Chapter 2: The Nature

of the Human Person

• What is a human person? What is the nature
of a human person? How does a person attain
his highest potential that can create a positive
result towards society?
• When we talk about the human person, it is obviously
everything that pertains to man - physical, spiritual, emotional
and intellectual attributes. Note: “Man” does not mean “males,”
or “males more than females.” The philosophy of Human
Person could be roughly understood as an attempt to unify
disparate ways of understanding behavior of humans as both
creatures of their social environments and creators of their own
value
CHARACTERISTICS OF A HUMAN PERSON

• a. A human person is a rational being. He or she is free to think and has the capacity to reason
and distinguish between right and wrong.
• b. A human person is born free. He or she has the freedom to do or not to do things. However,
every person is responsible for his or her own action.
• c. A human person is unique. He or she possesses an identity that makes him or her unlike any
other person. Generally speaking, even if two persons have the same
characteristics and physical features they are not the same because each one has his or her own
perception and different set of values and priorities in life.
• d. Every person is intrinsically a social being and cannot be detach himself or herself from other
creatures in the universe. By nature, he or she is characterized by his or her relationships with
other creatures, objects or his or her fellowmen
• e. All living things are sexual by nature, but the uniqueness of expression of a person’s sexuality
makes him or her different. The expression of a person’s emotions, attitudes, feelings, actions,
and thoughts in sexual activity best exemplifies his or her uniqueness from other animal.
 CLASSICAL GREEK VIEWS
• The early classical Greek defined the human person as “a rational
animal” .Aristotle and Boethius described man as a rational being. A human
being is a material(body) and spiritual (soul) being. As rational being, a person
is able to know, reason out and apply what he knows.
• The human being is the highest form of animal due to the fact that he or she
has a rational thinking. Because of the fact that the human being is given
free will to choose, decide or shape his or her life, so he or she is always
responsible for his or her action.
• A human person is capable of knowing, loving, and believing, which leads him
or her to be fully aware of his or her humanity.
 BIBLICAL VIEWS
• The human person has superiority and dignity inherited from the Supreme Being.In
literature and the Bible, the word man is not only limited to males but it
addressed to humanity. In the book of Genesis 1:26-27 man was created in the
“image and likeness of God” and made them masters of the fish of the sea, the
birds, the heaven, the earth, the wild beasts and all the reptiles that crawl upon
the earth. The human nature was patterned after the image of God (Agbuya, 1997)
• The Supreme Being entrusted to the human person the care of the creatures on
earth, aware of the possibilities, challenges and difficulties he or she encounter in
his or her life. Since, human made in a divine image we endowed with a human
soul with two great powers: Free will and Intellect
• Human intellect – enables us to recognize and understand God’s command to do
good and avoid evil
• Free will - enables us to choose good with the guidance of our conscience and to
obey God’s law of love
PHILOSOPHICAL VIEWS
• According to Protagoras, a human person is the measure of all things that
exists and of all things that do not exists. Furthermore, Plato claimed that
the perfect human being does not exist in this world because what is in this
world is just an imperfect copy of humanity’s original self in the realm of
ideas. Parmenides stated that a person has knowledge of something that
exists, for a person who does not exist is nothing
• A human person like other animals has external and internal organs. A human
being becomes evident when he or she starts to share his or her thoughts and
ideas with others.
Maguigad (2006) in his book, Philosophy of the
Human Being, explains the different philosophical views
of the human person. These are the following

1.Conservatism
2.Liberalism
3.Socialism
4.Fascism
 SOCIOLOGICAL VIEWS
• Social scientists are interested to understand what a human
being is. The work of the philosopher Rene` Descartes is quite
popular in this respect. He argued that a human is a thinking
thing (a res cogitans) but which has a body (a res extensa)
attached to it.
• A perspective is a way of looking at and seeing something.
Salcedo (2004) states that people look at this social world or at
the various ways that human beings behave in a social way.
Hence, when we talk about society or the social world, we are
really referring to the behavior of human beings.
San Juan (2007) proposes some common ideas
about the human person. These are the following:

• 1. Human persons are social animals. We need to cooperate with others in someway to
create the social world in which we live.
• 2. The human person’s social behavior is learned, not instinctive. In this view, the
argument is that we have to learn from the moment we were born, how to be not just a
human being but also a recognizable member of the society into which we happen to
have been born.
• 3. To understand the human person’s behavior, we have to focus our attention on the
groups to which people belong. These groups are many and varied, but the largest group
to which people belong is a society.
• 4. Sociology is a discipline that looks into the totality of relationships in
an individual’s life. Sociologists do not restrict their studies to a single dimension of an
individual’s life (economics, politics, history, geography and psychology
dimension). Although each of these areas is significant and interesting in varying degrees,
it is only by looking at how these relationships affect each other that we can arrive at a
complete picture of human social behavior.
Hierarchy of Needs

• Abraham Maslow an American psychologist

proposed that healthy human beings have a
certain number of needs. And that these needs
can be arranged in a hierarchy. Maslow
published his paper on the year 1943
“A Theory of Human Motivation” were in
he imposed the motivation of human
being is based on the hierarchy of needs.
 PSYCHOLOGICAL VIEWS

• According to Locke (1690) defines a person as, “a thinking intelligent being that has reason
and reflection, and can consider itself the same thinking thing, in different times and places”.
A person has to think, has to reason, self- awareness and self-evaluation on the things
happened in the past, present and what will happen in the future. Thinking is the way of
living.

• The human person development consists of processes that everyone should understand, as
human behaves according to his or her feelings and experiences. Experiences mold the
personality of human. As the famous phrase goes “Experience is the best teacher” but how can
experience become experience? If and only if, he or she learned from it (event or feelings).

• According to Jean Piaget in his cognitive -developmental theory based on the idea that
children actively construct knowledge as they explore and manipulate the world around them.
According to Varner (2012), a person must be rational, self-conscious, and a full blown moral
agent having the following four concepts from which to construct a self-narrative: self, birth,
death, and personality