Jeeves: ‘Here are we, in a bright and breathing world:
Our origin, what matters it?’ muses that inward eye.
Bertie: Jeeves, I’m much obliged for your felicitous reply,
Your third excursion into poetry! ¹ Tell me who penned it.
Jeeves: Wordsworth, nearly sixty years before man descended.²
I took the liberty of quoting the bard, to prevent
A proneness to reductionism from usurping what is important -
To establish criteria for humanity, seeing through the slickness
Of the thesis of Darwinism, and to describe and defend our uniqueness.
Bertie: The original vision of man is rational, I guess so -
Now that the vision of original man seems less so.
Jeeves: Your definition of man, if I may widen it, dates
Back to Aristotle and kindred philosophical pates,
Whose Reason was activity, not something that qualifies activity,
Who outcast from sapiens the homo with a different proclivity.
The rational life, like that of the stoic or scientist,
Could be a placebo for the meaning and fulfilment he missed
When he failed to evolve the adaptive capacity in relationships
Or the gene for a passive vision of the truth, for worships
And the voyage of artistic discovery. These emotional and cultural
Abilities enrich life with discretion beyond the intellectual’s
Sense of its pointlessness and tragedy. So I would tweak
The sapience in Homo, rightly thought to be unique
Among animals to include all that we do in our very best moments
To make sense of life and the world with our natural bestowments.
Bertie: I can trust you, Jeeves, to do justice to the meaning of ‘sapiens’.