About
For all its ubiquity, the human condition is, if anything, ill-defined.
This collection of essays asks how the human condition, rather than holding up a mirror to our entire species, might be better thought of as a window into one very particular kind of human society. Instead of searching for humans’ definitive factory settings, these essays center how the very search for factory settings—that is, the act of delineating the bounds of a human—is itself humanity’s most revealing pursuit.
These essays take the ambiguity of human nature not as a bug, but a feature of the concept. For followers of the Enlightenment philosophical tradition, the human condition acts as a catch-all explanation for the gap between the way things are and the way the speaker thinks they should be; a simple answer to existential questions like why powerful people are so greedy, why doing bad things can feel so good, and why our species is careening towards its own extinction: baby, we were born this way. The human condition, precisely because it is ambiguous, acts as a pillar of common sense in a backwards and confusing world. In this way, the things that we find most difficult to explain become those that we consider most fundamental to our nature.
The actual content of the human condition has no correlation with scientific truth. Certainly, we are biological creatures, with features that are simply out of our control. And certainly, there are things that we seem fated to do with a uniquely human flavor: philosophize, socialize, invent, discover, create, fuck up. But the human condition is used precisely as a blanket 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 rational cause-and-effect world, one which is occasionally breached by our inner nature.
In an alternative account of the human condition, society as it stands is a distortion of a more divine previous existence. This is the kind of Default Human Society implied by the question, “What is the origin of inequality?”, or the political equilibrium we associate with hunter-gatherer societies. In fact, it is well established that “hunter-gatherer society” is an incomprehensibly large label, spanning literally hundreds of thousands of years and encompassing innumerable complex and fluid social, political, and economic systems. It is questionable, then, that the human condition is so often invoked to project current human behavior backwards onto our entire lineage of ancestors. It’s even more questionable that people who did this could also be the president of the American Philosophical Association in 1998, a bestselling historian in 2011, and the president of Argentina in 2024. In other words, appealing to the human condition to explain the most backward and contradictory aspects of our particular society is seen as an intellectually sound and indeed commendable thing to do.
The main mechanism of the human condition, when it is used as a blanket explanation, is naturalization. That means it explains things by bottoming out in places like biology, evolution, and instinct. For example, to naturalize a situation where someone is being greedy, we might say: a) people are born to pursue their own self interest at the expense of others, or b) people are destined to live in environments where they can only get what is best for them at the expense of others. This is the entire basis of many indispensable philosophers, like Thomas Hobbes and Friedrich Nietzsche. The writers of this project disagree with those philosophers on that point, but for reasons that we think are honest, inviting, and productive.
In any case, in our current way of life, socially dominant groups often rely on ideas about our inner nature to tell stories about how the world came to be the way it is. These stories are elaborate and remarkable myths that become the air we breathe; a common sense so intertwined with our image of ourselves that we consider it primal, innate, and even sacred. These stories, emanating from a historically dominant strata of society, are structurally bound to naturalize the existing social order. This is not because of the way humans “naturally” are, but because our society in particular requires those at the top to reproduce the social conditions that got them there, or else risk themselves and all of their future generations falling into desperate and deplorable conditions of exploitation. In 200,000+ years of human history, living under the imperative to justify and reproduce mechanical-productive dominance through story, under penalty of a life of total scarcity and destitution, is not a statistically common situation.
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 contradictory way of life? 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?