An odd combo: One places the individual human person on a pedestal, and the other ignores it. Yet both are fruits of modernity. The former protects the individual’s autonomy in choosing a path in life, and the latter brackets all meaning from the physical circumstances of this life. This leaves us rather adrift and quite possibly with too many choices and too little guidance. But if we reconciled them and understood human nature comprehensively, our actions could be guided—but not governed—by biology.

I turned to Edith Stein’s philosophy and the way she speaks of the natures of individual things, or their essences. She finds a structure in them by which we understand meaning as in part given and in part of our making. Her work brings together the questions “What is it?”, “What does it mean?”, and “What is due to it?”. Each part of the answer we give to one of these questions informs the others as our understanding of an individual deepens.

For example, consider our human DNA. We find that each is unique. I cannot point to some part of my DNA that makes it human, but I find that two human DNAs are always more similar to each other than either one is to, for example, chimpanzee DNA. Recognizing by this similarity that my DNA is human DNA is already one step past the purely physical and an expression of meaning. In Stein’s terms, we are grasping an aspect of an essence.

But there is much more to being human. Another insight that is essential for grasping Stein’s philosophy is the communal nature of human life. To be alive is to unfold one’s meaning in time, and a human life simply cannot do this in isolation. Our human nature does not permit it. But modernity also discovered that merely adhering to traditions is not enough for everyone to prosper. Human meaning unfolds through individuals in community, which is why the community needs to respect individuals. They need space to explore their insights and convince others of their validity. This is the basis of human rights, and the community was found to prosper when it respected them. With them, human life became more meaningful. Now human rights are recognized as much a part of human nature as human DNA, for without them, to be human would no longer be what it means to be human.

The hallmark of modernity is the self-grounding of human reason; it treats reason as autonomous. But this is only a methodological choice. We can treat human reason as autonomous and let this take us to the discovery that we exercise this autonomy on a biological foundation. We discover the world as creation in which we are created to co-create. Our contributions are meant to become a harmonious part of what was given to us to continue.

Now, we can learn from nature not just how to build better mechanical devices but also how to find guidance on how to act. Nature is no longer the adversary to our autonomy, but it constitutes the context within which autonomy finds its meaning.