ABSTRACT
Viewed merely as living things, human beings can be regarded simply as one of the many results of the evolution of life. They can be viewed within the framework of the three tele, and placed within the structure of a biocoenosis as a species that uses other species as funds and serves other species as a fund themselves. As that living creature, however, which confronts non-human nature in order to essentially understand it, scientifically explain it, and technologically master and use it, a human being is not properly understood within the categories we use to describe non-human life. When comparing human beings with other living creatures, one of the first things we notice is that the development and behaviour of human individuals is far less predictable than the development of most individuals among animal and plant life. Thus we can characterise the development and typical behavioural patterns of a lion, in so far as it lives in freedom, fairly precisely, independent of the time in which it lives, neglecting for the most part its individual traits. Human behaviour, on the other hand, is very different according to the particularities of epoch, culture, place, and not least the range of variation in individual capabilities and character traits. If every living thing is, as biology teaches us, unique and novel, the human being is that creature in which uniqueness and novelty can reveal itself in a special way. It is possible for human beings to recognise as well as to create novelty, produce it in works and make it the product of deeds – be this in a good or bad sense. Whereas novelty in nature occurs – e.g. through mutation within the mechanisms of evolution – with human beings it is discovered and accomplished. Thus the characteristic of unpredictability chiefly belongs to the actions of human beings in so far as they are perceptive, producing and acting creatures. In the philosophical tradition, this difference between human beings and other living things has been described as follows: animals and plants are determined by their nature, whereas human beings are influenced by their biological nature, but are free in the sense that they can follow its influences or not. Human beings are not determined by anything foreign, they determine themselves. Thus their behaviour is generally unpredictable. Independent of the difficulties linked to such a statement, it clearly expresses a phenomenological circumstance. To a great extent, we know and can predict
how animals behave, if we know their species-specific characteristics; the behaviour of human beings, however, remains to a certain extent unpredictable. Human behaviour is open in a way for which no parallels exist in nature. In our terminology we can say: every species of animal and plant life has a way and means of living out its three tele that we can define fairly precisely through sufficient research. In this sense it is also not difficult to infer typical individual behaviour from species-specific characteristics – in fact, even possible deviations are known as a type. In the case of human beings such inference is far more problematic. It is not possible to either cite species-specific characteristics in the same way as with other living things, or, even if they were known, to make any sure statements about a concrete individual without having met the individual in person or collected information about him or her. Every new human being is a new beginning, or at least the possibility of a new beginning. One can at most cite general behavioural patterns which, however, don’t hold for the whole of humanity, but only for a certain culture, epoch or area.1 In regard to an individual, we can at best form expectations as to what extent these patterns will be adhered to or not. Even a human being we know well, and with whom we can form reasonable expectations concerning his or her behaviour, can suddenly act in a completely new and unexpected way. In concrete terms this means that for human beings we generally cannot cite a specific manner in which the three tele will be realised. Such realisations are more likely to be very different according to the culture, epoch, living area and individual development involved.
