Week-6 - Lesson - Fundamenta of Human Lfe - MAN
Week-6 - Lesson - Fundamenta of Human Lfe - MAN
TERESA COLLEGE
BAUAN BATANGAS
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Content
Foundations Of The Moral Life
l. MAN
a) The scholastics call man a rational animal.
b) Msgr. Fulton Sheen compares him to a three-level structure:
1st level is his body - through his senses, makes him conscious of the material
universe.
the second level is his soul also calls mind or psyche - makes him conscious of
other people and "other knowable things" such as the arts, sciences, philosophy,
and law.
3rd level is spirit - enables him to communicate with God.
c) Traditional philosophy presents the soul as composed of the intellect and the will.
d) To Teilhard de Chardin, Man is a phenomenon. "a very special phenomenon,” in fact, for "he is
a being knows, he is also a being who knows that he knows.”
e) To Martin Heideger, man is a dasein, a "being there,” part of this world and part of the next.
f) To Engelbert J. Van Croonenburg:
1. Man stands out in several ways:
a) He is raised above the abyss of nothingness.
b) He lives on the dividing line between the past and present and future.
c) He is embodied.
d) He is above all subhuman beings.
e) He "rises above the lower levels of his existence and reaches consciously
beyond himself into being of which he partakes and becomes more than he is.”
2. He is a being-in-the-world.
3. His vocation is "the perfecting of life and personality to the full measure to which he
has been destined. "
4. He is subject to pain and suffering which he should accept and attempt to find the
significance of in his life.
5. He is a being-unto-death.
6. He has a super-temporal dimension.
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Father Ruben J. Villote
“Sapagkat Kami'y Tao Lamang" is a song about our human condition. While it
acknowledges the moral primacy of conscience (kahit Diyos na ang may utos), it also
humbly accepts our human powerlessness over the dictates of our feelings and emotions
(damdamin din ang Siyang nasusunod). However, the song can be made to sound like an
act of surrender to our human weakness, an act of despair even over the impotence of man
to transcend himself (O, kay saklap ng buhay!).
The human condition is not really as bleak and bitter as the song would want us to
believe. If there are bleak and bitter cases of human misery, depravity, and other
overpublicized symbols of man's surrender to his weak and fallen human nature, there are
also brave and beautiful cases of human achievement, virtue and a thousand other
unpublicized symbols of man's triumphs over human weakness. But it is often our weak
and defeated side that we seem to want to glamorize—the unfaithful husband, the wayward
wife, the prostitute, the bandit, the married priest—and we try to get the audience to shed a
tear, hero-worship, and even emuemulate them for "being human" (sapagkat sila'y tao
lamang).
We don't seem to realize that being truly human is to proudly accept the fact that
we have the power to become the best thing in all creation precisely because it is the
human person, and no other, that God created in his own image (Gen. 2). To belittle this
fact is to say that man is only an animal, and that human society is a society of animals that
look like men, and men who look like animals. If this is what we call "human condition,"
then sapagkat kami'y tao lamang which means to reject the capacity of man to rise above
his human condition, is not a love song but a dirge.
But man is not tao lamang (only human) in the sense that he must always succumb
as a rule to his baser nature. Man is tao, yes, and he is proud of it because being tao
(human) means being lord, not the slave, of God's creation. He can be a slave if he wants
to but then, being a slave to money, power and his body means being less human.
Sapagkat Kami'y Tao Lamang therefore, should never be used as an excuse for
irresponsibility. Instead, it should be taken as a humble acceptance of the fact that man
alone (tao lamang), without his God, is bound to fail. "Without me," Christ said, "you can
do nothing" (John 15:5). For being merely human can be a boringly close-ended existence.
It begins today and ends tomorrow. Everything merely human exhausts itself, and even our
most exciting human experience of fulfillment leaves behind an aftertaste of sadness. And
yet the human heart reaches out for some more as if it is made to be happy with what is
here and now. And if it does not find it anywhere, it cries out, "O, kay saklap ng buhay.”
But this is what it feels to be merely human precisely because being such means
being alone without the consciousness of an inexhaustible Presence. This Presence is what
the Easter experience is all about. It puts man in the context of a Constant Living Presence
which makes him shout with joy, "Hindi na ako tao lamang sapagkat ang Diyos ay kasama
ko. " (I am no longer merely human because God is with me). This "theological" reflection
on the song may sound irrelevant to those who do not believe, but those who believe know
that it is true because they see it alive in stable and happy marriages, in joyous and
meaningful celibate lives, in honest and committed public service, in beautiful and lasting
friendship. These serve as symbols of the human possibility of being man alone and yet
also being-with-Someone to a point where one can say with conviction, "See, if I can do it,
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you can do it, sapagkat tayo'y tao nga pero hindi tao lamang!"
Happiness can be imperfect or perfect. Too many people have sought it in money and social
prestige or sensual pleasures and they have naturally become bitter or despondent. When will they
ever learn that true peace of heart is in the possession of God for all eternity?
l. Hedonism an ethical system which, in general, affirms pleasure as the chief good in life.
Its important kinds are:
a) Egoistic Hedonism the ethical theory which states that man seeks pleasure for his
own personal good. This theory was supported by Aristippus, Epicurus, and
Thomas Hobbes who have reduced the concept of morality to a mere pleasure-pain
basis.
b) Altruistic Hedonism or Universalistic Hedonism or Utilitarianism the ethical
theory which expresses that man desires pleasure not for his own interest but for
the common good or for the well-being and welfare of the greatest number of
people. This is also known as the greatest happiness principle. Bentham and Mill
are the most famous exponents of this theory.
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2. The Cynic Ideal comes from the school of Diogenes, one of the ancients, and tells that
the highest good is in the simple enjoyment of happiness.
3. Stoicism - of Zeno, another ancient philosopher. It teaches that happiness comes from
morality, the highest good.
4. Theistic - in general considered as the Christian ideal that held by Augustine, Anselm,
Thomas, to name a few which declares that God or the possession of God is man's
ultimate end and highest good.
5. Idealism - as enunciated by Kant, is that theory which believes the supreme created
good is the most perfect world, that is, where men are happy and desire to be happy.
6. Self-realization - is a theory with many variations. We present here that of Bradley -
who thinks that the end of every moral act is self-realization.
7. The libido - according to Freud, is the cornerstone of the problem of happiness and,
thus, there is no golden rule: every man must find out for himself how he can be
happiest in this world.
8. Authentic existence - is taken by the existentialist as the only way to happiness.
Kierkegaard exposes his view of it: to live in the present, being present to himself, as
against people who live only in memory (the past) or in hope (the future). He ushers in
what later existentialists would develop: man and historical becoming, a being caught
in the three ecstasies of time past, present, and future.
The answers of the philosophers mentioned to the question of what makes a man happy are
from Approaches to Ethics: *
l. Aristotle:
In the Nicomachean Ethics, a book in which Aristotle's critical mind dwells on the
problems of conduct, three prominent types of life are disclosed: (l) the life of enjoyment,
in which the good or happiness is identified with pleasure; (2) the political life, in which
happiness is identified with honor; and (3) the contemplative life, in which happiness
results from contemplation, the activity of man nearest to the activity of God, which is
contemplative.
Thus, for Aristotle, the third type is the best; the philosopher is the dearest to the
gods. But he hastens to add "in a complete life, for one swallow does not make a
summer nor does one day." A man cannot be blessed and happy in one day or a short time,
and he needs the other two types of life as well.
2. Epicurus:
An "epicurean" is generally understood to be a lover of pleasure and luxury. in this
sense, Epicurus has been really misunderstood. It is true he recognizes pleasure as "the first
good innate in us" and "to pleasure we return again," but he is discriminating as to the
choice of pleasures for it is not continuous drinkings and revellings, nor the satisfaction of
lusts, nor the enjoyments of fish and other luxuries of the wealthy table, which produce a
pleasant life, but sober reasoning, searching out the motives for all choice and avoidance,
and banishing mere opinions, to which are due the greatest disturbance of the spirit.
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Of all this the beginning and the greatest good is prudence. . . .2
3. St. Augustine:
This learned fifth century Christian philosopher , the most influential of his time,
presents in conversation form his ideas of happiness. In The Happy Life, St. Augustine
brings out the following ideas in his discussion with his mother Monica, his brother
Navigius, his son Adeodatus, and some relatives and pupils: tl
4. Thomas Hobbes:
He is an Englishman who lived during the year of the Armada. He
reminds one of Macchiavelli in his espousal of a strong central authority on
"men who are essentially egocentric and shortsighted," and of Galileo in his
metaphysics "based on the proposition that only matter and motion exist."
This short excerpt is from his Leviathan, a book on naturalistic philosophy.
5. Joseph Butler:
His most important work is Fifteen Sermons Preached at the Rolls
Chapel, in which he champions the ancient belief that "virtue consists in living
in accordance with nature." For him happiness does not consist in self-love but
in the disengagement and in benevolence, which is affliction for others.
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6. David Hume:
Drawing his inspiration from Newton, Hume applies his new knowledge on
moral topics. In An Enquiry concerning the Principles of Morals, he bases moral
rules on the principle of utility.
His idea of why an action, or sentiment, or character, is virtuous or vicious is
because it gives us pleasure or uneasiness.
7. Emmanuel Kant:
He is a formidable philosopher of the eighteenth and early nineteenth century. He
surveys the different ethical systems of the ancients and concludes that all these are
based on the question of what constitutes the Supreme Good.
To Kant, "the supreme created good is the most perfect world, that is, a world in
which all rational beings are happy and are worthy of happiness." He finds the ideal of holiness
"philosphically the most perfect... but as it is humanly unattainable it bases itself on the belief
in divine aid." It is the ideal of the Gospels, and contains the most potent motive — that of
happiness beyond this world.
8. Jeremy Bentham:
Leader of the "Philosophical Radicals.," this Oxford nineteenth century man presents
an ethics on the scientific basis, calculus-oriented, for correct decisions to be reached on
given circumstances. He is a believer of the principle of utility, which for him is the same
as the greatest happiness principle. In An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and
Legislation, Bentham talks, among other things. of the four sanctions or sources of
pleasure and pain: the physical. the political, the moral (or popular), and the religious.
1.Some kinds of pleasure are more desirable and more valuable than others
(such as mental over bodily pleasures).
2.The quality of pleasure, for as he says, "…Few human creatures would
consent to be changed into any of the lower animals for a promise of the
fullest allowance of a beast's pleasure… It is better to be a human
being dissatisfied than a pig satisfied; better to be a Socrates dissatisfied
than a fool satisfied. . ."
3.The utilitarian standard (which Mill considers the standard of morality) is not
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the greatest happiness of the agent, but of other people and the world
in general.
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remember a past which has had no reality, then we have the essentially unhappy
individual… For when an individual loses his hope, and then in-stead of taking refuge in
memory, continues to hope, then we have such a type. When an individual who loses his
memory, or who has nothing to remember, will not become a hoping individual, but
continues to become a man of memory, then we have one type of unhappiness. If thus an
individual buried himself in antiquity, or in the Middle Ages, or in any other period of time
so that this has an authentic reality for him, or if he lost himself in his own childhood or
youth, so that these things had an authentic reality for him, then he would not in a strict
sense be an unhappy individual. On the other hand, if I imagine a man who himself had no
childhood, this age having passed him by without attaining essential significance for him,
but who now perhaps by becoming a teacher of youth, discovered all the beauty that there
is in childhood, and who would now remember his own child-hood, constantly staring
back at it, then I should have an excellent illustration of this type of unhappiness. Too late
he would have discovered the significance of that which was past for him, but which he
still desired to remember in its significance. If I imagined a man who has lived without real
appreciation of the pleasures or joy of life, and who now on his deathbed gets his eyes
opened to these things, if I imagined that he did not die (which would be the most fortunate
thing) but lived on, though without living his life over again — such a man would have to
be considered in our quest for the unhappiest man.
The unhappiness of hope is never as painful as the unhappiness of memory. The man
of hope always has a more tolerable disappointment to bear ...
11. Francis Herbert Bradley:
He drew his inspiration from Hegel and used this in his revolt against traditional
English empiricism. For him the ethical end is self-realization. He proves this in the
following manner:
Morality implies an end in itself — we take that for granted. Something is to be
done, a good is to be realized. But that result is, by itself, not morality; morality differs from
art in that it cannot make the act a mere means to the result. Yet there is a means. There is not only
something to be done, but something to be done by me --I must do the act, must realize the
end . . . and if you consider them as end and means you cannot separate the end and the
means . In short, for morality, the end implies the act, implies self-realization . . . For if
pleasure be the feeling of self and accompany the act, this indicates that the putting forth of the
act is also the putting forth of the self.
12. Sigmund Freud:
He is primarily a psychoanalyst. One of his last works, Civilization and Its
Discontents, from which excerpts are given below, presents, as he sees them, the ethical
and cultural implications of psychoanalysis. It is timely to note here that he does not
consider religion as giving the perfect answer to the problems of perfect happiness.
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As we see what decides the purpose of life is simply the programme of the pleasure
principle ... and yet its programme is at loggerheads with the whole world. . . . What we call
happiness in the strictest sense comes from the (preferably sudden) satisfaction of needs which
have been damned up to a high degree, and it is from its nature only possible as an episodic
phenomenon. . . . We are so made that we can derive intense enjoyment only from a contrast and
very little from a state of things. Thus our possibilities of happiness are already restricted by our consti-
tution. Unhappiness 'is much less difficult to experience. We are threatened with suffering from three
directions: from our own body . . . from the external world . . . and finally from our relations to
other men.
It is no wonder if, under the pressure of these possibilities of suffering, men are
accustomed to moderate their claims to happiness . . . Reflection shows that the
accomplishment of this task can be attempted along very different paths. . . . But the most
interesting methods of averting suffering are those which seek to influence our own
organism. In the last analysis, all suffering is nothing else than sensation; it only exists in
so far as we feel it, and we only feel it in consequence of certain ways in which our
organism is regulated.
The crudest, but also the most effective among these methods of influence is the
chemical one — intoxication .. .
The complicated structure of our mental apparatus admits, however, of a whole
number of other influences . . . One may .. . hope to be freed from a part of one's sufferings
by influencing the instinctual impulses. The extreme form of this is brought about by
killing off the instincts, as is prescribed by the worldly wisdom of the East and practiced
by Yoga. . . . We follow the same path when our aims are less extreme and we merely
attempt to control our instinctual life.. .
Another technique for fending off suffering is . . . shifting the instinctual aims in such a
way that they cannot come up against frustrations from the external world. In this,
sublimation of the instincts lends its assistance. One gains the most if one can sufficiently
heighten the yield of pleasure from the sources of physical and intellectual work . . . such
as an artist's joy in creating, in giving his phantasies body, or a scientist's in solving
problems or discovering truths. . . . But their intensity is mild as compared with that
derived from the sating of crude and primary instinctual impulses; . . . (also) it is accessible
to only a few people. . . . And even to the few who do possess them, this method cannot give
complete protection to suffering.. .
. . . The next procedure . . . satisfaction is attained from illusions, which are
recognized as such, without the discrepancy between them and reality being allowed to
interfere with enjoyment. The region from which these illusions arise is the life of the
imagination; .. . at the head of these satisfactions through phantasy stands the enjoyment of
works of art. . . . Nevertheless the mild narcosis induced in us by art can no more than
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bring about a transient withdrawal from the pressure of vital needs, and it is not strong
enough to make us forget real misery.
Another procedure . . . regards reality as the sole enemy and as the source of all suffering,
with which it is impossible to live, so that one must break off all relations with it if one is
to be in any way happy. The hermit turns his back to the world and will have no truck
with it. But one can do more than that; one can try to re-create the world, to build up in
its stead another world in which its most unbearable features are eliminated and replaced by
others that are in conformity with one's own wishes. But whoever, in desperate defiance, sets
out upon this path to happiness, will, as a rule attain nothing. Reality is too strong for him. He
becomes a madman, who, for the most part finds no one to help him in carrying through his
delusion. It is asserted, however, that each one of us behaves in some respect like a
paranoid, corrects some aspect of the world which is unbearable to him by the construction
of a wish and introduces this delusion into reality . . .
. . . And how could one possibly forget, of all others, this technique in the art of living?
… I am, of course, speaking of the way of life which makes love the centre of everything,
which looks for all satisfaction in loving and being loved . . . one of the forms in which love
manifests itself — sexual love — has given us our most intense experience of an overwhelming
sensation of pleasure and has thus furnished us with a pattern for our search for happiness…
The weak side of this technique of living is easy to see…
. . . The programme of becoming happy, which the pleasure principle imposes on us, cannot be
fulfilled; yet we must not —indeed, we cannot — give up our efforts to bring it nearer to ful-
fillment by some means or other . . . Happiness, in the reduced sense in which we recognize it as
possible, is a problem of the economics of the individual's libido. There is no golden rule which
applies to everyone; every man must find out for himself in what particular fashion he can be
saved . . . It is a question of how much real satisfaction he can expect to get from the
external world, how far he is led to make himself independent of it, and, finally, how much
strength he feels he has for altering the world to suit his wishes. In this, his psychical
constitution will play a decisive part, irrespective of the external circumstances. The man who is
predominantly erotic will give first preference to his emotional relationship to other people; the
narcissistic man, who inclines to be self-sufficient, will seek his main satisfaction in his internal
mental processes; the man of action will never give up the external world on which he can try out
his strength. . . As a last technique of living . he is offered that of a flight into neurotic illness — a
flight which he usually accomplishes when he is still young. The man who sees his pursuit of
happiness come to nothing in later years can still find consolation in the yield of pleasure of
chronic intoxication; or he can embark on the desperate attempt of rebellion seen in a
psychosis
Religion restricts this play of choice and adaptation, since it imposes equally on
everyone its own path to the acquisition of happiness and protection from suffering …
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References
Prepared:
Checked: Approved:
Mr. Catalino L. Pormison Jr.
Mrs. Joy N. Reyes
__________________ ______________
Ms. Gina A. Siglos
Brian Jay U. Giman Department Head Dean
Instructor / Instructress
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