Academy of St.

Joseph
SENIOR HIGH SCHOOL DEPARTMENT
Introduction to Philosophy of Human Nature
Maverick Jann M. Esteban

THE HUMAN CONDITION

It is nature which defines a human person, but it is through his or her condition
that the nature of the human person is revealed. Human condition is defined as the
inevitable positive or negative events of existence as a human being. Through human
condition, a person realizes how it is to be human. Which the three aspects of human
nature (i.e., somatic, behavioural, and attitudinal) defined or characterized the human
person, one will understand how to live according to this nature through human
condition.

Man as Freedom
According to the French philosopher Jean Paul Sartre, the human person has no
fixed nature – that his or her reality is his or her freedom. He claimed that the human
person has free will and he or she has to exercise this capacity because it is only in
choosing that the human person’s existence becomes authentic.

With using our free will or freedom, it will end up to phenomenological problem
which continuous to plague modern life: mauvaise foi literally “bad faith” or the habit
that people have of deceiving themselves into thinking that they do not have the
freedom to make choices for fear of the potential consequences of making a choice. Bad
faith occurs when we lie to ourselves in order to spare ourselves short term pain, but
thereby suffer from long term psychological impoverishment. We force ourselves to
believe something which we’re not really convinced by, because it’s easier. In
particular, Sartre believes that what we constantly lie to ourselves about is that we don’t
have other options, that we are not free.

Man as Being-for-itself
Sartre characterized the dimension of being as having consciousness. He stated
that consciousness is the knowing being in his capacity as being. Furthermore,
according to Edmund Husserl, a German philosopher, the concept of consciousness is
the consciousness of something. This means that consciousness posits a transcendent
being.
 Hence, two types of beings emerged: the being-in-itself and the being-for-itself.
Before characterizing these two beings in the technical language of Sartre, you might
have recognized that one of that being under scrutiny is your very being or the being of
man, while the other is the being of beings that do not have the capacity to know, or in
effect, do not have consciousness. (Take note niggas, the use of the term being in this
section I the general notion which some philosophers use to refer to entity in Greek, that
is, anything that is or anything that exist.) If you guessed that beings like tables or chairs
do not have consciousness, then you are correct.

The being-in-itself is a “what is.” This is the reason why it is the being of material
objects; without consciousness, they are explicitly made or an actuality which is solid or
opaque. The identity of the table as a table is the function as furniture – it has no other
possibilities of becoming something else because its being is already an absolute. As
stated, consciousness requires transcendence or surpassing itself; the table without that
consciousness, however, has no transcendence

Since consciousness is characterized with an essential structure of transcendence,

then it cannot coincide with itself in full equivalence as characterized like the being-in-
itself. It is the exact opposite of the being-in-itself because it is the decompression of
being. For example, your consciousness of this sentence is a consciousness not only of
the sentence but a consciousness that the object of your consciousness is this sentence.
This consciousness is only a presence when your consciousness is directed to (or for) it.
Hence the being-for-itself is the presence of consciousness to itself.