#Thomas Hobbes

[litandlifequotes]

Hell is truth seen too late.

Leviathan by Thomas Hobbes

#thomas hobbes #leviathan #book #book quote #quote #words #reading #philosophy

[ma-pi-ma]

La curiosità è un desiderio della mente.

Thomas Hobbes

#thomas hobbes

[theoutcastrogue]

The Ravening War: Raphaniel's Leviathan

Raphaniel reminds me VERY much of a character I once made for the explicit purpose of roleplaying something I loathe. I said, what's a real life philosophy that would make sense in a d&d setting and that I hate? Ooh, I know, Hobbes in the context of the English Civil War. I'll play a champion of that then. But I won't make it a caricature, the point isn't to build a strawman and bash it (that's way too easy to be satisfying), I'll try my best to portray the character like a real person who genuinely believes all that. What would make someone believe that? And how would that someone behave, think, understand the world?

So I ended up playing a noble, a lawful evil Paladin of Tyranny (that was back in 3.5) wielding an executioner's greatsword named "Divine Right". And it was hard! I had to fight every instinct I had at every turn, it was a fucking struggle. (But interesting, illuminating, and rewarding, especially when she finally fucking died.)

this is the future Raphaniel wants

So anyway, I might be biased, but I think Raphaniel is a Hobbesian figure too. In this episode he revealed some of his political vision for Calorum, in the 2-year downtime he spent scheming:

"I will share some of the most touching parables and epistles from the Book of Leaves that have to do with unity and the uniting of people. … The clans of the Meat Lands struggle and strife, and unity, my mind dwells on unity. We long for stories to share and for songs and prayers that can unite a disparate people. It is my hope that if there is any aid I could lend you that the Meat Lands might find a common song to sing."

"Sir Drunon, as of this most recent battle, has become something of a national hero. Vegetania doesn't need heroes. Heroes give people pride. Pride on the story of their homeland, where they are from, legends that make them stand tall. Pride is the opposite of humility and obeisance. […]

I wanna drive a spike into the proto-, like, into the thing that gets under Raphaniel's skin is this burgeoning Vegetanian nationalism. This idea of civic pride which Raphaniel finds loathsome. So I think that it's a spreading through church channels always ringing the bell of like, an end to war. An end to bloodshed. Basically painting the lords of this new ascendant, like, Vegetanian rebel court as like, we still have a monarch. It's still the Lady Amangeaux. This is a love of bloodshed, and this knight's just been murdered in a house of ill repute, and this was the person you called a hero of the battle? And spreading through that area as well this idea of "had you knelt your head to the laws of the church and saw fit to include the Lady Amangeaux, we would not have returned an incredibly beloved Fructeran noble to Tomaté in his hour of needing to unify Fructera". So in other words, it's not pro-Amangeaux like, what a great lady. It's like, you're bad at politics, right?"

What do you make of this? My take is: this is an EXTREMELY authoritarian radish. His first priority is to make all people subjects (obedient, humble, without agency, never thinking of independence / self-government / self-determination, or that they deserve rights of any kind) under ONE rule.

Which rule, exactly, is not immediately clear. We know he promotes the interests of the church: he chose to dispose of Sir Drunon because he was an enemy of the church. I think he's angling for a theocracy in the long-term. But for now he's supporting a secular monarch, and he doesn't even think to rally the people to give power to the church from below. Because the people aren't supposed to rally, they're supposed to do as they're told. And until he gets the church to call the shots directly, he's happy with an absolute monarch ruling by divine right, i.e. one that he/the church can control. And until that happens, he's happy supporting the "rightful" monarch, Queen Amangeaux, NOT because she's "a great lady" (if she is, it's irrelevant!) but because she's THE queen, and y'all don't get to choose your kings and queens. [Speculation: he engineered the lack of heirs via contraceptive/abortifacient in the tea, so that the church would succeed the last heirless monarch.]

What he emphatically does NOT want in power is the rabble. And in his mind, all the classes are rabble. Even a hypothetical parliament of landlords or a council / diet of nobles would be too democratic and inclusive, and even a bunch of independent but otherwise perfectly monarchical kingdoms would be (and have been!) too chaotic. Which is why he's pushing for "unity" at every turn.

the union of temporal and spiritual power: castle + church, crown + mitre, cannon + excommunication, weapons + logic, armies + religious courts

So I think his end-goal is a sovereign with absolute authority, both secular and spiritual. In his mind, there needs to be a single State under a single "decider", a one-man (or one pope) rule, "a common power to keep them all in awe", otherwise it's "war of all against all", and everyone's doomed to the whirring teeth of death he keeps seeing in his visions: "continual fear, and danger of violent death; and the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short."

I'm telling ya, that radish is a Hobbes fanboy FOR SURE. And if the whirring teeth of death are revealed to be, as suspected, a blender or a garbage disposal, the magnificent absurdity of this setting will have given us the most batshit illustration of Hobbesian terror at the prospect of people living "without a common power to keep them all in awe":

"Darkness. Whirring, strange reflective teeth. The sound of a high-pitched whining scream, grinding lower and lower. Blood, viscera, tearing of flesh. Nothing, darkness, flesh, shadow."

And this being a prequel, we already know the levels of repressive authoritarianism such a fear can give birth to.

…Or I am making ALL of this up, because I'm biased for reasons already explained. We'll see!

[quotes in italics are Hobbes's]

#the ravening war #the ravening war spoilers #dimension 20 #bishop raphaniel charlock #brennan lee mulligan #thomas hobbes #Leviathan #how to rogue #d&d #analysis #fluff #theory #rogues in fiction #the phantom of liberty #trs

[spilledreality]

On conflict theory

Basically, the first serious attempt at creating a scientific field of archaeology was done by 19th century Germans, and they looked around and dug some stuff up and concluded that the prehistoric world looked like the world of Conan the Barbarian: lots of “population replacement,” which is a euphemism for genocide and/or systematic slavery and mass rape. This 19th century German theory then became popular with some 20th century Germans who... uh... made the whole thing fall out of fashion by trying to put it into practice. After those 20th century Germans were squashed, any ideas they were even tangentially associated with them became very unfashionable, and so there was a scientific revolution in archaeology! I'm sure this was just crazy timing, and actually everybody rationally sat down and reexamined the evidence and came to the conclusion that the disgraced theory was wrong (lol, lmao). Whatever the case, the new view was that the prehistoric world was incredibly peaceful, and everybody was peacefully trading with one another, and this thing where sometimes in a geological stratum one kind of house totally disappears and is replaced by a different kind of house is just that everybody decided at once that the other kind of house was cooler. The high-water mark of this revisionist paradigm even had people saying that the Vikings were mostly peaceful traders who sailed around respecting the non-aggression principle. And then people started sequencing ancient DNA and...it turns out the bad old 19th century Germans were correct about pretty much everything. The genetic record is one of whole peoples frequently disappearing or, even more commonly, all of the men disappearing and other men carrying off the dead men's female relatives. There are some exceptions to this, but by and large the old theory wins.

from Mr & Mrs Smith, cf Margulis vs Dawkins, Graeber vs Hobbes, and critiques of Randall Collins's (via Weber) conflict theory

#lynn margulis #richard dawkins #john p smith #jane p smith #david graeber #thomas hobbes #randall collins #max weber

[wormswurld]

was reading thomas hobbes’ “leviathan” for my ap government & politics class and i couldn’t stop thinking abt this particular expert and how it literally explains oliver’s motives

“…the quality of hope in the attaining of our ends. And therefore if any two men desire the same thing, which nevertheless they cannot both enjoy, they become enemies; and in the way to their end (which is principally their own conservation, and sometimes their delectation only) endeavour to destroy or subdue one another. And from hence it comes to pass that where an invader hath no more to fear than another man's single power…”

#thinking so hard abt this rn #oliver quick #saltburn #saltburn posting #barry keoghan #felix x oliver #cattonquick #felix catton #jacob elordi #thomas hobbes #philosophy #enlightenment #lgbtqia #words #quote #w #thomas hobbes leviathan

[cosmonautroger]

#thomas hobbes #leviathan

[kingoftheu]

#history #memes #calvin and hobbes #hobbes #thomas hobbes #leviathan #history humor

[existentialcomicsfeed]

Your Money or Your Life!

#philosophy #existential comics #thomas hobbes #jean jacques rousseau #freedom

[yorgunherakles]

en iyiyi görüyorum, beğeniyorum; fakat en kötüyü yapıyorum.

spinoza - etika

#kitap #edebiyat #blogger #felsefe #kitaplar #blog #kitap kurdu #friedrich nietzsche #baruch spinoza #spinoza #etika #rene descartes #felsefe blog #karl marks #thomas hobbes #dostoyevski #karamazov kardeşler #faust #küçük prens #martin heidegger #bertolt brecht #sappho #sophokles #kral lear #hamlet #william shakespeare #antigone #sokrates #platon #sofist

[civcivwq21]

"Hiçbir korkuluğu kurt şeklinde yapmamışlar, ayı ve leopar şeklinde de yapmamışlar. Zannediyorum ki insanlardan daha korkunç bir varlık bulamamışlar..."

#thomas hobbes #alintilarim

[bazzybelle]

Jesus Christ... I was today years old when I realized that Hob's Leviathan is a play on words for the book Leviathan by Thomas Hobbes.

Hobbes' Leviathan... Nice one, Neil Gaiman...

I can't wait to tell this to my husband, and for him to laugh fondly at me, the history major, who only JUST figured this out.

#hobs Leviathan #Hobbes Leviathan #thomas hobbes #neil gaiman #the sandman #hob gadling #belle is a lil slow on the uptake

[pro-philosopher]

If you still love your partner after yesterday, here are some belated Valentines!

#pro philosopher #visual novel #indie games #philosophy #happy valentines #valentines #confucius #locke #Jenn #Hobbes #thomas hobbes

[theoutcastrogue]

Existential Comics #525: We Live in a Society

"Hobbes more or less thought we all give up our freedom to live under the absolute authority of the State because without it we would all be in a constant state of war and violence against each other over resources. So essentially people can't be trusted to dole out the birthday cake evenly themselves without a cop watching, we'd all be at each other's throats. He lived in a pretty violent time where the English monarchs were constantly starting wars with each other over every little reason, so he had some reason to think this, but his view on human's natural social cooperation was pretty dim."

#Existential Comics #theory #comics #thomas hobbes

[andthentheywilleatthestars]

You see me annotating a copy of Leviathan by Thomas Hobbes and you look over my shoulder and I'm just writing "literally 1984" over and over again

#original #thomas hobbes

[daakureisaiko]

#funny #meme #memes #david xanatos #goliath #gargoyles #will riker #thomas hobbes #shakespeare

[thequietabsolute]

Fear of invisible power, if publicly allowed, is religion; if not allowed, superstition. Thus the decision as to what is religion and what superstition rests with the legislator.

— Bertrand Russell, from the entry for Hobbes’s Leviathan; History of Western Philosophy (1946.)

#thomas hobbes #bertrand russell #religion #philosophy #leviathan #i found this particularly clean; a formulation worth remembering