Human being

(ME. humayne; OFr. humaine; L. humanus, human, humane; from homo, man, humus, soil. Being, from be: from AS. beon, to be, beom, I am; OHG. bim; G. bin). The reference of the h.b. in situation is the body itself. It is in the body that the relationship between the human being’s subjective moment and objectivity takes place, and it is through the body that the h.b. can understand itself as “interiority” or “exteriority,” depending on the direction it gives to its intentionality, to its “look.” Before it the h.b. encounters everything that is not itself, everything that does not respond to its intentions. Thus, the world in general and other human bodies – which the body of the h.b. affects and has access to and which it also registers the action of – set the conditions in which the h.b. constitutes itself. These conditioning also appear as future possibilities, and in future relation with the body itself. In this way, the present situation can be understood as something modifiable in the future. The world is experienced as something external to the body, but the body is also seen as part of the world, since it both acts in the world and receives the action of the world. Corporality is also something that changes and, in this sense, a temporal configuration, a living history launched toward action, toward future possibility. For human consciousness, then, the body becomes the prosthesis of intention, responding to intention in a temporal sense and in a spatial sense; temporally, to the extent that it can realize in the future what is possible for intention; spatially, as representation and image of intention.

In this becoming, objects are extensions of corporal possibilities, and other bodies appear as multiplications of those possibilities insofar as they are governed by intentions recognized as similar to those governing one’s own body. But why would the h.b. have the need to transform the world and to transform itself? Because of the situation of finiteness and temporal-spatial deficiency in which it finds itself, and which it registers, in accordance with various conditioning, as pain (physical) or suffering (mental). In this way, the overcoming of pain