Abstract
Our rapidly changing technological environment is becoming increasingly intimate and ubiquitous. It becomes more and more intimate to our bodies, which are not only equipped by always new smart devices, but one could almost say inhabited by ever more discreet medical aides that function as internal prostheses. In principle, with the gene scissors CrisprCat9, some elements of human bodies might soon be produced technologically even before persons are actually born. On the other hand, the disembodied dimension of intellectual and social life is increasingly affected by the impersonal ubiquitousness of digitalisation that mimes and parasites thought and communication. While yesterday’s science fiction thus becomes reality, today’s science fiction imagines technological futures in which today’s humanity itself gradually turns obsolete.
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Notes
- 1.
Identification of technology as the motor of the future evolution of humanity is the central thesis of transhumanism, as stated in the Transhumanist Declaration (More and Vita-More 2013, pp. 54–55). Technology is central also for a more general experience of posthumanity that does not identify itself with transhumanism, like for instance in N. Katherine Hayles’ groundlaying book How We Became Posthuman? (1999). How technology contributes to the emergence of the idea of posthumanity, see also Callus and Herbrechter (2004, pp. 226–257). Posthumanism is a label grouping quite heterogeneous positions. The possibility of a technological overcoming of classical humanism is imagined firstly in Donna Haraway’s famous “Cyborg manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist Feminism”, in Haraway (1991). Other forms of posthumanism study the possibility of an animal or ecological overcoming of humanism. This article focuses on the first one of these two versions.
- 2.
In what follows, my subject is what ancient Greek called technè and what modern French calls technique and German calls Technik. However, the English language has three words for it: technics, technology and technique. I will speak about technics in a maximal sense that includes technique as know-how, technics as technical objects, and technology as entire industrial systems.
- 3.
For instance, the transhumanist Nick Bostrom identifies himself as a posthumanist in “Why I Want to Be Posthuman When I Grow Up?” in More and Vita-More (2013, pp. 28–53).
- 4.
Like Heidegger, Derrida, Nancy and Stiegler are “antihumanists”, not because they would defend anything like inhumanity, on the contrary, but because they criticise all theories that claim to know what is the humanity capable of justifying humanism and, furthermore, what else is invited into enlarged forms of humanity (this is how some forms of trans- or posthumanism understand their own task). Humanity and humanism are not rejected because of their ethos but because of the philosophical status of these concepts that leaves them capable of betraying their own ethos .
- 5.
Why would immortality be self-evidently good? Generally people dislike the idea of their own death—but they forget the fact that a deathless society would have to be a childless society, as well, unless humanity wants to die of a horrible overpopulation and a total exhaustion of resources, instead. What is sadder than a world without the novelty represented by children? In popular culture, the curse of immortality is treated, for instance, in Anne Rice’s Interview with the Vampire , which Neil Jordan has turned into a film.
Why would painlessness be self-evidently good? Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World describes a society free of pain—for the greatest sources of pain, thought and feeling, have been drowned in powerful psychotropes and shallow entertainment.
Why would intelligence be self-evidently good? Generally transhumanists take intelligence to mean tireless, flawless calculations. A computer does this better than man—but as for instance Hayles (1999, pp. 194–207) has shown, there are many other forms of intelligence that cannot be reduced to computation (sensibility, sociality, play, etc.).
- 6.
Transhumanists generally take as granted that each person should be free to do whatever s/he likes with her/his own body and mind. This is defended by analytical bioethicists who insist that the state should not forbid the individuals’ projects of self-transformation (Buchanan et al. 2000). This is precisely why today’s transhumanists claim to defend the very opposite of twentieth-century totalitarian eugenics: their desire to enhance theirs and their future children’s lives is precisely not about state controlling natality and education but about individuals choosing them differently. At first glance, this may seem as irrefutable as the necessity of freedom of conscience: one ought to be free to enhance one’s body and mind as one sees fit (plastic surgery, gender reassignment, learning drugs, weird brain stimulators, etc.). But the case is much more complicated than this, because the freedom of enhancement is precisely not claimed for oneself only but for one’s children. Ordinary birth control and even embryo selection are not transhumanist. On the contrary, the genetic manipulation of the embryos is, especially since the invention of the genetic scissors CRISPRCat9, which make the fabrication of chimaeras a less chimeric idea. Genetic manipulation is not the proper autonomous consented choice of the future child, but of the adults who impose their will on the child’s very body. Starting from the moment when a future child is the result of other people’s projects, does it really make a difference if it is the state’s project to have better workers or the parent’s project to have the smartest children of the neighbourhood? I admit that quite cynically I doubt the intelligence of average parents as much as the goodwill of average states.
The most well-known critics of transhumanism have paid attention to the ethical and political problems connected to this problem in particular. Andrew Pilsch has labelled “bioconservatives” the critics who have warned against the consequences of transhumanism when it becomes a new eugenics (Pilsch 2017, p. 65). He names Francis Fukuyama, but one could have named for instance Hans Jonas (1985) or Jürgen Habermas (2001) as well. The term “conservative” is of course misleading, especially because it suggests that critics of modern consumer eugenics are critical because of religious reasons, while it is actually most often the other way round. On the contrary, critics like Jonas or Habermas warn against both consumer and state eugenics, not because they sanctify the present-day human genome, but because eugenics jeopardise the freedom and the autonomy of the child. Be it as it may, this debate on values is by nature without an objective solution: it is about values.
- 7.
Nonetheless, this does not mean that technics would bear the stamp of the ethnical community of their invention. Stiegler quotes Leroi-Gourhan who shows on the contrary that similar techniques have been invented at the same time in many places: they reflect a certain relation between man and matter rather than the inheritance of the idea of one genial inventor (Stiegler 1998, p. 63).
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Lindberg, S. (2022). On Prosthetic Existence: What Differentiates Deconstruction from Transhumanism and Posthumanism. In: Jorion, P. (eds) Humanism and its Discontents. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-67004-7_3
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