철학적 인간학적 물음: 정신으로서의 인간

초록

Human being is spirit. Spirit is one of the concepts most essential in defining the human being. The human being discloses himself precisely as spirit. But the understanding of spirit is not so simple in as much as it contains various meanings. In fact, the ‘absconditus’ of the human being is also based on the abyss of human spirit whose depths we cannot penetrate. The understanding of human spirit has always traditionally been a subject of metaphysics. But today in the development of science human spirit has been processed actively in an area of science different from metaphysics. It is true that the development of the natural sciences gives aid to the understanding of the human self. However, metaphysical inquiry is still an important method of knowing, in as much as we find distinct phenomena of spirit in distinction to physical phenomena in relation to the human nature. This paper examines from the viewpoint of traditional metaphysics 1) what is the basic idea of the modern philosophical anthropological insight which defines the human being as spirit, 2) the philosophical anthropological essential concept of spirit, 3) essence and substance of spirit as the true nature of the human being, and 4) the place of spirit as human nature and its meaning. The essence of spirit is freedom. That means in traditional metaphysics the unconditional and unlimited character of freedom. This inherent character of spirit is exposed still more explicitly in the human basic behavior, namely in what a man calls “distance” in the surrounding environment of human action. Through free spirit the human mediates the surrounding environment to himself reflectively and simultaneously objectifies it. Through his spirit the human becomes also an entity that is opened to the world, a cultured entity, and a historical being. Furthermore, the human becomes above all a ‘transcendent’ entity. ‘Transcendence’, springing from spirit is one of most inherent characteristics of human nature.

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