Showing posts with label personhood. Show all posts
Showing posts with label personhood. Show all posts

Monday, January 7, 2008

Human uniqueness

"Every person born into this world represents something new, something that never existed before, something original and unique. ... Every man's foremost task is the actualization of his unique, unprecedented and never-recurring potentialities, and not the repetition of something that another, and be it even the greatest, has already achieved."

Martin Buber, The Way of Man


As each and ever person exists only once and will be not be replicated, she is called to contribute to the world in an equally singular and unrepeatable manner. 

Friday, January 4, 2008

Doctrine of the Mean

“By the absolute mean, or mean relative to the thing itself, I understand that which is equidistant from both extremes, and this is one and the same for all. By the mean relative to us I understand that which is neither too much nor too little for us; and this is not one and the same for all. ... And so we may say generally that a master in any art avoids what is too much and what is too little, and seeks for the mean and chooses it—not the absolute but the relative mean.”

Aristotle, Nichomachean Ethics II. 6-7


There is no one-size-fits-all formula for everyone. Moderation is relative to particular persons because each man or woman is unique.