Law of nature Essay Example for Free

Law of nature EssayThere are several gives that deal with philosophical questions of liberty, tender restrictions, pursuit of property and freedom versus enslave ment. I watch selected six related to these bags to be reviewed and closely analyzed to understand those themes better. The second treatise of Government by John Locke has been ever since its first publication in 1689 an influential source of political and social interpretation. The USA constitution is based on the principles and themes John Locke deals with in this master piece of philosophical reasonablenessing. His principal(prenominal) stock in the book is that the sovereignty is in the hands of the mass and that the government is in their service. Locke underscored the importance of being aware as quite a little of our pictorial and first harmonic businesss but that we hold in had to relinquish certain aspects of this human freedom to be equal to(p) to coexist peacefully deep down a society regulated by laws established to maintain the order. People are thus originally endowed with certain in alienateable reforms in a state of nature where freedom exists in absence of laws or rules to abide to.This law of nature does thus non require people to obey each other but instead people are free to be themselves. The state of nature is defined by Locke himself as To properly understand political power and trace its origins, we must give the state that all people are in naturally. That is a state of perfect freedom of acting and disposing of their own possessions and persons as they think fit within the bounds of the law of nature.People in this state do not have to ask permission to act or depend on the entrust of others to arrange matters on their behalf. The natural state is also one and only(a) of equality in which all power and jurisdiction is reciprocal and no one has more(prenominal) than other. Locke deals thus with the topic of civil society in this book and how we can po litically coexist together as people. To understand the true and best make up of a civil society we need to comprehend the fundamental right we are born with as humans which is simply freedom in its collar sense.Taking this into consideration we have also to acknowledge the full meanings this brings along with it for everybody despite color, ethnicity, religion or race. Since all people are born with this right then it follows that all people are equal and deserve to live in a brass that secures this equality and freedom of pursuit of ones dreams. Lockes second main argument is how governments should only rule with the consent of the people and that whatever government that does not becomes as a result illegitimate and deserves to be overthrown by the people through their right to revolution.He also deals with the themes of conquest and thralldom, property and representative government. Property for instance lead to the humans of the civil society as men sought to protect his property through the law. People exchanged some of their natural rights in order to achieve this form of civil society where they could coexist peacefully with other people in a safe and secure atmosphere. The representative government on the other hand is only legitimate if it is adjudge by the people and serves the needs of the people.It is this way that Locke established the rule that governments should be there for the service of the people rather than vice versa. Lockes ideas virtually slavery on the other hand are that it is essentially a form of involuntary servitude and the only way slavery could be justified as a system that goes against the order of the natural state is through the absence of the state of nature and the presence of the opposite which is the state of war during which exceptions were rented.The discussion of slavery leads us to another major work concerned with the subject The Life of Olaudah Equiano which is an autobiographical work that was first publish ed in the 18th century and recounts the paper of slavery and its horrors. The story of his enslavement, acquired freedom and pursuit of work as a seaman and merchant is a very fascinating tale of forward movement and determination at achieving success, despite the hardships encountered along the way, in order to earn the natural right of freedom back.Olaudah, manage Locke, was a fighter for a ca utilize. Lockes book helped revolutionize the ideas about government and temptd the USA constitution the way we know it now. His defense of the rights of the human continues to influence the discourse on democracy, human rights and politics. Olaudahs journey and cope for freedom has also left tremendous impact in the literature of slavery and he also helped in the process of abolishing slavery afterwards on. Those devil prominent men had a social vision of what a society was supposed to be like and fought to achieve it.The book starts with the recount of Olaudahs personal manners befo re enslavement when he used to live in an African region called Assaka. He was kidnapped and forced into slavery(something that enforces Lockes opinion about the forced status of slavery as an institution) at the age of ten and transported to the New World or to be more specific the plantations of Virginia. He was purchased by a lieutenant in the Navy called Michael Pascal who named him Gustavus Vassa, a name he also came to be known by. His life as a slave was a continues fence and suffering.He could not tolerate the idea of deprivation of his right of freedom and chose to rebel through denying the new name his owner gave him which lead to his punishment as if he was a mere dog whose job was to obey without reluctance. Being deprived of his freedom reduces the human being into an animal. The life of the slave was really hard harmonize to the journals of Olaudah. He was later sold in the Caribbean and acquired by a Philadelphian Quaker who taught him how to read and write better an d educated him in the Christian faith.He allowed him to dole out to earn the money required to buy his freedom as young man in his twenties and traveled to England where he fought for the cause of slavery abolition. Olaudah observed in his book how slaves were treated as inhuman subjects with no feelings. It was almost as if the masters considered them to be a different specie or an alien creature. Our third book or novel is concerned with a creature that displays those characteristic Frankenstein.Frankenstein by the author Mary Shelley refers to the scientists within the book Victor Frankenstein who knows how to produce life and decides to create a creature that is like man but with more powerful characteristics. The novel is made up of the correspondence between the passkey Robert Walton and his sister. Walton happens to know about Frankensteins creature and recounts the story to his sister in his letters. The story starts with Walton traveling to the North Pole where he bequ eath be trapped by a sea of massive ice rocks.This is how Walton meets Victor Frankenstein and this is also how he comes to know about the monster Victor had created. Victor is himself terrified by what he has created and runs away thereby allowing the monster to be released. The troubled scientist feels sick with guilt and his depressed state only worsens when he hears about the murder of his brother. It appears that the monster was who dispatch his brother and this was explained by the monster himself as an attempt at taking revenge of Victor who had treated him with horror and disgust.He begs Victor for a accompany since he cannot stand the loneliness. Victor does decide to oblige but later on regrets it and destroys his second creation to which the monster vows revenge that he soon fulfills through killing one of his friends. The monster manages to also kill his bride and Victor decides to follow the monster which led him to meet Walton and dies a few days later on. Walton co ncludes his letters by recounting how surprised he was to find the monster weeping on his body in agony and loneliness.It turns out that the monster had feelings like any other human being and could be good or evil like any other normal person. But Victors fear and blemish blinded him from seeing that. The same thing happened with the sportsmanlike owners of slaves in the era of Olaudah. They stopped seeing the slaves as human beings and regarded them as mere properties to be feared and doubted if they acted other than the way Olaudah did through educating himself.The fear of the unknown is a characteristic of the human psyche but what is also a common aspect between the white and black man and the monster of Frankenstein is the need of freedom. Our fourth book is the Communist manifesto by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. The first publication of the book took place in 1848. fitting like John Lockes The Second Treatise of Government the Communist Manifesto is a very influential p olitical manuscript. The main theme of the book is the class struggle and the weaknesses of the capitalist system.The Communist Manifesto is what the communist party enduringnessened the ideology of the Communist party. The Manifestos main aim was to make communism more understood by a larger number of people since the party was feared and doubted by many. Karl Marx continues then to mark the differences between the bourgeois and lying-in class since his main concenter will be throughout the paper on how the proletariat has been victimized by the capitalist system and bourgeois class. He states in the first section that The accounting of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles.Freeman and slave, patrician and plebeian, lord and serf, guild-master and journeyman, in a word, oppressor and oppressed, stood in constant opposition to one another, carried on an uninterrupted, now hidden, now open fight, a fight that each time ended, either in a revolutionary re -constitution of society at large, or in the common ruin of the contending classes. Marx arguments of class struggle resemble those of Locke to a certain extent. He also echoed the claim that the human need for property is what leads to the creation of civil society as we know it today.Marx acknowledges this human need for the acquisition of property but seeks to regulate it more through establishing laws that do not allow for a minority of rich people to subject and benefit from a larger group that is the real driving force of any society the proletariat class. The proletarians will, according to Marx, rise to power through class struggle. The bourgeois continues exploiting the proletarians but the latter will use their right to revolution (Locke again) to throw this form of social establishment and create a new reality more fit for the general and larger public.This vision was eventually realized by the Bolsheviks in the former Soviet Union. Our human need for freedom equality a nd development is according to Locke, Olaudah, Marx and Shelly a fundamental aspect of our psychological nature. This leads us to the fifth book to focus on On the Origin of Species by Charles Darwin who explains in this work how humans have developed from their natural state to their current one and how they have been able to survive. The natural state described by Darwin in his book is different from that of Locke in that he focuses on how we developed physically as people from the shape of monkeys to that of humans.It is needless to say that his book has caused the necessary controversy in the religious circles. Darwin presents a very interesting evolutionary idea in this particular book to explain the process of human evolution the survival of the fittest. The idea of the transmutation of the species was however not welcomed by the Church establishment of that time and is still not looked at with favor by several even nowadays and despite the many scientific data that has been s upplied to enhance his theory. Natural selection or to use the other phrase, the survival of the fittest, has been described by Mr.Herbert Spencer as Owing to this struggle for life, any variation, however slight and from whatever cause proceeding, if it be in any degree profitable to an individual of any species, in its infinitely complex relations to other organic beings and to external nature, will tend to the preservation of that individual, and will generally be inherited by its offspring. Charles Darwins book has also helped in reshaping the human thought regarding its origin and nature and developed the notion of the necessity of strength and relentlessness to succeed and earn the right to exist since only the fittest survive.Our last book is also closely related to the themes we have seen so far in relation to human rights and natural states and the preservation of an efficient civil society. Civilization and its discontents was first published in 1929 and became one of Sig mund Freuds most renowned works. Freuds main theme in this book is the state of conflict between the individual and his society. Just like with Lockes book we come to wonder how much the relinquishment of our fundamental right of total freedom affects our psyche and therefore our performance within the civil society we created.The primary source of conflict, according to Freud, is the individuals desire of freedom and the clash that creates with societys chance of the individual to conform to the general rules. The majority kills with this the individuality and our natural states are denied for the sake of preserving the general picture agreed upon by the majority of the citizens. Humans have certain desires and characteristics that are hard to control. The desire for sex is the most prominent one which has lead to the creation of many laws to regulate sex conduct in public and punish the acts of rape and sexual aggression.The natural instincts come to be subjected to laws and regu lations to allow for the peaceful existence within a society. The six books that we have seen so far all deal with several issues related to humanitys primal needs that can clash at times with societys expectations of the individual. Our quest for freedom and property creates conflict all along but we never are able to let go of one of the two. Humans have always wanted the two together and the need for more property led to the enslavement of millions to satisfy the need for cheap labor thereby violating the natural human state of being free by birth.But humans are creatures who seek pleasure and understanding and bonding with the other. That is also another reason why we co-exist within a society and try to abide to the rules to sustain the civil form. Works Cited Darwin, Charles (2002). The Origin of Species. W. W Norton Company. Equiano, Olaudah (1999). The life of Olaudah Equiano. Dover Publications. Freud, Sigmund (1989). Civilization and its discontents. W. W Norton Company. Locke, John (2002). The Second Treatise of Government. Dover Publications. Marx, Karl (1998). The Communist Manifesto. USA Oxford University Press. Shelley, Mary (2004). Frankenstein. Pocket.