Human Nature: Spirit, Dignity, and the Search for Truth

Is Man a Spiritual Being?

Plato believed that man is a spiritual soul and the body is merely a prison for the soul. Man does not belong to this world of things but to the immaterial world of ideas to which he aspires. "While we have the body, and the soul has been intermingled with such evil, we do not possess enough of what we want, i.e., the truth."

"The body, in fact, brings us countless distractions due to the need for sustenance. Diseases attack us and prevent us from real knowledge of what fills us with loves, desires and fears, all kinds of pictures... Also, war, strife, and battles result from the body and its desires. And is death not a liberation of the soul from the body? So those who philosophize truly prepare for death." - Plato.

For Gabriel Marcel, man is an "incarnate spirit." If man's spirit is to reach its destination, the heavenly world.

We also find the opposing view expressed by materialism, for which man is primarily a body and his existence is made and just down here on earth.

Does Man Possess Dignity and Misery?

In Pico della Mirandola, there is this famous passage: "The supreme craftsman made man a creature of indefinite form and, placing him in the center of the world, spoke to him in this way: 'We have given you no fixed place, no form of your own, nor any Adam, oh office! For the post, the image, and the desires that the jobs for you, those have and possess through your own decision and choice.'

For others, man is a nature incurred within certain laws that we have pre-written... You are put in the center of the world to become more comfortably viewed; you looked around you and everything in this world. Neither heaven nor earth did we make you, neither mortal nor immortal, so that you did for yourself as though you were a sculptor and the way you want with you. You can degenerate to the lower, with gross, real things; you find peace in divine things by your own decision. What each of the cultivars that will blossom and bear fruit within."

In Nietzsche, we find the misery of man: man, the sick animal. Man is sicker, more uncertain, more disturbed, more indeterminate than any other animal, no doubt about it; he is the sick animal. Where did this come from? It is true that he also has been bold, innovative, challenged, and confronted destiny more than all the animals together: he is the great experimenter with himself, the dissatisfied, the insatiable, who disputes the last domain of animals, nature, and gods. The still undefeated forever, the eternal future, is no longer any rest, harassing his own strength, so that its future relentlessly rubs like a goad in the flesh of all this: How was this brave and rich animal not to be too exposed to danger, the more durable and deeply sick among all the sick animals?"