Sunday, September 5, 2010

What is human being?


I can’t even understand myself so I am not able to say anything about human being. Here I am trying to tell something which related with my views. An ancient maxim tells us that the proper study of man is man. It lies at the heart of the philosophical questions of man's place and destination in a world that is being discovered and transformed in the name of humanity, the highest of all values. The main goal of social development is the formation of human abilities and the creation of the most favorable conditions for human self-expression.
Nothing in the world is more complex or more perplexing than a human being.
Many sciences study people, but each of them does so from its own particular angle. Philosophy, which studies humanity in the round, relies on the achievements of other sciences and seeks the essential knowledge that unites humankind.
Idealism reduces the human essence to the spiritual principle. According to Hegel, the individual realizes not subjective, but objective aims; he is a part of the unity not only of the human race but of the whole universe because the essence of both the universe and man is the spirit.
In ancient philosophy man was thought of as a "small world" in the general composition of the universe, as a reflection and symbol of the universe understood as a spiritualized organism. A human being, it was thought, possessed in himself all the basic elements of the universe. In the theory of the transmigration of souls evolved by Indian philosophers the borderline between living creatures (plants, animals, man and gods) is mobile. Man tries to break out of the fetters of empirical existence with its law of karma, or what we should call "fate". According to the Vedanta, the specific principle of the human being is the atman (soul, spirit, selfhood), which in essentials may be identified with the universal spiritual principle—the Brahman. The ancient Greeks, Aristotle, for example, understood man as a social being endowed with a "reasoning soul".
In Christianity the biblical notion of man as the "image and likeness of God"( if God exists), internally divided owing to the Fall, is combined with the theory of the unity of the divine and human natures in the personality of Christ and the consequent possibility of every individual's inner attainment of divine "grace".
Proceeding from this dualistic understanding of man as a being belonging to two different worlds, the world of natural necessity and that of moral freedom. The first should study what nature makes of man, while the second is concerned with what he, as a freely acting being, does, can or should make of himself. Unlike that of the animals, man's bodily organization and sense organs are less specialized, and this is an advantage. He has to form himself, by creating a culture. Thus we arrive at the idea of the historical nature of human existence. According to Nietzsche, man is determined by the play of vital forces and attractions and not by the reason. The point of departure of the Marxist understanding of man is the human being as the product and subject of labor activity. ". . . The essence of man is no abstraction inherent in each single individual. In its reality it is the ensemble of the social relations."

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