The document discusses several philosophers' views on the meaning of life and how to attain a meaningful existence. Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle believed happiness requires virtue and contemplation. Nietzsche advocated realizing one's "higher self" by fulfilling noble ideals. Schopenhauer saw life as suffering caused by desires that make us harm each other. Heidegger viewed human existence as "care" shaped by possibilities, facticity, and fallenness. For Sartre, freedom is essential for authenticity while avoiding "bad faith." Jaspers and Marcel both emphasized transcendence but differed in their philosophical methods of reflection.

1. THE HUMAN PERSON
AND DEATH
INTRODUCTION TO THE PHILOSOPHY OF HUMAN
PERSON

2. Reflect on the meaning of one’s
life
Explain
the meaning of one’s
life
Enumerate the projects or goals one wants
to accomplish in life

3. What is the meaning life?How can humans attain a
meaningful life?

4. Socrates
•Socrates believes that knowing oneself is a condition
to solve the present problem.
•For Socrates, for a person to be happy, he has to live
a virtuous life.
•Virtue is not something to be taught or
acquiredthrough education, but rather it is merely an
awakening of the seeds of good deeds that lay
dormant in the mind and heart of a person.
•Knowing what is in the mind and heart of a
humanbeing is achieved through self-knowledge.
•True knowledge means wisdom, which in turn, means
virtue.

5. Socrates major ethical
claims:
happiness is impossible without moral virtuaa
unethical actions harm the person who performs
them more than the people they victimize.
Plato
•For Plato, contemplation means that the mind is in
communion with the universal and eternal ideas.
•Contemplation is very important because this is theonly available
means for a mortal human being to free himself from his space-time
confinement to
ascend to the heaven of ideas and there commune
with the immortal, eternal, the infinite, and thedivine truths.
;

6. •The body, for Plato, causes us turmoil and confusionin our inquiries.
•To see the truth, we must quit the body
—the soul in it self must behold things in themselves.
•Knowledge, however, can be attained (if at all) after
death: for while in the company of the body, the soulcannot have pure
knowledge.
Aristotle
•Aristotle’s account of change calls upon actuality and
potentiality.
•
Everything in nature seeks to realize itself
—to develop
its potentialities and finally realize its actualities.

7. •Entelechy means that nothing happens by chance.
•Nature not only has a built-in pattern, but also differentlevels of being.
•For the world of potential things to exist, there must
first be something actual (form) at a level abovepotential or perishing things (matter).
•All things in the world are potentially in motion and
continuously changing; there must be something
that is actual motion and which is moved by nothingexternal (Unmoved Mover).
•The Unmoved Mover is eternal, immaterial, with
pure actuality or perfection, and with no potentiality.
Recognize the Meaning of One’s Life

8. •
Objects and human beings move toward their divineorigin and perfection as they
strive to realize
themselves.
•
Reason finds its perfection in contemplating theUnmoved Mover.
•
The Unmoved Mover is the form of the world
moving it toward its divine end.
•
The highest human activity is contemplating aboutthe Unmoved Mover.
Recognize the Meaning of One’s Life

9. These self-examination activities will bring moreunderstanding about you
and the project/s you may
want to accomplish.
A.Know thyself. Write your strengths and weaknesses.
Goals One Wants to Accomplish

10. Goals One Wants to Accomplish
B. Before you itemize what you want to achieve, first,
ask questions regarding what you want to achieve.

11. Friedrich Nietzsche
•
Nietzsche analyzedthe art of Athenian tragedy as
the product of the Greeks’ deep and non
-evasive
thinking about the meaning of life in the face ofextreme vulnerability.
•
Athenian tragedy reminded its audience of the
senseless horrors of human existence but at the
same time provided an experiential reinforcement ofinsights that we can nonetheless
marvel at beautywithin life, and that our true existence is not our
individual lives but our participation in the drama of
life and history.
Meaning of Life

12. Morality was based on healthy self-assertion, notself-abasement and the
renunciation of the
instincts.
•
Realizing one’s “higher self” means fulfilling one’s
loftiest vision, noblest ideal.
•
The individual has to liberate himself from
environmental
influences that are false to one’s
essential beings and draw a sharp conflict betweenthe higher self and the
lower self, between the idealaspired to and the contemptibly imperfect
present.
Meaning of Life

13. Arthur Schopenhauer
•
Schopenhauer begins with the predicament of the
self with its struggles and its destiny:
What am I?What shall I do with my life?
•
Schopenhauer
utilized Kant’s
distinction between
the noumenal(the world-in-itself, which is Will) and
the phenomenal (the world of experience andinclination) realms.
•
Schopenhauer departs from Kant both in denying
the rationality of the Will and in claiming that we
can have experience of the thing-in-itself as Will
•
For Schopenhauer, there is but One Will, and it
underlies everything.

14. •
Every being in the phenomenal world manifests theWill in its own way: as a natural force,
as instinct or,in our case, as intellectually enlightened willing.
•
Will is ultimately without purpose, therefore, cannot
be satisfied and this led Schopenhauer to see thewillfulnature of reality
—
a reality that has no pointand cannot be satisfied.
•
Schopenhauer contends that all of life is suffering
which is caused by desire.
•
Our desire make us see other people as separate and
opposed beings in competition for the satisfactions
we crave leading us to harm each other.
•
We
can alleviate suffering by “putting an end to desire.”

15. Martin Heidegger
•
In Heidegger’s analysis, human existence is exhibited
in care, a finite temporality which reaches with death.
•
Care’s threefold
structure:
Possibility.
Humanity constructs the instrumental
world on the basis of the persons’
concerns.
Facticity.
A person is not pure possibility but
facticalpossibility: possibilities open to him at any
time conditioned and limited by circumstances.
Fallenness.
Humanity has fallen away
from one’s
authentic possibility into an authentic
existence
of irresponsibility and illusory security.
Meaning of Life

16. •
Heidegger claims that only by living through the
nothingness of death in anticipation do one attain
authentic existence.
•
Death is not accidental, nor should be analyzed
rather it belongs to
humanity’s facticity (limitations

17. Jean-Paul Sartre
•
the human person desires to be God; the
desire toexist as a being that has its sufficient
ground in itself
•
The human person builds the road to the
destiny ofhis/her choosing; he/she is the
creator
•
Sartre’s dualism:
en-soi (in-itself) –signifies the permeable and
dense, silent and dead
pour-soi
(for-itself)–the world only has meaning
according to what the person gives to it.
Meaning of Life

18. •
The person, first of all exists, encounters himself,surges up in the world, and defines
himself afterward.
•
Freedom, therefore, is the very core and the door toauthentic existence.
•
The human person who tries to escape obligations
and strives to be
en-soi
is acting on bad faith (
mauvais foi
).
Meaning of Life

19. Karl Jaspers
•
Jasper’s philosophy places the person’s temporal
existence in the face of the transcendent God, anabsolute imperative.
•
Transcendence relates to us through limit-situation(Grenzsituation).
•
To live an authentic existence always requires a leapof faith.
•
Authentic existence (existenz) is freedom and God.
•
Human beings should be loyal to their own faiths
without impugning the faith of others.

20. Gabriel Marcel
•
Philosophy has the tension (the essence of drama)and the harmony (that is the
essence of music).
•
Marcel’s Phenomenological Method
Primary Reflection.
This method looks at theworld or at any object as a problem, detachedfrom the self
and fragment.
Secondary Reflection.
Secondary reflection is
concrete, individual, heuristic, and open. It isconcerned not with object but with
presencesand recaptures the unity of original experience.

21. •Secondary reflection is an ingathering, a recollection,
a pulling toegether of the scattered fragments of our
experience.
•Beyond one’s experience, beyond the circle of fellow
human beings, one turns to the
Absolute Thou, the unobjectifiableTranscendent Thou.
Meaning of Life

22. 1.From the perspective of Socrates, Plato and Aristotle,how can
human beings attain happiness?
2.In your view, how can one attain a “higher self”?
3.Discuss how desire can lead us to suffering from the
point of view of Schopenhauer.
4.Explain Martin Heidegger’s concept of “Care”.
5.Compare Jasper’s and Marcel’s philosophies. What
are their similarities and differences?