The progression of man’s decision to come together from his own immediate family and network of local tribes and establish a much larger social body has been a long-standing consideration within the realm of political philosophy. Thomas Hobbes, who wrote his magnum opus Leviathan during the time of the English Civil War, sought to discover the causes of war through an examination of human nature and of the nature of civil society. In light of the commanding role that self-interest has in our identity and our civil arrangement with others, Hobbes says that our self-interest intersects ethical and political matters only when reason discovers the better state of living can be realized if the desires of many men are brought together through mutual agreement.
When the importance of protecting and pursuing what we desire is realized, we make a conscious decision to enter into social existence, and consequently, to care for our fellow man. Hobbes delivers a skeptical view of man’s ability to attain a moral sensibility. According to Hobbes, every individual runs the race of life for himself. There is nothing in man’s make-up or natural behavior that leads him to principles of justice or ethical agency.
Our independence is a fundamental feature of being human; as a result, we are not bound to experience or view life with an attunement to ethical considerations. Like any other physical body set in motion, humans have a kind of inertia present in their existence. In the case of people, though, it is known as the law of self-preservation. Hobbes believed that there is no social tendency that can be derived from the mechanics of human bodies.
The human machine, as Hobbes characterizes it, has a psychological motivation that is purely egoistic-the human being wants to preserve the same state of life that is originally bestowed by nature. Hobbes views that even though man may have the bias of thinking that we can decide our personal fate, to rationally move towards an ethical perspective on our life, he believes much more in the power of experience in shaping who we are. Our interaction with any ideas or prejudices depends on the way that our feelings of pain and pleasure direct us. Just as a given force moves an object, man can be moved by his feelings of pain and pleasure, which provides an impetus for our certain actions.
There is no specific goal in his motion or in the pattern of these feelings. Our very notions of good and evil arise from these appetites and aversions. What one loves and hates is purely subjective and this reality is based on the notion that man lives without purpose. The problem that Hobbes reveals about unabated self-interest is that it results in an impractical life situation. We are driven by pleasure and pain to pursue certain things, which in the case of some men is power. These individual scramble out of a lust for power because it is what pleases them, while others are driven to it out of a fear that what they have will be taken from them unless they acquire more.
What men are driven to do to appeal to their own feelings causes them to clash with other men following their own self-interest. This is what leads Hobbes to deduce that men are, by nature, in constant and bitter conflict. This struggle emerges in a condition of war of each man against every other. This clashing of personalities leads to the diminishment of all human endeavors. In this state, for example, there is no room for man’s industry.
The work done by men is performed in an isolated manner, and in having to provide and protect oneself, specialization and creativity is stifled, and all men are generally worse off as a result. Life in such a condition, outside of the state, is clearly unpleasant. Solitary, cruel, nasty, brutish, and short, as Hobbes so famously terms it. Thus the state—the great Leviathan or artificial man is created. The state itself is nothing but a superhuman apparatus that enforces, by commanding the combined forces of its citizens or members, certain rules of behavior that guarantee the safety of each of its members. These rules are the laws of the state.
Their sanction is the original covenant or social contract. Their “truth” is their usefulness in preserving peace: the condition of human survival. As a result, the things that man creates, including society, cannot be a natural human condition. Society must be a special artificial creation of man to serve some specific purpose, one that is ultimately connected to our feelings of pleasure, pain, and self- preservation. The commonwealth is the result of individuals who come together and created structures that live in relative peace. It is a structure that allows them to live peacefully. This commonwealth is the result of a certain conception of human nature.
For Hobbes, human nature is a stable and unchanging ground for politics. Take away society and return to the state of nature and we return to the same creatures that we were before the state of society. Sometimes, Hobbes points out, the state itself threatens the survival of the individual. The first and only rule of life for man is his self-protection. It is a creed that is bestowed by nature herself and something that man has an intimate relation to at all times. Every man may preserve his own life and limbs with all the power he has. This rule of survival precedes all rules and laws that are devised by the state. In the face of violent death, the contract is broken and man is again in a state of war with his fellows.
In a state nothing but self-preservation counts. The problem with all this is that its subjects, due to the unilateral nature of its agreement, cannot try the sovereign. This can pose a problem for individuals who are born into the covenant. They have not willingly given their personal consent to the sovereign for the sake of protection, but since the majority of the state has rationally decided to give themselves up, they must defer to the state’s better judgment. Given that the sovereign exists to set up laws to maintain security, and every he creates is just, when people rationally decide to support a ruler, they must also recognize the fact that they can be oppressed.
In other words, to give ones consent to one individual in determining the best course of action for a group of people demands recognition that one’s individual self-interest may be betrayed in order to cater to what the sovereign sees as best. To borrow the terminology of Thomas Jefferson, self-preservation is man’s inalienable right. All functions of the state have, therefore, only one legitimate goal in view: the preservation of peace and the conditions of security. Justice and virtue are simply rules of the state needed to keep the passions of men in check and to preserve life by using fear to maintain the precarious balance of power.
In Hobbes’ system, there is no place for happiness or human fulfillment. Self-interest according to his formulation is part of an instrumental feature of ourselves that plays a functional role in keeping us alive and realizing our biological purpose. But there is the foundation of absolute human rights that follow necessarily from mechanics.
The human animal does not have a lawgiver that informs or directs its existence; it is subject to the laws of physics as are all other material bodies. What is distinct about the human animal among all other beings and bodies, however, is that it is can plot, plan and imagine, and therefore direct its mechanical impulses to the creation of an artificial world. It is our reason alone that enables us to discover human nature, and in the same vein as Hobbes, gives us to means to discover the natural laws of human association. In this artificial world-the social and political world-man can use the power of his new self-knowledge to prevent mutual self-destruction.
