Human Ontology

What do we consider ourselves to be? To give something of a survey of the answer to this question is essential for considering what comes later. Here we overview the major options of western human ontology. The purpose of this is so that we later on make an assessment as to how AI might interact with what we take ourselves to be and whether or not we should consider this desirable or not.

Humankind has frequently been defined largely by its rationality e.g. Descartes (for whom rational thinking was a dominant feature of humanity), Kant (who emphasised reason as key to our moral nature) and Aristotle called us rational animals; for him, reason was the tool by which we learned virtue and achieved eudaimonia, a flourishing life.

Religious perspectives offer accounts of humans as created by a divinity either in their image (Christianity) or for their worship (Islam) or they are simply trapped in a situation of suffering that may be alleviated through spiritual means (Buddhism). Clearly these are vast simplifications of highly complicated pictures, yet they serve to remind us of another sense in which we can think of the being of the human.

For the existentialists, the very being of man is inextricably linked to freedom. Central to this is the idea that existence precedes essence; humans are not born with a pre-defined purpose but rather define themselves through their choices and actions. This radical freedom implies that individuals are entirely responsible for who they become, carrying the weight of infinite possibilities and often experiencing anguish as a result. Existentialism champions authentic living, urging individuals to embrace this freedom and take ownership of their choices rather than conforming to external pressures. In a world putatively devoid of inherent meaning, humans are tasked with the freedom, and the burden, of creating their own values and purpose. Essentially, human existence is viewed as a constant project of self-creation through the exercise of freedom, emphasizing that individuals are not defined by a fixed nature but are perpetually in the process of becoming through their choices.

Heidegger conceives the human not as a rational animal or a free subject, but as Dasein — literally being-there. Dasein is not a consciousness standing apart from the world but a being always already in the world, entangled with others, tools, and social structures that constitute its everyday existence. This being-in-the-world is not a mere spatial condition but an ontological one: we are defined by our involvement, our concern, and our capacity for understanding the meanings that the world discloses to us.

For Heidegger, the central issue is not the exercise of freedom in an absurd universe (as for Sartre), but the way Being itself is revealed or concealed through our existence. Human life is characterised by care (Sorge): our projects, our concern for others, and our awareness of our own finitude. Dasein’s possibilities — the many ways it might be — are always shaped by the world into which it is thrown and by the temporal horizon of death that bounds it. Authentic existence arises when Dasein recognises and takes up these conditions rather than fleeing them; inauthenticity occurs when it dissolves into the anonymous everydayness of “the they” (das Man).

The philosophy of Deleuze and Guattari on the other hand, holds a kind of nuanced Spinozistic philosophy that suggests, not unlike Heidegger, that humankind is essentially open; however here the openness beyond the human is made even more overt. The human is essentially never just human but rather a series of becoming-other. There is always a generally static trend of human being (what we sometimes think of as human in a given era) but there is also a bleeding edge of becoming many other things. The Spinoza connection is not always entirely visible, but it lies in Spinoza’s view of the conatus as our ‘power of acting’. To become-other is to participate in this creative expansion of possibility. In such becomings, humanity is not lost but transformed.

Psychoanalytic thought offers yet another way to understand human ontology, this time grounded not in reason or essence, but in desire and lack. For Freud, the human psyche is not a unified rational subject but a conflicting field of drives and their repression (with commensurate symbolic substitution). Consciousness is a surface phenomenon, continually shaped by what it seeks to exclude. Lacan refined this view, describing the subject as fundamentally divided—constituted through language and through the loss that language itself imposes. For her to speak, to enter the symbolic order, is to be separated from immediacy; the self is a void, not a fullness.

From the scientific perspective, the human is best understood as a biological organism — Homo sapiens, a highly evolved primate distinguished by its neural complexity and capacity for symbolic communication. Evolutionary theory situates the human within a continuous natural history, explaining cognition, language, and sociality as adaptive functions rather than transcendent traits. The body is approached as an intricate system of mechanisms, coordinated through the brain and nervous system, sustained by metabolic exchange and genetic inheritance. In this view, what distinguishes the human is not metaphysical essence but quantitative difference — greater brain power, linguistic ability, and technological behaviour. Scientific ontology thus conceives humanity as an emergent pattern in matter: a contingent arrangement of organic processes capable of self-reflection, yet explicable in the same terms as any other material phenomenon.