Friday, January 15, 2016
Species-Being and State of Nature
While Aristotle conceives political organization as a 'natural' fulfilment of human interaction, Hobbes conceives the 'state of nature' to be a 'war of all against all', for which political organization is an extra-natural remedy. Now, though Hobbes concept of Nature is sometimes traced to the English Civil War of the period, the thesis that grounds it is not historical, but Psychological--that the fundamental principle of motivation of each human is Egoistical, i. e. Self-Preservation, with universal war ad its consequence. In sharp contrast, according to Darwinism, the 'state of nature' is primarily a property of a Species, involving processes such as Evolution, Surviving, and Adaptation, usually with respect to an environment. Accordingly, the internal conditions of a Species, i. e. the motivations and relations of its members, are derived from Species-processes and -conditions. Thus, if members are motivated by Self-Preservation it can only be as an expression of a Species-Principle. However, absent a self-destructive mode of the latter, a war of all against is impossible as a state of nature. Hence, there is no need, as does Hobbes, to cast the remedy for an actual event such as the English Civil War as 'extra-natural'.
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