Understanding Human Need 2e. Dean, Hartley
strength relative to other more physically powerful species and often in spite of adverse natural and climatic conditions. Human beings’ sociality is founded on a loyalty to one another, ‘clinging together against the dark’ (Rorty, 1982: 166). But human beings are also generically social in the sense that ‘clinging together’ is made possible, as we have seen, through shared language, customs, institutions, knowledge and beliefs – all of which are dynamically socio-historically constructed and contested; and which, through social or ‘interpsychological’ processes, shape the personal development of every human being (Vygotsky, 1978).
From a different perspective, Hannah Arendt has observed that a life not lived among other humans is not a human life. She draws on Hegel in asserting that significance of mutual recognition between human beings ‘as builders of worlds or co-builders of a common world’ (1958: 458). In clinging together against the dark, it is upon the struggle for the mutual recognition and the achievement of sociality that humanity depends. A recent and influential contribution to the philosophy of recognition debate has been provided by Axel Honneth (1995), who discusses three modes of recognition upon which worthwhile human lives depend:
•Love. It is through intimate relationships that we discover ourselves and who we are; and by which we establish and affirm our self-identity.
•Solidarity. It is through participation and engagement with others in communities or social groups that we discover what it is that we can do; and by which we establish ourselves as actors, with shared collective identities.
•Rights. We shall consider the relationship between human needs and socially constructed rights in Chapter 8. But the point for now is that it is through exercising our own and respecting others’ rights that we are able mutually to engage with strangers and more distant members of our species.
Sociality is a constitutive characteristic of an individual human’s species being in the sense that she is shaped through, and depends for, her identity upon her immediate and historical social context. A human’s being is realised though her mutual interdependence with other human beings. Human sociality is realised and sustained through love, solidarity and rights.
Historical development
Human beings, unlike any other species, make their own history (once again, see Box 2.1). When Marx asserted that ‘Philosophers have hitherto only interpreted the world; the point is to change it’ (1845b: 84) his appeal was to the everyday reality of human beings’ continuing and ever-evolving struggle for a better life, for self-fulfilment, for ‘moral progress’ (A. Gilbert, 1992) or emancipation. His famous assertion was a riposte to Feuerbach’s (1841) characterisation of belief in God as an idealised projection of the material or natural essence of humanity itself. Marx effectively adopted and adapted the notion of human essence by treating it not as a mere construct or interpretation, but as an historical reality; not as an explanatory insight but as the constitutive driver of human history. According to Márkus, by referring to the ‘human essence’ Marx was referring to ‘… those characteristics of the real historical existence of mankind which made it possible to comprehend history as a continuous and unified process that has a developmental tendency’ (1978: 61). The human essence, therefore, is not invariant and inherent to the individual human, but dynamic and historically constitutive of the species (see, for example, Margolis, 1992).
Humanity’s conscious social being and engagement in material productive self-activity provide the substantive dimensions of an encompassing and continual developmental process that is concerned with the realisation of the human essence; a realisation that can only be achieved by direct human intervention under actually prevailing social and material conditions. As a species being a human is defined and constrained not merely by nature, but by her historical context. Her world may be shaped around her by the state, laws, religion, ideology, culture and customs, but these things have been created by humans and can and most certainly will be changed by humans: a process in which others might participate. Her own actions have meaning not only for her and those around her, but also potentially for the processes by which her species might survive or flourish. Human beings, uniquely, have the capacity to contribute to an historical process of species development; to have a purpose of their own making; to participate in defining the future, rather than passively replicating the past. The significance of this will, I hope, become clearer in Chapter 9.
Humans are vulnerable and needy beings, who yet make their own history. That history has unfolded as a continuing tale characterised by struggles to fulfil not only the need for material survival as a species, but to realise the dynamic essence of humanity; to fulfil not some naturally ordained purpose, but essentially human purposes. These have been on the one hand cooperative struggles with Nature, but on the other, competitive struggles between one another. In the chapters that follow, it will be argued that human needs are constructed through the social determination of human purposes. It may be concluded from the earlier account that the determination of human purposes (and thereby our needs) has been and continues to be contested. Our needs and purposes may be prescribed by prophets, priests and philosophers or by despots, leaders and ideologues; or they may be named and claimed in the process of day-to-day social existence and human being.
This chapter has endeavoured to address what it means and what is needed to be a human being. To that end, the chapter has:
•Discussed the history of the human species. In relation to the age of the Earth, the origin of the Homo Sapiens species is recent, but its development has been rapid and its impact has been immense. Individually, it is a physically frail and vulnerable species, but humans’ cognitive abilities and capacity for social organisation have enabled the species to dominate (with adverse environmental consequences). Demographically the species has flourished, though the fortunes of different parts of the global human population have varied. The advantages associated with new agricultural, industrial and information technologies and evolving forms of social order and governance have been unevenly distributed both within emerging centres of civilisation and between different parts of the world. Relationships and competition for resources, territory or power within and between different human societies have been often conflictual and sometimes violent.
•Explained different kinds of humanism. For much of human history, human beings sought the meaning of their own existence and that of the world around them through mythological or religious beliefs. But some while before the scientific discovery of evolutionary processes, people began to reflect in secular terms upon the distinctive nature of the human species. It is now generally accepted that human beings were not created in any literal sense by some divine being or supernatural powers, but evolved naturally and may or must be respected, protected or recognised as such, albeit that this can be achieved in different ways, of which we have delineated three: liberal-individualist; solidaristic (which may be inflected in conservative, reformist or revolutionary directions); and supremacist. Each of these particular humanisms understands the human being and her needs in a different way.
•Offered an account of the human species’ essential characteristics: a humanist approach developed in part from the early anthropological insights of Marx. Four intersecting and interdependent characteristics of the human species are identified: its form of consciousness; its engagement in creative ‘work’; its sociality and social interdependence; and its self-defining historical development. These characteristics are fundamental to and constitutive of the essence of humanity, whose historical potential has perhaps still to be fully realised.
1.What