We explain what humanity is according to different meanings that have developed throughout history and today.
The question of what makes us human is not yet resolved.What is humanity?
Contrary to what it seems, it is not easy to define what humanity is. By that word is usually understood, commonly, very different meanings, as the dictionary shows:
- The set of all Humans that we exist and our existence common in both species (Homo sapiens).
- The essence or nature of human beings, that is, the supposedly proper way we have to behave, for better and for worse.
- The feeling of compassion and pity for another person which is recognized as belonging to the same human species.
- A set of knowledge about the human being cultivated, organized and studied under the name of "humanities", such as literature, the art, etc., and distinguishable from social Sciences.
As will be seen, it is a fairly abstract concept, which is generally dealt with by various branches of science. philosophy, who aspire to build a more or less functional concept of what is, say, the human.
That which distinguishes us from others animal species and that we possess all the members of the species, without distinction, and that some religions they identify with the soul: that is, in principle, humanity. But what is it really?
Different philosophical doctrines throughout history raised their own answer to that question. For example, religious positions assimilated it to the spirit or the soul, which is the true and immortal portion of each human being, that is, the thing that makes us human and that supposedly God breathed into us at the beginning with his divine breath, as raises The Bible in Genesis.
This traditional and long-standing idea, however, did not prevent oppressive societies from being formed, supported on the backs of the slavesSince the fundamental question of what is human 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 were forcibly exported to America, for example, they lacked a soul and could then be treated like animals. Something that today we would consider, paradoxically, inhuman.
On the other hand, the atheistic and materialistic aspects always bet on a secular vision of the human, aided in contemporary times by the science and above all for the Darwinian theories on evolution and the origin of species.
Thus, a biological look at the human was proposed, which understands it as belonging to a specific genus and species. But in some cases, these speeches spawned monsters of the stature of Nazism, which tried to apply Darwin's concepts to politics, in order to thus extinguish by their own hand 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 the technology.
"What is humanity?", In that sense, it seems to be a question that, paradoxically, only humans ask ourselves, the only creatures we know so far that reflect on their own in this way. existence.