what are the views of philosphers on the freedom of man like voltaire,rousseau,karl marx,abrahm lincoln?

Answer 1

VOLTAIRE-"French writer, satirist, the embodiment of the 18th-century Enlightenment. Voltaire is remembered as a crusader against tyranny and bigotry. Compared to Rousseau's (1712-1778) rebelliousness and idealism, Voltaire's world view was more skeptical. His great contemporary thinker Voltaire disliked, but both of their ideas influenced deeply the French Revolution. In 1761 Voltaire wrote to Rousseau: "One feels like crawling on all fours after reading your work."
"Liberty of thought is the life of the soul." (from Essay on Epic Poetry, 1727)"

ROUSSEAU - "In 1750 Rousseau won the Academy of Dijon award for his Discours sur les sciences et les arts (Discourse on the Sciences and the Arts, 1750), and in 1752 his opera Le devin du village (The Village Sage) was first performed. In his prize-winning discourse and in his Discourse on the Origin and Foundation of Inequality Among Mankind (1755; trans. 1761), he expounded the view that science, art, and social institutions have corrupted humankind and that the natural, or primitive, state is morally superior to the civilized state. The persuasive rhetoric of these writings provoked derisive comments from "the French philosopher Voltaire, who attacked Rousseau’s views, and subsequently the two philosophers became bitter enemies."

KARL MARX - "Marx' philosophy hinges on his view of human nature. Along with the Hegelian dialectic, Marx inherited a disdain for the notion of an underlying invariant human nature. Sometimes Marxists express their views by contrasting “nature” with “history”. Sometimes they use the phrase “existence precedes consciousness”. The point, in either case, is that who a person is, is determined by where and when he is — social context takes precedence over innate behavior; or, in other words, one of the main features of human nature is adaptability. Nevertheless, Marxian thought rests on the fundamental assumption that it is human nature to transform nature, and he calls this process of transformation "labour " and the capacity to transform nature labour power. For Marx, this is a natural capacity for a physical activity, but it is intimately tied to the active role of human consciousness:

A spider conducts operations that resemble those of a weaver, and a bee puts to shame many an architect in the construction of her cells. But what distinguishes the worst architect from the best of bees is this, that the architect raises his structure in imagination before he erects it in reality. (Capital, Vol. I, Chap. 7, Pt. 1)
Marx did not believe that all people worked the same way, or that how one works is entirely personal and individual. Instead, he argued that work is a social activity and that the conditions and forms under and through which people work are socially determined and change over time.

Marx' analysis of history is based on his distinction between the means / forces of production, literally those things, such as land, natural resources, and technology, that are necessary for the production of material goods, and the relations of production, in other words, the social and technical relationships people enter into as they acquire and use the means of production. Together these comprise the mode of production; Marx observed that within any given society the mode of production changes, and that European societies had progressed from a feudal mode of production to a capitalist mode of production. In general, Marx believed that the means of production change more rapidly than the relations of production (for example, we develop a new technology, such as the Internet, and only later do we develop laws to regulate that technology). For Marx this mismatch between (economic) base and (social) superstructure is a major source of social disruption and conflict.

Marx understood the "social relations of production" to comprise not only relations among individuals, but between or among groups of people, or classes. As a scientist and materialist, Marx did not understand classes as purely subjective (in other words, groups of people who consciously identified with one another). He sought to define classes in terms of objective criteria, such as their access to resources. For Marx, different classes have divergent interests, which is another source of social disruption and conflict. Conflict between social classes being something which is inherent in all human history:

The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles. (The Communist Manifesto, Chap. 1)
Marx was especially concerned with how people relate to that most fundamental resource of all, their own labour power. Marx wrote extensively about this in terms of the problem of alienation. As with the dialectic, Marx began with a Hegelian notion of alienation but developed a more materialist conception. For Marx, the possibility that one may give up ownership of one's own labour — one's capacity to transform the world — is tantamount to being alienated from one's own nature; it is a spiritual loss. Marx described this loss in terms of commodity fetishism, in which the things that people produce, commodities, appear to have a life and movement of their own to which humans and their behavior merely adapt. This disguises the fact that the exchange and circulation of commodities really are the product and reflection of social relationships among people. Under capitalism, social relationships of production, such as among workers or between workers and capitalists, are mediated through commodities, including labor, that are bought and sold on the market.

Commodity fetishism is an example of what Engels called false consciousness, which is closely related to the understanding of ideology. By ideology they meant ideas that reflect the interests of a particular class at a particular time in history, but which are presented as universal and eternal. Marx and Engels' point was not only that such beliefs are at best half-truths; they serve an important political function. Put another way, the control that one class exercises over the means of production includes not only the production of food or manufactured goods; it includes the production of ideas as well (this provides one possible explanation for why members of a subordinate class may hold ideas contrary to their own interests). Thus, while such ideas may be false, they also reveal in coded form some truth about political relations. For example, although the belief that the things people produce are actually more productive than the people who produce them is literally absurd, it does reflect the fact (according to Marx and Engels) that people under capitalism are alienated from their own labour-power. Another example of this sort of analysis is Marx' understanding of religion, summed up in a passage from the preface to his 1843 Contribution to the Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right:

Religious suffering is, at one and the same time, the expression of real suffering and a protest against real suffering. Religion is the sign of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people.
Whereas his Gymnasium senior thesis argued that the primary social function of religion was to promote solidarity, here Marx sees the social function as a way of expressing and coping with social inequality, thereby maintaining the status quo."

ABRAHAM LINCOLN - LOL, I've already written to much, go here instead of me copying and pasting ;) http://www.lincolnportrait.com/common_sense_intro.asp

Answer 2

This is very complicated you know. I can tell you a little about Rousseau. He was about during the French Revolution and wrote 'The Social Contract'. In simple terms here goes.

There are 2 wills, the general will and the particular will. The particular will is the personal view of a citizen. For example deciding what to have to eat which should not afferct others in the group. The general will is the will of all which is best for the group as a whole. By the way this is extremely simplified.

In matters of importance for example if the local council wanted to build a supermarket in your town and what was best for the community would be to have it in an area where there was plenty of parking spaces, this would be the general will. Any citizen who then did not conform to the general will, which they should do as the general will is always the correct answer to an important problem, would not be free, They would be a slave to their particular will and be nothing more than 'stupid limitless animals'.

The legitimate state, according to Rousseau would not make a descision that would harm a citizen and thus the citizen has a duty to the state. If an individual does not abide by the general will then they can be forced to do so in order to make them 'free and noble'.

Answer 3

That HAS to be the most difficult question to answer I have seen in this "Ask the World" thing.

I'd have to think about this to answer it and it would probably take more room than I have letters for. My only problem is, calling Lincoln a "Philosopher" since he was anything BUT a philosopher... so I'd have to toss his name out before answering the question. What say you rephrase this question and include someone like Plato or Socratese and dump Lincoln from the list.

Answer 4

What a fantastic tribute to your descendant President Lincoln, my other favorite in addition to President Clinton and President Obama, on this historical day. I just finished watching the inauguration, and felt hope floats once again. Thank you for your beautiful tribute. And how blessed you are to be a Lincoln; I have always admired him immensely.

Answer 5

ask em na