The Human Condition Today: The Challenge of Science

An essay in Arendt Studies by Roger Berkowitz (2018) written for the 50th Anniversary Celebration of Hannah Arendt’s The Human Condition (1958) was recently republished in The Abstract Elephant, a publicly available journal. Berkowitz writes:

What The Human Condition reveals today is the basic conditions of human existence. The bite of the book is to show how the scientific worldview threatens to fundamentally alter the earthly and worldly conditions in which human beings have lived. And since humans are conditioned beings, the change from living as split beings — earthly in our subjection to fate and worldly in our human capacity to create our own humanly built world — to living uniformly in a fully artificial and alienated world, threatens to transform humanity itself. The transformation Arendt describes as the threat of the forces of science, artificial intelligence, and the merging of man with machines is the loss of our earthly human plurality to the technological singularity. Unless, in thinking what we are doing, we choose to act to hold on to our humanity.