We explain what humanity is according to different meanings that have developed throughout history and today.
What is humanity?
Contrary to what it seems, it is not easy to define what humanity is. This word usually has very different meanings, as the dictionary shows:
- The set of all human beings that we exist and our common existence as a species (Homo sapiens).
- The essence or the nature of human beingsthat is, the supposedly proper way we have of behaving, for better and for worse.
- The feeling of compassion and commiseration with another person who is recognized as belonging to the same human species.
- A set of knowledge about human beings cultivated, organized and studied under the name of “humanities”, such as literature, art, etc., and differentiable from the social sciences.
As will be seen, it is a fairly abstract concept, which is generally dealt with by various branches of philosophy, which aspire to construct a more or less functional concept of what, let's say, the human is.
What distinguishes us from other animal species and that we possess all members of the species, without any distinction, and that some religions identify with the soul: that is, in principle, humanity. But what is it really?
Different philosophical doctrines throughout history posed their own answer to that question. For example, religious positions assimilated it to the spirit or soulwhich is the true and immortal portion of each human being, that is, the thing that makes us human and that God supposedly breathed into us at the beginning with his divine breath, as stated in the Bible in Genesis.
This traditional and long-standing idea, however, did not prevent oppressive societies from being formed, sustained on the backs of slaves, since the fundamental question of what is human was shifted to who has a soul.
In this context, the Catholic Church, a social and political institution like any other at the time, decided that African slaves forcibly exported to America, for example, lacked souls and could then be treated like animals. Something that today we would consider, paradoxically, inhuman.
Instead, The atheistic and materialist tendencies always opted for a secular vision of humanity.helped in contemporary times by science and especially by Darwinian theories on the evolution and origin of species.
Thus, a biological perspective on humanity was proposed, which understands it as belonging to a specific genus and species. But in some cases, these speeches gave rise to monsters of the stature of Nazism, which sought to apply Darwin's concepts to politics, thus extinguishing by their own hands the peoples they considered “inferior” or “less fit.”
Finally, the question of what humanity is and where it resides seems to have no definitive solution. In fact, the technological future seems to offer new questions, instead of certainties, through artificial intelligence, robotization and the intervention of the human body with technology.
“What is humanity?”, in that sense, seems to be a question that, paradoxically, only humans ask themselves, the only creatures we know so far that reflect on their own existence in this way.
Continue with: Human
References
- “Humanity” in the Language Dictionary of the Royal Spanish Academy.
- “Humanity (disambiguation page)” on Wikipedia.
- “Humanity” in Encyclopedia.us.
- “In search of a definition of humanity” at UNHCR.
