Unsettling the Coloniality of Being/Power/Truth/Freedom: Towards the Human, After Man, Its Overrepresentation—An Argument Wynter, Sylvia. CR: The New Centennial Review, Volume 3, Number 3, Fall 2003, pp. 257-337 (Article) Published by Michigan State University Press DOI: 10.1353/ncr.2004.0015 For additional information about this article http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/ncr/summary/v003/3.3wynter.html Access Provided by Binghamton University at 03/14/12 11:28PM GMT Unsettling the Coloniality of Being/Power/Truth/Freedom Towards the Human, After Man, Its Overrepresentation—An Argument SY LVI A W Y N T E R Stanford University INTRODUCTION Guide-Quotes 1 One thing in any case is certain: man is neither the oldest nor the most constant problem that has been posed for human knowledge. Taking a relatively short chronological sample within a restricted geographical area—European culture since the sixteenth century—one can be certain that man is a recent invention within it. . . . In fact, among all the mutations that have affected the knowledge of things and their order, the . . . only one, that which began a century and a half ago and is now perhaps drawing to a close, has made it possible for the figure of man to appear. And that appearance . . . was the effect of a change in the fundamental arrangements of knowledge. . . . If those arrangements were to disappear as they appeared . . . one can certainly wager that man would be erased. —Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of The Human Sciences ● 257 258 ● Un s e t t l i n g t h e C o l o n i a l i t y o f B e i n g / Po w e r / Tr u t h / Fre e d o m The reality in highly indebted countries is grim. Half of Africa’s population— about 300 million people—live without access to basic healthcare or a safe water source. In Tanzania, where 40 percent of the population dies before age 35, the government spends nine times more on foreign debt payments than on healthcare. In 1997, before Hurricane Mitch, Nicaragua spent more than half its revenue on debt payments. Until recently, it has taken countries in structural adjustment programs six or more years to get debt relief. For lenders this seems like common sense—making sure the country has its economic house in order before canceling debts—but the human cost is tremendous. Six years is a child’s entire elementary school education. If governments are forced to cut subsidies for public education and charge fees that make schooling too expensive for the poor, it cheats a whole generation of children. —Robert W. Edgar, “Jubilee 2000: Paying Our Debts” Step up to the White House, “Let me in!” What’s my reason for being? I’m your next of kin, And we built this motherfucker, you wanna kill me ‘cause o’ my hunger? . . . I’m just a black man, why y’all made it so hard? Damn, nigga gotta go create his own job, Mr. Mayor, imagine this was yo backyard, Mr. Governor, imagine it’s yo kids that starve, Imagine yo kids gotta slang crack to survive, Swing a Mac to be alive, . . . Extinction of Earth? Human cutdown? . . . Tax-payers pay for more jails for black and latin faces” —Nas, “CIA” Definitions of the intellectual are many and diverse. They have, however, one trait in common, which makes them also different from all other definitions: they are all self-definitions. Indeed, their authors are the members of the same rare species they attempt to define. . . . The specifically intellectual form of the operation—self-definition—masks its universal content which is Sy lv i a Wy n t e r the reproduction and reinforcement of a given social configuration, and— with it—a given (or claimed) status for the group. —Zygmunt Bauman, Legislators and Interpreters: On Modernity, Post-Modernity and Intellectuals What is known as the Gregorian reform was actually an effort of modernization initiated and carried out by the Church from about 1050 until 1215 (the year of the Fourth Lateran Council). The reform first of all established the independence of the Church from secular society. And what better barrier could have been erected between clergy and laity than that of sexuality? Marriage became the property of lay men and women; virginity, celibacy, and/or continence became the property of priests, monks, and nuns. A wall separated the pure from the impure. Impure liquids were banished from the realm of the pure: the clergy was not allowed to spill sperm or blood and not permitted to perpetuate original sin through procreation. But in the realm of the impure the flow was not stanched, only regulated. The Church became a society of bachelors, which imprisoned lay society in marriage. —Jacques Le Goff, The Medieval Imagination The intellectual’s schizoid character stems from the duality of his social existence; his history is a record of crises of conscience of various kinds, with a variety of origins. In their ideologies the intellectuals cultivate certain particular interests until they have universalized them, then turn about and expose the partiality of those ideologies. . . . They articulate the rules of the social order and the theories which give them sanction, but at the same time it is intellectuals who criticize the existing scheme of things and demand its supersession. —George Konrad, Ivan Szelenyi, The Intellectuals on the Road to Class Power Now the highest Father, God the master-builder, . . . took up man . . . and placing him at the midpoint of the world . . . spoke to him as follows: “We have given to thee, Adam, no fixed seat, no form of thy very own, no gift peculiarly thine, that thou mayest feel as thine own, have as thine own, pos- ● 259 260 ● Un s e t t l i n g t h e C o l o n i a l i t y o f B e i n g / Po w e r / Tr u t h / Fre e d o m sess as thine own the seat, the form, the gifts which thou thyself shalt desire. A limited nature in other creatures is confined within the laws written down by Us. In conformity with thy free judgment, in whose hands I have placed thee, thou art confined by no bounds; and thou wilt fix limits of nature for thyself. . . . Neither heavenly nor earthly, neither mortal nor immortal have We made thee. Thou, like a judge appointed for being honorable art the molder and maker of thyself; thou mayest sculpt thyself into whatever shape thou dost prefer. Thou canst grow downward into the lower natures which are brutes. Thou canst again grow upward from thy soul’s reason into the higher natures which are divine.” —Pico della Mirandola, Oration on the Dignity of Man THE ARGUMENT PROPOSES THAT THE STRUGGLE OF OUR NEW MILLENNIUM WILL be one between the ongoing imperative of securing the well-being of our present ethnoclass (i.e., Western bourgeois) conception of the human, Man, which overrepresents itself as if it were the human itself, and that of securing the well-being, and therefore the full cognitive and behavioral autonomy of the human species itself/ourselves. Because of this overrepresentation, which is defined in the first part of the title as the Coloniality of Being/ Power/Truth/Freedom, any attempt to unsettle the coloniality of power will call for the unsettling of this overrepresentation as the second and now purely secular form of what Aníbal Quijano identifies as the “Racism/ Ethnicism complex,” on whose basis the world of modernity was brought into existence from the fifteenth/sixteenth centuries onwards (Quijano 1999, 2000),2 and of what Walter Mignolo identifies as the foundational “colonial difference” on which the world of modernity was to institute itself (Mignolo 1999, 2000).3 The correlated hypothesis here is that all our present struggles with respect to race, class, gender, sexual orientation, ethnicity, struggles over the environment, global warming, severe climate change, the sharply unequal distribution of the earth resources (20 percent of the world’s peoples own 80 percent of its resources, consume two-thirds of its food, and are responsible for 75 percent of its ongoing pollution, with this leading to two billion of Sy lv i a Wy n t e r ● 261 earth’s peoples living relatively affluent lives while four billion still live on the edge of hunger and immiseration, to the dynamic of overconsumption on the part of the rich techno-industrial North paralleled by that of overpopulation on the part of the dispossessed poor, still partly agrarian worlds of the South4)—these are all differing facets of the central ethnoclass Man vs. Human struggle. Central to this struggle also is the usually excluded and invisibilized situation of the category identified by Zygmunt Bauman as the “New Poor” (Bauman 1987). That is, as a category defined at the global level by refugee/economic migrants stranded outside the gates of the rich countries, as the postcolonial variant of Fanon’s category of les damnés (Fanon 1963)—with this category in the United States coming to comprise the criminalized majority Black and dark-skinned Latino inner-city males now made to man the rapidly expanding prison-industrial complex, together with their female peers—the kicked-about Welfare Moms—with both being part of the ever-expanding global, transracial category of the homeless/the jobless, the semi-jobless, the criminalized drug-offending prison population. So that if we see this category of the damnés that is internal to (and interned within) the prison system of the United States as the analog form of a global archipelago, constituted by the Third- and Fourth-World peoples of the so-called “underdeveloped” areas of the world—most totally of all by the peoples of the continent of Africa (now stricken with AIDS, drought, and ongoing civil wars, and whose bottommost place as the most impoverished of all the earth’s continents is directly paralleled by the situation of its Black Diaspora peoples, with Haiti being produced and reproduced as the most impoverished nation of the Americas)—a systemic pattern emerges. This pattern is linked to the fact that while in the post-sixties United States, as Herbert Gans noted recently, the Black population group, of all the multiple groups comprising the post-sixties social hierarchy, has once again come to be placed at the bottommost place of that hierarchy (Gans, 1999), with all incoming new nonwhite/non-Black groups, as Gans’s fellow sociologist Andrew Hacker (1992) earlier pointed out, coming to claim “normal” North American identity by the putting of visible distance between themselves and the Black population group (in effect, claiming “normal” human status by distancing themselves from the group that is still made to occupy the nadir, 262 ● Un s e t t l i n g t h e C o l o n i a l i t y o f B e i n g / Po w e r / Tr u t h / Fre e d o m “nigger” rung of being human within the terms of our present ethnoclass Man’s overrepresentation of its “descriptive statement” [Bateson 1969] as if it were that of the human itself), then the struggle of our times, one that has hitherto had no name, is the struggle against this overrepresentation. As a struggle whose first phase, the Argument proposes, was first put in place (if only for a brief hiatus before being coopted, reterritorialized [Godzich 1986]) by the multiple anticolonial social-protest movements and intellectual challenges of the period to which we give the name, “The Sixties.” The further proposal here is that, although the brief hiatus during which the sixties’ large-scale challenge based on multiple issues, multiple local terrains of struggles (local struggles against, to use Mignolo’s felicitous phrase, a “global design” [Mignolo 2000]) erupted was soon to be erased, several of the issues raised then would continue to be articulated, some in sanitized forms (those pertaining to the category defined by Bauman as “the seduced”), others in more harshly intensified forms (those pertaining to Bauman’s category of the “repressed” [Bauman 1987]). Both forms of “sanitization” would, however, function in the same manner as the lawlike effects of the post-sixties’ vigorous discursive and institutional re-elaboration of the central overrepresentation, which enables the interests, reality, and well-being of the empirical human world to continue to be imperatively subordinated to those of the now globally hegemonic ethnoclass world of “Man.” This, in the same way as in an earlier epoch and before what Howard Winant identifies as the “immense historical rupture” of the “Big Bang” processes that were to lead to a contemporary modernity defined by the “rise of the West” and the “subjugation of the rest of us” (Winant 1994)—before, therefore, the secularizing intellectual revolution of Renaissance humanism, followed by the decentralizing religious heresy of the Protestant Reformation and the rise of the modern state—the then world of laymen and laywomen, including the institution of the political state, as well as those of commerce and of economic production, had remained subordinated to that of the post-Gregorian Reform Church of Latin-Christian Europe (Le Goff 1983), and therefore to the “rules of the social order” and the theories “which gave them sanction” (See Konrad and Szelenyi guide-quote), as these rules were articulated by its theologians and implemented by its celibate clergy (See Le Goff guide-quote). Sy lv i a Wy n t e r ● 263 The Janus face of the emergence of Mignolo’s proposed “modernity/coloniality” complementarity is sited here. As also is the answer to the why of the fact that, as Aníbal Quijano insists in his Qué tal Raza! (2000), the “idea of race” would come to be “the most efficient instrument of social domination invented in the last 500 years.” In order for the world of the laity, including that of the then ascendant modern European state, to escape their subordination to the world of the Church, it had been enabled to do so only on the basis of what Michel Foucault identifies as the “invention of Man”: that is, by the Renaissance humanists’ epochal redescription of the human outside the terms of the then theocentric, “sinful by nature” conception/ “descriptive statement” of the human, on whose basis the hegemony of the Church/clergy over the lay world of Latin-Christian Europe had been supernaturally legitimated (Chorover 1979). While, if this redescription was effected by the lay world’s invention of Man as the political subject of the state, in the transumed and reoccupied place of its earlier matrix identity Christian, the performative enactment of this new “descriptive statement” and its master code of symbolic life and death, as the first secular or “degodded” (if, at the time, still only partly so) mode of being human in the history of the species, was to be effected only on the basis of what Quijano identifies as the “coloniality of power,” Mignolo as the “colonial difference,” and Winant as a huge project demarcating human differences thinkable as a “racial longue durée.” One of the major empirical effects of which would be “the rise of Europe” and its construction of the “world civilization” on the one hand, and, on the other, African enslavement, Latin American conquest, and Asian subjugation. PA RT I The Janus Face of the Invention of “Man”: Laws of Nature and the Thinkability of Natural, rather than Supernatural Causality versus the Dynamics of the Colonizer/Colonized Answer to the Question of Who/What We Are. This “enormous act of expression/narration” was paradoxical. It was to be implemented by the West and by its intellectuals as indeed a “Big Bang” process by which it/they were to initiate the first gradual de-supernaturalizing 264 ● Un s e t t l i n g t h e C o l o n i a l i t y o f B e i n g / Po w e r / Tr u t h / Fre e d o m of our modes of being human, by means of its/their re-invention of the theocentric “descriptive statement” Christian as that of Man in two forms. The first was from the Renaissance to the eighteenth century; the second from then on until today, thereby making possible both the conceptualizability of natural causality, and of nature as an autonomously functioning force in its own right governed by its own laws (i.e., cursus solitus naturae) (Hubner 1983; Blumenberg 1983; Hallyn 1990), with this, in turn, making possible the cognitively emancipatory rise and gradual development of the physical sciences (in the wake of the invention of Man1), and then of the biological sciences (in the wake of the nineteenth century invention of Man2). These were to be processes made possible only on the basis of the dynamics of a colonizer/colonized relation that the West was to discursively constitute and empirically institutionalize on the islands of the Caribbean and, later, on the mainlands of the Americas. This seeing that if, as Quijano rightly insists, race—unlike gender (which has a biogenetically determined anatomical differential correlate onto which each culture’s system of gendered oppositions can be anchored)—is a purely invented construct that has no such correlate (Quijano 2000), it was this construct that would enable the now globally expanding West to replace the earlier mortal/immortal, natural/supernatural, human/the ancestors, the gods/God distinction as the one on whose basis all human groups had millennially “grounded” their descriptive statement/prescriptive statements of what it is to be human, and to reground its secularizing own on a newly projected human/subhuman distinction instead. That is, on Quijano’s “Racism/ Ethnicism” complex, Winant’s “race concept,” Mignolo’s “colonial difference,” redefined in the terms of the Spanish state’s theoretical construct of a “bynature difference” between Spaniards and the indigenous peoples of the Americas (Padgen 1982): a difference defined in Ginés de Sepúlveda’s sixteenth-century terms as almost a difference between “monkeys and men,” homunculi and true humans. “Race” was therefore to be, in effect, the nonsupernatural but no less extrahuman ground (in the reoccupied place of the traditional ancestors/gods, God, ground) of the answer that the secularizing West would now give to the Heideggerian question as to the who, and the what we are. Sy lv i a Wy n t e r ● 265 In his 1999 Coloniality Working Group conference presentation, Walter Mignolo perceptively identified one of the consequences of the “Big Bang” initiation of the “colonial difference” as that of the fact that, “in the imaginary of the modern/colonial world system sustainable knowledge . . . disregarded Amerindian ways of knowing and knowledge production that were reduced to curious practices of strange people and, in another domain were demonized.” However, the anthropologist Jacob Pandian (1985) enables us to see that this epistemological “disregard” was itself part of an even more central imperative—that of the sustainability of the new mode of being human, of its epochal redescription as, primarily, that of the political subject of the state Man in the transumed and reoccupied place of Latin-Christian Europe’s founding matrix description, Christian, which had defined the human as primarily the religious subject of the Church. While, if this new descriptive statement (one that was to gradually privatize as well as harness the matrix Christian identity to the realizing of the modern state’s own secular goals of imperial territorial expansion) was also to be effected on the basis of a parallel series of discursive and institutional inventions, there was one that was to be as novel as it was to be central. This, as Pandian documents, was to be that of the West’s transformation of the indigenous peoples of the Americas/the Caribbean (culturally classified as Indians, indios/indias), together with the population group of the enslaved peoples of Africa, transported across the Atlantic (classified as Negroes, negros/negras) into the physical referents of its reinvention of medieval Europe’s Untrue Christian Other to its normative True Christian Self, as that of the Human Other to its new “descriptive statement” of the ostensibly only normal human, Man. In his seminal book, Anthropology and the Western Tradition: Towards an Authentic Anthropology (1985), Jacob Pandian enables us to see that within the terms of the Judeo-Christian religious creed (within the terms, therefore, of its variant of the “formulation of a general order of existence,” correlated “postulate of a significant ill,” and therefore proposed behaviormotivating “cure” or “plan of salvation” that is defining of all religions [Girardot 1988]), the physical referents of the conception of the Untrue Other to the True Christian Self had been the categories of peoples defined in reli- 266 ● Un s e t t l i n g t h e C o l o n i a l i t y o f B e i n g / Po w e r / Tr u t h / Fre e d o m gious terminology as heretics, or as Enemies-of-Christ infidels and paganidolaters (with Jews serving as the boundary-transgressive “name of what is evil” figures, stigmatized as Christ-killing deicides). In the wake of the West’s reinvention of its True Christian Self in the transumed terms of the Rational Self of Man1, however, it was to be the peoples of the militarily expropriated New World territories (i.e., Indians), as well as the enslaved peoples of Black Africa (i.e., Negroes), that were made to reoccupy the matrix slot of Otherness—to be made into the physical referent of the idea of the irrational/subrational Human Other, to this first degodded (if still hybridly religio-secular) “descriptive statement” of the human in history, as the descriptive statement that would be foundational to modernity. So that rather than “sustainable knowledge” merely disregarding the “other ways of knowing” of the Amerindian peoples, as Mignolo contends, Pandian proposes instead that it was to be the discourses of this knowledge, including centrally those of anthropology, that would function to construct all the non-Europeans that encountered (including those whose lands its settlers expropriated and those whom they enslaved or enserfed) as the physical referent of, in the first phase, its irrational or subrational Human Other to its new “descriptive statement” of Man as a political subject. While the “Indians” were portrayed as the very acme of the savage, irrational Other, the “Negroes” were assimilated to the former’s category, represented as its most extreme form and as the ostensible missing link between rational humans and irrational animals. However, in the wake of the West’s second wave of imperial expansion, pari passu with its reinvention of in Man now purely biologized terms, it was to be the peoples of Black African descent who would be constructed as the ultimate referent of the “racially inferior” Human Other, with the range of other colonized dark-skinned peoples, all classified as “natives,” now being assimilated to its category—all of these as the ostensible embodiment of the non-evolved backward Others—if to varying degrees and, as such, the negation of the generic “normal humanness,” ostensibly expressed by and embodied in the peoples of the West. Nevertheless, if the range of Native Others were now to be classified, as Pandian further explains, in the terms of the multiple mythologies, of the savage Other, the fossil Other, the abnormal Other, the timeless ethnographic Sy lv i a Wy n t e r ● 267 Other, the most salient of all these was to be that of the mythology of the Black Other of sub-Saharan Africans (and their Diaspora descendants). It is this population group who would come to be made, several centuries on, into an indispensable function of the enacting of our present Darwinian “dysselected by Evolution until proven otherwise” descriptive statement of the human on the biocentric model of a natural organism. With this population group’s systemic stigmatization, social inferiorization, and dynamically produced material deprivation thereby serving both to “verify” the overrepresentation of Man as if it were the human, and to legitimate the subordination of the world and well-being of the latter to those of the former. All of this was done in a lawlike manner through the systemic stigmatization of the Earth in terms of its being made of a “vile and base matter,” a matter ontologically different from that which attested to the perfection of the heavens, and thereby (as such) divinely condemned to be fixed and unmoving at the center of the universe as its dregs because the abode of a post-Adamic “fallen” mankind had been an indispensable function of the “verifying” of medieval Latin-Christian Europe’s then theocentric descriptive statement of human as “sinful by nature.” In this way, the descriptive statement on which the hegemony of the world of the Church over the lay world was legitimated (Chorover 1979). Gregory Bateson and Frantz Fanon, thinking and writing during the upheaval of the anticolonial/social-protest movements of the sixties, were both to put forward new conceptions of the human outside the terms of our present ethnoclass conception that define it on the model of a natural organism, as these terms are elaborated by the disciplinary paradigms and overall organization of knowledge of our present episteme (Foucault 1973). In an essay entitled “Conscious Purpose vs. Nature,” published in 1969, Bateson proposed that in the same way as the “physiology” and “neurology” of the human individual function in order to conserve the body and all the body’s physical characteristics—thereby serving as an overall system that conserves descriptive statements about the human as far as his/her body is concerned—so a correlated process can be seen to be at work at the level of the psyche or the soul. To put it another way, not only is the descriptive statement of the psyche/soul determinant of the kind of higher-level learning 268 ● Un s e t t l i n g t h e C o l o n i a l i t y o f B e i n g / Po w e r / Tr u t h / Fre e d o m that must take place, seeing that the indispensable function of each such system of learning must be, imperatively, to conserve that descriptive statement, but it is also determinant of the overall range of acquired know-how that is produced by the interactions of the wider society in which each individual finds itself—and as a society whose overall descriptive statement will necessarily be of the same general order as that of the individual, at the level of the psyche/soul. All such learning, whether at the microlevel of the individual or at the macrolevel of the society, must therefore function within the terms of what Foucault has identified as a specific “regime” and/or “politics of truth” (Foucault 1980, 1981). Fanon had then gone on to analyze the systemically negative representation of the Negro and of his African past that defined the curriculum of the French colonial school system of the Caribbean island of Martinique in which he had grown up (one in which, as he also notes, no Black countervoice had been allowed to exist), in order to reveal why, as a result of the structures of Bateson’s system of learning designed to preserve the status quo, the Antillean Negro had indeed been socialized to be normally antiNegro. Nor, the Argument proposes, was there anything arbitrary about this deliberate blocking out or disregard of a “Black” voice, of a positive Black self-conception. Rather this “blocking out” of a Black counter-voice was, and is itself defining of the way in which being human, in the terms of our present ethnoclass mode of sociogeny, dictates that Self, Other, and World should be represented and known; a lay counter-voice could no more have normally existed within the terms of the mode of sociogeny of medieval LatinChristian Europe. In consequence, because it is this premise that underlies the interlinked nature of what I have defined (on the basis of Quijano’s founding concept of the coloniality of power) as the Coloniality of Being/ Power/Truth/Freedom, with the logical inference that one cannot “unsettle” the “coloniality of power” without a redescription of the human outside the terms of our present descriptive statement of the human, Man, and its overrepresentation (outside the terms of the “natural organism” answer that we give to the question of the who and the what we are), the Argument will first link this premise to a fundamental thesis developed by Nicholas Humphrey in his book A History of the Mind: Evolution and the Birth of Consciousness, Sy lv i a Wy n t e r ● 269 published in 1992. It will then link both to the sixteenth-century dispute between Bartolomé de Las Casas, the missionary priest, on the one hand, and the humanist royal historian and apologist for the Spanish settlers of then Santo Domingo, Ginés de Sepúlveda, on the other—as a dispute that it will define as one between two descriptive statements of the human: one for which the expansion of the Spanish state was envisaged as a function of the Christian evangelizing mission, the Other for which the latter mission was seen as a function of the imperial expansion of the state; a dispute, then, between the theocentric conception of the human, Christian, and the new humanist and ratiocentric conception of the human, Man2 (i.e., as homo politicus, or the political subject of the state). Here, the Argument, basing itself on Fanon’s and Bateson’s redefinition of the human, proposes that the adaptive truth-for terms in which each purely organic species must know the world is no less true in our human case. That therefore, our varying ontogeny/sociogeny modes of being human, as inscribed in the terms of each culture’s descriptive statement, will necessarily give rise to their varying respective modalities of adaptive truthsfor, or epistemes, up to and including our contemporary own. Further, that given the biocentric descriptive statement that is instituting of our present mode of sociogeny, the way we at present normatively know Self, Other, and social World is no less adaptively true as the condition of the continued production and reproduction of such a genre of being human and of its order as, before the revolution initiated by the Renaissance humanists, and given the then theocentric descriptive statement that had been instituting of the mode of sociogeny of medieval Latin-Christian Europe, its subjects had normatively known Self, Other, as well as their social, physical, and organic worlds, in the adaptively true terms needed for the production and reproduction not only of their then supernaturally legitimated genre of being human, but as well for that of the hierarchical social structures in whose intersubjective field that genre of the human could have alone realized itself. And it is with the production and reproduction of the latter (i.e., the social world) that a crucial difference needs to be identified in our human case. This was the difference identified by C. P. Snow when he described our present order of knowledge as one defined by a Two Culture divide between 270 ● Un s e t t l i n g t h e C o l o n i a l i t y o f B e i n g / Po w e r / Tr u t h / Fre e d o m the natural sciences, on the one hand (whose domains comprise the physical cosmos, as well as that of all biological life), and the disciplines of the social sciences and the humanities on the other (Snow 1993). And although there has been some attempt recently to rebut the hypothesis of this divide, centrally among these the Gulbenkian Report on the social sciences prepared by a team of scholars headed by Immanuel Wallerstein and Valentin Mudimbe (1994), the fact remains that while the natural sciences can explain and predict, to a large extent, the behaviors of these nonhuman worlds, the disciplines of the social sciences and humanities still remain unable to explain and predict the parameters of the ensemble of collective behaviors that are instituting of our contemporary world—to explain, therefore, the why not only of the large-scale inequalities, but also of the overall Janus-faced effects of large-scale human emancipation yoked to the no less large-scale human degradation and immiseration to which these behaviors collectively lead. These behaviors, whether oriented by the residual metaphysics of fertility/reproduction of the agrarian age in the poorer parts of the world, or by the metaphysics of productivity and profitability of our techno-industrial one in the rich enclaves—with the one impelling the dynamics of overpopulation, and the other that of overconsumption—now collectively threaten the planetary environment of our human-species habitat. The Argument proposes, in this context, that the still unbreachable divide between the “Two Cultures”—a divide that had been briefly challenged by the range of anticolonial as well as the social cum intellectual movements of the sixties, before these movements were re-coopted—lies in the fact that our own disciplines (as literary scholars and social scientists whose domain is our sociohuman world) must still continue to function, as all human orders of knowledge have done from our origin on the continent of Africa until today, as a language-capacitated form of life, to ensure that we continue to know our present order of social reality, and rigorously so, in the adaptive “truth-for” terms needed to conserve our present descriptive statement. That is, as one that defines us biocentrically on the model of a natural organism, with this a priori definition serving to orient and motivate the individual and collective behaviors by means of which our contemporary Western world-system or civilization, together with its nation-state sub- Sy lv i a Wy n t e r ● 271 units, are stably produced and reproduced. This at the same time as it ensures that we, as Western and westernized intellectuals, continue to articulate, in however radically oppositional a manner, the rules of the social order and its sanctioned theories (Konrad and Szelenyi 1979). Recent and still ongoing scholarship on archaeo-astronomy has shown that all human orders—from the smallest society of nomadic hunter-gatherers, such as the San people of the Kalahari, to the large-scale societies of Egypt, China, the Greeks, and the Romans—have mapped their “descriptive statements” or governing master codes on the heavens, on their stable periodicities and regular recurring movements (Krupp 1997). Because, in doing so, they had thereby mapped their specific criterion of being human, of what it was “to be a good man and woman of one’s kind” (Davis 1992), onto the physical cosmos, thereby absolutizing each such criterion; and with this enabling them to be experienced by each order’s subjects as if they had been supernaturally (and, as such, extrahumanly) determined criteria, their respective truths had necessarily come to function as an “objective set of facts” for the people of that society—seeing that such truths were now the indispensable condition of their existence as such a society, as such people, as such a mode of being human. These truths had therefore both commanded obedience and necessitated the individual and collective behaviors by means of which each such order and its mode of being human were brought into existence, produced, and stably reproduced. This, therefore, meant that all such knowledges of the physical cosmos, all such astronomies, all such geographies, whatever the vast range of human needs that they had successfully met, the range of behaviors they had made possible—indeed, however sophisticated and complex the calculations that they had enabled to be made of the movements of the heavens (as in the case of Egypt and China)—had still remained adaptive truths-for and, as such, ethnoastronomies, ethno-geographies. This was no less the case with respect to the long tradition of Greek/ Hellenistic astronomy, which a medieval Judeo-Christian Europe would have inherited. Since, in spite of the great advances in mathematical astronomy to which its fundamental Platonic postulate (that of an eternal, “divinized” cosmos as contrasted with the Earth, which was not only subject to change 272 ● Un s e t t l i n g t h e C o l o n i a l i t y o f B e i n g / Po w e r / Tr u t h / Fre e d o m and corruption, but was fixed and unmoving at the center) has led a long line of astronomers to struggle to “save the phenomena” (i.e., to reconcile their measurements of the movements of the heavens with this premise), Greek astronomy was to remain an ethno-astronomy. One, that is, in which the moral/political laws of the Greek polis had been projected upon the physical cosmos, enabling them to serve as “objective truth” in Feyerabend’s (1987) sense of the term, and therefore as, in my own terms, adaptive truthfor the Greeks. With the consequence that their projected premise of a value distinction and principle of ontological distinction between heaven and earth had functioned to analogically replicate and absolutize the central order-organizing principle and genre-of-the-human distinction at the level of the sociopolitical order, between the non-dependent masters who were Greek-born citizens and their totally dependent slaves classified as barbarian Others. With this value distinction (sociogenic principle or master code of symbolic life/death) then being replicated at the level of the intra-Greek society, in gendered terms (correlatedly), as between males, who were citizens, and women, who were their dependents. In a 1987 interview, the theoretical physicist David Bohm explained why the rise of the physical sciences would have been impossible in ancient Greece, given the role that the physical cosmos had been made to play in stabilizing and legitimating the structures/hierarchies and role allocations of its social order. If each society, Bohm pointed out, bases itself on a general notion of the world that always contains within it “a specific idea of order,” for the ancient Greeks, this idea of order had been projected as that of an “increasing perfection from the earth to the heavens.” In consequence, in order for modern physics (which is based on the “idea of successive positions of bodies of matter and the constraints of forces that act on these bodies”) to be developed, the “order of perfection investigated by the ancient Greeks” had to become irrelevant. In other words, for such an astronomy and physics to be developed, the society that made it possible would have to be one that no longer had the need to map its ordering principle onto the physical cosmos, as the Greeks and all other human societies had done. The same goes for the need to retain the Greek premise of an ontological difference of substance between the celestial realm of perfection (the realm of Sy lv i a Wy n t e r ● 273 true knowledge) and the imperfect realm of the terrestrial (the realm of doxa, of mere opinion). This was not a mutation that could be easily effected. In his recent book The Enigma of the Gift (1999), Maurice Godelier reveals an added and even more powerful dimension as to why the mutation by which humans would cease to map the “idea of order” onto the lawlike regularities of physical nature would not be easily come by. This would come to be effected only in the wake of the Renaissance humanists’ initiation of the processes that would lead to the degodding/de-supernaturalizing of our modes of being human on the basis of their invention of Man in the reoccupied place of their earlier matrix theocentric identity, Christian. Although, Godelier writes, as human beings who live in society, and who must also produce society in order to live, we have hitherto always done so by producing, at the same time, the mechanisms by means of which we have been able to invert cause and effect, allowing us to repress the recognition of our collective production of our modes of social reality (and with it, the Argument proposes, the recognition also of the self-inscripted, autoinstituted nature of our genres/modes of being human). Central to these mechanisms was the one by which we projected our own authorship of our societies onto the ostensible extrahuman agency of supernatural Imaginary Beings (Godelier 1999). This imperative has been total in the case of all human orders (even where in the case of our now purely secular order, the extrahuman agency on which our authorship is now projected is no longer supernatural, but rather that of Evolution/Natural Selection together with its imagined entity of “Race”). As if, in our contemporary case, Evolution, which pre-adapted us by means of the co-evolution of language and the brain to self-inscript and auto-institute our modes of being human, and to thereby artificially program our own behaviors—doing so, as the biologist James Danielli pointed out in a 1980 essay, by means of the discourses of religion, as well as of the secular ones that have now taken their place—still continued to program our hybrid ontogeny/sociogeny behaviors by means of unmediated genetic programs. Rather than, as Danielli further argued, all such behaviors being lawlikely induced by discursively instituted programs whose good/evil formulations function to activate the biochemical 274 ● Un s e t t l i n g t h e C o l o n i a l i t y o f B e i n g / Po w e r / Tr u t h / Fre e d o m reward/punishment mechanism of the brain—as a mechanism that, while common to all species, functions in the case of humans in terms specific to each such narratively inscribed and discursively elaborated descriptive statement and, thereby, to its mode of the “I” and correlated symbolically/altruistically bonded mode of the eusocial “we” (Danielli 1980). If, as David Bohm pointed out, the Greeks’ “idea of order” had been mapped upon degrees of perfection, projected upon the physical cosmos as degrees of rational perfection extending from the apex of the heavens’ degrees to the nonhomogenous nadir of the earth’s—with the rise, in the wake of the collapse of the Roman Empire, of a now Judeo-Christian Europe, while the classical Greco-Roman (i.e., Ptolemaic) astronomy that had given expression to the Greek idea of order was to be carried over—it was to be Christianized within the terms of Judeo-Christianity’s new “descriptive statement” of the human, based on its master code of the “Redeemed Spirit” (as actualized in the celibate clergy) and the “Fallen Flesh” enslaved to the negative legacy of Adamic Original Sin, as actualized by laymen and women. Hence the logic by which medieval Latin-Christian Europe’s “notion of the world” and “idea of order” would become one of degrees of spiritual perfection, at the same time as it would remain mapped onto the same “space of Otherness” principle of nonhomogeneity (Godzich 1986). With the result that on the basis of this projection, the medieval Latin-Christian subject’s sensory perception of a motionless earth would have “verified” for them not only the postulate of mankind’s justly condemned enslavement to the negative Adamic legacy, but, even more centrally, the “sinful by nature” descriptive statement of the human in whose terms they both experienced themselves as Christians, being thereby behaviorally impelled to seek redemption from their enslavement through the sacraments of the Church, as well as by adhering to its prohibitions, and to thereby strive to attain to its otherworldly goal—that of Divine Election for eternal salvation in the Augustinian civitas dei (the city of God). Central to Winant’s “immense historical rupture,” therefore, was the conceptual break made with the Greco-Roman cum Judeo-Christian premise of a nonhomogeneity of substance, and thereby of an ontological distinction between the supralunar and the sublunar, heaven and earth, as the break Sy lv i a Wy n t e r ● 275 that was to make possible the rise of a nonadaptive, and therefore naturalscientific, mode of cognition with respect to the “objective set of facts” of the physical level of reality: with respect to what was happening “out there.” The fifteenth-century voyages of the Portuguese (to and around Africa, then to the East), as well as Columbus’s voyages across an until-then held to be (by Western Europeans) non-navigable Atlantic Ocean (since both of these areas, Black Africa and the Americas, had been held to be uninhabitable, the one because too hot, the other because under water, with both being outside God’s providential Grace) were themselves expressions of the same overall process of self-transformation. This as the process that, internal to latemedieval Latin-Christian Europe, was to underpin the rise of the modern political city and monarchical states of Europe, and that (together with an ongoing commercial revolution) were to effectively displace the theologically absolute hegemony of the Church, together with that of its celibate clergy, over the lay or secular world, replacing it with that of their (i.e. the monarchical states’) politically absolute own. The new conceptual ground of this reversal had, however, been made possible only on the basis of the intellectual revolution of Renaissance humanists—a revolution that, while allied to the Reform movement of Christian humanism, was mounted in large part from the counter-perspective of the lay intelligentsia. From the viewpoint, therefore, of the category whose members had until then been compelled to think and work within the very theocentric paradigms that legitimated the dominance of the post-Gregorian Reform Church and its celibate clergy (the name clergy means, in Greek, the chosen) over the lay world—as these paradigms had been elaborated in the context of the then hegemonic Scholastic order of knowledge of medieval Europe. This theological condemnation of the “natural man” of the laity had become even more intensified by medieval Scholasticism’s reconception of the human in Aristotelian Unmoved/Mover terms. Its Omnipotent God had created the world for the sake of His Own Glory, thereby creating mankind only contingently and without any consideration for its own sake (propter nos homines/for our human sake), had left it, in the wake of the Adamic Fall and its subsequent enslavement to the Fallen Flesh, without any hope of being able to have any valid knowledge of reality except through the media- 276 ● Un s e t t l i n g t h e C o l o n i a l i t y o f B e i n g / Po w e r / Tr u t h / Fre e d o m tion of the very paradigms that excluded any such hope. Given that it was precisely these theologically absolute paradigms that, by circularly verifying the “sinful by nature” cognitive incapacity of fallen mankind, served at the same time to validate both the hegemony of the Church and of the celibate clergy over the lay world, including the state, as well as the hegemony of the supratemporal perspective of the Church (based on its represented access to Divine Eternal Truth) over any knowledge generated from the local, temporal, and this-worldly perspective of a lay world ostensibly entrapped in the fallen time of the secular realm, this thereby subjected mankind to the instability and chaos of the capricious whims of Fortune (Pocock 1989). The lay intelligentsia of medieval Europe had, therefore, found themselves in a situation in whose context, in order to be learned and accomplished scholars, they had had to be accomplices in the production of a “politics of truth” that subordinated their own lay world and its perspective on reality to that of the Church and of the clergy. Accomplices also in the continued theoretical elaboration of a theocentric descriptive statement of the human, in whose terms they were always already the embodied bearers of its postulate of “significant ill”—that of enslavement to Original Sin—an “ill” curable or redeemable only through the mediation of the Church and the clergy, and circularly, through that of the theologically absolute paradigms that verified the hegemony of the latter. The manifesto (put forward from the perspective of the laity) that was to make possible the rupture in whose terms the Copernican Revolution and the new epoch that would become that of the modern world were to be made possible was that of the fifteenth-century treatise by the Italian humanist Pico della Mirandola (1463‒1494) entitled Oration on the Dignity of Man. In this treatise, Pico rewrote the Judeo-Christian origin narrative of Genesis. Adam, rather than having been placed in the Garden of Eden, then having fallen, then having been expelled with Eve from the garden by God, is shown by Pico to have not fallen at all. Instead, he had come into existence when God, having completed his Creation and wanting someone to admire His works, had created Man on a model unique to him, then placed him at the center/midpoint of the hierarchy of this creation, commanding him to “make of himself ” what he willed to be—to decide for himself whether to fall Sy lv i a Wy n t e r ● 277 to the level of the beasts by giving into his passions, or, through the use of his reason, to rise to the level of the angels (See Pico’s guide-quote). It was therefore to be on the basis of this new conception, and of its related civichumanist reformulation, that Man was to be invented in its first form as the rational political subject of the state, as one who displayed his reason by primarily adhering to the laws of the state—rather than, as before, in seeking to redeem himself from enslavement to Original Sin by primarily adhering to the prohibitions of the Church. Two strategies were made use of in order to effect this epochal degodding (if, at first, only in hybridly religio-secular terms) of the “descriptive statement” in whose terms humans inscript and institute themselves/ourselves as this or that genre of being human. The strategy was that of a return: the return by the humanists to Greco-Roman thought, to (in the case of Pico) the Jewish mystical tradition of the Kabbalah, as well as to the even earlier Egyptian thought as transmitted through these latter, in order to find both a space outside the terms of the medieval order’s “descriptive statement” and an alternative model on which to reinvent the matrix optimally Redeemed-in-the-Spirit Self of the Christian, the “subject of the church,” as that of the Rational Self of Man as political subject of the state. While it was the revalorization of natural man that was implicit in this overall return to the Greco-Roman and other pre-Christian thought, and models by Renaissance humanists such as Ficino and Pico, as Fernand Hallyn (1990) has proposed, that was to make possible Copernicus’s intellectual challenge to the ontological distinction between the supralunar and sublunar realms of the cosmos: to its foundational premise of a nonhomogeneity of substance between them. Why was this the case? Within the terms of the medieval order’s theocentric conception of the relation between a totally Omnipotent God and contingently created humans, the latter could not attempt to gain valid knowledge of physical reality by basing him/herself on the regularity of its laws of functioning. Seeing that God, as an absolute and unbound God, could arbitrarily intervene in the accustomed course of nature (cursus solitus naturae) in order to alter its processes of functioning, by means of miracles, at any time He wished to do so. It was therefore to be, as Hallyn 278 ● Un s e t t l i n g t h e C o l o n i a l i t y o f B e i n g / Po w e r / Tr u t h / Fre e d o m proposes, the humanists’ revalorized conception of a more egalitarian relation between natural man and a Christian God, reconceived as a Caring Father who had created the universe specifically for man’s sake (propter nos homines, for our human sake), that provided the counter-ground for the Copernican rupture with the orthodox Christianized astronomy that had been inherited from the Greeks. It was the new premise that God had created the world/universe for mankind’s sake, as a premise that ensured that He would have had to make it according to rational, nonarbitrary rules that could be knowable by the beings that He had made it for, that would lead to Copernicus’s declaration (against the epistemological resignation of Ptolemaic astronomy, which said that such knowledge was not available for mere mortals) that since the universe had been made for our sake by the best and wisest of master craftsmen, it had to be knowable (see Copernicus guide-quote). In his book The Medieval Imagination, Jacques Le Goff analyzes the way in which the medieval order of Latin-Christian Europe had organized itself about a value principle or master code that had been actualized in the empirical relation between the celibate category of the clergy (as the embodiment of the Spirit, and the noncelibate category of the 1aity (as the embodiment of the Fallen Flesh). This Spirit/Flesh code had then been projected onto the physical cosmos, precisely onto the represented nonhomogeneity of substance between the spiritual perfection of the heavens (whose supralunar bodies were imagined to move in harmonious and perfectly circular motions) as opposed to the sublunar realm of Earth, which, as the abode of a post-Adamic fallen mankind, had to be at the center of the universe as its dregs—and, in addition, to be not only nonmoving as it is sensed by us to be, but to be so because divinely condemned to be nonmoving in the wake of the Fall. However, it was not only the Earth that had to be known in these adaptive truth-for terms, within the conceptual framework of the ChristianPtolemaic astronomy of the time. The geography of the earth had also had to be known in parallel Spirit/Flesh terms as being divided up between, on the one hand, its temperate regions centered on Jerusalem—regions that, because held up above the element of water by God’s Providential Grace, were habitable—and, on the other, those realms that, because outside this Sy lv i a Wy n t e r ● 279 Grace, had to be uninhabitable. Before the fifteenth-century voyages of the Portuguese and Columbus, which disproved this premise of the nonhomogeneity of the earth’s geography, the Torrid Zone beyond the bulge of Cape Bojador on the upper coast of Africa had therefore had to be known as too hot for habitation, while the Western hemisphere had had to be known as being devoid of land, seeing that all land there had to remain, in the framework of Christian Aristotelian physics, submerged in its “natural place” under water, since ostensibly not held “unnaturally” above the water by Divine Grace. This series of symbolically coded Spirit/Flesh representations mapped upon the “space of Otherness” of the physical cosmos had not only functioned to absolutize the theocentric descriptive statement of the human, its master code of symbolic life (the Spirit) and death (the Flesh), together with that statement’s overall explanatory thesis of supernatural causation. It had also served to absolutize “a general order of existence,” together with its “postulate of significant ill,” whose mode of affliction then logically calls for the particular “plan of salvation” or redemptive cure able to cure the specific “ill” that threatened all the subjects of the order, in order to redeem them from its threat of nihilation/negation that is common to all religions (Girardot 1988). Now in specific Judeo-Christian formulation, the postulate of “significant ill” had, of course, been that of mankind’s enslavement to Original Sin, with his/her fallen state placing him/her outside God’s Grace, except when redeemed from this “ill” by the sacrament of baptism as administered by the clergy. While this behavior-motivating schema had itself also been anchored on the Spirit/Flesh, inside/outside God’s Grace, ill/cure system of symbolic representations attached to the represented supra/sublunar nonhomogeneity of substance of the physical cosmos, as well as to the habitable/uninhabitable geography of the earth. Here the Argument identifies Girardot’s schemas as ones that also function beyond the limits of original religious modalities, seeing them instead in the terms of Danielli’s hypothesis as forms of the central, behavior-motivating/-demotivating, discursive, good/evil postulates, able to activate the biochemical reward and punishment mechanism—and, therefore, as the central “machinery of programming” that is common to all human orders, 280 ● Un s e t t l i n g t h e C o l o n i a l i t y o f B e i n g / Po w e r / Tr u t h / Fre e d o m whether religious or secular. In consequence, whether religious or secular, all such schemas/programs and their formulations of “a general order of existence” also function to inscribe the specific “descriptive statement” of the human that is enacting of the ontogeny/sociogeny, nature-culture mode of being human, for whom the specific ensemble of motivated behaviors will be adaptively advantageous. In this conceptual framework it can therefore be recognized that it was in the context of the humanists’ redescribing of the Christian definition of the human—in new, revalorizing, and (so to speak) propter nos homines and/or Man-centric terms—that the series of fifteenthcentury voyages on whose basis the West began its global expansion voyages (one of which proved that the earth was homogeneously habitable by humans, seeing that the Torrid Zone was indeed inhabited, as was that of the land of the Western hemisphere that turned out to be above water), together with Copernicus’s new astronomy (which proposed that the earth also moved about the Sun, projected as the center, and was therefore of the same substance as, homogeneous with, the heavenly bodies), were to initiate the rupture that would lead to the rise of the physical sciences. Thereby, to a new order of cognition in which “the objective set of facts” of the physical level of reality was now to be gradually freed from having to be known in the adaptive terms of a truth-for specific to each order, as they had been millennially—to be known as they were and are “out there.” What needs to be emphasized here is, firstly, that the two orthodox presuppositions that were now to be swept away—that of the nonhomogeneity of the geography of the earth and that of the nonhomogeneity of the earth and the heavens—had been ones indispensable to the conservation of the medieval order’s theocentric descriptive statement of the human. Secondly, it had been the reinvention by the lay humanists of the Renaissance of the matrix identity Christian in terms of the new descriptive statement of Man as political subject, allied to the historical rise and expansion of the modern state (for whom, eventually, these earlier orthodox presuppositions, their truth-fors, were expendable, because no longer of any adaptive advantage to its own instituting as such a mode of being human), that had made the sweeping away of the earlier unquestioned principles of nonhomogeneity possible. Sy lv i a Wy n t e r ● 281 This sweeping away led a later Isaac Newton to exult that, because it had now been shown that all parts of the universe were made of the same forces, of the same matter, one could now be able to extrapolate from the bodies nearest to us, and on the analogy of nature always consonant with itself, what the bodies furthest from us had necessarily to be (Funkenstein 1986). To sum up: this means that the epochal rupture that was set in motion by Western intellectuals, by means of which human knowledge of the physical cosmos would be freed from having to be known in the adaptive truthfor terms that had been hitherto indispensable to the instituting of all human orders and their respective modes/genres of being human—the rupture that was to lead to the gradual development of the physical sciences— had been made possible only by the no less epochal reinvention of Western Europe’s matrix Judeo-Christian genre of the human, in its first secularizing if still hybridly religio-secular terms as Man as the Rational Self and political subject of the state, in the reoccupied place of the True Christian Self, or mode of sociogeny, of Latin-Christian Europe; by the reinvention also of the secular entity of the West in the reoccupied place of the latter, with this reinvention being based on the model of Virgil’s Roman imperial epic. This takes us back to the negative aspect of the dialectical process of culture-historical transformation by which the West was to initiate the first phase of the degodding of its descriptive statement of the human, thereby also initiating the processes that were to lead to the development of the new order of nonadaptive cognition that is the natural sciences. Since it was to be in the specific terms of this reinvention—one in which while, as Christians, the peoples of the West would see themselves as one religious genre of the human, even where they were to be convinced that theirs was the only true religion, and indeed, as Lyotard points out, were unable to conceive of an Other to what they called God—as Man, they would now not only come to overrepresent their conception of the human (by means of a sustained rhetorical strategy based on the topos of iconicity [Valesio 1980]) as the human, thereby coming to invent, label, and institutionalize the indigenous peoples of the Americas as well as the transported enslaved Black Africans as the physical referent of the projected irrational/subrational 282 ● Un s e t t l i n g t h e C o l o n i a l i t y o f B e i n g / Po w e r / Tr u t h / Fre e d o m Human Other to its civic-humanist, rational self-conception. The West would therefore remain unable, from then on, to conceive of an Other to what it calls human—an Other, therefore, to its correlated postulates of power, truth, freedom. All other modes of being human would instead have to be seen not as the alternative modes of being human that they are “out there,” but adaptively, as the lack of the West’s ontologically absolute selfdescription. This at the same time as its genuine difference from all others (i.e., its secularizing reinvention of its matrix religious identity from the Renaissance onwards as that of Man in two forms—one ratiocentric and still hybridly religio-secular, the other purely secular and biocentric) would remain overseen, even non-theorizable within the acultural premise on whose basis it had effected the reinvention of its matrix Christian genre or theological “descriptive statement” of the human. This central oversight would then enable both Western and westernized intellectuals to systemically repress what Geertz has identified as the “fugitive truth” of its own “local culturality” (Geertz 1983)—of, in Bruno Latour’s terms, its specific “constitution with a capital C,” or cultural constitution that underlies and charters our present order, as the parallel constitutions of all other human orders that Western anthropologists have brilliantly elucidated underlie and charter all other human orders (Latour 1991)—doing so according to the same hybrid nature-culture, ontogeny/sociogeny laws or rules. With this systemic repression ensuring that we oversee (thereby failing to recognize) the culture and class-specific relativity of our present mode of being human: Man in the second, transumed, and now purely biocentric and homo oeconomicus form of that first invention that was to lead to Winant’s “immense historical rupture,” to Quijano’s “Racism/Ethnicism” complex, and to Mignolo’s modernity/coloniality complementarity. What were the specific terms of that first reinvention? Of its overrepresentation? Why were these terms to lie at the basis of the Las Casas/ Sepúlveda dispute, whose empirical outcome—in favor of the latter’s humanist arguments as opposed to Las Casas’s still theologically grounded ones—was to provide the legitimated “ground” for what was to become the colonizer (both the metropolitan imperialists and their settler enforcers) vs. colonized relation (both Indians and Negroes, on the one hand, and the set- Sy lv i a Wy n t e r ● 283 tlers as criollos subjugated to the metropolitan peninsulares—whether those of Spain, England, or France—on the other). PA RT I I The Las Casas/Sepúlveda Dispute and the Paradox of the Humanists’ Invention/Overrepresentation of “Man”: On the Coloniality of Secular Being, the Instituting of Human Others. The suggestion that the Indians might be slaves by nature—a suggestion which claimed to answer questions concerning both their political and their legal status—was first advanced as a solution to a political dilemma: by what right had the crown of Castile occupied and enslaved the inhabitants of territories to which it could make no prior claims based on history? . . . [John Mair’s text adopted from Aristotle’s Politics] was immediately recognized by some Spaniards as offering a final solution to their problem. Mair had, in effect, established that the Christians’ claims to sovereignty over certain pagans could be said to rest on the nature of the people being conquered, instead of on the supposed juridical rights of the conquerors. He thus avoided the inevitable and alarming deduction to be drawn from an application of these arguments: namely that the Spaniards had no right whatsoever to be in America. —Anthony Pagden, The Fall of Natural Man: The American Indians and the Origins of Comparative Ethnology Leopoldo is asked to compare the Spaniards with the Indians, “who in prudence, wisdom (ingenium), every virtue and humanity are as inferior to the Spaniards as children are to adults, women are to men, the savage and ferocious [man] to the gentle, the grossly intemperate to the continent and temperate and finally, I shall say, almost as monkeys are to men.” . . . “Compare the gifts of magnanimity, temperance, humanity and religion of these men,” continues Democrates, “with those homunculi [i.e., the Indians] in whom hardly a vestige of humanity remains.” —Ginés de Sepúlveda (cited by Pagden) 284 ● Un s e t t l i n g t h e C o l o n i a l i t y o f B e i n g / Po w e r / Tr u t h / Fre e d o m The major reason for writing (this book) was that of seeing all and such an infinite number of the nations of this vast part of the world slandered (defamed) by those who did not fear God . . . [and who published] it abroad that the peoples of these parts, were peoples who lacked sufficient reason to govern themselves properly, were deficient in public policy (and) in wellordered states (republics) . . . as if Divine Providence, in its creation of such an innumerable number of rational souls, had carelessly allowed human nature to so err . . . in the case of such a vast part of the human lineage (de linaje humano) as is comprised by these people allowing them to be born lacking in sociality, and therefore, as monstrous peoples, against the natural tendency of all the peoples of the earth . . . —Fr. Bartolomé de Las Casas, Apologetic History of the Indies I am talking of millions of men who have been skillfully injected with fear, inferiority complexes, trepidation, servility, despair, abasement. —Aimé Césaire, Discourse on Colonialism5 Leopoldo: If a breach of natural law is a just cause for making war, either I am wrong, or there will be no nation on earth that cannot be militarily attacked because of their sins against, or breaches of, the natural law. Tell me then, how many and which nations do you expect to find who fully observe the law of nature? Democrates: Many do, I am sure: [but] there are no nations which call themselves civilized and are civilized who do not observe natural law. —Ginés de Sepúlveda, The Second Democrates, or On the Just Causes of War Against the Indians Clearly one cannot prove in a short time or with a few words to infidels that to sacrifice men to God is contrary to nature. Consequently neither anthropophagy nor human sacrifice constitutes just cause for making war on certain kingdoms. . . . For the rest, to sacrifice innocents for the salvation of the Commonwealth is not opposed to natural reason, is not something abominable and contrary to nature, but is an error that has its origin in natural reason itself. —Las Casas’s reply to Ginés de Sepúlveda6 Sy lv i a Wy n t e r And there is no difference with respect to the duties imposed upon these who do not know him, (the True God as we Christians do) as long as they hold some God to be the true God, and honor him as such. . . . This is because the mistaken conscience/consciousness (la conciencia erronea) obliges and compels exactly the same way as does the true/a correct one (la conciencia recta). —Las Casas, Tratados de Fray Bartolomé de Las Casas (Third Treatise) The priest Casas having at the time no knowledge of the unjust methods which the Portuguese used to obtain slaves, advised that permission should be given for the import of slaves into the islands, an advice which, once he became informed about these methods, he would not have given for the world. . . . The remedy which he proposed to import Black slaves in order to liberate the Indians was not a good one, even though he thought the Black slaves, at the time to have been enslaved with a just title; and it is not at all certain that his ignorance at the time or even the purity of his motive will sufficiently absolve him when he finds himself before the Divine Judge. —Las Casas, History of the Indies (vol. 3) . . . Doctor Sepúlveda, before dealing with an issue of which he had no direct knowledge should have sought information from those servants of God, who have toiled day and night to preach to convert the peoples of the Indies, rather than have rushed to pay heed to and give credit to those profane and tyrannical men who, in order to justify the expropriations (latrocinio) robberies and murders that they have committed, as well as the usurped social rank to which they have climbed doing so at the cost of the vast torrents of spilled blood, of the suffering and damnation of an infinite number of innocent souls, have persuaded him to write his thesis [i.e., in defence of their position/interests]. —Las Casas, Tratados Culture, in my view, is what a human being creates and what creates a human being at the same time. In culture, the human being is simultaneously creator and creation. This is what makes culture different from both the natural and the supernatural; because in the supernatural we have the world of ● 285 286 ● Un s e t t l i n g t h e C o l o n i a l i t y o f B e i n g / Po w e r / Tr u t h / Fre e d o m the Creator, and in nature we have the world of creations. The coincidence of these two roles in a human being is what makes him a cultural being. . . . Transculture means a space in, or among, cultures, which is open to all of them. Culture frees us from nature; transculture frees us from culture, from any one culture. —Mikhail Epstein, “Postcommunist Postmodernism: An Interview” About the Pope being the Lord of all the universe in the place of God, and that he had given the lands of the Indies to the King of Castille, the Pope must have been drunk when he did it, for he gave what was not his. . . . The king who asked for and received this gift must have been some madman for he asked to have given to him that which belonged to others. —Cenú Indians’ reply to the Spaniards7 Two different anthropologies and their respective origin models/narratives had inscribed two different descriptive statements of the human, one which underpinned the evangelizing mission of the Church, the other the imperializing mission of the state based on its territorial expansion and conquest. Nevertheless, rather than merely a Christian/classics opposition, the second descriptive statement, that of “Man” as political subject of the state, was to be instead a syncretized synthesis of the anthropology of the classics drawn into a secularizing Judeo-Christian framework, and therefore into the field of what Latour would call the West’s “constitution with a capital C.” This syncretism had already been at work in the formulations of Ficino and Pico della Mirandola. For the latter, classical thought had enabled him, as part of his revalorizing strategy of natural man, to fuse the original JudeoChristian conception of the human as being made in the image of God, with the view of Platonic philosophy in which man is defined by the fact of the choice that he can give himself to adopt “the sensual life of an animal or the philosophical life of the gods.” Ficino had also defined man in terms derived from both Christian and Platonic, as well as other pre-Christian sources as a creature standing between “the physical world of nature” and “the spiritual Sy lv i a Wy n t e r ● 287 world of the angels of God”: as balanced between “natural” and “supernatural” order. It was in the context of this syncretized reinscription that the new criterion of Reason would come to take the place of the medieval criterion of the Redeemed Spirit as its transumed form—that the master code of symbolic life (“the name of what is good”) and death (“the name of what is evil”) would now become that of reason/sensuality, rationality/irrationality in the reoccupied place of the matrix code of Redeemed Spirit/Fallen Flesh. The descriptive statement instituting of the humanists’ Man would therefore use the Judeo-Christian answer to the what and who we are (i.e., the “human created in the image of God,” but later become the embodiment of Original Sin) to revalorize the medieval order’s fallen natural man by proposing that, because “God is included in man in that an image embodies and includes its exemplar,” human reason had remained “lord over the senses similar to the way in which God is lord over his creatures.” The relation here is one of analogy. While reason is not a god, “it partakes of some of God’s functions” in that it is intended to rule over a “lower order of reality.” The fundamental separation for Pico was one between two orders of creation, with man placed by God at the midpoint between them. These were, on the one hand, the “super-celestial” regions with minds (i.e., angels, pure intelligences), and on the other, a region “filled with a diverse throng of animals, the cast off and residual parts of the lower world.” Placed between these two realms, man was the only creature “confined by no bounds,” free to “fix limits of nature” for himself, free to be “molder and maker of himself ” (see Pico’s guide-quote). Rather than the medieval Christian’s choice of remaining enslaved to the Fallen Flesh and to Original Sin, or seeking to be Redeemed-in-the-Spirit through the sacraments of the Church, this newly invented Man’s choice is that of either growing downwards into the lower natures of brutes, or responding to the Creator’s call to grow “upward” to “higher” and “divine” natures (Miller 1965). With this redescription, the medieval world’s idea of order as based upon degrees of spiritual perfection/imperfection, an idea of order centered on the Church, was now to be replaced by a new one based upon degrees of rational perfection/imperfection. And this was to be the new “idea of order” on whose basis the coloniality of being, enacted by the dynamics of the rela- 288 ● Un s e t t l i n g t h e C o l o n i a l i t y o f B e i n g / Po w e r / Tr u t h / Fre e d o m tion between Man—overrepresented as the generic, ostensibly supracultural human—and its subjugated Human Others (i.e., Indians and Negroes), together with, as Quijano notes, the continuum of new categories of humans (i.e., mestizos and mulattos to which their human/subhuman value difference gave rise), was to be brought into existence as the foundational basis of modernity. With this revealing that, from the very origin, the issue of race, as the issue of the Colonial Question, the Nonwhite/Native Question, the Negro Question, yet as one that has hitherto had no name, was and is fundamentally the issue of the genre of the human, Man, in its two variants— the issue of its still ongoing production/reproduction in the form of the second variant. The clash between Las Casas and Sepúlveda was a clash over this issue— the clash as to whether the primary generic identity should continue to be that of Las Casas’s theocentric Christian, or that of the newly invented Man of the humanists, as the rational (or ratiocentric) political subject of the state (the latter as the “descriptive statement” in whose terms Sepúlveda spoke). And this clash was to be all the more deep-seated in that the humanists, while going back to the classics and to other pre-Christian sources in order to find a model of being human alternative to the one in whose terms the lay world was necessarily subordinated, had effected their now new conception and its related “formulation of a general order of existence” only by transuming that of the Church’s matrix Judeo-Christian conception, thereby carrying over the latter’s schematic structure, as well as many of its residual meanings. In this transumed reformulation, while the “significant ill” of mankind’s enslavement was no longer projected as being to the negative legacy of Adamic Original Sin, the concept of enslavement was carried over and redescribed as being, now, to the irrational aspects of mankind’s human nature. This redescription had, in turn, enabled the new behavior-motivating “plan of salvation” to be secularized in the political terms of the this-worldly goals of the state. Seeing that because the “ill” or “threat” was now that of finding oneself enslaved to one’s passions, to the particularistic desires of one’s human nature, salvation/redemption could only be found by the subject able to subdue his private interests in order to adhere to the laws of the Sy lv i a Wy n t e r ● 289 politically absolute state, and thereby to the “common good.” This meant that the primary behavior-motivating goal, rather than that of seeking salvation in the civitas dei, was now that of adhering to the goal of the civitas saecularis (Pocock 1975): the goal, that is, of seeking to ensure the stability, order, and territorial expansion of the state in a competitive rivalry with other European states. This at the same time as the primacy of the earlier religious ethic, as defended by Las Casas from a universalistic Christian perspective, was replaced by the new ethic of “reasons of state,” as the ethic carried by a Sepúlveda whose civic humanist values were still, at the time, only incipiently emergent. However, it is the latter ethic that, given the existential sociopolitical and commercial, on-the-ground processes that were to lead to the rapid rise of the centralizing state,8 to its replacement of the medieval system-ensemble with its monarchical own (Hubner 1983), and to the expanding mercantilism with its extra-European territorial conquests, exponentially accelerated was soon to triumph and become the accepted doctrine of the times. Nowhere is this mutation of ethics seen more clearly than in two plays written in the first decades of the seventeenth century: one the well-known play by Shakespeare, The Tempest; the other the less well-known play by Spain’s Lope de Vega, written at roughly the same time and entitled The New World Discovered by Christopher Columbus. In the plot of The Tempest, the central opposition is represented as being between Prospero and Caliban; that is, between Higher Reason as expressed in the former, and irrational, sensual nature as embodied in the latter. The drunken sailors, Stephano and Trinculo, had also, like Caliban, been shown as embodying that enslavement to the irrational aspects of human nature (if to a lesser degree than the latter) which Prospero must repress in himself if he is to act as a rational ruler; that is, one for whom the securing of the stability and order of the state (in effect, reasons-of-state) had now to be the overriding imperative, the major this-worldly goal. And while Miranda as woman, and as a young girl, is shown as poised at midpoint between rational and irrational nature, she is pre-assured of attaining to the former status because of her father’s tutoring. This master code of rational nature/irrational nature, together with the new “idea of order” as that of degrees of rational perfection in place of the 290 ● Un s e t t l i n g t h e C o l o n i a l i t y o f B e i n g / Po w e r / Tr u t h / Fre e d o m earlier degrees of spiritual perfection, is also seen to be at work in Lope’s play, even where syncretized with the earlier religious ethic within the context of Spain’s Counter Reformation order of discourse. There, the rational/irrational master code contrasts the rational Christian king and queen of Spain, Ferdinand and Isabel, as opposed, on the one hand, to the “irrational” Moorish prince of Granada—who is shown dallying with the sensual pleasures of love while Ferdinand and Isabel capture Granada, displacing him (“Orientalism” has an even longer history than Said has traced!)—and on the other, and most totally so,9 to the “irrational” because tyrannical Arawak cacique who, because of his forcible abduction of the bride-to-be of one of his subjects, is shown to be as justly expropriated of his sovereignty, his lands, and his religion as Caliban is “justly” expropriated of his in The Tempest. In both plays, therefore, the Human Other figures to the generic human embodied in Prospero and in the Catholic king and queen are made to embody the postulate of “significant ill” of enslavement to the lower, sensory aspects of “human nature.” At the same time, the generic human bearer-figures of the politically rational are made to actualize the new, transumed formulation and its conception of freedom as having no longer mastery over Original Sin (as well as over those Enemies-of-Christ who as such remain enslaved to it), but rather of mastery over their own sensory, irrational nature—and, as well, of all those Human Other categories who, like Shakespeare’s Caliban and Lope de Vega’s Dulcanquellín, are stigmatized as remaining totally enslaved to theirs. But perhaps what Shakespeare’s Reformation play reveals, more clearly than does Lope de Vega’s Counter Reformation one, is the profound shift in the grounds of legitimacy of which Sepúlveda had been the proponent in the 1550s dispute with Las Casas, and that were now being instituted in early seventeenth-century Western Europe. That is, the shift in the terms by which the latter’s ongoing expropriation of New World lands and the subsequent reduction of the indigenous peoples to being a landless, rightless,10 neo-serf work force—together with the accelerated mass slave trade out of Africa to the Americas and the Caribbean and the instituting of the large-scale slave plantation system that that trade made possible—will be made to seem just and legitimate to its peoples. In addition, the way in which this shift will be Sy lv i a Wy n t e r ● 291 linked to another shift (one by which Western Europe’s categorization of the “Indians” and “Negroes” in now secular rather than in the earlier religious terms of Otherness: the new terms, therefore, of Quijano’s “Racism/ Ethnicism” complex) will be effected. As Valentin Mudimbe documents in his The Invention of Africa (1988), beginning in 1444 with the Portuguese landfall on the shores of Senegal West Africa, all the actions that were to be taken by European-Christians—their enslavement of non-Christians whom they first classified in theological terms as Enemies-of-Christ, whether those of Africa or those of the New World, together with their expropriation of the lands of the peoples on both continents (limitedly so, at that time, in the case of Africa; almost totally so in the case of the Americas)—were initially seen as just and legitimate in Christian theological terms. In these terms, all the concessions of nonEuropean lands by the pope to the Portuguese and Spanish sovereigns were effected by means of several papal bulls that defined these lands as ones that, because not belonging to a Christian prince, were terra nullius (“the lands of no one”), and so legitimately expropriated by Christian kings (Mudimbe 1988). In other words, they were so seen within the terms of the adaptive truth-for of their “local culture’s” still hegemonic descriptive statement of the human, and of the order of knowledge to which that statement gave rise. And, therefore, as the truth of the “single culture” in whose theocentric terms they thought and acted (Epstein 1993), whose truth they believed to be as supernaturally ordained as we now believe ours to be “objective” because, ostensibly, supraculturally true. This means that the large-scale accumulation of unpaid land, unpaid labor, and overall wealth expropriated by Western Europe from nonEuropean peoples, which was to lay the basis of its global expansion from the fifteenth century onwards, was carried out within the order of truth and the self-evident order of consciousness, of a creed-specific conception of what it was to be human—which, because a monotheistic conception, could not conceive of an Other to what it experienced as being human, and therefore an Other to its truth, its notion of freedom. Its subjects could therefore see the new peoples whom it encountered in Africa and the New World only as the “pagan-idolators,” as “Enemies-of-Christ” as the Lack of its own nar- 292 ● Un s e t t l i n g t h e C o l o n i a l i t y o f B e i n g / Po w e r / Tr u t h / Fre e d o m rative ideal. This was consequential. It set in motion the secularizing reinvention of its own matrix Christian identity as Man. The non-Europeans that the West encountered as it expanded would classify the West as “abnormal” relative to their own experienced Norm of being human, in the Otherness slot of the gods or the ancestors. This was the case with the Congolese who, seeing the white skin of the Europeans as a sign of monstrous deviance to their Bantu genre/norm of being human, classified them together with their deceased ancestors (Axelson 1970). For the Europeans, however, the only available slot of Otherness to their Norm, into which they could classify these non-European populations, was one that defined the latter in terms of their ostensible subhuman status (Sahlins 1995). The creation of this secular slot of Otherness as a replacement for the theocentric slot of Otherness in which non-European peoples had been classified in religious terms as Enemies-of-Christ, pagan-idolators, thereby incorporating them into the theological system of legitimacy—which, as set out in the papal bulls from the 1455 Romanus Pontifex onwards, had provided the framework in whose terms their ostensibly “lands of no one/terra nullius” had been seeable as justly expropriable, and they themselves justly enslavable as such pre-classified populations—was taking place, however, in the wider context of the overall sociopolitical and cultural transformation that had been set in motion in Western Europe from the Renaissance onwards, one correlated with the challenge of the then ascendant modern European monarchical state to the centralizing post-Gregorian hegemony of the Church. In this context, Anthony Pagden has excellently documented the shift that would eventually take place in the grounds of legitimacy in whose terms Europeans were to see themselves as justly expropriating the lands and living space of the indigenous peoples of the New World. This shift, as he shows, would occur as a direct result of the fact that while, at first, the Spanish state had depended on the pope’s having divided up the New World between Spain and Portugal, doing this in exchange for the promise that their respective states would help to further the evangelizing mission of Christianity, the Spanish sovereigns had soon become impatient with the papacy’s claim to temporal as well as to spiritual sovereignty. In conse- Sy lv i a Wy n t e r ● 293 quence, King Ferdinand of Spain, wanting to claim temporal sovereignty for himself as he set out to institute the first Western European world empire, had summoned several councils comprised of jurists and theologians. He had then given them the mandate that they should come up with new grounds for Spain’s sovereignty, which moved outside the limits of the sovereignty over the temporal world claimed by the papacy. The fact that the theological grounds of the legitimacy both of Spain’s sovereignty over the New World and of its settlers’ rights to the indigenous people’s lands (as well as of the latter’s right, in the early period, to carry out slave-trading raids on the American mainland) had come upon a central obstacle made this matter all the more urgent. The obstacle was this: all the basic concepts of the theological system of legitimation—i.e., that the lands of non-Christian princes were terra nullius and as such justly expropriable by Christian princes; that the indigenous peoples could be enserfed or even enslaved where necessary—had come to founder upon a stubborn fact. This was that the indigenous peoples of the New World could not be classified as Enemies-of-Christ, since Christ’s apostles had never reached the New World, never preached the Word of the Gospel to them. Which meant that because they could not have ever refused to hear the Word, they could not (within the terms of the orthodox theology of the Church) be classified as ChristRefusers, their lands justly taken, and they themselves enslaved and/or enserfed with a “just title.” The life-long struggle of Bartolomé de Las Casas, the Spanish missionary priest, in the wake of his 1514 conversion experience, to save the Caribbean Arawaks from the ongoing demographic catastrophe that followed both their infection by new diseases to which they had no immunity and their subjection to the harsh, forced-labor regime of the Spaniards was a struggle waged precisely on the basis of the fact that such subjection could not be carried out with a “just title.” This was, therefore, to lead him to make a fateful proposal, one that was to provide the charter of what was to become the Black-diasporic presence in the Americas. This proposal was that African slaves, whom he then believed to have been acquired with a just title, should be brought in limited numbers as a labor force to replace the Indians. This proposal, which kick-started what was to be the almost four-centuries- 294 ● Un s e t t l i n g t h e C o l o n i a l i t y o f B e i n g / Po w e r / Tr u t h / Fre e d o m long slave trade out of Africa, had therefore been the result of his struggle not to replace “Indians with Africans,” as Liberal historians who think in biocentric, classificatory terms would have it—but rather, within the theological terms in which Las Casas thought and fought, to replace those whom he knew from first hand to have been enslaved and enserfed outside the “just title” terms of orthodox Christian theology with others whom, as he thought at the time, had been acquired within the terms of those “just titles.” The cited passage (see Las Casas guide-quote) reveals that Las Casas, when he later found out that the African slaves had been no less ruthlessly acquired outside the terms of the same just titles than had been the Indians, was to bitterly repent of his proposal. But by then, the mass slave trade from Africa across the Atlantic that would give rise to today’s transnational Black Diaspora had taken on a life and unstoppable dynamic of its own. Las Casas had thought and acted in the terms of his Christian evangelizing imperative. The Spanish state’s primary imperative, however, was that of its territorial expansion, of realizing its imperial goals of sovereignty over the new lands. Its jurists had, in this context, at first attempted to get around the Enemies-of-Christ obstacle by means of a judicial document called “The Requisition” (“Requerimento”). A hybridly theologico-juridical document, written in Latin, the Requisition was supposed to be read out to groups of assembled indigenes by a notary who was to accompany any slave-raiding, land-expropriating expedition that sailed from the first settled Caribbean islands to the mainland. This document was intended to ensure that the indigenes in question literally heard the Word of the Christian Gospel, so that they could then be later classified as having refused it, and therefore as Enemies-of-Christ. The document proclaimed to the indigenes that Christ, who was king over the world, had granted this sovereignty to the pope, who had in turn granted the lands of their “barbarous nations” to the king of Spain, who had sent the expedition members as his emissaries. The expeditionaries had been sent to give the indigenes the choice of accepting the king of Spain’s sovereignty over their lands, together with their acceptance of Christ’s Word and, with it, of conversion to Christianity. If they accepted the king’s sovereignty together with conversion, they would be unharmed. Should they refuse (thereby making themselves Christ-Refusers and Sy lv i a Wy n t e r ● 295 Enemies-of-Christ), they would be attacked, captured, justly enslaved—their lands justly expropriated. If Las Casas was to write that on reading this document he did not know whether to laugh or cry, the reported reply by the Cenú peoples on the mainland to one such expedition opens a transcultural cognitive frontier onto the way in which, to use Marshall Sahlins’ phrase (if somewhat inverting its meaning) “natives think” (Sahlins 1990), and lawlikely so within the terms of their/our order-specific modes of adaptive cognition-for, truth-for. Seen from hindsight, what the Cenú are saying (see Cenú/Greenblatt guide-quote) is that, outside the “local cultural” field of what was then Western Europe, and therefore outside the adaptive truth-for terms of its monarchical-Christian genre of being human, the speech of the Requisition was “mad and drunken”: speech that was meaningless. Since it was only in the terms of what could seem just and legitimate to a specific genre of being human that the lands of non-Christian and non-European peoples could have been seen as the pope’s to give, or the king of Castile’s to take. What is of specific interest here is not only that it was this initial, large-scale, onesided accumulation of lands, wealth, power, and unpaid labor by the West that was to provide the basis for today’s 20/80 wealth and power ratio between the world’s peoples, but also that this primary accumulation had been effected on the basis of a truth-for, or system of ethno-knowledge, that was no less non-veridical outside the viewpoint of its subjects than the premise the Portuguese and Columbus’s voyages had only recently disproved—i.e., the premise that the Earth was nonhomogeneously divided into habitable within God’s Grace and uninhabitable outside it. Seeing that what we also come upon is the nature of our human cognitive dilemma, one that is the very condition of their/our existence as hybridly nature-culture beings, the dilemma is how, in Epstein’s terms, we can be enabled to free ourselves from our subordination to the one culture, the one descriptive statement that is the condition of us being in the mode of being that we are (Epstein 1993). That vast dilemma, which is that of our still-unresolved issue of consciousness (McGinn 1999) was one that Las Casas brilliantly touched upon when, referring to the Aztecs’ practice of human sacrifice, he stated that a 296 ● Un s e t t l i n g t h e C o l o n i a l i t y o f B e i n g / Po w e r / Tr u t h / Fre e d o m mistaken (i.e., adaptive) consciousness/conscience impels and obliges no less than does a true one. However, not only the Cenú Indians, but the Spaniards themselves had also come to realize the invalid nature of their attempt to get around the theological concept of Enemies-of-Christ. In consequence, as Pagden tells us, the Spanish Crown had, from early on, initiated the adoption of new grounds of legitimacy that were to eventually make the Requisition document unnecessary. The councils of jurists/theologians that King Ferdinand set up for this purpose had come up with a formula that, adopted from The Politics of Aristotle, would not only enable the master trope of Nature (seen as God’s agent on Earth) to take the latter’s authoritative place, but would also effect a shift from the Enemies-of-Christ/ChristRefusers system of classification to a new and even more powerfully legitimating one. It was here that the modern phenomenon of race, as a new, extrahumanly determined classificatory principle and mechanism of domination (Quijano 2000), was first invented, if still in its first religio-secular form. For the indigenous peoples of the New World, together with the massenslaved peoples of Africa, were now to be reclassified as “irrational” because “savage” Indians, and as “subrational” Negroes, in the terms of a formula based on an a-Christian premise of a by-nature difference between Spaniards and Indians, and, by extrapolation, between Christian Europeans and Negroes. This neo-Aristotelian formula had been proposed by the Scottish theologian John Mair. A new notion of the world and “idea of order” was being mapped now, no longer upon the physical cosmos—which beginning with the fifteenthcentury voyages of the Portuguese and Columbus, as well as with the new astronomy of Copernicus, was eventually to be freed from having to serve as a projected “space of Otherness,” and as such having to be known in the adaptive terms needed by human orders to represent their social structures as extrahumanly determined ones. Instead, the projected “space of Otherness” was now to be mapped on phenotypical and religio-cultural differences between human variations and/or population groups, while the new idea of order was now to be defined in terms of degrees of rational perfection/imperfection, as degrees ostensibly ordained by the Greco-Christian cultural construct deployed by Sepúlveda as that of the “law of nature,” “nat- Sy lv i a Wy n t e r ● 297 ural law”: as a “law” that allegedly functioned to order human societies in the same way as the newly discovered laws of nature served to regulate the processes of functioning of physical and organic levels of reality. It is, therefore, the very humanist strategy of returning to the pagan thought of Greece and Rome for arguments to legitimate the state’s rise to hegemony, outside the limits of the temporal sovereignty claimed by the papacy, that now pro...
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