The Emotional, Intellectual And Moral Orientation Essays

The Emotional, Intellectual And Moral Orientation Essays The Emotional, Intellectual And Moral Orientations Of Consciousness Of The Human Person And How They Become Disorientated. Introduction Mans world is manifold, and his attitudes are manifold. What is manifold is often frightening because it is not neat or simple. Men prefer to forget how many possibilities are open to them. (Kaufmann,1970) The human person is neither simple nor neat. It is a dynamic structure with many correlated parts, some of which are still areas of mystery, intrigue and simple ignorance. Thus to try and discuss the orientations of the human person we must try to narrow our fields of examination. This is in no way ideal but Purcell in I am I love you; the human person as friend implicates three distinct areas of orientation; the emotional/ aesthetic, the intellectual and the moral. These areas are actively orientated towards beauty, truth and good respectively. These orientations, when genuine, are not contained solely within the self or I but as we are dynamic structures firmly rooted within the world our orientations are projected outwards towards another or a Thou. It is when these orientations are confined within the I or when projected onto an It or We that these aspects of ourselves becomes disoriented. Orientation I When we begin to try and look into the emotional orientations of the human person it is obvious that we should try and examine its product, namely Art. Art is the manifestation of emotional communication, the voice inside that cries out to the other, waiting for a reply. The composer Arnold Schoenberg described this expression best in 1909: Art is a cry of distress from those who live out within themselves the destiny of humanity, they are those who do not turn their eyes away to protect themselves from emotion but open them wide to oppose what must be attacked. They do, however, often close their eyes to perceive what the senses do not covey, to look inside of what seems to be happening on the surface. Inside them turns the movement of the world; only an echo of it leaks out the work of art. In the first essay, called dialogue, in his Between Man and Man, Martin Buber describes a recurring dream he has where he lets out a cry into the world. His cry is answered by a new echo which seems to answer questions that were, unbeknownst to him, contained within his own original cry. If we take Art as this cry of distress it can be seen that the artist is indeed waiting for that returning cry of recognition, a deep meaningful connection through a dialogue without the boundaries or confines that encase us in everyday survival .It is through this dialogue that the human person bypasses restrictions to reach his audience and to converse and communicate with his own community, humanity. II In the search for truth the intellectual mind has often emphasised theory rather than experience. For our purposes though, both experience and knowledge of others and ourselves are required to examine the intellectual orientations of the person. For it is not just how I see myself as being but also how I live my life that is the embodiment of my personal truth. The phrase having the courage of our convictions can have a profound meaning in so far that in our search for our own meaning we must live out our own truth. Victor Frankl, while in a Nazi concentration camp, saw how people found strength in the meaning rather than the quality of their lives: We who lived in concentration camps can remember the men who walked through the huts comforting others, giving away their last piece of bread. They may have been few in number, but they offer sufficient proof that everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of human freedoms - to choose one's attitude in any given set of circumstances - to choose one's own way. (Victor Frankl) Again, however, we cannot over look the importance of interaction with another in defining our own meaning. Through thinking with others we can discover our own thinking and expand our own horizons of understanding. For genuine dialogue of our cognitive experiences is just as important a communication as