The Moral Sense of Life as Constitutive of the Human Person

Abstract

We have so far emphasized the role of the person in the living individual’s organizing, articulating and acting; that is, in the functioning through which he unfolds by delineating his individual life-course. When it comes, however, to asserting the point at which this life-course takes a turn of a specifically human sort, it seems most difficult to single out from among the factors entering into human functioning an element that would account for the specificity of this turn which both differentiates man from other living beings and maintains the line of continuity with other functional circuits. When we ask what is it that accounts for the specificity of the human being, we cannot consider the human being as an abstract set of features by means of which he “presents” himself; we have to seek this specificity in the network of functioning by means of which his manifestations occur. That is, we have to seek it within the life-world which he establishes as the system of meaningfulness of his existence. We have to seek it in the various types of interrelations, meanings, and corresponding “languages” (e.g., the language of art, the moral language, the religious language, etc.) which serve as means of communication within the human world. Furthermore, as is obvious from the first two models of the person presented above, the person draws upon and participates in the entire system of life and nature.