Are We Homo sapiens Yet?

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.