Self-Alteration as innate human capacity and as individual human right 

Nigel Rapport

Are individuals limited by cultural traditions? Irony, eccentricity, idiosyncrasy, creativity, revolutionariness, as universal markers of human behaviour would suggest not. Collective cultural traditions are more properly seen as rhetorical constructs and political claims: as symbolic fabrications that do not equate to phenomenological reality, to how life is individually lived and experienced. How we relate as individual human beings to a so-called collective cultural tradition is a personal matter. 

Human life is individual. There is a distinctness and discreteness to human embodiment whereby consciousness attaches itself solely to individual bodies that exists as unique and finite organisms. Those organisms possess an interiority that sets them against the otherness of the world around them. Individuality can be understood as ontological: an aspect of the universal reality of the human condition, an inextricable part of human nature. This ontological reality is completely distinct from symbolic reality: completely independent of what cultures and societies may  determine to be the constructed character of social and cultural identities. There is the symbolism of individualism, dividualism, personhood and so on and there is the ontology of individuality.  

Part of our ontological inheritance as human beings is to possess innate capacities for metabolic self-maintenance: for maintaining the homeostasis of our bodily integument; for existing as healthy organisms that regulate the passage of ‘stuff’—nutrients, information—across the permeable boundary of the skin. Our consciousness is our means to perceive and interpret and make sense of what lies beyond the self: to make order and meaning of the otherness of the world. Resident in the ‘bone box’ (William Golding) of our discrete embodiment, we practice meaning-making: acts of interpretation whereby we create world-views for ourselves, and life-projects of intentionality, that are intrinsically individual, personal, private in nature. 

The practice of interpretation is constant, moreover. The world around the individual is in constant flow, and maintaining the homeostasis of self means that the individual’s interpretings and intentionings are in constant flux too. The individual is in constant process of construing and effecting relations between itself and what exists beyond itself. Not only this, the individual is in constant process of considering itself, its own identity, world-views and life-projects, querying whether it is the best it can be to itself and as itself. The individual human being has the innate capacity and the proclivity to reflect on itself, and to change itself, alter, make itself anew.  

A liberal, free and just society is one that recognises and respects such individual capacity and proclivity: a cosmopolitan project endeavours to give such liberalism global expression and force. Alongside the openness of globalisation—of individuals able to envisage their life-projects in global terms—we must be wary of the closure of cultural fundamentalism as prescribed in the discourses of identity politics. An anthropology of human nature amounts to a powerful and necessary statement, imbued with a cosmopolitan mission: to ‘recognise humanity wherever it occurs, and give its fundamental ingredients, reason and moral capacity, our first allegiance and respect’ (Martha Nussbaum). The anthropologist insists that one is human not inasmuch as one inhabits different worlds of culture but over and against such symbolic and rhetorical fictions. Putting culture in its place one commits to human being, to Anyone.