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Hannah Arendt, in The Human Condition, is quick to make sure that we understand that the human condition as such is not equivalent to human nature. For her, while the latter consists of “essential characteristics of human existence in the sense that without them this existence would no longer be human,”¹⁾Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition [HC] (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2018), 10. the human condition as such is a structuring principle: “conditions of human existence […that] can never ‘explain’ what we are or answer the question of who we are for the simple reason that they never condition us absolutely.”²⁾HC, 11. Indeed, for her, human nature is likely both inexplicable without recourse to theology — she notes that “[t]he question about the nature of man is no less a theological question than the question about the nature of God; both can be settled only within the framework of a divinely revealed answer”³⁾Ibid., 11 f. 2. — and, perhaps, non-existent: “the fact that attempts to define the nature of man lead so easily into an idea which definitely strikes us as ‘superhuman’ and therefore is identified with the divine may cast suspicion upon the very concept of ‘human nature.'”⁴⁾Ibid., 11.

It is my contention, however, that not only does Arendt (perhaps unconsciously) smuggle human nature and/or essentialism back into the picture despite being nominally anti-essentialist, but she also ontologizes human finitude in the same way Ray Brassier accuses Heidegger of doing. In this short post, what I want to try to do is explicate Arendt’s supposed anti-essentialism in The Human Condition, recapitulate Ray Brassier’s critique of anti-Prometheans in his 2014 essay “Prometheanism and its Critics,”⁵⁾Ray Brassier, “Prometheanism and its Critics” [“PC”], in #Accelerate: The Accelerationist Reader, ed. R. Mackay and A. Avanessian. (Falmouth, UK: Urbanomic, 2014.): 467-487. and ultimately argue that despite Arendt’s claims, there is a latent essentialism in her work.

Hannah Arendt by Ben Northern

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