At The Beginning It Wasn't Like This

DISTORTED HUMAN

Emerging from the feverish desire for life following the Black Plague, humanity entered the Renaissance with revolutionary tendencies, as if it had not previously experienced such situations in earlier periods of its history. The hunger for supposed novelties consumed the people of that era, driven by the desire to reach the unknown – as if it had not already been revealed. However, from a falsely intellectual perspective, the notions studied by Scholasticism, which described the human being in its entirety – body, soul, and spirit – began to falter. Thinkers of the time began to suggest that man could also be seen and interpreted as part of the center of the Universe, bringing with it the idea that he should not merely be a secondary actor in his environment, his society – the world – but that he should now start behaving as part of the Center of creation: man once again positioning himself as the center of the universe, as seen in the periods of the great World Empires.

This is demonstrated in the major subsequent philosophical theories that agree with the summaries described below. I suggest paying attention to the details that emphasize the 'struggle for freedom,' the 'naturalistic existence,' and the 'relativistic subjectivism' that formed the completely disordered thoughts of human purpose by the Enlightenment thinkers after the French Revolution up to the present day: man being interpreted merely as a rational animal, as if composed only with the animal soul.

According to the reading of the main notions of philosophies after the Black Plague, we have taken the liberty to highlight – in bold – the parts that contrast with the aspect of the spiritual soul in relation to its purpose. The reader will notice how these highlights strongly interfere in the current reality of how distorted modern man has become from his Origin: by ignoring, deliberately distorting, or even excluding the spiritual soul from its creature's end. At the end of the compositions of each philosophical thought, I will explicitly address the highlighted parts.

NOMINALIST PHILOSOPHY

Excerpt from: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_of_Ockham

William of Ockham, also known as Occam, 1285 — Munich, April 9, 1347, was an English Franciscan friar, philosopher, logician, and scholastic theologian, considered the most eminent representative of the nominalist school, the main current deriving from the thought of Roscelin of Compiègne (1050-1120). William of Ockham, also known as the "Invincible Doctor" [Doctor Invincibilis] and the "Venerable Initiator" [Venerabilis Inceptor], was born in the village of Ockham, near London, England, in 1285, and spent his last years studying and meditating in a convent in Munich, where he died on April 9, 1347, possibly a victim of the Black Plague.

He is a philosopher who reveals his intense struggle for freedom. The individual would be capable of choosing and knowing what is right and wrong without any external intervention [1]. Man would have the right to decide his end, and society should not impose anything on him. For ethics, freedom is the quintessential subject. Freedom is essential for ethics because it deals with free will, the purpose of our life and existence. For Ockham, freedom presents itself as the possibility to choose between yes or no, to be able to choose what is convenient for me or not, and to decide and be accountable for the decision made or simply let it happen.

William of Ockham's concern is that organized and moralized power is contrary to the nature and freedom granted to us by God. This truth was not admitted by all philosophers, and in medieval thought, of which Ockham is a representative, this was a complete disintegration of the existing organizational culture and societies [2].

Ockham denounces those who, in the name of religion, have begun to usurp free will. And such usurpers understand, as he does, freedom as a gift from God and nature. Thus, he places human action in the individual and his real and concrete choices, present not in universal truths or entities but in particular, individual things and situations. He distinguishes human faculties from animal faculties, meaning that man possesses the ability to live through art and reason, which, in the philosopher's understanding, are human faculties, and it is through them that he must act, not through animal faculties (instincts). It is assumed that the capacity for choice exercised through free will is part of our own nature, understood as a gift from God and nature.