While improving the world, human beings are also called to improve themselves: lack of knowledge, lack of kin, lack of love, and other aspects of imperfection are not easy to bear but are necessary to acquire knowledge and to achieve the fullness of our human vocation. Therefore, theologically, lacking and need appear to be a necessary and proper characteristic of being. Rational analysis reveals a paradox: the human mind identifies, but also creates, lacking: Thanks to the capacity of the mind to recognize a new potency, people experience new forms of lacking around them which are inevitable since the fruits of the human mind are not yet realized at that particular moment (Kėvalas 2016: 60).
In that context, the importance of reflecting on lack is obvious. The mind comprehends that lack is not absolute. Human beings are mindful to choose measures to improve a situation and have the freedom to accomplish this. They are to be regarded as independent beings, ends in themselves, open to advancement and the knowledge of others, but not to forced dependency. Those features are captured on the primordial level and develop into a definition of what it means to be human. 1.4. Lack as a universal concept of humanity The fundamental or ontological scarcity of perfection is rooted in the nature of the world and human beings and cannot be eliminated. All entities originate from a lack of something, and so they all are marked by incompleteness. The fact itself that something is changing, coming into being, or disappearing indicates that the world is not complete. According to ancient Greeks, everything around us is characterized by the lack of absolute ontological perfection. Plato (2009) perceives all phenomena and objects of the dynamic world as dialectics of lack and plenitude in the very center of tension between being and non-being.
26
