Navigating Between Oppression and Liberation in Understanding the Human Person

Every philosophical tradition that has tried to answer the question “What is the human person?” has, at some point, landed on a partial answer – and partial answers, when treated as complete ones, become tools of oppression. When a society defines a person solely by their economic utility, their social role, their body, or their soul, it inevitably marginalizes those who don’t fit that narrow frame. Understanding how philosophical conceptions of the human person can either oppress or liberate is not just an academic exercise. It shapes laws, institutions, cultural norms, and the way individuals experience their own dignity – or the denial of it.

What do we mean by oppression and liberation in philosophy? 🔗

In a philosophical context, oppression refers to the systemic and institutional forces that limit the freedom, potential, and well-being of individuals or groups. It manifests through economic exploitation, social marginalization, cultural repression, and even physical violence. These forces constrict the human person’s ability to live fully, preventing the authentic expression of who they are. Liberation, by contrast, is not simply freedom from external control. It is the active, conscious effort to reclaim one’s agency and dignity in the face of oppressive structures – not just political freedom, but the recovery of one’s whole humanity.

What connects these two concepts to philosophy is the recognition that how we define the human person has direct consequences for how we treat people. A one-dimensional philosophical view of the human person doesn’t just produce intellectual error – it produces real-world suffering. This is why critically examining different understandings of human identity is so essential.

The danger of one-dimensional views 🔗

Throughout history, philosophers have emphasized different aspects of the human person – the individual, the social being, the body, the soul, the rational agent. Each of these emphases contains genuine insight. The problem arises when any one of them is elevated to the exclusion of all others, producing a reductive picture of humanity that fails to account for the full complexity of human existence.

Radical individualism and its limits 🔗

Individualism, in its philosophical form, holds that the worth and interests of the individual take ultimate precedence. It emphasizes realizing one’s goals and desires, valuing independence and self-reliance, and placing the individual above the state or social group. This position has deep roots in Enlightenment thought and remains dominant in many Western liberal democracies.

There is genuine value in individualism’s insistence on personal dignity and freedom. But taken to an extreme, it produces a view of the human person as a self-contained, atomistic unit – disconnected from community, history, and social obligation. Proponents of individualism argue that the interests of the individual ought to take precedence over those of the community, but when this becomes the only lens through which we view human beings, it strips away the relational dimension of identity. People become competitors rather than collaborators. Social structures that produce inequality are left unexamined, because the individual is held solely responsible for their own circumstances.

Liberation psychology, developed by Ignacio Martín-Baró, directly critiques this tendency, arguing that a key failure of mainstream frameworks is attributing to the individual characteristics that are actually produced by social relations. When individualism refuses to look at structural causes of suffering, it becomes philosophically oppressive – it blames the person for conditions they did not create.

Collectivism taken too far 🔗

At the opposite extreme, collectivism submerges the individual into the group. In this view, individuals are not isolated atoms but social beings with shared interests, and society may act through the state to promote them. Again, this contains real philosophical merit – humans are fundamentally relational, and ignoring the social dimension of identity is a serious error.

But when collectivism becomes totalizing, the individual is erased. Identity is reduced to group membership, social role, or collective function. Dissent becomes dangerous. Personal conscience is subordinated to the demands of the collective. A sharp individualism-collectivism dichotomy leads one to overlook values that inherently serve both individual and collective interests – and it can be used to justify the suppression of individuals in the name of social harmony. Historically, oppressive regimes have invoked collective good as justification for denying individual rights.

The philosophically sound position, as scholars across traditions have argued, is not a forced choice between the two. Bernard Stiegler captured this well when he observed that the “I” can only be thought in relationship to the “we” – the individual self is constituted through collective tradition, while also remaining irreducibly personal.

The body-soul divide: a particularly influential form of oppression 🔗

Perhaps no philosophical distinction has had more lasting oppressive consequences than the sharp separation of body and soul – a divide most prominently associated with Plato, though later amplified through various religious and philosophical traditions.

Plato’s dualism and its consequences 🔗

Plato assumes a distinction between an invisible soul and a visible body, arguing for the soul’s immortality and its successive reincarnations. For Plato, the soul is the true self – rational, divine, and oriented toward the eternal realm of Forms. The body, by contrast, is a prison. His famous phrase soma sema – “a body, a tomb” – captures the attitude: the body traps the soul in the world of imperfect material appearances, and philosophical life means learning to transcend it.

Plato saw the separation of body and soul at death as normative, even the special delight of philosophers. This view, absorbed into early Christian thought and reinforced through Neoplatonism, had enormous cultural consequences. It justified the devaluation of bodily experience, material needs, and physical labor. It was used to rationalize the control of bodies – particularly the bodies of women, enslaved people, and the poor – by treating them as lower, more “material” beings who needed to be governed by those with greater access to reason and spirit.

As a critical reading of Western philosophical views on the human person points out, Plato called for human beings to rise above the “oppressiveness of the body” – but in doing so, his framework could be turned into a tool for dismissing the suffering of those whose lives were primarily defined by bodily labor, poverty, and material need.

Aristotle’s corrective: the unity of body and soul 🔗

Aristotle offered a fundamentally different picture. Through his doctrine of hylomorphism, Aristotle identifies the soul of a living creature with its form, arguing that forms cannot exist separately from the material they organize. The soul is not a prisoner in the body – it is the organizing principle that makes the body a living, purposeful organism. Body and soul are not enemies; they are inseparable aspects of a unified being.

This is philosophically significant because it means that bodily experience, physical well-being, material conditions, and social life are not distractions from what is truly human – they are constitutive of it. Aristotle rejected Plato’s mind-body dualism because the form of a human – rational thought – cannot be separated from their body. A philosophy built on this foundation cannot so easily dismiss the suffering of bodies.

Toward an authentic philosophy of liberation 🔗

A liberative philosophy of the human person does not simply reject the above traditions – it learns from them while refusing to be imprisoned by any single one. It recognizes that the human person is a complex, irreducible unity: simultaneously individual and social, bodily and spiritual, rational and emotional, historical and transcendent.

Liberation philosophy seeks to contribute to the liberation of the oppressed and to the creation of a more just society. Thinkers like Martin Luther King Jr., Enrique Dussel, and Ignacio Martín-Baró have each, in different ways, insisted that philosophy cannot be a purely abstract enterprise when human dignity is at stake. Its task is to illuminate the nature of oppression and injustice in ways that lead to genuine change.

Intersectionality and the complexity of human identity 🔗

A liberative understanding of the human person must also grapple with intersectionality – the recognition that individuals may experience multiple, overlapping forms of oppression based on race, class, gender, sexuality, and other dimensions of identity. No single factor exhausts who a person is. Liberation psychology addresses this by reorienting the focus from an individualistic to a social orientation, without erasing the individual person in the process.

This means that a philosophy of liberation cannot treat “the human person” as an abstract, universal category divorced from social context. It must attend to the concrete, lived experience of actual people – including those whose experiences have historically been excluded from philosophical reflection.

Liberation as collective, not just personal 🔗

One of the most important insights of liberative philosophy is that personal empowerment cannot be achieved at the expense of others. True liberation is deeply interconnected with collective well-being. The fundamental features of a utopia of justice, equality, and freedom are that they apply to all human beings regardless of race, sex, or nationality. This means the freedom of one person is genuinely tied to the freedom of all – and that oppression must be challenged not only at the individual level, but in the social, political, and economic structures that perpetuate it.

This is not merely idealism. It is a philosophical claim about the nature of the human person: that we are constitutively relational, that identity is social as well as individual, and that a person’s capacity to flourish depends on the conditions their society creates – or destroys.

Why this matters beyond the classroom 🔗

The question of how we understand the human person is not confined to philosophy seminars. It is embedded in every policy debate about poverty, healthcare, education, and human rights. When societies treat people as purely economic units, they enact a kind of philosophical reductionism with real consequences. When systems deny the material needs of people in the name of spiritual or ideological abstractions, they reproduce the logic of Platonic dualism in political form. When individuals are held entirely responsible for structural problems, radical individualism becomes an instrument of injustice.

A balanced view that mediates between individual and collective, body and soul, personal and political is not a compromise between extremes – it is the philosophically honest position. The human person is genuinely complex. Any understanding that denies that complexity, however coherent it may appear internally, ends up distorting what it means to be human – and that distortion always falls hardest on those who are already most vulnerable.

What do you think? If every philosophical tradition carries both liberative and oppressive potential, what responsibility do philosophers – and societies – have in deciding which aspects of a tradition to emphasize? And is it possible to construct a truly universal account of the human person that honors both individual dignity and collective belonging without collapsing into either extreme?

References

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liberation_psychology
2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Individualism
3. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/379120440_Individualism_versus_Collectivism_The_Mediation_of_Human_Solidarity
4. https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/abs/cambridge-history-of-philosophy-18701945/individualism-vs-collectivism/CFF1E2C88F07708FFEC0C044E960861B
5. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0022022190212001
6. https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/dualism/
7. https://robinmarkphillips.com/plato-physical-body/
8. https://egyankosh.ac.in/bitstream/123456789/35019/1/Unit-3.pdf
9. https://alevelphilosophyandreligion.com/philosophy-soul-mind-body/
10. https://academic.oup.com/aristoteliansupp/article/98/1/1/7710669
11. https://pages.gseis.ucla.edu/faculty/kellner/Illumina%20Folder/kell7.htm