Humanity, Concepts of

Anthropological Universals

Every concept of humanity is logically shaped by basic distinctions between humans and nonhumans. In most life-forms, the latter is divided into two dimensions: the natural and the divine, or the transcendent. Humans are placed in between, a place where both nature and the divine meet and are mediated with each other. These three dimensions of being are ordered hierarchically: The highest value is ascribed to the divine world and the lowest to nature; humans are placed in the midst of both. The limits among nature, humankind, and the divine world are never strict and sometimes even permeable.

The moral organization of human life is regulated by a clear distinction between good and evil. This presupposes a special idea of humanity; humans are defined as persons, they are individuals with a physical and psychic continuity; as such they are responsible for what they do—at least on the level of their daily lives. This responsibility endows each human being with the quality of dignity, which demands respect and recognition in social interrelationship. Dignity also derives its social quality from a person's ability to change one's own perspective by adopting that of others—the ability of empathy. Other norms of moral behavior of similar universality define fairness in competition and the cooperative form of labor.

Every human society makes a distinction between people who belong together and form a community (thus, sharing a collective identity as well as a strong feeling and conviction of togetherness) on the one side, and people who are looked at as the others and the strangers on the other side. The interrelationship between the social self and the otherness of the others is ruled by an elementary and universal logic of social differentiation: that of an ethnocentric discrimination and that of the hospitality offered to strangers. The efforts to bring about hospitality (against a quasi-natural inclination of aversion against otherness and strangeness) demonstrate the power of ethnocentrism in the realm of cultural identity. Ethnocentrism causes the image of oneself to be shaped by positive values, which enable people for self-affirmation, which empowers them to live together with others. Otherness, however, is therefore defined by a lack of valuable elements in the life-form of people outside of [Page 834]one's own community. A widespread example of this discrimination is the distinction between civilization and barbarism.

All these universals could not hinder change from taking place; on the contrary, change takes places within them as its forms. History is structured as a process of development, the forces of which stem from a person's permanent intention to bring the dichotomies, within which human life is pursued, into an acceptable equilibrium. Human life is pushed forward by a permanent struggle to overcome the destructive forces, the “unsocial sociability” (as defined by Kant) of its social organization. Behind the entire struggle, there works the leading idea of, or a drive for, living in a life-form that can be accepted, if not appreciated, as one's own. This is the most basic and universal definition of liberty as the cultural power of humanizing human life. The cultural means of bringing about this “humanity”—a form or condition of life legitimated by the people who live it—is the use of reason. In an anthropological understanding, reason is a human's ability to create his or her own world according to his or her own will to live a “good” life.

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