What makes us human? Though there are many easy answers—bipedal apes who give live birth and care for their young until their teen years, users of tools and reason, beings that experience and articulate complex emotions—these responses, however, are at best superficial and all too often make space for the dehumanization of certain groups and people. Definitions that exclude are definitions waiting to be abused. Conversely, definitions of humanity that include make space for the depth, breadth, width, range, and variety of humanness foster inclusion and development.

Naturally, finding such a definition of everyone is at the core of the Theory of Everyone. It is also integral to a recent publication called A Theory of Everyone by Michael Muthukrishna, a work that, in my view, paints a compelling picture of what makes us human, why the messiness of humanity can cause so many problems, and what we can do about it. It is, as you might imagine, a work I will be returning to and discussing in greater depth in later posts.

One of the areas in which I largely coincide with Muthukrishna’s argument is in the assertion that humans and humanity can be defined by our capacity to self-reflect, a capacity that, when nurtured, is the most human and humane of abilities. We reflect individually and collectively on the ways we inhabit the world. We dream, we hope, we dread. We imagine different ways that we each could inhabit our worlds together and apart. We compare these alternatives, evaluating according to an established set of values, and under the right circumstances, we develop the necessary capacities to choose among them—pursuing and potentially accomplishing the realization of the ways of being in the world we have chosen. When we participate in this project of human habilitation on an individual or collective level, we enact the common facet of our humanity that connects, defines, and, to a certain extent, binds every human together.

In part, my interest in studying humanity through the lens of habilitation stems from my own lived experience. My life has been a series of dishabilitations and habilitations (sometimes rehabilitations, though not always, as my habilitation journey, like most, is not about getting back to where I was but moving forward into increased function). This series of diahabilitations and habilitative advances started in my mother’s womb and carries through to the present as I undergo prehabilitation for a surgical intervention to repair a dishabilitative knee injury. The surgery will be followed by rehabilitation, and the cycle will, undoubtedly, continue.

I am convinced that this cycle is not unique to me. The dynamics of habilitation and disabilitation are the palate on which health, civilization, freedom, meaning, growth, flourishing, progress, and regression are painted across collective and individual canvases of the human condition.

I, together with my Ph.D. supervisor Darin Weinberg, recently published an article titled The Diffusion of Diagnosis, which posits that “rather than confining the categories of health and sickness to a biomedical conception of the biological organism, there is growing recognition of epistemological and ontological multiplicity in the realm of diagnosis and, indeed, in the very realm of disease itself. In short, the empirical manifestations of health and illness, as well as the processes thought to cause them, are now understood to assume a much wider variety of both biological and other forms. This essay considers the underlying epistemological and ontological opportunities and challenges of taking what (he and I) are calling this diffusion of diagnosis seriously. By diffusion (he and I) mean the movement from a concentrated understanding of diagnostic authority as confined to scientific biomedicine to a less concentrated appreciation of the diverse approaches to diagnosis throughout the world.”

I believe that this diffusion is not limited to diagnosis but rather expands into habilitation—into rehabilitative medicine and its subfields. Further, new modalities and directionalities in habilitation are not mere diffusion but include fusion, refusion, infusion, and confusion in the professional habilitative landscape. Some habilitative practices have defused, some have been confused, and some infused into subfields they weren’t in before. This, for an ability-obsessed Ph.D. candidate such as myself, is an exciting trend and one that begs for rigor.

Ensuring that habilitation is as rigorous as possible is necessary because the project of habilitation, a convergent diversity of the human experience, something we all have in common that is different for each of us, the experience of dishabilitation, rehabilitation, prehabilitation, in many different modes extending across many different spheres of human activity, is fundamentally vital to the positive fulfillment of the possibilities of the human experience.

Fusion, including diffusion, refusion, infusion, and confusion in habilitation without rigor is positive and can be subversive but is not cohesive enough to supplant the dominant position of and ease the tension between economics, medicine, and education in current definitions of ability (and thus humanity).

As it stands, ability is often defined in economics as about labor and production of value, about output. This definition does not value potential or unrealized ability. Even forward-looking projections of ability, such as the price-to-earnings ratios of many tech companies, are based on the manifest productive ability of those companies’ leaders and employees.

Medical definitions, on the other hand, privilege the “order of the normal.” Medically defined ability puts a premium on conformity with function standards of the biological blueprint. Medicine is, therefore, preoccupied with where the limits of ability are so as to determine the range of human function in which the normative human falls. This is at odds with the economic model in which brains in jars pioneering multi-billion dollar innovations would be notable for the multi-billion dollar innovations, not for being brains in jars.

Both of these approaches differ from the educational definition of ability, which is concerned almost exclusively with potential ability. The educational definition, at its most optimistic, does not deal with limits of ability as it is often put in practice where no ability is manifest. The educational model does, however, involve direct comparison between individuals as opposed to measurement against the normative.

These three definitions of ability are, of course, deeply intertwined. Medical definitions of ability are found throughout education systems the world over from special ed plans to gifted and talented programs. And few and far between are people who have never heard ‘get a good education so you can find a good job’ (i.e. generate value). They also paint a habilitative panorama rife with opportunities to devalue, marginalize, dehumanize, and shove aside.

We must, therefore, find alternative methods of defining and developing ability. I believe that the multidirectional fusion event underway in rehabilitative medicine, its therapeutic subfields, and other fields of habilitation presents the opportunity to do just that. This is why, particularly in light of Prof. Murukrishna’s A Theory of Everyone, which elegantly lays out many of the woes I have and wished to explore on these pages and in my academic work, I am channeling my efforts into the exploration of habilitation. This refined trajectory includes a new title for my Ph.D. research: The Fusion of Professional Habilitation and Its Implications for the Epistemology and Ontology of Human Function and Ability. In my research, I hope to establish that the trends I have described are indeed significant, to describe these trends more clearly, and, through conversations with methodologists and practitioners, to understand the perspectives of those in the field of both the trends I have described and their roots.  It also includes a forthcoming project titled The Habilitation Game in which I will explore eight modes of habilitation, discuss their roles in my own experience, and extrapolate from my experience to the broader habilitative landscape. I look forward to sharing more with you.