Are We Homo sapiens Yet?
Name
thld_a_00073.pdf
Description
Published version
Size
456.69 KB
Format
Adobe PDF
Checksum (MD5)
5960a63d161b40c7b79f8a8a67b493d4
Author(s)
Jarzombek, Mark
Date Issued
January 2014
Journal
Thresholds
Publisher
M.I.T. Press
Citation
Jarzombek, Mark. "Are We Homo sapiens Yet?" Thresholds, 42, (2014): 10-25 © 2014 Mark Jarzombek
Version
Final published version
Abstract
We may appreciate the Enlightenment-era optimism about our intrinsic epistemological capacity, but when the Swedish botanist Carolus Linnaeus (1707 - 1778) coined the term Homo sapiens, this was not the Socratic mandate to know thyself. Instead our “knowledge” belonged to a com-plex classificatory tree, the smallest element of which was a species and its ‘varieties’. It was a revolution just as significant as Darwin’s theory of evolution some hundred years later. Linnaeus’ Man was not a creature of the Bible tortured by the perplexing duality of body and spirit, but an animal, one of the thousands, that populates the world. And yet, Homo sapi-ens had a special gift, for it alone sees that everything fits into a single, vast imperium. The argument was the perfect and perhaps somewhat frightening fusion of reason and empire.
MIT Department
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Architecture
Terms of Use
Article is made available in accordance with the publisher's policy and may be subject to US copyright law. Please refer to the publisher's site for terms of use.
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DOI of Published Version
https://doi.org/10.1162/thld_a_00073
