Some Philosophical Reflections on the Dignity of Man

Gholamreza Aavani, Iranian Institute of Philosophy

It is a great honor to be in a colloquium in which distinguished guests from Japan, Bahrain, Iran and other Islamic countries take part to talk about one of the most crucial and significant issues relating to the very essence of man, namely the dignity of man? In the beginning of our discussion certain points should be made clear: First is the eruption of discussion nowadays on the worth and dignity of man to be construed to mean that modern man has got a more profound and thoroughgoing awareness of his dignity than the traditional man or not? Second when we talk about the dignity of man, we should have a clear horizon or definition ( Greek horismos ) about man because missing it, our discussion would end in obscurity as if we were groping in the dark. Third what do we mean by philosophical reflection and in short what distinguishes it from other scholarly and pedantic considerations especially with regard to the problem at issue here. To begin with the third question first and without wanting to foist philosophy as a scare-crow, philosophy in the classical and the traditional conception is the sole discipline which poses the ultimate questions and does not stop questioning until it has attained the desired end. Both according to Plato and Descartes, philosophy is a discipline without any hypothesis taken for granted. According to this view all other sciences are hypothetical, that is they rest on unproven and unanalyzed hypotheses. So if our conception of man is to be philosophical, we should not shun the more ultimate questions about man, especially with regard to the fact that the question of his intrinsic dignity depends, to a great extent, upon such ultimate questions1.

To turn now to our second question: how are we to conceive man and generally speaking how has been man's self-image and self-conception in different ages. We must not allow the modern man with his modernistic mental predilections prevail upon the scene2. We have a lot to hear, concerning this problem from the great sages of the East, from China, India, Japan and from the sages of ancient Persia. As a matter of fact, they have their own "say" about the becoming and the destiny of man. Let us turn our attention for a while to an epoch in human history which Karl Jaspers has properly termed as the Axial Age, a period extending almost from the sixth to the fourth centuries before Christ, an age in which such luminaries as Parmenides, Pythagoras, Heraclitus, Socrates, Plato and Aristotle in the Hellenic soil, the writers of the Upanishads and the great Buddha in India, Lao-Tse and Confucius in China lived and taught their metaphysical and spiritual doctrines about man.3 The issue of ultimate concern for all these great sages was the true awakening or enlightenment ( quite different from the aufklaerung of the age of enlightenment ) and true knowledge which sifts out the real from the illusory, the atma from the maya, or in Greek terminology the noumenon from the phenomenon. For all of them the man awakened from the slumber of illusions unto the state of the Real, whatever its name, was the real man, living up to his real vocation and dignity4. I am not going to weigh down my talk with ponderous statements from the books on a history of philosophy or history of religion , but suffices it here to make some cursory allusions to these sages of the Axial Age to see how important was this idea of awakening and enlightenment in their envisioning of man and his becoming. In the land of Hellas, for Pythagoras, true Sophia belonged to God and it behooved man to be philosophos, or the lover of Sophia, or in other words, it was the

end of man to be assimilated to God. For Parmenides the way of true philosophy rested in discriminating the way of illusion ( doxa, phenomenon ) from that of reality and true wisdom ( episteme, noumenon )5. For Socrates, the ideal of philosophy was the knowledge of the self and its realization, through the realization of the virtues and the knowledge of the true nature of things through their real definitions. For Plato, it was the vocation of philosophy to make man as much assimilated to God as possible and to make God ( and not man ) the measure of everything and to become as god-like as possible6. Aristotle's definition of man as zoon logikon or rational animal who is able to attain to the reality of everything and whose nous hylikos , contains potentially all noeta or intelligible realities, in the final analysis bears the same connotations. I do not need to elaborate on the doctrines of the Buddha, whose very name bears the connotations of enlightenment, awakening and intellection, nor to the teachings of Lao-tze, whose Tao like the Buddha nature penetrates and is manifested in everything and to attain to true awakening one need only to behold the deployment of Tao on the Buddha nature in everything and again to realize it in one's self. Nor on the writers of the Upanishads for whom our self or atma is a reflection of the Atma or the absolute self to which it becomes finally identified. The sages living in the Axial Age had almost similar presuppositions concerning Reality and it was within this framework that the reality of man and his ultimate becoming was defined. In Abrahamic religions too, man receives the mandate of his dignity from the ultimate reality, which is called differently as Jahweh in Judaism and Allah in Islam. In Judaism man makes his covenant with God, Who has made man in His image and Who has taught man the names, that is the reality of things. He has blown into man of His spirit. In Islam man is the vicegerent

or the representative of God on earth. He is the earthly embodiment or manifestation of all Divine Names and Qualities. He has been bestowed with Divine Dignity. He has accepted to bear the eternal Divine Trust, which all other creatures, the heavens and the earth have refused. He is superior in dignity even to angels7. His Divine image has been dimmed and blurred by his forgetfulness of his original abode. He can gain salvation through knowledge, purification, love and good deeds. There is a lot of agreement among these traditional world-views with regard to the ultimate destiny of man, notwithstanding their extrinsic and apparent differences, but when we turn to modern man, that is to the new conception of man in the PostRenaissance period in Europe, the problem of human dignity is posed in a quite different matrix. Human dignity is viewed with a total disregard for his Heavenly and Divine origin8. The modern age is generally marked by the Copernican revolution, not only in astronomy which has replaced geocentrism with heliocentrism, the Copernican revolution has also found its epistemological apostle in Kant, who has changed the respective functions of the subject and the object9. It is most evident in the domain of philosophy, which has condescended to change the places, and gradually the functions of God and man. In the anthropomorphist conception of God, He is made in the image of man rather than the other way round. By declaring the total autonomy of man, man gradually proclaimed his independence of God and once again became the measure of everything. Emphasis was laid upon the conception of freedom and liberty to the extent that according to certain philosophers, the mere idea of God was an obstacle and hindrance to the liberty of man. There came about another Copernican revolution in the domain of science and technology. Modern science, wedded to

mathematics was self-sufficient in explaining the phenomena and there was no longer any need for speculative and theoretical wisdom to save the appearances. Modern science, a sort of mathematicized know-how was ready to serve as the handmaid of technology to open up new horizons for the mastery over and the manipulation of nature10. Nature in the Copernican venture is no longer an object of contemplation and Divine manifestation, but has become rather the victim of the subjugation, exploitation and profanation of man. The world of nature has been prostituted and desecrated in an unprecedented manner by those who have secularized the world around them and by those who have developed a science and technology capable of destroying nature on an unimaginable scale. The modern phenomenon of science and technology has made the Trasymachean motto that " might is right " to prevail upon and overcome the Socratic and the Platonic ideal of justice.11 Now in the modern western context, all key traditional terms such as enlightenment, awakening, science, art, reason and so on have taken on a secular meaning that is, have been divested of their spiritual and metaphysical significance. Such has been the case with other key concepts as liberty and dignity, which in traditional civilizations, where taken for granted, but within the wider context of man's Heavenly and theomorphic function. Man according to the traditional view is the manifestation of Heaven or God, and this not accidentally, but in his aspect of theomorphism and primordial perfection. Man is the manifestation of the intellect, which in its turn manifests the Divine intellect. Man, as such reflects the cosmic totality and thereby the Heaven of God. The Divine intelligence confers on man intellect, reason and free will. Through these features together with speech, which manifests them, the human beings are distinguished from animals. Even if all beings, including

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plants, have intelligence, but the human intellect alone has access to reality. It alone is made in the Image of Heaven or God. The quasi-divine character of man, which explains his sacredness and his spirituality, implies that man can reconcile himself once more to his divine source and can realize once again his divine aspect. It is in his reconciliation with Heaven that man has the possibility of an intrinsic dignity. Man being made of clay is corruptible and hence has to be ransomed and saved. The ambiguity of the human state is that we are as it were, suspended between God, our true reality, and the human, which is made of clay. We are so to a mixture of divinity and dust. All the dignity of man resides in that, being made of dust and clay it manifests in himself the totality of the Divine aspect. According to the Iranian poet Hafez Lying on the mud-bricks but overstepping the seven spheres behold the mighty hand of power and the exalted lofty rank.

1- According to the traditional view, Hikmah or prime philosophy poses the most ultimate questions so as to attain to
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that unhypothetical or absolute knowledge mentioned above. It is quite pertinent here to let the first philosophy to ask the more ultimate questions about man and his intrinsic dignity. 2- Even if there is much talk about the dignity of man in the Modern Age, but modernity has deprived man of this dignity by cutting the cord that connected him to his Heavenly and Divine source. In other words, the modern man has boldly asserted his autonomy at the expense of total neglect of his Divine source and his theomorphic function. Our argument is that we should not permit the modern secular and profane conception of man to become the sole judge and arbiter regarding this issue. 3- See Karl Jaspers, vom Ursprung und Ziel der Geschichte, Zurich, 1949, chapter 1. 4- For Heraclitus, one of the sages of the Axial Age, an enlightened man was he who had awakened from his habitual slumber unto his veritable source and origin which he called the Logos. Philosophy, according to Heraclitus was homolegein, that is to comprehend and to become conversant with the Logos. See for example: Diels, an Ancilla to Presocratic Philosophy. 5- The same distinction, according to these philosophers can be made between the noumenal self and the phenomenal self. Needless to say, human dignity was considered to be more in accord with the realization of his Divine and noumenal, rather than his phenomenal self. 6- Plato on the one hand defines philosophy as theosis or homoiosis theou that is to become as much God-like as it is humanly possible and on the other hand unlike Protagoras, he makes God the measure of everything, including the measure for the dignity of man; see Plato, Protagoras 356-7; Laws, 4.716 7- Both in the Old Testament and in the Holy Quran it is emphasized that God blew into man of His own spirit, which

means that by this Divine spirit in us we manifest all the Divine qualities. Moreover, it is emphasized in the two Holy Books that God taught Adam all the Names, that is the reality of things, a fact which distinguishes man from all other creatures including angels, see Quran, chapter 2, 30/34. 8- Modern man is characterized by humanism, subjectivism, secularism individualism, relativism and other isms which go against his primordial Divine Nature, qualities which set him against the Heaven of Bliss. 9- Kant's Copernican revolution has made knowledge, and contrary to his assertion even phenomenal knowledge impossible. By blindfolding man's theoretical knowledge, he has left man imprisoned in the bastion of the categorical imperative, without deriving its authenticity from a Divine source. 10- Moderns usually blame the medievals ages for having made philosophy the handmaid of the higher science i.e. theology, but they forget that they have made it a handmaid of science and technology. Modern science by cutting itself off from both the revelation on the one hand and the sapiential wisdom of the ancients on the other, reigns supreme in the modern world. Not incognizant of the boons and blessings which modern science has brought, I do not want to elaborate on the injustices and havocs it has wrought. 11- The Republic of Plato starts with the statements of the famous sophist Trasymachus, to the effect that justice is nothing but what is to the benefit and advantage of the mighty and the strong or tersely stated it is the embodiment of the rule that "might is right", How true is this statement is in our day when science and technology have become terrible tools in the hands of some politicians and statesmen to suppress to the point of extinction the oppressed and the weak.