Life & Mortality Quote by Thomas Hobbes

Hobbes turns immortality into a thought experiment, then immediately yanks it back into the mud of lived experience. The first sentence flatters the metaphysicians: if spirit is pure, unbodied, it slips past time like an idea. Nothing to wrinkle, nothing to fail. But Hobbes is less interested in comforting doctrine than in the psychological and political consequences of having a body. Once spirit is embodied, mortality is not an event at the end of life; its shadow is present at the start. “As soon as its day dawns” makes birth a kind of countdown clock.

The subtext is classic Hobbes: fear is not a moral weakness, it’s the operating system. In Leviathan’s world, humans aren’t primarily moved by lofty virtue but by the constant, rational awareness that we can be hurt, degraded, killed. That’s why the “horizon” matters. Death stays at a distance, but it structures the landscape. It determines what we value (security), how we bargain (self-preservation), and why we submit to authority (peace beats glory when the stakes are survival).

Context sharpens the edge. Hobbes wrote through civil war, state collapse, and sectarian violence, when airy talk of immortal souls could be weaponized to justify earthly cruelty. By splitting “disembodied” from “embodied,” he’s not endorsing a spiritual escape hatch; he’s diagnosing the condition that makes politics necessary. The body is the great equalizer, and mortality is the quiet argument for order.