Transcript Reading: Introduction and Thomas Hobbes

The first person we're going to cover is Thomas Hobbes. And you remember I described him as a real outlier because he's a materialist, that is, he believes that all reality is purely physical or caused by the purely physical. We'll cover him, and then we'll refer to him at the very end again. But in the meanwhile, we won't have much to do with him, because the modern period is always taken by thinkers to have begun with René Descartes, the world-famous mathematician. He does have a theory of reality, but he shifts to a big emphasis on epistemology, and he thinks he can solve a number of problems. One of them is: How do we know that our perception reveals to us the way the world is around us? How do we know that?

See, they had noticed that perceptions are something that occur inside people's heads. The thing that convinced them of that was that somebody was walking through a slaughterhouse, picked up the eye of a bull, and wherever they pointed it, an upside-down image appeared on the retina of the bull's eye. And they went, "Oh, my God." I mean, that means that what we are seeing when we see an object is the image on our retina, not the thing. And that started a whole series of arguments that undermined sense perception, meaning we couldn't rely on it. No wonder it can be tricked. No wonder it can be fooled, and so on. Descartes thought he had an answer, and he has a proof, a logical proof, that normal sensations can be trusted. Okay?

The thinker who follows him in order is a fellow named Spinoza.

Spinoza made his living as a glass grinder. He worked in a factory that made glasses, and he would grind them at a wheel. And of course, that meant he breathed in glass dust, and eventually it killed him. He didn't live to be very old, but he looked at the problems with Descartes' view and proposed a way to solve them, and the way included being a pantheist—that is, saying that everything is part of God, everything's made of God, and so on. The result was that he got thrown out of the synagogue he was a member of, because they said, "That's not Judaism," so they tossed him.

And then these are thinkers who are on the continent along with Descartes. The next one is Leibniz.

Leibniz, who was once referred to in an essay in Time Magazine as the last man who knew everything, was an amazing person. He, too, worked out a theory to try to solve problems with Descartes and tried to save that view. So he gave us an ontology. He gave us epistemology. But Leibniz was a multi-sided thinker. He invented calculus. He and Newton, independent of one another, each invented calculus. I mean, I would like to be able to put on my resume that I could do calculus. Yes, I can't put that on my resume, but he could put down that he invented it. He was a mathematician. He invented symbolic logic. He wrote about theology. He made a big proposal for reconciling Roman Catholic and Protestant churches. He worked as an engineer for a city, establishing their defenses. There was almost nothing that Leibniz didn't know about or write about—an amazing character, and we'll have a look at his theory as well.

Then we're going to look at three thinkers who were not on the continent of Europe but were in Britain, and they are Locke—John Locke. Locke is going to give us his theory of reality, very close to Descartes. He wants to defend Descartes, but instead of insisting that all of knowledge is highly rational, taking the form of rational truths and arguments, Locke wants to be an empiricist. He wants to say we have to look at the world around us and investigate things and tell how they work, not construct a theory as to how x, y, and z must work. Go investigate x, y, and z, see how they work. And it’s because Locke, by training, was an MD—he was a doctor—and so he champions what we call the Empirical Method. Empirical means experience. It means go, see, go look, take it apart, investigate. And Locke’s a champion of that.

But then we get to George Berkeley, who follows in this order. He wanted us to pronounce his name “Barkley,” because that was the Irish pronunciation of it. He was a bishop of the Church of England in Ireland. I can't imagine how popular that was—to be an official in the Church of England in a country that hates England. Anyway, Berkeley came up with what he thought was a terrific argument. It explained reality, explained knowledge, explained God in relation to the world, and showed that materialism was impossible. So, there’s Berkeley, and he accepts that all our perceptions are in our minds, that everything we see, hear, and smell is inside our minds, not outside. Or does he? Then he has other writings where he seems to say it’s both. Anyway, what he wrote about was picked up by a man named David Hume.

This is easy to place in time, folks, because Hume died in 1776. I used to say to my classes, “That’s easy for you to remember, right? Because that’s the year Gibbon published The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.” That’s my idea of a joke. Once in a while, some of them would get it, smile a little. Anyway, Hume's easy to place in time, and Hume was interested in the natural sciences. He was interested in the progress being made in astronomy and in physics, and so on, but he had a very radical critique of everybody before him. Hume is always referred to as the philosophical buzz saw. He comes through, and he levels everybody

What does that do to Newton here? Newton's considered the great, towering genius of the whole era—the guy who took all these disparate facts that were known in physics and, with a few laws like his laws of motion and gravitation, combined that with free fall, which was worked out by Galileo. Now, he has a tidy explanation of virtually everything in physics. And then Hume comes along and shows that it's all ridiculous, it's all false to nothing. There are no laws. We can't know laws. And that is what provokes Kant. Kant says that in his early days, he really was a dogmatist. He just took things for granted, but reading Hume woke him up. "Oh my God, look at this. This goes, that goes. The other thing—we don't really know what we pretend to know." And really, what we're doing is this: "Oh, my God, science and ethics are both in the trash can." And Kant couldn't stand that.

So Kant comes along to save philosophy and Western civilization from Hume. Kant has the big white hat, rides the big white horse. He comes in, and he's going to save them. He's going to do battle with Hume and defeat him. And the two things Kant thinks he must save are science and ethics. He's not going to let Hume get away with his attacks. Yes, there is a way that we can know laws in science, and yes, there is a way that we can know right from wrong in ethics. And Kant says, "I have an answer to your criticisms that doesn't sidestep them, and that's where this period ends," with Kant believing himself to have come out triumphant against Hume.

Now, I have met people in philosophy who still think that Hume was not answered by Kant, because you could take Hume's arguments, turn them back on Kant, apply them in a different way, and Kant would be defeated too. And some of them say that all philosophy and all rational thinking actually ended with Hume, and everything that's been done since is just pretense. That's pretty extreme. Most people think Kant succeeded. He did an end-run around Hume's arguments. He showed that we do have certainty in science and ethics, maybe nowhere else, but we have it in science and ethics. Science, for Kant, includes logic and math. And where we apply logic and math, such as in astronomy and physics, we can still have certainty. And in ethics, we can be certain of what's right or wrong to do. And Kant wants that to be a law that is not culturally relative; it's not something you can get around, okay?

He also proposes—and I'm just going to add this here, because I'm going to come back to it and spend some real time on it later—he proposes that there are what he calls "ideas of reason." Ideas of reason. By this, he means that any rational being—and humans are rational beings—any being that thinks rationally is going to come up with an idea of the Self, the human self. He's going to come up with the idea of God, a transcendent, divine being. He's going to come up with the idea of free will. He's going to come up with the idea that there's an entire world external to us. And there are a few others that he puts on this list.

What Kant wants to say is we have those ideas, and the truth is we can't live without them. They aid us. They come, they intrude, and they produce beneficial results in human life by serving as explanation points for what goes on. None of us can avoid distinguishing ourselves from other people. But do we have a concept of something called the self? Kant's answer is, no, we have an idea of it, but no concept. So all of these ideas that Kant has listed—look at them again: the Self, God, free will, the external world—and sometimes Kant gives other lists with other things as well. These are all ideas we can't live without, but no one can prove are true. We shouldn't try to prove they're true because proof applies only to the world that we know by sensation—the empirical world. Only about that can we get proofs because only that world is the world to which logic applies. These are ideas of reason. They're not illogical, but they can't be proven. They can't be shown to be true. They can't be shown to be false either. But we need them, and any rational being is going to come up with some idea or other of itself as distinguished from everything else, of what produced it all—the divine—and is going to come to the conclusion that he has free will. He can freely choose to do good or evil once he’s distinguished which is which. He’s distinguished the evil from the non-evil, however you want to put that. That's right, but he still has a choice. Then, he can go ahead and do what's evil, knowing it to be evil.

So Kant is still considered a champion of ethics that are not relativistic, ethics that don't just say, "Well, those are all cultural things that are just made up." You know, in one culture, it's wrong to desecrate a dead body, a human body—you get a jail term for that. In another culture, it's wrong not to eat the dead body of a deceased member of the tribe. These things vary so widely that there's no universal agreement. Kant is dead-set against that. "No," he says, "I can show you that there is a way to arrive at what is morally right or wrong."

And then our course proper ends, and we go to the two surveys of the 19th and 20th centuries. But this is the cast of characters between the 16th and 18th centuries—look at it again: between 1600 and 1800. So our very first one is Descartes, a very clear thinker. Then we have Spinoza, wanting to make everything part of the Divine. He calls the Divine God or Nature—whatever term you want to use, he doesn't care. Then you have Leibniz, arguing against Spinoza and offering a theory that he thinks improves on Descartes. I'll talk about a few other minor thinkers who want to do the same thing in there. And then we turn to the British empiricists: Locke, Berkeley, and Hume.

John Locke tries to integrate reason and investigation. What's the balance between experiment and investigation about how the world works? Don't just sit back and construct logical proofs about how it must be—go see how it really works. But he's still a rationalist. He still wants to say that the laws of logic and mathematics are unchanging, eternal, sure, and certain.

Okay. Then Berkeley comes along and says, "No. What we know are our own sensations, and that's all." And he takes all of physics and shows that, one by one by one, the physical characteristics of things all come down to sensations. They are all reduced to sensations, which is pretty shocking. And if everything is sensations, then nothing can exist unperceived. He says, "That's correct, and to the end."

And then he's asked, "But when we light a candle and we all go out of the room, and we come back and it's burned down, doesn't that show it was existing in the room while nobody perceived it?" And his answer is, "It shows that there's a mind that perceives all things all the time."

There's his argument for God and, to make sense of it, we call it phenomenalism, saying that it's only appearances that are real. David Hume adopts that, picks it up, turns it against God, against the self, against all the things that Kant is later going to call ideas of reason—free will—and he demolishes all previous philosophies with these arguments. He demolishes science. He demolishes ethics and physics, and provokes the great champion Kant to mount up and ride to their rescue.

And then we will go to our surveys of the two following centuries. All right, I have finished this. What shall I call it? Prequel to the course? The introduction? This is what I mean by religion. This is what I mean by philosophy. It's ontology and epistemology. Here are the people that we're going to cover in the period of time we're going to cover them. And I said that there's also kind of an extra thinker we're going to toss in—one who’s really out of step with this whole era—and that was Thomas Hobbes. He's an outlier. So, in the time that remains to us today, we're going to cover Hobbes. We're going to cover Hobbes' thought. If you're ready, get your notes ready, your pen and pencil ready, and we're going to launch ourselves into Mr. Hobbes.

Hobbes was born in an auspicious year, 1588—that was the year of the Spanish Armada. So, Queen Elizabeth I is on the throne. You know about the fate of the Armada: the great fleet sent to defeat England and force them to have a Catholic, rather than a Protestant, on the throne. The Armada was defeated, and it left the English navy the prevailing force on the seas.

Hobbes was born that year, and he lived 90 years, so he died in 1678. He saw a great deal of what I've been calling the towering genius of the people that lived between 1600 and 1800—towering genius after towering genius, not only in philosophy, but in mathematics. Pascal invents the probability calculus. Leibniz and Newton both invent calculus. Descartes invents analytic geometry. We have towering genius among composers. We have Bach, who was born, wrote, and died during this period. Handel, Vivaldi. We have work being done for the first time in electrical theory by people like Volta, or even Franklin with his key experiment showing that the flashes we see in a thunderstorm are the same stuff that we call lightning. In other places, we have Lavoisier with the start of chemistry—all this in the same period of time. It's fantastic. Hobbes would like to be classed among those geniuses, but he doesn't quite measure up to that.

But perhaps taking Hobbes will allow us to get into a particular philosopher, and when we deal with him, it'll present a model that I’m going to be following for how I'm going to deal with all the others. So this will give you a good idea of how the treatment of the others will go. So here is Mr. Hobbes on my board: 1588 to 1678. He wrote two major works and some minor ones. His major works: one was called Leviathan, and the other was called De Corpore, on physical matter. He wrote another in English, called Elements of Philosophy. And he did some minor works as well.

This is a rather crude sort of materialism compared, of course, to today's, but even for then, it was crude. There had been materialists in the ancient world, people such as Epicurus or Lucretius in the Roman world. Probably the best-known materialists are Leucippus and Democritus. They were ancient Greek thinkers who lived just after 500 BC, and they came up with the atomic theory. There are little particles called atoms—that means, in Greek, "can't be divided" (a-tom)—and the smallest of all possible particles combine in different shapes. If they combine in one sort of shape, it's a horse. Combine in another shape, it's a rock. Combine in another case, it's a planet or an ocean, or it's a human being. So all things are made of these tiny, tiniest of all particles.

That was held by some other people I've named. Epicurus wrote a big theory about it all. In Epicurus' ontology, there is infinite space. There are an infinite number of physical particles, and in an infinite amount of time, the particles go through every possible combination. This world is one possible combination, so this world was inevitable, but not planned. There's no conscious being called God. There are just the laws of possibility, physical particles in infinite space. So, because this world—because you and I—are one possible combination of atoms, it was inevitable that we occur. But then, when we die, our bodies go back to splitting apart into the pieces and particles, and that's the end of us. So, for Epicurus, there was no human soul. There was no life after death. He believed in beings called gods—he didn't reject them—so he didn't want to be called an atheist. He believed there are beings that have more rational powers and other powers than we do, but none of them are eternal, and none of them created the cosmos. They're all creatures. They're all beings that exist inside the cosmos.

And then, a few hundred years later, you get Lucretius, a Roman poet, who writes about the universe as being made up of small particles, and that humans are made up of these particles too, and so on, largely dependent on Epicurus. The atomic theory, as we know it or think of it, is a rather late invention. These people thought that there were tiny particles, but they didn't think they knew anything about them other than how they combine. What makes one thing a tree, another thing a grass plant, another thing a human being, and another thing a frog. But they didn't have any insight into the nature of these little particles, nor did they think they could get that kind of information.

Atomic theory was re-proposed in the 19th century, and what made people take it seriously was the development of molecular theory. So, there are atoms. An atom of hydrogen looks like this, and an atom of water looks like that, and an atom of iron looks like that. So you have a nucleus to the atom, you have electrons going around it in different orbits. How does that help explain anything?

There was a physicist who left a physics convention in Vienna, and on the way back to Italy on the train, he worked out the molecular theory—the theory of electronic exchange between atoms that creates molecules. And it's the molecules, then, that give us the key to the nature of the objects they make up, and that is what really gave atomic theory its boost at the end of the 19th century. Then, it got one more boost early in the 20th century. Einstein, among others, reports this boost. It was done by more than one physicist—experiments with what's called Brownian motion, because a guy named Brown did it.

He took a beaker with some liquid in it and put extremely fine particles of something or other on the top. Then they watched what happened to them. And what happens is, here's the beaker, and there's the liquid inside it, and it's sprinkled with extremely fine particles of something. They watched these particles under a microscope, or with as high a magnification as they could get, and they found that the particles do not go straight to the bottom of the beaker. That's not what happens. Instead, the particles leave the surface, and they begin to do things like this...

And the explanation is that these particles are being struck by the molecules that make up the liquid. It was observing that kind of motion of particles that convinced people: "We're really onto something with this idea of atoms and molecules." These particles don't go straight down. They're being hit, battered, and knocked—sometimes upward. On the whole, they're moving downward more than upward. That's because of the pull of gravity. So that shows that they're physical. They're responding to gravity, but they're being hit by things we don't see. And those things must be physical too—they're the molecules of the liquid.

So this experiment, called Brownian motion, was endorsed by Einstein in 1905, which is the year he put forth his special theory of relativity. It's in the context of atomic theory, and then he addresses that, and with relativity combined, atomic theory is really established.

But in the era that we're looking at, which starts with Hobbes, Hobbes just talks about little tiny bodies called corpuscles. They are little, tiny physical things, and they make up everything else. And that's it. That's his ontology.

The thinkers before Hobbes—the medieval thinkers—were all into both Plato and Aristotle, and they combined that with Christianity. There were also thinkers who combined it with Judaism, like Moses Maimonides, or combined it with Islam, like Al-Farabi and Avicenna. But the mode of philosophizing was to be so powerfully impressed by what had been done by either Plato or Aristotle, or a mix of the two, that they combined their religion—religion being sure and certain—with Plato and Aristotle being sure and certain, to come up with a big synthesis that explained the world and humans and everything in those terms. Hobbes certainly is not among them. Not one of them would have said all reality is physical.

In fact, Hobbes never quite put it that way. You know why? Because he didn't want to end up executed for being an atheist. So, he didn't want to be charged. He talked about God and our relationship with God and all that, but this world—this creation—is all physical. Whether he really meant that or did it just to stay out of jail, we don't know. But anyway, that's what he says. He says he believes everything in creation is physical, including us. And he believes in God, but he has nothing to do with all these Platonic and Aristotelian ideas of there being a perfect something or other—a perfect form or formula, the rule for what it is to be a horse or a cactus plant or a human being, and so on. That world of perfections impacts our physical, imperfect world and produces regularity and order, and the things in it that we can name, discriminate, talk about, and try to explain. That's the way most medievals did philosophy.

Hobbes is definitely more in the modern period, rejecting that as the way to go.

I'm going to distinguish here two kinds of materialism. Remember, we'll come back to this at the end of the course: strong materialism

Strong materialism says all things are purely physical. Now, just think about that for a minute. All things are purely physical. Think about the things that you see around you right now—maybe you're looking at a phone or a computer screen.

Those things have physical properties. They have weight, mass, solidity, density. But do they have only physical properties? Don’t they have color? Don’t they have a shape? Shapes aren't physical, are they? Shapes don't fall to the ground if not supported. Don’t they have quantity? Isn't there something you can measure, like so many inches across? But quantities are also not physical. Numbers aren't physical objects. Numbers don't fall to the ground if you don't support them.

It seems these objects have physical properties, but as we experience them, they also have non-physical properties. It costs money, for example. Isn’t that a real property of the computer or the phone—that it costs so much money? Sure it is. But that's not a physical property. It's not explained by the laws of physics.

So what does the strong materialist say to all that? The strong materialist says that all of those non-physical properties are illusions. The world as we experience it all day, every day, is the illusory world. What appears to us as properties of things that are quantitative or spatial, or as economic properties, legal properties, or anything else, is just an illusion. For example, your phone or computer might be evidence in a court case and help establish someone's guilt or innocence—those non-physical properties are illusions, says the strong materialist. What we experience all day long is an illusory world. The real world is made up only of things that have physical properties. They have different kinds of arguments for it, but that's strong materialism, okay?

Now, the weak materialist—I'm calling it that, it’s my term—says all things are purely physical or caused by the purely physical.

This allows for there to be characteristics of things that aren't physical. This guy doesn't say that the world you experience every day is an illusion. He says, "No, that's the real world." But what you don't see when you just look at that world is that it's the purely physical that is creating all the other kinds of properties: the colors, tastes, sounds, smells, quantitative properties, spatial properties, and even properties that are economic or legal. They're all real, as long as they're caused by the purely physical. The purely physical is what has independent reality, and it generates all the rest.

The strong materialist says, "No, there are no non-physical properties to things at all. All things are purely physical." Of course, that means that the self-existent ones are purely physical too. For both of them, the ones that are self-existent and produce all the rest—if there are any more—are purely physical.

Hobbes liked that. He didn’t like all the talk about the perfect horse in another world that impacts matter and makes imperfect horses in this world—that’s Plato, that sort of stuff. Wow, that’s fantastic, it’s fantasy. That’s science fiction kind of stuff. Hobbes didn’t want to hear that. He was going to be a materialist.

Now, having said that, Hobbes fails to make this distinction. He doesn’t distinguish between the strong and weak materialist, and sometimes he talks as though he’s a strong materialist, and sometimes he talks as though he’s a weak materialist. And he never tells us—he never distinguishes between them or gives us an argument why one is right and the other is wrong, which is not so good. His way of dealing with medieval philosophy having to do with perfections is pretty much to just ignore it.

What he does do, however, is argue from this materialism and draw the consequence that what has basic reality are individuals. It’s individual bodies that are the ultimate reality, right? They’re little tiny—he probably thought of them like ball bearings or something infinitesimally small. But they’re the tiniest particles, and their matter, their material, and how they combine determines whether the whole they combine in is earth, air, fire, water, or a horse, a mountain, a cloud, or a human. Alright? But it’s individuals that are ultimately real. So he holds that human individuals are the ultimate social reality. Transfer all this, transfer this to the theory of society.

Human society, then, is made up of individuals.

That's human society. In other words, it mirrors reality. Reality is made up of individual infinitesimal particles, corpuscles; they combine to form different things. What's the basic human reality? Individuals. Basic human reality is each and every person. There isn't society, and humans depend on this—individuals depend on being in a society. No, individuals are what make society. At first, there were only independent individuals, says Hobbes; there was no society. He hasn't got a theory of how these humans came about. This is long before Darwin. Okay, he isn't that, but he would like that theory. He might say, "Okay, evolution took place, and now we get humans. We get beings that think rationally." He's not throwing out rational thought. We think rationally. It's just that rational thinking can do a lot less than these other guys are all going to say.

What are individuals geared for? At first, survival. Here they are in a tough environment. They're on their own. The first individuals had to be tough. They had to hunt their own food, make their own clothes. I mean, think about this. Maybe you haven't thought about it before, but suppose you were cast alone on an island—no clothes, nothing on your feet, no hat to keep the sun off. You don't know anything about this island. What's the first thing you're going to do? What's your first need you're going to meet? Is the first thing to find water? If you do find it, how will you know if you can drink it?

Find food. Oh, maybe you find plants with berries on them—okay to eat that? Or is that going to double you up in convulsions and kill you? Maybe there's something on the island that has picked up your scent and is even now coming to eat you. So, is the first thing you should do to make a weapon, get a stick, and try to push it against the rock to form a sharp point at the end? Or maybe something even better—maybe you can find a stick that seems to be bent and springy and make a bow out of it if you can get something to be the string and make something that would count as an arrow. Would it hit something else with enough force to save you from being that other thing's evening meal?

Well, there are a lot of things to think about, aren't there? Is the first thing to get something on your feet so you can walk around and do any of these tasks? A lot of people don't realize how helpless we would be. That's why the older theories weren't individualist. Plato and Aristotle, for example, held that it's society that's the basic human reality, and the society produces human individuals. It takes more than one to produce one. You've got to have a group. And then, when you have a group of humans that is self-sufficient and can supply all their needs, then you automatically have a state—a political institution that decides what laws there should be and decides matters of justice. But it's society that's the primary human reality.

Aristotle puts it this way: the solitary human dies. There can't be solitary humans. They have to form a society, or a society has to be formed to produce them and reach the point where it's producing its own needs. It's self-sufficient. It can defend itself, feed itself, clothe itself. Bingo, you've got human society, but nothing less.

Hobbes reverses it. It's the individual that's primary. Solitary individuals—superior ones—don't die; they survive. And how did the race continue? Hobbes says there wasn't even marriage. It’s just a male meets up with a female, has sex, and she has a child all on her own. That's how the race continued until finally, people got tired of living like that—where each one's on his own to defend himself and produce everything for himself. That eats up the whole of life. That's no fun. So they get together and they make a contract with each other to form a society, to have rules, to have laws that they will live by, and some way to resolve disputes.

And then, and only then, they can divide up the work. So, you don't have to make all your clothes—there are clothes makers. You don't have to build your house—there are house builders. You don't have to make your shoes or your weapons—there are weapon makers and shoemakers. And maybe what you make are canoes and sell them—that's fine. Then you don't have to do it all. Hobbes says, then we get a society, and then we get the rules, and we get the terms of the contract under which they live with one another.

Individuals contract with each other, sorry, to form a society. Now we are going to come up against that theory. In the future, there are going to be other people who are going to hold it as well, and some of them were very influential in other places. For example, the British empiricist idea of individuals and the contract view of society, as it was explained by Locke, was very influential on the American founding fathers. So, this will come back to haunt us in a way. Is society the primary reality, or are individuals the primary reality, and they create a society? Or is society the primary reality, and the society produces individuals who continue to depend on society?

Aristotle changed his view a little bit. He admitted that there might be some unusual individuals who could survive on their own, but he said anybody who is like that and can continue to live entirely on their own, separated from any other human society, is not a human. That individual is either a god or an animal, either pre-human or superhuman. And there may be such individuals, but don't allow them in your state. If there are such individuals, they should be banished because they'll wreck everything for those who have to live by society's rules.

Interesting stuff. We'll come back next time. We'll finish Hobbes, and then we'll talk about how the previous century influenced the people that we're going to look at, mainly Descartes to Kant, and then we'll start with that.