The phrase "the human understanding" is correct and usable in written English.
You can use it to refer to the capacity people have to comprehend or understand something. For example, "The complexity of the issue was beyond the human understanding."
In terms of the material improvement of the lot of humanity, not to mention of the human understanding and control over nature, the case for seeing the history of the 20th century as progress is actually more compelling than it was in the 19th.
One is a moralist who expects to be judged by the sternest criteria; the other is a canny mover who tells people that he has the juice, and the human understanding, to give them what they want.
As Francis Bacon put it nearly 400 years ago, "The human understanding when it has once adopted an opinion…draws all things else to support and agree with it".
Francis Bacon's philosophical masterwork Novum Organum, published in 1620, analyses four kinds of idols or false notions that "are now in possession of the human understanding, and have taken deep root therein".
Yet the supreme value that Arendt places on individual pride and aristocratic distance, on intellect and excellence, also sharply restricts the human understanding that must be the basis for any confrontation with political evil, especially the evil of the Holocaust.
The grand old man of American letters since he was made a Nobel Laureate in 1976 "for the human understanding and subtle analysis of contemporary culture that are combined in his work", his recent novella, The Actual, was fairly slight but respectfully received; Ravelstein, a memento mori to dead friend, is suffused with mortal dread and fine comedy.
The "almost mythical" Human Project is turned into a "metaphor for the possibility of the evolution of the human spirit, the evolution of human understanding".
Yet what he is most eager to communicate, echoing Popper, is the imperfection of human understanding and the fallibility of all theorists, including himself: "The time is ripe for developing a conceptual framework based on our fallibility".
"The clarity and human understanding on the page is simply breathtaking.
Such holistic tendencies would seem to put the attainment of the requisite knowledge beyond the boundaries of human understanding.
The princess asserted that "the heritage of Cyrus was the heritage of human understanding, tolerance, courage, compassion and, above all, human liberty".
