically, in the excesses of the verb to be;(6) concepts are but names.
This linguistic theory has further implications in moral appreciation, in the manner moral judgments were conveyed and in the possibility of a moral philosophy founded on stable footing, “…we cannot from experience conclude, that any thing is to be called just or unjust, true or false, nor any proposition universal whatsoever, except it be from remembrance of the use of names imposed arbitrarily by men.”(7) If sense-data depended on personal observation, then, even if there was an external necessary order of things, no objective knowledge could be forged for it had to pass through the filter of diverse physiologies, characters, and constitutions. Hobbes developed a positive approach to knowledge by devoting to a novel form of understanding and relating to nature.
Leonardo- Rearing Horse
(1) De Corpore, VIII, 5. It is interesting to pursue certain antecedents of Hobbes in Ockham. His suppositio theory already suggested a renewed approach to the relation of subject and predicate, they both stand for a singular being they can be predicated of. They do not relate two separate entities, but refer to two terms to a single entity. Terms do not have any metaphysical relation with properties or ideas but refer directly to a singular object given in reality. Only personal suppositio has an ontological character, an external individual as referent. Ockham analyzes the ontological status of the things to which we attribute predicates and concludes that they do not share any property or participate from any idea. A word that entails a concept is being predicated of them. It is a mental representation that can be truly predicated of a series of individuals, an idea stemming form man’s mind. In Ockham there is a shift of interest from a representative ontology to a referential epistemology.
Universals (genera, specia) are terms of second intentio in the sense of meta-referential. The first intentio denotes terms that do have some external object as a reference, whereas second intentio terms refer to a sign of the first intentio, they are meta-linguistic, they represent abstract concepts. Aristotle pointed out in his works the existence of two different substances, the first substance associated to the individuals and the second substance which comprises genus and species, i.e. the universals. Metaphysics as a science would stand especially for the latter. The critical nuance of these two substances was their relation through the principle of individuation
Ockam’s first assumption, his principle of individuation, implies that any object in the world has to be singular, only singulars have an external existence so that if any external object is singular and universals are deemed to be external they would be singular, and therefore they would not exist as universals. This idea is summarized in the maxim ‘nulla substantia est universalis’.
(2) Leviathan, IV, 46, 14.
(3) “…accident as a mode of conceiving a body.” De Corpore, VIII, 2. “Nam si de nominee corporis, id est, de nominee concreto interrogatur, quid est ? per definitionem respondendum est, quaeritur enim vocis significatio tantum : verum si de nomine abstracto quaeratur quid est ? quaeritur causa quare aliquid hoc vel illo modo apparet. Ut si quaeratur, durities quid sit ? Ostendenda est causa, quare nisi cedente toto, pars non cedit, ” Ibid.
(4) “Le signe n’est pas type à partir de la chose; il l’est contre la chose, à contre-chose” A. Robinet, “Le ‘Leviathan’ aujourd’hui: de l’automate langagier”, B. Willms et al., op. cit., p.203.
(5) Elements of Law, I, 5, 6. Ibid, “there is nothing universal but names; which are therefore also called indefinite.” Cf. Leviathan I, 5, 5, “if a man should talk to me of a round quadrangle, or accidents of bread in cheese; or immaterial substances; or of a free subject; a free will, or any free, but free from being hindered by opposition, I should not say he were in an error, but that his words were without meaning; that is to say, absurd.”
(6) ”Unde constat essentium, quatenus distinquitur ab existential, nihil aliud esse praetor nominum copulationem per verbum est…” Objectiones, objectio XIV.
(7) Elements of Law, I, 4, 11.
