The passions that incline men to peace are fear of death, desire of such things as are necessary to commodious living, and a hope by their industry to obtain them. And reason suggesteth convenient articles of peace, upon which men may be drawn to agreement. These articles are they which otherwise are called the Laws of Nature, whereof I shall speak more particularly in the two following chapters.
UNDERSTANDING THE TEXT
Why does Hobbes believe all humans are equal in the state of nature? In what ways can those who are physically weaker than others compensate for their weakness? According to Hobbes, is this equality good or bad? Why?
What makes people enemies in the state of nature? Is it possible to avoid this enmity? Why or why not?
What three principal causes of warfare and conflict does Hobbes name? Explain why Hobbes lists them in a particular order. How does one lead to the others? What do these causes imply about Hobbes's idea of human nature?
Under what conditions can peace occur? Considering the other tenets of human nature Hobbes puts forth, would these conditions ever be feasible?
According to Hobbes, how do people living in civilized states "degenerate into a civil war"? Why should people avoid doing this at all costs?
Why does Hobbes state that justice cannot exist in the state of nature? What conditions are necessary for it to exist?
What feelings propel human beings to seek "peace" and, therefore, civil government?
Which of Hobbes's passages appeal most to logic, or logos? Which appeal most to emotion, or pathos? Which of these two modes of persuasion (p. 649) are the most important to the presentation of his argument?
MAKING CONNECTIONS
Does Hobbes, like Hsun Tzu (p. 84), assert that human beings are evil? Does he advocate the same kinds of solutions to improve the natural condition of humankind? Explain.
According to Hobbes, any government should be tolerated because any state of peace is better than a state of war. How might Martin Luther King Jr. (p. 425) or Aung San Suu Kyi (p. 442) respond to this assertion?
How does Hobbes's take on the state of nature compare with Darwin's view of natural selection (p. 314)? How might Darwin evaluate the condition that Hobbes fears most: a social situation in which all humans compete with all other humans for survival?
5. How does Hobbes's idea of the state of nature compare to Plato's myth of human beings in their natural state in "The Speech of Aristophanes" (p. 74)?
WRITING ABOUT THE TEXT
Develop your own "state of nature" theory in which you describe how, in your opinion, human beings would behave in the absence of government or civil society.
Write a rebuttal to Hobbes using Martin Luther King Jr.'s distinction (p. 425) between "a negative peace which is the absence of tension" and "a positive peace which is the presence of justice" as the basis for your critique.
Compare Hobbes's assumptions about human nature to those of Hsun Tzu (p. 84). What kinds of assumptions might more likely lead to totalitarian governments, and what kinds might more likely lead to democratic governments?
john locke
Of Ideas
[1690]
LIKE HIS CONTEMPORARY Thomas Hobbes, John Locke (1632-1704) lived during one of the most turbulent times in English history. A student at Oxford University in the 1650s, Locke came of age during the brief period of republican rule that occurred in England after the execution of Charles I in 1649 and before the Restoration of Charles II in 1660. Unlike Hobbes, however, Locke did not see political unrest, or even revolution, as necessarily bad things, nor did he perceive human nature as inherently self-interested and aggressive.
In his Second Treatise on Government (1689), Locke argued that individuals enter into a two-way contract with the state, surrendering absolute liberty in exchange for the protection of life, liberty, and the right to own property. When the state fails to uphold its end of the bargain, he believed, the people have a right to renegotiate the terms of the contract. In his own day, Locke's ideas helped lay the groundwork for the Glorious Revolution of 1688-1689, when King James II was forced from the English throne without bloodshed. Nearly a hundred years later, Locke's ideas were incorporated almost verbatim into the American Declaration of Independence.
In addition to being one of the most important political theorists of the Enlightenment, Locke was also one of the founding figures of the school of philosophy known as "empiricism," the belief that all knowledge is gained through experience. In Locke's day, as in ours, empiricism contrasted directly with "nativism," the belief that all people share certain values and perceptions as part of their human inheritance—which can come from God, as many people in Locke's day believed, or from the mechanical operation of genes, as many scientists today affirm.
The selection below is drawn from Locke's influential Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690). According to this principle, the human mind begins as a blank slate (in Latin, tabula rasa) and acquires knowledge through experience. For Locke, all such experience is either sensation (information acquired through the senses) or reflection (information that the mind derives through its own operations). Both sensation and reflection begin at birth, and together they entirely determine human understanding. Human nature, from this perspective, is simply the sum total of human experience.
Of Ideas in general, and their Original
1. Idea is the object of thinking. Every man being conscious to himself that he thinks; and that which his mind is applied about whilst thinking being the ideas
that are there, it is past doubt that men have in their minds several ideas, such as are those expressed by the words whiteness, hardness, sweetness, thinking, motion, man, elephant, army, drunkenness, and others: it is in the first place then to be inquired, How he come by them?
I know it is a received doctrine, that men have native ideas, and original characters, stamped upon their minds in their very first being.[47] This opinion I have at large examined already; and, I suppose what I have said in the foregoing Book[48] will be much more easily admitted, when I have shown whence the understanding may get all the ideas it has; and by what ways and degrees they may come into the mind; for which I shall appeal to every one's own observation and experience.
All ideas come from sensation or reflection. Let us then suppose the mind to be, as we say, white paper,[49] void of all characters, without any ideas: How comes it to be furnished? Whence comes it by that vast store which the busy and boundless fancy of man has painted on it with an almost endless variety? Whence has it all the materials of reason and knowledge? To this I answer, in one word, from EXPERIENCE. In that all our knowledge is founded; and from that it ultimately derives itself. Our observation employed either, about external sensible objects, or about the internal operations of our minds perceived and reflected on by ourselves, is that which supplies our understandings with all the materials of thinking. These two are the fountains of knowledge, from whence all the ideas we have, or can naturally have, do spring.