HUMAN PERSONS

ARE ORIENTED
TOWARD THEIR
IMPENDING DEATH
What is the meaning of life?

"What is the meaning of life?", pertains to

the significance of living or existence in general.
The meaning of life as we perceive it is derived
from philosophical and religious contemplation
of, and scientific inquiries about existence, social
ties, consciousness, and happiness.
Socrates
•Great teacher in Athens
•Believed that knowing oneself is a
condition to deal with life’s problem
•Had two different way of teaching:
- The expository and Socratic method.
The first process is called ironic process
•a process that serves the learner to seek for
knowledge by ridding the mind of prejudices
and then by humbly accepting his lack of
information and insight.
The second process is the maieutic process
•The process of making a person realize the full
meaning of his thoughts that is employed after
the first process has cleared the mind of the
learner of ignorance, and then draws truth out
of the learner’s mind.
HAPPINESS
• For Socrates, for a person to be happy, he has to
live a virtuous life.
• Virtue is something to be taught or acquired
through education, but is rather it is merely an
awakening of the seeds of good deeds that may
lay dormant in the mind and heart of a person.
• It also means the fulfillment of moral duty of man
to himself and to others in his society.
• Practical knowledge means that one does not
only the rules of right living, but one lives them in
the real world and in everyday life.
• For Socrates, true knowledge means wisdom
which, in turn, means virtue.
Socrates’s major ethical claims are:

•Happiness is impossible without moral

virtue
•Unethical actions ultimately harm the
person who performs them more than the
people they victimize

Socrates believed that an unethical person is

week in character even in psychologically
unhealthy.
PLATO
According to Plato, universal and eternal
ideas are concepts that exist literally in the
heavens above men. Contemplation is very
important in the life of humanity because this
is the only available means for a mortal
human being to free himself from his space-
time- confinement to ascend to the heaven of
ideas and there communes with the immortal,
eternal, the infinite, and the divine truths.
Plato’s Theory of Immortality

According to Plato, the physical human

body is the source of endless trouble to
us by reason of the mere requirement of
food, and is liable also to diseases, which
overtake and impede us in the search of
true being: It fills us with love, lusts and
fears, and fancies of all kinds, and
endless foolishness.
ARISTOTLE
Realizing your Potential

For, Aristotle everything in nature seeks to

realize itself- to develop its potentialities
and finally realize its actualities. Actuality
refers to the complete and mature form of
a creature or thing. All thing have strived
toward their “end”.
Entelechy- a Greek word for “to become its
essence” . It also means that nothing happens by
chance.

Aristotle divided everything in the natural world

into two main categories: the nonliving things and
nonliving things.

For Aristotle, all things are destructible, but the

Unmoved Mover(God) is eternal, with pure
actuality or perfection, and with no potentiality.
Aristotle explained how an Unmoved Mover could
cause the motion of the world and everything in it
by comparing it to a beloved who “moves” its lover
by the power of attraction. The highest human
activity resembles the activity of the Unmoved
Mover. Just as the Unmoved Mover thinks only of
imperfect, we cannot think of perfection itself.
According to Aristotle, the most pleasant activity
for any living creature is realizing its nature;
therefore, the happiest life for humans is thinking
about the Unmoved Mover.
The Meaning of Life
Friedrich Nietzsche
Friedrich Nietzsche
Nietzsche’s first book, The Birth of Tragedy,
analyzed the art of Athenian tragedy as the product
of the Greeks’ deep and non-evasive thinking about
the meaning of life in the face of extreme
vulnerability.

The brilliance of Athenian tragedy, according to

Nietzsche, was its simultaneous awakening of both
perspectives in the observer. Referring to the
Greeks, Nietzsche fantasized, “ They knew how to
live!” Insofar as “morality,” it was based on healthy-
assertion, not- self abasement and the renunciation
of the instincts.
Arthur Schopenhauer
Arthur Schopenhauer

The essay of Schopenhauer begins with the

predicament of the self with its struggles and its
destiny: What am I? What shall I do with my life?
We have to be responsible for our own existence.
Each of us knows that each is a unique person,
but few of us have the energy, courage, or insight
to throw off the husks of convention and achieve a
sincere realization of their potentialities, and no
one can do that for us. However, unless we do
“become ourselves,” life is meaningless.
We consider ourselves part of the world, we
ignore profound reality that underlies it, the
noumenal reality, the thing-in-itself. In other
words, the reality we see in our eyes is not true
reality, rather, a deep reality exists which is the
true form, nature, and meaning of everything in
the world.
Martin Heidegger
 Martin Heidegger

In Heidegger’s analysis, human existence is

exhibited in care. Care is understood in terms of
finite temporality, which ends to death. Death is a
possibility that happens; all possibilities are
evaluated in this light, when ones lives with a
resoluteness, which brings unity and wholeness to
the scattered self. Eternity does not enter the
picture, for wholeness is attainable within
humanity’s finite temporality.
Care has a threefold structure:

• Possibility- Humanity gets projected ahead of itself.

Humanity constructs the instrumental world on the basis of
the persons’ concerns. Reality is viewed on what can happen.
• Facticity- A person is not pure possibility but one who has a
limited possibility; possibilities open to him at any time
conditioned and limited by circumstances. Man and reality are
understood in terms of the historical times the person lives in.
• Fallenness- Humanity flees from the disclosure of anxiety
to lose oneself in absorption with the instrumental world, or to
bury oneself in anonymous impersonal existence of the
mass, where no one is responsible . Humanity has fallen
away from one’s authentic possibility into an authentic
existence of irresponsibility and illusory security. In other
words, man withdraws from taking responsibility of himself
and the world around him.
Death is nontransferable. An individual must
die himself alone. Heidegger believed that
death is not accidental, nor should it be
analyzed. It belongs to humanity’s facticity.
Jean- Paul Sartre
Jean- Paul Sartre

Jean-Paul Sartre disagreed with Heidegger. For

him, death is not a possibility but the cancellation
of possibility. Sartre’s philosophy is considered to
be a representative of existentialism. For him, the
human person desires to be God; the desire to
exist as a being that has its sufficient ground in
itself ( en sui causa). This means that for an
atheist, since God does not exist, the human
person must face the consequences of this. The
human person is entirely responsible for his/her
own existence.
Sartre is famous for dualism:

•En-soi (in-itself)- signifies the permeable and

dense, silent and dead. The en-soi is absurd; it
only finds meaning through the human person, the
one and only pour-soi.
• pour-soi (for-itself)- the world only has meaning
according to what the person gives to it.
Compared with the en-soi, a person has no fixed
nature. To put it in a paradox: The human person
is not what he/she is.
Sartre’s existentialism stems from this principle: existence
precedes essence. Since a person exists, that is the
meaning of a person’s life. Freedom is therefore the very
core and the door to authentic existence. Authentic
existence is realized only in deeds that are committed
alone, in absolute freedom and responsibility, and which
therefore is the character of true creation. On the other
hand, the human person who tries to escape obligations
and strives to be en-soi (e.g., excuses such as “I was born
this way” ) is acting on bad faith (mauvaise foi). For
Sartre, there is no way of coming to terms with other that
does not end in frustrations. This explains why we
experience failure to resolve social problems arising frem
hatred, conflict, and strife.
Karl Jaspers
Jaspers resolutely opposed Nazism. He
was the first German to address the
question of guilt: of Germans and of
humanity, implicated by the cruelty of the
Holocaust.

Jaspers’s philosophy places the person’s

temporal existence in the face of the
transcendent God, an absolute
imperative. Transcendence relates to us
through limit-situation (Grenzsituation).
To live an authentic existence always requires
a leap of faith. Authentic existence is
freedom and God. Freedom alone opens the
door to humanity’s being; what he decided
to be rather than being what circumstances
choose to make him. Jaspers asked that
human beings be loyal to their own faiths
without impugning the faith of others.
Gabriel Marcel
For Marcel, philosophy has tension (the
essence of drama) and harmony (the
essence of music). Philosophy’s starting
point is a metaphysical “ disease”. The
search for a home in the wilderness, a
harmony in disharmony, takes place
through a reflective process that Marcel
calls secondary reflection.
Marcel’s Phenomenological Method
Primary Reflection- this method looks at the
world or at any object as a problem, detached
from the self and fragment. This is the
foundation of scientific knowledge.

Secondary Reflection- it is concrete ,

individual, heuristic, and open. This refection is
concerned not with the object but with
presences. It recaptures the unity of original
experience.