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Christian asked:

What is man?

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Man is a human being who does not bear children. Emotionally, he is the weaker of the human
species and because he does not have to be prepared for childbirth, he cannot easily bear pain. He is
more vulnerable than women and to hide this fact he has instigated the myth that man is the stronger
sex which gains spurious support from the fact that he is, on average, physically bigger.

However, if by "man" you mean mankind, then man is a biological organism with a brain capacity that
can sustain thought and language and he believes himself so superior that he can use the world's
resources as he wishes without having to bear the consequences.

Rachel Browne

If you are asking 'what is the essence of humanity', then that is far from an easy question to answer.
Many philosophers, Sartre among them, have argued that the question is incoherent, and cannot be
answered. But one thinker who did his best to find out what it is that makes humans different, 'the
science of human specialty' he called it, was Jacob Bronowski. He concluded, among other things,
that humans not only have a unique capacity to make comparisons between concepts, but that this
process of comparison is something which we are forcedto do by the way our minds are structured. I
think there is considerable merit in this view, which has echoes in Freud.

It may well be the case that we are stuck with this process of comparative reasoning. One thing which
rather supports the view is the way in which many thinkers, even those with skill in philosophy, often
seem to observe only the differences between things, and miss entirely the similarities. For instance,
it is not uncommon for people to assert that there are considerable differences between human males
and females, when, in fact, the differences are negligible while the similarities between the sexes are
all but overwhelming. Even such differences as there are, for instance that males are usually more
skilled at spacial and analytic reasoning, while females are better at facial recognition, are only
matters of degree and of average. It is just as probable to find a female with greater than average
male skill in philosophy as is it is to find a male who is shorter than the average female. Such
concentration on difference might even lead a human to think that they were significantly different to
non-human animals — on their collective attitude to the world's resources, for instance.

Now that you have two answers, you can use this faculty of comparison on them. But don't forget to
look for the similarities, not just the differences!