"That all men are created equal."

When John Locke wrote his Second Treatises: Of Civil Government and Thomas Hobbes wrote The Leviathan, intellects were still trying to unpack everything the sovereign individual idea had to offer. It was generally accepted by both Locke and Hobbes that all men were equal (Even though "man" was a pretty exclusive group, but it was more progress than ever before), but they were equal in different ways.

John Locke

Locke believed that men were all equally good and needed very little authority to govern them. According to Man's "State of Nature," no one has power over another and all are equally free to do as they please so long as they don't infringe on other's freedom. Locke had a relatively optimistic outlook on human nature.

Thomas Hobbes

Hobbes, on the other hand, thought that man needed a parent authority to create "good laws" that he could abide by. He determined that because people were continually in competition for honor and dignity, they tended toward envy and hatred. Hobbes also generally believed that people were equal despite their differences because no matter how weak, the "weak" person could still use strategy to have a "strong" person killed.

The Hybrid

Over the weekend I attended a lecture by a well-known psychology professor from the University of Toronto. He analyzed the line from the declaration of independence, "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal..." We know that all men are not "created equal" socially or economically, and the founding fathers who owned slaves obviously didn't think so. So what did they mean?

At the lecture, Dr. Peterson said that the self-evident truth is not that all people have equal opportunity when they come into the world, but that they all have equal capacity for good and evil. This could be thought of as a hybrid of the thoughts of Hobbes and Locke. He explained because all people have equal capacity for good and evil, they have an equal responsibility to the collective not to pursue evil and to seek out good. Because the state is made up of sovereign individuals in a free society, whether or not the state is inherently good depends on the individual.   

Carl Jung's Response to Gaspare and Ottaciano

A portion of The Courtier deals with the ideas of virtue and good vs evil. These differences can be summed up in Gaspare response in The Courtier to Ottaviano's claim that people cannot choose evil.

"Yet there are many who fully understand that they are doing evil, and still do it; and this is because, like thieves and murderers, they are more conscious of the pleasures of the moment than the punishment the fear in the future." Castiglione-- The Courtier

Ottaviano claimed that people unconsciously sinned and shouldn't be held accountable. Gaspare argued that humans that humans are self-conscious beings, and sin for the pleasure of the moment. While reading this dialogue I was reminded of Carl Jung's concept of The Shadow.

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The idea behind The Shadow is that every individual has a dark side. Jung described this dark side as the unconscious malevolent part of our personality that has the potential to corrupt what we do, say, and think. According to Jung's description of the shadow, we won't truly know the difference between good and evil until we are aware of The Shadow and make it conscious.

My explanation of The Shadow does not do it justice so I would recommend researching it for yourself. However, I do think its logic contains elements of both Gaspare's and Ottaviano's claims. It supports Ottaviano's argument that we do evil things unconsciously. The way to overcome this would is to internalize the shadow and make it conscious. Or as Gaspare might say it, we must understand the temptations to do evil acts that bring pleasure at the moment and withstand these temptations.

The realization of the terrible things we are capable of gives us a greater capacity for virtue as we choose not to do evil. We can thank Castiglione for introducing these concepts of the nature of good, evil, and the divine individual. Revolutionary thinkers like Carl Jung looked to these renaissance pioneers to better understand who we are as human beings.