Sylvia Wynter’s work offers profound insight into the question of humanness. She questions our received conception of what it means to be human. Wynter argues that our current understanding of who we are is, first, an overrepresentation of an ethnoclass, the Western white bourgeois man. Wynter’s work is aimed at transcending European cognitive frameworks, she unravels how Eurocentric myths have positioned one genre of human as universal and standing in for all others. She situates how various European epistemological epochs have constructed what it means to be human. Indeed she shows how the Copernican thesis raptured the “Latin-Christian Europe” worldview that constructed Christian mankind and then the rest, the unsaved. This rapture opened up the “conceptual space” that lead to Darwin’s epistemological break that radically challenged the Christian macro-origin story. Her argument is this: Since the theological order of knowledge could disappear, our current, “purely secular and purely biocentric order of knowledge can also cease to exist”.
Additionally, she argues that currently all forms of human being have been subsumed into a single homogenized “descriptive statement” based on concept that Man is purely biological like all other species. Therefore, she places a challenge that humans are hybrid beings, both bios and mythoi. According to Wynter, the human is homo narrans, implying we are not only a languaging species but we are also storytelling beings (an idea she draws from Césaire) . Indeed, her project to redefine humanness is encapsulated in her famous sentence “Towards the Human, after Man”. Lastly, she notes that this overrepresentation of European man as Human is the struggle of our time, and economics is but a “proximate function,” in the sense that it is implicated in maintaining the reproduction of this ethnoclass. But more importantly, Wynter’s work presents a radical approach to unthink Western systems of epistemology.