I like to be human because in my unfinishedness I know that I am conditioned. Yet conscious of such conditioning, I know that I can go beyond it, which is the essential difference between conditioned and determined existence. The difference between the unfinished that does not know anything of such a condition, and the unfinished who socio-historically has arrived at the point of becoming conscious of the condition and unfinishedness. I like being human because I perceive that the construction of my presence in the world, which is a construction involving others and is subject to genetic factors that I have inherited and to socio-cultural and historical factors, is nonetheless a presence whose construction has much to do with myself. It would be ironic if the awareness of my presence in the world did not at the same time imply a recognition that I could not be absent from the construction of my own presence. I can not perceive myself as a presence in the world and at the same time explain it as the result of forces completely alien to me. If I do so, I simply renounce my historical, ethical, social and political responsibility for my own evolution from the life support system to the emergence of Homo Sapiens. In that sense, I renounce my ontological vocation to intervene in the world. The fact that I perceive myself to be in the world, with the world, with others, brings with it a sense of "being with" constitutive of who I am that make my relationship to the world essential to who I am. In other words, my presence in the world is not so much of someone who is merely adapting to something "external," but of someone who is inserted as if belonging essentially to it. It's the position of one who struggles to become the subject and maker of his history and not simply a passive, disconnected object.
Paulo Freire
"Pedagogy of Freedom"
pp 54, 55
