Transcript Reading: Finishing Hobbes and Starting Descartes
Finishing Hobbs and Beginning Decartes
We continue now with the thought of Thomas Hobbes, the big materialist who spoils the party for everybody else. Nobody agrees with him, but that doesn't faze him in the least—it doesn't bother him. Hobbes sets as his agenda his ontology, which is that everything is physical. I already explained that he's not clear on whether he's a strong materialist or a weak materialist, but he's definitely not a dualist. A dualist is someone who says it's not true that everything is only physical—some things are purely rational. And it's the combination of the purely rational with the purely physical that brings about the world that we experience. Humans, they say, have a bit of that rationality. Rationality is divine; physical matter is divine. That is, they both have independent existence. We are beings that are both. We have physical bodies and we have rational minds, so we're able to know rational truths, and so on. But not for Hobbes—no, no. What we do is calculate. When we reason, all we're doing is adding and subtracting words the way we add and subtract numbers in arithmetic. That's his epistemology. Try not to laugh—it's pretty crude and excessively simple, but that's what he wrote.
All of our real knowledge, when we increase our knowledge, is derived from what Hobbes calls phantasms. We would call it perception, or maybe sensation. So, we see patches of color, we feel resistance when we hit something, we experience sounds, tastes, touches, smells—that stuff is what registers in human brains, and that's where we get all our information. It's what we experience—perceptions, sensations. In fact, we can't really think of anything that we haven't experienced in that way. Because when we try to create fantastic things, new things, all we're doing is combining pieces of other stuff that we already perceived. So, we can think of a horse with wings, but we've already seen beings with wings called birds, and we've already seen horses. We just think of combining pieces of one with pieces of the other, but we haven't come up with anything new that we didn't experience.
All knowledge comes from perception. And I told you before that this emphasis on knowledge coming from experience is called empiricism.
Now, people can be empiricists partially about knowledge, or empiricists totally. The vast majority of people who have been empiricists and liked being called that were not total empiricists. Hume tried to be that and tried to get away with it. We'll see why he didn't succeed in that when we get to him. But Hobbes is another one who’s saying, "Yeah, it all comes from experience." Now, you might ask, "Why are there people who resist that? What's the alternative?" The alternative is what most of the guys we're talking about are doing: saying that our experience is divided—well, maybe that's not the best way to put it—our experience has two components. There's an empirical part to our experience, but we also experience—not in the same way, but experience—the laws of logic and the laws of mathematics. And those aren't objects that we perceive with our senses, but once we know about these logical truths, we can't get them out of our minds. We can then see that every time we reason correctly, it’s in conformity to them.
Let’s take as an example the fundamental axiom of logic called the law of non-contradiction. Here’s an easy way to remember it: nothing can be both true and false in the same sense at the same time.
So no belief can be both true and false in the same sense. If you shift senses on me, then all bets are off. At the same time, things can be one thing and then change and be another, but at the same time, in the same state? No. So if I owe you 20 bucks and I haven't paid it back, then either it's true that I owe you 20 bucks or it's not, and it can't be both. I can't say to you, "Oh, well, I did pay you," and you say, "No, you didn't." And then I say, "Oh, well, that's right, I didn't, and I did." You're going to think I'm just clowning around or I'm ready to be locked up in a padded room. Contradictions can't both be true of the same thing in the same sense at the same time.
There are other logical rules as well, and they're all equally obvious. There are mathematical formulae and rules—one and one is two. That doesn't give anybody any problems, does it? It's an obvious truth. We say it's self-evident, which just means it looks irresistibly true, and nobody can think of a good reason why it isn’t, right? But that doesn't come from seeing one thing and another thing make two things. If I see I hold this up and I hold that up, I put them together and say, "This one and that one make two." But if I add a spark to a pile of gunpowder, it doesn't make two things—it makes an explosion, which is very unlike two things.
It has to be the right sort of putting together. And it’s something that I see examples of in my sensory experience, but I don't see that one and one is always and everywhere two at all times. I don't see that with my senses. It’s the "everywhere and at all times" part that you don’t see. I can see that one thing and another thing make two things right now on top of my desk, but I can’t see that it was true a million years ago, and I can’t see that it will be true 1,000 years from now—not with my eyes. So they’re called "rational truths." We have these intuitions of rationality that are as certain as anything we could have. If you listen to Pascal or Descartes, or any of the great thinkers who worked in logic and mathematics, they’re going to tell you these things are self-evident.
The law of non-contradiction was what Aristotle thought was the most certain of all truths: that nothing could be both true and false in the same sense at the same time. So we have Mr. Hobbes here saying that rationality isn’t so important. He says we just calculate, and our ordinary reasoning is simply adding and subtracting words the way we add and subtract numbers in arithmetic. And that’s it.
Most of our information, he says, comes from our senses. We’ve seen that he wants to argue that the individual is the primary social reality, and any groups are formed by individuals choosing to come together and create the group. So what then is the state? What then is the political institution of society? Well, the state is created by agreement among individuals.
Here again, I went over this briefly, but I’ll recap a bit. What we find in the state of nature, as we naturally are in the world, are solitary individuals trying to survive in a certain landscape. There isn’t even a plan for reproduction. Having sex and reproducing are things that just happen accidentally, all over the place. There are no marriages, no families, no schools, no institutions of worship—nothing. There are just individuals on a landscape trying to survive. This means you have to make your own clothes, your own weapons, get your own food, defend yourself, and so on.
That is no way to live, Hobbes says. That’s the natural state of humans. When they came into existence, that state of nature was, in his own words, "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short." You don’t last very long being your own sole defender. It’s because of all those inconveniences—Locke later calls them "inconveniences," like being eaten by a bear is an inconvenience. The inconveniences of that kind of life are what drive people to get together and try to form a unified group, to make an actual social institution.
They’re going to create it by agreement, and the first thing they do, Hobbes says, is they all agree to give up their right to everything and create a sovereign. Now, he chooses that word carefully. He doesn’t say "king" because he knows there are associations in Britain with the monarchy and the Royal House. A sovereign of some sort—this person is going to be the supreme authority.
Everyone in the state of nature has a right to whatever they can get. There’s no theory about rights, law, or natural justice. There are no things that are naturally right or wrong. There’s just whatever you can get and keep—it’s yours. It’s like talking about the right of self-defense. Self-defense comes naturally to everybody. And Hobbes says all rights are like that—they’re natural and have to do with survival.
But this group gets together, and they agree to give up their rights to the sovereign. They make a deal among themselves, and they all give up their rights and give the sovereign the sole right to make and enforce laws. In fact, the sovereign isn’t even part of the deal. The contract is among the people. They agree among themselves to create the sovereign. The sovereign doesn’t have to agree to any conditions. The sovereign is now the final authority, the maker of all laws, and the enforcer.
But what that means is that there’s going to be some sort of constabulary—some sort of armed force that enforces the laws the sovereign makes. And that same armed force is also going to protect all the citizens who are party to this contract, who have entered into it. And Hobbes says that’s the way all human society came about. It was only after they did that, that they formed into families, larger family groups, the broader family, and that they formed businesses, maybe labor unions, schools to educate the young, and so on.
These different institutions arise within the state, within the political institution that exists to make and enforce laws.
Now, that theory is not going to go over well with rationalists, with the other people that we're going to study. They're all going to want to make the laws of logic and mathematics one of the Divine realities. And they're going to say that we think best and rightly only when we think in accordance with those laws. And they're going to want those natural laws of logic and math to determine truth and falsity, to be a big part of formulating what a society should be, and so on. They're going to say that right rule is a rule of reason—that's what Aristotle had already said, you know, 2,300 years before this. But here, this is what we get put forward by Mr. Hobbes. I'm going to come back to that and to his materialism later on, but two points now to remember: he's an individualist. The basic reality in human society is not the group, it's the individual.
Let me do something by way of putting that on my blackboard. There are individuals, and there are groups. And the question is, which is the basic reality? Which creates the other? Is it that individuals come together, make a contract of some kind among themselves in order to become a group and appoint a sovereign, appoint a ruler? Is that how it works, and then you get the group? Or is it that you have a group that evolves to such a size that it becomes self-sustaining? It provides its own food, its own clothes, and so on, and then appoints a ruler as an individual? But meanwhile, it's the group that's the primary reality. The primary reality produces the individuals. Remember Aristotle—the solitary individual dies? Well, that's what he wants to say. There he holds it. It's the group, the state, that is the basic unit and the basic institution.
Now, let me say something right away about this and not keep you in suspense, so we come back to it from a Christian point of view. Is it individuals that create groups, or groups that create individuals? And the answer is, neither one is right. God has created both individuals and groups. One of the Psalms says, "He sets individuals in families." God has created both. They interact with one another, but neither is the source of the other.
And why is that important? Let me tell you, it's important for this reason: the people that say it's individuals who create the groups then don't want the law to afford a full range of rights to any group. It's the rights of the individual that always trump the rights of the group. They come first and foremost. And if there are any rights for groups, they're derivative of the rights of individuals. If you're a collectivist, you hold that it's the group that's the primary reality, and the group has the rights, and individuals have them only when the group grants them. So the whole notion of rights and equality before the law is wrecked by either of these. One always favors the group over the individual; the other, the individual over the group. And neither one can come to a balance because they're committed either to saying that it's collectivist—the group that's primary—or individualist—it's the rights of the individual that are primary. Neither one is correct from a Christian point of view, as I see it.
All right, I think we've done enough with Mr. Hobbes. It was, after all, just a quick convenience to add on, to include a thinker so out of step with everything that happened after him. In fact, for 200 years, or more like 400, serious materialism arose in the 19th century with Marx, and again in the latter part of the 20th century with academic philosophy in general.
But not until now are we poised and ready to launch into the modern period, from 1600 to 1800, which begins with Descartes and ends with Kant. Are you ready? Because I am. We're just going to dive right in. Let me get my blackboard back. Okay?
And we start here, of course, with René Descartes.
Descartes was born into a family that was fairly well off. He had a good education and valued original, creative thinking. While still very young, he invented analytic geometry—a way of applying algebra to geometry. That made him famous all over Europe. Anywhere you went, people knew the name Descartes. He did other things, too—some of you know Cartesian coordinates, which are named after him, and so on. But what he loved most of all was philosophy.
He had a habit of staying in bed until noon every day. He'd wake up fairly early, but he would stay in bed, doing his work there—writing, thinking about math, thinking about philosophy. He didn’t feel particularly troubled by many of the issues he wrote about, but the century into which he was born was deeply troubled. That century was preceded by the 16th century—the 1500s—and in the 1500s, three major cultural forces emerged, two of them brand new.
What had prevailed through the Middle Ages—I'll call it medieval culture—was an arrangement where the church ruled a person's soul and the state ruled the person's body. The two of them were the big authorities in life. There was the state, ruled by a king, and there was the church, ruled by a pope. Between the two of them, their rules covered the whole of life. In fact, sometimes they collided with each other, and it was hard to tell which one had the right authority in a particular matter at a particular time. But the general scheme was that church and state accounted for the whole of life, just as a human being has a soul and a body, okay?
This medieval time was a time when people greatly revered what had come down to them from the ancient world. They thought highly of what little they knew about the ancients like Plato or Aristotle, about Greek culture, and about the Roman Empire. They admired the accomplishments those empires had achieved between the Greeks and the Romans. They saw the Roman roads, the Roman ruins—they knew about all that stuff. But they no longer had one central authority spreading over the entire empire the way it had been before the fall of Rome. They didn't have one central body of laws, a court system, or a central monetary system. Things fragmented and fell apart, creating a time of great uncertainty.
Without the empire and its army to enforce court rulings, without courts to make those rulings, and without schools of education to train judges, lawyers, businessmen, and others, uncertainty took hold. The only institution that preserved schools of learning during this darker time following Rome's fall was the church. It preserved those schools for monks, priests, and ordained clergy, not to prepare lawyers or businessmen or accountants. So it became a time when life lacked the certainty that existed under Rome’s rule.
Now, church and state continued into this time of uncertainty, but the uncertainties really blossomed in the 1500s. That century saw the rise of a movement that had been quietly growing in the 1400s, gaining momentum and becoming louder and almost overwhelming. It was called the Renaissance.
Not only did people in the 1300s and 1400s admire ancient culture, but they also dug up more of it. They found old writings that described life under the Roman Empire. They discovered the rationalism that had been central to both the Greek and Roman empires, a belief that the laws of reasoning, mathematics, and logic pervaded the universe and gave it order. And those same laws could be understood by human reason, which could use them to understand the world, people, and make life better. This rebirth of ancient world culture was called the Renaissance—literally, "rebirth." What was being reborn was largely rationalism, a commitment to reason that saw human beings as superior to all other living things because humans alone operate by reason.
Let me read to you a short section from one of the ancient world plays. This is a play by Sophocles, written in 441 BC, and here is what the chorus chants in the middle of the play:
"Many are the forms of life wondrous and strange to see, but nothing appears more wondrous and more strange than man. He with the wintry gales over the white, foaming sea, with wild waves surging around, wins his way across the sea. Earth, of all gods the most ancient, the first unmor decay, man with his plows travels over and over, furrowing it with horse and mule every year. The thoughtless tribe of birds, the beasts that roam the fields, the brood in sea depths—he takes them all in nets knotted in snaring mesh. Man, wonderful in skill and by his subtle arts, holds sway over the beasts, the beasts that roam the fields or tread the mountain’s height, and he brings the binding yoke upon them, upon the neck of the horse with shaggy mane, or on the bull with a mountain crest untameable in strength. In speech and thought as swift as wind, and tempered mood for life in higher states of a higher life of states, these he has learned and how to flee the clear cold of frost or the darts of storm and shower. Man, the all-providing unprovided, meets no chance the coming days may bring. Only from death still he fails to find escape, though by skill of art he may teach how to flee from disease incurable."
Man is the supreme being on earth. By his reason, he dominates all the other living forms, even the strongest beasts. He achieves a temper, a personality accustomed to life with other people, a higher life that's achieved only by having a state, an organized society with laws, lawmakers, and enforcers. Only from death does he fail to escape, though he may yet learn how to conquer even incurable disease.
What an exalted view of human beings and their reason! This is the view that was deliberately retrieved from the ancient world into European society in the 16th century. So, within this century, you have the old regime—the combination of king and church. You do your work in the fields and go to church on Sunday, and that’s what life consists of.
The state rules your body.
The Church rules your soul. Now you get a revival of man as supreme—man able to form not only states and the higher kinds of life that come with the state but also a multi-sided dominance of his environment, of the planet on which he lives. With his winds of thought and his more subtle moods, he dominates everything—only death he hasn't conquered. And he may get to that one yet.
Now, with that comes a lot of the old philosophical controversies about truth.
In the traditional medieval regime, which I'm calling the Church-State tradition, the traditions are held sacrosanct. Everything is done by custom and tradition. The Renaissance thinker wants to rethink it all: “Let's see how else we could do this. What else we might believe about this? You have this custom? Oh, how do we know that really happened?” The Renaissance is a shock to the traditional view.
Now, there's a third force that also arises in the 16th century, and that's the Reformation within the church itself. The church, being the bastion and preserver of custom and tradition, of sacred authority, faces a challenge. The Reformation claims that the church has gotten the gospel wrong for the last few centuries—quite a few centuries, in fact—and has majored in minors and added invented doctrines that don't belong there at all. And so there’s the attack on the greatest of authorities.
In a time that reveres custom and authority, you have a challenge to the church, a challenge to the state, a challenge to custom, and a challenge to tradition. Everything seems to have had the rug pulled out from under it. What's certain then? What’s sure? What can we count on?
The Renaissance says: man, with his winds of thought, will answer that. We will figure out the world. We will create the sciences. We will create philosophy. We will devise systems of ethics and law. It’s the people who know this stuff that should rule the state.
The Reformation says: we have to go back to the original Gospel. The scriptures we have are authoritative and reliable, but we may not just take them by rote. We have to do more than that, and we have to keep the church from including false doctrines and invented doctrines. That hasn’t been done, but we intend to do it. For their trouble, they were excommunicated—thrown out of the traditional church, which said, “You’re not going to come tell us what Christianity is. We’ll tell you.”
So you have three competing forces, each one of which is at odds with the other two. The Renaissance says reason will discover the truth, determine what counts as right rules, and set the customs. The Reformation says Christianity is the truth, the scriptures are reliable, but the church often messes it up. I’m reminded here of the preface to the unified Book of Common Prayer in the English church, written in 1565. It opens with this sentence: "There is nothing by the wit of man so well devised or sure asserted as hath not, in the passage of time, become corrupted." That’s a very Reformational attitude. The Gospel was committed to the church; the church messed it up. It needs to be cleaned up and reformed, and now we’ll present the Gospel.
Then there’s the traditional view: No, the old medieval way is the right way. We’ll keep the old customs. We’ll keep the old traditions. There’s the King and the Church, and those are the two alliances in life. You don’t need more than that.
That was a time of great upheaval, with these three views colliding, and one clearly emerges as the winner—or rather, comes to dominate the course of Western European civilization as we move from the 16th century into the 17th, which is where we start with Descartes.
You’ll see Descartes started as a Renaissance man. He himself is a Christian—he’s a Catholic. He doesn’t renounce his faith. He wants to remain a good Christian, but he thinks the challenges to the old views are essentially right. He says we’ve got to start all over. "Let’s sweep away all the tradition, all the custom, everything we think we know based on the authority of someone else or some other body of work. Sweep it all away, and let's start all over, starting at rock bottom. What is it that we can’t be wrong about? Is there anything that is absolutely sure and certain?"
Having swept away everything else, Descartes says: we’re going to start with that and see what else we can add to it. See what else it requires, see what else it makes at least highly probable, and we’ll build on that foundation.
That’s Descartes’ challenge to the world in which he lives. He looks back at the century before him, at all the upheaval and uncertainty brought by the challenges of the Renaissance, the Reformation, and the traditional King-Church combination that had ruled medieval life for centuries. All three of these were at odds with one another. While Descartes doesn’t reject Christianity as his own faith, he does want to start in the way the Renaissance program dictates.
So his way is to say: we have no absolute foundation for anything until we find what it is that cannot possibly be false. His way of beginning philosophy is not as the ancient Greeks or the medievals did—starting with a theory of reality and then moving to a theory of knowledge. Descartes flips it. He starts with a theory of knowledge and asks: what is it we can’t possibly be wrong about? Let’s start with that, and then see what other things we can add. We’ll build on sure and certain foundations and deduce whatever else is reasonable to know.
So what we find in Descartes is that he takes two major problems as important. One is: can we trust our senses? Can we know that there really is a world that’s just like what we perceive it to be? The other is: can we know that God is real and has created us and the world? Are those things sure and certain?
Descartes says: let’s sweep away everything again. Sweep away even the idea that the senses are veridical. Sweep away the idea that God is real. We’ll have to show those things on the basis of what cannot possibly be false. Is there anything like that? What do we know that couldn’t possibly be wrong?
So Descartes proposes a method. He calls it methodological doubt. He says: let’s start by doubting everything that can be doubted—not that we seriously doubt it, not that we really doubt whether there’s a world around us, whether we have a body, and so on. No. But methodologically, as a method, we’ll put it in the doubtful column unless it’s based on something that couldn’t possibly be false. We’ll keep putting everything that can be doubted in that column that we’re temporarily getting rid of, to see what’s left—what survives. What is it that can’t be wrong? And can we prove all these other things on the basis of what can’t be wrong?
Descartes says he thinks he can, and that’s exactly what we’re going to cover when we reconvene and talk about how Descartes tried to do this. What is it that can’t be false? On that basis, can he prove that the senses are reliable? Can he prove that God exists and created the world? Descartes’ answer is: yes, I can do all those things. Watch me.
And that’s where we’re going to start next time.