It emerged most forcefully during the so-called Age of Enlightenment, when philosophers, intoxicated by the promise of reason, imagined humanity as a singular species that could be united beneath one political and moral canopy. This vision of universality—noble in aspiration, yet abstract in foundation—was less a discovery of human essence than an invention designed to serve a particular order: the Western order.
The Enlightenment project carried within it a utopian premise. It assumed that beneath the dense thicket of cultural difference, historical trauma, and geographical dispersion, there lay a common human substratum waiting to be revealed. If only reason were universally applied, it was believed, humanity could converge upon a shared destiny, a single form of government, and a universal moral law. Yet history, stubborn and unyielding, has consistently mocked this assumption.
Human beings have never been a singular tribe. They are divided by race, fractured by religion, anchored to disparate nations, and shaped by climates, languages, and traditions that generate profoundly different ways of life. What one civilization sanctifies, another abhors; what one calls justice, another may denounce as tyranny. To speak, therefore, of a universal human nature is to indulge in a myth, a philosophical fiction designed to ease the anxieties of fragmentation.
If there is no universal human essence, then the edifice built upon it—universal morality, universal law, universal government—collapses under its own weight. The dream of a single world order is not a political possibility but a mirage. The very attempt to impose it, as history has shown in colonial encounters and imperial adventures, leads not to harmony but to violence, resistance, and disintegration.
This recognition is not a call to nihilism but to humility. To accept the absence of a universal human nature is to acknowledge the plurality of human existence: that different peoples, born into different soils, shaped by different histories, will craft different visions of the good life. The challenge, then, is not to subsume them under a singular code, but to negotiate coexistence amidst incommensurability.
The Enlightenment myth of universality was a bold gamble of reason against reality. Its failure reminds us of an older, perhaps wiser truth: that mankind is not a monolith but a mosaic. The task of philosophy and politics alike is not to erase the tesserae but to find beauty in their irreducible diversity.