Human condition: Difference between revisions

For other uses, see Human condition (disambiguation).

The human condition encompasses the totality of the experience of being human and living human lives. As mortal entities, there are a series of biologically determined events which are common to most human lives, and some which are inevitable for all. The ongoing way in which humans react to or cope with these events is the human condition. However, understanding the precise nature and scope of what is meant by the human condition is itself a philosophical problem.

The term is also used in a metaphysical sense, to describe the joy, terror and other feelings or emotions associated with being and existence. Humans, to an apparently superlative degree amongst all living things, are aware of the passage of time, can remember the past and imagine the future, and are intimately aware of their own mortality. Only human beings are known to ask themselves questions relating to the purpose of life beyond the base need for survival, or the nature of existence beyond that which is empirically apparent: What is the meaning of existence? Why was I born? Why am I here? Where will I go when I die? The human struggle to find answers to these questions — and the very fact that we can conceive them and ask them — is what defines the human condition in this sense of the term.

Although the term itself may have gained popular currency with The Human Condition, a film trilogy directed by Masaki Kobayashi which examined these and related concepts, the quest to understand the human condition dates back to the first attempts by humans to understand themselves and their place in the universe.

Self-awareness

Human self-awareness leads us to recognize three core paradoxes or absurd features of the human condition:

• The human imagination has no physical boundaries, but our bodies do. In our minds, we can instantly travel to the ends of the universe, the center of the earth, even the center of the sun. We can use our mental microscope to visualize germs, viruses, atoms, quarks. As soon as we detect something with any instrument, we can make images of it in our minds. We travel effortlessly in our thoughts. The boundless production of fiction literature is evidence of the creative powers of the human imagination. Yet physically we are bound to one specific, small planet, and due to the speed limit of the universe (speed of light), it appears that we are bound to a small neighborhood around this planet for the foreseeable future. This paradox is the physical frustration of the human condition.
• Human spirits can motivate the noblest and holiest thoughts, the most altruistic actions, the most beneficial generosities. But they can also produce the most horrible cruelties and violence against countless people, including suicide of the perpetrators. Our will effortlessly moves our thoughts one way and then another, untamed by moral law or conscience. Leaders can sway whole populations to do things -- benevolent or malevolent -- that individuals would never, on their own, have contemplated. How can these two extremes coexist in the same individual? We don't observe such extremes in animals. They are exclusive to the human condition.
• Human actions and our very lives are motivated by hope -- that we can make a difference, that we can learn and grow and build and make things better. Yet physically speaking we know that we are mortal, we are made of dust, and we will return to dust. Despite this realization, hope springs eternal. Without hope, as Albert Camus said, the only serious philosophical question is why we should not commit suicide. Hope gets us up in the morning, and drives us forward every day. By extension, we hope for eternal life beyond the grave -- God, heaven, paradise -- because otherwise our existential situation has no meaning. These aspirations -- for hope, meaning, significance, purpose, identity, peace, happiness, beauty, love -- are all aspects of human spirituality.

These paradoxes present universal, inescapable questions about life. Whenever any people lift their thoughts from daily routines, they may ponder these questions. Attempts to explain or resolve these paradoxes are the domain of religion and philosophy. The human condition is the central subject of much literature, drama and art.

Study

The human condition is the subject of fields of study such as sociology, anthropology, demographics, and sociobiology. The philosophical school of Existentialism deals with the ongoing search for ultimate meaning in the human condition.

In most developed countries, improvements in medicine, education, and public health have brought about marked changes in the human condition over the last few hundred years, with increases in life expectancy and demography (see demographic transition). Probably one of the largest changes has been the availability of contraception, which has changed the sexual lives of human beings, especially women, and attitudes to sexuality. Even then, these changes only alter the details of the human condition. In some of the poorest parts of the world, the human condition has changed little over the centuries.

Negative usage of the term

This term is sometimes used with a pessimistic or derogatory air, to imply that the human condition is in general a wretched one or that it cannot be improved. This can be associated with the ubiquitous phrase "only human," as far as pertains to its implications of inferiority to an unspecified comparative source. This can also be compared to the phrase "mere mortals" in a more declamatory or melodramatic mode of speech. Negative views of the "human condition" also may arise out of cynicism towards human civilization. The far-reaching implications of that philosophical inclination, however, are beyond the scope of this article. See: Nihilism, Absurdism, Misanthropy, Cynicism etc.

Possibilities of Change

Certain movements, most prominently Transhumanism, aim to radically change the human condition. Some thinkers, like Enrico Fermi and others, deny that human nature has really changed in any fundamentally meaningful way over time and that, despite all of our social and scientific advances, human beings are still essentially the same animal and merely have been transplanted into progressively more complex environments. Transhumanist theorists agree; however, they argue that this is precisely the problem. In transhumanist thought, the human species clearly has come as far as it can usefully go in terms of biological evolution, and if we, as intelligent life forms, intend to keep progressing at what we consider to be a reasonable pace, we must dramatically alter the parameters of life, via emerging technologies. Opponents of transhumanism such as extreme Neo-Luddites, and moderate Bioconservatives assert that human nature, as we currently know it, is sufficient, and therefore does not necessitate any upgrades.

Many transhumanists hold a positive and embracing view of life itself, but see the existence of the human mind and its human body as a something of a cosmic tragedy, because every human being is consigned to death after a relatively short and delimited life, even while humans have the intellectual capacity to imagine a better world which is presently beyond their experience. Human nature, to the transhumanist, is an oppressive circumstance to be rationally overcome through the judicious application of science and technology.

See also

• The Denial of Death
• Erik H. Erikson
• Existentialism
• Absurdism
• Hannah Arendt
• Human nature
• Human self-reflection
• Malaise
• Man's search for meaning
• Maslow's hierarchy of needs
• Ontology
• Rite of passage
• Seven ages of man
• Seven deadly sins
• A Species in Denial