Thomas Hobbes Leviathan

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Hobbes believes that man is evil, greedy, power-driven, self-interested, preserving of one’s life and wants to avoid violent death. In Leviathan, he exclaims that man is equal as well as free in the capacity to kill one another, e.g. when two men desire the same thing, they do not compromise, instead, they fight till death to have it all to themselves. He believes that the nature of humans inevitably produces a state of war “as of every man against every man” (Hobbes, 76). Intrinsically, the only way for mankind to be in peace is in a commonwealth where everyone gives up their freedom to live in harmony and protection. His ideal form of government is an absolute monarchy where “all is given to him they make sovereign..and consequently none …show more content…
Hobbes will reply to this by saying that people value escapes from violent death than they do anything else since this commonwealth gives them access to that escape they would prefer it over freedom and power. The idea of a sovereign is also problematic because there are only two ways a person can become the sovereign, through domination by war/force and nomination. If the mankind in the state of nature is power-driven, self-interested and preserving of one’s life, then everyone would nominate themselves for the position of a sovereign and the war/force would never suffice to the domination of a mass body of people. Hobbes response would be, mankind sharing a common space will inherently have issues with foreigners and feel the need to defend their territory, because they want to avoid violent death. This allows for cooperating for a common good, there a potential leader will arise and the opportunity for him to use war/force or nomination to become a sovereign would be …show more content…
Prior to my encounter with Perspectives, I never questioned my religion because my understanding of religion was like that of the prisoner in the cave being bound to only look straight ahead. Throughout the course, especially during the study of the Bible, I felt myself evolving from the cognitive stage of imagination to belief to thought and now, understanding. When one perspective of religion is all that a person knows and has ever been exposed to, its difficult to configure anything outside of that but Perspectives dragged me out of that cave. I went from believing everything in the bible to understand the purpose of the Bible as a noble lie. The bible is a book of parables that like philosophy aims to answer the question of the good life. Because the Bible has been transcribed and translated over centuries, the true value of it has been lost. I believe that there is a God but not in the conventional form that the Bible takes. God for me is a concept that is simultaneously within us and outside of us. God is the deepest level of connectivity with the psyche, he is the form of good, similar to the sun. I still keep certain practices of religion in my daily activities such as praying in the form of meditation, the golden rule, and gospel music. Besides religion, I believe I have a deeper understanding of myself, human relations, the world, and ways to navigate through

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