ABSTRACT
Montaigne had ended “Of Experience” musing—by way of a skeptical analysis of human being—that “it were an absolute perfection, and as it were divine for a man to know how to enjoy his being loyally.” One of the “skeptical” traditions, of course, is Christian doctrine, which, from a species perspective, can be seen to constitute humankind as uniquely vulnerable to sin and folly and therefore “properly” incapable of knowledge in the first place. The vanitas tradition and the ethos of natural history alike had to be bypassed in order to create the particular concentrate that the singularized concept of “the human” would become after Descartes and for the Enlightement. In a longer archeology, this “human” would, in its turn, be superseded by new sciences from Darwin, to DNA, and to further de-singularizations of human being from the cell level to the milieu of the environment.
