NATURE
OF MAN
1.Diginity and freedom of the huma individual has been a common principle
for all philosophies and faiths, except perhaps for Nietzshce. marx
emphasized the potentiality of man by denying God. Kant exhorted us to
treat every human individual as a end in himself and never as a means.
Democracies are based o the equality ad dignity of every human individual.
In the Mahabharata to the Jainas, the individual soul, in its pure
form its its elf divie, and man can attain divinity by his own efforts.
2. In
India, the aim of philosophy was atom vidya Atmanam viddhi was the
cardinal injunction of the Upanishads. Yajnyavalkya explains that all
worldly objects are of no value apart from the self 13 Today we have a
new Humanism where we are becoming increasingly aware of the importance of
ma in this word. Philosophical interest has shifted from nature to god
and from God to man. Even the claim of absolute value for science is being
questioned . Man and his values are primary, their primacy has to be
acknowledge by any philosophy.
But
with all these philosophical interests, the real nature of ma has been
eliding us. Attempts have been made to kwon him. But there has to been an
agreed conception of man easily to be understood and accepted by the
common man.
There
were philosophers like protagoras who reduced man to mere sensations. The
Itheaettus describes the Sophist conception of the individual as a
complex of changes interacting with other ofrces, and seeking to satisfy
the desires.15 in English empiricism, Hume denied everything including
the human soul, except impressions and ideas. The Human tendency was
recently revived by the Cambridge philosophers who brought philosophy to
the brink o extinction. Perennial problems of philosophy including the
conceptions of soul were dismissed as non-sense. Like the men chained
against the walls of the cave in the republic the empiricists
refused to see beyond what they would like to affirm. I ancient Indian
thought, Carvakas led us to similar conclusions. It is said that the
Buddhists deiced a permanent soul. The Buddha was silent about the
metaphysical problems. His disciples analyzed soul as a aggregate of
matter, feelings and sensations. Men is a psychological personality, and
when it is analyzed away sunya is realised.
However soul of ma has emerged as permanent and eternal principle
imperishable in batter . Socrates, Plato and Aristote accepted soul as a
pure eternal and imperishable principle. Plato talked of the imm0ortaltiy
of the soul. In India, the outlook in the Ireveda Is empirical. The gods
were invoked to time cows and property n this world. The idea of a
permanent soul has yet to be evolved. In the Upanishads the conception of
a permanent soul gained predominance. In the Dialogue between Prajapati
and Indra we get a progressive development of the definition of the soul
in four stages- as I) bodily, 2) empirical, 3) transcendental and 4) the
absolute 16. The next step was to identify the self with the absolute.
As Radhakrsishanan says, we may not understand the truth of the saying�
that thou are� tatt vam asi, but that does not give us a sufficient
right to deny it .17
The
idea of the self has been a fundamental caption in Jaina philosophy. The
existence of the soul is a presupposition. The soul is described from the
phenomenal and the nominal points of view. All things in this world are
divided into living ad non- living. From the phenomenal point of view, the
soul is described as possessing impartial qualities. It is possessed of
four pranas. It is the lord, the doer, and the enjoyed of the fruit
of Karma. As a potter considers himself a maker and enjoyer of the clay
pot, so the mundane soul is the doer of things and the enjoyer of the
fruits of Karma. From the numeral point of view, soul is pure and perfect.
It is pure consciousness. It is unbound, untouched and not other than
itself. Man is the jiva bound by matter and it assumes gross
physical body. Through the operation of Karma the soul gets entangled in
the wheel of Samasara. Whe it is embodied it is affected by the
environment- physical, social and spiritual in different ways. Then it
identifies itself with the various functions of the bodily ad social
environment. William James distinguishes between the self as known or the
I. On the same basis , distinction between the states of the soul as
Bahairathman has been made.
3.
Apart from the read nature of man it would be necessary to know him as an
individual in his physical and social environ meant. As an empirical
individual man lives in this life and is influence by the environment. To
some extent he is a product of the environment, at the same time shaping
the other selves, man cannot be separated from nature. He is a part and
parcel of the interacting forces in nature. In this sense, individual men
including the heaven born prophets are products of environment and social
heritage. They also contribute to the development of the social life this
universe is a vale of soul making� thoraces a cosmic purpose in the
incessant struggle of the individuals in this world. The purpose as
translated in human efforts, is the perfection of men.
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