“A man is a wolf to another man”?

Thomas Hobbes’s main work Leviathan is a book about the state. Part II of the book, titled “Of Commonwealth” discusses the elements, characteristics etc. of the state as such; Part III (“Of Christian Commonwealth”) discusses the Christian state and Part IV discusses the “Kingdom of Darkness”. But here I am not interested in the state, but I am interested in Man, and that’s what the first part of the book is about. (I write Man with a capital in order to indicate that I mean the human being and not only the male version).

In order to understand Hobbes’s portrayal of Man, one must know that he wrote Leviathan in a period of civil war. The book was published in 1651, the year that the English Civil War ended. Two years before, for the first time in history an English king had been executed. Did these circumstances make Hobbes’s portrayal of Man so negative? He didn’t use the expression “A man is a wolf to another man” in the Leviathan (but in his De Cive — by the way, the saying is not from Hobbes, but it is an old Latin proverb —), but this expression fully shows the way Hobbes thinks about Man, if you interpret its meaning this way that basically Man is cruel to other Men and that Man thinks only and only of himself (or herself, of course, but for Hobbes Man is only a masculine being). This is a bit strange, for actually a wolf is a social animal.

So for Hobbes Man is quite an egoist being. He is there only for himself, and maybe with the exception of his family, he doesn’t care about others. Man is also a materialistic being. “Higher values” don’t count. I can give here only some illustrations, but for Hobbes, love is a desire of the flesh, or friendliness at most. Religion is a kind of fear for an invisible power. Happiness is a continuing desire of going from one object to another, and once you have it, you use it get the next one. As if there isn’t more in it.

But alas, Man’s fellow Men are of the same kind. The result is that Man is continuously at war with his fellow Men; maybe not always in practice, but the possibility of war is the background of everything Man does in relation to other Men. This situation can be solved only in one way, so Hobbes: An agreement between all Men to appoint or choose a kind of higher authority, the Sovereign or otherwise a kind of sovereign council that rules society. But I’ll not talk about this, for then I am in the field of politics.

There are certainly many people who agree with Hobbes’s view of Man: Man need to be tamed and for this we need a dictator, a strong man. Otherwise society will be a mess, they think. However, I think that such a view of Man is completely at odds with reality. As I have expounded in my blog on shared intentions two weeks ago (http://philosophybytheway.blogspot.com/2020/06/shared-intentions.html), Man came to be different from the other primates and from the other animals in general just by becoming less egoist than those fellow animals. Man’s fellow animals could cooperate, indeed. Anyway, primates like chimpanzees could (and can) and wolves could (and can). However, they cooperate from egoist motives, as we have seen in this blog two weeks ago. Man, on the other hand, doesn’t have only egoistic intentions when cooperating with others, but Man has also intentions that s/he shares with others. Philosophers and psychologists still disagree what this sharing involves, but one thing is clear: In one way or another Man can and does share intentions with others. Moreover, Man doesn’t only share intentions with others, — which manifests itself, for instance in the way Men make plans; have you ever seen animals that come together and make plans? — but s/he also cares for others, and then I mean others who don’t belong to her or his family. Man is a sharing if not caring individual. An individual, indeed, for Man is often egoist. However, Man is not only an egoist; egoism is only one of his/her characteristics. Man is social at heart. Man is a sharing and caring individual. Don’t you believe it? I’ll give you a simple illustration. You are walking in a street. A woman passes you. Then you see that her purse falls on the ground. What do you do? I agree that not all people will do so, but I guess that you pick it up, and you call: “Madam, madam! You have lost your purse!” And you give it back. And if she doesn’t hear you, you’ll run after her and stop her. You’ll do it, although she is a stranger for you; although you’ll never see her again in your life; and although nobody will know that it was you who picked up the purse. A man is a wolf to another man?