PHILOSOPHICAL EGGS

Thomas Hobbes

In chapter 15 of his book Leviathan (1651), Thomas Hobbes wrote: “No man giveth but with intention of good to himself, because gift is voluntary; and of all voluntary acts, the object is to every man his own good; of which, if men see they shall be frustrated, there will be no beginning of benevolence or trust, nor consequently of mutual help.”

This sentence is often used to exemplify the position known as psychological egoism which states that everyone is always motivated out of self-interest. Hobbes himself didn’t hold such an extreme position. But he believed something many believe: people are, for the most part, egoists who act for their self-interest.

But now compare Hobbes’ claim with this remarkable passage from section 105 of Friedrich Nietzsche’s book Daybreak (1881):

“Pseudo-egoism.—The great majority of people, whatever they may think and say about their “egoism,” do nothing for their ego all their life long, but only for a phantom of this ego which has been formed in regard to them by their friends and communicated to them. As a consequence, they all live in a haze of impersonal and half-personal opinions and of arbitrary and, as it were, poetic valuations: the one always in the head of another, and this head, again, in the head of somebody else—a queer world of phantoms which manages to give itself a rational appearance! This haze of opinions and habits grows in extent and lives almost independently of the people it surrounds; it is it which gives rise to the immense effect of general judgments on “man”—all those men, who do not know themselves, believe in a bloodless abstraction which they call “man,” i.e. in a fiction; and every change caused in this abstraction by the judgments of powerful individualities (such as princes and philosophers) produces an extraordinary and irrational effect on the great majority,—for the simple reason that not a single individual in this haze can oppose a real ego, an ego which is accessible to and fathomed by himself, to the universal pale fiction, which he could thereby destroy.”

Friedrich Nietzsche

Go here for my related post on Nietzsche’s claim that vain people, far from always thinking they are so special, are actually afraid of being original.

Go here for my post on psychological egoism and conspiracy theories.

Go here for my post on ethical egoism and friendship.

Go here for my post on Hobbes vs. Socrates.