Homo Sapped Sapience

The hominid I am becoming is a becoming-human.

The animal I am becoming is a becoming-human.

The human I am becoming is a becoming-animal.

It makes a difference.

It makes a difference.

What we think of as the animal hasn’t got a damned thing to do with the animal. It has to do with reacting to the ultimately restrictive changes and differences assembled by the geniuses of the 18th century Enlightenment and then inflicted upon all of us.( As if we were dumb matter and what the geniuses supplied us with was the “form” which arranged this dumb matter into a "beautiful" sculpture.) That’s all it has to do with. In other words, there's nothing whatsoever creative or creatively-potentiating, in taking up "the animal" as we typically conceive it - it is a reactive and regulating principle, not an activator or actuating concept.

Enlightenment was a casting off of self-inflicted immaturity; immaturity was understood as an inability to reason for oneself... The capacity to reason came to be viewed the criterion of maturity, of being adult.( The capacity to reason came to be viewed as what is distinctively human; the capacity to desire has been assumed to be shared with "the animal." Reason in the 18th century Enlightenment comes to be a form which forms the dumb matter of the human being's many "animal" impulses.)

But there's really only one kind of maturity that matters- sexual maturity- and though "reasoning for oneself" could play some as yet unexplored role in sex-matur- becoming, "reasoning for oneself" alone is not sufficient. Sexual maturity cannot be achieved with an isolating disparagement of "the animal"...it requires the animal as a creative concept.

The biological-physiological maturation processes, alone, are not sufficient, either. One doesn't reach sexual maturity at the end of puberty- puberty is only the very first baby step in that process.

Enlightenment,having privileged "knowledge" and a "knowledge maturity", has had the curious effect of removing even an expectation of sexual maturity beyond puberty...The dynamic of knowledge maturity displacing a notion of sexual maturity reminds me of the phenomenon of the hypertrophy of one organ or area of the body leading to the atrophy of another, of one faculty developing at the expense of another, but perhaps a more productive way to view what has happened is to see the effect as the "redistribution of singularities" created by the powerful Kantian-Enlightenment conceptual apparatus. The prospect that this redistribution of singularities would doom so many to perpetual adolescence may not have displeased Kant...I see a pertinence to the "merely" biographical fact of Kant spending his afternoons enjoying fine English cheeses, but never ever another kind of afternoon delight. In What is Enlightenment? where we see Kant explicitly equate the power to reason for oneself with maturity, we also see Kant getting down on his hands and knees before Frederick in what I urge be recognized as a gesture of sexual immaturity.

Excuse me now-- Betsy has invited me over for some good, old-fashioned, raw carcass. Oh boy!

The 18th century Enlightenment was really the most important, the primary, step in a becoming human, in what we would all call being human.(Being human comes to mean not being animal.) Let’s be honest about that, okay? It’ll be a lot easier that way.

Becoming animal is a primary step in counteracting the hylomorphic heist of the human capacity to boldly go outside, out there where we can be “out there.”