Human Nature: Religious, Scientific, and Philosophical Views
The Religious Experience of Death
The religious experience of death is certainly the event that causes more astonishment in human beings. It always manifests itself as a mystery, impossible to understand and unravel. The awareness that we are inevitably going to die makes us feel the need to dig into the meaning of our life and ourselves. The mystery surrounding the origin of life, and the conviction that it continues in some manner beyond the physical death of the individual, is possibly one of the oldest beliefs of humanity. The religious conception gave the first explanations to try and comprehend the mystery of death, life, and human existence.
The Scientific Conception
The development of science is facilitating the comprehension of human nature. Thanks to discoveries in fields such as genetics, it is easier to understand the influence of heredity on the activities carried out by humans, such as language.
The Philosophical Conception
From the sixth century BC, Greek philosophers noted that the world was unknown, yet it is possible to decipher. They were the first to apply reason, which opened up new philosophical activity. Throughout the history of thought, the problem of human identity has largely been reflected in the terms body and soul, matter-spirit, brain-mind. It is precisely because human beings are the only beings who have self-awareness that, besides knowing what they are and how to become human, they have the need to know. Knowledge about man is born of the need of human beings to understand their biological nature. To meet this need, the sciences are dealing with their research, and their successes are increasingly allowing a better understanding of the genes, systems, and devices that make up the human body. Unlike science, philosophy considers man as a whole and is the most appropriate means of rational form to try to understand what “human being” means. Its primary objective is to define human nature, its essence, what makes humans differ dramatically from any other being.
Modern Age
René Descartes is considered the founder of modern philosophy. He said that man is distinguished by two realities: body and soul. His conception is dualistic. The nature of the body is the extension. For Descartes, the body functions as *res extensa*, a machine. The soul is spiritual in nature, called *res cogitans* because it is a thinking thing. In *Meditations*, Descartes defines the soul as a thinking thing, a thing that doubts, understands, imagines, and feels. Cartesian dualism, despite defending that body and soul are two different and independent realities, admits that a mutual influence occurs between them. How can physical vision produce a feeling? Descartes explained this by saying that, although independent, soul and body communicate at a point in the brain called the pineal gland.
Personalism
Personalism is a school of thought that defends the dignity of the human individual. According to Ferrater Mora, it is any doctrine that holds the upper value of the person against the individual, the thing, or the impersonal. Emmanuel Mounier is the best-known representative of personalism. For him, man is not just a material object, nor is he a spirit, a being that is not divisible into two distinct substances, soul-body, mind, and brain. His design is unitary. Man is a natural being, which is both material and spiritual. The human being is the drive that makes up the body and soul. It is true that man belongs to nature, but his self-consciousness allows him to circumvent the laws of nature and be free. As a free person, his relationship with nature is full of responsibility and moral sense. As an individual, man is only a senseless part of nature. As a moral person, man transcends the individual that he is and pours himself into the rest of humanity so that his existence can only be given within the relationship of others. It is in the community where each person reaches his own status as a person.