The experience of totalitarianism leads Arendt to reproblematise our situation, our capacities and possibilities, with a renewed sense of their fragility and with a modified sense of the modalities through which we understand and re-present them to ourselves theoretically. What will not do here, she thinks, is another comprehensive theory of human nature. The ruptures and fragilities that recent experiences have brought to light undermine an enterprise of this sort; and commensurately, to persist in such an enterprise promises only to provide us with another reified self-conception that is likely to prove as inadequate in the face of the realities of our experience and the challenges it presents as previous formulations have proven to be. The vulnerabilities that our recent experiences have exposed were brought to light in extremis, by the way in which human powers have been organised and put into the service of rendering persons as ‘material’ to be worked upon with a view ultimately to eradicating human qualities. This indicates to us the susceptibility of persons to the conditions we make for ourselves: ‘in addition to the conditions under which life is given to man on earth, and partly out of them, men constantly create and their own self-made conditions’ (Arendt 1958: 9). The fact that we are able to formulate definitive accounts of natural phenomena is a function of the capacity for understanding which is itself related to our capacity for self-conditioning – and in this sense it provides the very reason why such definitions fail when we attempt to apply them to ourselves.