|
February 14, 2008
Philip Pettit says of his Made with Words:Hobbes on Language, Mind, and Politic that it is informed by the idea that by nature human beings are more or less as other animals, and that what makes them different, giving them the capacity for thought, is the impact of a cultural development: the invention of speech at some distant time in the past. Language is an invented technology, not a natural inheritance, according to Hobbes, and it is a technology that transformed our kind, introducing a deep cleavage between us and otherwise comparable animals. Pettit says:
The line of argument is straightforward. Human beings are distinguished from other animals by the transformation that occurred as a result of the invention of language. This gave people three positive capacities, associated with ratiocination, personation, and incorporation, but it also had a dark side: it warped their appetites, focusing their attention on the future as well as the present, and on their standing relative to others as well as their private welfare. The dark side means that by nature—by the second nature that they share in the wake of language—human beings are put in a situation of inescapable competition. But their positive capacities show them a way out: that of incorporating under a sovereign to whom they ascribe more or less absolute authority.
In this Pettit follows the approach associated with historians of thought like John Pocock, John Dunn, and Quentin Skinner, which holds that “the history of thought should be viewed not as a series of attempts to answer a canonical set of questions, but as a sequence of episodes in which the questions as well as the answers have frequently changed” (Skinner 1988, 234). So Hobbes was focused on issues and pressures specific to the world in which he lived.
|
