A. Held over from last lecture: the concept of Felicity (happiness), end of chap. VI and beginning of chap. XI.

1. Felicity is not a state of having no unfulfilled desires ("Tranquillity of mind," p. 130: "the repose of a mind satisfied," p. 160); rather, it's a characteristic of a life, which proceeds in time ("Life it selfe is but Motion," p. 130). In a happy life, desires are in the course of being fulfilled, but at any time there are unsatisfied desires motivating projects you're still engaged on. So Felicity is "a continuall progresse of the desire, from one object to another" (p. 160).

2. We have not just successive motivations toward the objects of our successive ground-level desires, but also a motivation toward assuring our continued felicity (p. 161: our inclinations "tend, not only to the procuring, but also to the assuring, of a contented life"). Put this in the context of "anxiety for the future time," p. 167.

3. Hobbes concludes that a basic human motivation is "a perpetuall and restlesse desire of Power after power, that ceaseth onely in Death" (p. 161). This is required, he says, by the desire for assurance of future felicity. Why? Because if you stop trying to expand your power, others will encroach on it and your future ability to get what you want will be lessened. Implicit here: people are essentially competitive.

B. Chap. X, on power (and associated concepts): background to chap. XI's claim ("perpetuall and restlesse desire of Power after power"). Note:

1. He says natural power is "the eminence of the Faculties of Body, or Mind" (p. 150). See the quotation from Elements of Law, Introduction p. 35. The assumption of competitiveness is at work here too; you have to be constantly straining to be stronger than others, on pain of a threat to your future felicity.

2. Individualism: other people appear only as either threats/obstacles, or means/instruments. Thus (a) friends are instrumental powers (p. 150); and (b) the value of a person is what someone else would be willing to pay for her usefulness toward his own ends (pp. 151-2). Conspicuously absent are (a) the idea that friends might be worth having for their own sake, independently of usefulness; and (b) the more general idea that human beings just as such have value, independently of usefulness.

C. Chap. XIII, on "the Naturall Condition of mankind" (chapter heading), i.e. "what manner of life there would be, where there were no common Power to feare" (p. 187).

1. He alludes to empirical grounds for his picture of the state of nature (pp. 186-7). But his main point is more like a thought-experiment. We're supposed to know about individual human nature, from the previous chapters. The idea is: in thought, subtract the existence of a political authority from the determinants of the shape of our lives together, leaving only the interplay of individual natures, and ask yourself how things would be. The picture of the state of nature is supposed to follow from the picture of individual human nature in something like the way in which the theorems of geometry follow from the axioms.

2. What manner of life would there be? No one could be sure of getting the benefits of any productive activity (e.g. agriculture), because one person couldn't trust the others not to grab the benefits (if necessary by ganging up in groups to increase their power). ["Diffidence" (p. 184) is absence of trust.] The result would be war of each against all (pp. 185-6; note that a state of war needn't involve constant fighting). So life would be "solitary, poore, nasty, brutish, and short" (p. 186).

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