Energeia, Spring 2013

29 be true in all times and places.” When the spoken word transfers our mental discourse outside ourselves, it permits us to transcend the particularity of our immediate perceptive experience. When we reflect upon, or even simply hear spoken words, we encounter something said then from the standpoint of now, and something said there from the standpoint of here. When the same connection between sets of words is preserved regardless of our position of time and place, the notion of generality is born. Abstraction from the particular to the universal is what makes another “invention” possible, namely truth.

According to Hobbes, truth enters into human experience as soon as two names are joined together as a consequence or affirmation. If the latter name signifies all that the former name does, the consequence or affirmation is true, and if not, it is false. This suggests that the truths we tell are formally tautologous. That is, whenever we tell a truth, we are joining one definition to another and making the claim that their significations are the same.

Once man is capable of telling truths, he is also capable of telling lies. This is why the invention of the spoken word makes us accountable in a way that natural perception and imagination did not. Through speech, we are capable of error. Regarding this significance of the spoken word, Hobbes says: “Nature itself cannot err.” It is only by means of words that we have the power to deceive both ourselves and others. In fact, three of Hobbes’ four “abuses of speech” are modes of de-