Civilizational Differences and the Isomorphism of Human Nature: A Theoretical Response to the Clash of Civilizations

After the end of the Cold War, Samuel Huntington's clash-of-civilizations thesis asserted that civilizational differences would become the principal source of world conflict and that cultural identity would replace ideology as the basic dividing line of international politics. This paper argues that the fundamental limitation of the thesis lies not in its recognition of civilizational differences, but in its treatment of difference as the analytical terminus, without descending to the common structure of human nature beneath civilizations. On the basis of a four-layer structure of human nature (the material, bodily, affective-appetitive, and rational layers), the paper demonstrates that civilizational differences are differentiated paths through which different civilizations respond to the same set of basic human problems, and that the isomorphism of human nature provides the deep ground for civilizational dialogue. Civilizational conflict is not the necessary outcome of difference but the product of path absolutization (superiorization, hostile framing, closure, and politicization) combined with imbalance within the structure of human nature; the strategic instrumentalization of civilizational narratives and the algorithmic amplification of hostility in the digital age further intensify confrontation. Accordingly, the paper proposes five mechanisms of transcendence—reduction to common humanity, recognition of desires, rational truth-seeking, conversion toward the common good, and composite identity—together with a three-tier ladder of cross-civilizational dialogue, thereby supplying the community with a shared future for humanity with a grounding in a theory of human nature and redirecting civilizational relations from the logic of conflict to the logic of symbiosis.