Wild essences and the existence of human rights (part one): a conceptual elucidation of the meaning of the expression in Merleau-Ponty

Abstract

The existence of a wild essence of human rights raises two current issues: their intercultural foundation in a post-Marxist era marked by bourgeois individualism, and animal rights, revived by Peter Singer in Animal Liberation. Many civilizations did not recognize formal codes of human rights, although they did establish ethical limits; China, for example, invoked the Confucian tradition in 1993. It also asks whether only the sensitive human body (Leib) possesses rights. Both problems question cultural relativism, human specificity, and Western superiority, requiring a phenomenological foundation of anthropology. Merleau-Ponty’s wild Wesen connects this issue with Ricardo Sánchez Ortiz de Urbina’s Estromatología and with the critique of transcendental egologie, beyond the Cogito.