It is not good for man to keep reminding himself that he is man.
To brood over oneself is bad enough; to brood over the species, with all the zeal of a fanatic, is worse still—it affords an objective basis, a philosophical alibi for the arbitrary woes of introspection.
As long as we masticate our own ego, we have the excuse of indulging a whim; when all egos become the center of an endless rumination, we merely generalize the disadvantages of our own condition, transform our accident into a norm, a universal case.
We perceive first the anomaly of sheer existence, and only afterward that of our specific situation: the surprise of being precedes the surprise of being human. Yet the strange character of our state should constitute the primordial datum of our perplexities: it is less natural to be man than, simply, to be.