Human beings have been struggling to learn the meaning of life since the first day. Ideologies are born as human’s interpretation of the world and belief system, also an endeavor to seek the truth of human nature. Ideologies emerge throughout the periods of great changes: the Enlightenment, the English “Glorious” Revolution, the American Revolution, etc. They have become the motivations, the standards, and the roots to modern political systems. Their roots are the philosophies developed by famous philosophers throughout the time. However, as each ideology is developed, its own contradiction also grows, takes place in the realm of actions. This, in turn, shows contradiction as human nature.
Everything changes over time, and there is no moment when things stop changing to a different state, or a completely different thing. Heraclitus, a pre-Socratic Greek philosopher, states firmly: “There is nothing permanent except change.” Heraclitus’s works have influenced later philosophers and thinkers, including Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, a German philosopher of the late 18th and early 19th century. In order to define “contradiction”, I found it is understandable to use Hegel’s principle of non-contradiction, which has been studied for a long time. As Horst Althaus says in his Hegel: An Intellectual Biography, “If it is true, as Hegel says, that ‘all things are in themselves contradictory’, then the principle of non-contradiction is itself logically contradicted, and the sublation of contradiction as a logical operation becomes in turn a contradiction of the contradicted contradiction or a case of double negation.” (Althaus, 131) Thus, to Hegel, the nature of everything is contradiction. This, to me, includes human beings. The nature o...
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...es place over time, alternate key events, and transfers contradictory ideas. Contradiction in thoughts and actions of revolutionary leaders makes the historical events and their ideologies sometimes hard to be determined. It depends on each person to decide whether one thing is right for them. However, since human natures include contradiction, the world would keep changing over time.
Works Cited
Adams, John. Letter to Abigail Adams. 14 Apr. 1776. The Liz Library: Women's law and research
Althaus, Horst. Hegel: an Intellectual Biography. Malden, MA: Polity, 2000. Print.
Carswell, John. The Descent on England; a Study of the English Revolution of 1688 and Its European Background. New York: John Day, 1969. Print.
Wood, Gordon S. The Radicalism of the American Revolution. New York: Knopf, 1992. Print.
In a letter to her husband, Abigail Adams asked him to remember the ladies, and "to be more generous and favorable to them than your ancestors". She goes on to warn John Adams not to put unrestricted power into the hands of men (Doc B). Abigail wrote this letter in light of the new position women are representing. The women finally decided to take action and rebel against how their ancestors have lived in the past.
Elton proposes that sovereign revolution was achieved under Cromwell; this claim seems to stand strongly, as evidence in form of the fact is that England remains sovereign from the Holy Roman Empire until this present moment which undoubtedly supports Elton. Under Cromwell, sovereign England was further strengthened as Wales was joined with England and placed under the rule of its Supreme King, Henry. The changes which Cromwell successfully administered were all permanent thus revolutionary, these changes were able to withstand the whole Tudor dynasty and more. Revolution was achieved by Cromwell with his skilful crafting of the parliamentary bills which ensured the Resolution of the Great Matter as well as the supremacy and absolutism of the King. Supremacy, sovereignty and Henry’s divorce were unl...
Abigail made her strongest appeal for women¹s rights in 1776, when John was in Philadelphia serving in Congress. As members drafted laws to guarantee the independence for which the colonist were fighting, Abigail wrote to John begging him to remember that women also needed to be given the right of independence. She sensed the struggles that were to come and understood the unfairness of making one group subject to the will of another.
Braddick, M. J., State formation in early modern England, c. 1550-1700, (New York : Cambridge University Press, 2000), 399.
They fight for the rights of women in regard of being viewed as equal to the male gender. Although they have many similarities, they differ in several ways as well. In “Letter to John Adams” Abigail Adams urges her husband to “remember the ladies” in a well written letter. However, in the “Declaration of Sentiments of the Seneca Falls Woman’s Rights Convention” the rights of women are addressed at a city held convention fighting for our rights as women. Similarities of these documents contain the ideas of addressing the amendments and people of the Congress when standing up for what they believe
Nietzsche's master-slave morality describes the way in which moral norms shifted through the through eras, from pre-scocratic times to the modern age founded upon Christian and Jewish beliefs. During pre-socratic times, value was dominated and enacted by the master class, who saw themselves and what they did as good. Value was defined along their terms of good- what was good for the master class was itself good. This notion of value was designed along the lines of nobility and purity, which included traits such as courage, beauty, strong-will and happiness. The master-class said yes to existence, and their values affirmed their belief system, which, due to their position of control, created their disposition as elite and influenced the norms for morality at their time. Since the master-class viewed themselves as good, they distinguished themselves from the weaker individuals, those not in power, as bad. The weaker individuals, in pre-socratic times known as plebeians, according to the master-class, were weaker for various reasons. Be it due to their unhappiness, victimization to unfortunate circumstances, weak-will or a lack of courage, pride, or a combination of any of these despicable or non virtuous values. According to the master-class, adherence to these weak values initiated a form of fear within the plebeian, which created a lack of self worth and a lack of freedom or self-consciousness, deemed as slavery.
To scrutinize Hegel is simply impossible without attending to his dialectical method resulting in Aufhebung of the oppositions. In the present context this attention should have political and ethical twist - to extract from Hegel's dialectical play some points that are relevant even nowadays (both in political and philosophical terms).
Our artificial faculties have made us weak, a weakness that is inherently unnatural. Rousseau asserts, that in order for us to understand man in the state of nature, we must evaluate, and critique the savage man, the man as he exists and survives in the state of nature. Rousseau’s theory of the natural state of man is evidence that he does not agree with the concept of the state of nature as it is theorized by Hobbs; as the state of war of each against all, and Locke’s assertion that natural man is rational and that the state of nature is one where man has the ability to reason. Instead, Locke is of the belief that in his natural state once stripped of the artificial facilities of human invention and improvement, man is basically a beast and it is from here that his natural need for improvement propelled mans creation of a civil, political, society. This unnatural evolution is where man sets the foundation for inequality. Rousseau’s discomfort which the idea that the natural state of man may be both organic and Hierarchical is also evident in his theory of human nature. Unlike philosophers before him, Rousseau theory is able to be more complete because he is able to examine the behavior of man in his natural state and provide a rational argument based on the his understanding of human evolution and comparative human anatomy. Rousseau’s radical new theory of human nature reinforces his belief that the savage man was a peaceful man, but this man was unfulfilled. The natural human need for interaction and human nature reaffirms that the savage man was a man who is peaceful, but he was also unfulfilled. The need for interaction, and the need for improvement in order to find actualization have influenced several important chan...
As presented in the Phenomenology of Spirit, the aim of Life is to free itself from confinement "in-itself" and to become "for-itself." Not only does Hegel place this unfolding of Life at the very beginning of the dialectical development of self-consciousness, but he characterizes self-consciousness itself as a form of Life and points to the advancement of self-consciousness in the Master/Slave dialectic as the development of Life becoming "for-itself." This paper seeks to delineate this often overlooked thread of dialectical insight as it unfolds in the Master/Slave dialectic. Hegel articulates a vision of the place of human self-consciousness in the process of Life as a whole and throws light on the role of death as an essential ingredient in the epic drama of life's struggle and Spirit's birth.
The second chapter of the Introduction to the Philosophy of History bears the title "Reason in History"; however, careful study reveals that it could just as aptly been dubbed Reason is History or better, History is Reason. Although Reason exists in a finite form within the human being, the whole—infinite Reason—is necessarily greater than the sum of its parts—the sum of finite Reasons. Hegel's Reason is the infinite material of all reality—the substance, form, and power.
Hegel is considered one of the most famous German philosopher’s who wrote and taught during the early 1800’s. Hegel thought that humanity and civilizations was inevitable working towards becoming a free society in hope that this idea and process would spread throughout the world. Many of Hegel’s ideas such as his dialect and triad greatly influenced the 19th century. This movement also translated over into the ideas and findings of people in the new world with liberal and free market democracies who represent the final state of Hegel’s progress. Hegel’s ideas can all be seen as part of a progression and broken down and explained through his teachings and theories, the Hegelian triad, and the legacy that Hegel left behind.
ABSTRACT: This paper aims to show how the Hegelian philosophy can contribute to the conceptual discussions between the two strains of contemporary ethical-political philosophy. I argue that the Hegelian political theory is of central import to the discussion between communitarians and libertarians, both in the communitarian criticism of the libertarian — mainly in Michael Sandel's criticism of Rawls — and in the Rawlsian project of a society founded in justice as equality. For if the communitarians' theoretical basis is the living of a community in terms of historical-social values, and the individualists' deontological rationality is the basis for the libertarians, Hegel's pointing to a synthetic resolution of the two positions provides a moral foundation for their harmonious coexistence. This does not, however, mean that there is one simple ideological solution that can unite the universal and the particular, the community and the individual, through artificial dialectics, as the critics of Hegelian thought would affirm following the Frankfurt School.
Through my eyes, the word change provides a great part of life, change is inevitable. People must change, things must be modified, and animals must adapt. My personal belief upon change consists of the thought that no matter the stretches we take to avoid it, we cannot. We must alter along with the world we live in and become that intense act or instance of making or becoming different.
In his Introduction to the Philosophy of History Hegel confronts the reader with a new way of understanding history. According to this infamous philosopher, there are three methods of dealing with history: original, reflective, and philosophic. The approach taken by Hegel is the philosophical approach to history, which is the foundation of his work. In order to understand this approach, Hegel introduces the reader to his understanding of what history is.