What is man according to:

Ancient
Throughout time, Man (as a concept) has gone through various transformations Since philosophy took shape in the
Milesian school of which Thales is the acknowledged founder, the birth of the philosophy of Man had to wait for over
a century. However, Thales could be credited with having initiated the egalitarian tradition criticism and self-criticism
(Popper, 1998, p. 22) which marked the uniqueness of the movement he founded, a marked characteristic. at the
Philosophy of Man which Socrates would stress later in his many dialogues with his students. The school of Sophistry,
famous for its rhetorical use of language and ' wisdom, formally introduced the conceptual investigation of the nature
of Man which found expression in the homo mensura principle established by Protagoras. The principle states “Man
is the measure of all things; of things that are that they are; of things that are not that they are not.” While the Sophists
made progress in understanding Man as the subject of exploring wisdom, their limitations were often rhetorical in
nature. They failed to grasp the essence of Man beyond the arbitrary standards by which men had been accustomed to
know truth, and judge what is right and wrong. Heraclitus spoke once of a single arbitrary standard of truth -” War is
the mother of all truths” (Mckirahan, Its, 1996, p. 37). Incidentally, war is one of the worldly outcomes of the function
of the political which Aristotle (in his work, Politics) would assign to one of the essential characteristics of Man that
of his being a political animal.
Socrates one said that an “unexamined life is not worth living." This would have strong implications on understanding
the place of man in the cosmos, which the Presocratics, particularly, the ancient school of Milesian naturalism, assigned
a secondary function in philosophy, next to the larger, therefore, more important investigation of the nature of the
universe (cosmology). In this context, man barely had a moment to reflect upon his / her own powers, which, after all,
are the things that really matter and operate during the process of investigation, with him/ her as the active agent in
discovery and experimental procedure. The Protagorean principle of homo mensura would have been appropriate for
this re-definition of man within the context of the individual’s self-realizing potentials, but the implications
surrounding the employment of the principle that man is the measure of all things-are enormous. This view of man
can encourage unbridled individual competition, and the desire to assert and impose one’s truth or belief at the expense
of others. Being a measure, man would immediately take up self-enhancing attitude, and worst, self-aggrandizement,
if this measure becomes wholly absorbed in itself. It must be noted that some of the famous Sophists were notorious
for the high fees they charged upon their clients and students in exchange for wisdom. They competed against each
other for power and the prospects of wealth to sustain their leisurely lives. In this light, Socrates’ insistence to reflect
upon one’s self underlines the ethical substance of knowing or discovering truth. Further, his insistence that he is the
wisest of all men in Athens because he alone knows that he knows nothing must be chiefly viewed as an attack against
the Sophists.
After the Greeks who proposed to understand the nature of Man within the context of self-realization (i.e., the
awareness and conscious realization of human potentials guided by rational and moral virtues) the Romans placed
Man under various experimental conceptual frameworks, The self-realization of the Greeks was re-invented into a
’philosophy of consolation’ (Popkin and Stroll, 1993, p. 16) which characterized the intrinsic direction of popular
Roman philosophies at the ' time, such as Stoicism, Cynicism and Hedonism.
Medieval
The Scholastics of the Middle Ages took up this conceptual status of understanding the nature of Man. As conceptual,
Man is acknowledged as a legitimate subject of discourse or philosophic and theological inquiry; This was already in
practice since the Sophists (the school of philosophy in ancient Greece noted for its rhetorical teachings and
adventurous practice in wisdom), and continued by succeeding generations of philosophers until Iudeo-Christianity
decisively made it an article of faith. As faith, however, it necessitated a rational explanation that paved the way to the
great doctrinal fortification of the Christian dogma. The Word was, so to speak, enforced.
The arrival of the Renaissance age provided promising routes to understanding Man. Owing to economic development
brought forth by mercantilism, people’s lives, especially in Europe, started to progress toward a transcendent
dimension of existence. The invention of the type mould, which was the precursor of the modern printing press, helped
ignite a culture of discovery and a” prodigious appetite for learning” (Krailsheimer, et. a1, 1971, p. 21). Considerable
reaction against authority (the church and the state) and tradition was envisaged as a characteristic feature of the period.
This period had produced brilliant thinkers who would figure in the rise of Reformation for their scathing reaction
against the Catholic dogma and their criticisms of social practices that were no longer relevant to the emerging
libertarian mood of the time. People were becoming increasingly affected by secular authority rather than the
ecclesiastical. It was typical of this period that people "preferred concrete examples to abstract ones” (Ibid, p. 27). The
broadening of the explorative range of wisdom into diverse areas of knowledge-arts, politics, philosophy, etc-yielded
fertile seeds of a premodern culture to which humanity would look back in the centuries that followed for enduring
models that endorsed the transcendent powers of human creativity, imagination and reflectiveness. The Renaissance
also had no central unifying paradigm; it was, at best, characterized by intellectual ferment, a chaotic search for
universal truths upon which knowledge could rest as it sought to resolve the predicaments of existence such as the
problem of evil, the seeming perpetuity of diseases, and death. Man could be said to have reached a period in the
development of personal maturity equivalent to a curious adolescent, frantically in search of a stable self, entering
thresholds of curiosity and personal experiments that might prove enabling or distressing in later life. By the nature of
the period’s turbulent journey the Renaissance’s concept of Man was limited to disparate and multiple forms of
expressiveness and liberal experimentations.

Modern
At the outset of modern philosophy through Rene Descartes and David Hume, not much had altered in the conceptual
status of Man as a legitimate subject of philosophic inquiry, despite the many radical insinuations of these thinkers
that challenged religion, employing the new science that was to become the distinctive face of the seventeenth century
What would qualify as the prominent feature of this period is its mechanistic view of nature. Although it begun as an
affirmation of the rational powers of man to fathom the laws of nature using the methods of the new science, the
mechanistic ideology that underscored belief in destiny, and an ordered or flawless universe would be critically
examined by succeeding generation of thinkers. With the turn of more recent philosophic reexaminations of the
vestiges of modern philosophy, not much has changed in that respect too. One example is the existentialism of the
1960’s which, despite its assertion of the precedence of existence over essence (or any conceptual attribute of the
former), had to articulate its views in the function of concepts. The same applies to the school of phenomenology,
started by German philosopher Edmund Husserl, which sought to bracket or suspend existence (in the sense of
achieving a pure concept of existence free of all the presuppositions and habits of thought that shaped our unrealistic
view of things). The limitations of phenomenology are like the limitations of Sigmund Freud’s psychoanalysis; both
attempted at an awareness of the pure idea of the object of inquiry (the unconscious), as if there was any chance we
could ever achieve it, much more arrive at a pure originary source of knowledge which these schools of thought sought
in vain.