Human Conditions

Social, ecological, and political crises together with the growing technological complexity of our life-world call for an ongoing reflection on the human conditions. We are challenged to redefine our relationship with non-humans, each other, and ourselves, and reconsider the legacy of social liberation and emancipation articulated by Enlightenment humanism.

Centered on the notion of the production of subjectivity and its discontents, the ESPhil research group ‘Human Conditions’ aims for a philosophical examination of the current status of the human. Its members reconsider the relation between institutional and technological domains and individual and collective self-understanding, and address the pervasive sense of impotence, its corresponding lack of care, attention, and trust, but also the new configurations of the world. Our engaged approach consists of both critical diagnoses of dominant social and cultural tendencies and alternative modes of imagination in conversation with societal partners and colleagues from other disciplines.

The concept of the autonomous subject is usually presupposed in discourses of liberating or empowering individuals, holding people responsible for their deeds or producing objective knowledge of the world. However, ‘subjectivity’ is also an intensely contested concept, because of its anthropocentrism, its lack of attention to our physical embedding in the world, and its blindness to the interwovenness of the self and others. In this research programme we focus on problems of subjectivity in areas such as climate change and the Anthropocene, artificial intelligence, media and design, feminism, anticolonialism, and on concepts such as post-truth, consciousness, agency, responsibility, power, and citizenship. We aim for a theoretical analysis and renegotiation of the relation between institutional domains and individual self-understanding, that enables us to overcome the sense of impotence and corresponding lack of care, attention, and trust.