Epistemology

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Rousseau on a botanical model of science

December 27, 2011 in Epistemology, Nature, Rousseau | No comments

Jean Jacques’ self-contained passion for botanic endeavours, his love for ‘herborisation’, confirmed a certain organization and system in nature, a ‘chaîne de rapports et de combinaisons’.(1) This acknowledgement was not from a theoretical order, it was obtained from his own cultivating experience in his retreat to L’Ermitage. A major shift in the observation of nature occurred based on the recollection of actual elements rather than on the exemplification of rules and models. In his letters on botanic he deployed meticulous and careful observations,(2) introducing technical concepts for the teaching of a neophyte. The series of eight letters addressed to Mme. Delessert witnessed this circumstance. Botanic provided with a strong counterpart to classical science based on manipulation rather than on mere observation.(3)

Rousseau also cultivated, as an amateur, the sciences. Rather than classical mechanics, his interest shifted towards chemistry, to which he devouted the unpublished Institutions chymiques. Here he reflected on Stahl’s distinction between aggregate and mix, by which the latter adquired novel properties by means of the combination of the previous discrete elements. Physics, classical modern science, more deemed to a static analysis, would be in charge of describing the exterior of a body, meanwhile chemistry would be concerned rather with the interior, in the same vein as Rousseau devouted his effort to displaying all his dynamic interiority. The chemical paradigm helped distilling the theological content of Bossuet’s concept of organism and refurbishing the noetic space with new central metaphors and alignments of elements that would reappear in the division within the individual and in the achievement of an internal conglomerate by means of the nation.(4)

His later ideas on nature point to a continual flux and, on the other hand, an individual wish for stability: “Je voudrais que cet instant durât toujours.” (5) Time and continuity were reconciled with the consistency of the I that always escaped definition, either because of external change or because of inner motions. Observation, focusing the attention externally, provoked a certain forgetfulness of the self. Self-conscience was released and projected on the entire nature; the absence of self-awareness unveiled the being, sparse, opaque to attention, conveying experience and communion.

Only the perpetual tides of change impeded human welfare. The object of fulfilment was also in continuous movement producing an endeavour, a strife never to be accomplished, with no possible halcyon, -a never ending agitation. Change was related to a certain concept of golden age; a lost paradise that lied in a hypothetical past, not in any metaphysical or mysterious doctrine.

(1) Confessions XII [Seuil I, p. 369].
(2) “La Corolle du Lis n’est pas d’une seule piéce comme il est facile à voir. Quand elle se fane et tombe, elle tombe en six piéces bien séparées qui s’appellent des Pétales.” [Pléiade IV p. 1153].
(3) Cf. P. Saint-Amand “Rousseau contre la science: l’exemple de la botanique dans les textes autobiographiques” Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century, 219, 1983, pp. 159-67.
(4) An ambitious portrait of chemistry’s influence in other areas of Rousseau work can be found in B. Bensaucle- Vincent and B. Bernardi, Rousseau et les sciences, Paris, 2003. Chemistry allowed him “… constituter, si je puis risquer cette expression, le terreau dont ses concepts politiques en formation avaient besoin pour se nourrir.” B. Bernardi, “La place des référents scientifiques dans l’invention conceptuelle: Une étude de cas”, B. Bensaucle- Vincent and B. Bernardi, op. cit., p. 311. Chemistry and both the idea of composition and organism were still consistent with Rousseau’s endeavor, both the description of the individual and the arrengement, the politicalformula, behid the constitution of the sovereign. The orography had included this new element an was to be affected, once more, on other areas of knowledge and the representation of power. Besides the few scientifical writings of Rousseau, as a divulgator, included spherical geometry in his Traité de la sphére (1760-7), he showed a deflection from cartesian analytical geometry. Rousseau actually used the mechanical image to despise his enemies “…je compris que mes contemporains n’étoient par rapport à moi que des êtres méchaniques qui n’agissoient que par impulsion et dont je ne pouvais calculer l’action que par les loix du mouvement…” Rêveries du Promeneur Solitaire VIII [Seuil I, p. 535].
(5) Rêveries du Promeneur Solitaire V [Seuil I, p. 523]. Starobinski observed the incompatibility of Rousseau’s aimed transparent reference with his empirical reality, “…je suis authentiquement cette infidélité à un équilibre que me sollicite toujours et qui se refuse toujours.” J. Starobinski, op. cit., p. 76.

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Hobbes on man’s individual meanings

March 8, 2011 in Epistemology, Hobbes, Individual | No comments

Metsu, Gabriël - L'Apothicaire - c. 1651-1667

Hobbes’s negative conception of man in the hypothetical state of nature was a methodological assumption that regarded men as wrongdoers, but this mental experiment was only an extreme depiction of human nature, conveying a prudential maxim.(1) Human passions had to yield to the public sphere, granting their conditions of existence and redeeming the possibility of violence and death arising from the self-gain inherent to man. Passions also followed the physical model in which bodies act and are acted upon (pati), suffer the effect of another body. In chapter nine of De Corpore to every action there is an agent that produced an effect on a patient.

Having therefore thus arrived at two maximes of humane Nature, the one arising from the concupiscible part, which desires to appropriate to it selfe the use of those things in which all others have a joynt interest, the other proceeding from the rationall, which teaches every man to fly a contre-naturall Dissolution, as the greatest mischiefe that can arrive to Nature…(2)

Being self-centered, a balance between man’s tendencies and the avoidance of death was needed. In the preexisting substratum experience was mediated by the authority that set up the standard truth. Since the Reformation experience started becoming an individual marker, later experience was linked to one’s body and sensibility, being personal and different from other beings’. An example of the struggle of traditional doctrine to absorb different phenomena is transubstantiation, the conversion of wine in Christ’s blood, ‘passionately’ argued among schoolmen. This circumstance was interpreted as a change in substance rather than an accidental property acquired, but change in substance was impossible, for this was the substratum of change, hence it had to be a qualitative accident suffered. This convinced an advocate of the reduction of categories like Ockham to keep qualitative accidents alive. Hobbes adopted a different position, to him wine represented the body of Christ. Instead of a metaphysical assertion related to the existence of substances, he analyzed it from a subjective perspective: something representing something to somebody in semiotic terms. The sign is posited in its modern cadre, the separation of reality and language in two different series, -the premise of Locke’s autistic model of communication. The individual is the interpreter of nature for things do not possess a universal and evident meaning, they have to be filtered to acquire signification, meaning is individual-dependent.(3)

(1) “But this, that men are evil by nature, followes not from this principle; for though the wicked were fewer then the righteous, yet because we cannot distinguish them, there is a necessity of suspecting, heeding, anticipating, subjugating, selfe-defending, ever incident to the most honest, and fairest condition’d…” De Cive Preface to the Reader. In other places Hobbes states more clearly a more pessimistic and negative awareness of human nature, “…the parvity of humane disposition is manifest to all, and by experience too well known how little (removing the punishment) men are kept to their duties, through conscience of their promises.” De Cive, VI, 4. Hence follows, penalties are necessary for the sustenance of common life.

(2) De Cive, W. Devonshire.

(3) According to M. Esfeld there is no simple unity in Hobbes’s thought but a straight relation between his natural philosophy and his theory of knowledge and action, that debouches in a central modern concept: the subject. “Denn diese Subjektivität ist ein Selbstbild relativ auf eines als Objekt gedachte äußere Welt,” op. cit., p. 296

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Hobbes on man’s faculties

January 5, 2011 in Epistemology, Individual, Modernity | No comments

Franciscus Gysbrechts Vanitas

Following Hobbes’s empiricism, all that is learned is acquired by the senses, these provide us with the means to all possible knowledge. Avoiding error is a question of subtlety and finesse, placing the sight as the paradigm of accession of stimuli to our reason.(1) Transposing objects into perceptions cleared up the way to absolute skepticism in its two most important shades: ontological, in idealism, following the logical consequences of the annihilatio mundi in Berkeley, and epistemological, the absence of necessity in nature, as stated by Hume, both consistent with the delineation of the plane of construction.

Man, like any other existent, was defined in relation to the concept of body. The special features that distinguished him from other beings were not any sort of form or essence, but his faculties. The specific nature of man was described immanently, as an assembly of faculties that bestowed him with his particular character, rather than as the union of body and soul, according to Christians.(2) Man’s faculties included his physical strength, experience, reason and passion.(3)

These faculties supplanted the formal aspect of man, his essence, the soul. Hobbes knew his assail on the distinction between body and soul, a central tenet of orthodox Catholicism and of its noetic substratum, would be hardly criticized and mostly rejected.(4) Still this conception achieved a coherence that allowed the emergence, despite resistance, of a new and more comprehensive plateau that could include the foregoing striations of the given plain occasioned by the advent of the nova scientia and the manifestation of a novel approach to knowledge. Natural philosophy and anthropology boosted each other in the construction of an immanent political science, granting the due stability to power, rejecting the out-worldly elements that weakened the government of the earthly affairs and the prevention of conflicts, insecurity and death as the precipitate of the grossly frail human nature.

(1) Hobbes accentuated in several moments the primacy of seeing over other senses, for instance discussing the error induced by incantations he stated “…they would have men to believe an alteration of nature that is not, contrary to the testimony of man’s sight, and all the rest of his senses,” Leviathan, IV, 44, 11.
(2) Elements of Law I, 1, 4.
(3) De Cive, I, 1.
(4) “But if there be no immaterial spirit, or any possession of men’s bodies by any spirit corporeal, it may again be asked, why our Savior and his apostles did not teach the people so; and in such clear words, as they might no more doubt thereof. But such questions as these, are more curious, than necessary for a Christian man’s salvation,” Leviathan IV, 45, 8. The rise of rhetoric elements of the previous strata is still evident in his reappraisal of the theme of salvation that had been obfuscated by his insistence in immanence.

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Hobbes on the finality of natural philosophy

December 10, 2010 in Epistemology, Hobbes, Modernity | No comments

Any finality or utility was previously absent in natural philosophy, the sole concern was with truth. With the disappearance of the homology between language and reality the idea of truth, of an isomorphy between understanding and world, fainted. This absence of finality in nature was balanced by a purpose in science. Both the classical pagan and Christian tradition, especially in its Thomist-Aristotelian articulation, unveiled an intention within the ontological order, the modern conception lacked this finality in nature. There is no natural order in the sense of finis, the end was not in nature but in science, -in the artificial image rendered by man. Man was not connected to reality but to his representation of it. The idea of progress appeared as the theistic and immanent scion of this fundamental alteration.

The finalist character of science is thus stressed.(1) Science, like reason, was not pure speculation, but a means to attain certain ends, an instrumental mean. It subserved human desires rather than being opposed to appetite itself, as a purely eidetical arrangement, “reason is the pace; increase of science, the way; and the benefit of mankind, the end.”

Francis Bacon

Francis Bacon

(1) Science is the knowledge of consequences, and dependence of one fact upon another: by which, out of that we can presently do, we know how to do something else when we will, or the like, another time….” Leviathan, I, 5, 17.

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Hobbes on science

November 28, 2010 in Epistemology, Hobbes | No comments

From such a conception of experience followed his rejection of Boyle’s experimental program, according to Shapin and Schaffer.(1) Hobbes also wrote that it was by means of expectation, in the sense of accordance with previous subjective observations, with familiarity, and not with any transcendental law of cause and effect, that experience was achieved. Experience was, in this sense, always personal.(2) How could it become science in the sense of a detached corpus of knowledge?

According to Hobbes, legality constituted science. Philosophy was basically a search for causes, an awareness about the effects and causes, about the necessity of causes.(3) He distinguished between two types of knowledge, tied to the two aforementioned methods, a knowledge of facts, resting on experience, and a knowledge about consequences, that is, proper science. Science conveyed the capacity to predict and search for causes by seeking for required conditions, a system in which causes were necessities. The antecedent of an event, its cause, was defined as the totality of accidents.(4) In Hobbes’s full, replete, universe a mechanicist attitude provided with an explanation for every circumstance with an accurate description of a previous state.

Moreover, the effects observed were due to the existence of particular conditions in both the agent and the patient. The effect of the agent on the patient had to suffice to produce sensation.(5) Power was the ability to be a cause, resembling the Aristotelian potentia.(6) Once more Hobbes reckoned on traditional concepts, on the given elements, in his ‘mechanisation of Aristotelianism’.(7) According to Hobbes science is composed of a deterministic set of laws, to him

A possible action is one which is not impossible. Consequently, every possible action will be produced at some time or other; for if it is supposed that it will never be produced,it will never be the case that all the requirements of its production will come together; therefore (by definition) this action is impossible, which is contrary to what was supposed.(8)

Boyle air pump
Boyle’s air pump

(1) S. Shaphin and S. Schaffer, Leviathan and the air pump: Hobbes, Boyle and the experimental life including a translation of Thomas Hobbes, Dialogue physicus de natura aeris, Princeton, 1985. His passion for natural philosophy together with his boldness and current mistakes truncated his aspirations within the nascent scientific community. In his latter years Hobbes saw the flourishing of the Royal Society. The aim of this institution was to apply the Baconian ideals of science and remove Scholasticism from its privileged stand. Despite the allegiance with Hobbes’s ideals in many respects and his acknowledged status, he never became a member and was disdained by some of its most outstanding members like Boyle or Wallis, personal reasons being involved. Cf. N. Malcom, “Hobbes and the Royal Society”, in G.A.J. Rogers and A. Ryan (eds.), op. cit., refers to other reason relating to his rejection by members of the Royal Society: Hobbes’s anticlericalism dangerous for the proper evolution of the incipient institution and its social image. On the other hand they defended, according to the Lord Chancellor’s principles, the implementation of experiments without feigning any theoretical hypotheses –admonishing the famous hypothesis non fingo-, solely based on controlled, verifiable, experiments. This procedure contravened Hobbes’s conviction that thought science had to be concerned with statements of necessity not with verified contingency.
(2) “Experience concludeth nothing universally,” Elements of Law, I, 4, 10.
(3) De Corpore, I, 2.
(4) “…causa (per denitionem) sit aggregatum accidentium…” De Corpore, IX, 7.
(5) “Est autem ex his statim hoc manifestum, effectum quem expectamus, cum agentia sint idonea, tamen propter defctum idonei patientis, et cum patiens sit idoneum, tamen propter defectum agentium idoneorum, frustari posse.” De Corpore, IX, 4. “Power and action correspond to cause and effect. Indeed, power is the same thing as cause, and action is the same thing as effect…” De Corpore, X, 1.
(6)“…la puissance est la cause en tant qu’elle ne s’est pas encore produit.” L. Foisneau, “Le vocabulairde du pouvoir, potentia/potestas, power,” Y.-Ch. Zarka (ed.), op. cit., p. 88. This author realizes a comparison of both Latin terms and proposes that, meanwhile the use of Hobbes’ potentia is based on partial equivalences with other terms (causa, facultas and excessus), potestas is equivalent to another set of synonyms (autoritas, imperium and dominium), …on trouve chez Hobbes deux philosophies du pouvoir…” p. 102. Actually they cohered and became entangled.
(7) Cf. C. Leijenhorst, The Mechanisation of Aristotelianism. The Late Aristotelian Setting of Thomas Hobbes’ Natural Philosophy, Leiden, 2002.

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Hobbes: inductivism and deductivism

November 22, 2010 in Epistemology, Hobbes | No comments

Opposite to the deductive tradition, Hobbes was raised, working as a secretary for Francis Bacon, in intimate touch with the unfolding of another intellectual tradition, -inductivism. Bacon’s model presented knowledge as a collection, an advancement from single samples to the formulation of general hypotheses, gaining a secure footing based on the elements of experience. Gathering single specimens was the methodological replica to Nominalism, accepting the sole existence of individuals. A science that only acknowledged individuals had necessarily to start natural inquiry with them.

Hobbes’s work still showed traces of this influence tempering the continental deductive esprit. Method had to depart from the more simple elements in nature rather than from general propositions, conveying a gradual ascension towards more complex and intricate conclusions, -it comprised a cumulative process.(1) There could be traced an ascending continuum from physics to morals and politics. A proper analysis of the constituents of nature would lead inductively to more complex bodies unto the political body. Induction was based on pure experience, without any intromission of ideas or prejudices; still, experience could only obtain a subjective representation of reality:

The remembrance of the succession of one thing to another, that is, of what was antecedent, and what consequent, and what concomitant, is called an EXPERIMENT; whether the same be made by us voluntarily, as when a man putteth any thing into the fire, to see what effect the fire will produce upon it; or not made by us, as when we remember a fair morning after a red evening. To have had many experiments, is that we call EXPERIENCE, which is nothing else but remembrance of what antecedents have been followed with what consequents.(2)

NSRW Francis Bacon

(1) Leviathan, I, 5, 4 and 7.
(2) Elements of Law, I, 4, 6.

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Hobbes on language: Nominalism and sense-data

November 7, 2010 in concepts, Epistemology | No comments

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

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.

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Hobbes on reason

November 4, 2010 in Epistemology, Hobbes | No comments

According to Hobbes,to reason is basically to calculate quantitative aspects of the external world; thus reason can connect us, by means of mathematics, with the ordo essendi. Hobbes delivered an insight initiating a tradition patent in authors like Leibniz, providing a solid ground for the calculus that soon started developing as a branch of mathematics, subserving the intuition of a lingua mentalis. Hobbes saw in the system of language a veridical reflex of the very layout of thought, intuition developed by the philosophy of Port-Royale; language and thought are isomorph according to the authors of the Grammaire and the Logique.(1) Rather than a relation between world and thought by means of language, it was thought and language that were directly joined. There was an intimate relation between the art of speaking and the art of thinking; the order of signs uncovered the organization of thought. Language was the agent, the intermediary of thought, -it was an individual system of representation. The book of nature was written in mathematical terms and language as a calculus could be transformed in numbers, therefore thinking is just adding and subtracting.(2) It solely referred to the objective, quantitative, aspect of reality.
Furthermore, reason had a distinctive methodological, formal, character, consistent with the passive role of man in the process of sensation. This disposition provides with a ‘common sense’ among men, a feature shared by all reasonable people that afforded communication and an objective yardstick to handle the phenomena. Reason, in its ‘common sense’ shed, was deemed to be judge, like in the occasion of discerning between natural and the alleged supernatural gifts.(3) By means of right reason it was possible to ascend from the contemplation of singulars to universal principles.(4) Still, reason is secondary to will, there is a preponderance of passions in human activity; desire drives reason. Reason gives support to the will, but the former becomes its factotum.
These two traits of reason, instrumental and individual, will have important effects on other areas of Hobbes’s philosophy. Traditionally recta ratio permitted to discern what was good in itself. The separation of man’s objective grasp on the world afforded his relinquishment to particular ends, -what is good according to individual ends-, for, as we will later see, also the ends and values are not palpable, they are determined by every single man. In the last resource, reason becomes constructed, it is neither innate nor completely learned, it is “attained by industry.” (5)

Library Port Royale

Library of Port Royale

(1) A. Arnauld and C. Lancelot, Grammaire génerale et raisonée, Paris, 1660. Ibid., La Logique ou l’Art de Penser, Paris, 1662.
(2) Similar contemporary approaches to the theory of sign can be found in J. Wilkins, Essay towards a real character and philosophical language or in Dalgarno’s Ars signorum. ”For REASON, in this sense, is nothing but reckoning (that is, adding and substracting) of the consequences of general names agreed upon, for the marking and signifying of our thoughts…” Leviathan, I, 5, 2.
(3) Leviathan, III, 36,19. Despite accepting the possibility of miracles, Hobbes demands an extreme care in embracing them as wonders and not as the outcome of man’s industry. Until the final victory of natural philosophy, people will remain imbued in superstition, affording imposture and enchantment, -the ability to deceive and beguile.
(4) De Cive, Letter to William Devonshire, “Per hanc (Rationis rectae) enim à rerum singularum contemplatione ad praecepta vniuersalia via aperitur.”
(5) Leviathan, I, 5,17.

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Hobbes on vision as the last instance of knowledge

October 28, 2010 in Epistemology, Hobbes | No comments

Hobbes envisaged a cognitive theory of vision, according to which we err because we have false impressions.(1) The boundaries between perception and cognition are blurred. Thus imagination, an active product of the mind, is but the remaining conception produced by a ‘decaying sense’, an obscure image, unable to produce a clear impression.(2)
This mist between senses and representation had another major implication: qualities are inherent to the subject, not to the object. The quantitative measure bounded reality to the language of mathematics, the qualitative aspect of experience is referred to the patient of its effect. Qualities are the byproduct of the action bodies exert upon our senses, they are perceived in the interaction with our particular and characteristic physiology.(3) Hobbes addressed the topic in a fashion similar to the Greek Sophists, sensations are deemed to be particular to every single human being.(4) The solution to the problem of sense perception was diametrically opposed to any objective stance, curiously enough Hobbes unravels this difficulty by means of the senses again. Thus ends their review in his early The Elements of Law:

And from thence also it followeth, that whatsoever accidents or qualities our senses make us think there be in the world, they are not there, but are seemings and apparitions only. The things that really are in the world without us, are those motions by which these seemings are caused. And this is the great deception of sense, which also is by sense to be corrected. For as sense telleth me, when I see directly, that the colour seemeth to be in the object; so also sense telleth me, when I see by reflection, that colour is not in the object.(5)

The traditional deception of the senses was not to be corrected by reason or by the submission to a different instance like authority, but rather by a new perceptual appreciation, recovering Galileo’s stress on pure, unprejudiced, observation. Knowledge was related to sensation, neither to accepted wisdom nor to individual reason.

Cartesian_Vision

(1) “Fools and madmen manifestly deliberate no less than the wisest men, though they make not so good a choice, the images of things being by diseases altered.” The Questions Concerning Liberty, Necessity and Chance, VIII, p. 80.
(2) “An obscure conception is that which representeth the whole object together, but none of the smaller parts by themselves; and as more or fewer parts be represented, so is the conception or representation said to be more or less clear.” Elements of Law, I, 3, 7.
(3) “That image and colour is but an apparition unto us of that motion, agitation, or alteration, which the object worketh in the brain, or spirits, or some internal substance in the head,” Elements of Law, I, 7 in fine.
(4) “And to proceed to the rest of the senses, it is apparent enough, that the smell and taste of the same thing, are not the same to every man, and therefore are not in the thing smelt or tasted, but in the men.” Elements of Law, I, 2, 9.
(5) Elements of Law, I, 2, 10.

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Hobbes on the world and its perception

October 27, 2010 in Epistemology, Hobbes, Representation | No comments

According to Zarka, Hobbes was already situated in the divorce between reality and perception, of the adequatio of thought and world and its being expressed in language. The ‘age of representation’ could not reconcile those two separate series, objects and words.(1)

Il y a donc une subjectivité de la représentation sans sujet subjectif fondateur. On comprend ainsi que la Philosophia prima de Hobbes inaugurée par l’hypothèse annihilatoire ne parte ni du monde, ni du moi, mais de la représentation.(2)

The importance of representation bore the generation of an inner ply, an interiority,(3) conveying the annihilatio mundi, the fading of external reality, and the deterioration of the link with the ontological order, of the aforementioned relation between world and human understanding; a delicate position ensconced by God in Descartes, -condition of veracity of our thoughts. This independence of thought, in the sense of an elaboration of sensations, from the worldly order, implied the idea of a self-contained world and a chasm between subject and object.(4) The philosophia prima conformed a plane of construction that rested on a net of concepts fabricated by, and subservient on, the senses, on the effects of external bodies on them rather than on their absolute, metaphysical, existence. This relativization of the external world posited man and his sensations as its condition of assertability, of judgement. A natural philosophy that was based on individual perception and did not resort to any divine instance, assuming the adequation of the senses to the world, put forward a ‘post-sceptical metaphysics’,(5) a first philosophy based on the ordo cognoscendi rather than on the ordo essendi.
The external object produces sensation by direct contact with the body of the perceiver, either materially or through the effect of light. Hobbes maintained a mechanistic idea of sensation, -motion and direct pressure are the basis of sensation, acting on the senses-; sensation can be also analyzed, from the opposite side, as a passion of the subject. The object acquired an active role in the act of sensation and the mind becomes a passive recipient of those inputs.(6) It is by means of sensual perception that we can maintain an affirmative predicate about existence.

(1) “En ce sens la fondation politique d’un code juridique de l’Etat se substitue à l’ordre ontologique perdu. C’est donc sur le plan politique qu’il faudra chercher la réponse du problème posé sur le plan métaphysique par la séparation du discours et de l’être, ” Y.-Ch. Zarka, La Décision Métaphysique de Hobbes, Paris, 1999, p. 26. It is also very recommended, to document the roots of this notion, P. Alféri, Guillaume d’Ockham. Le singulier, Paris, 1989.
(2) Y.-Ch. Zarka, op. cit., p. 44.
(3) “par la réification imaginaire, on passe du phantasme au fantastique…” Y.-Ch. Zarka, “Le vocabulaire de l’apparaître: le champ sémantique de la notion de phantasma,” in Y.-Ch. Zarka (ed.), Hobbes et son vocabulaire, Paris, 1992, p. 29.
(4) “…the absence or destruction of things once imagined, doth not cause the absence or destruction of the imagination itself,” Elements of Law, I, 2, 8.
(5) R. Tuck, “Hobbes and Descartes”, G.A.J. Rogers and A. Ryan, Perspective on Thomas Hobbes, Oxford, 1990.
(6) “Originally all conceptions proceed from the actions of the thing itself, whereof it is the conception. Now when the action is present, the conception it produceth is called SENSE, and the thing by whose action the same is produced is called the OBJECT of sense.” Elements of Law, I, 2, 2. “…mens nihil aliud erit praeterquam motus in partibus quibusdam corporis organici.” Objectiones, objectio IV.

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