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The Place Of Man In Aristotle: The Basis Of Man’s Life Crisis
CHAPTER ONE -- [Total Page(s) 5]
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Thanks to the scholastics who inherited this Aristotelianism,
especially Thomas Aquinas who presents man as a man by the actuality of
spirituality, existing form that informs an organic body and makes it a
human body.19Thomas Aquinas unearthed and developed this “mutual
affinity†between body and soul as that co-opting for the natural
repugnance to death. Man, for Aristotle, then is not only a rational
subsistence but also: an ‘unam’ per se, composed of essence, and ‘to be’
of body and soul, of substance and
accident.20
In the modern era, Rene Descartes believed strongly that he can be more
certain of himself as a “thinking thing†than as a body. This
understanding of man as an automata or mechanism creates sharp dichotomy
in his ‘cogito ergo sum’, between mind which can outlive the bodily
extension. Leibnitz followed this pattern of thought.
The
contemporary thinkers conversely hold against this metaphysical
parallelism of the exaggerated dualism. Hence Marxists proffered their
‘dialectical materialism’ as in defense of the body. Hence, the body
contrary to Aristotle’s view becomes the ‘elan vitale’, instead of the
spirit, which now is turned into a product of the creative body and its
instrument. Thus, man was rated a brute animal. The existentialists,
among whom Sartre is a chief exponent confirmed this materialistic
outlook on man and upturned man’s centre of gravity to his body. For
him, it is the body that gives man his individual species to be what it
is.21 He is Aristotle’s most drastic opponent. He defined man as
ontologically pure spiritual being. Sartre remarks thus: The concept of
man is spirit and no one ought to allow himself to be deceived by the
fact that he can also walk on two legs.22
It is categorically clear
that the consciousness he projects is not the same kind with
Aristotle’s. Human body is only ‘an encumbrance and ballast for man’s
spirit’. Man for him is anguished by the body limits. Also, in the
contemporary era thinkers who are exaggerated realists, like L. Klages,
maintain that man is made up two substances, spiritual and corporeal but
the elements are always at war with each other portraying the spirit as
the enemy of biological and psychosomatic life. Thus he asserts more
seriously that:
spirit benumbs life which is essentially becoming and
moving, thus two powers are in mutual conflict here which were
originally similar and this conflict is not merely factual but
inevitable. And yet both of them are supposed to build up the person,
the personal ego, which is the carrier of the spirit and life.23
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