Abstract:
The main objective of human beings as absolute entities is related to our urge for survival, because in a material sense we are not self-supporting, but completely dependent on what nature offers us. In earlier times survival instincts meant that we lived as hunters, guided by our functional antennas (hunger, thirst, fatigue, sexual feelings, etc.). Today, this activity can be described as economically motivated, basically including everything that can be assumed to be serviceable, so it must therefore be construed very broadly – not merely providing in our primary needs, but everything else that is necessary for this. As our human society becomes more complex and more prosperous, secondary activities to attain the primary necessities of life become more comprehensive. In our present day and age they are even so multi-faceted that we can now expect to be occupied with such activity for perhaps the greatest part of life, possibly even without being truly aware of it on a daily basis.We might well ask ourselves whether it is a good thing for people as absolute entities to seize every opportunity to raise the level of prosperity all over the world so that a great many people benefit from it. What will be the consequences? We would do well to wonder whether some limit needs to be set. Unrestricted growth of the world population and unbridled growth of prosperity may well mean that one day there will be a price to pay. The crucial question is when the critical limit is reached and what factors affect this; resourceful management can shift this limit infinitely. However, these are forces that are currently not under our control. Perhaps new worldwide macro-organisational structures will be able to provide a solution. But once again, should human beings as absolute entities be happy with this? Or will such a development take place at the expense of other interests of absolute entities? Worse still, will it interfere to such an extent with one or more of the conditions for our existence that it must be slowed down or even stopped?
Machine summary:
com Abstract The main objective of human beings as absolute entities is related to our urge for survival, because in a material sense we are not self-supporting, but completely dependent on what nature offers us.
Philosophical Anthropology: a consistent overall vision of man and his world This definition can largely be derived from a study of the basic tenets of the relationship between philosophy and the sciences, in particular the philosophy of man and the social sciences in Models of Man, A Phenomenological Critique of Some Paradigms in the Human Sciences by Jim Dagenais, from which, in a nutshell, the following hypotheses are borrowed: “The thesis maintained is that the human sciences, as sciences, must attempt to reduce the meaning of man to the control of the scientific presuppositions which found each science, and that, in consequence, each scientific model can and must pretend to universal exclusiveness.
Dagenais and Chinese philosopher Chan Fai Cheung (CUHK) “Max Scheler, in his Man’s Place in Nature, maintains that there are three most fundamental ideas of man in Western history: man understood as a rational animal in the Greek philosophy of Plato and Aristotle; as a creature created by God in His image from the Jewish-Christian tradition, and finally as the recent product of animal evolution.
Although his “phenomenological destruction” of the metaphysics is only directed to the Western tradition, his critique of the metaphysical basis of the very conception of human nature is, in my opinion, trans- cultural”, in the words of Dr. Cheung Chan Fai, professor of philosophy at the Chinese University of Hong Kong in his Human Nature and Human Existence – On the Problem of the Distinction Between Man and Animal.