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BEINGS
INTRODUCTION
Philosophy, as a search for meaning, has only one obsession:
MAN
The Ionian Philosophers, Notably THALES, ANAXIMANDER, and ANAXIMENES, were:
..profoundly impressed with the fact of change, of birth and growth, decay and
death.
Coming-into-being and passing away these were the obvious and inescapable facts of
the universe.
To this assessment of Greek thought must be added the Greeks will power against
their ideal of moderation and their belief of divine jealousy, which drove them to
create their Olympin dream-world, the gods of which watch over him with
jealousy to see that he does not transgress the limits of human endeavour.
His answer to the primary composition of everything was
WATER
nothing that everything was moist, and that if water evaporated, it became either mist or air,
and if frozen, could become earth.
water is the one primal kind of existence and that everything else in the universe is merely a
modification of water.
The material cause to him not water nor any element but infinite, eternal and
ageless, the source of all the worlds.
This was air, for man and all things cannot live without it.
which he calls soul, both holds together and guides the living creature.
THE MOST IMPORTANT GREEK
PHILOSOPHERS
For him, mans body comes from this world of matter, but his reason comes from
universal reason or Mind of the World.
The being in human is an inner-self. This inner-self is divine, cannot die, and will
dwell forever with the gods. Only human beings can distinguish virtue, which is
knowledge, from ignorance, which is the root of moral evil. (Easton pp. 72 & 73)
The human being is so constituted that he "can" know the good. And, knowing
it, he can follow it, for no one who truly knows the good would deliberately
choose to follow the evil.
To him knowledge and virtue are one, in the sense that wise man, he knows
what is right, will also do what is right.
Socrates himself admits that he is ignorant, and yet he became the wisest of all
men through this self-knowledge.
The Soul The philosophy of Plato is that reality is spiritual in nature. Each man
has a soul that is chained to their body and it is freed at death.
Plato says that the proper purpose of the soul is justice. A just soul is rewarded
by God after death. The suffering someone has in life is caused by the evil
they did in a prior life.
The knowledge a person has is the soul remembering ideas. Plato believed
that ideas are eternal and true and that man cannot know ideas through
the senses because the senses deceive men.
Plato also believed that men can arrive at the truth through reasoning. He
believed that truth is eternal and absolute:
For man, when perfected, is the BEST of animals, but, when separated from LAW
and JUSTICE, he is the WORST of all.
Wherefore, if he have not virtue, he is the most unholy and the most savage of
animals, and the most full of lust and gluttony.
The passions are in themselves good; they become bad only when they go
beyond or defeat the purpose for which God has intended to them
To Augustine, virtue means the constant harmonizing and ordering of all the
activities of the human personality towards love under guiding inspiration of love.
The will of man is free. United to the question of the liberty of man is the problem
of evil.
Three kinds of evil can be distinguished:
metaphysical, physical, and moral,
each of them consists in a deficiency in being, a descent toward non-being.
Metaphysical evil is the lacking of a perfection not due to a given nature and
hence is not actually an evil. Under this aspect, all creatures are evil because
they fall short of full perfection, which is God alone.
Physical evil consists in the privation of a perfection due to nature; e.g., blindness
is the privation of sight in a being which ought to have sight according to the
exigencies of its nature.
The only true evil is moral evil; sin, an action contrary to the will of God. The cause
of moral evil is not God, who is infinite holiness, nor is it matter, as the Platonists
would have it, for matter is a creature of God and hence good. Neither is the will
as a faculty of the soul evil, for it too has been created by God.
The cause of moral evil is the faculty of free will, by which man
is able to deviate from the right order, to oppose himself to the
will of God.
By sinning man injures himself in his being; for he falls from what
he ought to be. As a result of this fall there exist the sufferings
which he must bear, such as remorse in the present life, and
the sufferings which God has established in the life to come for
those who violate the laws laid down by His will.
For Thomas Aquinas, the human is a paradox. As "rational animals", we are the only
species that straddles the divide between matter and spirit.
We absorb knowledge first through our senses, and the intellect gradually develops
through our bodily experiences and desires.
Beautiful things arouse our desire, which leads to the formation of concepts, the
awakening of understanding and the attribution of meaning.
Pico confronts the classic humanist question about what the dignity of humanity
is, he locates this dignity precisely in the human capability and freedom to be
whatever it wants to be
The greatest dignity of humanity is the boundless power of self-transformation.
In the Christian tradition, it is accepted and well-worn dogma that human beings
were created free by God and intended to be free and independent.
For Montaigne, man cannot know the divine. He remarks, Man cannot make a
worm, yet he will make gods by the dozens.
By honestly looking at ourselves, we can recognize what our true nature is, instead
of pretending to be something that were not.