The Argument, as Wynter calls it, remembers that “Man” is a recent category. Invented during the Renaissance, Man transformed and reoccupied the locale’s common understanding of what it was to be human. That locale was specific: European, Christian, bourgeoisie. As it was formed, Man was described as the representation for all humans, across time and space: in the 15th century as a rational and political subject (Man₁), then in the 18th and 19th century as evolved organism and economic entity (Man2).
Both variants of Man, the Argument shows, revalorized Judeo-Christian notions of the Redeemed and the Fallen, of True Christian and Idolater. Far from being the “objective description” Man assumed itself to be, Man supplanted a specific culture’s True Christian Self and conceived of an Untrue Other according to an organizing principle that persists today: race.
For instance, when Man₁ was defined by human’s capacity for reason, Christian Europe’s existing order of heaven (divine, perfect, harmonious) and earth (vile, fallen, corrupt) was remapped. Rationality was considered as a higher, more divine nature, where as sensuality and the physical was of a lower order: earthly, closer to animal. At the time of the Renaissance, the ruling class in Europe transitioned from “lawfully” invading, pillaging, and enslaving Others because they were outside of God’s grace—as pagans and Enemies of Christ—to “lawfully” invading and expropriating the indigenous peoples of the Americas/the Caribbean and enslaving the peoples of Africa because according to Man’s new logic, they were subrational, less than human, savage, and thus “slaves-by-nature.” Again, when Man2 became a purely secular, bio-economic subject, Black and colonized “native” people were negatively marked as dysselected, non-evolved, or backward in the biological sense. Or in economic terms, as the new category of the Poor, the jobless, and the underdeveloped.
And so the Argument is against Man, which Wynter describes as but one genre, one mode of being that has been overrepresented, and has two faces: modernity and coloniality.
