This blog assignment requires you to read and comment on the text below. Your comment can be an interpretation of a quote from the text or a connection between texts and the topic being discussed. At the end of your comment, you must write an open-ended question you are curious about so that we can try to answer it during the seminar.
Our goal is to find meaning in this article through our collaborative efforts. From Discourse on the Origins of Inequality Among Men by Jean Jacques Rousseau I am going to speak about man, and I speak only to human beings who are not afraid of the truth. I think there are two kinds of inequality among human beings. One I call natural or physical inequality, because it depends on differences in age, health, bodily strength, and intelligence. The other I call moral or political inequality because it depends on the laws which human beings have agreed to. These laws allow some people to have more wealth and power than others. Everyone knows what the source of natural inequality is. It is nature. Some people also ask whether political inequality isn't based on natural inequality. Whether, in fact, those who have wealth and power aren't better in strength, intelligence, and moral virtue than those who don't have wealth and power. This is the sort of things that slaves say when they know their masters are listening. Free and reasonable people who are looking for the truth don't talk this way. What then are we looking for? We are looking for that moment in the history of man when the idea of right took the place of strength and violence; when nature was subjected to law. We want to explain by what series of almost magical events the majority of the people who together are strong could be made to serve their rulers who are few and therefore weaker. We want to know why all human beings traded their real happiness for the imaginary security of living in political society. The philosophers who have tried to answer this question have all felt the need of going back to the state of nature in which man lived before societies were formed. They do this to discover the distinction between law and nature. None of them has reached it. Some of them have assumed that man in the state of nature already had the ideas of just and unjust. These philosophers didn't even bother to ask the question how human beings could have had political ideas before they were useful to them. Other philosophers have talked about the natural right everyone has to protect what belongs to him, his property. They haven't explained what they mean by "belong", or property, or how human beings thought of this idea in the first place. Other philosophers still have tried to argue that the strong have a natural authority to govern the weak. They haven't thought about how much time was needed before the words "authority" and "govern" could have any meaning at all for human beings. Finally, all these philosophers speak about man in the state of nature in terms of the ideas of needs, greed, oppression, desire, and pride. These ideas can't apply to man in the state of nature, because they require society to come into existence. This blog assignment requires you to read and comment on the text below. Your comment can be an interpretation of a quote from the text or a connection between texts and the topic being discussed. At the end of your comment, you must write an open-ended question you are curious about so that we can try to answer it during the seminar.
Our goal is to find meaning in this article through our collaborative efforts. From About Revenge by Francis Bacon Revenge is a sort of savage justice. The more people try to take revenge, the more the law should punish them. When a man commits a crime, he breaks the law. But when the injured person takes revenge, the person destroys law itself. In taking revenge, a person does indeed get even with his enemy. But when one refuses to take revenge, he shows that he is better than his enemy. King Solomon, I am sure, said it is glorious for a person to forget an injury. Whatever is past is gone and can't be changed. Wise people know they have enough to do in the present and with whatever might happen in the future. They don't spend their time taking revenge. People who spend their time worrying about past injuries just waste their time. Also, no person hurts another person just to hurt him. Rather, it is done for his profit or his own pleasure or his honor or for some other reason he might have. So why should I be angry with someone for loving himself better than he loves me? Suppose someone hurts me because he is evil. Isn't that just like a thorn or briar which scratches me because it can't do anything else? Revenge is most allowable when there is no specific law to correct an injury. However, one must then be careful that the kind of revenge one takes does not break yet another law. Some people when they get even want their enemy to know that it will happen. This is a more generous way of acting. Not letting your enemy know you are going to get even is a cowardly thing to do. It is like killing at night from ambush. What is certain about planning to get even is that one's own wounds remain open. If one didn't spend one's time trying to take revenge, those injuries would heal and be forgotten. Public or state revenges are, for the most part, good--as in the case of the murders of Julius Caesar. Private revenges are, however, not good. People who take revenge live the life of witches. They cause trouble to others and come to a bad end. |