Manifesto of the human rupture

Living organisms maintain themselves through regulations that combine several levels. Some are local and distributed. Others rest on centres of coordination, hierarchies or global signals. Their coherence therefore does not come from a single principle, but from the articulation between interactions, memory, constraints and adjustments.

Human beings belong fully to this living world. Their body, their attention and their conduct remain subject to needs, to learning and to limits. One particular capacity nevertheless modifies their relation to those determinations. They can form a representation of themselves, interpret what they feel and act on the basis of narratives or norms.

The rupture

The rupture here designates a change in the relation to oneself. An action can become the object of a further action. An emotion can be named, judged or contained. An intention can be compared with a rule. This doubling abolishes no biological constraint. It adds a symbolic mediation able to modify conduct.

This faculty makes possible deferred choice, commitment, explicit learning and self-questioning. It also makes it possible to build justifications that mask the causes of a conduct. The narrative of the self is neither a sovereign master nor a mere commentary. It takes part in a system where perceptions, habits, emotions, norms and social relations meet.

The great fracture

The fracture appears when the image we form of ourselves comes durably into conflict with our real conditions. We then seek to constrain the body, the emotions, relations or institutions to make them conform to a representation. That intervention can correct an injustice or support a learning process. It can also become rigid when the representation refuses the signals that contradict it.

Freedom and unhappiness

Reflexive distance widens the field of action. It supports ethics, art, science, law and the promise. It also exposes us to guilt, to shame and to the grip of an impossible ideal. An idea can give meaning to existence or justify destruction. Its value depends on its effects, on the possibility of revising it and on its compatibility with the conditions of common life.

Consciousness as a crack

Consciousness is not a linear progression towards greater mastery. It opens a space of self-observation in which regulations can be understood, reoriented or fought. That tension becomes a crack when self-judgement blocks every possibility of adjustment. It becomes a resource when it makes it possible to recognise a conflict and to transform its conditions.

Neither return nor conquest

Spontaneity guarantees neither justice nor viability. Total control is no more accessible. Between these two illusions, human action consists in intervening from an always situated position, with partial knowledge and effects that sometimes exceed the initial intention.

Discipline, care, transmission and responsibility require going against certain impulses. Their exercise nevertheless remains dependent on the body, the milieu and other people. No single authority can durably govern the whole while ignoring those relations.

The human task

The human task consists in making conflicts perceptible before they turn into blind constraint. That requires examining the narratives that orient action, the needs they neglect and the consequences they produce. We modify the system from within, with means that themselves issue from our history and our relations.

Human dignity can then be understood as a capacity to respond. It engages memory, language, norms, the body and the milieu without granting any one of these dimensions a monopoly over the others.