Reconstituting Humanity - New International Law
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Abstract
I. Self-Constituting Humanity
`The mind is its own place, and in itself
Can make a heaven of hell, a hell of heaven.'
John Milton, Paradise Lost, I.254-5.
1. Human Responsibility
1.1 Humanity has come face-to-face with itself. After 8000 years of accumulating self-consciousness, humanity has formed a certain idea of its self and its situation, an idea which is now filling human consciousness with anguished anticipation. The human animal looks at itself in its own consciousness, as in a mirror, and it sees that it is the most creative and the most destructive of all animals. The human species is the species which creates itself. The human animal is the animal which is its own predator.
1.2 Humanity is called upon at last to take responsibility for itself. The long centuries of accumulating consciousness - so short a period in the history of the species, let alone in the history of life on earth, of the earth, of the universe - have brought forth the familiar phenomena of the moral consciousness of the human individual and the social consciousness of human societies. At the end of an epoch, in one conventional reckoning of elapsed human time, at the end of a century and at the end of a millenium, humanity is beginning to recognize the remaining burden of human consciousness, the human responsibility of the whole of humanity within the universe of all-that-is.
2. Humanity Self-made
2.1 Humanity is a figment of its own imagination. Humanity exists as humanity of and for itself. By its own efforts it has differentiated itself from the rest of what is, for it, the universe of all-that-is. It has identified itself as a particular form of living thing and as a particular species of animal. It has conferred upon itself unique species-characteristics.
2.2 We do not know if other parts of the universe, including other living things and other animals, are capable of conceiving of their own specificity. And we do not know how, if at all, they conceive of us as humans. We do not know that any other part of the universe conceives of us in the way that we conceive of ourselves. We do not know that humanity has any form of existence other than as humanity conceived by and for itself.
2.3 The human species is the species which creates itself.
3. Human Habitat
3.1 In conceiving of itself as humanity, it creates at the same time a universe fit for human habitation, the human habitat. It is a habitat in three dimensions - the natural world, the social world, and the inner world of the human individual.
3.2 The natural world is the human habitat conceived as not merely human, as the universe of all-that-is, in which we find ourselves to be a particular thing-that-is. The natural world takes part in human self-forming, in our self-identification as living things like other living things, animals like other animals. And the natural world takes part in human self-forming as an Other, because we identify ourselves as the species with uniquely human characteristics, including human consciousness.
3.3 The social world is the human habitat conceived as the place of our self-creating as a species, as the human co-habitants of the natural world, as the self-socializing animal. Human self-forming identifies its social world, by assimilation and differentiation, in relation to the natural world and to the inner world of the human individual. Without those two worlds there would be no social world, no place to cohabit, no world-conceiving consciousness.
3.4 The inner world of the individual is the human habitat conceived as consciousness, the place of the self-creating of the human personality. It is the place where consciousness identifies a self which is a unique self in relation to an Other which is the natural world and an Other which is the social world, but a self whose self-constituting is integrated with the self-constituting of those other worlds.
3.5 Humanity constitutes itself in the three worlds of the human habitat.
4. Human Reality
4.1 The self-made human world is reality-for-
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