Q0179

Feng Youlan

A verified English rendering from the curated archive.

English

Human life is life with awareness and understanding — or with a higher degree of such awareness. This is what distinguishes humans from beasts, and human life from the life of other animals.
Thinker Feng Youlan
School New Rational Philosophy
Source A New Treatise on the Nature of Man
Theme Philosophy
Another quotation More from this thinker

Source context

This English passage is associated with A New Treatise on the Nature of Man, within the tradition of New Rational Philosophy. The wording below is a verified rendering prepared for careful reading rather than a claim of unique translation authority.

A short reading

Read in the register of philosophy, the sentence asks the reader to test an assumption rather than to collect a slogan. In Feng Youlan's wider work, similar claims are usually offered as prompts for judgment: what would have to be true for the sentence to hold, and what would follow if it did?

How to cite this quotation

APA: Feng Youlan. (n.d.). Human life is life with awareness and understanding — or with a higher degree of such awareness. This is what distinguishes humans from beasts, and human life from the life of other animals. In Philosophy Blind Box. https://www.philosophydef.com/quotes/q0179

MLA: Feng Youlan. “Human life is life with awareness and understanding….” Philosophy Blind Box, https://www.philosophydef.com/quotes/q0179.

Chicago: Feng Youlan. “Human life is life with awareness and understanding….” Philosophy Blind Box. Accessed 2026. https://www.philosophydef.com/quotes/q0179.

Same thinker

More from Feng Youlan

  1. The function of philosophy is not to increase positive knowledge, but to raise the level of the spirit.

All quotations by Feng Youlan

Same theme

More on philosophy

  1. It is through wonder that people both now begin and first began to philosophize.
  2. A person's character is their destiny.
  3. What is opposed brings together; from what differs comes the finest harmony.
  4. Death is nothing to us: for what has been dissolved has no sensation, and what has no sensation is nothing to us.
  5. Pleasure is the beginning and end of the happy life — not the pleasures of profligates, but freedom from pain in the body and from disturbance in the soul.

Browse the philosophy theme