Epistemology is 

the theory of knowledge

She instead engages what I call What Does It Mean to Be Human?

Wynter suggests that if we accept that epistemology gives us the principles and rules of
knowing through which the Human and Humanity are understood, we are trapped in a
knowledge system that fails to notice that the stories of what it means to be Human—
specifically origin stories that explain who / what we are—are, in fact, narratively
constructed.

To study “Man” or “Humanity” is therefore to study a narrativization that has been

produced with the very instruments (or categories) that we study with. In short, it is
precisely the practice of accepting the principles and rules of knowing that produces
narratives that naturalize, for example, evolution.

The problem of the Human is thus not identity- based per se but in the enunciations of what
it means to be Human—enunciations that are concocted and circulated by those who most
convincingly (and powerfully) imagine the “right” or “noble” or “moral” characteristics of
Human and in this project their own image- experience of the Human into the sphere of
Universal Humanness. The Human is therefore the product of a particular epistemology, yet
it appears to be (and is accepted as) a naturally independent entity existing in the world.

What is this enunciation? How has Western thought been thinking Man as the Human.

Vitruvian Man and 1492

Wynter explains how our “image” or narration of what it means to be human is underpinned
by a referent subject constituted by the local knowledge of the enunciator. She retraces how
from the Renaissance onwards; Western thought narratively constructed the image of the
Human in analogy to that of its idea of Man. To be human is to match the attributes of what
being Man entails. She highlights how the European Renaissance stamped a concept of Man
that brought together the colonization of time, the colonization of space, and the perfection
of geometric forms that have been immortalized in the famous Vitruvian Man, drawn by
Leonardo de Vinci. The correlations in this image between the Human body and the
universe hide the fact that the body depicted and the experience upon which Leonardo was
relying was a Greco- Roman concept of the human figure.

What does she mean by the colonisation of time and of space?

Colonisation of time There is a temporal shift in western thought whereby it thinks Man as a
variable independent of God (the beginning of western modern scientific rationality – when
science thinks the origin of man in scientific rather than theological terms) . In Western
thought, the image of Man is thus “colonised” by a new image, which Wynter exemplifies
with the Vitruvian Man.

Colonisation of space:
The modern process of imperial colonisation with the discoveries of the Americas with
Christopher Columbus, which prompts the emergence of “Indians” in the European
consciousness coupled with the image of Africans, as descendants of Ham, already
embedded in the consciousness of European Christians. Thus, Columbus’s arrival in the
Americas in 1492 and other voyages outside of Europe are landmarks of the moment in
which the concepts of Man and of Human became one and the same and, at the same time,
came to be understood in relation to race and racism. The epistemology from which Indians
or Africans were observed and described was, of course, not the epistemology of the
Indians.

For Wynter it is the intersectionality between a colonisation of time and of space that
prompted a system of categories of knowledge to emerge: derived from Greek and Latin,
this system disqualified Africans from Humanness (thus rendering them appropriate for
enslavement) and excluded Indians from the proportions, rationality, and knowledge of
God. Wynter’s writings demonstrate that Western epistemology built itself on a concept of
Human and Humanity that, in turn, served to legitimate the epistemic foundation that
created it.

The Human as Man, Capitalism, and International Law

Sylvia Wynter and many black intellectuals (such as C. L. R. James, George Lamming, Wilson
Harris, Aimé Césaire, Frantz Fanon, and so forth) draw attention to the significance of
plantations and palenques and kilombos, colonization, nationalism and independence,
gender, and the state in relation to fifteenth- century global processes. More specifically,
they underscore how the exploitation of labor and the initiation of the modern / colonial
slave trade Atlantic triangle corresponds to the massive appropriation of land. The
colonization, expropriation, and violence directed at lands and peoples engendered a new
type of economy based on the reinvestments of gain and the impulse to increase production
that would create and satisfy a global market.

Finally, these thinkers also highlight an important contradiction: Slavery and colonisation,
along with the mass deaths, trauma, the mass processes of exploitation, extraction and de-
humanisation took place as international law emerged.

International law as a field that reproduces such logics..

Modern European imperial thinking line of thinking racialized geography into a North where
Man is and a South where it locates a non-human. This was used to legitimise the
emergence of sixteenth- century Atlantic commercial circuits and the changes this
generated in Europe itself.

As all of this happened, another field of knowledge and laws was emerging international
law. However, how did international logics represent the world? In the west, international
law developed along a logic called linear global thinking: it divided the globe into two main
area: a global North and a Global South. Carl Schmitt coined this concept and as he made
clear, Global linear thinking was the way in which Europe divided and appropriated the
planet and established a hierarchy of people. International treaties and laws took care of
the legal aspect of the appropriation in two ways: legality among European Imperial powers
and legality of European Imperial nations vis-à-vis the land expropriated in non-European
territories.

So how did international law think the human? There an an aporia at the heart
of the logic of international law of human rights:
1- It postulates the universality of humans: “humans are all born equals”
2- It accepts the existence of hierarchies to establish differences between all
who were “born equal.”

Indeed, after we are born, we inhabit a world made of inequality. The discourse
that “we are all born equal” is inflected with practices of inequity that shape
how we live in the world differentially.

The ecological implications:

The vision of the Human as a racialised Man does not only pathologizes are relation to the
political but also to the ecological. The main issue is that it relies on a separation between
culture and nature. This stands in sharp contrast with key concepts in indigenous
ecological cosmologies which include a lack of division between concepts of
nature and culture and the idea that many nonhuman entities are considered
persons with whom interactions must be based on relations of kinship.

So what if we reconsidered the relationship between human and nature along the lines of
kinship rather than antagonism?

How would this help us rethink human rights along an ecological ethics?

So to go back and recap, when we talk about Human rights, we shall ask the question/ what is
it to be human? Who is the enunciator of what it is to be human, who defines it, gives it a
sense? How does that reflect on the definition? If we follow from Wynter we see that the
image of the human in our conception of “human rights” is dependent on an a priori division
of Man between a White Bourgeois model that is naturalised as the only possible image of
Man and non-whites as confined to the peripheries of humanness. Moreover, the implicit
morphology of the genre “Man” has always included the presumption that “Man” can and
does act unilaterally. In this vision Man is uprooted from the natural world and Man and
Nature are now seen as antagonistic forces. Modernity is thus marked by an attitude of Man
towards nature marked by two main laws: nature is to be domesticated or tamed and nature
has to be exploited. The result of this normative thinking and the polices it has and is
producing has given us global warming.

The most popular term for the climatic context produced by this dynamic today
is Anthropocene. We now live on a planet where, unlike in previous eras, human activity is
the primary force of geological change. A competing conception is that of the Capitalocene,
which highlights the role of capitalism as the primary driver of such transformation and
destruction. Anthropocene names human beings as the cause of climate change; Capitalocene
names a mode of production adopted by human beings as the cause of climate change.

No more boundaries between human and nature,

Ecology does not privilege the human, it is not something beautiful, and it has no real use for the
old concept of Nature. What we now know about the impact of human beings on the planet has
led to the need to rethink the concepts of nature and ecology, and exactly how humans are
connected to the world. This rethinking occurs in philosophy as well as in the arts.

Remanant:

In Wynter’s analyses, “capitalism,” as we know it, is revealed to be one economic aspect of

the emerging colonial matrix of power; this framework, in turn, challenges analyses that
focus solely on the capitalist underpinnings of the slave trade and land exploitation by
delineating features, particularly those brought into view by non- Europeans, that are not
simply driven by economic matters (cultural practices, social exchanges, political shifts).

As the concept of Man and its encroachment by capitalist logics of production evolved, it
took up the representation of what she calls the ethno-class white Bourgeois man. In this
image, the human and measured by a morphology that privileges an implicit whiteness,
classness, masculinity, cis-ness, hetero-ness, symmetry, and ability, or one is a biological
organism defined as the lack of all of these attributes; they as such, are excluded from the
image of what it is to be Human.

Ultimately, What Wynter allows us to see is that Human and Humanity were
created as the enunciated that projects and propels to universality the local
image of the enunciator: what Wynter calls the ethno-class man: white western
bourgeois man as an idealised and total image of what human is.

In 1994, Sylvia Wynter wrote an open letter to her academic colleagues reflecting on the
brutal beating of Rodney King by the Los Angeles police. Focusing on the acronym NHI (No
Humans Involved), used by some police officers to describe cases involving Black Americans,
Wynter’s letter examines how, decades after the anti-colonial revolutions, humanity
continues to be governed by an ethnoclass value system that takes white bourgeois Man as
its positive norm. This hierarchical ordering of humanity, she writes, is visible in “the
beating, and the verdict, as well as the systemic condemnation of all the Rodney Kings, and
of the global Poor and Jobless, to the futility and misery of the lives they live, as the price
paid for our well-being.” The police violence inflicted on King is for Wynter a direct
continuation of colonial violence: a “discursive classification that had enabled them [Black
Americans] to be recognized as aliens, as strangers who were, as if it were, of a different
species.”