The imagination: the beginning, middle and end of Hobbes’s state of nature

Abstract

In this article, imagination is the key concept to identify natural man’s epistemological evolution. The primacy of the feeling of pleasure is going to expose, in three moments, the development of man’s mental faculties. First, natural man’s pictorial imagination refers pleasure to objects of sensibility and uses calculating reason to guarantee their stability. Second, an evolution towards a pictorial imagination mediated by a human power capable of bringing men together and imposing itself, in order to refer pleasure to a reality created by common signs and behaviors. Finally, the immediacy of the feeling of pleasure of the pictorial imagination is subordinate to the pleasure derived from the creation of significant linguistic symbols and sticking to them.