Topic: Man As Some Western Philosophers Philosophers See Him The study of man himself is called philosophical called philosophical anthropology anthropology.. Martin Buber says this study is unique in the sense that man is the subject as well as the t he object of knowledge. To him ...the philosophical anthropologist must anthropologist must stake nothing less than his real wholeness, his concrete self. And more: it is not enough for him to stake his self as an object of knowledge. He can know the wholeness of wholeness of the person and through it the wholeness of man only when he does not leave his subjectivity his subjectivity out out and does not remain as untouched observer. He must enter, completely and in reality, into the act of self-reflection, in order to become aware of human wholeness. The ancient philosophers perhaps were not aware of such sophistication when they pioneered into expressing their ideas and feelings at the contemplation of their world. Anaximander, like Anaximander, like THALES a philosopher from Ionia, the cradle of Greek civilization, claims “man was born from animals of another species, for while other animals quickly find nourishment for themselves, man alone needs a lengthy period of suckling, so that had he been originally as he is now, he could never have survived.” Socrates toys with the idea that man’s body comes from this world of matter but that his reason comes from the Universal Reason or Mind of the World. However, Socrates is more concerned with man as a moral being. Plato has Plato has shown his interest in man as knower and as possessor of an immortal soul. It remains for Aristotle, Aristotle, however, to defined man as a rational animal. His ideas on almost everything that concerns man have influenced Aquinas as well as philosophers beyond the middle Ages. To him, man is not the center of the universe. Man is only a part of it; it is the cosmos that is the focal point . This is Aristotle’s sosocalled “geocentric spherical system.” Augustine, Augustine, the fifth century Bishop of Hippo, is the first big name of the Christian era. He calls man the “great mystery.” He wonders “at that in man which cannot be understood as a part of the world as a thing among things.” Thomas Aquinas, Aquinas , the “angelic doctor,” expounds on expounds on the Christian belief in man as a creature of God, as a composite of body and soul, the soul having the elements or reason and will. Pico Della Mirandola, He was an intellectual who boasted of having studied all schools of philosophy. His best known work is On the Dignity of Man, the thesis of which is that man may make of himself what he wishes to be. Man is a “three chief zones of the created universe: the immaterial angels, the material but incorruptible heavenly bodies, and corruptible earthly bodies.” Niccolo Machiavelli was Machiavelli was a Florentine politician of the sixteenth century. But his famous work, The Prince, has become a handbook on power and its dynamics. Its widely held theme is the end justifies the means. This is evident from his aphorisms on the nature of man which come from this book and from another work, Discourses on Livy: Some of those aphorisms are: 1. 2. 3. 4.
All men are bad and ever ready to display their vicious nature, whenever they may find occasion for it. Men act right only under compulsion. The great majority of mankind are satisfied with appearance, as though they were realities, and are often even more influence by the things that seem t han by those that are. Men change master willingly, hoping to better themselves.
Marcus Aurelius – Aurelius – To To him, man does not do evil willingly. Epictetus – To him, men must find happiness in himself, not in outside circumstances he cannot control. He must fear of all the God within him. His favourite maxim is “bear and forbear”.
Boethius – To him man is “an individual substance of a rational nature”. Rene Descartes – Father of Modern Philosophy Distinguish between spirit and matter, between “thinking and extending substance. Thomas Hobbles – As a philosopher he considered knowledge empirical in origin and results. He is best remembered for his Leviathan a treatise on theory of government, as well as a philosophy of naturalism. Leviathan is in fact an artificial man with sovereignty as an artificial soul, and the pats and covenants as parts of man when God said “Let us make man”. Benedict Spinoza – A Dutch philosopher. For him God or nature is only substance. Though and matter are Gods infinite attributes and all finite thing (such as human minds and bodies) are only modes or states of the attributes of God. John Locke – He was sometimes referred to as “the intellectual ruler of the 18 th century because of the theories of knowledge and political life. David Hume – Hume is one of those persons disappointed in their life ambitions. He wanted literacy fame, but it eluded him all his life. For him, all knowledge comes from experience. Jeremy Bentham – His chief distinction is his being the founder of the school of philosophy known as Utilitarian. Briefly this means that the value of every act (a) derived from usefulness and (b) is for the greatest happiness for the greatest number of people. John Stuart Mill – He become a believer in Utilitarianism. Here, he admits there might be some pleasures that are “intrinsically higher than others; he hints the virtue may have a value apart from the good consequences of virtuous action, and finally, he gives conscience as a basic position in foundation of ethics. Arthur Schopenhauer – The world as will and Idea is his masterpiece. His theme here is that though “the world seems a vast collection of diverse objects spread out in space, it is really only a bl ind, struggling will. “ This, to him, can be known by intuitions, and is the basis for his et hics. TIMELINE
Socrates
(470 – 399 BC)
Thomas Hobbes
(1588-1675)
Plato
(428/7 – 348 BC)
Benedict Spinoza
(1632-1677)
Aristotle
(384 – 322 BC)
John Locke
(1632-1704)
Marcus Aurelius
(121-180 AD)
David Hume
(1711-1776)
Epictetus
(50-138 AD)
Immanuel Kant
(1724-1804)
Boethius
(480-524 AD)
Jeremy Bentham
(1748-1832)
Augustine
(354-430 AD)
Georg Wilhelm Fredrich Hegel
(1770-1831)
Thomas Aquinas
(1224-1274)
John Stuart Mill
(1806-1873)
Pico Della Mirandola
(1463-1419)
Arthur Schopenhauer
(1788-1860)
Rene Descartes
(1596-1650)
Martin Buber
(1878-1965)
Nicolo Machiavelli
(1469-1527)
Fredrich Nietzsche
(1844-1900)
3. Topic: Phenomenon of Man In The Shoes of the Fisherman, Jean Telemond, who is thinly-disguised portrait of Theilhard de Chardin, says, “Man is the only significant link between the physical order and the spiritual one. Without man the universe is a howling wasteland contemplated by unseen Deity…” Again: Man is a very special phenomenon. He is a being who knows, he is also a being who knows that he knows . . .” Pierre Teilhard de Chardin was born in France in 1881 and died in the United States in 1995. He was a Jesuit priest and a paleontologist, one of those involved in the discovery of the Peking Man in 1929. His masterpiece is The Phenomenon of Man. Here he tries to “reconcile Christian theology with the scientific theory of evolution.” His writings were suppressed during his lifetime. He was really a man ahead of his time. Teilhard state the book must not taken as metaphysics, nor as theology, nut only as science. He says the book is about man solely as a phenomenon, but covers the whole phenomenon of man. Here he reminds us of two things: 1. 2.
that nothing exist in pure isolation, and science, philosophy, and theology tend to converge the nearer they try to explain the whole man.
Teilhard point out two basic assumptions in the development of his theme 1. 2.
the pre-eminent significance of man in nature, and the organic nature of mankind.”
4.
To Huxley, Teilhard has affected a threefold synthesis, namely: 1. 2. 3.
2.
Pre-Life – which covers the stuff of the universe (principally energy and matter) and the within of things (existence and spiritual energy, and juvenile earth.) Life – which covers the advent life, its expansion, its complexity.
Of the material and physical world, of the world mind and spirit; Of the past with the future; and Of variety with unity, of many, with the one.
Huxley asserts Teilhard’s two positions: 1.
2.
“… that mankind is its totality is a phenomenon to be described and analyzed like any other phenomenon, and all its manifestations, including human history and human values, are proper objects for scientific study. His second, and perhaps most fundamental point is the absolute necessity of adopting an evolutionary point of view.”
Huxley concludes: We, mankind, contain the possibilities of the earth’s immense future, and can realize more and more of them on condition that we increase our knowledge and our love. That, it seems to me, is the distillation of The Phenomenon of Man. I would like to point put certain terms used by Teilhard, as explained by Huxley: 1. 2. 3.
The book reflects clearly the author’s evolutionary approach. It has four main parts: 1.
Thought - which discusses the birth of thought and the different stages toward homo sapiens and modern earth. Super Life – which talks of the spirit of the earth, the convergence of the person and the Omega Point, and man and the Ultimate Earth.
4.
5.
Noogenesis: gradual evolution of the mind. Cosmogenesis: gradual evolution of the cosmos. Hominization: denotes the process by which the original proto-human stock becomes (and is still becoming more truly human.) Noosphere: sphere of the mind and is opposed to biosphere which is the sphere of life. Convergence: denotes the tendency of mankind, during its evolution, to superpose centripetal on centrifugal trends, so as to prevent centrifugal
6.
differentiation from leading to fragmentation. Complexification: this concept includes the genesis of increasingly elaborate organization during cosmogenesis, as manifested in the passage:
from subatomic units to atoms, from atoms to inorganic and later to organic molecules; thence to first subcellular living units to cells to multicellular individuals to cephalized metazoan with brains to primitive men to civilized societies. He suggests: “For man to discover man and take his measure, a whole series of ‘sense’ have been necessary…” These “sense” are: A sense of depth, pushing back laboriously through endless series and measureless distances of time, which a sort of sluggishness of mind tends continually to condense for us in a thin layer of the past; A senses of number, discovering and grasping unflinchingly the bewildering multitude of material or living elements involved in the slightest change in the universe; A sense of proportion, realizing as best we can the difference and dimension, the atom from the nebula, the infinitesimal from the immense; A sense of quality, or of novelty, enabling us to distinguish in nature certain absolute stages of perfection and growth, without upsetting the physical unity of the world; A sense of movement, capable of perceiving the irresistible development hidden in extreme slowness – extreme agitation concealed beneath a veil of immobility – the entirely new insinuating itself into the heart of the monotonous repetition of the same things; A sense, lastly, of the organic, discovering physical links and structural unity under the superficial juxtaposition of succession and collectiveness. Keeping these “sense” in mind will serve to have a unified vision of man and an understanding of the main outline of this work: Pre-Life: Life: Thought, all leading to the Super-Life, in his
words, “a single and continuing trajectory, the curve of the phenomenon of man.”
