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Introduction: Human Transformation: The Concept of Self in East and West
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15312 |
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MODERN THOUGHT
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8 / 1989 |
691 Words |
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Man's greatest problem is the problem of existence, of being. Everyone realizes that. Philosophers and prophets have struggled with it for ages. Whence have I come? Why am I here? What is life? How am I to live? What is death? Why is there evil? Such questions have perplexed man from the moment he first became consciously aware of himself in the world. He has long turned to religion for a framework in which to work out these questions. Confucius, Buddha, Jesus, and other religious figures have contributed much to the clarification of these questions. Religion, they have shown, cannot be separated form the problem of existence--that is, man's understanding of himself is deeply affected by his understanding of God, of the divine. To understand God requires knowing oneself. Also, man's image of the divine is a reflection of his understanding of his highest self--representing what he should strive to become.
It may be characteristic of any decaying civilization that the greatest masses of the people grow unconscious of such things. As Reinhold Niebuhr once wrote, "Nothing is more calculated to deceive men in regard to the nature of life than a civilization whose cement of social cohesion consists of the means of production and consumption." From the sixteenth century to the present the world saw the rise of science. With it came prodigious accomplishments and miraculous discoveries. Dread diseases are retreating with every advance in medicine; our world made smaller by communication and travel; our senses bedazzled with sensuous delights and comforts. Along with these advances, the modern mind has produced a kind of intelligence that deprives man of reason for existence and certainty of a transcendent end. Various attempts have been made to redefine the personhood of man. Bergson spoke of it as a flash of intelligent being; Hume, as a succession of thoughts and feelings; Locke, as an intellectual substance that considers itself; Whitehead, as a projection of mind; and mechanistic philosophers, as a special organization of matter. Having lost faith in the Absolute, man has lost faith in himself and faith in the future. With all the talk about out drug crisis, crime epidemic, and leadership problems, lurks, at least in our more lucid moments, the perception that that which threatens to destroy us lies within.
In the following pages the concept of self--by which is meant a spiritual soul, a higher self beyond the mind, body, or ego where the deepest human spirituality dwells--as found in a variety of Eastern and Western traditions is explored. Tu Wei-ming describes the Confucian concept of self-realization as ultimate transformation, a process that enables us to embrace the family, community, nation,
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