Philosophy who is man

We must, however, note here the position on this issue taken by Edward Burnett Tylor. He was, admittedly, one of the most distinguished of the British anthropologists. There is no intermediate stage, logical or neurological, between symbol ling and non-symbolling: an individual or a species is either capable of symbolling or he or it is not.

Instead of openly confessing his ignorance on the issue of the origin of symbolling, i. If both philosophy and science fail us in this matter, why not then accept the view given in the Scriptures that man learnt the names of things from God Himself and call it the divine theory of language. Even as scientists we are not to say that there are only perceptual symbols and completely ignore a whole class of symbols called the religious symbols.

Having acquired the capacity to use symbols a bit more freely and having built up a sizable working lexicon of these symbols, man started his journey away from the physical world merely a sensory world of the animals , created by the Lord, to a non-physical world, created by man himself as the Deputy of the Lord. Very briefly this new world of the Deputy is the world of, meanings and values; giving a broad classificatory description of it, it is the world of language, myth, art, religion, philosophy, and science.

It is however more convenient to call it the world of culture. Culture and symbols indeed are like soul and body to each other.

Much more important, however, is the fact that it is only through its symbolic dress that culture receives a tangible form so that it can be safely stored in libraries, galleries, museums, and places of worship. Soon, culture assumes a personality of its own, independent of man, its creator. Culture thus comes to change its position with man and claims to be creator of man.

The way culture is transmitted from one generation to another is the most wondrous of all the cultural phenomena. Nietzsche observed in his usual inclisive way that culture could be possessed by man alone for man alone is born as an unfinished animal. The human infant as compared to the infants of other animals is biologically much less formed as if it were born premature and certainly it is too much of a weakling to face the slightest blows of nature.

Moreover this creature has to go a long way before it can lay claims to be on its own - if ever it would! On the other hand the parents of this weakling are irresistibly attracted to it and extend to it the most affectionate care and love. This phase has been termed as the second gestation or the extra-uterine gestation. It seems as if the infant at the time of its birth was released from the biological confines of the mother only to be thrown into the socio-cultural confines of the world.

It has sometimes been said that most human animals move from the confines of one shell into those of another and never really are born, unless, of course, if they are helped through some kind of cultural maiuetics or spiritual midwifery.

It is a well-known fact that a child learns his native language in the shortest possible span of time. This is amazing! How does the child learn all this? The child starts being sensitized right from the early days of its birth by a deeply emotionalized inter-personal involvement with a number of persons around it.

The most important of these persons, of course, is the mother who starts teaching the child a new scheme of conditioned reflexes, soon to be developed into an elaborate system of symbols, not merely through the words of mouth but also through the soft and warm touches of her body, her hugs, her fondlings, her caresses, and her one and hundred kisses.

The language as if it were, was being injected into the child. As the child grows up through boyhood and adolescence right into adulthood this language stays with him and becomes the veritable part of his personality. It would not be for wrong to assert that the child gets enclosed for ever within the shell of its native language which it cannot possibly break through - unless it chances to be a Ghalib or an Iqbal.

It is exceedingly important to note here that the child imbibes its native culture through the same emotionally sensitized, subjectivized, internalized way as becomes available to it in learning the native language.

Culture and language scheme of symbols are so closely tied to each other that it is well-nigh impossible to imagine a culture without its peculiar language; nor is it possible to think of a language without its culture. To have a language without a culture is tantamount to having words without meanings, which makes no sense. Some leading modern psychologists, however, are of the view that the child learns the whole value and belief-system embodied in its culture much quicker than he learns the language.

The process of imbibing the culture they hold is comparatively more sensitized, more subjectivized and more internalized; than that learning the language. Language on the other hand, is a bit more of a cognitive and schematic affair.

The child internalizes all the cultural meanings and values of his milieu and they become real powerful ingredients of his personality. In other words the child gets snugly enclosed in a fully fortified, double-walled shell of language and culture for the rest of his life.

The notion of the second, i. The above process of acculturation through which every human child has to pass has led some American psychologist, notably Benedict Ruth and Margaret Mead, to advance their doctrine of cultural determinism. Gender Jan 04, Are gender roles and differences fixed, once and for, all by biology? Queerness Mar 05, Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Transsexual… it is safe to say that new ideas of gender and sexuality have broken into mainstream consciousness within the past few decades.

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The problem to which they address themselves is summed up in the question, What is man? It is true that man is a living being who produces tools, but it is equally true to say he is a living being who employs symbols, who knows of his own mortality, who is capable of saying No, who is a social being, and so on.

One definition cannot dispute the assumptions of another, for every particular aspect of man is isolated, and none of them is capable, from its own particular standpoint, of providing a notion of the whole man, concretely and as a totality.

In the pursuit of the question, What is man? As long as the relationship between these two questions— What is man? It is only on the basis of a distinct and established conception of man that a synthetic discipline will be able to draw together the data of the various partial sciences into an integral knowledge of man. The concept of man as a whole must be the premise of such a synthesis. Otherwise the synthesis would be one-sided, whether we were aware of it or not, for it would be undertaken on the basis of some specialized scientific pursuit, and man would accordingly be biologized, physicalized, sociologized, economicized, irrationalized, or something of the sort.

If man, divided into races and nations, creating disparate cultures, governing with his understanding and yet governed by the unknown, is as such the subject matter of science, why then should such distinct human concerns as happiness, the responsibility of individuals, the relationship between the individual and the collective, the sense of life, and the like, all be neglected?

But, on the contrary, this philosophy does not in any way conceive of man as a starting point, but looks upon him rather as an addition. Since its attitude is based upon the notion of man as a completion, its conception is necessarily one sided. It does not get to the heart of the matter; the most basic philosophical questions are excluded from its area of interest, and man is considered in isolation from fundamental philosophical problems.

Man can no more overlook the fact of his existence in the world than he can account for the world as a reality without including man. The gnosiological question as to whether and how the world can exist independently of man really presupposes man in the world, so that he can ask this question. Man is implicitly included in every conception of the world reality ; that this juxtaposition is not always clear is a source of frequent mystifications.

To posit the existence of man is to make a statement not only about man, but also about the reality outside of him: nature, out of which man developed and in which he exists, is in principle different from nature without man. If those who employ this definition do not concern themselves with its presuppositions, but simply place it within a scientific framework for the uses of biologists, chemists, embryologists, geneticists, and so on, this fact does not in any way speak out against philosophy, but rather is in its favor.

The above quoted definition is not false, but rather it becomes false the moment it reaches beyond its bounds. For it presupposes a totality or a system which explains man through something that is not man, that stands outside of him and is not by its nature bound up with him. Man is seen herein as a component of nature, subject to the laws of the natural world. But if be is solely a component of this totality that he has not created though he knows its laws and uses them for his own purposes , if processes penetrate him and the laws of nature govern him, and yet these things do not have man as a precondition, but merely impose themselves upon him, how is this fact to be reconciled with human freedom?

In such a case, freedom is merely a recognition of necessity. Sartre argues against this conception:. We must choose: man is first of all himself or first of all Other than himself. Heidegger starts out with Being in order to arrive at an interpretation of man.