Among the most varied attempts to define the Human, most of which start from a specific property as a sign of difference, the circumscription of the Human as a being devoid of any essence seems, in the Anthropocene era, the most appropriate designation. The question of the Human implies the fundamental question of its destiny and its position in relation to the destiny of the common world, of all sentient beings. Due to their physical, psychic, and technical constitution, human beings cannot be defined by comparison with other living beings. Beyond their bodily and instinctual connection to all other living beings and the entire global sphere, their capacity for imagination continually propels them, in their imagination, beyond their mortal condition.
Finitude and integration are constantly negated by a disintegrative fantasy of eternity. Due to their symbolic and technical development, human beings are open in their adaptability and need not merely adapt to physical conditions but insist and reinforce that the world adapts to the Human. This adaptation through symbolic and technical imagination is primarily an imitation of what is found in the multiplicity of conditions and conceptions of possible worlds. The human is originally a deprived being, a Mängelwesen; deprivation is one of the essential characteristics of the human, and all their cultural efforts and technical innovations are still compensatory techniques. In line with a certain theory of compensation, human beings compensate for their incompetence’s, or deficiencies given by nature with conceptual (linguistic), symbolic (artistic), and technical-industrial inventions.
What nature once provided freely is now appropriated through human will and instrumental power. Human beings are not merely specialized creatures, like any other animal with its own specific physical and neural constitution. Beyond their physical and psychological abilities, human beings are capable of reinventing themselves by imitating other beings as closely as possible. Human beings appropriate not only objects, but above all the gestures and processes of action of other beings, or of purely geological or physical processes. Their essence is mimesis, imitation, and dissimulation, so that Aristotle, in his Poetics ( ), long before Darwin and Nietzsche, asserted that “imitation is natural to humans from childhood, and in this they differ from other animals, for humans have the greatest capacity for imitation, and it is through imitation that they acquire their first knowledge.”
The primordial constitution of the Human can, therefore, be designated as an anarchic and groundless openness. Its essence is the imitation and invention of the most varied relationships and activities, which only constitute their reality in the course of these appropriations. But this does not mean that there is no reality as a backdrop. It means, however, that the tendencies in how humans shape the world, in accordance with their anarchic disposition, are geared toward transgressing all forms of external determination. This is evident first in primitive techniques, which serve to remove and liberate humans from their enslavement to nature, all the way to the technical innovations of the present, which affect both the naturally given body and the mind, to liberate and realize theories of a possible world to come. The Anthropocene Human is convinced that there are no longer any limits to the deliberate unfolding of their desires and fantasies, yet their corporeality and vitality inevitably ground them. The limit of the Human is the threshold of the Earth; that is, where the Earth begins, the solipsism of the human species ends.
Dirk Michael Hennrich