what is the human?

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The book What is man? The anthropology of the present in the light of the theology of the German Protestant theologian Wolfhart Pannenberg appeared in 1962 as a collection of eleven lectures, based on lectures that he gave between 1959 and 1961 at the Church University of Wuppertal / Bethel and at the Johannes Gutenberg University in Mainz .

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According to Pannenberg, we live in an age of anthropology (“science of man”), which as a comprehensive science is a main goal of the spiritual endeavors of our present day. Man makes himself a problem and tries more and more to decipher the riddle of himself.

One reason for this lies in the fact that God and faith are no longer, as they were in the Middle Ages, primary orientation points in our world. We live much more in a religiously indecisive society. For a time, new orientation was provided by the achievements of the natural sciences , which have made amazing advances in the last few decades. Nevertheless, even these have not yet been able to give people a satisfactory answer to the question about themselves.

A comprehensive understanding is now hoped for by bringing together all scientific findings in order to be able to design an overall picture that should help people to understand themselves and thus master their lives.

Pannenberg compares humans with animals. In contrast to the animal, which only has an environment, the whole world is available to man. While the animal represents a closed instinctual center, openness is inherent in humans. Open to new things and experiences, to the whole of reality.

Pannenberg derives the sense of openness from the human instinctual structure. In contrast to animals, it is not exclusively driven by instincts, but consists in being dependent on something. Man is infinitely dependent. That is why he sets an infinite counterpart that is not finite, but infinite. The cosmopolitanism presupposes a relation to God. The cosmopolitanism is not exhausted in cultural creation, as Arnold Gehlen postulates in his concept of the human being as a defective being and to which Pannenberg refers in many places in his publication. The human instinctual structure creates an infinite dependence on an infinite, on God. Humans rule the world with their limitless openness. This is done through language and symbols. In this way, humans create a cultural world with which they can satisfy their needs.

Parallel to the open-mindedness that determines people, there is an open-mindedness that forces people to think beyond their own death. Both are dependent on each other.

Work editions

Individual evidence

  1. Wolfhart Pannenberg : first edition 1962, p. 5 (see above under " work editions ").
  2. Wolfhart Pannenberg: first edition 1962, pp. 5–12.
  3. Wolfhart Pannenberg: first edition 1962, p. 8.
  4. Wolfhart Pannenberg: first edition 1962, p. 10.
  5. Wolfhart Pannenberg: first edition 1962, p. 18.
  6. Wolfhart Pannenberg: first edition 1962, p. 40.