PHILOSOPHY OF HUMAN

BEINGS
 INTRODUCTION
Philosophy, as a search for meaning, has only one obsession:

MAN
The Ionian Philosophers, Notably THALES, ANAXIMANDER, and ANAXIMENES, were:
..profoundly impressed with the fact of change, of birth and growth, decay and
death.

Coming-into-being and passing away these were the obvious and inescapable facts of
the universe.

To this assessment of Greek thought must be added the Greeks will power against
their ideal of moderation and their belief of divine jealousy, which drove them to
create their Olympin dream-world, the gods of which watch over him with
jealousy to see that he does not transgress the limits of human endeavour.
His answer to the primary composition of everything was

WATER
nothing that everything was moist, and that if water evaporated, it became either mist or air,
and if frozen, could become earth.

water is the one primal kind of existence and that everything else in the universe is merely a
modification of water.

 The primary element was indeterminate

The material cause to him not water nor any element but infinite, eternal and
ageless, the source of all the worlds.

He talked the evolution of animals and of the origin of man.

He claims Man was born from animals of another species

 The primary element was determinate

This was air, for man and all things cannot live without it.

What makes a creature alive, he observes, is that it breathes. A breathy thing,

which he calls soul, both holds together and guides the living creature.
 THE MOST IMPORTANT GREEK
PHILOSOPHERS

For him, mans body comes from this world of matter, but his reason comes from
universal reason or Mind of the World.

The being in human is an inner-self. This inner-self is divine, cannot die, and will
dwell forever with the gods. Only human beings can distinguish virtue, which is
knowledge, from ignorance, which is the root of moral evil. (Easton pp. 72 & 73)
The human being is so constituted that he "can" know the good. And, knowing
it, he can follow it, for no one who truly knows the good would deliberately
choose to follow the evil.

To him knowledge and virtue are one, in the sense that wise man, he knows
what is right, will also do what is right.

the unexamined life is not worth living.

Socrates himself admits that he is ignorant, and yet he became the wisest of all
men through this self-knowledge.
 The Soul The philosophy of Plato is that reality is spiritual in nature. Each man
has a soul that is chained to their body and it is freed at death.

Plato says that the proper purpose of the soul is justice. A just soul is rewarded
by God after death. The suffering someone has in life is caused by the evil
they did in a prior life.
The knowledge a person has is the soul remembering ideas. Plato believed
that ideas are eternal and true and that man cannot know ideas through
the senses because the senses deceive men.
 Plato also believed that men can arrive at the truth through reasoning. He
believed that truth is eternal and absolute:

what is true today will always be true.

Plato believes in virtue is knowledge and the source of knowledge is virtue.

It is not abstract, but concrete knowledge, not theoretical but practical
knowledge
A man must know what is good so that he may do good
 Man is a Rational Animal

The function of a human being is to be good at acting in accordance with

reason. In other words to be good at (or do well at) rational activities makes
human beings happy, signifying that they have achieved their peculiar function,
according to Aristotle.

the function of man is an activity of soul which follows or implies a rational

principle,
 if this is the case, and we state the function of man to be a certain kind of life,
and this to be an activity or actions of the soul implying a RATIONAL PRINCIPLE,
and the function of a good man to be the GOOD and NOBLE performance of
these and if any action is well performed when it is performed in accordance with
the appropriate excellence: if this is the case, human good turns out to be activity
of soul in accordance with VIRTUE, and if there are more than one VIRTUE, in
accordance with the best and most complete.

Aristotle exercizing rational virtues/(excellences) is the peculiar function of man

which makes "man" good and happy. But practicing irrational vices is also
peculiarly human, resulting in bad and unhappy people. In Aristotle's statement
from The Politics, quote
 A social instinct is implanted in all men by nature, and yet he who first founded
the state was the greatest of benefactors.

For man, when perfected, is the BEST of animals, but, when separated from LAW
and JUSTICE, he is the WORST of all.

Wherefore, if he have not virtue, he is the most unholy and the most savage of
animals, and the most full of lust and gluttony.

The goal of human life is happiness. Happiness depends on ourselves.

happiness depends on the cultivation of virtue

 Each of the virtues is a state of being that naturally seeks its mean {Gk. [mesos]}
relative to us.
According to Aristotle, the virtuous habit of action is always an intermediate state between
the opposed vices of excess and deficiency: too much and too little are always wrong; the
right kind of action always lies in the mean. Thus, for example:

with respect to acting in the face of danger,

courage is a mean between
the excess of rashness and the deficiency of cowardice;

with respect to spending money,

generosity is a mean between
the excess of wastefulness and the deficiency of stinginess;

avoid extremes of all sorts and seek moderation in all things

Medieval Philosophy of Human
Being
 Virtue, which is the art of living rightly and well, has been defined by
Augustine as the order of love
A virtuous life is a dynamism of the will which is the dynamism of love, a
constant following of and turning towards love, while a wicked life is a
constant turning away from love.
 All things come from God and each has a specific purpose to fulfil in the all-
embracing plan of divine providence.

The passions are in themselves good; they become bad only when they go
beyond or defeat the purpose for which God has intended to them

To Augustine, virtue means the constant harmonizing and ordering of all the
activities of the human personality towards love under guiding inspiration of love.

The will of man is free. United to the question of the liberty of man is the problem
of evil.
Three kinds of evil can be distinguished:
metaphysical, physical, and moral,
each of them consists in a deficiency in being, a descent toward non-being.
Metaphysical evil is the lacking of a perfection not due to a given nature and
hence is not actually an evil. Under this aspect, all creatures are evil because
they fall short of full perfection, which is God alone.
Physical evil consists in the privation of a perfection due to nature; e.g., blindness
is the privation of sight in a being which ought to have sight according to the
exigencies of its nature.
The only true evil is moral evil; sin, an action contrary to the will of God. The cause
of moral evil is not God, who is infinite holiness, nor is it matter, as the Platonists
would have it, for matter is a creature of God and hence good. Neither is the will
as a faculty of the soul evil, for it too has been created by God.
 The cause of moral evil is the faculty of free will, by which man
is able to deviate from the right order, to oppose himself to the
will of God.

By sinning man injures himself in his being; for he falls from what
he ought to be. As a result of this fall there exist the sufferings
which he must bear, such as remorse in the present life, and
the sufferings which God has established in the life to come for
those who violate the laws laid down by His will.
 For Thomas Aquinas, the human is a paradox. As "rational animals", we are the only
species that straddles the divide between matter and spirit.

We absorb knowledge first through our senses, and the intellect gradually develops
through our bodily experiences and desires.

Beautiful things arouse our desire, which leads to the formation of concepts, the
awakening of understanding and the attribution of meaning.

Enriched with a deeper appreciation of the source of beauty and goodness,

understanding is transformed into love and our desire pivots back towards objects in
order to express this love
 Love, knowledge and goodness are inseparable. The goodness we perceive
derives from the fact that created beings participate in the goodness and love
of God.
We could say desire is the current that creates invisible connections among
beings within the being of God.
This means that to be good is to flourish and fulfil one's potential as a particular
kind of being.
Just as a washing machine is good when it does what it was designed to do, so
a human is good when he or she lives as humans are created to live.
Aquinas uses Aristotle to explain all this philosophically, but from a doctrinal
perspective the human made in the image of God relates to the Christian
understanding of the Trinity.
 The more we deny our most fundamental desire for beauty and
goodness that Aquinas calls God, the more insatiable our
appetites become.

He assumes Aristotles distinction between the potential (man

can be perfected) and the actual (God Who is already
absolutely perfect)
 human being with her thoughts, intelligence, and imagination becomes a "small
universe," or parvus mundus.
The individual human being is the microcosm, that is, the individual human being
can express the whole of creation and can express the whole of the divine. If you
want to find God then look into your own soul for you perfectly express the whole
of divinity.
A human being could become as low as an animal or, though intellect and
imagination, become equivalent to God, at least in understanding.

Pico confronts the classic humanist question about what the dignity of humanity
is, he locates this dignity precisely in the human capability and freedom to be
whatever it wants to be
 The greatest dignity of humanity is the boundless power of self-transformation.

Above everything else, the greatest human capacity is to be able to express or

understand the whole of the human experience; in this light, the principle
freedom granted to humanity by God is freedom of inquiry.

In the Christian tradition, it is accepted and well-worn dogma that human beings
were created free by God and intended to be free and independent.

However, in early Christian, medieval and Renaissance thought, this freedom

was lost when Adam and Eve sinned by disobeying God. Pico, however, is
arguing that the principle virtue of humanity is that they are always and ever will
be free to be whatever they want and express the divine in whatever way they
can.
 the hallmark of being human this capacity of "freedom."
humanity is the only part of creation that has the freedom to will its own
changes, that is, human beings are the only part of creation that can change
themselves of their own free will
Pico did not accept the Christian view of eternal punishment or reward. Eternal
damnation, then, is illogical, for it argues that the human soul doesn't have the
power to reform itself even after death.

Man may make of himself what he wishes to be

 He is considered to be the founder of Modern Skepticism, famously exclaiming
What do I know?
Montaigne believed that one of the biggest problems with society is that people
believe they have knowledge when they really dont.
The only thing that is certain is that nothing is certain. He points out the
difficulty of knowing things for certain, when the world is constantly changing

He believed that knowledge of oneself is more important than attempting to

understand the fundamental nature of reality (i.e. metaphysics).
As human beings, what matters to us is the particulars of life.
 Montaigne opposes the belief that humans are somehow superior to other
animals. He believes that it is presumptuous and arrogant of man to say that he
has a divine nature in contrast to other animals that are looked upon as mere
beasts.
Montaigne, seeing the constant fighting going on around him, does not consider
man divine, but more cruel than any beast.
He points out that in some ways animals are in fact superior to us, for example,
having better senses of smell, sight and hearing
He brings up the good point that since there are some animals who dont have
one of the five senses we have, perhaps there are senses that other animals have
that we dont have. In this way, Montaigne encourages us to be humble. He
writes, When I play with my cat, who knows if I am not a pastime to her more
than she is to me?
 For Montaigne, mans arrogant nature is displayed most by his stubbornness when
it comes to matters of religion.

For Montaigne, man cannot know the divine. He remarks, Man cannot make a
worm, yet he will make gods by the dozens.

By honestly looking at ourselves, we can recognize what our true nature is, instead
of pretending to be something that were not.