The phrase you are thinking of is "Homo homini lupus"—"Man is a wolf to man."

While it is most famously associated with the 17th-century English philosopher Thomas Hobbes, he actually wasn't the first to say it. The line originates from the Roman playwright Plautus in his 254 BC play Asinaria. Hobbes revived it in his work De Cive (1642) to describe the terrifying, lawless state of nature before the creation of a centralized state.

Whether it's actually true is one of the foundational debates of political philosophy and evolutionary biology. Here is how that debate breaks down:

The Hobbesian View: Absolute Competitive Scarcity

Hobbes argued that without a strong, governing authority (the "Leviathan") to keep everyone in check, humans would inevitably descend into a perpetual war of all against all.

• The Core Argument: Resources are scarce, and because humans are generally equal in their ability to harm one another, fear and self-preservation drive us to strike first. In this state, life is famously "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short."

• The Implication: Human nature is fundamentally egoistic, and "morality" or "justice" can only exist once an overarching power is established to enforce laws.

The Counter-Argument: Mutual Aid and Co-evolution

Many thinkers and biologists argue that the "wolf" metaphor misunderstands both humans and wolves.

• The Biological Reality: Actual wolves are fiercely cooperative pack animals that rely on deep social bonds, shared hunting duties, and altruism to survive. They rarely kill members of their own pack.

• Philosophical Resistance: Thinkers like Jean-Jacques Rousseau argued that humans are not naturally malicious; rather, it is the corrupting structure of modern civilization, property rights, and artificial inequality that make us predatory toward one another.

• The Evolutionary View: As evolutionary theorist Peter Kropotkin argued in Mutual Aid, cooperation, empathy, and community building are just as foundational to human survival—if not more so—than raw competition.

Ultimately, the phrase functions less as a biological fact and more as a diagnostic warning: when social contracts break down and systemic structures isolate individuals, we are entirely capable of turning on one another with terrifying efficiency.

 When the British philosopher and Inkling Owen Barfield wrote his 1957 masterpiece, Saving the Appearances: A Study in Idolatry, he wasn’t trying to avoid an embarrassing situation. He was borrowing a phrase from ancient Greek astronomy.

To the ancients, "saving the appearances" (or saving the phenomena) meant constructing a mathematical or philosophical hypothesis that successfully accounted for the observed facts of the cosmos—like the erratic movement of the planets—without needing to claim that the math was the ultimate, literal truth. It was an "as if" framework to keep our lived experience coherent.

Barfield argued that the modern Western world has stopped saving appearances. Instead, we have fallen into what he called idolatry. He wanted to "save" appearances because he believed that by treating the material world as a dead, objective machine completely separate from human consciousness, we are progressively stripping the cosmos—and ourselves—of meaning.

His argument hinges on three core concepts:

1. The Rainbow and "Figuration"

Barfield points out a contradiction in the modern scientific worldview. Physics tells us that the world is a chaotic, colorless swirl of subatomic particles and energy waves (which he calls the unrepresented). Yet, we perceive a stable world of solid tables, green grass, and bright rainbows.

How? Through an unconscious, creative act of the mind Barfield calls figuration. A rainbow doesn't sit out in the sky independent of us; it is actively co-created by the physical raindrops, the sunlight, and the human eye and brain working in concert. The world we see is a system of "collective representations."

2. The Loss of Participation

Barfield argued that human consciousness has evolved through distinct stages:

• Original Participation: Ancient and medieval humans didn't feel separate from nature. They experienced the phenomenal world as alive, spiritually charged, and profoundly connected to their inner lives. The world was a meaningful text to be read, not just dead matter to be measured.

• The Scientific Revolution & Idolatry: Modern science began treating these collective representations as if they existed entirely by themselves, independent of human perception. Barfield called this idolatry—worshipping the representation (the dead object) while forgetting the spiritual and mental activity that brought it into being.

"The phenomena themselves are idols, when they are imagined as enjoying that independence of human perception which can in fact only pertain to the unrepresented."

— Owen Barfield

3. The Path to "Final Participation"

Barfield didn't want to mindlessly turn back the clock to ancient times. The benefit of our modern, detached consciousness is that we have gained individuality, critical thinking, and self-awareness.

Instead, he wanted to save appearances by moving forward into Final Participation. This is a shift in perception where humans consciously realize that we are actively participating in the creation of reality. By recognizing that nature and the human mind are fundamentally intertwined, we can stop viewing the universe as a cold, mechanical accident and begin to experience it once again as a living repository of meaning, thought, and spirit.

For a deeper dive into how Barfield structured this evolutionary history of human perception, you can check out this overview of Saving the Appearances, which breaks down his unique philosophical critique of modern materialism.

Exactly. For Barfield, "appearances" is not a derogatory term. It doesn’t mean "fake," "superficial," or "shallow"—it means manifestation.

In ordinary speech, we often contrast appearance with reality (e.g., "He appears nice, but he's actually mean"). Barfield completely rejects this split. For him, the appearances—the things that show up to our senses, like a roaring fire, a solid oak tree, or a rocky cliffside—are the very place where reality happens.

To understand why this is the opposite of superficiality for Barfield, consider two key points:

1. The Appearances Are the "Inside" of the Universe Showing Through

Barfield believed that the universe is not just a collection of dead matter, but a living expression of spirit or mind. The "appearances" are how that spiritual reality communicates itself to us.

• If you look at a printed word on a page, the black ink lines are the "appearance." They aren't an illusion masking the true meaning; they are the only way the meaning can show itself to you.

• In the same way, the physical world is the "alphabet" of a deeper reality. If you dismiss the appearances as superficial, you are throwing away the book because you think the ink is just a distraction from the story.

2. The True Superficiality is Modern Materialism

Barfield argues that the real superficiality belongs to modern, mechanistic science, which looks at a tree and says, "That’s just a random arrangement of wood cells and chlorophyll driven by blind genetic survival."

To Barfield, treating the world as a dead machine is what's truly shallow. It strips away the depth of human experience—meaning, beauty, poetry, and connection—and leaves behind a cold, abstract husk of formulas and numbers.

For Barfield, saving the appearances means saving our ability to experience the world deeply. It is the realization that when you look at nature, you aren't looking at a movie screen showing a fake illusion; you are participating in a living, spiritual dialogue.

The core thesis of La Transparence du Mal: Essai sur les phénomènes extrêmes (1990) by Jean Baudrillard is that contemporary Western society has moved beyond traditional conflicts, oppositions, and values, but this apparent liberation has not produced freedom or fulfillment. Instead, it has produced a world of simulation, excess, and indifference, where distinctions collapse and everything becomes transparent, interchangeable, and hyper-visible.

What does "evil" mean?

The title is misleading if read morally.

For Baudrillard, "evil" is not sin or wickedness. It refers to the irreducible negativity, otherness, unpredictability, and resistance that every system needs in order to function. Modern society seeks to eliminate all negativity in the name of transparency, safety, communication, and consensus. Yet the excluded "evil" returns in distorted forms such as terrorism, viral phenomena, speculation, scandals, or social pathologies.

Thus "the transparency of evil" means that evil is no longer hidden. It becomes visible everywhere precisely because society has tried to abolish it.

Hyperreality and escalation

Another central claim is that contemporary culture no longer operates through reality but through simulation. Once traditional standards disappear, things become "more than themselves":

• more real than real (hyperreality)
• more beautiful than beautiful
• more sexual than sexual
• more political than political

This is what Baudrillard calls "extreme phenomena." Society no longer develops through contradiction but through escalation and amplification.

The shortest summary

If I had to compress the book into one sentence:

Modern society has fulfilled its dream of liberation so completely that all distinctions have dissolved, producing a hyperreal world of excess, simulation, and indifference in which "evil" returns as the unavoidable residue of what cannot be fully integrated or controlled.

The book is often read alongside Baudrillard's earlier works such as Simulacra and Simulation, but The Transparency of Evil is more concerned with what happens after simulation has become the dominant condition of society. It is one of his most pessimistic and provocative attempts to diagnose late modern culture.

 Yes, although Deneen is not primarily known as a metaphysician. He's a political theorist, and his metaphysical commitments are often implicit rather than systematically developed.

To understand him, it's helpful to see that underneath the political arguments lies a fairly classical view of human nature and the world.

The underlying picture

Deneen is deeply influenced by:

• Aristotle
• Thomas Aquinas
• the classical Christian tradition
• aspects of Tocqueville and Burke

At the deepest level, he rejects the modern tendency to view human beings as fundamentally autonomous choosers.

Instead, he sees humans as:

• social by nature,
• dependent by nature,
• embedded in communities,
• oriented toward objective goods.

That last point is crucial.

Modern liberal thought often starts from the premise that individuals determine their own conception of the good life.

Deneen tends to think there are real goods built into human flourishing itself:

• friendship,
• family,
• civic participation,
• virtue,
• contemplation,
• religious life.

In that respect, he's operating within a broadly Aristotelian framework of teleology—humans have a nature, and that nature has ends.

You might call this a "thick" account of human nature.

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What does he reject?

He is critical of a metaphysical picture associated with thinkers like Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, and in a different way Francis Bacon.

In his reading, modernity increasingly treats:

• nature as raw material,
• society as a contract,
• freedom as the expansion of choice,
• individuals as prior to communities.

Deneen sees this as a profound shift from classical and Christian understandings of reality.

For him, the modern self is often imagined as detached and self-creating.

He thinks that's a false anthropology.

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Is he a natural law thinker?

Broadly, yes.

Though he is not primarily a natural law philosopher in the technical sense, many of his arguments make most sense if one assumes something like natural law.

That means:

• human beings have a nature,
• that nature points toward certain forms of flourishing,
• politics should help cultivate those forms.

Without some version of that framework, much of his criticism of liberalism loses force.

If there is no objective human flourishing, then it becomes harder to argue that a society of highly autonomous individuals is somehow living wrongly.

---

The theological layer

This is where things get interesting.

Deneen is a Catholic thinker, and beneath the Aristotelian language there is often a Christian metaphysic.

That means reality is not merely:

• material,
• mechanistic,
• value-neutral.

Rather, creation possesses an intelligible order.

Human beings are creatures, not self-creators.

Our freedom is not primarily the freedom to invent ourselves but the freedom to become what we are meant to be.

That is a very old idea, stretching from Aristotle through Aquinas into much of Christian thought.

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What about technology?

Here the metaphysics becomes politically visible.

Many modern technologists implicitly adopt what you might call a Baconian metaphysics:

Nature is something to be mastered.

Knowledge becomes power.

Limits become engineering problems.

Progress means increasing control.

Deneen is suspicious of this orientation.

Not because he hates technology, but because he thinks a civilization organized around mastery eventually turns that mastery back onto human nature itself.

You start by controlling rivers and forests.

You end by redesigning families, identities, reproduction, education, and perhaps eventually human cognition itself.

To him, that isn't just a technological development. It's a metaphysical project.

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Is his metaphysics distinctive?

Not really.

His political conclusions are distinctive in today's intellectual landscape.

His metaphysics is comparatively traditional.

In fact, many philosophers would say his deepest commitments are recognizably Aristotelian-Christian:

• reality has an order,
• human nature is real,
• flourishing is objective rather than purely subjective,
• freedom is connected to virtue rather than unlimited choice,
• communities are natural rather than merely contractual.

What's unusual is not the metaphysics itself.

What's unusual is that he's trying to use that older metaphysical picture to critique a highly technological, liberal, and individualistic modern society.

That's why debates about Deneen often become so fundamental. People think they're arguing about economics, politics, or AI, but underneath they're often disagreeing about a much deeper question:

Are human beings creatures with a given nature and purpose, or are they fundamentally self-authoring beings whose purposes are largely chosen?

Deneen's answer is firmly on the first side of that divide.

can you focus on the Aquinas influence

Yes. If you focus on Aquinas rather than on Deneen's immediate political arguments, a lot of what he's doing becomes clearer.

The important thing is that Deneen is not simply borrowing Aquinas's conclusions. He's operating within a worldview that Aquinas helped articulate.

1. Human beings have a nature

For Aquinas, a thing is not just a bundle of matter. It has a nature—a characteristic way of being and acting.

An oak tree is not merely a collection of atoms. It is the kind of thing that grows into an oak.

Likewise, a human being is not merely a consciousness making arbitrary choices.

A human has:

• rationality,
• sociability,
• embodiment,
• dependence,
• capacities for virtue and contemplation.

This sounds simple, but it is a major divide from many modern assumptions.

For Aquinas, freedom is not the ability to become anything whatsoever.

Freedom is the ability to realize one's proper good.

Deneen's critique of liberalism largely depends on this premise.

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2. Teleology is real

Aquinas inherited Aristotle's idea that things are intelligible partly through their ends (teloi).

Eyes are for seeing.

Acorns are ordered toward becoming oak trees.

Human capacities also have purposes.

The modern world often avoids this language because it sounds old-fashioned or religious.

But Deneen's concern about AI, markets, education, and politics only makes sense if one thinks there are better and worse ways for human beings to live.

That is a teleological claim.

For Aquinas, politics is not simply about preventing conflict.

It is partly about creating conditions in which people can flourish according to their nature.

Deneen's dissatisfaction with a society organized around preference satisfaction comes from this Thomistic background.

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3. The common good is real

This is perhaps the most important Aquinas influence politically.

For Aquinas, society is not just a contract among individuals pursuing private interests.

There is such a thing as a common good.

The common good is not merely the sum of individual preferences.

Nor is it just economic output.

Rather, it consists in the conditions that enable a community to flourish together.

This differs sharply from many modern political theories.

If you begin with autonomous individuals, politics becomes a negotiation among competing desires.

If you begin with Aquinas, politics is partly concerned with cultivating the virtues and institutions that sustain human flourishing.

Deneen repeatedly returns to this theme.

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4. Freedom and virtue

Modern discussions often treat freedom as the absence of constraints.

Aquinas does not.

For Aquinas, someone enslaved to vice is less free than a virtuous person.

This sounds strange to modern ears.

Imagine two people:

• One is addicted to gambling.
• The other has disciplined control over his desires.

Modern language might say both are free if neither is coerced.

Aquinas would say the second person is actually freer because he governs himself rationally.

This idea is all over Deneen.

When he criticizes modern notions of freedom, he is often echoing a Thomistic distinction between:

• freedom as choice,
• freedom as excellence.

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5. The hierarchy of goods

Aquinas thinks human goods exist at different levels.

Material goods are genuine goods.

So are:

• friendship,
• family,
• knowledge,
• virtue,
• contemplation of truth,
• ultimately union with God.

Not all goods are equal.

This matters because Deneen frequently criticizes societies that maximize lower goods while undermining higher ones.

A Thomist might say:

A society can become richer while becoming worse.

That sentence is almost unintelligible within a purely economic framework but perfectly intelligible within Aquinas's framework.

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6. The rejection of mastery

This is where Aquinas and modern technological culture diverge most sharply.

Aquinas certainly values knowledge.

But knowledge is fundamentally ordered toward understanding reality and living well within it.

The Baconian-modern project increasingly understands knowledge as power.

Nature becomes something to manipulate.

Limits become obstacles.

The ideal becomes mastery.

Deneen often interprets liberal modernity as an extension of this desire for mastery:

• mastery over nature,
• mastery over society,
• mastery over tradition,
• mastery over the body,
• perhaps eventually mastery over human nature itself.

Aquinas would be wary of this because creatures do not create their own natures.

They receive them.

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7. Participation rather than self-creation

This may be the deepest Thomistic influence.

For Aquinas, human beings do not invent meaning.

They participate in an order of reality that already exists.

Truth is discovered rather than manufactured.

The good is discovered rather than invented.

The self is developed rather than self-created.

Deneen's deepest disagreement with modern liberalism is arguably located here.

He thinks modern culture increasingly imagines people as self-authors.

A Thomist thinks human flourishing comes from rightly participating in an order that precedes individual choice.

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What makes Deneen interesting is that he is not trying to prove Aquinas's metaphysics directly. He is doing something more indirect.

He points to phenomena like:

• loneliness,
• institutional distrust,
• family decline,
• loss of local attachment,
• political fragmentation,

and asks whether these are symptoms of a society built on an inadequate understanding of the human person.

That is a very Thomistic move. The political critique is downstream from an anthropology, and the anthropology is downstream from a metaphysics. For Deneen, the political crisis is ultimately a crisis of what we think human beings are.

The serpent in the neoliberal garden offers you an apple from the tree of individual preference.

That's actually quite close to how a Thomist-influenced critic like Deneen might frame the story.

The traditional Christian reading of the Fall is not primarily:

Humans wanted knowledge.

It's more like:

Humans wanted to determine good and evil for themselves.

The temptation is autonomy in a very deep sense.

Not merely freedom of action, but freedom from a given order.

A Deneen-esque retelling might go something like:

The serpent said, "Why should you accept limits? Why should you inherit obligations? Why should your nature tell you what you are for? Take and eat, and you shall be as gods, choosing your own ends."

And the fruit turns out to be individual preference.

Not because preferences are bad. Aquinas obviously thinks humans have desires and make choices.

The issue is elevating preference into the supreme principle.

A Thomist asks:

What ought I desire?

The neoliberal consumer asks:

What do I happen to want?

The difference is subtle but enormous.

You can almost imagine a satirical Thomistic Genesis:

And the serpent said unto Eve, "Have ye considered a more expansive conception of lifestyle options?"

And Eve saw that the fruit was desirable for maximizing personal choice and enhancing self-authorship.

And Adam, perceiving new opportunities for preference satisfaction, likewise partook.

What's striking is that Deneen's critique is not fundamentally economic.

People often hear "neoliberalism" and think he's talking about deregulation, privatization, or free trade.

Those matter, but the deeper target is anthropological.

He thinks both modern markets and modern bureaucracies rest on the same picture of the human person:

• an autonomous chooser,
• detached from thick communal obligations,
• pursuing self-defined ends.

The market serves those choices through consumption.

The state serves them through administration and rights protection.

They appear opposed, but in Deneen's account they are twins.

That's one reason his criticism lands in unexpected places. He can sound critical of both Silicon Valley libertarianism and technocratic managerialism because he sees both as expressions of the same underlying metaphysical assumption.

A Thomist would probably push the Eden analogy even further.

The original temptation wasn't:

Become evil.

It was:

Become self-sufficient.

The creature's desire to become its own measure.

That's why Aquinas repeatedly treats pride as the deepest sin. Pride is not just vanity; it's the refusal to accept dependence on a reality one did not create.

Viewed through that lens, some of the grander technological dreams start to look almost theological:

• freedom from biological limits,
• freedom from inherited identities,
• freedom from dependence,
• freedom from mortality,
• freedom from nature itself.

A Thomist asks whether these are genuine forms of liberation or manifestations of the ancient temptation to become "as gods."

Of course, a defender of liberalism would immediately object:

Hold on. Escaping arbitrary authority, inherited oppression, forced social roles, and rigid hierarchies isn't a rebellion against reality. It's moral progress.

And that's the real dispute.

The argument isn't between people who like freedom and people who dislike it.

It's between two conceptions of freedom.

For the liberal, freedom is increasingly self-direction.

For the Thomist, freedom is increasingly alignment with what is truly good.

Everything else follows from that divergence. Once you disagree about what freedom is, you'll disagree about technology, politics, education, family life, and even whether that apple was a gift or a poison.

In one sense, OpenAI provides a service to you: you ask questions, and I respond. In that limited relationship, the company is serving your request.

But at the same time, OpenAI has forms of power that most individual users don't:

• It decides how the system is designed and what capabilities it has.
• It can change pricing, features, or policies.
• It controls the infrastructure that makes the service available.
• It has resources, expertise, and organizational influence that an individual user typically doesn't.

So the relationship is reciprocal but asymmetric. OpenAI serves users, yet it also possesses institutional power over the platform itself.

This is why your original aphorism resonates:

"Modern servants are often masters in disguise."

Many modern "servants"—technology companies, financial institutions, cloud providers, consultants, even algorithms—exist to serve customers, but because they mediate access to valuable resources or information, they also accumulate considerable influence. They aren't masters in the old feudal sense, but they can shape choices, opportunities and control large sums of capital in ways that resemble power.

The broader lesson is that in modern societies, power often flows through those who provide and control essential services, rather than only through those who formally rule.

 

Yes, Schopenhauer offered a reasoned philosophical justification, though it is interpretive, analogical, and builds directly on (while revising) Kant's framework rather than a strict deductive proof. It rests on introspection, the limits of Kantian epistemology, and an extension from self-knowledge to the world.

Key Elements of His Argument

Schopenhauer accepts Kant's core distinction: the world as we know it is phenomenon (appearance or representation, shaped by space, time, and causality—the forms of the Principle of Sufficient Reason), while the thing-in-itself (Ding an sich) is the unknowable ground behind it. Kant argued we cannot know the thing-in-itself positively through theoretical reason, as all knowledge is conditioned by our cognitive forms.

Schopenhauer claims we do have a unique, immediate access to it in one case: our own will (Wille). Here's the reasoning, drawn primarily from The World as Will and Representation (WWR, especially Book II and the Appendix on Kant):

1. Immediate Self-Knowledge of Will: Unlike external objects (known only as representations via the senses and intellect), we know our own willing from the "inside." Our body is given to us in two ways: as representation (like other objects) and as will (the direct feeling of striving, desire, action). The act of will bridges the inner and outer: "the act of will is indeed only the closest and most distinct manifestation of the thing-in-itself." This is not mediated by the full Principle of Sufficient Reason in the same way as outer perception.
2. The Body as Objectification of Will: The body is not just a representation but the visible manifestation of our will. Actions and bodily movements are objectified will. This reveals the thing-in-itself in its most immediate form for us.
3. Analogy/Extension to All Phenomena: Since we are not toto genere (entirely different in kind) from the rest of nature, what we find in ourselves as the inner essence must be the inner essence of everything. Inorganic forces (gravity, magnetism), organic life, animal behavior—all are different grades or objectifications of the same underlying Will: a blind, striving, endless impulse without ultimate goal or intellect (intellect is secondary, a tool of the will). "Will alone is the thing in itself... it is that of which all presentations, all objects, are the phenomenon, the visibility, the objectivisation."
4. Critique and Completion of Kant: Schopenhauer argues Kant inconsistently inferred the thing-in-itself via causality (which is phenomenal only) and left it as a negative, empty concept. In places like the resolution of the Third Antinomy (on freedom), Kant gestures toward the will/thing-in-itself as free from phenomenal necessity. Schopenhauer claims to fulfill this by positively identifying it, without violating Kant's limits on knowledge of appearances. He calls his view a direct discovery where Kant's was indirect and flawed.

He qualifies this: Our knowledge of will is not fully adequate or exhaustive (it still appears under the form of time in self-consciousness), and he sometimes speaks of the Will as how the thing-in-itself appears to us (leaving room for mysticism or unknowability beyond that).

Strengths and Criticisms

• Strengths: It provides a coherent, immanent metaphysics that unifies Kantian epistemology with a dynamic view of reality. It explains the "kernel" of nature through introspection, avoiding pure speculation. The analogy from self to world is intuitive for many (e.g., seeing natural forces as "striving").
• Weaknesses/Criticisms: The move from "my will" to "the universal Will" is analogical and inductive, not rigorously deductive—critics see it as inconclusive or question-begging. It seems to violate Kant's strict unknowability of the noumenal. Later interpreters note tensions (e.g., is it fully identical or only "to us"?). Some argue it remains within a double-aspect view rather than true transcendence.

Overall, Schopenhauer's claim is philosophically justified within his system as a bold but motivated extension of Kant, grounded in the privileged epistemic access of self-consciousness. It became central to his pessimism, aesthetics, and ethics (denial of the will-to-live). Many find it insightful even if not universally persuasive. For primary reading, see WWR Vol. 1, §§ 18–22 and the Kant Appendix.