Abstract: The ecological crisis that the techno-scientific transformation of
the earth has generated is about to unsettle the ground upon which humans
build and consolidate their modes of dwelling. This forces us to be aware
of something outside human manipulation, which is to say, the planetary
dimension. Confrontation with the planetary dimension urges us to formulate
new ways of thinking about the world that we inhabit. The increasing
prevalence of natural catastrophes stirs the fundamental conditions upon which
the existence of humans depends. At this moment, we are forced to admit that
we cannot be free of the inertia of material reality. This paper argues that what
is required is to view the human condition in contradictory double registers.
While humans inhabit the human world as artifacts, they become part of the
vastness of the planetary dimension in which humans are entangled with
other life forms. Thus, we can pay attention to the reality that the planetary
dimension that subtends the human mode of existence becomes unstable and
extends beyond human comprehension. Adding to that, inasmuch as it is
revealed through the fractures of the human artificial world at the moment of
the disaster, it has to do with the sense of fragility that is intrinsic to the human
condition.

Keywords: the human condition, the otherness of the planet, Hannah Arendt,
earthquake, Rinko Kawauchi