All posts by Cherry Zheng

Hobbes – How to use ‘death’

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If you’ve ever looked into or have been interested in political philosophy, you’ve heard of Thomas Hobbes. Hobbes is one of the most legendary names of polticial philosophy, a 17th century English philosopher (as well as scientist and historian), that had a heavy influence on a theory that eventually developed into the social contract theory, which we’ll touch on later. 

Thomas Hobbes was born in 1588, in Westport, Wiltshire, in England. His father abandoned him and his two brothers to the care of Thomas’s uncle. He ended up going to Oxford University at the age of 15, where he majored in traditional arts and, surprisingly, took up an interest in maps. He died from a stroke, in 1679 at the age of 91, in the Hardwick Hall in Derbyshire. 

For most of his life, Hobbes worked for rich, aristocrat families, working as tutors, translators, business representatives, political advisors etc. While working their, he became associated with royals, specifically between the royalists’ disputes with the parliament, until the eruption of the English Civil Wars from 1642 to 1651. During this conflict, Hobbes stood on the royalists’/king’s side, and wrote a treatise, The Elements of Law, Natural and Politic, on defending the king’s prerogatives. The treatise became widely popular, as more and more royalists used arguments from his treatise in debates. 

This experience was believed to be highly influencial to his beliefs as a philosophy. Due to his experiences, he was exposed to the chaos and suffering that separation and disagreement on the powers of the ruler can bring, and proposed his own thoughts in some of his masterpieces, including the Leviathan, or Behemoth, that eventually became the foundations for the political concept: the social contract theory. Because he saw the conflict as the parliament and citizens refusing to obey the king, he came up with the idea of a social contract, which basically tells of the contract between a ruler and its citizens, that in order to protect the citizens’ rights and livelihood the most, and for the ruler to most effectively keep order, they need to unconditionally obey the ruler’s commands. 

But what does all this have to do with death?

Hobbes believes that the inherent nature of humans is selfish and individualistic. If society didn’t exist and humans were still cavemen, Hobbes believes that everyone’s lives would be in a state of “continual fear, and danger of violent death”, as he writes in the Leviathan, “Life in the state of nature is solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short”. He believed this state also continues into war, that war exhibits the same aspects and qualities of what it would be like for humans to live in a state of nature. However, if a country were to enter a state of warfare, because of the social contract, he wold expect the country’s citizens to, without question, submit themselves to the hands of the ruler, and fight for this country. Although he thinks that individuals sought to escape the the natural state of terror and death by establishing and joining civil society, he expects the citizens to, once again, submit themselves to the natural state, for a selfless cause. 

Hobbes also believes that the fear of death isn’t absolute. There are some political theories reliant on the fear of death among people and citizens, to obey the absolute power of the ruler, but Hobbes believes otherwise. When Hobbes wrote the Leviathan and his other political works, it was a time when significant populations of England, Scotland, and Ireland sacrificed themselves for the civil war, due to honour, religious or political reasons. So it would be understandable if Hobbes believed that the concept of death itself didn’t affect the citizens of different countries anymore. Instead, Hobbes believes an unspoken agreement, or a moral obligation should be in place for the citizens to follow the ruler’s wishes, instead of any physical (death) punishment. 

Aside from political philosophy, Hobbes was also a materialist (resulting from the fact that he was a empiricist), which basically means that he believes all humans beings (and to some extent, God) is physical material, including their mind. He believes things that are incorporeal to be nonsensical and untrue. Following up the previous argument of the fact that he doesn’t think the fear of death is absolute, this could be because he believes humans to be physical. Because humans are entirely physical and do not have a mind or a soul that continues to exist after death, there is no reason to fear death. If death is just like falling asleep, without consciousness of the fact that you’ve died, what reason is there to fear death? 

Overall, Hobbes doesn’t discuss much about the concept of death, or the action of dying itself, but rather focuses more on death, and perhaps the fear and horror that comes along with the state of nature (which may bring inevitable death), and what it would mean to a nation, or the ruler of a nation. What do you think? Is it justifiable for the ruler of a country to order its soldiers to die simply because of the ruler’s wishes? How important or significant should life be to the individual?

Bibliography:

Duncan, Stewart. “Thomas Hobbes” The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Spring 2021 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/hobbes/

Sorell, Tom. “Thomas Hobbes” Encyclopedia Britannica, https://www.britannica.com/biography/Thomas-Hobbes.

McClure, C. S. (2014). War, Madness, and Death: The Paradox of Honor in Hobbes’s Leviathan. The Journal of Politics, 76(1), 114–125. doi:10.1017/s0022381613001072 

Hobbes, Thomas. Leviathan. University of Oregon, 1999.

Socrates – The Father’s Death

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“No one knows whether death may not be the greatest of all blessings for a man, yet men fear it as if they knew that it is the greatest of evils.“

Chances are, you’ve heard of the name ‘Socrates’ before, but you may not know who exactly he is. Socrates is one of the most famous and influential philosophers to have ever lived, despite never having written anything himself. He lived in Athens, and was one of the poorer citizens by will (according to remaining records of him by others, he actually embraced his own poverty and never charged money for his teachings). He was also apparently famously ugly, and due to his own poverty, didn’t change clothes a lot. Because most of the information known about Socrates comes from books and records written by his students, such as Plato or Xenophon, and those records were mostly focused on academic affairs, not much was written about his personal life. However, it has been recorded that Socrates was the son of Sophroniscus and Paenarete. He married a woman named Xanthippe and had three children with her. 

Despite his outward appearance, he was noted to be extremely arrogant, preaching his beliefs and knowledge to random people that he met on the street, trying to convince them that he was right through extensive questioning and debating with them. Although this behavior was noted to be semi-annoying and harmful to the youth of Athens, in addition to being a bother to other citizens of Athens, Socrates himself thought nothing of it. He believed that the behavior itself

This behavior, however, angered the citizens of Athen and drew the attention of the Athenian court, who accused Socrates of impiety and influencing the youth in a negative way. In the end, the people of Athens held a trial to determine whether Socrates was guilty or not, and what punishment would he receive. Socrates was found guilty of his crimes, and was sentenced to death. The remaining records of this event are from Plato’s Apology, which details Socrates’s opinions on death and his own trial. Due to the fact that Plato is Socrates’s student, the book is known to be subject to Plato’s subjectivity, which may paint Socrates in a better light than how other’s may have known him. In addition, it is hard to tell which ideas are Socrates’s own ideas, and which ideas are Platonic, projected through the persona of Socrates. 

One of Socrates’s most famous beliefs (and one of the points he gets made fun of the most) is that he knew that he knows nothing, and therefore he thought he was more intelligent than everyone else (which in itself is a contradiction, but at the time, it was a truly profound idea). Everyone else that Socrates encountered in Athens thought their own knowledge was irrefutable and real, so he wanted to help others share this supposed “truth” by walking around and teaching the citizens of Athens about his belief by asking others what they know and disproving them one by one. Many of the dialogues were recorded by Plato in the Platonic dialogues. Due to Socrates’s continous and main belief that no one can truly know anything, apart from the fact that he knows that he knows nothing, Socrates believes there is nothing to fear when it comes to death, since no one can really know what comes after death. Socrates believes that to fear death is to have a preassumption that death is supposed to be inherently bad, which is just one pretending to be smart when one is not. In the Apology, Plato writes, “To fear death, gentlemen, is no other than to think oneself wise when one is not, to think one knows what one does not know.” This idea is linked to the quote at the top of the page, in which Socrates explains no one knows whether death could be the greatest blessing, or the greatest evil (which is both dependent on the nature of death itself, and the person experiencing it). Socrates also proposes two situations: death involves the ending of one’s consciousness, in which case death is nothing but a dreamless sleep, or death involves the soul of the body being admitted to an afterlife, where souls are ruled by just judges. Neither situation can be constituted as necessarily frightful (in his case, at least), so he has nothing to fear. 

In the end, Socrates was executed by reason of impeity and corruption of the youth (although some believed that he technically commtitted suicide because he was granted the chance to escape, but he insisted on following the law and being executed instead), and we are left with unanswered questions, courtesy of Socrates’s legacy. Is being scared of death truly an act of ignorance? Will it always, under any circumstances, be irrational to fear death?

Bibliography:

Nails, Debra. “Socrates” The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Spring 2020 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/socrates/

Timmons, Greg. “Socrates Biography” The Biography.com Website, https://www.biography.com/scholar/socrates#:~:text=Socrates%20was%20a%20scholar%2C%20teacher%20and%20philosopher%20born,to%20death%20by%20hemlock%20poisoning%20in%20399%20B.C.

Plato. Apology, trans. G.M.A. Grube. Pp. 112.130 in Readings in Ancient Greek Philosophy: from Thales to Aristotle, 2nd ed. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, 2000.