Humankind, Psychic Unity of

Anthropology, the study of human beings in their bedazzling variety, eternally provokes questions about what human beings share, about their similarity, unity, or identity. The doctrine of the psychic unity of humankind is an answer to that question. Humans, it claims, are characterized by something more than merely biological unity. Equally, they are characterized by something less than spiritual unity, at least insofar as we fail to semantically disentangle “spirit” from a parochial Christian ontology and theology.

The psychic unity of humankind (or mankind) enters the anthropological lexicon in the work of Adolf Bastian (1826–1905). The idea itself, however, is too large to belong to any single person. An intimation that there is a “humanity” and that it is “one,” regardless of differences of caste, age, sex, or nation, is ethnographically rare but not unique. The historian of ideas,Eric Voegelin (1901–1985), suggests that the roots of this notion go back to the era of the ancient Mesopotamian city-states and the conviction they subsequently furnished that, standing as we do beneath the same sun, we are all equal.

Other sources for the idea have been essayed by the anthropologist Klaus-Peter Koepping. Particularly significant was the Stoics' challenge to the distinction between Greek and barbarian; Cicero's (106 BC–43 BC) coining of the term humanitas; the Renaissance ideal of the virtuous human as a cosmopolitan “universal human”; and the Enlightenment's championing of the “brotherhood of mankind.” Nor should we neglect the transformation of the Jewish image of the one God into a universal God for all peoples in Pauline Christianity, along with the radicalization of this idea in numerous peasant revolts and ecclesiastical reform movements, right up to the utopian socialism of the early 19th century and beyond.

Popular within anthropology from its mid-19thto early 20th-century beginnings, the psychic unity of humankind was a scientific postulate that fed from all these general influences. Today the phrase mostly surfaces in anthropological writings as a throwaway citation. Occasionally, as Melville Herskovits already noted in 1959, it is referred to approvingly but usually on the understanding that it no longer has any substantive theoretical role to play.

Nonetheless, the idea arguably remains at the very heart of the anthropological enterprise, though less as a still center of intellectual gravity than as a magnet possessing both attractive and repulsive poles. This curious centrality can be conveniently discussed by distinguishing between the synthetic, the programmatic, and the normative dimensions of the idea.