Human Persons Are

Oriented Toward Their

Impending Death
Objectives
1. To reflect on the meaning of one's life.
2. To explain the meaning of one's life.
[Link] enumerate the projects or goals one wants to
accomplish in life.
A. Socrates
Socrates, a great teacher in Athens around 469 BC, believes
that knowing oneself is a condition to solve the present
problem. Socrates in Clouds is the head nof the school; the
work of the school comprises research and teaching.
Socrates has two different ways of teaching. His expository
method that answers the student's direct or implied
questions, fills the void ignorance with information,
proceeds by analogy and illustration, or clears the ground
for exposition by demonstrating that some of the beliefs
hitherto held by the student are irreconcible other beliefs
or assumptions. His "tutorial" or well-known Socratic
method is: (1) to asses by questions the character of the
student; and (2) to set him problems, exhort him to reduce
each problem to its constituent elements, and criticize the
solutions that he offers.
The first process is also called ironic process, a
process that serve the learner to seek for knowledge
by ridding the mind of prejudices and then by
humbly accepting his ignorance. The second process
is the maieutic process that is employed after the
first process has cleared the mind of the learner of
the 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 not something to be taught or acquired through education,
but rather it is merely an awakening of the seeds of good deeds
that lay dormant in the mind and heart of a person. Knowing what
is in the mind and heart of a human being is achieved through self-
knowledge. Practical knowledge means that one does not only
know the rules of right living, but one lives them. Hence, for
Socrates, true knowledge means wisdom, which in turn, means
[Link]' major ethical claims were: (1) happiness is
impossible without moral virtue; and (2) unethical actions harm the
person who performs them more than the people they victimize.
Someone in the grip of corruption can no longer be satisfied and
endlessly seeks new pleasures. In addition, the individual's intellect
and moral sense are impaire. Socrates, thus, saw someone steeped
in vice as lacking the freedom, self-control, and intellectual clarity
that are needed to live happily. The immoral person literally
becomes a slave to his desires.
B. Plato
Contemplation in the mind of Plato means that the mind
is in communion with the universal and eternal ideas.
Contemplation is very important in the life of humanity
bacause this is the only available means for a mortal
human being to free himself from his sapce-time
confinement to ascend to the heaven of ideas and there
commune with the immortal, eternal, the infinite, and
the divine truths. Human beings, therefore, are in
constant contemplation of the truth, since the things we
see here on earth are merely shadows (or appearance) of
the real truth (reality) in the world of ideas; the good,
since here on earth, ghe body is inclined to evil things;
the beauty, since the things we see here on earth are not
fair or foul to others.
Plato's Theory of Immortality
According to Plato, the 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 after true being: it fills
us full of love, lusts and fears, and fancies of all kinds,
and endless foolishness.
C. Aristotle
Realizing Your Potential
For Aristotle, everything in nature seeks to realize itself--- to
develop its potentialities and finally realize its actualities. All things
have strived toward their "end". Aristotle called this process
entelchy, a Greek word for "to become its essence." Aristotle has
much more to say about change. Change takes place in time and
space. Since space and time are infinitely indivisible, Aristotle
analyzed the notion of infinity. Entelechy means that nothing
happens by chance. Nature not only has a built-in pattern, but also
different levels of being. Aristotle divided everything in the natural
world into two main categories: nonliving things and living things.
At the top of the scale is the Unmoved Mover (God); pure actuality
without any potentiality. All things in the world are potentially in
motion and continuously changing. Said Aristotle, there must be
something taht is actual motion and which is moved by nothing
external. He called this entity the Unmoved Mover.
For Aristotle, all things are destructible but the
Unmoved Mover is eternal, immaterial, with pure
actuality or perfection, and with no potentiality. The
Unmoved Mover has neither physical body nor
emotional desires. Its main activity consits of pure
thought (Nous). As such, it is a mind that is perfect
and its object of thought can only be itself. Our
highest faculty is the reason, which finds its
perfection in contemplating the Unmoved Mover.
Aristotle explained how an Unmoved Mover could
cause motion of the world and everything in it by
comparing it to a beloved who "moves" its lover by
the power of attraction. The object of love is the
cause of a change in the lover, without itself being
changed.
Similarly, God is the object of the aspirations of other
subtances but is not Himself susceptible to change or
motion. As the "form" adult is in the child directing it
toward its natural end, the Unmoved Mover is the
form of the world moving it toward its divine end.
Accordjng go Aristotle, the most pleasant activity for
any living creature is realizing ots natute; therefore,
the happiest life for humans is thinking about the
Unmoved Mover.
Meaning of life
A. 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. Tragedy, according to
Nietzsche, grew from his unflinching recognition and the
beautification, even the idealization, of the inevitability
of human suffering. The brilliance of Athenian tragedy,
According to Nietzsche, was its simultaneous awakening
of both perspectives in the observer. Although ostensinly
reminding its audience of the senseless horrors of human
existence, tragedy also provided the means to deal with
them.
For Nietzsche, kore than any other philosopher, the
new physics of energy enters into thinking, not only
in his spectacularly energetic writing style but also in
his very notion of human nature. On his way to the
goal of self-fulfillment, Nietzsche encounters perilous
difficulties. The individual has to liberate himself
from environmental influences that are false to one's
essential being, for the "unfree man" is "disgarce to
nature."
B. Arthur Schopenhaure
The essay of Schopenhaure 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
of our own existence. Schopenhauer, as an admirer of
Kant, utilized Kant's distinction between the noumenal
and the phenomenal realms to explain the source of
human ignorance. There is the world of experience and
inclination, and then there is the world-in-itself, which is
Will. For Kant, the Will is essentially rational and
presupposes freedom. As noumenal, however, it can
neither be experienced nor known. Schopenhauer
departs from Kant both in denying thr rationality of the
Will and in claiming that we can have experience of the
thing-in-itself as Will
For Schopenhauer, the Will is neither peculiar to human
agents, nor does each agent have his or her own Will.
There is but One Will, and it underlies everything. Every
being in the phenomenal world manifests the Will in its
own way: as a natural force, as instinct or, in our case, as
intellectually enlightened willing. Schopenhauer's Will is
ultimately without purpose, and therefore it cannot be
satisfied. An animal is born, it struggles to survive; it
mates, reproduces, and dies. Its offspring do the same,
and the cycle repeats itself generation after generation.
Following the Four Noble Truths of Buddhism,
Schopenhauer contends that all of life is suffering.
Suffering is causes by desire, and we can alleviate
suffering, as the Buddhists taught, by "putting an end to
desire."
C. Martin Heidegger
In Heidegger's analysis, human existence is exhibited in
care. Care is understood in terms of finite temporarily,
which reaches wigh death. Death is a possibility that
happens; all possibilities are evaluated in this light, when
one lives with a resoluteness, which brings unity and
wholeness is attainable within humanity's finite temporality
(Falikowski 2004)
Care has a threefold structure:
a. Possibility
Humanity gets projected ahead of itself. Entities that are
encountered are transformed merely as ready-to-hand for
serviceability and out of them. Humanity constructs the
instrumental word on the basis of the person's concerns.
b. Facticity
A person is not pure possibility but factical possibility: possibilities open to
him at any time conditioned and limited by circumstances (e.g., hisgorical
situation, race, and natural endowments). Heidegger speaks of
"throwness," that is, a person is thrown into a world and exists in his/her
situation. A person's situation as a finite entity is thrown into a world
where he/she must project his/her possibilities not disclosed by
theoretical understanding but by moods.
c. Fallenness
Humanity flees from the disclosure of anxiety to lose oneself in absorption
with the instrumental world, or to bury oneself in the 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. Inauthentic existence,
thus, is scattered and fragmented.

Death is non-transferable. An individual must die himself alone (being-

unto-death). Heidegger believes that death is not accidental, nor should
be analyzed. It belongs to humanity's facticity (limitations).
D. Jean-Paul Sartre
Sartre's philosophy is considered to be a
representative of (atheistic) existentialism. For
Sartre,the human person disires to be God; the
desire ro exists as a being that has its sufficient
ground in itself (en sui causa). This means tthat 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 his dualism:
a. en-soi ( in-itself)
Signifies the permeable and dense, silent and dead.
From them comes no meaning, they only are. The en-
soi is absurd, it only finds meaning only through the
human person, the one and only pour-soi.
b. 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.
The person is nothing else but that what he makes of
himself. The person is provided with a supreme
opportunity to give meaning to one'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 thos way" or "I grew up in a bad environment ")
is acting on bad faith (mauvais foi). Sartre reflects
that when someone looks at other people, they
become objects.
E. Karl Jaspers
He was the first German to address the question of guilt:
of Germans, of humanity implicated by the cruelty of the
Holocaust. He concluded that caution must be exercised
in assigning collective responsibility since this notion has
no sense from either the judicial, moral, or metaphysical
point of view (Falikowski 2004).Jasper'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). In the face of sickness, unemployment,
guilt or death, we are at the end of our line. At the limit,
one comes to grief and becomes aware of the
phenomenon of one's existence.
Once involved in limit-situations, a lonely individual has
"togo through these alone." Meaning, the decision that
one makes as how go face these situations are his/her
own and only his/her own.
Authentic existence (existenz) is freedom and God:
Freedom alone opens the door to humanity's being;
what he decides to be rather than being with
circumtances choose to make him. In freedom, the
person becomes aware of God as never before.
Freedom reveals itself as a gift from somewhere
beyond itself. Freedom without God only leads to a
person's searching for a substitute to God closer to
oneself. Usually, he himself tries to be God.
F. Gabriel Marcel
Marcel's Phenomenological Method
a. Primary Reflection
This methods looks at the world or at any object as a
problem, detached from the self and fragment. This is
the foundation of scientific knowledge. Subject does not
enter into the object investigated. The data of primary
reflection lie in the public domain and are equally
available to any qualified observer.
b. Secondary Reflection
Secondary reflection is concrete, individual, heuristic,
and open. This reflection is concered not with object but
with presences. It recaptures the unity of original
experience. It does not go against the date of primary
reflection but goes beyond it by refusing to accept the
data of primary reflection as final.