The Posthuman Fable. Questioning The Transhumanist Imaginary (original) (raw)
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The appearance of this text indicates a milestone of a bigger project about transhumanism. Since the parent text was expanded beyond my initial planning and i will take some more time to be completed I thought that this part has a rather strong unity and could appear as a a standalone whole. What remains to be depicted is primarily some aspects of technoscience and the realtions with ideology (liberalism). However their impact of the first is small and the second is here wrapped inside the idea of the progress and seems to me its internal details would not affect the basic approach, structure and content of this text.
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On We have always been Cyborgs (2022) "An eye-opening, wide-ranging and all-inclusive study of transhumanism. Sorgner's account avoids both the utopian trap and the bogeyman spectre. He makes a compelling case for placing ourselves on the transhuman spectrum. How we continue to use technologies is in our hands. Sorgner's book is both a comprehensive introduction to transhumanist thought and a clear-sighted vision for its future realisation." Julian Savulescu, University of Oxford "With an encyclopaedic knowledge of transhumanism and a deep philosophical grounding, especially in Nietzschean thought, Stefan Sorgner tackles some of the most challenging ethical issues currently discussed, including gene editing, digital data collection, and life extension, with uncommon good sense and incisive conclusions. This study is one of the most detailed and comprehensive analyses available today. Highly recommended for anyone interested in transhumanist/posthumanist ideas and in these issues generally.
In Pursuit of Perfection: The Misguided Transhumanist Vision
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In this article I will focus on the topic that has engaged me for the past 15 years-transhumanism. When I tell people that I write about transhumanism, I usually encounter a perplexed look, since most people are unfamiliar with the term. However, here at CTNS the term is well known, and I was very pleased to attend a class that studies transhumanism and that is very familiar with the current literature on the subject. To be sure we all know what we are talking about, let me begin by presenting transhumanism and telling you why transhumanism matters. Transhumanism is not easy to define. According to the leading transhumanist theorist, Nick Bostrom, "transhumanism is a loosely defined movement … [that] represents an interdisciplinary approach to understanding and evaluating the ethical, social and strategic issues raised by present and anticipated future technologies." 1 In the same essay, Bostrom also refers to transhumanism as a "worldview that has a value component," and that broader definition is more appropriate. Transhumanism is a vision about the role of technology in the evolution of the human species. There are many facets to transhumanism, but they all cohere into the claim that the human species is on the verge of a new phase in its evolution as the result of converging technologies such as genomics, robotics, informatics, and nanotechnology. According to transhumanism, these technologies will bring about the physiological and cognitive enhancement of human beings that will pave the way for the replacement of biological humans by autonomous, superintelligent, decision-making machines, which will constitute the posthuman age. Whereas biological humans emerged out of the slow, uncontrolled, and unpredictable process of evolution, the process that will bring about the posthuman will be fast, controlled, and directed, brought about by human engineering. Described as "enhancement revolution" (Buchanan), "radical evolution" (Garreau), "designer evolution" (Young), and "conscious evolution" (Chu), 2 this futurist scenario turns the human into a design project. By means of new technologies, the human species will be redesigned so as to transcend its biological limits and pave the way for the emergence of a new posthuman species. Numerically speaking, the transhumanist movement is still very small.
From Boundless Expansion to Existential Threat: Transhumanists and
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This essay examines visions of the future of human life in transhumanist imaginaries of the posthuman, ranging from utopian figurations to catastrophist warnings. Focusing on libertarian, liberal, and conservative posthuman imaginaries, it argues that the posthu man condition is defined by changing scientific, moral, and political narratives, including ideas of revolutionary change, progressive evolution through the ethical use of human en hancement technologies, and the mitigation of existential risk for the preservation of in telligence and civilization in the long term. Changing posthuman imaginaries, it shows, reshape spaces of present and future political imagination.
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This is the text of a keynote lecture I delivered to the 'Transcending Humanity' conference at Tubingen University on the 13th July 2017. It discusses the alleged tension between the transhumanist ideal of biological freedom and the glorification of technological means to that freedom. In the talk, I argue that the tension is superficial because the concept of freedom is multidimensional.
New Proposals: Journal of Marxism and Interdisciplinary Inquiry, 2021
Transhumanism is a philosophical, cultural and political revolutionary movement. It proposes a radical transformation of the human being and the society in which it develops. Transhumanism is revolutionary on a philosophical level because it collects ontological traditions of the past that posed this transformation, from British Marxist and non-Marxist left-wing thinkers of the 19th and 20th centuries to Soviet and Russian cosmism. But going further back one can find prototranshumanist proposals from Christian theologians and Enlightenment philosophers. And it is revolutionary at a political level because it can be traced back to proto-transhumanist ideas in political revolutionaries of the past. The revolutionary doctrine par excellence of the 19th and 20th centuries is Marxism. Marxism also influenced certain transhumanists authors, although there are no transhumanist movements that claimed to be Marxist themselves, because none of them put into question capital as the basic social relation of capitalism. In the texts of Marx, Engels and Lenin there can be found proto-transhumanist ideas. Philosophical connections between Marxism and transhumanism are numerous. But beyond this, in this article we suggest that it is possible to develop a Marxist transhumanism movement that exceeds the actual individualistic and pro-capitalist prism on transhumanism. Also, we suggest transhumanism can serve to revitalize Marxist materialism in this 21st century and for the future. Marxist transhumanism would comply with the definition of communism of Marx and Engels, and it could even be said that Marxism is, essentially, transhumanist in its foundations, even when it defines posthumans as New Men, or Men Made In Property. And it could even be said that transhumanism is, in essence, Marxist. In this article, we present a historical cartography of inherent class relations in techno-scientific development and try to show the ideological impact that these relations made on transhumanists. We describe actual transhumanism as transcapitalism, and analyze its theoretical influences, proposing a theoretical itinerary for Marxist transhumanism, from Marx to more contemporary authors that would pave its political and philosophical roots. In addition, we define transcapitalism as BTA-Politics-biopolitics, thanatopolitics and anatomopolitics-in the sense of Michel Foucault. Finally, we propose that it is precisely the inherent contradictions of current Transcapitalism that set the paths for the construction of Marxist transhumanism.