The human condition in the Anthropocene

Hannah Arendt is a political philosopher who seems to have anticipated our current moment; one where it seems increasingly likely that humanly made processes may undermine the integrity of the living system that is 'life on earth' and threaten its collapse. At the risk of offering too potted a summary of what was a complex series of meditations developed over the course of her career as a political philosopher, I want to suggest the nature of her prescience in regard to what she called 'the human condition' and the human desire to reconcile themselves to 'reality, that is, try to be at home in the world' (Arendt 1994, 308).