The Centre — Chronicles of Love and Resentment

The greatest confusion about the human is in its origin, whose specificity our secular age does so much to evade. One might in fact define the secular as the state of denial of a scene of origin. Since the human is essentially scenic, in its relation to the world and more particularly to itself, that is, as a community, this is in effect a denial of any genuine explanation of our existence. The discoveries of paleontology will never tell us about the origin of the human scene, and that is in fact the very purpose to which they are put: to reduce the origin of the human to that of “any other” species. Just as the principle of uniformitarianism has generated millions of words on the subject of “life on other planets” in the absence of any evidence whatever, simply on the basis that if we find it here, it must be everywhere, so the same principle appears to insist that since the human is just another species, whatever is “special” about humanity is only “relative” and we need not add new

The greatest confusion about the human is in its origin, whose specificity our secular age does so much to evade. One might in fact define the secular as the state of denial of a scene of origin. Since the human is essentially scenic, in its relation to the world and more particularly to itself, that is, as a community, this is in effect a denial of any genuine explanation of our existence. The discoveries of paleontology will never tell us about the origin of the human scene, and that is in fact the very purpose to which they are put: to reduce the origin of the human to that of “any other” s