Hobbes

In the philosophy of Thomas Hobbes (Westport, Ireland, 1588 – Hardwick Hall, Great Britain, 1679) we find the coexistence of ideas that in my opinion are very mature, along with others that instead prove rather crude. Let’s start by knowing those ones that show maturity.
First of all, he is an anti-metaphysical. According to him, words are nothing more than human conventions, although he does not deny the possible existence of a supernatural world, which however must not be exploited to enslave people. He then warns us that there is no ultimate goal in present life: man never ceases to desire, even after having obtained what he wanted. The maximum of goods is progressing without impediment towards ever new ends. In an attempt to explain the structure of the world, he adopts the Cartesian rationalism; from here he deduces that there is no free will. The problems and contradictions arise when he establishes that even political questions must be faced with mathematical or geometric criteria, such as those of addition and subtraction. Here we come to the crudest ideas.
His affirmation, taken up by Plautus (250-184 BC), homo homini lupus, which means that every man is a wolf towards the other man, is famous; man is fundamentally bad, selfish, prone to make war against the others. Here Hobbes resembles Machiavelli. But this is due, according to Hobbes, not to a mischievousness of a responsible soul, but to the structure with which we are formed. It is therefore not something about which we can be blamed, but precisely our constitutive being. From this conception, he states that the only way to make a state formed by wolves is to apply the most exaggerated absolutism; for example, according to Hobbes, the absolute monarch or emperor must not only have full powers, but must not be obliged to observe any law, to which citizens must instead submit; he must not be prosecutable; things are good or bad not depending on how they are evaluated, but simply based on how the sovereign has decided; since he has power over everything, he must also have power over the Church and will also decide how we will have to interpret any word of the Bible. Thanks to this totality of powers, according to Hobbes, all disputes, discords will be eliminated from the state and finally peace will reign. This is the “social pact” in Hobbes’ philosophy: it consists in the subjects’ decision to submit to the absolute sovereign, who however will be above that pact. Actually, Hobbes also lists 20 rules, which he calls “laws of nature”, which express common sense and a pursuit of respect; however, it is precisely for this reason that his thought is in many ways also contradictory.