Leviathan and Whatever Else
by Yvy Truong
Woops, i’m a little late to the blogging party!
Well, I can’t say I agree with Hobbes but granted, what I think he is trying to do is interesting.
So what is he trying to do? Well for one, there is a point that if lets say, I’m disputing with you about… What is just. I have a definition of what justice means and you have a different view on what it is and therefore, if we’re disputing on something that we both have a different interpretation of, we really aren’t disputing at all.
OR ARE WE?
I understand what Hobbes is doing in terms of giving us a dictionary. He’s doing it (I think) in attempts to reform the mind. Like Crawford said in lecture, it’s almost as if he is trying to reform the bible and the origin of man. And if he is successful of reforming the way we think, and if we abide by that, it opens the potential for absolute power. If we all thought the same way, did the same things, etc., etc., etc., then why not live under absolute power? If everyone and everything were the same, wouldn’t that be peaceful?
But that’s not the way humans are. We can’t all be the same because we just can’t accept that. Even if we are, we try to find things that distinguishes us.
But then here is my question:
Lets say that we start from the very beginning. The whole world, the universe, the stars, and whatever whatnots. Lets say we start from a blank slate and for some weird unexplainable reason we go along with everything Hobbes is saying and we abide by his definitions. Would that be possible to sustain peace?
I don’t think so.
If there is anything I want to believe about humanity, it is that we’re struggling, we’ve had a lot of victories, but damn have we fallen as well. And we’ve got a long way to go.
And that whole thing about the law of nature being chaos? I don’t think there is any other alternative.
Give me a utopia – give anyone a utopia and they will find something wrong about it.
Hobbes, dude, you’re not really thinking, man. This isn’t going to bode well with humans. Like, I know what you’re trying to do but… No. And I’m saying no just to show you how unattainable this whole things is. Like… People don’t want to be the same and peace on Earth, yeah that sounds nice, but maybe in the next world.
It’s true that if we all were the same and acted the same way, then perhaps we wouldn’t have a problem with living under a very powerful state. But I’m not sure that this is what Hobbes is saying. He says in his own introduction to the text that people’s desires, aversions, passions will differ (p. 4), and when he talks about achieving peace it’s not by making everyone desire the same things (except peace and security themselves). Rather, it’s about making it possible for people to seek to fulfill their own differing desires as well as they can, within the confines of following rules that protect the security of others as well as themselves. Hobbes thinks we’re all driven by our desires and aversions, which may differ amongst us, and that’s fine; it just that we need to be able to follow rules which will allow us to not continually engage in conflict with one another, to keep others from taking what we have, to allow us to seek what we desire within the same boundaries of rules that others have to follow too, for the sake of keeping peace among us.
Peace, for Hobbes, doesn’t mean we all agree on everything. It just means we aren’t attacking each other because we think that’s necessary to defend what we have; it means having rights to things like property and liberty and having the state defend those. It’s actually not too terribly different from how we live right here and now (neither here nor in Hobbes’ view, of course, do people always follow the rules, so there are still people attacking each other, but for the most part, most people do).