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Nasty: The term nasty was not derived from the surname of Thomas Nast as a reference to his biting, vitriolic cartoons. The word may be related to the Dutch word nestig , or "dirty". [ 73 ] It predates Nast by several centuries, appearing in the most famous sentence of Thomas Hobbes 's Leviathan , that in the state of nature, the life of man is ...
In this state, every person has a natural right to do anything one thinks necessary for preserving one's own life, and life is "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short" (Leviathan, Chapters XIII–XIV). Hobbes described this natural condition with the Latin phrase (bellum omnium contra omnes) meaning "war of all against all", in De Cive.
According to Hobbes, the lives of individuals in the state of nature were "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short", a state in which self-interest and the absence of rights and contracts prevented the "social", or society. Life was "anarchic" (without leadership or the concept of sovereignty).
He also very influentially described man's natural state (without science and artifice) as one where life would be "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short". [83] Following him, John Locke 's philosophy of empiricism also saw human nature as a tabula rasa .
Up till now human life has generally been, as Hobbes described it, "nasty, brutish and short"; the great majority of human beings (if they have not already died young) have been afflicted with misery… we can justifiably hold the belief that these lands of possibility exist, and that the present limitations and miserable frustrations of our ...
Hobbes reasoned that this world of chaos created by unlimited rights was highly undesirable, since it would cause human life to be "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short". As such, if humans wish to live peacefully they must give up most of their natural rights and create moral obligations to establish political and civil society.
In such a situation, life was "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short" (Ibid: 25). Upon realizing the danger of anarchy, human beings became aware of the need of a mechanism to protect them. As far as Hobbes was concerned, rationality and self-interests persuaded human beings to combine in agreement, to surrender sovereignty to a common power ...
Famously, he believed that such a condition would lead to a "war of every man against every man" and make life "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short." Hobbes's view was challenged in the eighteenth century by Jean-Jacques Rousseau , who claimed that Hobbes was taking socialized persons and simply imagining them living outside of the ...