What does it mean to be human if humanity is never finished?

 

Humanity is better understood through human becoming[1] than through a fixed definition of human nature. A human being is an embodied, narrative, and reflexive developmental process formed within networks of recognition, dependence, and power, embedded in cultural systems of meaning and ecological conditions. Identity develops, temporarily stabilizes, and is continually reinterpreted through interactions among biological, psychological, emotional, social, institutional, cultural, technological, and ecological processes.

The process-based conception of humanity provides this ontological description, while Relational-Processual Anthropology is the broader interdisciplinary research program that examines, tests, and critically safeguards it. The framework can be read as a connected sequence. Embodiment creates needs and limits; relationships shape capacities and identity; institutions distribute the conditions under which those capacities can develop; unequal power influences whose needs and interpretations become authoritative; ecological systems set material boundaries; and reflexivity permits people and institutions to revise inherited patterns. The normative orientation arises from this sequence but is not mechanically deduced from it: equal worth, autonomy, pluralism, and responsibility remain publicly defensible commitments that must withstand criticism.

The former describes the basic conditions of human existence; the latter supplies the methodological framework needed to prevent those claims from becoming fixed doctrines.

Human identity is not an object or an inner substance but an emergent pattern. It develops through experiences, relationships, interpretations, habits, memories, and practices[2]. This does not make identity arbitrary or permanently unstable. Continuity emerges through stabilizing mechanisms such as memory, repetition, moral commitments, social roles, relational expectations, and narrative coherence. People remain recognizable to themselves and responsible over time because they organize changing experiences into relatively continuous life stories.

Narrative identity is both personal and collective. Individuals interpret their lives through language, rituals, traditions, education, public memory, professional cultures, religious narratives, and institutional stories that they did not create by themselves. These frameworks provide meaning and recognition, but they can also impose expectations, exclude perspectives, and legitimize power. Identity is therefore formed within inherited narratives that people can partly reconsider and revise[3].

Reflexivity is the capacity to examine and transform these interpretative frameworks[4]. It includes individual introspection and collective practices such as science, philosophy, art, political criticism, and religious reform. Reflexivity prevents human development from being reduced to conditioning: people are shaped by circumstances but can also interpret, challenge, and partially redirect them. Because theoretical models are similarly shaped by historical and institutional contexts, anthropology itself must remain reflexive and corrigible.

Human development is always embodied. Cognition, emotion, and behavior are connected to neurological, hormonal, and genetic structures. These biological influences operate probabilistically and contextually rather than as deterministic programs. Gene expression, neuroplasticity, learning, stress, relationships, and cultural environments continually interact. This avoids both biological determinism and the opposite belief that humans are infinitely malleable[5].

The body is not merely a biological object but the medium through which people experience the world[6]. Perception, vulnerability, desire, emotion, social contact, illness, sexuality, ageing, and mortality are all embodied. Cultural and religious practices surrounding birth, care, illness, death, and mourning demonstrate that embodiment is simultaneously biological, experiential, social, and symbolic.

Relationality is not an additional feature of an already completed individual. People become individuals within relationships. Attachment, language, emotional regulation, identity, recognition, and moral orientation develop through interaction with others and participation in shared institutions. Rational and moral judgment also develop through communication, argument, criticism, and mutual accountability.

Relationships are nevertheless morally ambivalent. They can support solidarity, care, and recognition, but also produce hierarchy, dependence, exclusion, and domination. Relationality must therefore be analyzed together with power. Human development occurs within networks that distribute resources, information, recognition, and authority unequally.

Shared vulnerability and developmental potential provide the anthropological basis for human equality. All people can be physically harmed, cognitively misled, socially excluded, existentially destabilized, and ecologically threatened. At the same time, they possess capacities to learn, adapt, recover, revise their interpretations, and transform their environments and institutions.

Equal worth cannot therefore depend on achievement, rational performance, social power, or presumed cultural advancement[7]. Such differences frequently reflect unequal developmental circumstances rather than different degrees of humanity[8]. Biological and cultural variation represents a plurality of developmental paths, not a hierarchy of human value. Anti-hierarchy is consequently both an ontological principle and a methodological safeguard against racism, colonial classifications, social Darwinism, and technocratic rankings of people or societies.

Freedom is a gradual and relationally developed capacity for self-formation[9]. It requires upbringing, education, social safety, recognition, material stability, legal protection, and genuine opportunities to act. Formal rights alone are insufficient when people lack the practical ability to use them. Autonomy is therefore both an individual capacity and an institutionally supported space.

At the same time, a relational account of autonomy requires an anti-paternalistic limit. Institutions may support people’s ability to choose, but they may not determine which life goals people must adopt. Autonomy includes both the capacity to direct one’s life and the right not to be forced into a predetermined ideal of human development. It can grow under supportive circumstances and diminish through exclusion, manipulation, severe inequality, or authoritarian control.

Moral capacities are developable but fragile[10]. Empathy, cooperation, responsibility, and normative reflection arise through interactions among biological predispositions, upbringing, cultural meanings, social practices, and institutions. Moral development is neither automatic nor linear. Fear, scarcity, inequality, social disruption, propaganda, and authoritarian power can weaken empathy and encourage polarization, scapegoating, and dehumanization.

Moral competence therefore requires continuing social and institutional support. Education, public deliberation, the rule of law, independent institutions, reliable information systems, and safeguards against corruption and concentrated power help preserve the conditions for moral responsibility. Morality is not only an individual virtue but also a socially produced and institutionally protected achievement.

Emotion is a constitutive dimension of human life rather than an irrational disturbance of otherwise rational agency[11]. Empathy, trust, shame, fear, resentment, solidarity, and moral indignation shape interpretation, judgment, group formation, cooperation, and conflict. Social stability cannot be explained solely through rules or rational interests, just as conflict cannot be reduced to competing material interests.

Institutions and cultural practices also regulate emotion. Education, ritual, law, public dialogue, and shared symbols can channel affective dynamics, support solidarity, and prevent destructive escalation. They can also mobilize fear and hostility. Relational-processual analysis must therefore examine how emotions are interpreted, organized, and politically activated.

Meaning-making is another constitutive dimension of humanity. People experience life not only as a sequence of causes and events but through questions of suffering, mortality, guilt, hope, responsibility, and the future. Meaning emerges as people interpret these experiences through narratives and moral frameworks. Religious traditions can be treated as historical laboratories of meaning rather than as final normative authorities, while secular institutions provide additional forms of interpretation and public reflection.

Meaning develops dialogically, culturally, and intergenerationally. Narratives connect personal identity to collective memory and future expectations. They mediate between individuals, societies, histories, and ecological environments. Because narratives are shaped by power and cognitive limitations, they must be analyzed both as sources of coherence and as potential mechanisms of exclusion or domination.

Human cognition is bound. People interpret incomplete information through heuristics, simplified models, group loyalties, and identity-protective narratives. Reflexivity rarely develops by itself. Education, scientific inquiry, independent journalism, public debate, and open institutions are necessary correctives that allow dominant interpretations to be questioned and societies to adapt to changing circumstances.

Plurality is a normal feature of human existence. Multiple identities, moral traditions, and knowledge systems reflect different historical and cultural trajectories. Yet social cooperation also requires some shared frameworks. The tension between pluralism and cohesion cannot be permanently eliminated; it must be managed through inclusive institutions and continuing dialogue.

Plurality does not imply that every practice must be accepted. Variation can support creativity, adaptation, and social renewal, but practices that systematically destroy bodily integrity, relational safety, dignity, or developmental opportunity cross a minimal normative boundary. This boundary protects the conditions under which pluralism itself can survive without imposing a comprehensive moral doctrine.

Universal principles must be procedural rather than based on one substantive model of humanity. Shared conditions such as vulnerability, relationality, developmental potential, meaning-making, and ecological dependence provide common points of orientation, but their normative interpretation must remain open to intercultural criticism and revision. Universality becomes legitimate through inclusive dialogue, mutual justification, and correction of epistemic exclusion[12].

Human development is co-evolutionary. Biological capacities enable language, cooperation, and learning, while cultures, institutions, and technologies reshape the environments in which those capacities develop. Biological evolution must be distinguished from cultural and technological change so that evolutionary language cannot be misused to rank societies or populations.

Ecological systems are constitutive conditions of human development rather than an external background. Health, food, water, safety, economic organization, and cultural continuity depend on the biosphere. Freedom, dignity, and flourishing are therefore inseparable from ecological stability and planetary limits[13].

Relational-Processual Anthropology is consequently anti-reductionist, interdisciplinary, reflexive, and anti-hierarchical. It understands identity, morality, solidarity, and responsibility as emergent phenomena produced through reciprocal interactions across multiple levels. It distinguishes descriptive claims about human development from minimal normative orientations such as protecting vulnerability, expanding developmental opportunities, limiting concentrations of power, preserving pluralistic freedom, and ensuring participation.

These orientations function as a revisable compass rather than a fixed moral system. Technological change, ecological crisis, new forms of communication, and changing social institutions continually transform the conditions of human becoming. An anthropology centred on process must therefore remain open, historically aware, empirically testable, and capable of revising its own concepts.

 

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

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[1] Nicholson and Dupré, Everything Flows; Bronfenbrenner and Morris, “The Bioecological Model of Human Development”; Sandra D. Mitchell, Biological Complexity and Integrative Pluralism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511802683. T.

[2] McAdams and McLean, “Narrative Identity”; Galen Strawson, “Against Narrativity,” Ratio 17, no. 4 (2004): 428–452, https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9329.2004.00264.x. Together they support the role of narrative continuity while guarding against the claim that every person experiences identity in narrative form.

[3] Margaret R. Somers, “The Narrative Constitution of Identity,” Theory and Society 23, no. 5 (1994): 605–649, https://doi.org/10.1007/BF00992905; Jan Assmann, Cultural Memory and Early Civilization (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011).

[4] Anthony Giddens, Modernity and Self-Identity (Cambridge: Polity, 1991); Helen E. Longino, Science as Social Knowledge (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1990). Reflexivity should be presented as a capacity that varies with resources and institutions, not as an automatic property of modern individuals or organizations.

[5] Gilbert Gottlieb, “Probabilistic Epigenesis,” Developmental Science 10, no. 1 (2007): 1–11, https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-7687.2007.00556.x; Michael J. Meaney and Moshe Szyf, “Environmental Programming of Stress Responses through DNA Methylation,” Dialogues in Clinical Neuroscience 7, no. 2 (2005): 103–123, https://doi.org/10.31887/DCNS.2005.7.2/mmeaney. Qualify that evidence varies by species, tissue, developmental stage, and design.

[6] Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, trans. Donald A. Landes (London: Routledge, 2012 [1945]); Francisco J. Varela, Evan Thompson, and Eleanor Rosch, The Embodied Mind (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1991).

[7] United Nations, Universal Declaration of Human Rights; United Nations, Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, adopted 13 December 2006, 2515 UNTS 3; Waldron, Dignity, Rank, and Rights.

[8] Pierre Bourdieu, “The Forms of Capital,” in Handbook of Theory and Research for the Sociology of Education, ed. John G. Richardson (New York: Greenwood, 1986), 241–258; Lukes, Power: A Radical View; Fricker, Epistemic Injustice.

[9] Mackenzie and Stoljar, Relational Autonomy; Sen, Development as Freedom; Richard M. Ryan and Edward L. Deci, “Self-Determination Theory and the Facilitation of Intrinsic Motivation, Social Development, and Well-Being,” American Psychologist 55, no. 1 (2000): 68–78, https://doi.org/10.1037/0003-066X.55.1.68.

[10] Albert Bandura, Social Foundations of Thought and Action (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1986); Bandura, “Moral Disengagement”; Jean Decety and Jason M. Cowell, “Friends or Foes: Is Empathy Necessary for Moral Behavior?” Perspectives on Psychological Science 9, no. 5 (2014): 525–537, https://doi.org/10.1177/1745691614545130.

[11] Antonio R. Damasio, Descartes’ Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain (New York: Putnam, 1994); Martha C. Nussbaum, Upheavals of Thought: The Intelligence of Emotions (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001); Jonathan Haidt, “The Emotional Dog and Its Rational Tail,” Psychological Review 108, no. 4 (2001): 814–834, https://doi.org/10.1037/0033-295X.108.4.814.

[12] Simon, “A Behavioral Model of Rational Choice”; Hugo Mercier and Dan Sperber, The Enigma of Reason (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2017); Longino, Science as Social Knowledge. These sources support socially distributed correction but do not show that public deliberation is automatically epistemically superior.

[13] Laland, Odling-Smee, and Myles, “How Culture Shaped the Human Genome”; Steffen et al., “Planetary Boundaries”; Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, Climate Change 2023: Synthesis Report (Geneva: IPCC, 2023), https://report.ipcc.ch/ar6syr/.