Jamie Hamilton

Creative genius requires intelligence but intelligence is not enough. Most intelligent people are satisfied with mastering and working in a specific domain, not in challenging its received wisdom and striking out on their own. A special personality is required for high creativity. But a person’s personality can be inferred only from examining her behavior and experience from her reactions to the environment. This chapter is about Hobbes and his environment. I will consider his psychological, educational, and intellectual development, the relationship between his personality traits and his creativity, his motivation, and how his environment contributed to the psychological resources which he drew upon in developing his philosophy.

In Chap. 7 we first review the development of salient aspects of his extraordinary personal, interpersonal, and material resources. In the following four sections we will review our findings on his creativity in four aspects of his philosophy, his theory of cognition and the passions, his theory of moral relativity and the role of the sovereign, his theory of the state of nature, and his theory of the civil state and his reply to the theory of popular sovereignty. Then I will address what appear to be transformational aspects of his creativity, the contributions of this study to the work of philosophers and psychologists, and topics for further research. Finally, I will suggest that Hobbes was creative in so many different ways that it is fitting to think of him as a creative virtuoso, that an understanding of his creative processes adds an important new dimension to our understanding of his thought, and that his creativity and originality are the principal reasons that we prize his philosophy so highly today.