 Okay, we continue our slow upward march from sense on our way to human political organization with Hobbes. So just to remind you we started by dividing human faculties into bodily and mental ones and then we started talking about mental ones beginning with sense and imagination and memory and then all kinds of mental discourse names reasoning knowledge opinion belief and then last time we started talking about pleasure and pain and good and evil and we saw this really radical thesis pleasures and pains are just continuations of the conceptions formed in our minds on the basis of sense and these give rise to appetites and aversions or pursuit and avoidance and we call good and evil those things which we pursue and thus are pleasant and thus are those conceptions which enhance our vitality and we call evil or bad those conceptions which we have an aversion to or an avoidance of because they're painful because they are things we sense that inhibit our vital motions okay and there are you know other theories of good and evil this is a fairly reductive one to tie it to something so immediately evident as pleasure and pain which are themselves reducible to sensations which are themselves reducible to the effects of some kinds of emotions occurring outside of us we ended rather pasteurately talking about whether because it's there's a long philosophical tradition that says that good and bad can somehow ultimately be related in our life and we can sum these or connect them together into an overall concept of a final end or final condition that we want to be in this is sometimes called happiness or prosperity or eudaimonia or living well and so forth and here again Hobbes has a very reductive account of this it's no more he says than continual enjoyment of pleasures so he actually objects to the traditional way of talking about this is being an end it's not an end people are who are happy aren't at the end of living they're in the middle of their lives and they still necessarily have desires all the time and desires are can be painful so so-called happy people can still be thirsty they can still be hungry they can still want to have sex they can still want to warm up or cool down and so there is no end to this and there if there's any point in coming up with the general term for the end it can only mean enjoying more or a more continual succession of pleasures or less pains in his view okay so I'm gonna go on to go into a little more detail of what he says about passions of the body and then passions of the mind but are there any questions or discussion or comments on what we've covered so far since since we had to so rapidly go through it last time yes so this is I mean this is a classic form of hedonism so hedonism is the thesis that the purpose of life the end of human life the aim that we have in life is pleasure okay and that comes from a Greek term hidden a which means pleasure so hedonism is pleasurism as an ethical thesis and hogs is definitely a hedonist because that's our only end it's our only everything we pursue is on the basis of it causing us pleasure or pains yeah so he has an entire theory of virtue that is based on this okay and they are we'll see a little bit of this in what we're talking about today but to make a long story short the things we cause we call virtues are powers that we have to produce or enjoy pleasures and what we call vices are weaknesses that expose us to that that that that indicate lack of power and weakness because of which we experience pain so again a reductive account virtue and vice these high-minded terms like justice and temperance and courage and so forth wisdom are all going to be reduced to powers or abilities to experience pleasure and again pleasure we can reduce to an effect of conceptions and conceptions to sense so it is an impurisist materialist and hedonist theory all there are material objects and anomalous theory all there are particular material objects out there all we can know about them is what enters through our senses and all we can say about what we should do or how we should be is having those sensations that we enjoy and avoiding those that we doubt okay so a little bit more on passions of the body because he distinguishes these from passions of the soul this gets treated in human nature 8 he says motion and agitation of the brain which is called conception again it continues to the heart when it gets to the heart then we start calling it passion and he here distinguishes three kinds of conceptions we can have first one is very familiar to us sense that's a conception we have things that are present to us remembrance that's conceptions we have of things that are past or rather of sensations that we had in the past and expectation is of what's in the future now obviously we can't sense what's in the future and we can't remember what's in the future so there must be some tie between expectation and the present so he says that all conceptions of future are based on remembrance of the past okay so the reason why I think that I'll have ice with my drink is because I think that getting ice with my drink will mean that my drink is cold why do I think that because I've had ice in my drinks before and I thought it was cold or somebody who did have ice in their drinks and said it was cold that I trust reported that much to me so all of our conceptions about the future based on conceptions that have been formed in the present and that are remembered having occurred in the past okay and they relate to powers that we have whosoever he says expects pleasure to come okay hope you all are expecting pleasures to come like even the small pleasure of getting out of this class and we're going on to have lunch later today or going on to drink at a party later tonight all of that must relate to some power you have within yourself thinking that you'll be able to attain a pleasure by analogy to something you have experienced in the past like you've experienced having the enjoyment of eating lunch or the enjoyment of listening to music or the enjoyment of hanging out with friends or the enjoyment of having sex or whatever it is is again cannot be based on anything but relating it to what happened already in sense as I see a hand okay good now the most basic oh yeah I did thank you yes so he has to bite the bullet on that and say that you know babies experience pain they are fed the the feeding gives us a demo sensation of pleasure so then they expect that pleasure in the future by feeding again but until the babies fed there is no way that it has an appetite for feeding again or and or or can have an aversion to the pain there is there is there's no reason so babies are taught to eat and they're taught to drink in his view they they have to be they have to be coaxing to do this they're brought to the breast of their mother and their mouth is put on the breast of the mother so as to to eat and if that resulted in a painful thing then they would have an aversion to it and wouldn't do it it's only because it's causing a sensation of pleasure presumably because the hunger is being sated that they do it the next time and they do it habitually and that you always and and that as you go on to eat solid food drink whatever you that has to relate to a sensation that you had in the past so it's not as if a babies are born within innate mental module that says okay I've got to eat or I've got a drink and that they're already able to act on that they actually have to learn that behavior like everything else well I don't know what binary means it's in two everything in the mind originates in sense okay everything there's no other basis for anything in the mind other than sensations okay and there's no other basis for any kind of action or movement okay moving the limbs is basically what how we distinguish between being alive and being dead and there's no basis for moving the limbs except aversion I'm trying to avoid something or desire I'm trying to get something I move either towards or away for something from something okay so I think I think instead of binary the term you're looking for is reductive he takes he takes something very it seems very small like sensation pleasure pain appetite and he reduces all activities to those causes and says that they actually are nothing but those causes and they don't have any other causes and and in theory everything can be explained by those simple causes and remember his goal is to explain everything on the basis of what nobody could disagree with of what everybody has experiences of because the goal is ultimately to eliminate controversy where it exists in the political sphere and try to bring our politics to into a greater resemblance to mathematics where we don't have these controversies so in mathematics what we have is agreement about the principles and the starting points we all agree about what a point is and what a line is and what a triangle is and therefore we all agree that the interior angles of a triangle add up to the sum of two right angles but we don't all necessarily agree on what's good and evil okay but and so we have we have conflicts about this and not just conflicts we have wars about this okay so if we want to eliminate those wars and those conflicts we're going to have to find a concept of good and evil that we can agree on and that's going to require tying it to something that we all experience and that means reducing it essentially to sense because that is the only thing that we all definitely have in common or can say that we have in common it's the only starting point we can we can be sure of in his view so it's really a reductive account okay it's binary in the sense that he recognizes pursuit and avoidance or desire and aversion or pleasure and pain those are binary concepts so there there isn't something that's both pleasant and painful at the same time or something that you both desire and have an aversion to or use well okay so I mean we can we can go through these counter examples in his view if you like spice then you're actually getting an enjoyment out of it yes it's an intense thing but you're getting an enjoyment out of it if you don't like spice so that's me for example I really like spice I asked for extra hot salsa and things like that my girlfriend who cannot ever have spice in anything it's a nightmare when we're ordering together in Indian restaurants and so forth because I'm saying add extra spice and she's saying take all of the spice out of it because it causes pain for her and she has an aversion to it and doesn't want it same objects but for her it's evil for me it's good okay so but it's not the case that for me it's both pleasant and painful okay now he does recognize that you can have a series of things that are painful and that you undertake on the assumption that it's going to result in a greater pleasure or a less lesser pain later so it's very painful I know for you to be in here right now listening to this lecture instead of outside where it's nice and sunny and with your friends and doing drugs or drinking or whatever be a lot more pleasant so why are you here doing this apparently painful thing because it's in a train with things that are leading up to something you think is going to be very pleasant like the glory of getting an A in this class or the glory of getting a degree from UCSD or the glory of getting a good job because you had this degree and so overall we say that that entire series of events is pleasant is pleasurable but that's just because it has a preponderance of pleasant things in it even if it even if it includes painful things along the way but the case the case you're giving is interesting because could it be simultaneous you know could something be simultaneously pleasant and painful and that's where masochism becomes a problem because supposedly there's people who enjoy pain right who who get pleasure from pain now there's another analysis of what's going on there and it has to do with the pleasure is not the actual sensation they're getting but they they have fantasies of domination or something like that and so they undertake they undertake these smaller pains because they give them this greater pleasure of being dominated or being in this power relationship or causing pleasure to this other person or whatever but if there really is a phenomenon of people experiencing pleasure and pain from the same object at the same time then Hobbes theory has a problem but it's not at all clear that there is any such such phenomenon okay that can't be given his analysis of it okay that yes we're taking on some pleasures because we have a conception that that causes greater pleasure and that must be based on some analogy to something we experienced before like experiencing graduating from high school and that required actually showing up to class and doing the work and you remember the great glories of graduating from high school and you essentially want to repeat that and so you're willing to take on these pains in the meantime just as you took on pains doing it then and then why did you do it in high school because it was an analogy to what you were doing in in junior high or even in grade school and before that there were little things that were that were analogies to those set up like parents rewarding you for reading a book or something like that okay and as you you you you get inculcated with these pleasures and pains and then you think back to those full chains of them but if there if there isn't anything that you can draw an analogy to then you wouldn't be acting in that way I only wouldn't we be able to explain your action it's it's not clear that your action would be possible so there aren't zombies things that can't experience pleasure or pain that nevertheless walk around and do things there's no such thing in Hobbes view and I think he's got a pretty good point it's hard to explain how something they can't experience pleasure or pain could move or have any kind of action okay and plants don't move themselves around in space and that's because they don't pursue or avoid anything why because they can't move themselves around in space and they can't sense anything but animals they pursue and avoid things and our own account of our behavior is essentially that of an animal after all again I hate to break this news to you but we're all animals and so just like your cat comes pursues its food and avoids predators all it's doing is trying to get those pleasant sensations and avoid those painful ones now please don't interpret my harsh grading and the irritating didactic tone here is saying I'm acting like this is all obvious and this is all clear and this is how it has to be I'm taking on the persona of Hobbes here there's a lot of problems almost at every stage of what I'm saying here but this is this is his theory this is this is what he would say and and if you can present me some psychological evidence about masochism that says no it's clear that they've got pain and pleasure at the same time I'm not you know you have to come up with definitions of pleasure and pain and though and I'd have to agree to those and then we'd have to agree that there's actually somebody that pursues that activity that results in both of those but then you would have some kind of empirical evidence against this view and that's exactly the kind of evidence Hobbes is interested in hearing about this theory and that would count against it yeah because you can't the explanation of behavior and action why actions are undertaken wouldn't wouldn't wouldn't work if they could be simultaneous or if I guess the problem is if somebody would pursue if there's some sense in which somebody pursues something painful or avoid something pleasant his bedrock assumption about explaining behavior of animals and humans is that we is that all of this movement of our limbs pursuing things has to do with pleasure and all of this movement of our limbs avoiding things has to do with pain so if they could exist simultaneously either we would we move towards that object or not Hobbes would Hobbes would have to say that we both move towards that object and don't move towards that object that we have both a desire and aversion for it okay and so then then then there would be big problems for the theory yeah that's where that's where people yes so that's that's that's the explanation of it they fall in love with that person so they think that that's a pleasant thing and they want to avoid they want to pursue the things that that person tells them to pursue because they think it will bring them the pleasures of of required love of them and so and so then then it's a case where there's where there's mixed pains and pleasures which I've said how he tries to explain those that the agent must must think must have some experience and relate it to some idea of undergoing pain in order to get a greater pleasure later okay like Stockholm syndrome is explained exactly the same way as you're being here in this class right now is explained okay yes it's mixed in with pain but there are much greater pleasures to be had if you stay with it and complete this course well yes except that consequentialism does look at the ends and the effects of things whereas this is coming from the direction of the motivation of why the activities are taken and it assumes that that I'm thinking about the consequences when I'm deciding whether to act whether those painful things are worth undertaking to get this greater amount of pleasure so in that sense yes it is consequentialist but there's altogether less emphasis put on on these these ends and purposes and remote aims and more focus put on and I think Hobbes thinks this is more important to what are really basic motivations of doing things are okay well the there is the biological it's already tied in with the theory of biological instinct okay because the things that are pleasant what are those those are just conceptions whose continuation affects helps or augments vital capabilities like nutrition reproduction self-motion survival things like that so the very things that we experience as pleasant are things tied to the good functioning of our bodies and of our of our biological reality and the things that we call evil that is the things that are pains are the things that we have an instinctual reaction against because they damage those vital capabilities so it is tied into a notion it is we can relate it to an idea of instinct and biological in fact in the case of animals where we don't have very advanced conceptions we just have these sensations and pursuit and avoidance behaviors and maybe a little bit of memory it's all depends on that okay they have an instinct for eating this kind of food and avoiding that other kind of food turns out the ones that they pursue are the ones that actually are nutritious for them and the ones that aren't are the ones that actually inhibit those vital so he they either have to learn it as in the human case or if there are analogies to that elsewhere in the animal kingdom or they do it by trial and error and experience and so they actually do start out just eating something and it might be harmful for them and and there might be a kind of survival of the fittest that the ones that survive the ones that find pleasant those things that are truly conducive to their to their vital capabilities but yes it can't heat what he can't imagine is that there's some animal born with no senses and nothing in their cognition and that it somehow automatically starts pursuing the right doing eating the right kind of food or something okay that that has to be something learned in his view or it has to be learned and that could either be by trial and error or instruction from parents or whatever and so if you can find evidence out there empirical evidence that there are animals without any kind of sensation that that do that that invariably the first thing that they eat is is beneficial to them turtles that are born they know to go to the ocean but like there's no adult turtle there telling them you have to go to the ocean or you're going to die yes so so there must be some there must be some pleasant thing that they that they're experiencing they find it pleasant the light of the moon or whatever which is in the direction of the of the ocean that they're going for today or the water feels more pleasant to them than the air and they from an experience they have so he has to tell stories like that but if you could but maybe that's maybe that could be a counter example maybe you could say no there's some kind of there's there must be some innate mental structure that tells turtles to walk towards the sea once they're born that would that would be that would contradict this theory and it would be empirical evidence against this theory okay so notice that he reduces honor and dishonor just to these to these pleasant these good and bad things which are just pleasant and painful things so further further reducing these high-minded terms we have like honor and glory just to down just getting down to the sensations of pleasure and pain and then he has a theory of passions of the mind again passions the term passion just means affection or emotion or to put it simply things that we just have that happen to us and that we feel we've already talked about passions the body the passions of the mind that he talks about are things like glory humility shame curiosity admiration etc and all of these get defined in terms of awareness of one's power and the power again relates to the power for experiencing pleasant things and avoiding painful things which is tied into the vital capabilities and and you could scrutinize each of those definitions and see you know for example love gets reduced to lust okay now depending on the kind of person you are that's either a totally ridiculous theory or that's actually a completely accurate and clear-eyed view of the matter okay but in his view that's there's no difference there love means you think that person's causing you pleasure and so you desire to be with them and so on and that it has a power for bringing you pleasure yeah so with pleasure and pain nobody really teaches you the senses and what they feel like and what they mean so with that the kind of the example more of an instinctual thing because you kind of determine or more of a subjective thing because you determine for yourself what is pleasurable and what is painful to you and these and these differ right some people in my view the correct people prefer chocolate to vanilla but there's these crazy people out there that think vanilla is really great that must be due to their experience and the difference must be due to the difference of our constitutions such that and and those are the only differences that could explain that now we aren't taught what's pleasant and painful we experience that okay and so we pursue those things that we experience is pleasant so if somebody tries to instruct you and tell you that something you feel is really painful is actually really pleasant that cuts no ice whatsoever because it doesn't occur to your senses and your senses are the only things that are going to convince you that anything is true okay so now often we do things taking taking on somebody else's an authority oh no this is really great this new flavor of ice cream you've never tried I tried it before and it's really great so you might trust them and then try this weird blue colored ice cream to see if it really is good but then if you're either going to experience it as pleasant or painful and there's no amount of teaching that that changes that for you I mean there is an issue of acquired taste and things like that those those would complicate the picture but you're right nobody teaches pleasure and pain these are things that we sense and we experience and so the things that we in fact pursue are those things that are pleasant to us or that we're convinced are pleasant and we stop pursuing them if our senses give us some kind of different experience of it right so if you experience continual failure in in grade school and junior high and high school and so forth you're probably not going to be able it's going to be very difficult to convince you that you should go on and try to have the glories of college and don't worry it's a lot more fun than that sort of thing it's just not in your experience and really difficult to convince you about that yeah well the six senses because remember he said that there's also this internal sense of remembrance but yes sensation comes down to the to the five senses plus recollection of them yeah yes yes sure and because what our thoughts thoughts or conceptions what are conceptions decayed senses okay so like thinking about a human being is some kind of decayed impression of actually seeing and sensing human beings yeah yeah so I maybe this is a good time to move on because he I mean he did the reading for today right no okay so you're asking a dumb question because the people who did the reading know that yes he talks about religion in fact he offers a proof for God in the bit that we read for today okay so let's talk about that starting in chapter 10 of the differences between people and their discerning faculty and the cause you might think since we're all the same we're all human and we all experience the same objects these things that are out there in the world why are people so different well in one sense they aren't very different they seem different because we're on the ground but they're all actually pretty much the same and if you were looking at us from a telescope from Mars you'd say those are just masses of people like ants or something and there is no difference between them in fact that's how we think when we look at ants if you actually were an ant on the ground it would seem like there were big huge differences between all of these things that were that were going on so what he's really interested is why are some people stupid and dull and why are other people more quick-witted and smarter than things like that and he says that the difference has to do and this this seems to be very implausible so this is a case where I might myself find evidence against what's hogs is claiming difference of wits has its origin from different passions in the ends to which the appetite leads them so the intellectual vice of dullness supposedly comes from or proceeds from somebody whose appetites are focused on mere sensual or bodily delight so somebody who feel their focus for some reason they're obsessed with the pleasure that you get from drinking and alcohol that is a pleasant thing but it's gonna inhibit their ability to wake up in time for class and study and do all those other things that are pleasant in some in some other sense and produce effects that we consider to be intelligent or something like that but it's as if this is all voluntary so here he doesn't think there's just a genetic difference between people some people are just born stupid and some people are born very intelligent there's no notion of innate talent or ability or anything like that it all depends on what ends you you pursue and people end up pursuing different ends why do they end up pursuing different ends because different things seem pleasant to them why do different things seem pleasant to them because they have different constitutions and different things that they actually sense and so then he explains all of these other virtues and vices of the mind as relating to the different kinds of passions and the objects that are pursued by the people to which we assign those virtues and vices now chapter 11 is where he deals with religion and the way he deals with it is by saying what imaginations and passions people have at the names of things supernatural so you can see even that title a very skeptical approach to all of this and Hobbes is very often in the literature called an atheist and he was accused of being an atheist and atheists is somebody who denies that God exists but that doesn't sit well with what he does in the second section of this chapter where he actually offers a proof for the existence of God okay so he begins by saying God Almighty is this incomprehensible thing we don't have any conception of course we don't have any sense of God now there's an issue of religious experience and epiphanies and things like that we'll have to see if he can handle that kind of experience but has anybody in here had religious epiphanies or had a direct vision or illumination of God or something like that I mean in which case these arguments might not be as convincing to you but if you haven't then you're in the condition of most people that he says most of us we don't have any sense of God and all of the attributes that we give to him like ineffability and immortality and so forth are essentially negative characteristics that express our inability to know anything about God's nature but he says we can prove that God exists because there has to be a first cause for everything okay if we chase if we trace the chain of causes back and back and back it can't go on infinitely because then it never as it were could have got started there has to be something that initiated the whole chain of causation that results in there being these external objects that are moving somehow and thus producing effects on my senses and so what I really mean by God is whatever the initial cause of the existence of those motions external to me okay and so remember Hobbes is not a solipsist he doesn't believe that Monty Johnson is the only object that exists in the universe okay he thinks there really are objects external to us and those objects have to have a cause for their existence and we don't know what their cause is because everything we know has to do with the effects that they have on us and so whatever their cause is our name for that cause is God yeah God caused God okay so God is the name of the primary cause of the of our existence of the objects that exist and produce effects on our senses so it doesn't solve the problem it just gives a name to it but he's not he's not only trying to solve that problem the problem he's addressed here is what are people talking about when they're talking about God right lots of people talk about God what the hell are they talking about what sensation can this be tied to it can be tied to a sensation that one thing causes another this is a fundamental thing that we sense that some things cause other things to happen fire causes things to warm up ice causes things to cool down but what caused the objects they cause any sensations whatsoever again we can't have access to those we can't take a shortcut from our mind directly to those objects all we have is what comes into us through our senses and so whatever cause those things is gone we have a sense of that because we have a sense of causality okay but so this solves the problem of how people generated a conception of what God is and why that why you hear that term being thrown around all the time okay and that's the problem he's trying to address here but if you have some other problem like how did God create that world or how did God create those objects there he says we just have we have nothing to say everything is all of our terms for that are essentially negative now I was actually calling on somebody behind you no that's okay so so he's basically the same argument as Thomas Aquinas like Persian mover and teleological argument well you should have said it's actually like Aristotle's argument because that's where Thomas Aquinas got it okay and if you were taking my course on Aristotle right now you would have learned that already but so the it is it is that widespread proof proof of the first cause or whatever and Aristotle makes that argument in a metaphysics book 12 and Aquinas comments on that book and then developed his own set of proofs for the existence of God this is the main one this is the one that that most people who believe in God agree is the most important of these arguments and so he accepts that and he puts that here and the result is that he's not an atheist so if you don't like atheists you don't necessarily have a problem with Hobbes because he doesn't just say that God exists he's got a he's got a proof for God's existence here okay but he doesn't comment on God's nature and he doesn't think anybody else can comment on it because where are we where are they getting those conceptions they're getting them through through sense and nobody has any direct sense of God so that's don't like an organized church that has conceptions of God well and yes and it very much does but also remember his motive in writing this whole thing to eliminate political chaos and civil war what is the cause of this political chaos and civil war it's essentially religious disagreements disagreements between Catholics and Protestants and so forth so disagreements about religion are a big cause of civil strife and so he'd like to eliminate those by getting us to agree on this more minimal conception of God and then agreeing that that that the differences we have about him are not things we can actually resolve scientifically because they can't be tied to senses and so they certainly should not be incorporated into a conception of government that were that were building and he has other strange views that don't have time to spend on but if incorporeal spirits is an idea that doesn't make any sense to him so he says if there are spirits out there if there are ghosts or if there's the holy ghost or if God is some kind of spirit then it must actually be a physical body and so he's got these weird views about how maybe these things are actually just very rarefied bodies okay the next chapter is how we deliberate from passions and these produce our actions and this is really important because this is Hobbes theory of action okay how it is that we act and to make a long story short and I've given an example here there's some external object for example a chocolate cake and this causes conceptions in me like mmm that would be a tasty thing to eat and that conception causes appetite or fear for example it causes an appetite of wanting to eat the cake because I want to have that sweet sensation or as in my case it causes a fear that this is going to undermine my diet and thus undermine my health and these are the so-called unperceived beginnings of our actions now how do we what do we actually act on he says either we act on the first appetite we have but when we act all of a sudden there's a cake there and I just say oh great eat that cake or if the appetite itself is succeeded by the fear like oh god this would undermine my diet which would undermine my health then we withhold from the action now but it's possible that we can have a continual sort of succession of this appetite and fear so and this is what often happens when somebody offers us a piece of cake or a cigarette or a joint or something right you you you think oh that would be pleasant but actually that would be painful because it would undermine my diet or make me not able to study or whatever but yet you know there's always other time I can study and so it would be worth enjoying that now etc and all there is is just an alternation of these and the last one is what we call our will so yes it's gonna ruin my diet and so forth but it's just so tasty and you know this person has gone to the trouble to bake this cake so I'll eat it and so I do so my will is that last piece of deliberation or given my incredible and legendary strength of will be reframing from eating the cake and sticking nobly to my diet is my will because I refrain from that pleasure because of fear okay and so voluntary actions he say he says are those that have their beginning in will now I've just reduced will to the last stage of deliberation about any kind of object and appetites fears hopes all the other passions are not called voluntary because they don't proceed from but to the will they lead up to the will so so when I'm just considering I don't know if I'm gonna eat that or not because it might be pleasant or it might be painful that's not that's not will and that's not voluntary that's just a succession of imaginings and conceptions going on