ROUSSEAU AND THE GREAT WESTERN DIVIDE

THE IDEA OF THE EXCLUSIVITY OF HUMAN NATURE

Resumen

In Rousseau’s philosophy, the gradual construction of a western idea of humanity is exposed: the history of how the human being naming himself being, as well as the history of the abuse of that denomination. It is, above all, a critique of the construction of the myth of the exclusive dignity of human nature, a theme that permeates the works of different philosophers, from the modern to contemporary ones, from western to non-western. This article
discusses, based on Rousseau and in dialogue with other authors, the “cursed cycle” characteristic of modernity, an idea that separates humans from animals and segregates humans from each other. It starts with separating human being from nature and constituting him as a distinct part in a process of progressive monopolization of the value of existence: speciesism appears at first, then sociopolitical inequality, ethnocentrism and other forms derived from exclusion.