Made with Words by Pettit Philip;

Made with Words by Pettit Philip;

Author:Pettit, Philip;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Published: 2008-04-23T16:00:00+00:00


CHAPTER SEVEN

The State of Second, Worded Nature

THE STATE OF SECOND NATURE

If the argument so far is reliable, then the message is clear. By words human beings are lifted out of the passive, particularistic mentality of animals, being given the capacity to reason, personate, and incorporate. But by words human beings are also cast out of the garden of animal innocence, and reduced to a life of quarrel and distrust, unknown among other living creatures. Hobbes refers to the “condition of men outside civil society” as “the state of nature” (DCv preface). What my argument shows is that the state of nature in his sense is not the precultural state in which human beings are as other animals but the state in which they have already mastered language. It is not the state of first nature, prior to language and the “kind of agreement” on the meanings of words that is “necessary for human society” (DCv 18.4). It is the state to which human beings are reduced, as language and the mixed blessings of language become second nature to them.

The recognition that this is what the state of nature means for Hobbes sets his story in contrast with Rousseau’s account (1973) of the state of nature, presented most fully in his second discourse—the discourse on inequality. For it is crucial to Rousseau’s way of thinking that the state of nature is the state of first nature, before human beings learn language and develop the capacity to think. The state of nature is the state of animals in general, he suggests, and in this state the human being can live an untroubled existence. “His soul, which nothing disturbs, is wrapped up in the feeling of its present existence, without any idea of the future, however near at hand; while his projects, as limited as his views, hardly extend to the close of the day” (Rousseau 1973, 56).

Hobbes need not have disagreed with any of this. For he also offers support for the idea that had human beings not come to the invention of language, then they might have lived in the relatively untroubled fashion of animals. Rousseau presents his account of the state of nature as an alternative to that of Hobbes, but for all he says, there need be no disagreement between them. What divides them is not a divergence in their conceptions of one and the same state of nature but rather a divergence in the state of nature that they were each meaning to characterize.

Under the reading of Hobbes that my argument supports, there are three possible modes of human existence: the state of first nature, when humans are as other animals; the state of second nature, when they leave community with beasts as a result of developing language; and the civil state in which they incorporate under a sovereign. Hobbes obviously thinks that the state of first nature is no longer attainable, with the irreversible effects that the invention of language has had. The claim he wants to



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