From Sex to Humanity: How to be Human - A Guide in Two Parts (Part 2)

“On the project of what it is to think of oneself as fully human, to be fully human, I think the spiritual dimension is enormously important, but very difficult to pin down,” says moral philosopher Mary Warnock. “My general definition of the spiritual dimension of a persons life? It is what really exercises a person’s imagination, it would embrace the aesthetic.”

She believes that it is the spiritual facet of human beings that allow them to see beauty in an arrangement of coloured blobs of paint on a canvas, and to be emotionally moved by an operatic performance - to see the true likeness in a portrait, or feel pain and excitement in music.

The first person to put forward a biological view of spirituality was zoologist Alister Hardy. In 1965, shortly after he retired from the Chair of Zoology at Oxford University, Hardy gave the Gifford Lectures at the University of Aberdeen. As a committed Darwinist, he proposed that religious experience, or spiritual awareness, has evolved through the process of natural selection because it has survival value to the individual. Hardy was suggesting that this form of awareness is potentially present in all human beings and has a positive function in enabling individuals to survive in their natural environment. He provided an evolutionary mechanism to explain the biological mode in which spiritual awareness emerged in the human species.

The Challenge

Courtesy of Digit 52 - Alamy Images Above all... Be Yourself

Sex undoubtedly creates unique individuals. The sexuality that flows from this shapes our activities, and is a critical element in forming who we are. It also has a powerful influence over the way we share our existence with others.

The challenge for anyone wanting a holistic view of humanity is to assemble many disparate facets of our being and fashion them into a single entity. It’s easy to place a prism in front of a beam of light and split it into its constituent colours, but less easy to reverse the process. Similarly it is a relativly easy task to look at any one of the many facets of human existence and scrutinise it in isolation, but the challenge then is to recombine them in a way that honours each element, but also celebrates the apparent simplicity with which most people live out their lives.