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... Acting this way, women would turn out to be independent decision makers and will be treated as persons. Wollstonecraft's arguments are relatively straightforward. No new interpretation of the notion of a right is needed to recognize that if rational agents deserve the rights intrinsic to autonomy, women must deserve those rights.
The problem in Wollstonecraft's case is to convince others to act and reason in a manner consistent with their own stated principles. In the case of the Islamic or Biblical feminist, one must change others' reading of sacred texts, that is, others must be convinced first to change their principles and then to act consistently with those changes. (Groenhout 2002) Since, prior to Wollstonecraft, women do not use the terminology of rights; it is easy to ignore continuity between Wollstonecraft and previous politically-conscious women. This perceivable discontinuity is increased by the difference between the obvious secularism of Wollstonecraft's case, on the one hand, and the religious ring of the texts created by earlier women titles such as Astells Letters Concerning the Love of God, or Damages Mashams Occasional Thoughts in Reference to a Virtuous or Christian Life. However, as I shall argue, it is exactly theology that provides a link between women thinkers of the English Enlightenment and Mary Wollstonecraft.
This is not merely on account of the fact that Wollstonecraft's own religious views are now being acknowledged. But, more considerably, all these women give importance to moral arguments when making their case for parity and educational chance for women. And these proper arguments are founded in a shared set of theological assumptions, mainly their conception of God. This holds right for women on either side of the party-political divide, regardless of their religious traditionalism or non-conformity. In discussing socialism and its origins it is impossible not to mention George Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel who was one of the most prominent western philosophers of the 19 th century. Being a professor in Heidelberg and Berlin he wrote his most well-known works, The Phenomenology of the Mind (1806), The Science of Logic (1812) and The Philosophy of Right (1821).
Hegel was dubbed an "Absolute Idealist" because his metaphysical system stated that actuality is the result of a historical process whose final end is an comprehension of the essence of existence, or "the Absolute. " This process he called the dialectic: an evolution toward development that springs from conflict. (This give-and-take notion is now often called the Hegelian Dialectic. ) Hegel's absolute idealism studied a world-soul that develops out of, and is identified through, the dialectical logic. In this advance, known as the Hegelian dialectic, one concept (thesis) unavoidably generates its opposite (antithesis), and the communication of these leads to a new idea (synthesis). This sequentially becomes the theory of a new triad. Hegel considered Kant's study of categories to be unfinished. The idea of being is primary, but it evokes its direct opposite, not being. Yet, these two are not jointly exclusive, for they inevitably produce the synthesis, becoming.
Therefore activity is fundamental, progress is rational, and logic is the base of the world process. The study of nature and mind studies reason as it realizes itself in cosmology and history. The world process is the absolute, the active belief that does not rise above reality but exists through and in it. The universe develops by a self-progressing plan, proceeding from astral bodies to the world, from the mineral kingdom to the vegetable, from the vegetable kingdom to the animal. In the community the same progress can be revealed; human activities lead to property, which leads to law. Out of the relationship between the individual and law develops the synthesis of ethics, where both the interdependence and the freedom of individuals interact to produce the state.
The state thus is a entirety above all individuals, and since it is a unit, its highest progress is rule by monarchy. Such a state is a personification of the absolute idea. In his study of history, Hegel studied the history of states that held sway over lesser peoples until a higher representative of the absolute developed. Though much of his progress was questionable, the concept of the conflict of cultures provoked deep historical analysis. Hegel considered art a closer approach to the absolute than government. In the history of art he distinguished three periods the Oriental, the Greek, and the romantic.
He believed that the modern romantic form of art cannot encompass the magnitude of the Christian ideal. Hegel taught that religion moved from worship of nature through a series of stages to Christianity, where Christ represents the union of God and humanity, of spirit and matter. Philosophy goes beyond religion as it enables humankind to comprehend the entire historical unfolding of the absolute. Hegel's system has extraordinary implications for the development of history, mainly the evolution of people and government. He thought that the perfect universal soul can be made through logic that is grounded on his dialectic. This, he stated, was the basis of all progress.
Applying his three-part dialectic, he laid out the progress of society. Hegel's thesis was that the most important goal of persons is to obtain property, and the pursuit of possessions by all persons requires the antithesis of this aim, laws. The connection of persons and laws makes a synthesis, called ethos that combines the freedom and interdependence of the people and creates a state. According to Hegel, the country is above the individual. Allowed to achieve its highest form of development, Hegel thought, the country evolves into a monarchy (a government ruled by one person, often called a queen or king). Hegel's vision of government is at odds with the historical course followed by the United States.
In fact, he was a critic of the individualism at the heart of the American Revolution. But his ideas on the other hand have had an inestimable effect on modern thought in the United States and in Europe. He saw human history as the progression from bondage to freedom, achievable only if the will of the individual is made less important to the will of the majority. This view shaped the progress of the philosophy of idealism in the United States and Europe. Hegel's dialectic was also adapted by Karl Marx as the basis for Marx's economic theory of the fight of the working class to reach revolution over the owners of the means of production. In the twentieth century, Hegel inspired the scholastic methodology called deconstructionism, applied in areas ranging from literature to law as a way to interpret texts.
Although Hegel was basically ignored or criticized by U. S. authorized scholars for two centuries, the 1950 s brought a new attention to his ideas that has grown in the posterior decades. On the whole, scholars have analyzed his work for its views on liberalism and the concepts of freedom and accountability. Hegelian idea has been used to talk about everything from historical problems such as slavery to contemporary issues in property, torts, contracts, and criminal regulation. It has also affected the critical legal studies. "Its [the state] self-aggrandizement, its desire for survival, conflicts, as may be expected, with another State, whose sole ambition is similar to that of the first.
War ensues out of this conflict... Since a political unit must act through the wills of individuals, the hero represents the Spirit in its march through history, no matter now unconscious he may be of his mission, or how unappreciated his deeds are by his fellow men. " (Alphern, p. 169, pp. 171 - 170. ) The Hegelian vision, arrived at by the dialectic approach, was that there were basic laws which drove the progress of a culture or a state; that a culture or a state has a kind of a individuality of its own, and its progress is to be explained in terms of its own nature. Hegel also held up the suggestion that men are displeased or so unstable in their practical life that they need to believe in false ideas such as religious conviction or nationalism. These notions of historical progress and of alienation were to play a critical role in the theories of Marx. Marx followed Hegel, who had a deterministic vision and that all events (economic stages) come about as a consequence of the foreseeable development of history. Hegel's philosophical system affected the socialistic theories of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels.
They recognize the contribution of the philosophy of Hegel to their own scientific socialism. They say that socialism grew out of Hegel, while Mary Wollstonecraft was a progenitor of liberal feminist direction that was crucial for the development of the liberalism itself. Wollstonecraft, Schiller, Montagu, and many others felt there had been a sad falling-off in the literature of their age, as poets like William Collins and Thomas Gray had emphasized before them. The natural had yielded to the artificial, the naive to the sentimental, the truly beautiful to the merely pretty.
The general decay of the times found its echo in the rottenness of literary art. Barbauld might joke that it was high time for poets to come down from their garrets to chase a few squirrels and take in the vegetation, but Schiller regarded with gloom an era in which the absence of genuine poetry accompanied general social breakdown. Only a few years later Hegel was telling his Berlin students: "We may well hope that art will always rise higher and come to perfection, but the form of art has ceased to be the supreme need of the spirit. " (Reiss 1992) Works Cited Cornu, Auguste. The Origins of Marxian Thought.
Springfield, IL: Charles C. Thomas, 1957. Groenhout, Ruth E. "Essentialist Challenges to Liberal Feminism" Social Theory and Practice 28. 1 (2002) Reiss, Timothy J. The Meaning of Literature. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1992 Veljko Korea, On Humanism, in Socialist Humanism, edited by Erich Fromm, Anchor Books, New York, 1966 Henry Alphern's An Outline History of Philosophy (Forum House, 1969)
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