THE MAN IN SEARCH OF HIMSELF

There is no doubt that man is a being disoriented and lost in his existence. He does not know where he comes from, or where he is going to, much less why he is in the world. According to the Bible, such a condition was established when, in the beginning, the human being turned away from his Creator. For this reason, he lives to reformulate himself as if he were searching for his original self. Some Christian philosophers such as St. Augustine, Blaise Pascal, and Soren Kierkegaard reflected on this question. 

Augustine, for example, confesses that he lived a distant time from God: "I dissipated myself and reduced myself to nothingness, moving away from your unity to countless trifles"[1]. Passions and many activities take us away not only from God, but also from ourselves. We lose the self that we were in God's presence when we turned away from him. Augustine, then, shows how man does not know himself. He writes: "Therefore, as a pilgrim far from you, I am more present to myself than to you"[2]... And what am I, my God? What is my nature? A life varied in countless ways with immense vastness"[3]. 

Pascal, in his work Pensées ("Thoughts"), raised this questioning. He wrote, "Who put me here? By order and work of whom this place and this moment were destined for me? "[4].  Therefore, he despairs "because he doesn’t knows neither his principle nor his end". And this internal conflict increases when man looks at himself and cannot "perceive what it is to be a body and still less what it is to be spirit and still less how a body can be united to a spirit"[5]. 

Sören Kierkegaard also perceived this desperation in the human being. He saw two forms of despair. The first is man's desire to be himself, your original self, but don't get to be. Hence, the other form of despair is don't want to be the self that is. For this reason "man always desires to free himself from his self, from the self that he is, to become a self of his own invention [6]. It is at this point that one finds the sense of man's search for himself. The context here presents a relation to the event of the Fall, the moment when man separated himself from God, for the philosopher makes reference to the spiritual nature of man at all times.

Therefore, according to Kierkegaard, in his complex work Human Despair, this suffering stems from the "unconsciousness in which men are of their spiritual destiny." Thus, this Danish philosopher said that a person wastes his life when he does not attain "the consciousness of being a spirit, a self, in other words, that he can never see or feel deeply the existence of a God and that she, she herself, exists for this God "[7]. 

These philosophers, however, with their reflections grounded in Revelation, pointed out a path to the solution of this human problem. St. Augustine, for exemple, in his Confessions, declared: "... you have created us for you and our hearts live restlessly until we rest in you" [8]. Pascal, in turn, saw in man "an infinite abyss that can only be filled ... by God himself [9]. And Kierkegaard proposed "the formula that describes the state of the self, when it completely extinguishes despair: by orienting oneself, wanting to be itself, the self dives through its own transparency until the power that created it" [10]. That is, what these Christian thinkers are saying is that man finds himself when he meets God [11].

[1] AGOSTINHO, Santo. Confissões. São Paulo. Ed Vozes, p. 47

[2] AGOSTINHO, Santo. Confissões. São Paulo. Ed Vozes, p. 219

[3] AGOSTINHO, Santo. Confissões. São Paulo. Ed Vozes, p. 232

[4] PASCAL, Blaise. Pensamentos. São Paulo. Ed Abba Press, p.67

[5] PASCAL, Blaise. Pensamentos. São Paulo. Ed Abba Press, p.67

[6] KIERKEGAARD, Sören. O Desespero Humano. São Paulo. Ed Martin Claret, p.25

[7] KIERKEGAARD, Sören. O Desespero Humano. São Paulo. Ed Martin Claret, p.29,31

[8] AGOSTINHO, Santo. Confissões. São Paulo. Ed Vozes, p. 25

[9] PASCAL, Blaise. Pensamentos. São Paulo, Ed Abba Press, p.137

[10] KIERKEGAARD, Sören. O Desespero Humano. São Paulo. Ed Martin Claret, p.20

[11] MAIA, Antônio. O Homem em Busca de Si. São Paulo. amazon.com.br. p.100

Antonio Maia - M.Div.

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