On Being "Human"

WHO WOULD NOT LIKE TO BE HUMAN, if he or she could? It should come easily to a human being, attached as being human is to his or her essence or definition-an inescapable activity or prerogative or burden. The name, the Word human, cannot be wrenched away from the Thing it represents, though it threatens always to exceed it, that is, to summon it away from other, lesser conditions and to draw it toward higher ones. The princely faculty of humanity in this inherited scheme of things is, as we know, reason, la raison humaine, whose variousness Diderot invokes when, in the opening line of the Satire Premiere, he ironically compares its forms to the diversity of animal instinct.1 What ought to be a barrier, a line of distinction, drawn between man and beast suddenly collapses; reason is, we might say, naturalized, bent to do those sneaky, nasty things only passions, sin-and animals-seemed capable of. A very long

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  Robert Goulding•Defending Hypatia•2010

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