What It Means to Be Human

The human story is very complicated. We have long contended with power struggles, social upheavals, cultural declines, revolutions, wars. Perhaps it is a miracle that we survived all of this and more, but there is something extremely subtle holding the balance together. I will discuss the importance of this quality today, what I would call “humanity”.

The first essential fact of being human is a sense of selfhood. We may cling onto it or reject it entirely, but our ‘being-a-self’ status never quite changes. Because of the fact that we can only comprehend the world through ourselves, we must play the role of a subjective filter of meaning. I believe we can use this to become better at being ourselves. The extraordinary fact that we are all ‘selves’ means that we suffer from very similar things.

Note: I used to think that one can overcome this by being emotionally detached and objective, but I’ve come to realize that our subjectivity initially approaches all forms of analysis, via our temperament.

The second essential fact of being human is a sense of ‘need’. We certainly need to eat, to drink, to clean ourselves and have a place to sleep. We feel a need to be loved, to belong in some way, to feel a sense of self-importance. Our ‘need’ makes us real, and it brings us directly into the human experience. For it is the lack of fulfilled needs that causes us the greatest share of suffering, and one cannot ignore those needs for too long.

The third and possibly most important essential fact of being human is a sense of meaning-making. There is, in some sense, infinite meaning, because subjectivity is a faculty capable of making meaning out of anything. One can find it significant that they do some things well and some terribly, or feel comfortable expressing themselves around some and not around others. While meaning-making is often beautiful, some meaning is anxious, false, or outright harmful to us. Humanity has to understand that some of its meaning is contrived and constructed, while some, particularly what is internally felt in the heart, is actually true.

Note: The problem lies in meaning that is created without a basis, or, better said, meaning that is entirely separate from the world.

Having established this, we must also understand that humanity is a unity, and not just a collective of separate individuals. The evil of one tyrant hurts the lives of hundreds, thousands, millions of innocents. The good of one liberator could save that same number of lives. Everything that people argue about, particularly in terms of ideology, needs to be thrown away and remade from scratch. We are One, and yet we perceive Many.

The need to be better is not just a human need, but a divine one. If there were no higher meaning, no ideal figure or force, then we would have long been destroyed. But virtue is a powerful thing. It holds up the will to live, the need for personal power and kindness, the striving towards something. It seems that people do not simply exist in themselves, for themselves — we are all equally entangled in this divine interplay called life.

Love breaks down all the pretenses. It is the only way in which we can stop suffering. For it seems that our world has a lack of love, a lack of the essential empathy that makes us divine. One has to bring people together with their words and actions, employing a higher-order pragmatism. Once we realize the scale of the human condition, we become better people.

Thank you.