What if human beings are not fixed entities, but ongoing processes of becoming?

 

Every society is organized around assumptions about what human beings are. These assumptions shape institutions, laws, education, care, economic systems, and political legitimacy. They determine which vulnerabilities are recognized, how dependence is interpreted, what counts as genuine freedom, and how responsibility and justice are distributed. Philosophical anthropology therefore functions as a background theory of social organization and can become misleading when it is reductionist, culturally narrow, or normatively closed.

Human beings are not stable entities with a fixed essence but dynamic and relational processes in which biological, psychological, social, cultural, and ecological dimensions continuously interact. Identity is an emergent pattern that temporarily stabilizes through narratives, practices, relationships, and institutions[1]. Freedom is not an innate possession but a gradually developed capacity for self-interpretation, choice, and action that depends on social, educational, and institutional conditions.

Classical philosophical anthropology contributes the important insight that human capacities flourish within communities and shared practices[2]. Rationality, language, morality, and identity do not develop outside relationships. Its traditional teleology, however, often assumes that human nature moves toward a predetermined form of fulfilment. Historical, anthropological, and evolutionary evidence instead shows that values, institutions, and systems of meaning are plural, variable, and shaped by circumstances and cultural transmission.

Human flourishing should therefore not be understood as reaching one predetermined destination. It means expanding people’s developmental possibilities within relational and ecological limits[3]. Institutions should enable individuals to develop their capacities without prescribing which way of life is highest or most fully human. This preserves a minimal normative understanding of flourishing without imposing an essentialist ideal[4].

Enlightenment philosophy provides the indispensable principles of equal dignity, rights, autonomy, and moral responsibility[5]. Every person must be treated as an end and should not have their moral status determined by origin, social position, culture, or power. Autonomy nevertheless requires reinterpretation in light of empirical knowledge. It develops through upbringing, education, safety, recognition, and institutional protection and can deteriorate under fear, humiliation, deprivation, or extreme inequality[6].

Freedom is therefore both relationally supported and normatively protected. Institutions may create conditions that enable autonomy, but they may not decide which values, identities, or life choices individuals should adopt. This protects pluralism and prevents developmental support from becoming paternalistic direction. Autonomy is made more realistic by acknowledging its conditions without surrendering its role as a limit on institutional power.

Phenomenology and existential philosophy reveal that human beings are embodied and situated subjects who experience time, loss, hope, responsibility, and meaning. This prevents a process-based account from reducing persons to abstract systems. Human continuity arises through narratives that connect experiences, relationships, memories, and traditions[7]. People remain responsible across time because they understand themselves as continuing persons, even as their identities and circumstances change[8].

Existential freedom does not require liberation from every condition[9]. It consists in the capacity to interpret, reconsider, and sometimes transform the circumstances that shape one’s life. Conditioning is real, but it is not absolute. Reflective agency allows people to relate to their conditioning and reorganize its meaning. This capacity is vulnerable, unequally supported, and institutionally dependent, which makes it especially important as a normative concern.

Contemporary political philosophy strengthens the connection between freedom, dignity, and real opportunity. Formal rights are insufficient when people lack education, material security, healthcare, legal protection, or meaningful political participation. Freedom as developmental space therefore requires institutions that create actual opportunities to learn, choose, act, and participate.

Recognition is equally important because identity and dignity are relationally sustained. Relationality can generate solidarity, but it can also produce exclusion, humiliation, and domination. A distinction must therefore be maintained between descriptive relationality, which refers to the fact of human dependence, and normative equality, which rejects rankings of human worth. Equal dignity does not arise automatically from human interdependence; it requires institutional safeguards against selective recognition and domination[10].

Empathy connects anthropological possibility with normative orientation. It supports care, cooperation, and mutual recognition, but remains selective, fragile, and sensitive to context. It cannot provide a sufficient foundation for justice on its own[11]. Education, social security, and fair institutions are needed to develop empathy and broaden their reach beyond familiar individuals and groups.

Critical and postcolonial philosophy raises the question of who has the authority to define humanity. Universal claims are historically produced within relations of power and may reproduce the categories and values of dominant traditions[12]. Universalism must consequently be epistemically and institutionally protected against cultural superiority and exclusion.

Universal principles should be minimal, dialogical, revisable, and developed through inclusive procedures. Cultural traditions, local knowledge, and diverse experiences should function as sources of correction rather than merely being tolerated. Scientific convergence remains important but cannot act as the final normative authority, because scientific institutions also contain inequalities in representation and access. Epistemic inclusivity and power analysis are therefore conditions for credible claims about humanity.

Several conceptual safeguards protect relational-processual anthropology against misuse. First, evolution and development must be understood non-hierarchically. Differences in technology, knowledge, culture, or power do not represent natural rankings of humanity. Biological evolution describes population-level change, while cultural development follows multiple, context-dependent historical pathways. Human variation is a structural feature of development, not evidence of deficiency.

Second, dignity must be both relational and universal. It is relational because it becomes effective through recognition, protection, participation, and institutional support. It is universal because no person’s full humanity may depend on status, origin, performance, or presumed cultural development. Relational dignity without universality risks selective recognition, while universal dignity without relational support risks becoming an empty abstraction.

Third, normative conclusions must remain limited and revisable. Shared conditions of vulnerability, dependence, developmental potential, and ecological embeddedness do not produce a complete moral doctrine. They support minimal orientations: protecting people from severe vulnerability, expanding developmental opportunity, limiting concentrations of power, and sustaining the institutional conditions of pluralistic freedom.

The traditions do not converge without remainder. A capability theory may ask what substantive opportunities people possess; republican theory may focus on protection from arbitrary power; recognition theory may emphasize social standing; phenomenology may resist reducing experience to externally chosen indicators; and postcolonial thought may question who defines the supposedly universal standard. Their disagreement is instructive. Any institutional use of human becoming must combine material opportunity, non-domination, recognition, experiential knowledge, and protection against cultural imposition without assuming that one measure can replace the others.

Relational-processual anthropology brings several philosophical traditions into continuing dialogue. It retains the classical insight that human flourishing depends on social connection, the Enlightenment commitment to autonomy and equal dignity, the phenomenological emphasis on embodied experience and narrative continuity, contemporary attention to recognition and the material conditions of freedom, and critical warnings about epistemic power and cultural domination.

The resulting conception is realistic because it recognizes conditioning, vulnerability, unequal power, and moral ambivalence. It is also normatively oriented because it understands freedom as developable space and dignity as a universal claim that must be relationally and institutionally sustained. Its consistency depends on remaining open to criticism, distinguishing description from normative judgment, and refusing every attempt to transform human variation into a hierarchy of human worth.

 

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, eds., Everything Flows; Mitchell, Biological Complexity and Integrative Pluralism.

[2] Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, 2nd ed., trans. Terence Irwin (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1999), especially books I and X; Aristotle, Politics, trans. C. D. C. Reeve (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1998).

[3] Nussbaum, Creating Capabilities; Steffen et al., “Planetary Boundaries.” The precise connection between capabilities and ecological limits is the author’s normative extension and should not be attributed wholly to either source.

[4] Habermas, The Inclusion of the Other; Forst, The Right to Justification.

[5] Kant, Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals; United Nations, Universal Declaration of Human Rights. The chapter’s relational reinterpretation should be distinguished from Kant’s own account.

[6] Mackenzie and Stoljar, Relational Autonomy; Ryan and Deci, “Self-Determination Theory.”

[7] McAdams and McLean, “Narrative Identity”; Strawson, “Against Narrativity.” The qualification supplied by Strawson is necessary to avoid converting a common form of self-understanding into a universal requirement.

[8] Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception; Varela, Thompson, and Rosch, The Embodied Mind.

[9] De Beauvoir, The Ethics of Ambiguity; Jean-Paul Sartre, Existentialism Is a Humanism, trans. Carol Macomber (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2007 [1946]).

[10] Sen, Development as Freedom; Nussbaum, Creating Capabilities

[11] Decety and Cowell, “Friends or Foes”; Cikara, Bruneau, and Saxe, “Us and Them.”

[12] Charles W. Mills, The Racial Contract (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1997); Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, trans. Richard Philcox (New York: Grove Press, 2008 [1952]); Smith, Decolonizing Methodologies.