Assignment 7(HRM)

“Human beings are the most important potent and critical resource of any organization and yet the least understood and the worst managed of it resources.
It is important to understand what we are as human beings. The present state of knowledge of the human being is one which has been informed by the materialistic reductionist thinking of modern technological science. It is commonplace for people generally to think of the human body as being merely an elaborate machine, with all the non-material aspects of the human being- thinking, feeling, attitudes, emotions, mores, imagination, etc., etc, as being merely the result of the physico-chemical activities which take place in the physical body. However, the human organism is not a machine and does not operate under the aegis of chemical and physical laws. An important statement made by Rudolf Steiner in this context, given in a lecture series published as "Man as Symphony of the Creative Word", (Rudolf Steiner Press, London, 1970, pp. 188-189) in 1923, eloquently illustrates the problem:

" Wouldst thou heal man, look into the world on every side, see on every side how the world evolves processes of healing. Wouldst thou know the secrets of the world in the processes of illness and healing, look into the depths of human nature. You can apply this to every aspect of man's being, but you must direct your gaze outwards to the great world of nature and see man in a living relationship to this great world.
People today have become accustomed to something different. They depart from nature as far as possible. They do something which shuts their own sight off from nature, for what they wish to examine they lay beneath a glass on a little stand - the eye does not look out into nature, but looks into the glass. Sight itself is cut off from nature. They call this the microscope. In certain connections it might as well be called a nulloscope, for it shuts one off from the great world of nature. People do not know, when something under a glass is magnified, that for spiritual knowledge it is exactly as though the same process were to take place in nature herself. For only think, when you take some minute particle from the human being for the purpose of observation under a microscope, what you then do with this minute fragment is the same as if were to stretch the man himself and tear him apart. You would be an even worse monster than Procrustes if you were to wrench man and tear him asunder in order to enlarge him as that minute particle is enlarged under the microscope. But do you believe that you would still have the person before you? This would naturally be out of the question. Just as little do you have the reality there under the microscope. The truth which has been magnified is no longer the truth; it is an illusory image. We must not depart from nature and imprison our own sight. For other purposes, this can of course be useful; but for a true knowledge of man it is immensely misleading.
Knowledge of man in the true sense must be sought in the way we have indicated. Starting from the processes of nutrition, it must be followed through the processes of healing to the processes of human and world education in the widest sense. Or we can put it thus: from nutrition, through healing, to civilization and culture."

This line of thinking leads to the logical conclusion that it is not possible to understand the human being by means of the scientific methodology employed today. Anytime we open up the human being by means of tissue samples, doing blood analysis, etc., we simply do not have any reality before us; what we have is an artifact abstracted from the context in which it naturally exists, and so whatever we find out about the artifact has no reality with regard to the living tissue itself in the context of its functioning within the human organism. This has necessarily lead to tremendous confusion and chaos in the world because it is based on ignorance about what we are as human beings. The following is a greatly simplified description of the constitution of the human being; for a more detailed description of the complexities of the human being I refer you to the book "Theosophy" by Rudolf Steiner,
(Anthroposophic Press).