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Platonic-aristotelian Notion Of Man
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1.1.4 The Contemporary Notion of Man
This is the period of dialogical
concepts. It attacks vehemently the Psychological and ontological
theories of man. Mounier, in his essay “le personalisme†(personalism)
condemned the psychoanalysts, idealists and the Empiricists, who
maintained either the concreteness or the spiritual substance of man
alone. Rather, he embraced incorporate existence or incarnate existence
of thought and body.
Other concepts are analyzed thus: economic man
(Marx), existent man (Heideggar), symbolic man (Cassirer), Utopic man
(Block), Problematic man (Marcel), Cultural man (Gehlem), A thinking
reed (Pascal), An image of God (Origin), Will of Power (Nietzsche),
Anguished man (Kierkegaard)5 etc.
We say then, that whether
Psychological or ontological, all human beings whether, he or she, white
or black, Christian or Moslem, is globally a person made up of four
indubitable fundamental elements: autonomy in being, self-consciousness,
communication, and self-transcendence. He is free and social. In
communication, he intersubjectivises with others in correspondence to
love, friendship etc. In self-transcendence, he climbs the ladder of
God. He meets the real absolute and eternal.
Nonetheless, Man as man,
as Higgins formulates, means nothing less than the fact that man is
also a moral being. He summarized man by the means of Aristotle’s four
causes: the material, formal, efficient, and final causes. These four
causes make the boldest attempt at satisfying every branch of study that
claim to have the concept man. Higgins sees man, in Aristotle’s sense,
as a unified whole, a complete substance formed by infusion of two
widely differing constituents. One of this is the material element, the
undetermined and determined part of him-his body.
…by union with a
formal or determined cause, this material element put life into a human
body, of which its end is a rational animal. This formal cause or soul
is a life principle, the absolute, internal reason where man performs
his vital action.6
As for theologians, the efficient and final causes
may be regarded as indispensable aspects of man. Augustine (St.), for
instance believed that our souls will never rest until, they find rest
in Him from whom they come.
1.1.5 Igbo Notion of Man
In every age, every culture around the world has a certain picture of man, vis-Ã -vis his essential nature.
Conceptually,
the Igbo equivalent meaning for “man†is “mmadu.†Dr. E. M.P. Edeh
gives an analysis of the concept mmadu (mma-di), meaning “good that
is.â€7 Implying that he shares in the being of his maker, the highest
good (God).
Another school of thought gives the analysis of “mmaduâ€
as “mma-ndu,†“the goodness of life.†Here, the concept “the good†is a
quality associated with man. He is considered the highest good of all
creatures. This concept has a profound implication for the Igbo. If
“man†(mma-ndu) is the greatest good,†it follows that for the Igbo, the
being of man is an indubitable fact since His life (ndu) is an issue
for him (man)8
Concisely, there is one indubitable truth about man:
There
is man. He is there, I am here. Man is a man in the world as J.F.
Douceel, noted of the trend of contemporary philosophy. Man does not
simply live in the world. He also made us live in it.9
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