Today I reached Chapter 4 of Thomas Hobbes’ Leviathan, “Of Speech.”

What I am beginning to appreciate about Hobbes is the order in which he builds his argument. He does not rush towards kings, governments, laws or the famous “state of nature.” Before he can explain society, he seems determined to explain the human being who creates it.

In the earlier chapters, we followed a progression from sense to imagination, from imagination to memory, and from memory into a train of thought. Now Hobbes introduces something that changes everything: speech.

Because there is an obvious problem with thought.

What happens to a thought when there is no way to record it?

Before Writing, What Happened to Our Thoughts?

Hobbes begins Chapter 4 by reflecting on inventions that transformed human communication. Printing was revolutionary, but before printing came the invention of letters – the ability to represent speech through writing.

This made me stop for a moment.

Imagine human life without writing, inscription or any permanent means of recording language.

You could think. You could remember. You could speak to another person. You could teach your children.

But everything would ultimately depend upon human memory.

How would you preserve a complicated agreement?

How would you reliably record a debt?

How would you preserve a law?

How would you leave detailed knowledge for someone living hundreds of years after you?

Or, more fundamentally, how would you preserve your own reasoning so that you did not have to reconstruct it again?

A thought exists in the mind, but memory is imperfect. It fades.

Hobbes recognises this problem.

He describes the general use of speech as converting our “mental discourse” into verbal discourse – transforming the train of our thoughts into a train of words.

That is a remarkably powerful idea.

Words as Marks for Memory

Hobbes says that one of the first uses of names is to serve as marks or notes of remembrance.

Suppose I spend an afternoon thinking through a difficult problem and eventually reach a conclusion.

Tomorrow, I may remember the conclusion but forget how I reached it.

A month later, perhaps even the conclusion has disappeared.

But if I give the ideas names and record the reasoning in words, I have created markers that allow me to return to that train of thought.

This blog itself is an example.

I could simply read Leviathan, think about it for an hour and move on. Some of those thoughts would remain with me, but many would gradually disappear.

Instead, I write them down.

The words become marks.

Months or years from now, I may return to this page and reconstruct something of what I was thinking today.

Writing therefore does something extraordinary: it allows us to communicate, in a sense, with our future selves.

But Hobbes identifies another use of words that is even more consequential.

Words are not only marks for ourselves.

They become signs for other people.

Speech Creates a Bridge Between Minds

My thoughts belong to me.

You cannot directly experience what is happening inside my mind, just as I cannot directly enter yours.

But language creates a bridge.

When we share an understanding of words and arrange them in a meaningful order, I can communicate something of what I conceive to you.

A thought that existed privately in one mind can now produce a thought in another.

This sounds ordinary because we do it constantly.

But think about what it makes possible.

A person can experience something, think about it, give that thought words and communicate it to someone who never had the original experience.

Once those words are written down, the recipient does not even need to be alive at the same time as the speaker.

And once printing arrives, those words can be reproduced and distributed on an enormous scale.

I am sitting in the twenty-first century thinking about thoughts that Thomas Hobbes wrote in the seventeenth century.

That fact alone demonstrates the power he is describing.

Hobbes died centuries ago.

His thoughts did not.

Language Makes Knowledge Cumulative

This leads to something I find particularly fascinating.

Without some means of preserving and communicating thought, every generation would be far more dependent upon discovering the world for itself.

Imagine if every mathematician had to rediscover mathematics from the beginning.

Every doctor had to rediscover anatomy.

Every engineer had to rediscover the principles discovered by previous engineers.

Every society had to rediscover its laws and institutions.

Human progress would continually collapse back towards its starting point.

Speech, writing and eventually printing allow knowledge to accumulate.

One generation does not necessarily begin where the previous generation began. It can begin where the previous generation finished.

The dead can teach the living.

And the living can leave something for people who have not yet been born.

Seen this way, civilisation is partly a gigantic accumulated memory.

Books, contracts, laws, records, libraries and now digital archives are extensions of something Hobbes identifies at a much more basic level: our need to transform fleeting thought into something that can be marked, remembered and communicated.

The Four Uses of Speech

Hobbes identifies four principal uses of speech.

First, we use words to register what we discover through thought. Instead of repeatedly doing the same mental labour, we can record a conclusion and return to it later.

Second, speech allows us to communicate knowledge and counsel to others. What one person discovers can be taught to another.

Third, speech allows us to communicate our wills and purposes so that people can cooperate.

This third use is particularly important when we remember where Leviathan is eventually going.

Contracts, promises and agreements depend upon language.

If I cannot communicate what I intend, and you cannot communicate what you intend, it becomes extremely difficult to establish a common undertaking between us.

Before Hobbes can construct political society, therefore, he needs human beings capable of communicating intentions.

Finally, speech can be used for pleasure and delight – through language itself, through wit and through our interaction with others.

So speech becomes an instrument of memory, knowledge, cooperation and pleasure.

But then Hobbes introduces the other side of language.

Words Can Preserve Error Too

The invention that allows us to preserve knowledge also allows us to preserve nonsense.

This is where Chapter 4 becomes especially interesting.

Giving something a name does not make that thing real.

Nor does arranging sophisticated words into an impressive sentence necessarily mean that the person speaking has understood anything.

Words can clarify thought.

But words can also disguise the absence of thought.

If two people use the same word but mean different things by it, they can argue endlessly while believing they disagree about reality when they actually disagree about definitions.

If a word has no clear meaning at all, we can construct entire chains of reasoning upon something fundamentally unstable.

This explains why Hobbes becomes so interested in names and definitions.

Good reasoning requires disciplined language.

Before asking whether an argument is true, sometimes we need to ask a more basic question:

What exactly do these words mean?

That question feels remarkably modern.

Politics, law, philosophy and even everyday disagreements are filled with words such as freedom, justice, rights, fairness, truth and equality.

Two people can passionately argue about “freedom” while carrying completely different definitions of freedom in their minds.

The argument appears to concern the world.

Sometimes it actually concerns the word.

The Journey So Far

Four chapters into Leviathan, I can now see more clearly what Hobbes is constructing.

He begins with the external world acting upon us:

External objects → Sense

When the object disappears but its impression remains:

Sense → Imagination

As that impression fades with time:

Imagination → Memory

Our thoughts then follow one another:

Memory → Mental Discourse

But mental discourse remains private, temporary and vulnerable to forgetting.

So we give our thoughts names:

Mental Discourse → Names → Speech

Those words allow thoughts to move between people:

Speech → Communication

And when words can be permanently recorded:

Writing → Preserved Knowledge

Knowledge can then travel between generations:

Preserved Knowledge → Accumulated Human Knowledge

And language also allows us to communicate intentions:

Speech → Agreement → Cooperation

We are beginning to move from the individual mind towards society.

That, I think, is why these early chapters matter.

Hobbes could simply have begun Leviathan by discussing political authority. Instead, he takes us backwards.

Before the Commonwealth comes the human being.

Before agreement comes communication.

Before communication comes speech.

Before speech comes thought.

Before thought comes memory and imagination.

And before all of them comes our encounter with the external world through our senses.

My Reflection

The more I read these opening chapters, the more Leviathan feels less like a book that suddenly presents a political theory and more like an attempt to construct society from the human mind upwards.

Chapter 4 is an important turning point in that construction.

Until now, much of what Hobbes has described happens within an individual.

I sense.

I imagine.

I remember.

I think.

But with speech, suddenly there is another person.

Now I can tell you what I remember.

I can teach you what I have discovered.

I can tell you what I want.

You can tell me what you want.

We can agree.

We can disagree.

We can teach, deceive, persuade, promise, record and reason together.

Private thought has entered the shared human world.

And perhaps that is the most important thing I am taking from Chapter 4:

Speech does not merely give words to our thoughts. It makes our thoughts available to humanity.

It allows an idea to survive the moment in which it was conceived, the memory of the person who conceived it and, through writing, even the lifetime of its author.

Yet Hobbes gives us a warning at exactly the same time.

Once we give thoughts words, we gain an extraordinary instrument for knowledge.

But if our words are confused, undefined or detached from reality, the same instrument can multiply our errors.

So perhaps the lesson of Chapter 4 is not simply that language makes human civilisation possible.

It is that the quality of our shared world depends, in part, upon the quality of the words with which we construct it.

My journey through Thomas Hobbes’ Leviathan continues with Chapter 5, “Of Reason, and Science.”