What Thomas Hobbes Actually Said About Time

Thomas Hobbes returns to time three times in thinkr's library — more often than to almost anything else. English political philosopher. Leviathan argues that a strong sovereign is the cost of escaping the war of all against all.

What follows is every one of those passages, in full, with what each is actually claiming. The language is of its period, but the question underneath is not: what is time for, and what does it ask of you?

Every Thomas Hobbes passage on time

“A naturall foole that could never learn by heart the order of numerall words, as one, two, and three, may observe every stroak of the Clock, and nod to it, or say one, one, one; but can never know what houre it strikes.”

“For Prudence, is but Experience; which equal time, equally bestows on all men, in those things they equally apply themselves unto.”

“Hereby it is manifest, that during the time men live without a common Power to keep them all in awe, they are in that conditions called Warre; and such a warre, as is of every man, against every man.”

What holds these together

Read in sequence rather than one at a time, the passages stop being separate aphorisms. Thomas Hobbes is not offering three opinions about time; the lines are facets of one position, and the repetition is the argument. The shortest of them — “For Prudence, is but Experience; which equal time, equally bestows on all men, in those things they equally apply themselves unto” — is the version you can carry, and the longer ones are what it unpacks into.

Thomas Hobbes applied to a real decision

Quotation is the easy part. The harder test is what the position actually does when it meets a situation where every option costs something. thinkr puts two such cases to Thomas Hobbes.

You notice a loophole that benefits you and hurts no one visibly.

Argued as skeptical realism: You are suspicious of moral theater and alert to how systems really work. The risk is becoming clever at the expense of character.

Your workplace rewards a version of you that feels false.

Argued as social contract: You are acknowledging that institutions run on roles and incentives. The danger is becoming unable to find your own face afterward.

Who disagrees

Albert Camus, Bertrand Russell, Henry David Thoreau and Immanuel Kant all address time too, and they do not converge. Reading Thomas Hobbes alone gives you a coherent position; reading Thomas Hobbes against Albert Camus shows you what the position is actually choosing against.