Daniel Garcia
Western intellectual Self-preservation

Hobbes believed that self-preservation was everyone's fundamental natural instinct. He believed it was essential to ground political philosophy on this basic principle.
“Among so many dangers therefore, as the natural lusts of men do daily threaten each other a, to have a care of oneself is not a matter so scornfully to be looked upon, as if so be there had not been a power and will left in one to have done otherwise. For every man is wishful of what is good for him, and despise what is evil, but chiefly the prime of natural evils, which is death; and this he doth, by a certain impulsion of nature, no less than that whereby a stone moves downward. It is therefore neither absurd, nor reprehensible; neither against the dictates of true reason for a man to use all his endeavors to preserve and defend his body, and the members thereof from death and sorrows; but that which is not contrary to right reason, that all men account to be done justly, and with right. Neither by the word Right is anything else signified, than that liberty which every man hath to make use of his natural faculties according to right reason. Therefore the first foundation of natural Right is this, that every man as much as in him lies endeavor to protect his life and members”
But because it is in vain for a man to have a right to the end, if the right to the necessary means denied him; it follows, that since every man has a right to preserve himself, he must also be allowed a right to use all the means without which he cannot preserve himself.
If in the state of nature man is free and good there is reason to question the need for authority and the inequality that comes from it. Rousseau writes “this sentiment must serve as the praise of your earliest forebears, the criticism of you contemporaries, and the dread of those who will have