Discussion Topic
Thomas Hobbes' view on human nature and competition
Summary:
Thomas Hobbes viewed human nature as inherently selfish and driven by competition. He believed that in a state of nature, individuals are in constant conflict over resources, leading to a "war of all against all." To avoid this chaos, Hobbes argued for a social contract where individuals surrender certain freedoms to a strong central authority to ensure peace and security.
What were Thomas Hobbes' beliefs about human nature?
It's fair to say that Thomas Hobbes didn't really have a very positive view of human nature. As someone who'd lived through the terrible upheavals of the English Civil War, he had witnessed at first hand just how people could behave in the absence of an all-powerful sovereign. More than anything else, Hobbes craved order and stability, which he argued could only be achieved by the establishment of a sovereign ruler invested with absolute power over his subjects. Only this way would it be possible to restrain the natural impulses of human beings towards greed and selfishness.
For Hobbes, that is what human nature is basically like: mired in greed and selfishness. In the society that exists prior to the establishment of government—the state of nature, as Hobbes calls it—there is complete chaos and anarchy. Without a powerful sovereign to keep their greedy, selfish impulses in check, people are constantly...
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at each other's throats, grabbing whatever they want whenever they can by whatever means necessary.
Yet ironically it is man's very selfishness that leads him to invest a sovereign ruler with absolute power. Men realize that their own selfish interests are better protected by a sovereign than by a gigantic free-for-all in which everyone just does as they please. The establishment of a government does not, indeed cannot, change human nature. What it can do, however, is to channel man's natural greed and selfishness in more constructive directions, such as in the arena of economic activity, for example.
What was Thomas Hobbes' view on human nature and competition?
According to Thomas Hobbes, human nature is fundamentally competitive because everybody desires to accumulate possessions in the form of property. Hobbes begins this chain of reasoning in his introduction to Leviathan when he argues that,
Nature (the art whereby God hath made and governes the world) is by the art of man, as in many other things, so in this also imitated, that it can make an Artificial Animal. For seeing life is but a motion of Limbs, the begining whereof is in some principall part within; why may we not say, that all Automata (Engines that move themselves by springs and wheeles as doth a watch) have an artificiall life? For what is the Heart, but a Spring; and the Nerves, but so many Strings; and the Joynts, but so many Wheeles, giving motion to the whole Body, such as was intended by the Artificer?
This portrait of the human reduces all human life to mere "motion of the Limbs." By comparing the "Heart" to a "Spring," and "Joynts" to "Wheeles," Hobbes implies that people are just a collection of matter in motion. The remainder of Part I goes on to describe man in more detail, eventually demonstrating that this materialist account of the human leads to a desire, on the part of every person to increase his or her power over others because of their natural penchant for vainglory.
In Chapter X, Hobbes argues that men work to increase their power by their nature:
The POWER of a Man, (to take it Universally,) is his present means, to obtain some future apparent Good. And is either Originall, or Instrumentall.
Because man's appetite naturally inclines them to seek the "Good," all men wish to increase their power. Importantly, all of Hobbes' examples of power imply some kind of power over others. For example, he claims that,
Riches joyned with liberality, is Power; because it procureth friends, and servants: Without liberality, not so; because in this case they defend not; but expose men to Envy, as a Prey.
Thus, riches serve to empower the person who possesses them by allowing them "friends, and servants." Conversely, it not "joyned with liberality," riches decrease a man's power because it "expose[s]" them to others who "Envy" them. This calculus of power and desire embodies Hobbes' fundamental thesis on the nature of man.
What fundamental claim about human nature did Thomas Hobbes make?
I would actually suggest that Hobbes' fundamental claim (the root assumption from which his larger thought extends) is that human nature is, at its core, materialistic. Indeed, when reading Leviathan, note that it does not begin with political theory or discussions on the State of Nature, rather it begins with an explanation for how individual human beings think and operate. Note, for example, the following passage, taken from the book's first chapter:
"4. The cause of sense, is the external body, or object, which preseth the organ proper to each sense, either immediately, as in the taste and touch; or mediately, as in seeing, hearing and smelling: which pressure, by the mediation of the nerves, and other strings, and membranes of the body, continued inwards to the brain and heart, causeth there a resistance, or counter-pressure, or endeavour of the heart, to deliver itself." (Hobbes, Leviathan, ed. J. C. A. Glaskin, Oxford University Press: New York, 1996, p. 1)
When taken as a whole, Hobbes emerges as a materialist, who envisions human beings in terms of being a kind of biological machine, in stark contrast to traditional Christian views on the soul, or to Cartesian dualism. This is one of the aspects of Hobbes' thought which made him so controversial in his own time (even among the Absolutists, who tended to adhere to Divine Right Theory), and it serves as the foundation on which so much of his thought tends to rest.
References
Thomas Hobbes is an interesting character, because his views during the Enlightenment are different from many of the other Enlightenment thinkers. Hobbes believed in the idea of a strong leader in charge of a nation. It is important to take note that Hobbes lived during the English Civil War. Hobbes developed a belief, likely influenced by the war, that humans were naturally evil and selfish. The terrible violence of the English Civil War helped lead Hobbes to determine that people needed a strong leader, possibly a monarch, to keep them in line. Hobbes did, however, contribute to social contract theory, an idea that would later become more popular with philosophers like Rousseau. Hobbes believed that people, fearing a chaotic society caused by human nature, needed to surrender some of their freedom in order to establish a civil society. This meant giving up some freedoms to a government in order to live without constant fear of violence and death.
Hobbes's most important claim about human nature is that it is inherently bad. Hobbes believed that human beings were not naturally meant to live together in society because they were essentially too selfish.
To Hobbes, people are, by nature, likely to come into conflict with one another due to their inherent selfishness. This is why he famously argued that life in the state of nature was "nasty, brutish and short." Because of this inherent badness, people need to be controlled relatively harshly. It is for this reason that Hobbes believed that socieites needed to be headed by strong despots.
Hobbes's basic claim about human nature, then, is that human nature is inherently selfish.