Comments on Arash Abizadeh's The Oscillations of Thomas Hobbes

McGill University, 21 March, 2009

Justin E. H. Smith

Abizadeh’s Hobbes is an oscillator, not in the recent sense this term has acquired, of a measure in stable, repetitive variation around a central value, but in the original sense of the word --which makes its first appearance in English in 1658--  of something that swings unstably.  The oscillation is not around a central value, but between two poles, namely, mental inspection and linguistic convention.  The movement between these poles, Abizadeh thinks, is one that ripples throughout all of the subdomains of his vast philosophical project.   

With respect to his theory of truth, the oscillation manifests itself as one between correspondence and convention.  While most commentators have associated a correspondence theory of truth with Hobbes’s natural philosophy, and a conventionalist theory with his moral and political philosophy, Abizadeh thinks this is mistaken.  At the outset, at least, I am strongly inclined to agree with him: Hobbes had a unitary project, and to the extent that this project was seen to require a theory of truth as its foundation, he could not have risked fragmenting it by employing different theoretical accounts for different parts of it.   

It is also in part because Hobbes has a unitary philosophical project, in which the natural philosophy has consequences for the political, and vice versa, that one might have cause to fear a crippling bipolarity.  As Abizadeh explains in his elegant introduction, it is the sovereign who must be, for Hobbes, the ultimate arbiter of meaning and truth, while at the same time the fundamental truths of Hobbesian science must be true indepedently of the sovereign’s will.  Does, then, the sovereign have the authority to define words in a way that contadicts science?  Abizadeh maintains that, for Hobbes, insofar as he is  pulled toward the pole of mental inspection, the sovereign could not possibly make such science-contradicting propositions ‘stick’. The laws of nature do not morally oblige, even though they have independent evaluative standing to the extent that they point to instrumental goods that are independent of convention.  Science, as the product of mental inspection, identifies truths that limit the sovereign’s authority, while also discovering the need for an absolute sovereign, and the need to secure his absolute rule by means of convention.  

Abizadeh worries, however, that the consequence of putting science and convention together on the same team is effectively to obliterate the distinction between scientific truth and political myth, “so that replacing superstition with scientific truths now turns out to mean no more than replacing heresy with officially sanctioned conventions, established by an authoritative act of will.  But this goes against Hobbes’s demand that science provide causal knowledge.   

I want to leave the state’s ideological program aside for the time being in order to focuse on science, where I feel much more at home.  In natural science, the aspiration to causal knowledge could only be realized by sacrificing the aspiration to certainty, since, according to Abizadeh, by appeal to nature, we can only come to know that and what, but not why. The pole of Hobbes’s conception of science that Abizadeh calls --problematically, in my view-- a correspondence theory of truth has an affinity to Descartes’s appeal to clear and distinct ideas, as both would hope to close the gap between internal ‘ideas’ and external ‘things’. In my view, Hobbes’s approach does so infinitely better, to the extent that he is able to assent not just to his own existence as following immediately from his own thinking, but also to the existence of bodies as following immediately from his own perceiving.  Yet, again, Hobbes also seems to deny sometimes that external things constitute the subject matter of science at all, and if this is the case then the strategy for securing certainty will involve not certain correspondences to things, but rather an appeal to the will, or more specifically, to the human creation of language by the use of the arbitrium, which is to say, depending on who is doing the translating, either ‘as a result of a decision’ or ‘arbitrarily’.  

On this account, we know when we’re uttering true propositions precisely because we are the makers of the meanings of the terms involved.  The theory of maker’s knowledge has it that one can only know what one is capable of bringing into existence.  Mersenne appeals to it in arguing against the alchemists, who claim to know all the effects in nature, whereas they should only claim to know the causes of what they are capable of making.  (This is an odd criticism of the alchemists, since they were just as often criticized for claiming to be able to make anything whatsoever, such as gold or homunculi.  Their crime was not to claim to know things they couldn’t make, but to claim to make things they couldn’t possibly make.)  Mathematics and technology were the obvious domains in which the doctrine of maker’s knowledge seemed to have obvious relevance, and Abizadeh does a fine job of conveying the boldness of Hobbes’s extension of the doctrine to language, even as he denied, against the general grain of the experimental philosophy, that the end of natural philosophy was to come to know natural processes by manufacturing them in the laboratory.   

Hobbes’s maker’s-knowledge doctrine of language, however, might not commit him to the conventionalism that Abizadeh identifies at one of the two principal poles that structure the English philosopher’s thought.  At one point in the Elements of Law, Hobbes acknowledges that ‘divers things’ are grouped together because ‘we receive like conceptions’ from them, and thus ‘to all things we see, we give the same name of visible; and to all things we see moved, we give the same name of moveable’ (36f.).  As Abizadeh explains, on this view, the choice of the particular vocal sound may be arbitrary, but the basis for categorization is not.  Abizadeh thinks that in other passages Hobbes takes general names to be constrained only by formal-logical consistency, and that a general name could indifferently stand in for any of the particulars it names “simply because the inclusion of any of the particulars would be equally arbitrary.”  It is this that Leibniz denounced as ‘super-nominalism’, complaining that for Hobbes “the truth of things itself consists in names and, what is more,... depends on human will.” 

However much I hate to say it, I fear that the young Leibniz is simply being hasty here. When Hobbes writes that “every definition is a true and primary proposition because we make it true ourselves by defining it, that is, be agreeing about the meaning of the words,” I take it that he is not necessarily giving us a conventionalist theory of truth, but only a theory of definitions.  Certainly, Jesseph is correct in what he says about the arbitrary names ‘man’ and ‘cyanide’, on the one hand, and on the other the non-arbitrariness of the claim that cyanide kills men.  But I’m not sure that this takes Abizadeh to task for what he in fact claims about Hobbes.  Abizadeh wants to say that in his conventionalist moments Hobbes believes that truths about objects are created by men, insofar as truth is a feature not of the relationship between words and objects, but of arrangements of words.  But I’m not, in turn, sure that this is what Hobbes is saying either.  When Hobbes says that it is true that man is a living creature only because it pleased men to impose both those names on the same thing, this is not to say, as I think Jesseph takes Abizadeh to be saying of Hobbes, that there is no biological fact, let us say, about which this true proposition is made, and in virtue of which it is true; and I’m not sure it’s saying, as I think Abizadeh takes it to say, that we create truths about objects.  Rather, I think Hobbes is saying that ‘man’, for example, could have been defined as, say, a living or recently-dead-but-not-yet-decomposed creature, in which case there would be at least some cases of things on which both the names ‘man’ and ‘living’ could not properly be imposed.  The reason why they could not properly be imposed on, say, a fresh human corpse, would certainly have something to do with our definitions, but also something to do with a truth-making state of affairs.   

The fact that definitions are conventional, I want to say, does not make truth conventional.  The way definitions of words are constructed will determine which propositions using these words come out true, but this does not detach truth from objects.  Consider for example the only partially overlapping folk terms for animals in English and French.  Traditionally, there has been no available distinction in French between monkeys and apes, yet for an English-speaker to point to a gorilla and say: That may be a ‘singe’, but it’s no monkey, is not just to make an English definition more precise by way of example, and not to say that there is something that is true in English but not French (Descartes had had just this sort of worry about Hobbes’s account of truth in the Objections and Replies). It is rather to pick out a real difference between entities, to wit, between monkeys and apes.  Language is based on convention to the extent that one might choose to mark out differences that another chooses to gloss over, but once these differences have been marked out there’s nothing preventing us from saying that it’s the differences themselves that make our propositions true or false.  I take this to be just what Hobbes means in the passage Abizadeh goes on to cite from the unpublished De Motu: “Although the meaning of words depends on the way men use them, the truth of propositions, i.e., the linking of names in accordance with their meaning once established, depends not on the same things but on reason” (76).   

A few words on the theory of the Adamic language.  Hobbes paraphrases Genesis 2:19 as saying that ‘the first author of Speech was God himself, that instructed Adam how to name such creatures as he presented to his sight’ (L 24-5; 71).  Now, Arash find it odd that “Hobbes would give God an active role that the Genesis story itself does not appear to do.”  Arash thinks that Hobbes has as his target the Adamic essentialist interpretation, which did give God’s will a role in naming the animals, and that, by reconstruing the role of the divine will, Hobbes opened the door to giving Adam a direct, active role in naiming as well.” I’m not so sure. Followng the excellent work of Hans Aarsleff, Marcelo Dascal and others, I take it that most early-modern defenders of the theory of the Adamic language would have had it that God entrusted Adam to name the beasts only because God and Adam, in the pre-Babel state, both spoke the same language, namely, the one that zaps directly into the essences of things and ‘calls them like they are’.  Arash rightly notes that for Hobbes, human beings were the creators of post-Babel languages, but this creation was something very different than Adam’s creation of names for beasts.  Adam’s naming was not so much creation as reflection.   

In early-modern taxonomy and in linguistic projects relating to the creation of a characteristica universalis, there was a sharp divide between those who thought there was something of the pristine language to be recovered, and those who argued we would do better to start from scratch.  Hobbes’s view that Adam himself was, in effect, starting from scratch, is unorthodox indeed, and as far as I can tell appears only in the 1668 Latin translation of Leviathan. I’m not sure that it amounts to a more literal reading of Genesis, as Arash says, and I’m even inclined to say that it amounts to a more willful bending of Genesis to fit Hobbes’s programmatic ends. 

To conclude, if I may, a few more words about the title Arash has chosen for his book, indeed the password he has chosen for accessing its earlier incarnations. It may be that quite a bit hangs on our understanding of Arash’s adoption of the notion of oscillation.  Arash assures us in his Introduction that he does not wish to demonstrate or indict the logical incoherence of Hobbes’s philosophy by revealing the tension between sustained by the two poles he sets out to describe.  Rather, exposing Hobbes’s bipolarism ‘sheds light on a set of tensions’ that is ‘fundamental to the tradition of modern European political philosophy’.  Jesseph in contrast tells us that Hobbes’s occasional pronouncements in favor of conventionalism are, however present, not part of the real story of what Hobbes was doing.  [This is an interpretative approach that among Leibniz scholars has come to be called ‘weak incompatibilism’: you can’t make everything the philosopher said fit together, but you can give a correct account of the philosopher’s considered views.]  I am inclined to agree with Jesseph as concerns truth and knowledge in Hobbes, even as I remain open to Abizadeh’s argument that there is a tension worth studying between Hobbesian science and Hobbesian sovereignty.  But it seems to me that, if there is any bipolarity (and this is certainly a term with inescapably negative connotations, in its clinical usage, yet solid, respectable ones in its astrophysical acceptation), it is in the book’s alternation between the identification of a productive tension, one that might better be called a ‘two-pronged’ or ‘double-fisted’ account of the way in which, for example, self-evident knowledge may be come by, on the one hand, and on the other a tension that, if Hobbes were here in the room with us, we would be compelled to ask him to resolve.  Productive tensions are sometimes called ‘dialectical’, and this is a word that Arash, perhaps consciously, does not use.  So let me finish up with a ponderous interpretative question: is this tension one that might eventually have given rise to an Aufhebung, or to some new insight that required the tension in order to come into being; or is it something that one would have hoped that Hobbes might, had he lived even longer than he did, have been able eventually to overcome, like one hopes for the eventual remission of manic-depressive symptoms; or finally, is it rather a tension that one could have hoped Hobbes would hold onto forever, as a structure uniting the various branches of Hobbes’s thought, in the same way that the Earth’s poles keep it spinning on its course?