For all its ubiquity, the human condition is, if anything, ill-defined.
Typically, the human condition is understood as that which makes us us. It is an amalgam of tendencies and characteristics that point towards the essence of our species. This amalgam, which we call a “condition,” is a property of each individual in our species. To search for the human condition is to be an individual searching for something universal within yourself. To seek the human condition is to seek the universal contained within the particular.
These essays differ from this conception by asserting that the search for the human condition does not sprout from the mind of the individual, but is a collective social process. In this sense, a movement apparently enacted by the particular is in fact a universal act.
Furthermore, these essays depart from the traditional view by positing that the product of this undertaking is not the revealing of a property which is universal to all humans, as implied by the word “condition.” Instead, the act of searching for the human condition uncovers the particularities of the society that seeks it. The methods our society employs in its search for its “condition” have the effect of universalizing and naturalizing entirely novel elements of our society.
The name “human conditioning” is meant to be an initial signpost for our journey. We will be looking at the ongoing, porous, and ever-changing processes which produce the idea of a unitary “condition.” The object of this investigation is not really an object, but a process: the production of a supposedly universal object (the human condition) that can never quite escape the particular social processes which produced it.
By adding an -ing to the human condition, I mean to convey that the supposed “factory settings” of humanity are not fixed, but observably variable, and furthermore, that that variation is the product of contingent relations within the society that seeks to grasp its condition.
This is not to say that we have no biological tendencies or needs. It is to say that the search for definitive factory settings is a necessarily social, linguistic, and philosophical undertaking. The resulting “condition,” whatever it may be, is always partially a reflection of the social processes which lead us to believe in such thing as a “human condition” in the first place. The properties which we ascribe to the human condition are inextricable from the particularities of the society in which the notion of such a condition emerges.
The content of the human condition has no correlation with scientific truth. Certainly, there are aspects of our consciousness that are simply beyond our control and comprehension. And certainly, there are things that we seem fated to do with a uniquely human flavor: philosophize, socialize, invent, discover, create, fuck up. In its typical usage, however, the human condition is invoked as a catch-all for the holes that we cannot explain in an otherwise logical world. It is, in this sense, the opposite of a scientific truth: the human condition is the imaginative padding that allows us to believe we wake up every day in a fundamentally rational, measurable, and predictable world. The notion of the human condition permits the continuation of this dogmatic belief by ascribing the gaps between the real chaos of the world and the speakers’ imagined Cartesian world to inevitable breaches of humans’ inner nature.
In sum, the most fundamental contradiction of the “human condition” is that it seeks—and proclaims to find—a universal object proper to all humans without acknowledging that such an undertaking is itself ill-defined, socially conditioned, and historically particular.
These essays set out to invite an empirically and philosophically sound collective self-reflection. Our search is not in the direction of the factory settings of humans, but why we might believe in such a thing in the first place. For being so commonly referenced, the human condition is remarkably nebulous—why? In what discourses does it appear, and for what ends? Do we invoke the human condition as a product of science, ethical consideration, and rigorous philosophy, or as a psychological reconciliation with a planet on the brink of extinction? What might the elements of ourselves that we believe are universal reveal, not about the way people actually are, but about the unprecedented peculiarity of self-reflection in the modern age?