[German Version]

The expression conditio humana can best be understood against the background of the philosophical anthropology that developed into an independent discipline in the course of the 20th century. It appears already in a non-technical sense in Cicero (Tusc. I, 8, 15). B. Pascal describes the condition de l'homme as inconstancy, boredom, and anxiety (Pensées [Lafuma] 20). The expression refers to human life or the human condition as such, its general character, raising the fundamental anthropological question: what makes human beings huma…