The man of
flesh and bone; the man who is born, suffers, and dies--above all, who
dies; the man who eats and drinks and plays and sleeps and thinks and
wills; the man who is seen and heard; the brother, the real brother.
For there is another thing which is also called man, and he is the
subject of not a few lucubrations, more or less scientific. He is the
legendary featherless biped, the _zoon politikhon_ of Aristotle,
the social contractor of Rousseau, the _homo economicus_ of the
Manchester school, the _homo sapiens_ of Linnaeus, or, if you like, the
vertical mammal. A man neither of here nor there, neither of this age
nor of another, who has neither sex nor country, who is, in brief,
merely an idea. That is to say, a no-man.
The man we have to do with is the man of flesh and bone--I, you, reader
of mine, the other man yonder, all of us who walk solidly on the earth.
And this concrete man, this man of flesh and bone, is at once the
subject and the supreme object of all philosophy, whether certain
self-styled philosophers like it or not.
In most of the histories of philosophy that I know, philosophic systems
are presented to us as if growing out of one another spontaneously, and
their authors, the philosophers, appear only as mere pretexts. The inner
biography of the philosophers, of the men who philosophized, occupies a
secondary place. And yet it is precisely this inner biography that
explains for us most things.
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