How Can We Understand the Human Being Without Reducing Human Life to a Single Explanation?

 

Any interdisciplinary conception of humanity requires a clear methodology. Without one, insights from different disciplines risk remaining disconnected or being reduced to a single dominant explanation. Conceptions of humanity are never neutral: they shape ideas about responsibility, vulnerability, legitimate institutions, inequality, and power. A responsible anthropology must therefore be conceptually coherent, empirically testable, transparent about its normative assumptions, and protected against the historical use of anthropological and evolutionary language to justify hierarchy, exclusion, and domination.

Human beings exist simultaneously as biological organisms, psychological subjects, socially and culturally formed persons, and ecologically embedded actors. No single explanatory level can adequately account for this complexity[1]. Rationalist perspectives may underestimate emotion, embodiment, and context; constructivist approaches may neglect biological and material constraints; evolutionary explanations may reduce meaning and morality to adaptation; and humanist perspectives may overlook structural conditioning and unequal power. These perspectives must be integrated so that they qualify, deepen, and correct one another without anyone becoming a total explanation.

The epistemological foundation of this integration is processual realism[2]. Reality exists independently of language and culture, but human knowledge of it remains provisional and revisable. Knowledge develops through research, criticism, improved methods, conceptual refinement, and changing historical questions. Human beings are likewise understood as processes of becoming in which stability and change, identity and development, and freedom and conditioning are dynamically connected.

Emergence explains how properties arise through interactions across different levels of organization. Consciousness depends on neurobiology but cannot be fully reduced to neural activity. Identity requires embodiment but develops through language, relationships, and social structures. Moral action has neurocognitive conditions but acquires meaning through shared norms, practices, and institutions. Emergence avoids both biological determinism and the belief that human beings are infinitely malleable. Predispositions, environments, and interpretation continually influence one another, while freedom develops gradually within these conditions[3].

Integrative pluralism allows disciplines to retain their distinctive explanatory value within a layered framework. Biological and sociological explanations address different dimensions of human existence and need not compete for exclusive authority. Integration identifies how explanatory levels interact, where their limits lie, and where findings converge. Differences between levels do not represent a hierarchy of more or less authentic humanity; they reflect the multilayered constitution of human life[4].

The principal research method is convergence analysis. A claim becomes more plausible when independent disciplines using different methods arrive at compatible conclusions.

Consider early childhood development. Attachment research may describe the significance of reliable care; developmental psychology may examine emotional regulation and learning; neuroscience may identify stress-related processes; sociology may show how housing, income, and discrimination distribute exposure to risk; and law may determine access to support and protection. These explanations do not collapse into one another. Convergence occurs when their different methods support a compatible conclusion, for example, that dependable relationships and material security expand developmental possibilities—while disagreement about mechanism, effect size, or policy remains visible.

Developmental psychology, attachment research, and social neuroscience, for example, all indicate that early relationships strongly influence cognitive, emotional, and moral development. Such convergence supports the conclusion that relationality is constitutive of human development. It also reveals weak claims that rely on only one explanatory level or exceed the limits of their evidence[5].

Theory formation must remain iterative. Anthropological models should be formulated, critically examined, tested against new findings, and revised when necessary. They should also respond to historical experience, social conflict, emancipation movements, crises, and institutional experimentation without allowing ideology or authority to determine their conclusions. A process-based conception of humanity must itself remain capable of development.

Power structures are an essential part of human development. Economic concentration, political domination, and control over knowledge infrastructures can systematically restrict people’s opportunities. Human predispositions influence temperament, sensitivity, and cognitive tendencies, but rarely operate independently of environmental conditions. Evolutionary language must consequently remain descriptive and distinguish biological evolution from cultural, technological, and co-evolutionary development. Evolution does not constitute a universal ladder of progress, and differences in knowledge, power, or historical position must not be presented as natural differences in human worth[6].

Autonomy develops through the interaction of predispositions, environments, learning, relationships, work, loss, social position, and cultural change. It is generally an outcome of safety, education, recognition, trust, and support rather than an innate and fully formed capacity. Freedom is therefore developmental space that institutions and relationships can expand or restrict. Equal worth concerns the moral status of every person, whereas effective freedom and opportunity remain historically and socially unequal[7].

Relationships also shape neurological and psychological development. Affect regulation, language acquisition, social learning, and moral intuitions depend partly on interpersonal experience. Empathy supports cooperation, conflict reduction, and moral coordination, but it is limited and context-sensitive. It may operate selectively or be restricted by group boundaries. Empathic potential therefore requires cultural and institutional support if it is to extend beyond familiar groups[8].

Narrative identity explains how continuity can coexist with change. People connect experiences through revisable stories supported by memory, language, social recognition, and symbolic structures. Collective identities are constructed in similar ways. Narratives can create belonging and stability, but they can also exclude others and legitimize hierarchy. They must therefore be examined as both psychological resources and power-sensitive forms of cultural infrastructure[9].

Human life is also ecologically embedded. Food, health, safety, economic activity, and social stability depend on functioning ecosystems. Ecological degradation, drought, and soil exhaustion can intensify conflict and institutional instability. Ecological systems are therefore not an external background to human existence but part of its constitutive conditions. Human interdependence includes relationships with other people, institutions, the biosphere, and planetary systems[10].

Empirical knowledge does not automatically produce a complete moral system. Moving from description to normative orientation requires an explicit interpretative step. Shared human conditions, vulnerability, relational dependence, developmental potential, and the capacity for meanings support a minimal principle: institutions and social practices should not use human differences to create hierarchies of human worth or systematically deny opportunities for development[11].

This principle avoids scientism because moral norms are not treated as scientifically proven facts. Empirical findings nevertheless remain normatively relevant because they reveal how exploitation, exclusion, domination, and institutional arrangements harm human development. Practices are not neutral when they systematically increase vulnerability, damage essential relationships, or restrict developmental freedom.

Universal principles should emerge through continuing scientific examination, public deliberation, intercultural dialogue, and inclusive criticism. This procedural universality treats universalism as an open process rather than a doctrine imposed by one cultural tradition. Equal worth is based not on achievement, rationality, cultural advancement, or historical power, but on shared human conditions[12]. An explicitly anti-hierarchical orientation is therefore methodologically necessary: once variation is transformed into a ranking of human value, anthropology becomes an instrument of legitimation.

Several tensions serve as internal safeguards:

• Autonomy and conditioning: Freedom remains possible because autonomy is a gradual, relationally developed capacity supported by institutions.
• Universal dignity and cultural pluralism: Universal principles must arise through dialogue and inclusive criticism rather than cultural imposition.
• Identity and change: Narrative integration can produce continuity without requiring an unchanging essence, while social and cultural structures help stabilize multiple identities.
• Empirical description and normative judgment: Evidence informs moral reflection but does not dictate it; normative orientations must remain minimal, procedural, and revisable.

Interdisciplinary integration inevitably involves interpretative choices and cannot fully represent every perspective. Excessive complexity may also make the framework difficult to communicate, while an overemphasis on conditioning may leave freedom insufficiently defined. Reflexivity is therefore both a methodological requirement and a human capacity: people can question, revise, and institutionally correct their interpretative frameworks.

Relational-processual anthropology ultimately combines five dimensions: identity is processual, development is relational, human existence is embodied, opportunities are contextually shaped, and life is ecologically embedded. Human identity emerges as a temporary stabilization within interacting biological, psychological, social, cultural, institutional, and ecological processes. The value of this framework lies not only in its theoretical coherence but also in its capacity to expose reductionism, correct institutional blindness, resist hierarchy, and support societies in making equal worth, pluralism, dignity, and developmental freedom structurally possible.

 

Would you like to explore how a relational understanding of humanity can transform democracy, law, the economy, and public institutions? Click the link below to read the full book, Becoming Human Together, and discover a new framework for building a more humane, democratic, and correctable society within ecological limits.

(PDF) Becoming Human Together: Rethinking Democracy, Power and Institutions for a Complex and Changing World

 

---

[1] Sandra D. Mitchell, Biological Complexity and Integrative Pluralism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511802683. Mitchell provides methodological support for combining partial explanations without reducing them to one disciplinary level.

[2] Roy Bhaskar, A Realist Theory of Science, 2nd ed. (London: Verso, 1978); Nicholson and Dupré, eds., Everything Flows. “Processual realism” should be identified as the author’s synthesis of realist epistemology and process ontology, not as an established scientific school with one settled definition.

[3] Mark A. Bedau and Paul Humphreys, eds., Emergence: Contemporary Readings in Philosophy and Science (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2008); Mitchell, Biological Complexity and Integrative Pluralism.

[4] Mitchell, Biological Complexity and Integrative Pluralism, especially the distinction between explanatory plurality and fragmentation.

[5] Lawlor, Tilling, and Davey Smith, “Triangulation in Aetiological Epidemiology.” Clarify that convergence raises confidence only when methods have meaningfully different sources of bias and address compatible questions.power

[6] Longino, Science as Social Knowledge; Fricker, Epistemic Injustice; Sandra Harding, Whose Science? Whose Knowledge? Thinking from Women’s Lives (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1991).

[7] Mackenzie and Stoljar, Relational Autonomy; Ryan and Deci, “Self-Determination Theory”; Bronfenbrenner and Morris, “The Bioecological Model of Human Development.”

[8] Decety and Cowell, “Friends or Foes”; Mina Cikara, Emile G. Bruneau, and Rebecca R. Saxe, “Us and Them: Intergroup Failures of Empathy,” Current Directions in Psychological Science 20, no. 3 (2011): 149–153, https://doi.org/10.1177/0963721411408713.

[9] McAdams and McLean, “Narrative Identity”; Margaret R. Somers, “The Narrative Constitution of Identity,” Theory and Society 23, no. 5 (1994): 605–649, https://doi.org/10.1007/BF00992905.

[10] IPCC, Climate Change 2023: Synthesis Report; Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services, Global Assessment Report on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (Bonn: IPBES, 2019), https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.3831673.

[11] Fuentes et al., “AAPA Statement on Race and Racism”; Joseph Henrich, Steven J. Heine, and Ara Norenzayan, “The Weirdest People in the World?” Behavioral and Brain Sciences 33, nos. 2–3 (2010): 61–83, https://doi.org/10.1017/S0140525X0999152X.

[12] Jürgen Habermas, The Inclusion of the Other: Studies in Political Theory, ed. Ciaran Cronin and Pablo De Greiff (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1998); Rainer Forst, The Right to Justification: Elements of a Constructivist Theory of Justice (New York: Columbia University Press, 2012).