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| Jeremy Ball |
By Jeremy Ball, Class of 2017
One of the most important lessons I’ve been taught since entering the University of Louisville is how to think: to think outside the box, to challenge my preconceived notions, and to push my mind past anything it has ever experienced in high school. It goes without saying that the McConnell Scholars Program has been incredibly prominent in teaching me this process, beginning before I even stepped foot on campus.
At the Scholars’ annual retreat, Dr. Gregg convened the freshman to distribute our first major reading. As he handed out Plato’s Republic, he detailed to us the challenge of covering such dense material, and gave us a timeline for which sections must be completed. From my first opening of the Republic to our final session with Dr. Gregg, I was challenged to think about the origins of political institutions and the concepts of justice in the world that we live today.
This thought process brought on through our sessions lasted only to the start of my second semester when I took a Modern Political Theory class. In this class, our first assignment was to read through Hobbes’s Leviathan. My first moments in class were filled with the details of Hobbes’s political philosophy, and how he stood as one of the first political theorists writing in direct opposition to the classical theories akin to Plato. It’s with this reading that my mind was challenged like never before; there was a constant battle in my mind as to which man truly captured human nature.
The focus of this blog will be to discuss the differences in their accounts on human nature. To begin this comparison, it’s important to note that similarities exist between the two authors as both find the need for a government to hone in the actions of humans. The key difference lies in how they interpret human nature and its role in forming the state. Plato argues that humans are born with a different set of merits, and that there exists an ever-present inequality among individuals in a society. Due to these differences, there’s no mobility in this society. You’re either born with the philosopher kings (the highest class) or left categorized as bronze (the lowest class).
To the contrary of this, Hobbes describes humans in a more brutish manner through his account of the state of nature. Through this account, humans are driven by fear. Opposite of Plato, humans are equal… but only in our ability to kill others. This fairly pessimist account of human nature does give some hope in that humans are always trying to leave this state of nature based on how bad the state actually is for people. To Hobbes, humans are always focused on self-preservation, and willing to do anything to maintain this. His account gets to the very core of how humans behave without a state to oversee their actions.
Please note that there is so much more to consider than the very basic overview of only one concept raised by each author. The actual formation of the states is incredibly complex in both accounts, and it’s important to read them both for understanding. However, as I began to debate in my mind the merits of each philosopher’s arguments, I started to look at my own accounts of how humans behave. To me, Hobbes more accurately accounts on how humans behave. You can look at examples of when humans are left without the oversight of the government to see that we naturally behave in defense of our life. Consider instances of natural disasters when crime rates increase and people run rampant in trying to maintain their safety. When you account for these actions, it seems that Hobbes pinpoints human nature at its core, when Plato creates a more idealized, but less accurate account. This isn’t to discredit people, or to completely disregard altruism, but to look at people through a more realist account. The two authors’ ideas are strikingly different and the constant debate of these ideas has remained strong in my first year here at school. I have constantly been challenged as I worked through each material, and with each semester my capacity and ability to think has grown exponentially. I have learned to think.
Jeremy Ball, of Manchester, Ky., is a freshman McConnell Scholar at the University of Louisville. He is studying political science and economics.