On the “All-too-Human” Dream of Transhumanism

To the extent that we are always ahead of ourselves, always beyond ourselves, the human being is almost inherently metaphysical. And when Nietzsche characterizes the human being as the not-as-yet-determined, the unfinished, the all-too-vague animal—“Er ist das noch nicht festgestellte Thier” (KSA 11, 25 [428], 125)—he plays on this being ahead of ourselves, being beyond ourselves quality as our specific quality.

We can call this adaptability, many call it intelligence, and it is also what makes us the religious animal par excellence: the animal that, unlike other animals, not only has beliefs but can hang on to them blindly and until its dying day, no less. It is also what we could call our human exceptionalism: our conviction that we are other, higher, better than other animals, a belief that the ancient Greeks, as Nietzsche also noted, were able to advance to the insight that allowed them a kind of moral superiority to the gods.

More than the Judaeo-Christian ideal of creation in the image of the divine but, and much rather in some inchoate and above all invisible fashion (key elements of the metaphysical realm) ‘better’ than the gods, the human being was entitled to sit in judgment of his gods, denouncing their petty vanities and the cupidity that tended to turn out so badly for the human. And all peoples rate their gods in one way or another—our god is higher, your divinities are lower still: indeed your divinities are false gods, empty fantasies, mere and only idols.

Thus the human being, as Nietzsche also argued, invented truth and used it to prop up the furniture of the beyond, contra the immediate, sensible, real, all and always to his own advantage, and for at least as long as he could hold what he thus called the truth as truth.

Today we have science but even more than that we have our belief in science which has long since as Nietzsche also argued replaced the ascetic ideal that was the divine compact that drove the old and new testaments. Now we ourselves, as “machinists and bridge builders of the future” (BGE §14), expect to fabricate ourselves as gods, or just about. And with all the practice we have in the invisible, in the virtual appearances that play on our computer and tablet screens and cell-phone displays, we see ourselves as no longer merely the human beings we just happen to be but “as” our machines, our internet radios, our iPads, our cell-phones. On Facebook, on Twitter, texting our location automatically, triangulating our lives with and above all into the web, we are already transhuman and we imagine that with an implant, be it of a chip, a lens, a titanium joint, or even with new curved blades as legs, à la Oscar Pistorius, or with new ears, or some such thing there will be no limit at all to what we can be and, given the vistas of cyberspace, or at least given the cartographical conceits of a range of gaming domains (seemingly going back no further than Robert E. Howard or maybe J.R. Tolkien), it is argued that there will be no limits to where we can travel or set up shop, and ‘love’ and ‘live.’

But patently, a lot of this is fantasy, good design, and an inattention to details. As many of us have sports shoes we wear for specialty sports, Pistorius has his running legs, and he has his everyday legs which he wears, rather less dramatically, most of the time. 

And what about the rest of us?  What is our vision of ourselves as cyborg, as posthuman?

Tethered to a keyboard, we tell ourselves that we are limitless: scholars tell one another and any popular ear inclined to listen that human beings are (already) transhuman, (already) humanity 2.0. 

Note: This is the name of at least one essay, a documentary film project, a short and formulaic science fiction novel, and a scholarly study. Thus, more critically, see Daniel Kennelly, “Humanity 2.0 The Singularity and Science Fiction,” The American Interest (July/August 2007) as well, less critically, Sarah Chan, “Humanity 2.0? Enhancement, Evolution and the Possible Futures of Humanity,” EMBO Reports, 9 (2008): S70-S74 and not uncritically but with just enough ambiguity to encourage the powers that be, see Steven Fuller’s Humanity 2.0: What it Means to be Human Past, Present and Future (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011).  

Welcome to the online, connected, networked, virtual, digital realm. Welcome to your finger on a keyboard, tapping a screen or traced in the air. And we might wonder about the relationship between Minority Report’s air tracing gestures and the voice commands favored on Star Trek, yet some already murmur that with Siri, the “new” iPhone already— there’s that ‘already’ word again—does this.

Stefan Sorgner challenges those who seek to keep a distance between the transhumanist movement and any connection with Nietzsche’s thought. [See here.] For Sorgner the danger that is anticipated here is an already foregone conclusion. And as he muses, had Nietzsche known of transhumanism, he would have been, because he could only have been, sympathetic with the ideal. 

The only dissonance is a sheerly mechanical one, rather to the extent that transhumanism was once named via cybernetics, and hence associated with Donna Haraway’s ‘cyborgs,’ but this dissonance seems to vanish with Ray Kurzweil’s projection of the ‘technological singularity,’ as an automatic human machine mind-meld, a becoming-machine. 

More exigent writers will note that Kurzweil himself simply takes over or “borrows” the language and the science fantasy assumptions of the San Diego computer scientist and science fiction writer, Vernor Vinge. 

See Vinge's “The Coming Technological Singularity: How to Survive in the Post-Human Era,” lecture presented to the VISION-21 Symposium, NASA Lewis Research Center and the Ohio Aerospace Institute, Mar. 30-31, 1993. See too, Whole Earth Review, Winter 1993. The text of Vinge’s talk is accessible online here.

Rather more gingerly than Kurzweil (and this is true in almost every respect), Vinge contextualizes the language of what he called “the technological singularity” as a techno-theoretical trump card, explained by the cyberneticist Vinge with reference to John von Neumann (where it should be noted that the reference to von Neumann exemplifies a fairly ecstatic conventionality that is a staple in the science fiction world -- and Vinge duly celebrates von Neumann in his fiction as a “Dawn Age genius.”) 
 

Vinge’s new dawn allusion is significant and it should be noted that founding fathers, this is what I meant by calling this a sci-fi staple, from Ray Bradbury to Arthur Clark and Isaac Asimov (and it doesn’t get more staple than that), are permitted any number of limitations because one needs them, just like a real father, for legitimacy’s sake. 
Here the abstract of Vinge’s 1993 lecture on the technological singularity is worth citing and it has a certain punchy quality, as abstracts go:

Within thirty years, we will have the technological means to create superhuman intelligence. Shortly after, the human era will be ended.

Vinge cites Stanisław Ulam as reporting von Neumann in conversation regarding

the ever accelerating progress of technology and changes in the mode of human life, which gives the appearance of approaching some essential singularity in the history of the race beyond which human affairs, as we know them, could not continue.  (Vinge)

Note that Ulam’s retrospective review of von Neumann’s mathematical contributions cites von Neumann on the imminent transience of our human interest in science, here using the term singularity to characterize the prospect of life-altering change.  (See Ulam here, p. 5)

As Vinge points out in a parentheses drawn from Günther Stent, von Neumann himself

even uses the term singularity, though it appears he is thinking of normal progress, not the creation of superhuman intellect. (For me, the superhumanity is the essence of the Singularity. Without that we would get a glut of technical riches, never properly absorbed...) (Vinge)

 In the context of the technological singularity, including, as if for good measure, a reference to superhumanity, Vinge’s contextualization requires—as all in-comments require—a context. There are a lot of such references on the theme of the human-superhuman continuum and I would recommend unpacking them with the help of Günther Anders or Peter Sloterdijk or even, to be more esoteric, Jean Baudrillard or Paul Virilio, on one side of the tale, and of any number of more or less triumphalist futurists on the other, I like to think of Vannevar Bush and Hermann Kahn but it is more conventional to think of Marshall McLuhan (it was his ‘year’ last year) or Alvin Toffler and Vinge himself cites Erik Drexler and the seemingly-out-of-touch nuclear power enthusiast (damn the radiation and damn all the other details), Freeman Dyson, in addition to Marvin Minsky and others.

Although I will be making the point in what follows that Nietzsche offers us a good deal of help, philosophically speaking, it is hard to come to terms with triumphalist futurists without going all Frankfurt school on them and the rhetoric of Vinge’s abstract illustrates why. 

First you posit, as Vinge does, the inevitable and “imminent creation by technology of entities with greater than human intelligence.” (Vinge)

Then, having said that this is done by some technology (Vinge, a computer scientist is vague here), you go on to talk about the consequences. 

This is a sales pitch: whereby having invented (or better said assumed or supposed) “superhuman intelligence” (never mind the details), the pitch continues with the declaration that “the human era will be ended” (ibid.) and thus advises that one plan accordingly. 

The rest is science fiction and it is a lot of fun.

What interests me here is the rhetorical gambit and it depends on authority for its functioning. Paul Feyerabend has recalled the mechanism of such authoritative (trump-card-style) references. Referring to the debates of the 1930s, Feyerabend explained that for decades, during

meetings up to the Fifties the discussion usually went like this. First the defenders of the second interpretation presented their arguments. Then the opponents raised objections. The objections were occasionally quite formidable and could not be easily answered. Then somebody said “but von Neumann has shown …” and with that the opposition was silenced. (Feyerabend, Science in a Free Society, 90)

Continuing in this spirit, one might well suppose that Sorgner’s own arguments would support a claim for Nietzsche’s sympathies for or affinities with cybernetics or cyborgs as indeed for the technological singularity to come, now articulated as simply another way of parsing eternal recurrence. But Sorgner does not do this and he also opts here to defer engaging with the specific reasons articulated by other transhumanists who vigorously attempt to maintain a distance from Nietzsche. Instead (and it should be noted that this is characteristic of a certain kind of philosophical formation), Sorgner proceeds to tell us what Nietzsche would have “liked.”

Thus we are informed that Nietzsche would have been an advocate of transhumanism. If I myself do not find this claim likely, this does not mean that I do not understand Sorgner’s reasons for making such a claim. And I agree that whatever Nietzsche was, he was no traditional humanist, not at least of the garden-variety sort (unless we take that garden, as some do, to have been an Epicurean garden, just as Nietzsche heard this garden reference, all meteorological expression/comprehension, including allusions to Lucretius as well as Diogenes Laertius and not less to what Nietzsche apotheosizes as “personality,” which last term turns out to matter a great deal for today’s transhumanism—avatars and bots anyone?), as his thinking on the human, all-too-human includes all the complexities that were masks for Descartes.

On Epicurus: See Howard Caygill’s luminous essay: “Under the Epicurean Skies,” Angelaki, 11/3 (2006): 107-115 which Caygill himself situates via Usener but especially with reference to A.-J. Festugiére, Epicure et ses dieux (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1946) as well as to be sure the indispensable Pierre Hadot, Philosophy as a Way of Life, trans. Michael Chase (Oxford: Blackwell, 1995).

On Lucretius:  a useful discussion for those who favor, as most Anglophone readers do, Foucault, Agamben, Badiou, etc., is Jonathan Goldberg’s, “Turning toward the World: Lucretius, in Theory,” chapter two of his The Seeds of Things: Theorizing Sexuality and Materiality in Renaissance Representations (NY: Fordham University Press, 2009),  31-63. 

And in the spirit of internet cloaking devices, we should add that if Nietzsche appreciated one thing about Descartes, it was the mask. “Everything profound loves a mask.” (BGE §40)

Anonymity or what today’s lingo calls net-privacy which these days turns out to be less about surfing porn sites than it is about the venality of Microsoft and Sony and Apple who wish to be sure as they already know everything you look at, at being able to charge you for it, thus getting their cut from anything you look at, download, or share online, each and every time you look at it, download, share it.

Sorgner’s work is not masked and one of the great strengths of Sorgner’s work is this very straightforward quality. Hence and from the start, Sorgner reminds us that

 When I first became familiar with the transhumanist movement, I immediately thought that there were many fundamental similarities between transhumanism and Nietzsche’s philosophy, especially concerning the concept of the posthuman and that of Nietzsche’s overhuman. (Sorgner 2009, 29)

But, as Sorgner reflects, apparently with some surprise: a good many transhumanists seem anxious to refuse this coordination. At the same time, Jürgen Habermas, opposing the transhumanist movement concurs with Sorgner’s reading, in an inverse direction, such that Habermas refuses in his own account what Sorgner embraces in his. 

Sorgner’s own reference here is to Habermas, Die Zukunft der menschlichen Natur. Auf dem Weg zu einer liberalen Eugenik? (Frankfurt, 2001), p. 43.

Now, it seems to me, that one can hardly be surprised at this, for Habermas had long opposed Nietzsche in several other respects.

For Habermas’s anxiety concerning the danger of Nietzsche’s thinking, alternately characterized as “infectious” or contagious, see the contributions (including a translation of Habermas’s own 1968 essay on Nietzsche’s epistemology), to Babich, ed., Nietzsche, Habermas, and Critical Theory (Amherst, New York: Humanity Books, 2004).

Thus, and this has, alas, changed the landscape and indeed the intrinsically critical force of critical theory, Habermas differs from the perspective of either an Adorno or a Horkheimer or even a Marcuse, all of whom had more specifically critical tolerance for Nietzsche’s own brand of critical thinking. 

It should, but it does not, go without saying that what Anglo-American philosophers (analytic, broadly conceived, that is: mainstream philosophy) call “critical thinking” (meaning thinking that takes an avowedly pro-science perspective) has nothing in common with either Nietzsche or classical critical theory though it does have some elements in common with Habermas. 

Sorgner seeks to coordinate Nietzsche and transhumanism point for point, in part by citing Nick Boström’s contention that just as transhumanists tend to “view human nature as a work-in-progress,” Nietzsche similarly adheres to “a dynamic will-to-power metaphysics which applies to human and all other beings, and which implies that all things are permanently undergoing some change.”  (2009, 30)

Sorgner cites Nicklas Boström, “Transhumanist Values,” in: Review of Contemporary Philosophy, 4: (2005), here p. 1. Boström teaches philosophy at Oxford University and is the Director of the Future of Humanity Institute. He is also editor with Julian Savulescu of a book on Human Enhancement (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009) and takes the notion of the “post-human” condition about as literally as one might wish. For one overview of transhumanism as a concept see Nicholas Agar, “Whereto Transhumanism? The Literature Reaches a Critical Mass,” Hastings Center Report, Vol. 37, No. 3 (May-June 2007): 12-17 as well as Boström, “Human Genetic Enhancements: A Transhumanist Perspective,” Journal of Value Inquiry, Vol. 37, No. 4 (2003): 493-506. Note that discussion continues to be heavily influenced by N. Katherine Hayles, How We Became Posthuman (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999) as well as and in addition to Turkle’s early work, Mark Poster, The Mode of Information: Poststructuralism and Social Context (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990).

So far, so good, one might say. Yet the argumentative parallel in its further projection turns out to cause trouble for Sorgner.  Hence and beyond what he calls “ontological dynamics,” (32) Sorgner locates additional parallels on the level of values, the same level that is important for Boström as for his own part, Boström argues for a normative appreciation of the transhuman. For Boström, this is related to the demarcation of risk analysis that appeals to the speculative projections critical for research of this kind quite independently of anything so trivially ontic as actual research about actual options. Too empirical, one imagines and this, so it may be argued, is the nature of futurology. In his own discussion, Sorgner begins, rightly I believe, by emphasizing both Nietzsche’s critique of religion and morality in addition to underscoring Nietzsche’s regard for science and scientific thinking.

Sorgner’s claim is that Nietzsche can be aligned with those who favor what transhumanists call “human enhancements” just to the extent that “human beings strive for power” and, this is he crux of Sorgner’s argumentative point: “If you will power, then it is in your interest to enhance yourself.” (33) For Sorgner, this point can be taken as supporting the case that Nietzsche could well have been said to

have been in favour of genetic engineering, even though he mainly stresses the importance of education for the occurrence of the evolutionary step towards the overhuman. If genetic engineering, or liberal eugenics, can actually be seen as a special type of education, which is what transhumanists seem to hold, then it is possible that this position would have been held by Nietzsche, too, as education played a significant role in his ethics. He affirmed science, and he was in favour of enhancement, and the bringing about of the overhuman. (35)

Thus we may reconstruct Sorgner’s (and not only Sorgner’s) chained conventionality here: education = evolution = genetic engineering, noting to be sure that both education and genetic evolution are here regarded as kinds of proactive evolution. Hence and just as Boström argues that we should seek to broaden ourselves, Sorgner similarly seeks to argue that this same broadening corresponds to just what Nietzsche meant by self-overcoming. For Sorgner,

Higher humans wish to permanently overcome themselves, to become stronger in the various aspects which can get developed in a human being, so that finally the overhuman can come into existence. In transhumanist thought, Nietzsche’s overhuman is being referred to as “posthuman.” (36)

Patently, Sorgner distinguishes Nietzsche’s post-human from other transhumanist definitions of the posthuman in order to demonstrate that Nietzsche’s Übermensch or overhuman is the posthuman.

Nor do I disagree with this rendering and in generaly I do not oppose the metonymic as opposed to the literalist, techno-triumphalist rendering of the language of posthumanism and I myself use this terminology in a related context and with reference to both Umberto Eco and J.-F. Lyotard in Babich, “Nietzsche and the Condition of Post-Modern Thought: Post-Nietzschean Post-Modernism” in: Clayton Koelb, ed., Nietzsche as Postmodernist: Essays Pro and Contra (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1990), 249-266. I alsospoke of the posthuman to render the nuances of the concept of Nietzsche’s Übermensch in Babich, Nietzsche’s Philosophy of Science: Reflecting Science on the Ground of Art and Life (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1994), 12ff

In every case, so Sorgner contends, Nietzsche would have been in favor of enhancement and Sorgner thinks it plausible to suppose that (and at this would be at the very least) Nietzsche believed in a certain transhumanist possibility corresponding in turn to his teaching of the overhuman.
Sorgner goes further in this regard by noting that where the transhumanists fail to provide a basis for their teaching of the transhuman, Nietzsche does provide such a basis, with the consequence that on Sorgner’s reading just this fundament explains the “relevance of the overhuman for his philosophy. The overhuman may even be the ultimate foundation for his worldview.” (39) This foundational and systematic advantage permits Sorgner to offer the coordinate argument that to the extent that the “overhuman represents the meaning of the earth,” it can only be “in the interest of higher humans to permanently overcome themselves.” (40) Key for Sorgner is the focus not on the afterlife, which Sorgner here conceives in a fairly traditionally enlightened parallel or coordination with a focus on science rather than and by contrast with traditional religion, but on meaning instead.

And yet, as we have noted, Sorgner chooses not to take his point of departure by inquiring into the reasons Boström and Habermas in addition to others including, albeit for different reasons, the musically and creatively concerned Jaron Lanier — all of whom do tend to seek to keep Nietzsche at a distance. Indeed: many in the current context of cybernetics/cyborg lifestyle exclude any and all references to Nietzsche, not least perhaps because such references inevitably involve a number of historical and historicist issues. 

 See Jaron Lanier’s You Are Not A Gadget: A Manifesto (New York: Knopf, 2010). It is relevant to the present context that in response to an email inquiry I sent regarding the argument I seek to develop here, Lanier’s first response was the exclamation, “Yikes, Nietzsche studies!” And “Yikes” is the sort of comment that speaks for itself. Elegantly so.

Indeed: many in the current context of cybernetics/cyborg lifestyle exclude any and all references to Nietzsche, not least perhaps because such references inevitably involve a number of historical and historicist issues. These are observations on his opponents not eternal truths and one might think that Sorgner would first offer at least a preliminary reflection, if not on Boström (whom he does consider) or Jaron Lanier (whom Sorgner does not here consider, just as Sorgner here also excludes reflection on Sloterdijk and above all perhaps on Anders) then perhaps, at the very least, on the reasons Habermas has for finding it necessary to argue contra the transhumanist movement and indeed regarding Habermas’s reasons for assimilating Nietzsche to the same movement.

The foregoing is based upon my essay as published in the current issue of the Agonist, edited by Yunus Tuncel.  See this issue, here, for a leading essay by Keith Ansell Pearson with essays by Paul Loeb and by myself, with a response by Stefan Sorgner.