There are, of course, many possible answers to this question. For a long time, for example, it was believed that the ability to think makes us human – so Descartes believed, for example.
However, back in the early twentieth century, the neo-Kantian philosopher Ernst Cassirer (1874-1945) criticized the binding of humanity to thinking as wishful thinking, that is, wishful thinking. The philosophers of the early Modern period and the Enlightenment, he wrote, wanted to build society on the basis of pure rationality, i.e. rationality was their ethical requirement, man must be rational, but instead of putting it this way, they said that man by nature is rational. Meanwhile, if we look at all the diversity of human culture-art, religion, politics – those things that essentially make us human, then we will not be able to reduce all this variety to rationality. And in no case should they do this. Sorry, but attempts to build a “scientific ethics” in history have already been, for example, in the USSR, on the basis of the “scientific theory of class struggle”, and they did not lead to anything good.
If it's not rationality that makes us human, then what is it? For Cassirer, the answer to this question is the creation and use of symbolic constructs (language, money, political symbols, religious teachings, etc.) that form an intermediate world between us and physical reality. In other words, the peculiarity of the human position for the Cassirer is that he interacts with the world not directly, as animals usually do, but mainly through the world of symbols. For example, we do not exchange goods for goods, but exchange goods for money, symbolic units. The driver on the road normally stops at a red light (symbolic signal) even if the road is clear. I am now interacting with you through language (symbolic system), etc. It's not that animals can't use symbols at all – orangutans and gorillas are at least capable of learning a simple language – but no species other than humans lives in a symbolic reality that they create and maintain, and humans, on the contrary, can't live without it. This is one possible answer.
There is another answer to this question: a person is made a person by his freedom. Freedom comes from the incompleteness of human nature. The classic of modern philosophical anthropology Arnold Gehlen (1904 – 1976) wrote that the specificity of human nature consists in the fact that nature brings all animals into the world “ready”, i.e. adapted to solving specific problems and specific environmental conditions, while man comes into the world as if unfinished – without claws, fangs, fur, shell, etc., but able to finish himself independently. This means that it can adapt to a wide variety of climatic conditions: from the equator to the Arctic circle, unlike some, for example, corals, which die with a small change in water temperature.
French existentialist philosophers like J.-P. Sartre (1905-1980) will take up the idea of human freedom as a defining characteristic, but Sartre will emphasize that a person's freedom is his burden (because he did not choose to be born, and did not choose to be free), which cannot be abandoned, and at the same time his responsibility.
Finally, to talk about modernity, Noam Chomsky (b. 1928), speaking of “human nature”, defines it as free creativity (on YouTube you can watch an interesting discussion between Chomsky and the French philosopher M. Chomsky). Foucault in 1971). According to Chomsky, a person, first of all, is engaged in creative tasks: from a child who is learning a language, to a driver who is caught in a traffic jam and is thinking about how to avoid it. Then it is precisely the ability to creatively solve problems based, of course, on innate patterns of behavior and past knowledge, which is mostly manifested in scientific and artistic creativity, but is generally our standard way of solving problems, that is the defining characteristic of a person. Hence Chomsky's political conclusions: society is good only to the extent that it promotes free and independent human creativity, and hence the value of human rights, democracy, and ultimately Chomsky's anarchism.
Here is a selection of answers. I find all of these answers interesting to varying degrees; they seem to complement each other, with different accents, rather than contradict each other. They can be considered as approaches from different sides to the description of human nature.
When it comes to a person, an image of that sensually perceived type of being with human forms and corporeality that we understand immediately appears in our mind's eye. But, of course, not all those things define a person. After all, he also has a soul, and through it, according to the philosophers, he receives his existence (and fulfillment), and human existence. For as the ancient philosopher Proclus thinks, ” the true man is the soul.”
According to these philosophers, the soul has a non-corporeal nature and, accordingly, has, as they say, its unearthly origin. The ancient philosopher Plotinus writes: “The soul is the divine essence and inhabitant of the higher spheres, descends into the bodies.”
Therefore, the existence of the human soul and its perfection are determined by the fact that it has, as (these) philosophers think, a divine nature, and along the line of its origin it is endowed with those perfect abilities and virtues that it has: reason, freedom. And since a person is essentially determined by the soul, all of them pass in one way or another to the ” and “of the” whole ” person. German philosopher (Leibniz) so he writes: “The traces of the likeness of God consist both in the innate light of reason and in freedom.”
As a result, philosophers have come to understand that the more divine each of us is, the more human we are, and vice versa… Well, let's say that the manifestation of humanity (in us), which is “virtue and any perfection … liken us to the divine”, and “the greater their measure is present in us, the closer we are to an intelligent life” (Proclus, ancient philosopher).
Philosophy, oh, that philosophy. A person is made a person by belonging to a biological species (Homo Sapiens). No more than that. And philosophical arguments on this topic are nothing more than attempts of consciousness to realize itself. So “In modern taxonomy, the biological species Homo sapiens (Latin Homo sapiens) belongs to the genus Homo from the hominid family in the order of primates of the mammalian class”, please be aware of yourself.
All his anger and aggression, his lack of restraint, crying in the shower and whining to friends that life is somehow especially unfair to him. And this tingling feeling in my chest, at the sight of a special person, and chocolates for the night, although you can not, because the ass is already so ogogo what already. And a promise to be the best person in the world starting tomorrow. Feeling of shame and regret at the sight of a homeless animal and old people buying bread in the store for the promotion. All this makes a person just a person, and not a highly effective weapon in the hands of capitalism.
Consciousness and the ability to learn are also inherent in animals, this is not a unique feature of humans – experiments with animals have proved this. A unique feature, what makes a person a person, I would call the ability to consciously act contrary to their own interests. An animal always follows the interests of its own, family, pack, or species. A person, exercising free will, can neglect them, or even go against them-for the sake of conscience, morality, personal beliefs, principles, and so on.
Let's start from M. Mamardashvili's half-joking and half-serious definition of a person and develop it in the same ironic and tragic (here tragedy is used in the ancient Greek sense) way:
“A man is a lazy brute with two legs, which he is particularly proud of” (I don't remember the source, unfortunately).
All people are like that, but some people simply live and are a type of such a “person”, while others, while living such a life, are aware of this circumstance (at least they guess about it).
Of the (co)knowledgeable – some put up with it and even get, if not benefit and pleasure (there are quite a lot of them), then the justification for such a life (“Everyone is like that! How am I better/worse than others?” – most of them are), others are ashamed of it…
Of those who are ashamed, some get used to it, and still live in the duality of “shame and sin”, while others make such shame a profession: other people's shame (clerics, ideologues, teachers, lawyers, psychologists) or their own shame (philosophers, writers, artists in the broad sense of the word).�
Of these latter, very few manage to realize such” self-care “(other Greek: epimeleia heatou) in a universally meaningful way, i.e., both to fulfill themselves and to demonstrate (through sweat and blood, ridicule and fanfare) an example (and not a frontal edification and teaching) of self-fulfillment to others, to become” Great Initiates “and”Teachers”.
Where in these gradations is a person found? Everywhere and nowhere. In humanity (at least in belonging to homo sapiens) , you can not refuse the first “lazy cattle”. And those who are really worth learning about humanity are unlikely to adorn themselves with the appropriate insignia and point out themselves with a serious face.: “Behold the Man.” Man is a creature on the transition from the first to the second, and maybe even further: “tightrope dancer over the abyss” (Nietzsche), project (Sartre), ek-zistsiya/stepping (Heidegger)…�
What makes a person a person? Work, work on yourself. The work of the body, mind, and soul.
“Everything that makes us human is so base” – “Lucy”
But if you answer this question from a biological, simpler point of view, then this is:
1) Upright walking, which of course is characteristic of all animals of the Hominid group, but still
2) Well-developed thumbs
3) Large cerebral cortex
4) Weak hairline
If the answer is more philosophical, then I would say consciousness. That is, we are able to understand the meaning of our actions,we can predict the result of our activities, we can be aware of our existence. Can other animals, or even highly developed mammals, do this?We don't know for sure.
From a religious and mythological point of view, I would say that most of us make a choice between good and evil.Every day.Our sins,our prayers,our image in the image and likeness of God.This can also make us human.
Of course, there is no good in the world, and there is no evil, there is not even justice as such, all this was created by man and his mind.
Still probably people us, make thoughts about what makes us people).
There are, of course, many possible answers to this question. For a long time, for example, it was believed that the ability to think makes us human – so Descartes believed, for example.
However, back in the early twentieth century, the neo-Kantian philosopher Ernst Cassirer (1874-1945) criticized the binding of humanity to thinking as wishful thinking, that is, wishful thinking. The philosophers of the early Modern period and the Enlightenment, he wrote, wanted to build society on the basis of pure rationality, i.e. rationality was their ethical requirement, man must be rational, but instead of putting it this way, they said that man by nature is rational. Meanwhile, if we look at all the diversity of human culture-art, religion, politics – those things that essentially make us human, then we will not be able to reduce all this variety to rationality. And in no case should they do this. Sorry, but attempts to build a “scientific ethics” in history have already been, for example, in the USSR, on the basis of the “scientific theory of class struggle”, and they did not lead to anything good.
If it's not rationality that makes us human, then what is it? For Cassirer, the answer to this question is the creation and use of symbolic constructs (language, money, political symbols, religious teachings, etc.) that form an intermediate world between us and physical reality. In other words, the peculiarity of the human position for the Cassirer is that he interacts with the world not directly, as animals usually do, but mainly through the world of symbols. For example, we do not exchange goods for goods, but exchange goods for money, symbolic units. The driver on the road normally stops at a red light (symbolic signal) even if the road is clear. I am now interacting with you through language (symbolic system), etc. It's not that animals can't use symbols at all – orangutans and gorillas are at least capable of learning a simple language – but no species other than humans lives in a symbolic reality that they create and maintain, and humans, on the contrary, can't live without it. This is one possible answer.
There is another answer to this question: a person is made a person by his freedom. Freedom comes from the incompleteness of human nature. The classic of modern philosophical anthropology Arnold Gehlen (1904 – 1976) wrote that the specificity of human nature consists in the fact that nature brings all animals into the world “ready”, i.e. adapted to solving specific problems and specific environmental conditions, while man comes into the world as if unfinished – without claws, fangs, fur, shell, etc., but able to finish himself independently. This means that it can adapt to a wide variety of climatic conditions: from the equator to the Arctic circle, unlike some, for example, corals, which die with a small change in water temperature.
French existentialist philosophers like J.-P. Sartre (1905-1980) will take up the idea of human freedom as a defining characteristic, but Sartre will emphasize that a person's freedom is his burden (because he did not choose to be born, and did not choose to be free), which cannot be abandoned, and at the same time his responsibility.
Finally, to talk about modernity, Noam Chomsky (b. 1928), speaking of “human nature”, defines it as free creativity (on YouTube you can watch an interesting discussion between Chomsky and the French philosopher M. Chomsky). Foucault in 1971). According to Chomsky, a person, first of all, is engaged in creative tasks: from a child who is learning a language, to a driver who is caught in a traffic jam and is thinking about how to avoid it. Then it is precisely the ability to creatively solve problems based, of course, on innate patterns of behavior and past knowledge, which is mostly manifested in scientific and artistic creativity, but is generally our standard way of solving problems, that is the defining characteristic of a person. Hence Chomsky's political conclusions: society is good only to the extent that it promotes free and independent human creativity, and hence the value of human rights, democracy, and ultimately Chomsky's anarchism.
Here is a selection of answers. I find all of these answers interesting to varying degrees; they seem to complement each other, with different accents, rather than contradict each other. They can be considered as approaches from different sides to the description of human nature.
When it comes to a person, an image of that sensually perceived type of being with human forms and corporeality that we understand immediately appears in our mind's eye. But, of course, not all those things define a person. After all, he also has a soul, and through it, according to the philosophers, he receives his existence (and fulfillment), and human existence. For as the ancient philosopher Proclus thinks, ” the true man is the soul.”
According to these philosophers, the soul has a non-corporeal nature and, accordingly, has, as they say, its unearthly origin. The ancient philosopher Plotinus writes: “The soul is the divine essence and inhabitant of the higher spheres, descends into the bodies.”
Therefore, the existence of the human soul and its perfection are determined by the fact that it has, as (these) philosophers think, a divine nature, and along the line of its origin it is endowed with those perfect abilities and virtues that it has: reason, freedom. And since a person is essentially determined by the soul, all of them pass in one way or another to the ” and “of the” whole ” person. German philosopher (Leibniz) so he writes: “The traces of the likeness of God consist both in the innate light of reason and in freedom.”
As a result, philosophers have come to understand that the more divine each of us is, the more human we are, and vice versa… Well, let's say that the manifestation of humanity (in us), which is “virtue and any perfection … liken us to the divine”, and “the greater their measure is present in us, the closer we are to an intelligent life” (Proclus, ancient philosopher).
Philosophy, oh, that philosophy. A person is made a person by belonging to a biological species (Homo Sapiens). No more than that. And philosophical arguments on this topic are nothing more than attempts of consciousness to realize itself. So “In modern taxonomy, the biological species Homo sapiens (Latin Homo sapiens) belongs to the genus Homo from the hominid family in the order of primates of the mammalian class”, please be aware of yourself.
All his anger and aggression, his lack of restraint, crying in the shower and whining to friends that life is somehow especially unfair to him.
And this tingling feeling in my chest, at the sight of a special person, and chocolates for the night, although you can not, because the ass is already so ogogo what already.
And a promise to be the best person in the world starting tomorrow.
Feeling of shame and regret at the sight of a homeless animal and old people buying bread in the store for the promotion. All this makes a person just a person, and not a highly effective weapon in the hands of capitalism.
Consciousness and the ability to learn are also inherent in animals, this is not a unique feature of humans – experiments with animals have proved this. A unique feature, what makes a person a person, I would call the ability to consciously act contrary to their own interests. An animal always follows the interests of its own, family, pack, or species. A person, exercising free will, can neglect them, or even go against them-for the sake of conscience, morality, personal beliefs, principles, and so on.
Let's start from M. Mamardashvili's half-joking and half-serious definition of a person and develop it in the same ironic and tragic (here tragedy is used in the ancient Greek sense) way:
“A man is a lazy brute with two legs, which he is particularly proud of” (I don't remember the source, unfortunately).
All people are like that, but some people simply live and are a type of such a “person”, while others, while living such a life, are aware of this circumstance (at least they guess about it).
Of the (co)knowledgeable – some put up with it and even get, if not benefit and pleasure (there are quite a lot of them), then the justification for such a life (“Everyone is like that! How am I better/worse than others?” – most of them are), others are ashamed of it…
Of those who are ashamed, some get used to it, and still live in the duality of “shame and sin”, while others make such shame a profession: other people's shame (clerics, ideologues, teachers, lawyers, psychologists) or their own shame (philosophers, writers, artists in the broad sense of the word).�
Of these latter, very few manage to realize such” self-care “(other Greek: epimeleia heatou) in a universally meaningful way, i.e., both to fulfill themselves and to demonstrate (through sweat and blood, ridicule and fanfare) an example (and not a frontal edification and teaching) of self-fulfillment to others, to become” Great Initiates “and”Teachers”.
Where in these gradations is a person found? Everywhere and nowhere. In humanity (at least in belonging to homo sapiens) , you can not refuse the first “lazy cattle”. And those who are really worth learning about humanity are unlikely to adorn themselves with the appropriate insignia and point out themselves with a serious face.: “Behold the Man.” Man is a creature on the transition from the first to the second, and maybe even further: “tightrope dancer over the abyss” (Nietzsche), project (Sartre), ek-zistsiya/stepping (Heidegger)…�
What makes a person a person? Work, work on yourself. The work of the body, mind, and soul.
Something like this 🙂
According to Plato, a human being is a two-legged creature without feathers, with flat and wide nails (or claws, depending on the translation).
No denials have been found yet.
A deeply philosophical question.
“Everything that makes us human is so base” – “Lucy”
But if you answer this question from a biological, simpler point of view, then this is:
1) Upright walking, which of course is characteristic of all animals of the Hominid group, but still
2) Well-developed thumbs
3) Large cerebral cortex
4) Weak hairline
If the answer is more philosophical, then I would say consciousness. That is, we are able to understand the meaning of our actions,we can predict the result of our activities, we can be aware of our existence. Can other animals, or even highly developed mammals, do this?We don't know for sure.
From a religious and mythological point of view, I would say that most of us make a choice between good and evil.Every day.Our sins,our prayers,our image in the image and likeness of God.This can also make us human.
Of course, there is no good in the world, and there is no evil, there is not even justice as such, all this was created by man and his mind.
Still probably people us, make thoughts about what makes us people).