Human Nature: Dignity, Misery, and Insoluble Riddles
The Human Being: Dignity or Misery?
The man, dignity or misery? In Pico della Mirandola, we find this famous passage: “The Supreme Craftsman made man, creation of an indefinite form, and placed in the center of the world. I talk this way: ‘You have no fixed place or a face of your own, or a particular trade, Oh Adam! For the job, the picture of the job, and what you wish for yourself, you shall have and possess through your own decisions and choices. For others, nature is contracted within certain prewritten laws, whereas you are placed in the center of the world so that your eyes may comfortably look around you at everything in this world that is here. Neither heaven nor earth did you, neither mortal nor immortal, for you are, as a modeller and sculptor of yourself, shaped as you prefer. You can degenerate to the bottom with the brutes; you can realize the pace of divine things by your own decision… Whatever you cultivate, that will blossom and bear fruit within you.'”
In Nietzsche, we find the misery of man: “Man is the sick animal, the sickest of all, more uncertain, changeable, and indeterminate than any other animal—no doubt about it, the diseased animal is: Where does this lead? True, he has also dared, challenged, and confronted more than all other animals together: the great experimenter with himself, the unfulfilled and unsatisfied, the last contested domain of animals, nature, and gods. He is the still undefeated forever, the eternal future, who no longer finds any rest in his own strength, harassing himself, who so relentlessly gnaws his future as a thorn in the flesh of all this: How can this brave and rich animal also be the most exposed to danger, the most deeply and enduringly sick of all sick animals?”
-Conclusions: Mystery and Enigma. Gabriel Marcel says that problems may arise and also be solved because one can distance oneself enough from them. The mystery itself is wrapped by things that surround us so that we are immersed in them. Perhaps man is a mystery for man, an insoluble riddle, precisely because he is too close, because he is inside. It would be one of those issues that are better not to raise. But can we give up what we are? The Greek Heraclitus said: “I have looked at myself,” and Socrates: “Know thyself.”
- Main difficulties of the mystery of man:
- 1) First, man is highly individualized. The plants and even animals are virtually interchangeable; there seems to be only the species itself. In the case of man, this is not so: there appears to be a man, but only men, that is, each is special and irreplaceable.
- 2) The animal, when born, is biologically determined. Not so man, who, as the German anthropologist Gehlen states, is a being of grace, i.e., an incomplete, unfinished animal. So man has to create himself, supplying his own shortcomings and his adaptation to the environment. So, if we want to talk about man in general, we have to address his history, or his biography if we speak of one in particular.
- 3) Man, finally, is too rich to be locked into one idea. He continually changes and evolves; he has infinite facets, infinite aspects that are inexhaustible. And these aspects seem to contradict one another; hence, every idea of man can resist an opposing view.