"Why does Arendt privilege politics over other human activities? Why does she repeatedly underline the intrinsic connection between political freedom and ‘a truly human life’? The answer is found in her understanding of the human condition—of what it means to be human. True, she is reluctant to discuss ‘human nature’ in general or ‘Man’ in the abstract. But what she rejects is a static conception of human nature. She does not refrain from making important general claims about human beings, so long as the claims are about a stable and yet changeable, ‘quasi-transcendental’ set of conditions. These conditions reveal a general, albeit non-absolute, structure of human beings’ concrete existence.
To some extent, it is a matter of mere semantics whether the term ‘human nature’ should be avoided due to its unfortunately essentialist connotations. Freedom Few serious thinkers in modernity, and surely none after Darwin, have considered nature—let alone human nature—to be static, fixed or unchangeable. Nevertheless, the term ‘human nature’ is often seen as implying such essentialism, and Arendt proposes, in The Human Condition, to use the term ‘human condition’ to pre-empt confusion. Her terminological preference, however, is more than a simple effort to pre-empt confusion. It also signals her broadly Heideggerian orientation that draws our attention to ‘conditions’ understood as defining limits. [...] It is important to keep in mind in this context that conditions are not the same as constraints, and limits are not the same as limitations. On the contrary, conditionality in Arendt’s sense demarcates the realm of possibility; what men and women can do, as well as cannot do, depends on the human condition. To understand how men and women are conditioned in this sense is to understand what it means to be human."
Hiruta, Kei. Hannah Arendt & Isaiah Berlin, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 2021, p. 72-73.
