The Eternal Life of a Martyr & the Philosophy of
Thomas Hobbes
Adal Isaw
December 13, 2009
Thomas Hobbes is wrong and he has been wrong for many years. Life is not “nasty, brutish and short.” For the great philosopher that he was, he may be is tossing around in his grave, proving my point that at least life is not as short as he thought it is. I know; this is not a good venue to start a scholastic and excessively subtle dialectic; it is not.
Why don’t you calibrate your ostentatious flair for a critic? Some of you may murmur—with guttural voice of a dog that may trigger your cat (if you have one) to run onto the chimney in a heartbeat.
Forgive me for picking on a philosopher—the Goliath that some of you envision in your heads and hearts, to say nothing critical for fear of sounding utterly asinine. Not me; I fear not; for I know I am living a longevity of life fully paid in many lives by those who are living forever. I believe. Nothing else but this I believe is what pits a longer life that I know there is against Hobbes’s short.
Life may seem harsh, nasty and ambiguous for lack of better words, but it is not short at all. Life is the path that you take, following the wake of those who lived in ways greater than you do yours. It is enough to have kids and grand kids; enough to do bad and good; enough to sin and repent; enough to dwell in joy; enough to roam in deprivation; enough to harm; enough to live and die; enough to die and live;…etc, and enough to say—life is not short at all.
Life is not “nasty, brutish and short.” It’s not the years; it is not the comfort; it’s not the depth of your indignation either, but the goodness of your living to die for those who deserve to remember you—in the wake of your “disappearance” into an infinite web of time and space—invisible but yet brightly dotted—nowhere but in the deeper mind of those who live to revere the life that is being lived by martyrs forever. That is life. And it is not “nasty, brutish and short.” Thomas Hobbes is wrong.
I am an equal opportunity critic and hear me say to the mundane and the ordinary that life is not “what you make of it” either, but what we make of it rather. At the expense of sounding redundant forever, which I think I do—by way of perseverance— life is not “what you make of it.” It is not that malleable a plastic that would let the self-interested scalp humanity out of himself. “Self-interest is but the survival of the animal in us...” that dispels humanity—the basis of selflessness. Ask Henri Frederic Amiel; he will confirm it.
Life is not the mold neither the frame and the mirror that holds the vision of you rather than the greater visions of many others ahead of you. It is nor the cinematography of dreams—scripted, produced and screened by your neurons to block your vision of the many other deeds—not dreams of the many selfless souls.
Life is not lived once and singularly; it’s lived many times and by many others with you. To you, it may not be that profound, but “…humanity only begins for man [woman] with self-surrender,” to the will, betterment and happiness of the greater many of his/her kind. Just ask Henri Frederic Amiel.
Life is to live forever in the wake of your “disappearance,” having galvanized your kind by your selfless good deeds. And it is not at all “nasty, brutish and short.” Thomas Hobbes is wrong.