Abstract
The aim of this chapter is to shed a critical light on transhumanism’s philosophy as regards its positions on nature, human nature, technology, and death. Founding my argumentation on Martin Heidegger’s later thought I will show that transhumanism aims to radically change human nature, to create a new human being, in whom technology and the organic merge so as to finally overcome death, thus fulfilling, to the highest degree, modern human being’s “will to life”.
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Notes
- 1.
For a thorough analysis of this dense work see: Polt and Fried (2001).
- 2.
Nick Bostrom, co-founder of the World Transhumanist Association, defined Transhumanism in the following way: “The intellectual and cultural movement that affirms the possibility and desirability of fundamentally improving the human condition through applied reason, especially by developing and making widely available technologies to eliminate aging and to greatly enhance human intellectual, physical, and psychological capacities (Bostrom 2003)”.
- 3.
The concept transhuman can be better understood when seen in comparison with the concept posthuman. Following Robert Ranisch and Stefan Lorenz Sorgner: “The link between the human and the posthuman is the transhuman, an abbreviation for a transitional human, to which transhumanism owes its name. In this regard, transhumanism can be understood as a transhuman-ism. By the same token, transhumanism, according to its self-understanding, is a contemporary renewal of humanism. It embraces and eventually amplifies central aspects of secular and Enlightenment humanist thought, such as belief in reason, individualism, science, progress, as well as self-perfection or cultivation (Ranisch and Lorenz Sorgner 2014, p. 8). Furthermore, according to Keith Ansell Pearson: “The transhuman condition is not about the transcendence of the human being, but concerns its non-teleological becoming in an immanent process of ‘anthropological deregulation’. When Nietzsche asks his ‘great’ question, what may still become of man?, he is speaking of a future that does not cancel or abort the human, but one which is necessarily bound up with the inhuman and the transhuman (Ansell Pearson 1997, p. 163). Finally, as Philbeck (2014) puts it: The “posthuman” in posthumanism, on the other hand, refers to a state of being that is beyond our understanding from a humanist philosophical paradigm. It delineates an entity that defines and understands itself differently than through the contemporary notion of ‘human’ because of technology’s impact on basic human characteristics. (p. 175).
- 4.
The translations of the words provided in brackets are my additions.
- 5.
Total mobilization is a term used by Ernst Jünger, in an essay bearing the same title, in order to describe the total conversion of life into energy.
- 6.
For a comprehensive account of Heidegger’s philosophy of technology see Wendland et al. (2020).
- 7.
Positionality is the word Andrew Mitchell uses to translate “das Gestell”, instead of the commonly used term “Enframing”.
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Karakasis, G. (2022). Overcoming (Our) Nature: Transhumanism and the Redefinition of Human Being’s Essence. In: Tumilty, E., Battle-Fisher, M. (eds) Transhumanism: Entering an Era of Bodyhacking and Radical Human Modification. The International Library of Bioethics, vol 100. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-14328-1_4
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