The Enquiry To Hobbes' Theory Of Passions

The human nature theory is the foundation of Hobbes' political philosophy, and the theory of passions then constituted the core of the human nature theory. The research into Hobbes' theory of passions is the base of our understanding in Hobbes' human nature theory and political philosophy.The social history and cultural thought, and the source of thinking are all Hobbes' theory's backgrouds. His opinions about passions and appetites were the summarizations of the capitalism society's real demonstrations of the people, and were connected with his own experience and personality, and were the summarizations of opinions that people emphasized human beings' appetites and passions and concrete felicity since the Renaissance. Hobbes absorbed many useful materials from the Stoics School and Aristotle's 《Rhetoric》 as his thinking resources.Hobbes' theory of passions can be expounded from five aspects: explaining, analysising, depicting, illustrating and evaluating. Hobbes gave a definition to passions: " Interior beginnings of voluntary motions." Then he explained the definition's contents, and tried to analysis different passions in details. Passions had two types: one was human's "conceit and vainglory" and "appetites and passions", such as: power, wealth, knowledge, honor and so on. All these were the sources of" every people to every people's warfare ";The other was the violent death by war, it was the source of morality ideology. Because it is the fear of violent death with people's rationality that made the "natural people" in conflicting state realized the peace was the most important, so they started to establish contract and to found country.Hobbes made vivid depiction to the passions, and try to explainthe passions by two ways: mechanicism and vitalistic. Then he gave his specific evaluations about: were passions good or evil? Hobbes was deemed as a philosopher of evil human nature, but he thought his theory of passions were not evil .So it was difficult to explain the preach that Hobbes opposed the religious asceticism by evil human nature theory.Hobbes' theory had a far-reaching and deep impact on later age, Hegel had the "evil" as the dynamic of the development of the human social history, obviously, this argument took in Hobbes' thoughts, and those authors of Marxisim were agreed with them. F. W. Nietzsche was a philosopher advocating "Power Will", his thought absorbed from Hobbes' evidently. As a part of the theory of human nature, Hobbes' theory of passions still had its defects: Hobbes can't set out exploring the theory of passions from the physical life condition of the person's actuality and can't set out from the particular mode of production as the Marxist philosopher did.