Prolégomènes pour une Éthique de l’Hominisation

Abstract

The question of what is distinctively human poses a problem today, in view of the results of disciplines such as ethology and paleoanthropology. Man can be understood as a biological, cultural, and political animal. In order to grasp what ‘the human’ is today, this paper examines the relationship between hominization and humanization. The convergence of these phenomena places the human identity in the space between the two poles of the biological and what we might call the extrabiological, including culture and politics. The paper’s starting point is the idea that the specificity of the human animal is to have created a virtual home for itself, via the indefinite expansion of the extrabiological dimension of its existence. The question arises as to whether this process of humanization has been succesful, given that it has yielded not only the distinctively human triumphs of science and technology, but also the distinctively inhuman disasters of the 20th century. Human beings seem incapable of mastering the extra-biological dimension of their own nature. There is therefore a pressing need for an ethical analysis of the twin processes of hominization and humanization. The connection between hominization and humanization is the junction between the biological and the extra-biological. The challenge we face in trying to understand the articulation of these two trajectories is that one is much more easily identifiable than the other. We are all certain of being human rather than non-human, because we are all succesful products of the process of hominization, but no one is ever sure of being irreversibly human rather than inhuman, because the process of humanization is based on contingent and variable social and cultural principles. This paper analyzes this difficulty with the aim of identifying the fundamental elements that will contribute to the development of an ethic of hominization.