The (Post)human Condition

Abstract

The human turn in the Anthropocene landscape involves a certain hubris compared with a more traditional Western cosmological existential understanding of the world, and thereby it also comes to involve an exodus and estrangement from the limited and simultaneously central position that humankind holds in this understanding. Now, moving into the foreground, we see another topography in which Earth appears as an “ascetic celestial body” inhabited by self-transcending beings, setting new goals in a way that precludes the hitherto existing possibility of finding a way back to a given context.

The human turn consequently points onwards, to a posthuman condition in which humankind is no longer the measure of all things, where humans must look for themselves anew as they try to find and formulate the standards and the scales to which they adhere. Yet even here, the human remains a decisive factor to such an extent that it has become a matter of life and death how humans behave, educate and instruct each other, not only for humans but also for the planet at large.