Philippine E-Journals

Reality of Human Experience and the Search for Unity

Mario C. Mapote

 

Abstract:

Man’s basic attitude towards reality determines his end. Man either opts to accept reality and becomes an optimist or denies and becomes a pessimist. The study presents the reality of human experience. And these experiences of human reality all boil down into the experience of oneself and become a test of subjectivity. In the history of philosophy of Man, this outlook into the experience of the self develops into three stages: first, dualism propagated by the Greeks and Aristotle turned into second, monism which extremely focused on one aspect of human reality in relation to man, then, turned into pluralism which views various aspects of man in relation to the kind of society that becomes the byproduct of such development and yet makes the identity of man more complicated. In the history of philosophy, human consciousness was so caught up in dualism between body and spirit-mind that became an issue for philosophers like the Greek such as Socrates, Plato and Aristotle and followers such as Augustine, Aquinas, Descartes and others until it split into extreme monism of either materialism or intellectualism-spiritualism developed into more complex pluralism that resulted to a pluralist society. Hence, there is a call for unity especially for existential-phenomenologist in order to gather and link every piece of event and experience into a complete history of human reality as well as to form this experiential event called humanity.