A. Background

1. Historical: the political struggle that came to a head in the English Civil War raised urgent questions about political obligation. Hobbes' idea was to demonstrate, from an unquestionable (he thinks) conception of individual human nature, that rationality requires absolute obedience to a sovereign state.

2. Intellectual

(a) Euclidean geometry (see the Introduction, pp. 17-18): rigorous proof of perhaps surprising conclusions from self-evident starting points.

(b) Galilean physics: resolving complex phenomena into the operation of simple forces; and motion as the basic conceptual building-block for a science of physical things. Hobbes wants to carry over Galileo's principles into a science of human behavior, individually and in society.

B. The account of voluntary motion in chap. VI. Hobbes identifies two basic internal origins of action: (a) imagination (=fancy) – "the first internall beginning of all Voluntary Motion"; (b) appetite or desire (endeavor toward something) and aversion (endeavor "fromward" something). Note:

1. He pictures voluntary motion as resulting from the operation of an internal mechanism. This applies also to his account of deliberation (pp. 126-8) as a succession of appetites and aversions, hopes and fears, culminating in a last appetite or aversion "immediately adhaering to the action or to the omission thereof," which is what (he says) we call the will. (He is avoiding getting entangled in issues about "the freedom of the will.")

2. He connects valuation (calling things good, bad, or indifferent) to the appetites and aversions (p. 120). In that context he rejects the view of (e.g.) Plato that there are objective standards for good and bad. (The closest he gets to this is the suggestion that in a commonwealth a "common Rule of Good and Evill" can be set up "from the Person that representeth it [i.e. the commonwealth]"; so if the state says something is good or bad it's good or bad, whether or not you or I are in favor of it or against it.)

C. There's a lot of classification of "passions" for its own sake (to put detail into the otherwise schematic account of the origins of voluntary motion). One detail worth looking at: the discussion of curiosity (desire to know causes), p. 124. There curiosity figures as (in effect) the motivation for pure science, but in chap. XI (p. 167) he connects it with "anxiety for the future time." Knowledge of causes makes us better at securing better lives for ourselves.

D. Felicity (happiness), end of chap. VI and beginning of chap. XI: hold over to next lecture.

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