The dual nature of man, or the individual on the threshold between two worlds

Probably, no one needs to be convinced that people are biological beings. Whatever the Church says about this, the proximity of the anatomical structure, the physiology of homo sapiens to the higher primates is obvious. The biological nature of man is clearly inherited from the animal kingdom. All people have a nervous and circulatory system, have a certain set of internal organs, which are also present in the bodies of not only anthropoid apes, but also other mammals and even birds. To some extent, this originating from animals is rigidly determined. Parental genes give us growth, skin color, hair and eyes, and even hereditary diseases.

But from all philosophical currents only behaviorism reduces the nature of people only to their nature, resulting from biological nature. People are also social creatures. The philosophical concept of "man" includes both the body (organism) and the individual (personality, subject). And if certain chemical processes take place at the level of the body's vital activity-glucose uptake, oxygen enrichment, the release of slags, carbon dioxide, and so on, quite different, much more complex processes operate at the personality level. The social nature of a person is not limited to the vital activity of the organism. The meaning of life, the place of the individual in society, excites people no less than issues of saturation and continuation of the family.

If the biological properties of the body are inherited, then the social ones are acquired by the individuals themselves. This is not the place for discussion, which factors are involved in the creation of the personality - cultural unconscious, education, or experienced stresses in childhood - it is important that all these factors lie not in the material world, but in a completely different plane. Thus, the nature of man is twofold: with his body he belongs to the material world, and his heart and mind - to another, to another. And how far is this socio-biological or biosocial being directed to another? We can say that the biological nature of people is a prerequisite for their existence in this world, but the essence of the human race is in its sociality.

The child, being born, does not realize himself as a person. They are guided by instincts: the desire to be warm, dry and full. Later, he begins to recognize the source of this warmth and satiety - the mother. But he empirically knows other manifestations of this world: cold, hunger, danger. From these troubles save again the mother and father. Communicating with their parents, entering with them into these simple social relations, the child is already "humanizing". Sociocultural factors begin to dominate. The child is not enough to be fed and warmed, it is important for him to feel loved. So the nature of man, starting from biology, rushes to the sphere of spirituality, where such intangible concepts as love, tenderness, responsibility play a key role.

Growing up, the child realizes his limb as a biological being in this world. But the soul of man is always aimed at infinity, eternity. We can say that human nature is a heavy cross of alienation from nature. The material realm pushes man out of himself, and the person, over the years (and illnesses), feels alien to this world, abandoned in the "vale of sorrow". If the soul associates itself with its carrier - the body, tragedy can not be avoided: the shadow of death will pursue the person and poison her entire existence.

Maybe it's worth thinking about: where does this ability to love us, be grateful, why do we have an aesthetic sense of beauty, moral values? There is nothing in material and inanimate nature. Having emerged from the world of simple biological creatures through evolution, homo sapiens to some extent ceased to be just a biological being - he began to resist the material world, redesigning it "for himself." It is not for nothing that the existentialists noticed that we feel here not at home, but in a foreign country and are fighting for the right to have this house. We can say that the nature of man is outside the material world, in the spiritual world. "I will not all die," wrote Horace, "the best part of me will avoid destruction."