The Human Being as a Being Towards the Transcendence:‏ Allameh Jafari's Philosophical Anthropology and Tracing Certain Elements of Erich Fromm's in it

Anthropology and the discussion of human being is one of the subjects that always had been in the center of debate. Who is human being? What is his essence? What is his purpose of life? A look at Hadith and Qur’an shows that the human being has the capacity of resemblance to God.  It has been realized in the perfect man who is the manifestation of God’s names and attributes. Although Allame Jafari focuses on mystical aspect of human being, because of various reasons and causes, including being familiar to the Western thinkers, he expand the region of anthropology outside of the mystical boundaries, e.g. psychological and sociological aspects. This paper aimed at showing similarities as well as differences between these two thinkers. Furthermore, we will determine why Erich Fromm was so interesting to Allame Jafari? According to Allame Jafari, human being consists of two different aspect: soul and body, which the first aspect is more important. In soul there is “ego”. While other parts of body work mechanistic, ego is conscious of its actions and other part’s actions. In order to achieve the end of life, he must be guided by means of which he could elevate over the shadow of life.   Utilizing his internal abilities, including intellect conscience, man transcendence of natural ego and achieve his perfection. This stage, which he calls intellectual life, is full of consciousness and will and is leading to the perfection. Instead of traversing the way of perfection, he may be alienated which consists of two kinds: positive alienation and negative alienation. On the other hand, for Erich Fromm, the main problem is the essence of man. According to him, it is very difficult to present a rigid definition of human being. Thus, instead of appealing to the concept of substance, he utilizes internal contradictions of human. The man is some kind of animal but all of his instincts aren’t in harmony of his environment as well as his life. His defections in this filed lead him to learn. His characteristic is consciousness of his past, future and his death. Through this, he overcomes the nature.  While he changes his environment to be a suitable place for human being, he finds a gap between his animal status and his status as a conscious being. He has two choice: downgrade to animal status of his ancestors or training his powers in the way of history in order to achieve growth and transcendence. In fact, history is the road of man’s growth which he build by means of his freewill and freedom until he reaches to his perfection i.e. justice, love and thought. For Fromm, man creates his essence, though he may be alien of his essence because of certain events and submit before external powers. Fromm calls this idolatry. In this situation, man passes his power to external things and instead to himself, he loves another external thing. Review There are certain similarities between them. It seems that the most important influence of Fromm on Allameh is psychological aspects of his thought. For Allameh, the life of man is meaningful only when he elevates from the boundaries of biological life and reaches to transcendence.  Fromm holds such belief. Also, for Allameh, same as Fromm, man has no rigid essence, but he must manifest his potentialities. The idea that human being has no rigid essence has no root in Islamic thought and thus it seems that Allameh has borrowed from Fromm and other Western thinkers. Fromm believes that man must elevate from his natural bundries and utilizing his reason, he must move to perfection and transcendence. His optimistic approach is in accordance with Allameh’s ideas and in disagreement with Fraud’s thought.