Science can fairly easily provide a reductionist view of what it means to be a human being. However, this does not have to be the case. Science (human inquiry about the world, how it works, and its dimensions of intelligibility) can also awaken us to the depth, dignity, and mystery of our personhood and our humanity. In the contemporary world of relativity physics and quantum theory, this is especially the case. In this article I want to trace some of the developments that can restore a sense of intrinsic human dignity. I argue that this restoration is necessary to both human survival and our possible flourishing with a planetary civilization.

Archeologists have developed timelines for the emergence of Homo Sapiens out of a pre-human diversity of emerging humanoid types: Homo Neanderthal, Homo Erectus, Homo Escaster, etc. Within the context of planetary ecosystems, species evolution and competition, it appears as if Homo Sapiens is the one successful evolutionary line from this multiplicity of possible human-like species. Such facts are clearly part of our heritage, but they do not define what a human being is.

Some scientifically-minded persons declare correctly that our species has now colonized the entire Earth. We are now at 8 billion individuals and have entered the Anthropocene Era in which we substantially impact the evolutionary ecosystem that supports life on Earth. If we take this reductionist view of our human condition as definitive, then, like other inconsequential species (insignificant within the vast cosmos composed of billions of galaxies), our going extinct as a species appears to have little significance.

The assumption that individual human beings are simply ciphers within the species is demonstrated, for example, in today’s military conflicts. We have “every right” to kill one another for various geopolitical reasons, and all wars require that we calculate the “kill-ratio.” We calculate how many enemy soldiers are killed compared to the number of our soldiers. If the kill-ratio is in our favor, sooner or later we believe our side will “win.” Conflict is between abstract entities like “Russia” and “Ukraine,” or “Israel” and “Palestine,” or the “USA” and “China,” and the kill-ratio is simply a set of numbers indicating the success or failure of these abstract entities called “sovereign nations.”

If nuclear weapons are to be used, the calculation is whether we can wipe them out entirely and manage to survive ourselves without them wiping us out entirely. The deeper assumption is that individual human beings have no dignity, no real intrinsic value. They are just numbers in the war-game. If they had genuine dignity, there would be a serious problem with going to war. There would also be a serious problem with militarism (preparing for war).

The philosophical dogmas of empiricism and materialism have, since the 17th century, often clung to such a reductionist view of our human condition. 17th century philosopher Thomas Hobbes concluded that consciousness results from tiny atoms in the brain bouncing off one another. Human morality and dignity in any deep sense are illusions to him. Similarly for David Hume in the 18th century, who famously declared: “Reason is and ought only to be the slave of the passions.” The early-modern paradigm from which they are operating assumed that the universe was atomistic, deterministic, and mechanistic. And these assumptions are alive and well today in our global institutions of capitalism and sovereign nation-states.

However, our fundamental assumptions and hence our paradigm has fundamentally shifted since the advent of relativity physics and quantum physics in the early 20th century. In both, the whole and the part interpenetrate. There are not separate “atoms.” The whole is necessary to every part and every part reflects the whole. The world is composed of “holons” (Wilber 2007), that is “holograms” (Currivan 2017).

In the early 19th century, Hegel put human history on a temporal course of perpetual emergence. In the mid-19th century Darwin posited the evolution of species. Contemporary biology, like contemporary physics, often focuses on the emergence factor: what is really happening in what we observe on Earth and what is its connection with the cosmos as a whole? The cosmic hologram evolves into ever greater wholes, emerging holons.

“Something” is emerging from the cosmic evolutionary process over a course of some 13.7 billion years that is manifesting itself in us. There is a mysterious connection between human beings and the whole. Our minds appear to be living embodiments of that connection. For example, physicist David Bohm affirms that “the brain and nervous system respond directly to an order in the universal and unknown flux that cannot be reduced to anything that could be defined in terms of knowable structures” (1980, 67). Physicist Henry Stapp concludes that “man no longer appears as an isolated automaton. He appears, rather, as an integral part of the highly non-local creative activity of the universe” (1988, 57).

This connection between human beings and the whole might be called “infinity.” The whole cannot be “finite” for then it would not be the whole, it would have limits and we could rightly ask what is beyond those limits. The whole, as was understood by Spinoza in the 17th century, by Kant in the 18th century, by Hegel in the 19th century, and by many thinkers in the 20th century, is necessarily “infinite.” It is an incomprehensive depth to things that are coming to awareness in our human consciousness.

Although we may not think about it in our daily lives, we each experience infinity as our freedom, our ability not to be determined by instinct and sheer causality as the animals appear to be, our ability to question and to transcend, without end. This infinity is the basic holistic “non-local” principle of the infinity of Being coming to consciousness of itself in us. Human dignity lies in this infinity that interpenetrates our very being and makes it possible. Philosopher Errol E. Harris declares: “Our consciousness of ourselves is at the same time consciousness of the world and the world’s consciousness of itself (1988, 104).

The infinite principle behind intelligibility and emergent order in the universe, itself beyond intelligibility because it is infinite, comes to consciousness of itself in us. Perhaps we hear echoes here of the ancient belief that human beings are “made in the image of God.” 20th century thinkers as diverse as Sri Aurobindo coming from the Indian tradition (1970, Chap. XVI), Pierre Teilhard de Chardin (1970) coming from the Christian Tradition, and Frithjof Schuon (1984) coming from the Islamic tradition, have affirmed this idea.

This may well be an idea (and a non-cognitive awareness) that comes spontaneously to those who enter a certain level of moral, emotional, spiritual, and cognitive maturity, transcending their own immature egoism. Contemporary psychology and developmental models often identify “cosmic consciousness” as a necessary aspect of a mature human growth process. Contemporary thinker John Heron observes that the key step in human maturity is when “the ego-bound mind becomes cosmic consciousness.” (2024, 38).

In cosmic consciousness the “one” and the “many” begin to coalesce. We see that our human dignity is a product of the infinity at the core of our being. Psychologist Lawrence Kohlberg, who studied human development, identifies his highest stage of development as “stage 7.” In this stage, he writes, “development culminates in a synthetic, non-dualistic sense of participation in, and identity with, a cosmic order” (1984, 250). If this is the case, then a new experience of our common humanity opens up within such persons.

Each one of us is a “person,” not simply an individual cipher of the human species. As people mature, we become more conscious, more aware that to be a person means to be in relationship with all others. It also means that the infinity expressing the identity of the one and the many in my experience also binds me to the others, who could not be “human” without this cosmic infinity that has become aware of itself in us. This can help us understand the powerful opening prologue to the UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights that begins: “Recognition of the inherent dignity and of the equal and inalienable rights of all members of the human family is the foundation of freedom, justice and peace in the world.”

Dignity is both inherent in each person and it is the common identity that binds us to one another as a single human reality. This was understood as early as the 18th century when Immanuel Kant formulated his famous “categorical imperative”: “always treat every person as an end in themselves, never merely as a means.” He explains that to be “an end in oneself” is to have dignity, a dignity that arises from our free moral capacity to do what is right regardless of our inclinations. But not only each person, Kant says, but “humanity itself is a dignity.”

We human beings are necessarily a universal “we.” We are one reality in which the infinity of the whole emerges into awareness of itself in us. Because of our freedom, we have become coauthors with the cosmic nisus or telos toward what thinkers like Teilhard de Chardin have called “complexity-consciousness.” We are co-authors in what Heidegger called “the destiny of Being.” I attempt to articulate this in more detail in my newest book, Human Dignity and World Order (2024).

Philosopher David Kirchhoffer (2013) shows that there is an “eschatological proviso” to dignity. Dignity not only characterizes both individuals and our species but, because we are temporized creatures, we see that dignity is capable of ever-greater embodiments. We can bring dignity into human life through our actions and institutions that respect dignity and its potential. We can see how our infinite value can be ever more concretely actualized in history.

Let us return to the assumptions behind modern warfare with its “kill-ratio.” Human beings in this warfare have no intrinsic, inviolable dignity. If they did, such warfare could not take place. The assumptions in modern warfare represent a legacy of the early-modern mechanistic, deterministic, and atomistic paradigm that found no place for dignity as it looked at the world in terms of materialistic bodies in competitive, atomistic struggle with one another. These assumptions are also those of human egoism and immaturity. The ego thinks it is special and so unique that it is not subject to any human unity, and it sees little reason to affirm a common dignity.

It identifies itself further with collective egoisms such as “my race, my nation, my religion, or my private property.” In this immaturity lies the nightmare and tragedy of our human condition. 20th century philosopher Nolan Pliny Jacobson observes: “The major source of retardation endangering the future planetary civilization about which so much has been written… is the kind of selfhood in which the terrors of the modern nation are rooted. It is the archaic legacy of a self-substance, mutually independent of all others, which supports the entire superstructure of Western nations. (1982, 41, his italics)

It is not nations themselves, but the illusion of a national ego, the illusion that there is a “substance” or reality there, whether in my personal egoism or in the national egoism in which I participate. Israel bombs Iran because of its illusory Zionist egoism. Iran feels obligated to bomb back in retaliation because its national egoism demands this. They think they are dealing with realities when these are just illusions. The reality is the whole embracing every part and investing us with the infinite dignity declared by the UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights to be the foundation of freedom, justice, and peace in the world.

However, recognizing this requires a developed maturity informed by cosmic consciousness. If we recognized their inviolable human dignity, identical to our own, it would not be possible to bomb them. It is the world system of capitalism interfaced with militarized “sovereign” nation-states that institutionally defeats the recognition of our common human dignity and destroys all three goals of freedom, justice, and peace. The doctrine of “nation-state sovereignty itself perpetuates this illusion of being a substantial reality. The egoisms of nation, race, religion, and property grow beyond toward a maturity of cosmic awareness informed by love, compassion, and respect for diversity within our common unity.

That is why the Constitution for the Federation of Earth is a living symbol for human liberation to a world of freedom, justice, and peace. The Constitution is premised on human dignity, on our common humanity, and on cooperative working to establish a truly equitable common good that includes ending war, protecting universal human rights, diminishing social disparities, and protecting our planetary ecosystem. It actualizes our civilizational potential as a holarchy (Wilber 2007), not a hierarchy. It represents a true paradigm shift from fragmentation to holism, from atomism to the integration of whole and part that is inseparable from human dignity.

References

Aurobindo, Sri (1970). The Human Cycle. The Ideal of Human Unity. War and Self-Determination. Pondicherry: Sri Aurobindo Ashram Publications.
Bohm, David (2002). Wholeness and the Implicate Order. New York: Routledge.
Currivan, Jude (2017). The Cosmic Hologram: In-formation at the Center of Creation. Rochester, VT: Inner Traditions.
Harris, Errol E. (1988).The Reality of Time. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press.
Heron, John (2024). “A One-Many Reality,” in Oliver Griebel (ed.) Both One and Many: Spiritual Philosophy Beyond Theism, Materialism, and Relativism.
Jacobson, Nolan Pliny (1982). “A Buddhist-Christian Probe of Our Endangered Future.” The Eastern Buddhist. Vol. XV, No. 1.
Kirchhoffer, David G. (2013). Human Dignity in Contemporary Ethics. Amherst, NY: Teneo Press.
Kohlberg, Laurence (1984). The Psychology of Moral Development. Volume Two: The Nature and Validity of Moral Stages. San Francisco: Harper & Row.
Schuon, Frithjof (1984). The Transcendent Unity of Religion. London: Theosophical Publishing House.