Shaif asked:

My question is philosophical anthropology: what is the human essence? what property defines us all
as human and distinguishes us from other types of living beings?

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"Behold man, who strikes coins with the same die and gets coins all alike; but behold the King of
kings, the Holy-Blessed-Be-He, who strikes all men with the die of Adam and not one is the same as
another.

Babylonian Talmud

To be a human means to live as if one were not a being among beings. As if, through human
spirituality, the categories of being inverted into an 'otherwise than being'.

Emmanuel Levinas"

What makes humans special from rocks, trees, trout, dogs, in fact everything is that we are unique,
individual, we can't be lumped together under a heading, or at the most such headings and categories
are incidental and does not identify what makes us special — as the quote from the Talmud
recognises. What makes us unique is threefold; 1) that we are able to transcend our own particular
place in the world and to identify other times and places, nothing else experiences time and space as
we do, 2) that we recognise our own self, we are self aware, 3) that we recognise Others as Others
that is others in their own special uniqueness. No other living thing can respond to an other of its kind,
or any other living thing and say 'wow look at that it's completely unique and individual'. All cows are
the same. All humans are different.

Put these things together and you get something like what Levinas is describing an 'otherwise than
being' (this is not to be understood as not-being, nothingness or death. (Heidegger thought that our
experience of nothingness was what distinguished us, the awareness of our own death made us
unique, but there are problems with this view, plus the fact of our own death can I think be analysed
in terms of the three conditions I listed above especially self awareness and time awareness).

Cows are part of being, they exist from moment to moment with only a fleeting awareness of the flies
buzzing around the smell fresh grass, the calls of the bull. Humans are a part of being too (note
Levinas says as ifone were not a being among beings), we have material bodies that need to eat and
sleep, but we can make the move from merely participating in being to moving beyond being to
something better, we can care for and look after one another. We don't need to be defined by what
we are, that we exist, but by how we are, the way we exist.

Brian Tee

Bernard Lonergan draws the distinction that other living beings are pre-programmed and to act by
instinct, while humans alone perform intentional acts. The species Homo was initially
pre-programmed, but humans also had the capacity to develop. In Lonergan's view, expressed in his
A Second Collection(1974 Westminster Press, Philadelphia) modern humans "apart from times of
dreamless sleep, are performing intentional acts. They are experiencing, imagining, desiring, fearing;
they wonder, come to understand, conceive; they reflect, weigh the evidence, judge; they deliberate,
decide, act. If dreamless sleep may be compared to death, human living is being awake; it is a matter
of performing intentional acts; in short, such acts informed by meaning are precisely what gives
significance to human living" (1974, 3-4).

In the same work Lonergan identifies three levels of human investigation of reality and of human
intellectual development. There is the first level of experiencing, imagining and saying, the second
level of inquiry, understanding, defining and conceiving and the third level of reflecting, weighing the
evidence and judging (1974, 35).

It is the progress into this third level that has made Western culture dominant. The process of the
acquisition of information is intentional, and "our intending intends, not incomplete, but complete
intelligibility" (1974, 41). He dismisses Kant's limited understanding of "object",which asserts that the
one way our cognitional activities are related to objects immediately is by intuition, and he proposes
that "objects are what are intended in questioning and what becomes better known as our answers to
questions become fuller and more accurate" (1974, 122-3).

Lonergan's position is consistent with my thesis that the Cosmos is a process with a purpose. This
process involves both self-organization and self-creation at the human moral cultural level. ["The
Process of the Cosmos" (1999) USA, Dissertation.com] We are distinguished from other living beings
by our intentionality, our creativity and our morality.

Anthony Kelly