How Ethics drew on Leviathan
A documented line of influence: Baruch Spinoza demonstrably engaged Thomas Hobbes’s work. The commentary below is Gröblé’s, verbatim from each work’s page.
The source
Leviathan
Thomas Hobbes · 1651
EnlightenmentThe influenced
Ethics
Baruch Spinoza · 1677
EnlightenmentRelevance
6/10
On Ethics’s page
- The conatus at the heart of Part III — the striving by which each thing perseveres in its being — is Spinoza's documented borrowing from Hobbes
- Read Leviathan first and you see the raw material: the same mechanistic, appetite-driven account of human nature
- The difference is the payoff. Hobbes pointed it toward submission to the sovereign; Spinoza follows the same logic to liberation
On Leviathan’s page
- Hobbes's mechanistic picture of human nature — every creature driven by the striving to persist in its own being — passed straight into Spinoza
- Spinoza had Hobbes on his shelf (a Latin De Cive, and access to Leviathan) and built it into the bones of his system
- But he turned the engine the other way: where Leviathan uses the striving self to justify an all-powerful sovereign, the Ethics uses it to argue toward freedom