Hobbes and Rousseau both wrote a vast number of articles on the idea of human nature and the true behaviors of humans with no influence of society. No one can truly know what the true nature of a human is, due to the fact that all of our history is written from a civilized time, and we make inferences about our history. Rousseau and Hobbes both try to infer based upon their philosophical view points about the human mind. Rousseau believes that humans in the natural state are more similar to animals, than other man. While Hobbes believes that humans in their natural state are evil because they don’t know “good”, and their innate behavior is war. Hobbes starts off with addressing the foundation of where ideas come from and how they come to exist in the mind. According to Hobbes, ideas come to exist in the mind through material things which humans perceive using their senses. Each idea is derived from an original, material, object; from the material object, we create ideas based upon what we have seen. These ideas may be simple or a complex idea, either produced from one real object or a combination of real …show more content…
While Hobbes focuses on man’s natural instinct to fight. Rousseau, during his argument points out some of Hobbes viewpoints in which his thinking directly conflicts. For example, Rousseau analyzes Hobbes’s argument and deduces that “man is naturally intrepid and seeks only to attack and to fight” (20 Rousseau). However, according to Rousseau, fighting, war and anger are all societal values that a man in the true state would not possess. Another major difference between Hobbes and Rousseau is that Hobbes believes that man would still be social and have some “societal traits,” while according to Rousseau, man in nature would be completely secluded and have no form of communication or desires outside of personal