CHAPTER VII

This chapter will elaborate the philosophical condition of the human person as a social
being. Grounded on the premise that human person, not even that of the hermit in the
wilderness, is possible without a world which directly or indirectly testifies to the presence of
other human person. Human person as an active entity and the world which comprises the
nature, environment and several impinging structures surrounding the person will be dealt here
with.

Sociality as ordinarily conceived of as persons being together justifies the Aristotlelian

Translations of “Zoon Politikon” by “animal socialis. Persons before considered as Political is by
its very nature social. This philosophical valuations of the human person from the ancient is the
same basis of standard translations of St. Thomas Aquinas in medieval time:homo est naturaliter
pliticus, id est socialis-Man is by nature political, that is social. The foundation of any impinging
structures to human person is no less than captured by his being social. The political perspective
of Greeks was taken from the unconscious substitution of the social. To much emphasis on
politics or the art of governance, the Greeks paved the way to the lost of the original social
character which must be taken in the first place.
Significantly, the word social is roman and has no equivalent meaning to the Greeks. Not
that Plato or Aristotle is denying the fact that specific human condition is to be lived with the
company of men, but the concern of the Greek thinkers is to primordially and substantially point
out that fundamental human condition is to be erected in the perspective of the individual owing
to their predecessor Socrates. In fact, to perpetuate and exposed the human person in its own
very nature is a silent and subtle proof of one’s sociality. The political nature of man is thus social
in origin. Sociality is a direct proposition of the natural tendency of man to be associated with
others. It is a general meaning of the natural and fundamental condition of the human person.
This natural condition of sociality is a direct opposition made by the premise of the human
capacity for political organization. The person as social in character found its places basically in
the home and the family. The rise of this person as political arises the condition of city-state to a
nation state achieved in the pre-condition of the person as body-politic. The attainment of the
character of a wider concept of sociality created the polis-a society of man-kind governed by a
recognized, duly-constituted authority in the ordinance of the laws. The human person then is
distinguished into tow orders of existence. 1.) What belongs to him naturally and fundamentally
as a person in sociality and 2.) What is communal belonging to him as body politic.
These sharp distinction shows the natural capacity for human person to be social at the
same time creates an organized political units because he is a body politic. As a body politic,
impersonal structures are created that destroy the basic and fundamental drive of being social.
A private, personal and social being is lost with the introduction of communal, impersonal and
political culture outlined by the body politic enforced by several structures – kinship, fraternity,
friendships, sorority, clubs, guilds, associations, unions, and governments.
This distinguished the human person in the private realm and a public one.

ON SOCIAL BEING
This section is allocated to present the condition of human person in a social perspective
by elucidating Martin Heidegger’s philosophy. This is of pure convenience for he has gathered
the leading threads of Kierkegaaard, Nietzche, Dilthey and other existential phenomenologist,
and woven them into a more unified pattern.
Heidegger proposes for himself the goal of elucidating the meaning Being, in general-
Beings, as it is everywhere and in all things. His philosophical investigation seeks to discover the
meaning of being from the analysis and description of human being.
The trouble with all previous metaphysics, Heidegger says, is that it attempted to
understand human being from the categories of nature. In contrast to a long metaphysical
tradition, Heidegger proposes something analogous to a Copennican Revolution in Philosophy:
he intends to understand Being, in general, from the fact of human being.
Western Philosophy initiated by Descaretes ha song overarching tradition for almost
three centuries when he made the proposition, COGITO ERGO SUM, basic to his philosophizing,
arriving at the fact that I am from the fact of thinking.
For Heidegger, we must invert this order we must understand the COGITO from the SUM;
we understand man’s being we cannot understand his thoughts (cogitationis) or his thinking.
Further, as an existential phenomenologist he gives importance to the primary concern
of existence than essence. A belief upheld that existence precedes essence revolting against two
long tradition with that of Aristotle and the Schoolmen and partly with his predecessors. He
wanted to pursue the study of the human person still under the spell of metaphysics (ontology)
but by investigating the concrete lived experience of man as to here and now. It is a metaphysics
of man that in being he is concerned with his own being. Man seeks to understand his own being;
and this search itself is a fact that characteristics profoundly his being. And when he poses the
problem of Being, in general, he ought to begin from this being who is concerned about his own
being, if that philosophy of the human person is to achieve a new concreteness.
In his description of human existence (person), Heidegger resolutely avoids the use of
terms “man”, “human”, “human being”, which might carry traditional connotations of definite
human nature. Instead he uses the word “Dasein” a German philosophical term to designate
existence, which in his use also meant to preserve its literal meaning of “being-there” (seinda).
Human person is there. Being There. That is, human person always exist in a situation, he comes
to consciousness of himself as a concrete lived experience (reduction to phenomenology) in the
world, surrounded by factual conditions which he himself has not created. This is also a fact of
unreconciled events, estrangement that requires a great project of that being to proceed from
the basic and fundamental existence in the world to be concern with his own being towards
making the essence. By analyzing the human structures of existence, man’s existence is prior to
his essence; or more exactly, man existence is his essence in return. What Hedegger means is
that it is human existence itself, facing its task, transcending its past and projecting itself toward
its future, that transforms and recreates the structures, social and factual, surrounding it, and
which philosophers previously have too easily taken as being human itself.

Human Person Existence: Primary Features of Description

a) Human Existence is not existence in general
This existence seek to a pure – a pure transcendental Ego as the subject of all
experience.

b) Human Existence is personal

This existence is always mine, yours, his etc. This is an existence located primary to
the self-subjective which is also objective. The given by Isolating.
c) Human Existence is Social
This existence is an entrance into the domain of Dasein- Mr. Being There, in a
situation in the world.
d) Human Existence is Banal
a. Existence of the human person in the ordinary concrete lived experience
dominated by contradictions, unreconciled events and estrangement.
e) Human Existence if a mood
a. Primary concern of this existence is that it is confronted definitely by fear,
anxiety, tranquility or joy. The world is given to human person in feeling.
f) Human Existence is in state of anxiety
a. Existence in the state of anxiety gives the human person the first clue to an
authentic existence possible. Anxiety provides banal existence, curiosity and
Inquisitiveness.
g) Human Existence is Dispersio
a. In the state of anxiety (angs), The person busies himself with diversions and
distractions from himself and his own existence: distracted from distraction by
distraction.
h) Human Existence is to be with
 a. The person to exist is to be “in” the world and to be “with” others. Dasein is
always da-sein i.e. is always There (da), in a situation, and is always Being-with
(Mitsein) others.
i) Human Existence is made concrete of Care
a. The primary feeling of anxiety reveals the essential trait of care. Anxiety that
flows from the fundamental trait of man is characterized by the fact that he is
concerned about his own being. This separates him from all other beings in the
universe, and a care is simply the concretion of this quality in our everyday
existence.

ON POLITICAL BEING
The natural constitution of man being social is necessary fulfillment and realization of a
basic nature, i.e. the body politic. Naturally called as a state where the government directly or
indirectly expresses this natural composition should be worth investigating. It is in and through
the state where the basic nature is achieved. Without the realization of this natural capacity in
the state, the human person would lapse into some form of perverted existence. The human
person in a wretched existence would not create a wholesome and normal habitat in the society
and it is among people that he finds happiness and self-fulfillment. It is evident that a state is a
creation of nature, and that man is by nature a political animal. He who by its own nature and
not by mere accident is without a State is therefore having a wretched nature.

CHAPTER VIII
The two major classes of laws
The two major classes of laws are God’s law and Human law.
1. God’s law is given different names according to the perspective being considered. God’s
law is called Divine law when we consider God as the source and author of the law. When
we view in terms of duration in time and existence, the law of God is an Eternal law. In
terms of the manner a law is promulgated or made known, God’s laws are manifested in
the natural laws.
Divine Law emanate directly from God such as the Ten Commandments handed to Moses
and other moral directives written in the Bible.
Eternal Law is God’s plan and providence toward His creations. This law is from eternity,
which means its time and existence is only known to God. Seemingly, there is an
inescapable concept which logically and morally suggests that God and Eternal law are
one and the same since both are eternal. This concept may establish some connections
with the thoughts of Paul Gleenn in his description of the eternal law: “God, decreeing
 from eternity to create the world for an end (which is himself), eternally plans and directs
all thins toward that end. Thus there is from eternity a plan of Divine Wisdom as director
of all acts and movements and this is the Eternal Law.
The eternal plan, direction and guidance of God toward His creation is known to the
human person through his faculty of reason. God commands the natural course of things and
such command is appropriately addressed to human beings who is endowed with intellect,
rational freedom and authority to rule the world. St. Augustine’s definition of eternal law reflects
God’s command to preserve the natural order of things, and implies the significant participation
of the human persons in this divine exhortation. St. Augustine, a scholastic philosopher, defines
eternal law as “Divine Reason and Will, commanding that the natural order of things be preserved
and forbidding that it be disturbed,” Glenn adds that “eternal law extends to all acts and
movements in the universe.” These thoughts lead us to the reality known as natural law.
Natural law is simply understood as the law which governs the acts and movements of
human beings and all other things in the universe. Natural law governs human acts (those that
proceeds from a deliberate free will) and rules the movements of non-rational beings (brutes
and plants) and inanimate or non-living things.
That part of natural law which governs human acts is called moral law, and that which
rules the movements of the universe and the non-rational and inanimate objects therein is the
physical law.
Moral law as a rule of conduct is prescriptive, that is it lays down acts that are permitted
and prohibited and it bestows rights and obligations. On the other hand, physical law is
descriptive in the sense that things or events happen in a regular sequence such as the law of
gravity, the laws of planetary motion discovered by Johannes Kepler, and Gregor Mendel’s law
on genetics.
The difference between moral and physical law was thoroughly discussed by George
Berkley in his treaties “Passive Obedience.” It explains thus:
“We ought to distinguish between a two-fold signification of the terms law of nature,
which words do either denote a rule or precept for the direction of the voluntary actions of
reasonable agents, and in that sense the imply a duty, or else they are used to signify any general
rule which we observe to obtain in the works of nature, independently of the wills of men, in
which sense no duty is implied.”
Aristotle presented a teleological explanation about natural law. The term teleological
comes from the Greek telos which means purpose. The word was conceived by Christian Wolff,
and teleological being an adjective means purposive or purposiveness. In the said teleological
explanation, the law of nature affirms that every kind of thing or being by its nature has an end
or purpose. The various ends or purposes of things form a unified and harmonious system.
Human beliefs, practices, laws and actions are right if they agree with the purposes of nature; if
they contradict the ends or purposes of nature, they are wrong. Aristotle then applied this
explanation to the nature of the human person. He observed that the “law of nature requires
conduct that makes social life possible and enables the individual to flourish within it.”
2. Human Law, conversely is the law made by human persons vested with authority to
legislate. Human laws are those enacted by the State or by the Church. The laws of the
State are known as civil laws, whereas the laws enacted by the church are ecclesiastical
laws..
Human beings, as subjects of the natural law and ultimately by the eternal law, are bound to
enact laws that are in accord to the laws of nature and to the eternal law of God. To preserve the
natural order and to the avoid disturbing them, it is a moral requirement that human laws must
be rooted or based from the natural law, and ultimately in the Eternal Law of God.
St. Thomas Aquinas defines law as “an ordinance of reason promulgated for the common
good by one who has charge of a society.”
1. Law is an ordinance, which means it is an authoritative or der that regulates and directs
our actions toward the attainment of an end, purpose or goal.
2. Law comes from reason. This means that a law does not come from the arbitrary or
whimsical will of the lawmakers, rather it emanates from their reasonable will.
Reasonable will, according to Paul Glenn, is a “will illumined by understand of an end
necessary or useful to be attained, toward which the law serves as a proper direction.”
Furthermore, he said that for a law to be reasonable, it must be just, honest, possible of
fulfillment, useful, and in some degree permanent.

3. A law must be promulgated, made known or announced to the people who will be the
subjects of the law.
4. A law intends the common good. The purpose of a law is to serve the interest, welfare or
the good of the greatest majority if not of all the subjects of the law,. A law is intended to
promote order instead of chaos, to facilitate human development instead of destruction,
to realize human liberation rather than enslavement, to bring enlightenment rather than
despair.
5. A law is enacted by one who has change of society. Only persons clothed with authority
can make laws for the society.

CHAPTER IX
Having elucidated various aspects of the human condition shown by everyday life, the
reader can now gather all these threads into one pattern, under one unifying concept. The
unifying concept for the human condition is the fact of the Death. Every human person if to
express nature in its truest sense as he exist in the world and with others is to be sent into the
threshold of Death. The mode of every person as Being-in-the-world as an object in a box is given
to us in our everyday life is that we take care of ourselves because the phenomenon of Death.
This expresses the fundamental character of experience as we move through the world about
the tasks of everyday existence.
Human persons is always pointed at the absent and the future that give its human
existence singular incompleteness and make it impossible to grasp this existence as whole and
integral structure. Every person in its attempt to grasp his existence as a whole must send him
toward the fact of death which concludes that existence.
Authenticity of human existence can only be attained only if we come face to face
unblinkingly with the possibility of our own death, for it is death that tears us out of the external
banality of everyday existence.

Characteristics of Death
a. Death is Personal
It is impossible to experience the death of others. No matter how much I may
suffer, sympathetically, their death-pangs, no matter how much I may be afflicted
personally by the loss of the person deceased, the fact remains that it is his death
and not mine, and the very meaning of death that is robs me of my own being.
Just as no one else relieve me of my death taking it upon himself, so it is impossible
for me to experience death as a fact happening to someone else. Death is not a
public fact occurring out there in the world. It is something that happens within
my own human existence.
b. Death is the completeness of Life
Death is not the end of human life in the sense in which the end of a road may be
the termination of a journey. When I arrive at the end of my journey, I still exist,
and existing, I am in the state of having completed something. But when death
comes, I no longer exist and so there is no journey which, properly speaking, I can
be said to have completed. What has been concluded, that I can have concluded
it. When I am half-way along the journey, I can be at its termination only by
crossing the remaining half of the road, but death is an end of human life in the
sense that it may cut short my existence at any moment. “As soon as we are born
we are old enough to die.”

c. Death as a Fact
In the ordinary banal life, every human person play tricks to transform death as
fact. Considers death as public and make it as a fact to fob off this event as
something that happens to everybody, and therefore precisely Nobody-neither to
me, you, nor any real self.
 d. Death as possibility
In some of the clever tricks too, not only does it make out death as
something that happens to other people, but also something that will occur t
another and later time. Death is believed to happen to all but it does not come
now for we have plenty of time ahead of us. We think that as death is at the end
of the journey but we comfortably imagine that a great part of the road stretches
still in front of us. Death is possible at any given moment. As soon as man is born
he is old enough to die. Even though we do not think about death it is always
within the core of our existence. Our everyday existence reveals itself as
essentially pointed toward death. Death, as the end of existence in an authentic
sense is present in human existence from the beginning.

e. Death as Liberating and Freedom

Grasping death as possibility – affords us the first glimpse of a possible
“authentic” existence for the human person. Confronting death as possible at any
moment, we are torn out of the context of banal life, and restored to a self, which
must face death without disguise. Authenticity means no more than to become
oneself truly through the banality with which we face death. It frees us from the
servitude of petty cares that threaten engulf ordinary existence completely, and
delivers us to the essential projects by which we make our own existence. Life is
too short to worry about those petty cares and worries. Thank God, there is Death
for how should I live otherwise? I might go on indefinitely being someone else,
someone unconsciously false.

CHAPTER X
We have gone through some arguments for the existence of God possibly seen some
merits or flaws in these arguments. But the questions we will try to raise now are: Are these
arguments really important on the personal level? In trying to answer these questions, we cannot
but take into the for the question of what really is FAITH and its apparent opposition with
REASON.
The opinion that religious faith as the acceptance of certain beliefs by a deliberate act of
the will are those of 17th century French thinker Blaise Pascal and American philosopher William
James. Further expositions of some views of R.R. Tentent, Paul Tillich and Leo Tolstoy will also be
undertaken.
1. Pascal’s Wager – Pascal’s best known contribution to philosophy is called “Pascal;s
Wager.” In the section of his “Pensees:” he speaks about the search for God. For Pascal,
that search is the quest for the meaning of life, God provides the hope that we can be
 redeemed from misery and death. According to him, this search for God revolves around
the idea of a wager, a bet. He said,
“Let us weigh the gain and the loss in wagering that God exists. Let us estimate these two
chances, if you gain, you gain all; if you lose, you lose nothing. Wager, then, without hesitation
that He exists.”
Here, Pascal argues that we ought to bet that God exists. If we wager our lives that God
exists, we stand to gain eternal salvation if we are right and to lose little if we are wrong. If on
the other hand, if we wager our lives that there is no God, we stand to gain little if we are right
but to lose eternal happiness if we are wrong.
In other words, Pascal does not give so much thought in logical demonstration concerning
God’s existence. We only need to bet, to believe that there is a God, to have faith. We ought to
wager that God exists and live accordingly. To do so, he contends, is not irrational but exactly the
opposite. In our human situation, it is not given to us to demonstrate that God exists, and yet an
analysis of our predicament suggests that faith in God is sensible. He believes that. “The heart
has its reasons, which reason does not know.” He goes on to say, “it is the heart which
experiences God and not reason. This is faith God is felt by the heart, not by reason.”
2. James’ Will to Believe – William James argues in his famous essay “The Will To Believe”
(1897) that the existence or non-existence of God, of which there can be no conclusive
evidence either way, is a matter of great importance that anyone who so desires has the
right to stake his life upon the God-hypothesis. We are obliged to bet our lives upon this
or the contrary possibility. He says: “We cannot escape the issue by remaining skeptical
and waiting for more light, because, although we do avoid error in that way if religion be
untrue, we lose the good, if it is true, just as certainly as we positively chose to disbelieve.
“If there is a personal God, our unwillingness to proceed on the supposition that he is real
may make it impossible for us to be accepted by Him.”
3. Tennent’s View – A more recent philosophical theologian, F.R. Tennent identifies faith
with the element of willing venture in al discovery. Tennent freely allows that there can
be no general guarantee that faith will be justified. He says, “Hopeful experimenting has
not produced the machine capable of perpetual motion, and had Columbus steered with
confidence for Utopia, he would not have found it.” Faith always involves risks; but is only
by such risks that human knowledge is extended. He continued: “The fruitfulness of a
belief or of faith for the moral or religious life is one thing, and the reality or existence of
what is ideated and assumed is another. There are instances in which a belief that is not
true, in the sense of corresponding with face, may inspire one with lofty ideals and
stimulate to strive to be a more worthy person.”
4. Tillicb’s Ultimate Concern – Another philosopher, Paul Tillich, offered his ideas on the
subject. He contrast two types of philosophy of religion, which he describes as ontological
and cosmological. The latter (which is associated with Aquinas) thinks of God as being
 “out there”, to be reached only at the end of along and hazardous process of reasoning;
to find him is to meet a strange. For the ontological approach, which Tillich espouses and
which he associates with Augustine and Anselm, God is already present to us as the
Ground of our own being. He is identical with us; yet at the same time infinitely transcends
us. God is not another, an object which we may know or fail to know, but Being-itself, in
which we participate by the very fact of existing. To be ultimately concerned about God
is to express our true relationship to Being.
Tillich teaches that “Faith is the state of being ultimately concerned.” Our ultimate
concern is that which determines our being or not-being, not in the sense of our physical
existence but in the sense of “… the reality, the structure, the meaning and aim of
existence.”
People are, in fact ultimately concerned about many different things for example, their
nation, their personal success and status but these are only preliminary concerns, and the
elevation of a preliminary concern to the status of ultimacy is idolatry. Tillich describes ultimate
concern as follows:
“Ultimate concern is the abstract translation of the great commandment: “The Lord, our God is
one; and you shall love you God with all your heart, and with all your soul and with all your mind,
and with all your strength.” The religious concern is ultimate; it excludes all other concerns from
ultimate significance; it makes them preliminary. The ultimate concern is unconditional,
independent of any conditions of character, desire or circumstances.”
5. Tolstoy’s Power of Life – Count Leo Tolstoy, at one point in his life almost committed
suicide as a result of the senselessness and meaninglessness he finds in life. In his efforts
to find the real meaning in life, he found out that life can only become meaningful through
faith in God. He argues that faith is an irrational knowledge. But it gives and provides the
meaning of life.
It would be best to note that in his search for the meaningfulness of life, he tried to solicit
the help of the sciences and philosophy, for he thought, rational knowledge might provide
the answer for his question concerning life’s meaning. But in all these efforts, he never
succeeded. Let us take a look at an excerpt from is “My Confessions”.

CHAPTER XI
The term used for main ways of thinking about God is formed around either from the Greek word
for God “theos” or its Latin equivalent “deus”.
1. Atheism – is the belief that there is no God of any kind
2. Agnoticism – the belief that we do not have sufficient reason either to affirm or deny
God’s existence.
3. Skepticism – simply doubting
4. Deism – refers to the idea of an “absentee” God who long ago set the universe into
motion and has thereafter left it alone.
5. Theism – belief in God
6. Polytheism – the belief common among primitive people and reaching its classic
expression in Ancient Greece and Rome, that there are a multitude of personal gods,
each holding sway to different department of life.
7. Pantheism – is the belief, perhaps most impressively expounded by some of the poets,
that God is identical with nature or with the world as a whole.
8. Monotheism – is the belief that there is but one God, who is personal and moral who
seeks a total and unqualified response from his human creatures.

a. Infinite, unlimited and self-existent – God is infinite or unlimited.

b. Creator – God is also conceived in the Jewish-Christian tradition as the infinite, self-
existent Creator of everything that exists other than himself.
c. Personal – The conviction that God is personal
d. Loving and Good – when it is said that “God is Love”, “love” here refers to the “agape”
kind of love which is unconditional and universal in range.
e. Holy – This terms means “totally other’, the religious person, conscious of standing in
the presence of God is very much aware of the divine reality as infinitely other and
greater than he.