F.-X. Putallaz #2 : Qu'est-ce que l'homme ?

What is man? To know what man is, that is to say, to do anthropology, it is very useful to know what he is not, and therefore to mark out the borders from below, which our contemporary world often does: man is not a beast. He is not an animal without reason.

Below him there are animals, just like man is an animal, but animals without reason, beasts; and then above there are the angels. Thus would say Blaise Pascal, I was going to say, a rather common saying, but very profound. Man is neither an angel nor a beast.

And Pascal adds, from a moral perspective, the problem is that whoever wants to be the angel always ends up becoming a beast. So man is neither angel nor beast. He is not.

. . I will start with an angel.

Why? Because in many philosophies and in many doctrinal lines of thought, we imagine that man is a spirit, that man has a spiritual soul, which is thrown down as punishment, inadvertently, into this human body. This was Plato's position.

Plato, in his Alcibiades, says: man, Socrates, he is the soul. No, no, man is a whole, made up of soul and body. To say that man would be a soul or a spirit in a body is to imagine that man is very spiritual and then that he is lost in a body.

This is too angelic a view. It is not far from Descartes' view. It is in any case part of Plato's view.

There were other writers, like Origen, who thought that angels and human souls were the same thing. Simply, some had turned away from God, certain spirits, and then they had been punished in a body. First element: no, the body is not a punishment.

The body is not a prison. So, by saying "man is not an angel" positively I say that man is an animal. He is an organism, he is a being endowed with materiality and with organs, which goes without saying and which is obvious, but I did not say he was just that.

Because if he were only that, he would be below himself, he would be a beast, having food as his goal in life. . .

Not just eating, but gobbling his food, I would say. not to give of himself in love and body, but to copulate, et cetera. And man would at most have sensations, which, by the way, are less efficacious than those of other animals, e.

g. , a less developed sense of smell. He would have affections, he would have an affectivity of desire, pleasure or pain.

And his whole horizon would consist in avoiding pain and seeking pleasure. There is an entire tendency like that, which already comes from the ancient Greece of Epicurus, and which we find very strongly today in Anglo-Saxon currents of utilitarianism, for example, those who think that all of human life is about finding, maximising pleasure and reducing pain for the maximum of sentient beings. There is therefore no longer any difference in nature between man and beast.

There would only be a difference in degree. Well no, man is not a beast either, he is man! And what is man?

He is a person. Now, there is a lot that can be said on this. A person is a being, he is a substance: that is the technical word we use.

A substance which exists in a nature, a human nature precisely, an essence, which is characterised by two capacities. The ability to know intellectually - otherwise I could not speak to you today, otherwise you would not listen, otherwise I could not read my newspaper in the morning or watch a TV show. And then an ability to love.

Hence the classic definition: the person is an individual substance, an individual, of a rational nature, that is to say capable of loving and capable of knowing intellectually. But it is a human substance, that is to say that this capacity, which I have just mentioned, is exerted only with and by the human body. So, to your question "what is a human being?

What is a man? ", I answer as Aristotle said: He is an animal, but one endowed with reason; he is a rational animal. What is important in this definition, which avoids making man either an angel from above, or a beast from below, what is important in this definition, it seems to me, is that the human body is an integral part of the person.

The human body is an integral part of the person, which means that if I am a caregiver, if I take care of my grandmother who is sick and I humbly look after the body, it is my grandmother's person that I look after. And therefore, if you like, the human being reveals his greatness, manifests his greatness in the very humble little things of the earth, the 'humus', - for that is indeed the origin of the word: the human being, man (l'homme), what is humble, that is to say made of earth, 'humus', - but it is an earth, if you will, a humus or a biological reality, an animal who is, how can we say this, subsumed, as if surpassed, who is transfigured as compared to the animals, because he has in him a spiritual principle.