Human condition

As human condition ( in classical Latin but condicio humana ) is generally described as the condition of being human and the nature of man. It is the subject of philosophy, especially of philosophical anthropology, as well as various sciences such as social science or social psychology.

Sigmund Freud, for example, emphasized in connection with the question of the human condition, the unconscious, and Erich Fromm made ​​it the center of his cognitive interest.

Political action as a basic condition of human life

Hannah Arendt asks 1958 in her book vita activa ( engl. The Human Condition ) according to the basic conditions of human existence on this earth. The occasion is the first Sputnik mission into space in 1957 and the seemingly imminent possibility of extraterrestrial existence of man. The book presents an examination of the thesis of self-alienation of man from his nature by capitalist labor and production processes (cf. Karl Marx, Paris Manuscripts 1844). Arendt responds to Marx's critique of modern society, by not, the activities of the working and preparing, but the activities of the action at the center of their analysis. Action they defined as an activity that takes place exclusively among humans and is not dependent on the thing and use the reification. The action is the only activity in which man in the true sense can be to what it is. Arendt identifies the actions therefore not as condicio sine qua non ( a necessary condition ), but as a conditio per quam ( sufficient condition ) of the human being. She closes here on the Aristotelian understanding of man as a political animal.

Another framework of human existence Arendt called life itself, the earth and natality and mortality, worldliness and plurality. Especially their discovery of natality as a fundamental condition of human self-understanding has been found in recent bioethical debates input.

Criticism of the concept of the human condition

However, some ( postmodern ) philosophers reject the notion of the human condition or human nature as " essentialist " at all from. Thus Roland Barthes postulates the " mythological character " of the human condition, let him come reflected in the fact that this fixed, write the immutability of the world through naturalization and essentialization:

"The myth of the human condition is based on a very old mystification that has always existed is to put on the bottom of the history of nature. "

By way of example, he explains this in his essay The great family of people about the exhibition The Family of Man, whose title already an original " zoological " classification " sentimentalized " and " moralized ".