Reason and Desire After the Fall of Man: A Rereading of Hobbes’s Two Postulates of Human Nature

Abstract

Hobbes claimed to have discovered two most certain (certissima) postulates of human nature: first, the postulate cupiditatis naturalis, whereby man demands private use of common things and second, the postulate rationis naturalis, which teaches man to avoid violent death or “fly contra-natural dissolution” as the greatest natural evil. From these two postulates, Hobbes claims to demonstrate “by most evident connection” his moral and civil doctrines. But the character of Hobbes’s two postulates and their role in grounding his political philosophy has been a flashpoint of contention. This is not surprising given what is at stake: our reading of these postulates will implicate our understanding of Hobbes’s most celebrated moral and political doctrines. In what follows, I take up Leo Strauss’s influential analysis of the Hobbes’s two postulates and identify some problems for Strauss’s interpretation. I then sketch a rereading of the two postulates in light of the Christian Aristotelian or Thomistic tradition of thought. I argue that Hobbes’s human nature teaching is not as radically novel as has often been thought.1

Thomas Jefferson, Nature's God, and the Theological Foundations of Natural-Rights Republicanism

“…Modern materialistic theism can be traced from Thomas Hobbes, who labored mightily to wed materialism and theism, and from whose friend and fellow member of the Mersenne circle, Pierre Gassendi, Jefferson sought to glean genuine Epicurean doctrines to be published along the genuine or primitive doctrines of Christ. We do not dispute that Hobbes was a “subversive” theologian — and we do not pretend to resolve the ongoing scholarly dispute about whether Hobbes was really an atheist — but we maintain that it is at least plausible to read Hobbes as a theist whose “subversiveness” was not atheistic (cf., Martinich 1992; Cooper 2013). While Hobbes and Gassendi concurred both as to the truth of the new mechanistic science, and the truth of theism, Hobbes differed from the latter in his thoroughgoing materialism.…”