What changes when we understand human beings as processes rather than fixed individuals?

 

Relational-processual anthropology distinguishes between describing human conditions and reflecting on their normative significance. Empirical observations do not logically produce moral rules, but they can make certain minimal orientations plausible. These include protecting vulnerability, supporting developmental opportunities, limiting domination, encouraging mutual recognition, and ensuring epistemic inclusion. Such orientations remain open to criticism and revision rather than forming a closed moral doctrine .
Human beings are dynamic, emergent, and relational processes rather than stable entities with fixed characteristics. Biological, psychological, social, cultural, and ecological processes continually interact in human development. Identity is a temporarily stabilized pattern that changes through time, relationships, experience, and meaning-making.
Humans are open systems not only because they exchange matter and energy with their environments, but also because they depend on language, recognition, rituals, norms, and narratives. These are not external influences on already completed individuals; they are constitutive conditions of personhood. Human development is also co-evolutionary: people change their cultural, technological, social, and ecological environments while being shaped by them in return .
Religious and secular traditions provide historical and experiential insights into these conditions. Buddhism emphasizes impermanence and non-self, Judaism highlights dialogical and historical identity, Christianity and Islam stress relational responsibility and care, Hindu traditions situate human development within layered and extended processes, and secular humanism emphasizes reflection, autonomy, and pluralistic dialogue. Their metaphysical claims do not serve as empirical proof, but their convergence around vulnerability, relationality, interpretation, and development provides a rich record of human self-understanding.
Relationality is a condition of existence rather than an optional characteristic. People do not first become independent individuals and then enter relationships; they become individuals through attachment, language, recognition, moral socialization, and cultural transmission . This position avoids both essentialism and radical relativism. Humans share basic conditions of embodiment, dependence, vulnerability, and meaning-making, while the ways these conditions are expressed remain historically and culturally diverse .
An explicit principle of ontological anti-hierarchy prevents variation from being interpreted as a ranking of humanity. Evolution is multilinear, context-sensitive, and non-normative. It produces diversity rather than moral superiority. Biological, cultural, cognitive, and technological differences therefore cannot justify unequal human worth.
Vulnerability is a constitutive feature of humanity rather than a defect that can be eliminated. It has several interconnected dimensions :
• Bodily vulnerability arises from dependence on food, health, protection, and care. The exceptionally long period of human childhood makes dependence structurally necessary for survival and development.
• Cognitive vulnerability reflects the limited and context-sensitive nature of judgment. Human reasoning is shaped by emotion, heuristics, bias, group pressure, and social influence. The same openness that enables learning also creates susceptibility to propaganda, polarization, manipulation, and collective illusion.
• Social vulnerability follows from the need for recognition, belonging, and participation. Persistent exclusion, humiliation, racialization, and isolation can damage the conditions through which people form identities and develop emotionally and morally.
• Existential vulnerability arises from mortality, loss, uncertainty, and the need to interpret life. Narratives, symbols, rituals, and moral frameworks help people integrate suffering and contingency into meaningful patterns.
• Ecological vulnerability reflects humanity’s continuing dependence on biodiversity, climate stability, water systems, food production, and the wider biosphere. Technological capacity does not remove this dependence.
Religious traditions have often described cognitive and moral vulnerability through concepts such as temptation, pride, illusion, blindness, and error. These need not be accepted theologically to reveal an important anthropological insight: rationality and moral judgment are never perfectly stable or self-correcting. Education, public deliberation, and accountable institutions are therefore necessary to support reflection and correct cognitive and emotional distortions .
Ecological vulnerability connects biological, social, and normative dimensions of existence. Human flourishing cannot consist of unlimited expansion because development remains dependent on planetary systems that societies cannot completely control. Stewardship, cosmic harmony, interdependence, and reciprocal relationships with land are different religious and cultural interpretations of the same basic condition: human freedom depends on ecological stability.
Human dignity emerges as a plausible normative response to four shared conditions . Dignity operates here on three levels. As a moral claim, it expresses the equal standing of people despite differences in ability, dependence, achievement, or status. As a legal principle, its content depends on constitutional and human-rights doctrine and cannot be inferred from anthropology alone. As an institutional criterion, it asks whether practices humiliate, objectify, abandon, or place people under arbitrary control. Keeping these levels distinct allows dignity to guide interpretation without turning it into an undefined answer to every political conflict.
First, vulnerability makes people susceptible to violence, exploitation, and humiliation. Human fragility therefore calls for protection rather than exploitation. Second, developmental potential means dignity requires more than preventing harm; people also need opportunities for cognitive, moral, social, and relational growth . Third, relationality means that dignity depends on recognition. Dehumanization occurs when people are reduced to objects, instruments, categories, or enemies. Fourth, meaning-making requires respect for different ways of interpreting life, provided these do not justify violence, exclusion, or hierarchy.
Autonomy follows from these conditions rather than serving as an isolated starting point. It is the gradually developed capacity to direct one’s life within relational, social, and material circumstances. This interpretation avoids both paternalism and simplistic individualism. Institutions may provide education, care, recognition, and security, but they may not impose a single conception of proper development or the good life .
Vulnerability also creates opportunities for power. Dependence on resources, protection, information, and recognition allows individuals and institutions to exercise control. Temporary or functional asymmetries can be legitimate in areas such as care, expertise, and public administration. They become domination when power is structurally concentrated, dependency becomes one-sided, and effective countervailing institutions are absent .
Moral language alone does not prevent domination. Religious, political, scientific, and economic narratives can protect vulnerable people but can also legitimize hierarchy and exclusion. Concepts such as dignity, justice, and compassion must therefore be examined in relation to the institutions and power structures through which they operate. Scientific knowledge and anthropological theory are not exempt from these concerns. Their reliability requires scrutiny of concepts, data selection, measurement practices, and implicit assumptions.
Human beings possess capacities for empathy, cooperation, and moral growth, but also for aggression, group hostility, exclusion, and dehumanization. These capacities are context-sensitive. Fear, scarcity, humiliation, instability, and concentrated power can weaken empathy and increase polarization, authoritarianism, and scapegoating.
Destructive behavior is neither simply a product of individual evil nor an unavoidable outcome of social systems. It emerges from interactions among predispositions, collective emotions, institutions, cultural narratives, and power relations. Individual responsibility remains meaningful, but it must be interpreted within the conditions that influence agency. Human dignity is consequently not only a moral ideal but also a fragile institutional achievement that can deteriorate.
Plurality is another basic human condition. Historical, cultural, ecological, and religious differences produce multiple understandings of truth, morality, and meaning. Truth should therefore not be treated as the exclusive possession of one tradition but pursued through intersubjective examination in which perspectives challenge and correct one another.
Dialogical universality avoids both relativism and cultural domination. Shared norms remain necessary to protect dignity and justice, but no religion, culture, or intellectual tradition can claim final ownership of them. Universal principles are legitimate only when they remain inclusive, revisable, and sensitive to unequal power in knowledge production. Without pluralism and criticism, universalism can become an instrument of domination.
Human flourishing provides a positive horizon . It is not the fulfilment of a predetermined essence or a project of individual self-optimization. It is the expansion and deepening of developmental possibilities through meaningful relationships, moral practices, institutional support, and ecological stability. Education, healthcare, political participation, economic justice, social recognition, and environmental sustainability all influence whether flourishing is genuinely possible.
Flourishing is relational, historical, intergenerational, and ecologically embedded. People rarely experience it as individual success alone; they connect it to community, care, purpose, wisdom, compassion, and responsibility for a future extending beyond their own lives. It is therefore both a personal and collective possibility.
The conceptual foundations of relational-processual anthropology consist of processuality, emergence, relationality, vulnerability, developmental potential, meaning-making, co-evolution, and anti-hierarchy. Together, these concepts describe human beings as embodied, relational, meaning-making processes that remain open to development while being structurally vulnerable to power, conflict, and moral regression.
Its minimal normative orientations are the protection of vulnerability, expansion of developmental opportunities, mutual recognition, institutional limits on domination, ecological responsibility, and epistemic inclusion . These principles guide the evaluation of developmental conditions without dictating specific policies or imposing a comprehensive moral doctrine. Human dignity is thus an emergent, universal, and relational claim that must be protected through anti-hierarchical, dialogical, and accountable institutions.

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https://www.researchgate.net/publication/413458836_Becoming_Human_Together_Rethinking_Democracy_Power_and_Institutions_for_a_Complex_and_Changing_World