PHILOSOPHY

OF MAN

ELENA KAREN G. HERMONO BSN II-1

Man
The world tends to view man in one of two idolatrous ways. o Materialism sees man as composed of nothing more than material components. His intellectual, emotional, and spiritual aspects are nothing but products of his material nature acting according to the rules of physics and biology. Implications: Man is not responsible for his behavior. The environment is to blame for unacceptable behavior. (Leads to emphasis on social programs, big government) Man is not distinguishable from the other material of creation. Therefore, he has no dignity or inherent worth. Animals (or even plants) have the same inherent worth as people. Man's identity is not in any way related to God. Therefore, man is in some sense ultimate, which is idolatrous. o Idealism sees man as essentially a spiritual being, and his physical body is foreign to his essence. The body is nothing but a shell for the spirit or the intellect. Implications: Man's body is neglected. Deeds done in the body do not pollute the essence of the person. Male/female identity is a biological accident. o The Christian view holds these two aspects - the material and the spiritual - together in perfect harmony. But the Christian view goes beyond that. The Bible presents man in the proper context of the Creator/creature relationship. o Man is created and sustained by God. Gen. 1:27, Acts 17:25,28 o Man is a person and is therefore capable of making moral choices. o Man is made in the image of God. Gen. 1:27 The image of God is the key to man's identity. o Man is God's representative. Gen. 9:6 o Man is a picture of God in some respects. Gen. 1:26-31 o Christ, the God-man, is the perfect representative of what it means to image God. 2 Cor. 4:34, Col. 1:15 As a result of the fall, God's image in man is corrupted but not lost entirely. Ps. 58:3, Rom. 5:12, Rom. 8:7,8, 1 Cor. 2:14 Is man basically good or basically evil? o o o o God's image is corrupted in every aspect of man's being. God's image is not lost entirely. Gen. 9:6, James 3:9-12 God restrains sin through the operation of common grace. Gen. 20:6, Rom. 2:14,15 God's image is renewed through salvation in Christ. Rom. 8:29, Col. 3:9-10

The Christian view of man has implications. o Treatment of the weak and defenseless o The proper place of self-esteem o Critique of behavior o Critique of constructivist educational theories Aristotle defined man as the "rational animal." Plato and the medieval described other-worldly souls trapped in a bodily prison. Shakespeare dramatized man as an aspiring but foolish mortal, defeated by a "tragic flaw." Thomas Hobbes described a mechanistic brute. John Locke is sometimes referred to as the intellectual ruler of the eighteenth century because of his theories of knowledge and political life.

David Hume note that all men possess benevolence which he asserts is the basis of each moral judgment.

Immanuel Kant saw man as a blind chunk of unreality, in hock to the unknowable. Georg Wilhem Friedrich Hegel saw a half-real fragment of the state. Victor Hugo saw a passionate individualist undercut by an inimical universe.

Friedrich Nietzsche saw a demoniacal individualist run by the will to power. Martin Heidegger uses the word dasein for man. Dasein which means existence in ordinary discourse, literally means a there (da) and being (sein) therefore a being-there and refers to mans conscious, historical existence in the world, which is always projected into a there beyond its here...

John Dewey saw a piece of flux run by the expediency of the moment. Rene Descartes formulate his Cogito, ergo sum. (I think, Therefore I am).He distinguished between spirit and matter, between thinking and extending substances.

Pico Della Mirandola works On the Dignity of Man, the thesis of which man may make of himself what he wishes to be. Man is a part of the there chief zones of the created universe: the immaterial angels, the material but incorruptible heavenly bodies, and corruptible earthly bodies.

Sigmund Freud spoke of an excrement-moulding pervert itching to rape his mother. Benedict Spinoza said that God or nature is the only substance. Thought and matter are Gods infinite attributes, and all finite beings (such as human minds and bodies) are only modes or states of the attributes of God.

PERSON
is a human being, or an entity that has certain capacities or attributes associated with personhood.

Prior to the advent of Christianity, the word "persona" (Latin) or "prosopon" (Greek) referred to the masks worn by actors on stage. The various masks represented the various "personae" in the stage play, while the masks themselves helped the actor's voice resonate and easier for the audience to hear. In Roman law, the word "persona" could also refer to a legal entity.

In his work, De Trinitate, Tertullian became the first person recorded by history to use the word in a quite different way: to signify a being that is, at least in principle, complete, autonomous and fully responsible for his own acts. He not only adopted and adapted "person" to theological use, he also was the first to use the words "Trinity" (Latin: trinitas) and "substance" (substantia) in relation to God. He was the first to speak of three persons in one substance (Latin: una substantia et tres personae). Just as modern physicists have given strict technical meaning to a word like "color" in order to explain the inner workings of the quark, Tertullian gave strict technical meaning to the words "person", "substance" and "trinity" to explain the inner workings of the Christian Godhead. His work was meant to combat a Christian heresy called Modalism, which taught God worked in three different modes, or powers, but was not Himself "three" in any important sense. The mystery of the dispensation is still protected, which distributes the Unity into a Trinity, placing in their order the three Persons the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. - Tertullian, (Against Praxeas 3)

Tertullian thereby launched the modern understanding of the word "person." The modern meaning originates in the Christian theological explanation for how God exists in Himself - God is three Persons. Because Christians see mankind as being in the "image and likeness of God" (Genesis), thinking of God as three "Persons" meant we could also think of men as "persons" and, for that matter, angels as well. Observe, then, that when you are silently conversing with yourself, this very process is carried on within you by your reason, which meets you with a word at every movement of your thought ... Whatever you think, there is a word ... You must speak it in your mind ... Thus, in a certain sense, the word is a second person within you, through which in thinking you utter speech ... The word is itself a different thing from yourself. Now how much more fully is all this transacted in God, whose image and likeness you are?...

Before all things God was alone ... He was alone because there was nothing external to him but himself. Yet even then was he not alone, for he had with him that which he possessed in himself that is to say, his own Reason. ... Although God had not yet sent out his Word, he still had him within himself ... I may therefore without rashness establish that even then, before the creation of the universe, God was not alone, since he had within himself both Reason, and, inherent in Reason, his Word, which he made second to himself by agitating it within Himself. - Tertullian, (Against Praxeas 3)
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As can be seen, Tertullian's explanation depends not only on existence of Reason and Word within the Godhead, but also on the relationships between them. This aspect of "person" continued to be emphasized throughout the centuries of subsequent discussion. According to this understanding, a person is (1) that which possesses an intellect and a will, (2) defined in part by relationships. Since there is only one God, every Person of the Godhead is fully God. The only thing which distinguishes the three Persons of the Godhead is the relationships: Father to Son (Begetting to Begotten), Son to Spirit (Begotten to Breathed, or spirated), and Father to Spirit (Begetting to Breathed, or spirated).

PHILOSPHY: In philosophy, the word "person" may refer to various concepts. According to the "naturalist" epistemological tradition, from Descartes through Locke and Hume, the term may designate any human (or non-human) agent which: (1) possesses continuous consciousness over time; and (2) who is therefore capable of framing representations about the world, formulating plans and acting on them. Others have proposed different concepts including: According to Taylor, the problem with the naturalist view is that it depends solely on a "performance criterion" to determine what is an agent. Thus, other things (e.g. machines or animals) that exhibit "similarly complex adaptive behaviour" could not be distinguished from persons. Instead, Taylor proposes a significance-based view of personhood: The criteria for being a person... are designed to capture those attributes which are the subject of our most humane concern with ourselves and the source of what we regard as most important and most problematical in our lives.

Harry G. Frankfurt The philosopher Harry G. Frankfurt writes that, "What philosophers have lately come to accept as analysis of the concept of a person in not actually analysis of that concept at all." He suggests that the concept of a person is intimately connected to free will, and describes the structure of human volition according to first- and second-order desires:

Besides wanting and choosing and being moved to do this or that, [humans] may also want to have (or not to have) certain desires and motives. They are capable of wanting to be different, in their preferences and purposes, from what they are. Many animals appear to have the capacity for what I shall call "firstorder desires" or "desires of the first order," which are simply desires to do or not to do one thing or another. No animal other than man, however, appears to have the capacity for reflective self-evaluation that is manifested in the formation of second-order desires. According to Nikolas Kompridis, there might also be an intersubjective, or interpersonal, basis to personhood: * What if personal identity is constituted in, and sustained through, our relations with others, such that were we to erase our relations with our significant others we would also erase the conditions of our self-intelligibility? As it turns out, this erasure... is precisely what is experimentally dramatized in the science fiction film, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, a far more philosophically sophisticated meditation on personal identity than is found in most of the contemporary literature on the topic."

Other philosophers have defined persons in different ways. Boethius gives the definition of "person" as "an individual substance of a rational nature" ("Natur rationalis individua substantia"). Peter Singer defines a person as being a conscious, thinking being, which knows that it is a person (self-awareness). Philosopher Thomas I. White argues that the criteria for a person are as follows:(1) is alive, (2) is aware, (3) feels positive and negative sensations, (4) has emotions, (5) has a sense of self, (6) controls its own behaviour, (7) recognises other persons and treats them appropriately, and (8) has a variety of sophisticated cognitive abilities. While many of White's criteria are somewhat anthropocentric, some animals such as dolphins would still be considered persons. Some animal rights groups have also championed recognition for animals as "persons".