Homo Notans: Marks, Signs, and

Imagination in Hobbes's Conception of

Human Nature

GAYNENERNEY

"But to build either a philosophy or anything else, there must be materials ...
Nobody's synthesis can be more complete than his analysis." - J.S. Mill

"Doctrines must take their beginnings from that of the matters of which they treat."
- Giambattista Vico

Introduction

According to an old-fashioned and somewhat out-of-fashion view, Thomas

Hobbes, "The Monster of Malmesbury," espouses perhaps the most consist-
ent and rigid mechanical materialism in the history of thought. In the words
of A.E. Taylor, a proponent of this old-fashioned and simple view, Hobbes's s
philosophy, if completed,
... would amount to a vast system of deductions by which all the truths of physical and
mental science would be shown to be logical consequences of the ultimate simple laws
of motion laid down by mechanics.'1

If one tried to follow out this characterization of Hobbes's systematic ideal,22

his truly philosophical, or truly scientific account of human nature could be
obtained only by deducing it from "the very first principles of philosophy,"
viz., body and motion. More precisely, the truly scientific account of human
nature would take the form of a logical "generation," or synthesis of man
from the explanatory material available at the appropriate stage of the grand

I A.E. Taylor, Thomas Hobbes (1908; rpt. Port Washington, NY., 1970), p. 43.
2 The English Works of Thomas Hobbes, ed. Sir William Molesworth (London, 1839-
1845), Vol. I, pp. 80-81, 87-88; Vol. VII, pp. 183-184; On Man. trans. B. Gert, C.T.
Wood, and T.S.K. Scott-Craig in Man and Citizen, ed. Bernard Gert (Gloucester, MA.,
1978), pp. 41-42. All subsequent references to these works will be to these editions,
abbreviated respectively EW and OM, with citations inserted in the text.
(would-be) deduction that purports to be Hobbes's scientific system. This
apposite point of departure for this anthropogenesis would include the
characterization of the elements of sensitive-appetitive life exhibited in "the
nature of brute beasts," plus any additional concepts needed to effect the
"construction" of man.33
Now, while it is generally true that Hobbes neglected to develop this
version of his philosophical anthropology, it is my view that Hobbes,
besides giving us an inkling of what this bit of theory would look like, also
supplied us with the principles and insights necessary for carrying out (in a
rough and ready manner) this endeavour. What I would like to do in this
paper is to make a contribution towards recovering this somewhat esoteric
version of Hobbes's teaching on human nature. This reconstruction will of
necessity involve a certain amount of speculative invention, a hopefully not
"offensive" (as per, EW, I, vii) mixture of interpretation and critique. Such
venturesome, though not 'violent,' maneuvers are necessary not because
Hobbes's teaching has somehow "come to pieces,"4 or because of an inco-
herence calling for the hermeneutical intervention of "the king's men,"
magically to supply order where there is only chaos.5 No, our interpretation
must be somewhat inventive here simply because it is true that even though
Hobbes "thought one could build up a psychology from physics, he made no

3 Of crucial importance from a practical point of view, this version of Hobbes's

teaching on human nature would be accessible only to the mathematici (EW, IV, 73-74);
it would contain the vision of man open only to those who have "learned the first part of
philosophy, namely, geometry and physics" (Logica, 301, 303EW) - the theoretical
initiates "whose heads [are] strong enough to withstand the giddiness provoked by
[Hobbes's] skepticism"; Michael Oakeshott, "The Moral Life in the Writings of Thomas
Hobbes" in Rationalism in Politics and Other Essays (New York, 1962), pp. 287-288.
According to Oakeshott's account of the oft-noted discrepancies or tensions in Hobbes's
philosophical system, the anthropology he develops and uses in his political works is a
'political' or 'popular' anthropology, which is to be contrasted to the somewhat esoteric
version insinuated in Hobbes's system. For another account of the interplay between the
political-polemical and the scientific components of Hobbes's teaching, guided by
insights similar to those of Oakeshott, see Hiram Caton, "On the Basis of Hobbes's
Political Philosophy," Political Studies, 22, 4 (1974), 413-431.
4 William Mathie, "Reason and Rhetoric in Hobbes's LEVIATHAN," Interpretation,
14 (1986). 281, where Mathie refers to the criticism of this kind of "view-mending
approach" made by F.S. McNeilly, The Anatomy of Leviathan (London, 1968), p. 13.
5 Brian Barry, "Warrender and His Critics" in Hobbes and Rousseau: A Collection of
Critical Essays, ed. M. Cranston & R.S. Peters (Garden City, NY., 1972), p. 49 where
Barry speaks of the strangeness of the reconstructive efforts to make coherent a theory
the interpreter assumes to be incoherent.

54
serious attempt to do SO"16finding it "much easier" to produce the necessary
insights into human nature by using the introspective art of nosce teip-
sum.77
For the purposes of this essay I will stipulate the coherence of Hobbes's
system up to the point where we encounter the phenomenon of man.8
Working from a generally neglected passage in the Elements of Law, where,
with the invention of memorial marks, the Human as such seems to 'appear'
for the first time, I will sketch the Hobbesian theory of Marks and Signs, and
specify the distinctive cognitive power that underwrites, for Hobbes, the
very possibility of their invention. This way of approaching Hobbes's
account of the differentia of man, by working out the genesis of marks, and
their transformation into signs, and ultimately language, involves, in effect,
the construction of an alternate vision of the "state of nature." Using and
amplifying the physical and psychological principles explicitly worked out
in Hobbes's writings, the aim of this reading is to suggest a narrative from
which we may understand the origin of marks and communicative signs, the
key to Hobbes's conception of the differentia of man, and to consider the
most immediate political implications of this vision of the human condition.
By considering the origins of speech and reason we will in effect be
considering from a relatively fresh angle Hobbes's account of man's asocial
sociality.

We may begin by noting that Hobbes follows the Aristotelian tradition in

defining man as the rational animal, or, more precisely, as the "body animate
rational" (Logica 179); the "sum of his natural faculties and powers ...
[being] contained in the definition of man, under these words, animal and
rational" (EW, IV, 2). This 'definition' is, of course, a mere entree to the
subject, for while Hobbes had no compunction against using traditional
formulas, he almost always gives them a novel twist. Rationality may be

6 Bernard Gert, "Hobbes and Psychological Egoism" in Hobbes's LEVIATHAN:Inter-

pretation and Criticism, ed. B.H. Baumrin (Belmont, CA., 1969). p. 108.
7 J.W.N. Watkins, "Philosophy and Politics in Hobbes" in Baumrin, ed., pp. 103-
104.
8 This is, of course, a considerable stipulation seeing that it includes Hobbes's question-
able "generation" of sentient life from the modifications of body and motion. For a
criticism of Hobbes's performance on this point see A.E. Taylor, pp. 42-47. For a more
detailed interpretation see Frithiof Brandt, Thomas Hobbes' Mechanical Conception of
Nature, trans. V. Maxwell and A.I. Fausboll (Copenhagen, 1928), pp. 344-347, 355-363.

55
what most obviously distinguishes man, but, like science and all other
developed human accomplishments, it is not acquired "without method,
culture, or instruction" (EW, III, 56). Rationality, or the power "to compute"
(Logica 177), especially as this involves "reckoning ... the consequences of
general names" (EW, III, 30), is a competence that is founded on more basic,
more primitive, abilities and attributes. Reason itself, and not only printing
and speech, begins to appear as itself a product of human invention (EW, III,
18). The emergence of man from out of the fold of mere nature is for Hobbes
more subtle, more nuanced, and more problematic than the traditional
definition of man as the rational animal would lead us to believe. In order
that our doctrine take its beginning from the matter of which it purports to
treat, we must attempt to reenact conceptually, as it were, the moment of
man's appearance. However, before trying to understand the point where
man began "to rank himself somewhat above the nature of beasts" (EW, IV,
20), we must turn briefly to the Hobbesian characterization of the "body-
animated-sentient" that man is.
Besides sentience,9 the human body and the bodies of brutes are char-
acterized by certain vital motions which correspond to the distinctive needs
and functions of such bodies, e.g., circulation, breathing, concoction, nutri-
tion, excretion or exhoneration, and the like (EW, III, 38). Given sense and
vital need, the reverberation of that motion that is sense continues, according
to Hobbes, via the animal spirits to the heart, "the original of life," where it
"must necessarily make some alteration or diversion of vital motion, namely
by quickening or slackening, helping or hindering the same" (EW, I, 406). It
is for this reason that men and brutes experience either delight (pleasure) or
annoyance (pain) as the necessary accompaniment of sensation. Pleasure
and pain are internal motions about the heart which, though not called
senses, arise as the immediate effects of sense, being caused by the same
objects as cause sense (OM, 45).

9 The most striking feature of human bodies, a feature man shares with brutes, is the fact
that his body is composed in such a way that the motions caused in it by its reactions with
other bodies are retained in it "for some time" (EW, I, 393). This feature of the bodies of
men and brutes provides the physical condition for sensation and memory. Indeed, this
retention of the reverberations of reaction-caused-motionsis the condition of the very
possibility of that "most admirable" of all phenomena - namely, the phenomenon of
phenomena themselves, "apparition itself, to phainesthai" (EW, I, 389). The human body
is, then, composed in such a way that, by retaining the effects of motions for a time, it has
in itself "the patterns almost of all things" (EW, I, 389). However, when we say with
Hobbes that some natural bodies do not possess sense, "this is not because they do not
possess a soul or the like, but they lack it [i.e., sense] because their bodies are not of such
a nature that they retain part of the motion [of reaction]" (Brandt, 346).

56
 Now, this internal motion that is the feeling of pleasure or pain "is also a
solicitation or provocation either to draw near to the thing that pleaseth, or to
retire from the thing that displeaseth" (EW, IV, 31). This solicitation is "the
endeavour or internal beginning of animal motion" (EW, IV, 31), i.e., the
causa sine qua non of that kind of motion characteristic of animal bodies.
Men and brutes possess, in virtue of imagination and memory, a feeling
(`sense') of pleasure or pain from which originates the endeavour to animal
or voluntary motion (EW, I, 406-407; III, 39: IV, 31). This endeavor to
animal motion, which springs ultimately from that imagination that is sense
and its accompanying delight or annoyance, always takes the form of either
appetite or aversion, one or the other as those echoes of sense about the heart.
are either pleasant (i.e., help or quicken vital motion) or painful (i.e., harm
or slacken vital motion). Using the term desire to cover indifferently ap-
petite and aversion, every sentient being is necessarily a desiring or appe-
titive being.
The primary point to be culled from this brief bit of Hobbesian physics is
that men and brutes are not determined in their motions merely by the direct
impingings of external bodies. Men and brutes are also determined mediate-
ly by the imagination or 'representation' of external bodies in sense and
memory. Further, because motion is continual, this is to say that men and
brutes are determined in their motions by "trains of imagination"; i.e., by
thought or "mental discursion." More precisely, they are determined by
"regulated" trains of imagination, by thoughts that are given celerity, force,
and direction by desire (EW, III, 13).
It is at this point that the passage from the Elements of Law, to which I
have already alluded, acquires decisive significance. In this passage Hobbes
speaks explicitly of the emergence, or appearance of man from out of brute
nature. This is an event that must be conceived, like any other natural
phenomenon, as the necessary result of "a continual progress" of causes and
effects (EW, I, 123). At the same time it is an event that underscores "the
discontinuity which characterizes the situation of man with regard to na-
ture."1° This event signals nothing less than the permanent departure of man
from the simple fold of nature; it is an occurence that marks man as nature's
prodigal son. Here is Hobbes's narration of this momentous event:

Seeing the succession of conceptions in the mind are caused ... and that there is no
conception that hath not been produced immediately before or after innumerable

10 Leo Strauss, "On the Basis of Hobbes's Political Philosophy" in What is Political
Philosophy and Other Studies (New York, 1959), p. 175, where he quotes favorably
Raymond Polin's statement on this point; see Polin, Politique et philosophie chez Hobbes
(Paris, 1953), p. 23.

57
 others, by the innumerable acts of sense; it must needs follow that one conception
followeth not another, according to our election, and the need we have of them, but as
it chanceth us to hear or see such things as shall bring them to our mind. The
experience we have here of, is in such brute beasts, which, having the providence to
hide the remains and superfluity of their meat, do nevertheless ... want the remem-
brance of the place where they hid it, and thereby make no benefit thereof in their
hunger; but man, who in this point beginneth to rank himself somewhat above the
nature of the beasts, hath observed and remembered the cause if this defect, and to
amend the same, hath imagined or devised to set up a visible or other sensible mark,
the which he seeth it again, may bring to his mind the thought he had when he set it up.
(EW, IV, 19-20)
Whatever difficulties there may be with the accuracy or adequacy of
Hobbes's ethology, his point is nonetheless clear and provocative. Man is
pictured as raising himself, by his own bootstraps, as it were, out of a
pre-human, brute existence. This is purportedly accomplished by an act of
"invention," which is at once built on an instinctual endowment man shares
with brutes, and at the same time alters forever man's relationship with
nature. Characteristically, this anthropogenetic act is presented as one of
perfecting, improving upon, and, thus, going beyond "mere" nature. Man
expresses his humanity in the endeavour to remember this burial place by
setting up a mark. By the 'simple' act of marking, human ingenuity devises a
means for correcting and perfecting the now-recognized deficiencies natural
"providence."
It is, thus, by making his mark that man emerges from brute nature. In
order to understand the significance of this conceptualization of what differ-
entiates man from nature, and to grasp what ultimately makes man possible,
it is necessary to turn to Hobbes's technical discussion of marks and his
theory of signs. In this discussion we will see how it is that man the marker,
homo notans, may become, though not by teleological necessity, the speak-
ing animal who lives in cities.
According to Hobbes, marks are "sensible things employed by our own
decision, so that at the sensation of these things, thoughts can be recalled to
the mind, similar to those thoughts for the sake of which they were sum-
moned" (Logica 195). These "sensible moniments" or "sensible objects"
have as their primary function the job of aiding memory, or of helping to
insure that one will "remember thereby somewhat past, when the same is
objected to his sense again" (EW, IV, 20). The invention of marks is the first
step towards the "reduction" of mental "discursion" into that "discourse of
the mind," or "internal ratiocination of the mind without words," that is
finally transposed into "verbal discourse" with the invention of speech (EW,
IV, 14; I, 5; III, 19). As Hobbes says, the invention of marks, "to which past
thought can be reduced [to a form of proto-discourse]," also, and crucially,

58
serves the task of stabilizing mercurial and evanescent thought by register-
ing our thoughts "[each] in their own order" (Logica 195).
The invention of this sensible means for surmounting the limits of sense
and memory" is, as Hobbes stresses again and again, a manifestation of an
undeniable human spontaneity, viz., the capacity for arbitrariness. The
invention of marks, or, more precisely, the choice of the physical things
"ordained" to serve this singular function is purely "arbitrary" or "volun-
tary", taken utterly "at pleasure." Marking is not a passive process of
replicating some pre-notational natural form; it is, rather, an altogether
active gesture of self-assertion in which an order and coherence is imposed
on trains of thought where but little of this can be discovered. As Hobbes
says about names, that species of voiced mark "sensible by the ear" (EW, IV,
20), it is to be assumed their origin was "arbitrary," for "who can come to
think that the natures of things display themselves in their names?" (Logica
199). The very idea "that names have been imposed on single things
according to the nature of those things" is a "childish" notion (OM, 39). Not
only is it the case that "the nature of things is everywhere the same while
languages are diverse," but even more obviously, "what relationship hath a
call (that is, a sound) with an animal (that is, a body)?" (OM, 39). The idea
that marking and naming arise from the operation of a (divinely granted)
power of onomathesia might be called 'the great deception of mind,' as the
idea that the "accidents and qualities of our senses ...be [there] in the world"
is "the great deception of sense" (EW, IV, 8). 12
Memorial marks are, then, the first artifacts; they are, in a sense, the first
"contra-natural" (EW, II, vii) objects. The human act of erecting marks in
effect 'constitutes' nature as a term of distinction. Even if the aboriginal
marker does not understand this implication of his act of marking, it is none
the less the case that, by "arbitrarily" injecting this thing of art into the
natural process of sense life, he makes the distinction between nature and
non-nature, even in the radical sense of making there to be a distinction
between nature and non-nature (either as art or convention). The moment

11 G.C. Robertson, Hobbes (London, 1886), p. 78.

12 Regarding this feature of his theory of marks, Hobbes is most emphatic in his denial
of a likeness relationship between sign and signified in those places where he speaks of
the relationship between names and their referents (OM, 39; Logica 199). According to
A.E. Taylor, "Hobbes goes beyond most of the English writers who have since espoused
the doctrine that sensible qualities are subjective; he maintains the same thing about
space and time themselves" (A.E. Taylor, 52). On the basis of EW, I, 92-93, one could
indeed maintain that Hobbes's "phenomenalism" is "a crude anticipation of Kant's
transcendental idealism"; see Strauss, 174, where he commends Polin's similar view.

59
where and when man asserts himself as man is coeval with the origin of
'nature' as something other than a synonym for 'being.'
Just as important for Hobbes's conception of marks is his insistent claim
that marks are not in themselves communicative signs. The primary function
of marks - that of serving as a special kind of mnemonic aid - need not
include the function of serving the same or like role for "others." Hobbes
says, for example, that "general names" (the most sophisticated species of
mark) are "agreed upon for the marking and signifying of our thoughts," to
which he adds the emphatic gloss, "I say marking them when we reckon by
ourselves and signifying when we demonstrate or approve our reckonings to
other men" (EW, III, 30). He even goes so far as to say that a solitary thinker
does not need quantifiers, those "words, all, every, some, etc., which denote
universality and particularity," in his collection of marks, for:

From this it can also be known that the use of signs of this kind is not for the sake of the
man himself or for acquiring scientific knowledge by one's own meditation (for
everyone has his own determinate thoughts without these) but for the sake of others,
that is for teaching and signifying our conceptions to others. (Logica 221)

A solitary thinker does not need such signs because he cannot be confused as
to whether his "indefinite names" are to be taken as universal or particular.
Since he makes his marks, and knows what he made them to mark, there
could be no obstacle to his understanding them.
It is, therefore, only by the lone marker's decision to try "begetting in ...
another the same conceptions that [he has] in [himself]" (EW, IV, 71) that
his idiosyncratic marks may become communicative signs. Given that marks
are instituted for personal use and signs for social purposes, the Hobbesian
distinction between marks and signs intimates the most primitive distinction
between the private and the public. In the act of transforming marks into
communicative signs, which are as "sensible" and as "arbitrarily" chosen as
marks themselves, a solitary, thinking human being becomes, or would
become, something of a public person.
By considering it possible for marks to serve their characteristic role
without at the same time being communicative signs, Hobbes clearly indi-
cates that he did not consider the idea of a 'private language' to be absurd.
Even though names, for example, serve both for marking and signifying our
thoughts, "they perform the function of marks before that of signs," and
"they [i.e., marks] would serve a man as a memory aid even if he existed
alone in the world" (Logica 197). Indeed, if in the first place names "serve
for discovering, as I said before, as tokens for memory," and if they serve
only derivatively "as words for signifying [our thoughts to others]," it
follows for Hobbes that "a solitary man can be a philosopher without a

60
teacher" (Logica 311, 313). This essentially solitary philosopher is more like
Adam before the creation of Eve than like Robinson Crusoe. Crusoe, unlike
Adam (ignoring for the sake of example the presence of God), is a solitary
speaker, who just happens to be in condition where it is impossible for him to
speak to other human beings. It appears that a man could live the philosophi-
cal life in utter isolation. Dialogue does not seem to be necessary for the
discovery of philosophical truth. Hobbes seems to suggest that, after this
essentially solitary philosopher has "set down [his] own reading orderly, and
perspicuously" (EW, III, xii), the only benefit he would reap by communi-
cating "his notes with others" is the honor of being known, and remembered
after his bodily demise, as one who contributed to the "increase" of "the
entire human race" (Logica 195).
Hobbes does not, then, conceive marking, naming, speaking, or reasoning
to be inherently social actions. As it is false, however paradoxical, to think
that "man is a creature born fit for society" (EW, II, 2), so too is it false to
think that man's rationality, or proto-rationality, is inherently social. Man's
social bond with others is no more an essential feature of his nature than
being a medium of communication is a necessary feature of marks. Both are
"accidents" (EW, II, 3). Even if it were true that the development of science
and philosophy is the immanent telos of knowingly possessing in oneself
"the patterns almost of all things," the fruition of natural reason (EW, I, 1-2)
is not something that necessarily unites men. This is, of course, perfectly
consistent with Hobbes's "individualism"; human beings appear capable of
realizing their good alone, outside of any community constituted by lan-
guage, conversation, and tradition. What it means to say that "men come
together, and delight in each others company ... not because naturally it
could happen no otherwise, but by accident" (EW, II, 3) is that the goods of
conversation and community are only contingently related - however fre-
quently - to the real goods sought in and through association. In fact, the
ultimate utility of philosophy may be that it conduces to perfectly contented
privacy, giving a man "somewhat of [his] own wherewith to fill up [his]
time," and keeping him from being "troublesome to men that have business,
or take hurt by falling into idle company" (EW, I, xiv).

II

Besides the problems involved in Hobbes's version of the 'private language'

argument, we must also wonder how our 'rigid mechanical materialist' can
account for the very possibility of marks. If scientific knowledge is of the
reasoned fact (Logica 289), merely acknowledging that, 'There is man the

61
marker,' will hardly suffice. In order to come to a more nuanced view of
Hobbes's teaching, it is necessary to examine in greater detail, with an eye to
the substance concealed in the phenomenon, his theory of marks and signs.
By paying special attention to the deficiencies of his theory of marking, and
by trying to fill in the lacunae in his scientific generation of man, we may
discover the important qualifications' that (more than) "save the pheno-
mena." Arguing with our author, the promise is that this will be done in a
Hobbesian spirit if not always by the Hobbesian letter.
Marks and communicative signs, however distinct their function and
however different in complexity and refinement, at their root depend on
some arbitrary (i.e., voluntary) human act. Designed to serve specifically
human purposes, marks and communicative signs are artifacts. They are
thoroughly artificial, even if in respect of their "sensible" or corporeal
aspect they are quite literally natural things, as natural, for example, as the
stone set up to warn sailors of shoals, or the bush hung up to advertise the
sale of wine, or for that matter, the word-sounds "signifying the thoughts
and motions of the mind" (Logica 195, 197). But although Hobbes nowhere
speaks of natural marks, he does distinguish and speak at length of natural
signs. Even though the origin and purposes of marks and communicative
signs are unique, they are, thus, not without precedents and precursors.
Marks and signs are the artificial or human counterparts of a more general
phenomenon - namely, the capacity for the "taking of natural signs" (EW,
IV, 17). 13
Broadening our view to take in the whole of Hobbes's theory of signs, we
note the generic, or unqualified definition of a sign:

Signs however are customarily called the antecedents of consequences and the con-
sequences of antecedents, since we generally experience them in a similar way
preceding or following one another in a similar fashion. (Logica 195)

With somewhat more detail:

A sign is the evident antecedent of the consequent; and contrarily, the consequent of
the antecedent, when the like consequences have been observed before; and the oftener
they have been observed, the less uncertain is the sign. (EW, III, 15)

And finally:

When a man hath so observed like antecedents to be followed by like consequents,

THAT WHENEVER HE SEETH the antecedent, he looketh again for the consequent;

13 John W. Danford, "The Problem of Language in Hobbes's Political Science," Journal

of Politics, 42 (1980), p. 122.

62
 or when he seeth the consequent, maketh account that there hath been the like
antecedent; then he called both the antecedent and the consequent, SIGNS ONE OF
ANOTHER. (EW, IV, 17)

From these three citations it is possible to elaborate Hobbes's general theory

of signs.
Signs generally, whether artificial or natural, are "thoughts" or "concep-
tions" that are presumed "to be [something] more than images" (Logica
271). This phrase occurs in a place where Hobbes explains the possibility of
perceptual error, which he distinguishes sharply from falsity and absurdity,
both of which are 'errors' possible only for speakers. When conceptions are
taken "to be something more than images," i.e., when an interpretation or
judgment is made from a conception, perceptual error can arise. In the case
of the 'correct' taking of natural signs, conceptions are also, on the basis of
habit (EW, IV, 25), properly taken "to be something more than images,"
namely, as the antecedent or consequent of that of which it is the natural
sign.
Signs, themselves evident and sensible things, are, then, individual
thoughts (or images) taken either to be the antecedent (and, thus the sign) of-
some other thought, or to be the consequence (and, thus the sign) of some
other thought. Natural and artificial signs are distinguished on the basis of
how it comes to be, as a matter of fact, that a thought is taken "to be more
than an image"; they are distinguished in terms of the particular mechanism
through which signification and its regularity are established. For a natural
sign the fact of its being either the regular antecedent or consequent of some
other thought is something simply discovered in "mere" nature; it acquires
its status as a sign by a process that originates in something other than
human will. For example, "a dense cloud is a [natural] sign of consequent
rain" and "rain [is] a [natural] sign of an antecedent cloud" (Logica 195), not
because some man or group of men has ordained it so, but because "the
nature of things is everywhere the same" (OM, 39). Natural signs, being
independent of human artifice, hold irrespective of the differences in human
customs and practices. And yet, given that the natural is distinguished first,
and only, in opposition to the sorts of things that arise due to the causation of
the human will (EW, III, 71), it follows that even though natural signs are
certainly first in the order of becoming, they cannot be defined, or even
recognized as such, except over and against the sort of sign that is their
humanly instituted counterpart.
Individual thoughts acquire these additional `sign' characters, which are
something beyond the actually experienced contents of these thoughts,
because they have been regularly experienced in this antecedent-consequent

63
relationship. This regularity of "the succession of conceptions in the mind"
engenders a habit (EW, I, 348-349; IV, 25), i.e., an ingrained disposition to
take certain thoughts (or conceptions, images, phantasms, representations,
etc.) as either the antecedent or consequent of some other thought. Hobbes
stresses that in virtue of this habitual determination, which is more "certain"
the "oftener" this order has been observed, the "succession of conceptions
...followeth not according to our election" (EW IV, 19). Signs, whether
artificial or natural, once they have been'established,' direct the attention of
the mind either from one thought to the anticipation of another (i.e., "he-
looketh again for the consequent"), or from one thought to the recollection
of another (i.e., he "maketh account that there hath been the like antece-
dent") by a blind, involuntary compulsion (i.e., "not according to our
election"). Because an artificial sign may come to be as "certain" an
indicator of its respective consequent or antecedent, the habits instituted on
the basis of human will becoming as fixed and determinate as those estab-
lished by the 'untutored' process of natural causation, it is possible for
confusion to arise as to what is and what is not naturally significant.
It is, then, by this process of forming `significant habits,' which is nothing
else but the very generation of connected experience, that individual
thoughts are taken "to be something more than images." This is to say that
those individual thoughts that become signs are no longer simply single
presentations, but work to present some other object besides themselves. On
this basis, it can be said that signs mark the joints between portions of
experience. According to Hobbes, it is thus that signs provide the basis for
prudence, which is a "taking signs from experience warily" (EW, IV, 17).
Prudence is a 'wary' taking of signs because this taking has the character of a
"conjecture," for which "assurance" is relative to, or proportional to the
frequency and regularity of observed sequences of conceptions (EW, IV,
18).
What Hobbes describes as a sign, natural or artificial, may be understood
as a regular association that depends on an association by contiguity, and not
upon an association based on resemblance or on any intellectual operation.
In virtue of this habitual association, a truly existential relation, in fact, an
actual dynamic connection, is established between different conceptions in
the mind of some sentient-thinking being. Because of this real connection,
based on experience and habit, an object known directly points to something
else or makes something other than itself virtually present to the knower.
This "something other" may be something anticipated in the future (e.g.,
rain from a thick cloud), something recollected from the past (e.g., a thick
cloud from rain), or something present with the sign, but less evident than it
(e.g., shoals marked for unsuspecting sailors). In sum, signs, which establish

64
real connections between things, are specific objects or 'facts' of whose
reality someone has actual knowledge, and which indicate to him the reality
of certain other objects or facts, in the sense that his belief in the reality of
the one is experienced (though not at all evidently) as motivating a belief in
the reality of the other. Because of this there is "experience" and the richness
of experience incorporates more than the present, even though the present
alone "has a [true] being in nature" (EW, III, 15).
One of the striking features of Hobbes's theory of signs is that he does not
describe any sign relationships based on the principle of likeness. This is a
lacuna in his account of marks and signs that affects either the coherence of
his 'private language argument' or the way in which we ought to take his
paradoxes on this score. Hobbes makes no mention of what Peirce calls an
icon, or iconic sign, or of what Husserl calls an "expressive" or "meaning-
ful" sign. The only sorts of sign Hobbes recognizes are indexical (Peirce) or
indicative (Husserl) signs.14 In his explicit discussions of this matter, the
only connection between a sign and its object recognized by Hobbes is an
association by contiguity, primarily temporal, but also spacial.
Even when the examples Hobbes uses exhibit the kind of signification
characteristic of signs-by-likeness, he does not point it out. In the case of "a
bush hung up for signifying that wine is for sale" (Logica 197), Hobbes does
not make clear whether or not the 'bush' is a pictorial representation of a
grape vine, or merely some arbitrary bush selected "at pleasure" to advertise
the sale of wine. In the case of "a stone [set in the ground] for signifying the
boundries of a field" (Logica 197), the stone is not a likeness of what it
signifies, whereas if it were a stone that "men that have passed by a rock at
sea" set up as a sign to warn others of the danger (EW, IV, 20), this would be
an example of an iconic or expressive sign. The relationship, for example,
between "a thick cloud" and "rain" is not one of likeness, even though the
very taking of signs requires a recognition of resemblance holding between
sensed antecedents, or between sensed consequents that do function as
indexical-indicative signs of their respectively anticipated consequents or
recollected antecedents. In fact, in his treatment of identity and difference
Hobbes conceptualizes the likeness relationship as a species of antecedent-
consequent relation, specifically as the proportion "of the magnitude of the
antecedent compared to the magnitude of the consequent" (EW, I, 133).

14 Peirce. "Logic as Semiotic: The Theory of Signs", in The Philosophical Writings of

Peirce, ed. Justus Buchler (New York, 1955); 98-199; Husserl, "Investigation I: Expres-
sion and Meaning," in Logical Investigations, I, ed. & trans. J.N. Findlay (London,
1970), 269-333.

65
 As already mentioned, Hobbes is most emphatic in his denial of a likeness
relationship between sign and signified in those places where he speaks of
the relationship between names and their referents (OM, 39; EW, I, 15).
Quite in keeping with the counter common-sensical implications of his
(version of the modern) theory of perception, where "the subject wherein
color [sound, smell, taste, feel] and image are inherent, is not the object or
thing seen [heard, smelt, tasted, or felt]" (EW, IV, 4), signs for Hobbes are
no more 'representative' of their signifieds than are our sense conceptions
'representative' of those objects reason requires us to posit as their cause.
Hobbes's characterization of "fancy," the natural aptitude manifested in the
observation of similitudes, as "one kind of madness," and his refusal to
"commend as a virtue" this penchant for recognizing likenesses (if not
governed by "discretion") applies as much to his theories of perception and
signification as they do to his account of "natural wit" (EW, III, 57-58). The
"great deception of sense" and the "childish" view that names represent
natures are examples of the great "madness" of common sense, over and
against which the philosophical truth on these matters must seem "worse
than any paradox," in fact, "a plain impossibility" (EW, IV, 4), hardly
doctrines that square "with the sense of all men" (EW, I, 12).
Be this as it may, even if names formed on the Principle of onomatopeia
are rare enough to justify ignoring, only the most stubborn 'phonocentrism'
could justify ignoring their visual analogue - namely, 'pictures' (or dia-
grams, statues, models), the most basic sign-by-likeness. With such signs-
by-likeness it is neither an anticipation of future time (anticipation of a
consequent), nor a recollection of past time (remembering an antecedent)
that makes such things signs, but rather the qualities that they have on their
own qua "sensible things." Most important, they would describe a form of
marking that would already have the form of signing.
The distinguishing feature of such a picture-sign or iconic sign is that it
possesses the feature that renders it significant, even if the object of which it
would be the sign had no existence. In other words, for an iconic sign the
relationship of significance between the sign and the signified rests on a
similarity or analogy between sign and object; the sign is linked to the
signified by a relationship of resemblance to, not simply contiguity with, the
general features which the (would-be) signified happens to possess. This
kind of sign is, or can be, significant merely by virtue of its own distinctive
features; it can be a sign of its object simply by virtue of the fact that it is a
likeness of its object in some qualitative respect.
None of this is true of signs that are significant only in virtue of associa-
tion by contiguity, be this contiguity in space or time. Such indexical,
indicative, or natural and artificial signs as Hobbes understands them, have

66
the characteristics that make them signs precisely and only because they are
placed in a dynamic, existential relation (built on sense and the memory of
regular succession) with their objects. Nothing in the 'experienced contents'
of a Hobbesian thought makes this thought the antecedent or consequent of
some other thought except the brute fact of really being the antecedent or
consequent of that other thought. Unlike signs-by-likeness, where the rela-
tionship between sign and object is 'lucid' because it is a recognized likeness
that constitutes the sign relationship in the first place, the connection
between sign and object in indexical, indicative, or Hobbesian natural and
artificial sign relationships is in no way 'evident' or 'lucid.' The relationship
is only (but not 'merely') a factual one, no matter how irresistible the
compulsion to anticipate consequents or recollect antecedents. Without the
concept of signs-by-likeness it is hard to see how Hobbes can explain the
transformation of idiosyncratic marks into communicative signs, but with
this concept the human mind takes on features that would make it impossible
to obfuscate or denigrate the sui generis character of man.
These points about picture-making and signs-by-likeness have a direct
bearing on Hobbes's notion of evidence. The principle of "evidence" is
introduced in order to distinguish scientific from non-scientific knowledge.
According to Hobbes it is precisely the lack of evidence in the connections
of common (i.e., natural-sign-based) experience that separates prudence (the
perfection of the knack of conjecturing from natural signs) from science.
Scientific knowledge is not merely psychologically compelling, but also
"well founded" (Logica 191) because it possesses the two things necessary
to this kind of assurance, namely "truth" and "evidence" (EW, IV, 27).
Defining truth as that of a proposition in which the predicate "is contained
in" the subject (Logica 225, 233; EW, III, 23; IV, 23-24), Hobbes sets down
the definition of evidence as, "the concomitance of a man's conception with
the words that signify such conception in the act of ratiocination" (EW, IV,
28). Without this concomitance of conception with the words ordained to
signify them, even a perfectly cogent exercise in scientific reasoning would
be but the prating of a parrot, for:

Evidence is to truth, as the sap to the tree, which so far as it creepeth along with the
body and branches, keepeth them alive; where it foresaketh them, they die: for this
evidence, which is meaning with our words, is the life of truth. (EW, IV, 28).

Scientific evidence, then, is had when all of the words contained in a

demonstration are ratified, as it were, by a simultaneous conception of that
phantasm they were ordained to signify.
Even if, as Hobbes claims, a solitary cogitator, using only his own
'private' notations, can acquire science there still remains the question as to

67
how this lone scientist could be sure that the thought he is presently
entertaining in concomitance with the marks or private names he is presently
using is the same thought, or even like the thought, that his words were
originally ordained to signify. Now, whether or not science requires a public
setting in principle, or merely as a matter of practical convenience, the
problem facing the would-be essentially solitary scientist is more than just
analogous to the intersubjective problem raised when we wonder how we
can ever be sure that the thought which we use a word to signify is the same
as that entertained by the other. Danford states the issue pointedly:

If truth is not merely private or subjective, and it must not be if science can exist, then
there must be some way to guarantee that words have meanings which are objective,
that is, that we agree on the conceptions which words signify."

The problem of the intersubjective validity of science is, then, already posed
at the level of the intrasubjective coherence and order of the private thoughts
of the solitary subject of cognition and of speech. Could an essentially
solitary philosopher even entertain the idea of communicating his notes to
others if he had not already rehearsed his private marks to another voice
within his private mind? Even more basic, if there were not some such
"second voice" within his soul, standing guard over the danger of "internal
discord" (Gorgias 482b-c) how could this would-be solitary philosopher
even have assembled "his notes" in such a fashion as to be, as least, in
principle communicable to others.
It is perfectly correct to interject at this point that for Hobbes, scientific
reason does not conclude to the nature of things, but only to their names. It is
also correct to observe that in order to establish "a discourse free of motion,
and thus certain," Hobbes "attempts to sever words from dependence on
sense" by identifying reason, truth, and science "not with names derived
from things, but with the construction of definitions."'6 Correct but not
sufficient, the problem posed by science's need for evidence remains: "If, as
[Hobbes] contends, the bases of all reasoning are arbitrary definitions, it is
hard to see how reasoning can disclose to us the true character of reality. "17
If evidence really is the sap of the tree of knowledge, then unless the
definitions of our solitary philosopher 'close' in some manner with the
reality they would reveal, how could even the most scrupulous keeping of
self-imposed conventions result in anything but 'parrot talk'?

15 Danford. 112.
16 John F. Wilson, "Reason and Obligation in LEVIATHAN," Interpretation, 8 (1979),
39.
17 Strauss. 174.

68
 This excursion into the problem of evidence and scientific objectivity
leads us back into the question of the priority of marks or signs, i.e., into the
question of whether man as a marking, naming, and reasoning animal is not
in virtue of this fact a social, if not a political animal. Hobbes faces this
problem while considering the requirements involved in transforming name-
marks into name-signs:

Moreover, names in themselves are individual marks, for they recall thoughts even
alone, while they are not signs except insofar as they are arranged in speech and are its
parts. For example, the vocal sound 'man' evokes the idea of man in the hearer, but
does not signify that some idea was in the speaker's mind (unless he adds, 'is an
animal,' or something equivalent); but it signifies that he wanted to say something,
which could indeed begin with the vocal sound 'man' but also could begin with the
vocal sound 'manageable.' (Logica 197)

Here Hobbes admits that though name-marks are sufficient to perform their
function "even [standing] alone," they cannot serve as name-signs "standing
singly." For name-marks to function as signs, they must be "arranged in
speech," i.e., they must be put into propositions (Logica 197). If, for
example, someone hears a spoken word, and from this the hearer begins to
frame an idea in his mind, the hearer "cannot conceive [this idea] to be the
idea which was in the mind of him that spake" unless the speaker goes on to
connect that first word with some other word in such a way that this second
word, and its correlative idea, guides the hearer in forming the idea that the
first word would be the sign of.
How could such a 'refinement' - the disposing and ordering of marks in
speech so that they might become signs - occur to any would-be speaker if
such a disposition and order of marks were not the very form in which marks
as such are entertained in his own mind? If the propositional form is already
inherent to the thought of the private marker, then his individual mind must
already implicitly exhibit the structures of intersubjective representation. As
a marker who could be a signer, man must be "virtually" a member of a
linguistic community; rationality, even proto-rationality, implies (and is
implied by) society. Simply put, "if names are both marks and signs...they
are signs before they are marks It would seem that Hobbes must acknow-
ledge "the priority of signs over marks,"19 in the sense that if marks can be
transformed into signs, then marks must always already be 'signs' for the
marker quite in the way that they would be signs for another. The sign

18 Robertson. 83.
19 Martin A Bertman, "Hobbes on Language and Reality," Revue Internationale de
Philosophie, 32 (1978), 542-543.

69
function, or the being-as-sign of the counters by which (wise) men think,
must be fundamental, essentially prior, and not only as a matter of historical
fact.
If all of this is true of the nature of marks, signs, and the mind of man, then
even if man is not actually "bom fit" (EW, II, 2) to fulfill all the "greater
possibilities" founded on the capacity for speech (OM, 41), it could not be
the case that his membership in a community is merely contingently neces-
sary for attaining a good that he could in principle realize alone. Further,
even if we grant with Hobbes that "it is far more [man's] selfish motives on
which the urge to be sociable and to live in society is based, 1120than it is from
"love [of] every man" (EW, II, 3) that we enter society, the 'selfishness' of
this motive cannot be egotistical or only egotistical. The 'self' whose
interests are at stake here is, after all, one who experiences solitude as a
privation "poor, nasty, brutish, and [most hopefully] short." The "true
delights of society" (EW, II, 4) may not lie merely in the fact that it provides
for necessary instruments, but, rather, in the fact that it provides the arena in
which we can develop our most distinctive capacities. Realizing what must
be the case if idiosyncratic marks are even in principle to function as signs,
we also realize that 'we do therefore by nature seek society for its own sake,
and only incidentally, however necessary, that we may receive some honor
or profit from it' (inverting EW, II, 3). The sober, and more subtle, truth
grasped by acknowledging the priority of signs to marks is that "while
[political society comes] into being for the sake of living, it exists for the
sake of living well" (Politics 1252b30).
Hobbes does see clearly that if marks are to function as signs, the
"evidence" that makes a system of marks more than 'parrot talk' must be
generated by some kind of intersubjective construction of the thought-
governing objects of reference. Because the shared basis of evidence does
not, for Hobbes exist naturally, men are required to set up this object, by
which process this object personates their private conceptions in a public
forum (EW, III, 31, 147). It is indeed not the mere capacity for sense, but
those "sensible moniments" that are marks, signs, and ultimately language
itself "that guarantees for us the reality of the world outside. "21

20 Ferdinand Toennies, Hobbes and the Zoon Politikon," trans. E.G. Jacoby in Ferdi-
nand Toennies On Sociology: Pure, Applied, and Empirical, ed. W.J. Cahnman & R.
Heberle (Chicago, 1971 ),p. 51.
21 T.A. Heinrichs, "Language and Mind in Hobbes", Yale French Studies, 49 (1973),
56, 62-63. For a further clarification of how Hobbes uses language to provide the
universal context for explanation see William Sacksteder, "Some Ways of Doing Lan-
guage Philosophy: Nominalism, Hobbes, and the Linguistic Turn," Review of Meta-
physics, 34 (1981), 471-473, 479. Hobbes's puzzling failure to develop the concept of an

70
 In any event, if marks can be transformed into signs, then man could,
without miraculous assistance, break out of his timetic egocentricity (honor,
or vanity-bound idiocy) and "find" a common world much in the way that
"statuaries ...by hewing of that which is superfluous, do not make but find.
the image [of their sculpture in statu nascendi]" (EW, I, xiii). And if this is
the case, then the 'asocial sociality' of Hobbesian man is not that of a "wolf
man covenanted."22 Homo Notans, the marker who can be a signer, or who
always already is a maker of signs, is decidedly more social by nature than
an "arrant wolf brought to heel. Whether or not amended to include the
concept of iconic signification, Hobbes's theory of marks and signs, by
underscoring the correlativity of marking and signing, however distinguish-
able these performances be, describes at once the basis and prospective
limits of human sociality.

iconic sign, or sign-by-likeness, provides the opening for an interesting conjecture.

Picture making, or the construction of signs-by-likeness, by its very mechanism forces
the discrimination of the parts of a perceptual whole in such a way as to organize -
"arrange" and "dispose" - the rehearsal of ideas. Objectification, or staging, in picture-
making not only makes private perceptions sharable by making them literally 'public
property,' it also brings to bear the discernment of the accidents of the perceptual whole,
a process crucial to the abstraction of those "similitudes" that serve as the only real basis
of universal names. This is because picture-making, or 'personating,' is a remaking of the
object of perception, and, as Hobbes would be the first to tell us, what one makes one
knows. As the remaker of things 'in their likeness,' the maker of picture-signs "submits
to the standard of truth" - verum et factum convertuntur; see Hans Jonas, "Homo Pictor
and the Differentia of Man," Social Research. 29, (1962), pp. 216-218. Something like
this sort of process that would seem to lie at the heart of Hobbes's recourse to definitions
is the only possible ground for "a discourse free of motion." The 'genetic' or 'causal'
definitions by which Hobbes would constitute a discourse possessing the validity and
evidence that characterize science would be something like 'recipes' for rational picture-
making, whereby those conceptions that give life to words are made the bases of our
evidence, taking their beginning from sense, but correcting the defects of sense. In the
kind of 'marking' that is picture-making, the singular event is at the same time a general
phenomenon, because the objectification of perception in image-making provides the
model for the conception of 'the same' in the notion of remaking, which if carefully done,
must lead to 'the same' result. Thus, something like the making of signs-by-likeness
would describe in a "sensible" way, "both possible and easy to be comprehended" (EW, I,
531), the personation or staging of sense experience. In picture-making the private,
idiosyncratic 'mark' is made public, as private perception is objectified in "sensible"
form. Indeed, signs-by-likeness, and man the picture-maker express "in one indivisible
evidence ...the point in which Homo Farber and Homo Sapiens are conjoined - and
indeed shown to be one and the same" (Jonas, 218).
22 Paul J. Johnson, "Hobbes and the Wolf-Man" in Thomas Hobbes: His View of Man,
ed. J.G. van der Bend (Amsterdam, 1982), 37-39, 41-44. See also in this connection,
Martin A. Bertman, "Hobbes' Homo Lupus Covenanted," International Studies in Philo-
sophy, 9 (1977), 38.

71
 III

The invention of marks and signs is, then, the natural sign of man. But what
"antecedent" does this phenomenon make us recollect? Of the man that
Hobbes draws for us once he has this premise in his hands I will say more
below. Now, however, we must ask what it is that could make the coming-
into-being of man "both possible and easy to be comprehended" (EW, I,
531).
According to the promise implicit in Hobbes's systematic ideal, it must be
some modification of body and/or motion that would supply the needed
hypothesis. We would expect this to be a novelty akin to the wonder-
provoking fact that the bodies of sentient beings are "fit for the retaining of
such motion as is made in them [by reaction] ... for some time" (EW, I, 393).
The promised key to a corporealist account of mind, of human mind, is not,
however, forthcoming. At the crucial point of his promised synthesis of man
"from the very first principles of philosophy" (EW, I, 73), Hobbes turns to
introspection for the necessary hypothesis. "The only natural peculiarity of
man's mind"23 is a certain modification in the 'direction' of imaginative
motion.
In Leviathan (and only in Leviathan) Hobbes observes that:

The train of regulated thoughts is of two kinds: one, when of an effect imagined we
seek the causes, or means to produce it: and this is common to man and beast. The
other is, when imagining anything whatsoever, we seek all the possible effects that can
by it be produced; that is to say, we imagine what we can do with it, when we have it.
Of which I have not at any time seen any sign, but in man only. (EW, III, 13)

The ability to reckon the way (means) to obtain (or avoid) some presently
sensed object of desire (or aversion) is not, according to Hobbes, uniquely
human. He mentions "ranging," "hunting," and "tracing" (EW, IV, 15-16)
as examples of the "methods of seeking" or the "faculty of invention" that
can be observed in brutes. Human superiority to brutes in this variety of
regulated thinking is merely a difference of degree. What distinguishes man
from the brute beasts is the ability to think in the opposite direction. From
the consideration of "anything whatsoever" as a cause, or starting point,
man has the capacity to imagine the possible effects, "all the possible
effects," dependent upon the possession of this "any thing whatsoever." Man
qualitatively "excell[s] all other animals in this faculty, that when he
conceive[s] anything whatsoever, he [is] apt to inquire the consequences of
it, and what effects he could do with it" (EW, III, 33).

23 Strauss, 176, note #2.

72
 As is "both possible and easy to be comprehended" this way of defining
man in terms of a modification in the direction of imagination allows Hobbes
to develop his characteristic doctrine of human nature. By this capacity for
'synthetic imagination' "man is not made better, but only given greater
possibilities" (OM, 41). From this capacity for "causal" as opposed to
"teleological" thinking24 arises the ability "to knit together things past with
those that are present," and to "make a future" (EW, IV, 16; Logica 201).
'Synthetic imagination' appears to be the sensible ground of propositional
form. Not only, therefore, the animal "famished even by future hunger"
(OM, 40), the uniquely human "account of time" (EW, III, 113) founded on
synthetic imagination is insinuated in all the other "proper accidents" of
human nature. From curiosity, the concern for property, and the desire for
recognition to the fear of death, the institution of science, and the thought of
God, this form of imagination is what makes it possible for man "to rank
himself somewhat above the nature of the beasts." On the basis of this
conception of the differentia of man, we understand, citing Strauss's intrepid
precis, that:

man alone can consider himself as a cause of possible effects, i.e., man can be aware of
his power; he can be concerned with power; he can desire to possess power; he can
seek confirmation for his wish to be powerful by having his power recognized by
others, i.e., he can be vain or proud; he can be hungry with future hunger, he can
anticipate future dangers, he can be haunted by long-range fear.25

Even if it is true that Hobbes's 'observation' of the cognitive power that

distinguishes man is less an observation than it is a reading of reason back
into the structure of man's pre-linguistic or proto-linguistic life,26 this
conception of the differentia of man crucially qualifies the kind of sociality
that one could think natural to man. If the relationship of a solitary marker to
his own thought is analogous to the structure of intersubjective communica-
tion, and, thus, to a kind of social life, it is, nonetheless, not identical to it.
The recognition of and relation to the other, a recognition and relation that
exists de facto and de jure in virtue of the character of synthetic imagination,
is little more than "an open horizon" for the possibility of communication
and action. 27

24 Strauss. 176, note #2.

Zs Strauss. 176-177, note #2. -
26 Heinrichs. 65.
27 Bernard Willms, "Liberty as CONDITIO HUMANA in Hobbes" in Thomas Hobbes:
His View of Man, ed J.G. van der Bend (Amsterdam, 1982), p. 103.

73
 Hobbes takes his lights from the failures, disruptions, and obstacles that
stand in the way of fulfilling the social possibilities inherent in the fact that
marks can be transformed into signs. He does not start from a view that the
everyday language of men is, somehow, just as it stands in perfect order.
Rather, he would suspect what passes for the automatic understanding
common to everyday speech to be most often misunderstanding instead. It is
difficult, "to find out the true meaning of what is said ...in our [everyday]
discourse, which being derived from custom and common use of speech,
representeth unto us not our own conceptions" (EW, IV, 23). Let alone the
other, knowledge of the self can be lost in everyday speech.
But not only does Hobbes seem to take situations in which communication
is compromised or broken by the vagaries of "the drift, and occasion, and
contexture of ... [everyday] speech" (EW, IV, 23) as the norm, he also sees
these as the situations in which the necessary conditions of understanding
are revealed with the greatest clarity. In fact, he seems to think that were it
not for such failures and disagreements, there would not be any role for
words like 'understanding' and 'meaning' in our language. Much like the
sense of reality that we acquire only by correcting ourselves, meaningful
conversation seems to appear only over and against those "sad experiences"
(EW, II, 4) in which we discover equivocation, falsity, absurdity, and
deception - all among the "greater possibilities" vouchsafed by speech.
Indeed, the very notion of an understanding or a community, without these
defects is something that could exist only "in speech."
Even if man the marker must already possess in his individual mind a
quasi-social or 'third person' form of awareness (suited at least to the
representation of his own temporally distinct selves), he remains 'alienated,'
nature's prodigal. This alienation follows more from the defective manner in
which his natural imagination `admits' the existence of his fellows than from
the fact that "the intellectual principle is multiplied according to the number
of bodies," as it were. The fulfillment of the "greater possibilities" latent in
his powers as a marker is, thus, problematic. It is "in [the use of] speech in
general, and in the misuse of words, that Hobbes usually seeks and finds the
proximate causes of political discord. "28
It is for reasons like these that Hobbes's leaving open the conceptual
possibility of a 'private language' reflects more than simply the adoption of
a felicitous conceit for the purpose of a systematic exposition of doctrine.29
While it may be in accord with Hobbes's scientific intention to think of the

28 Frederick G. Whelen, "Language and Its Abuses in Hobbes: Political Philosophy,"

American Political Science Review, 75 (1981), 59.
29 Bertman. "Hobbes on Language and Reality," pp. 542-544.

74
state of nature as "a (counterfactually conceived) limiting case analogous to
the inertial principle" of Galilean-Newtonian physics,3° the fact remains that
the state of nature can and does describe a real situation, whereas the
situation 'described' in the first law of motion can never be realized. The
'confusion of all with all' is as real a possibility as the war "of every man,
against every man," even if, like the latter, it would necessarily be 'local-
ized,' and "never generally so, over all the world" (EW, III, 113, 114). And
if one thinks of speech that would touch on matters where "truth and the
interest of men" (EW, IV, xiii) are at odds, the 'confusion of all with all' may
describe much more than an omnipresent possibility. Considering the exer-
cise of speech that would discern and pronounce upon the good, the just and
the noble, and not rest content with the pleasant inanities of everyday gossip
or the certain but superficial clarity of reckoning numerical sums and
differences, the distance between natural 'confusion' and civil 'under-
standing' may be less than one would expect.
The 'linguistic ' state of nature, as "a condition distraught by an anarchy
of meanings,"31 is the sobering prospect that may humiliate the complacent
vanity of men in times and places where "ratio is but oratio" and conversa-
tion really nothing much more than "the motion of the tongue" (EW, IV, 25).
If there really is an ultimate and indivisible good bound up with social life as
such, a good that "cannot be divided" and which ought "be enjoyed in
common, if it can be; and if the quantity of the thing permit, without stint"
(EW, III, 142), such as we imagine friendship based on conversation to be, it
is a good that men will most likely never experience satisfactorily in "this
life" (EW, III, 85). In the meantime "every man must account himself such
as he can make himself, without the help of others" (EW, II, 5), and be
content if he finds "somewhat of [his] own wherewith to fill up [his] time,"
for which Hobbes finds nothing better to recommend than "the study of-
philosophy" (EW, I, xiv).

Murray State University

3o Amos Funkenstein, "Natural Science and Social Theory: Hobbes, Spinoza, and Vico"
in Giambattista Vico's Science of Humanity, ed. G. Tagliacozzo & D.P. Verne (Balti-
more, MD., 1976), p. 195, gloss mine.
31 Sheldon S. Wolin, Politics and Vision (Boston, 1960), p. 257.

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