What We Get Wrong About Transhumanism
Two vectors, not one.
Transhumanism is a concept with a problem. The problem is that it has two entirely distinct meanings, two vectors on which it draws humanity forward. Many consider Transhumanism to simply be the blending of the human and the machine, specifically with the creation of cyborgs. This is not a good conception of Transhumanism.
To gain a better understanding of transhumanism and its two vectors, we must discard Cartesian dualism first and foremost. Under this popular conception of Transhumanism, we are all already cyborgs.
Pro-Human Optimism
The first vector of so-called transhumanism is an optimistic one. Marshall McLuhan understands that media, which includes all technology, is an extension of the human. To a degree, we have been transhuman since we started using tools. Spengler has a similar conception of technics. Technics are not just the tools themselves. They are also the processes in which the tools are used. These processes are stored in the mind.
For example, the hammer as tool is meaningless unless it is brought up into the technique of hammering. Hammering, as a technique, does not exist in the hammer, but rather in the human mind and nervous system. As long as technology has existed, the line between human and technology has been blurry. It is only technology insofar as we make it so.
Under the extended mind thesis put forward by Andy Clark and David Chalmers, the line between the human and the technological is even harder to draw. They use the example of a man with Alzheimer’s who uses a small notebook to keep directions as he traverses the city. The man’s wife, who does not have Alzheimer’s, uses her mind to recall directions. They argue that these two cases are not so different as they at first seem to be. The man’s mind is extended into the notebook.
McLuhan describes the process of auto-amputation as the human being offloading some capability into technology. Socrates warned against the written word, arguing that its use would reduce the capabilities of human memory. He was correct. But, by adopting the written word (which is technology), human beings extend their mental capabilities by offloading something into external technology.
Some may argue that this is not transhumanism: transhumanism is when technology becomes physically attached to the human person! This is a bad way to look at it. There are obvious counterexamples, such as prosthetic limbs or hearing aids. But, more importantly, the widespread use of smartphones and computers also runs against this point.
But these are not physically attached to the human body! Correct, but they are psychically attached. We carry out smartphones with us everywhere we go. They are practically a part of us. The difference between physical and psychological attachment is nonexistent. The mind is as much a part of the human whole as the body is. If something is psychologically attached, it is attached to the human person, likely even more so than a physical attachment.
Schopenhauer argues that mental pain is far more painful than physical pain. Changing the brain is far harder than changing the body. In the same way, a mental attachment is far more difficult to sever than a physical attachment. You can take your phone out of your pocket and put it down, but the mental attachment does not disappear so easily. Even if you leave your house, the mind still yearns for the connection long after the physical connection is severed.
Therefore, the distinction between good transhumanism versus bad transhumanism should not be evaluated based on whether or not it is physically attached. We are all transhuman already, fully integrated into technology. Rather, the distinction should based on which direction a given piece of technology pulls humanity.
In Haywood’s Foundationalist Manifesto, he argues that we should be optimistic about technology, but only insofar as it does not destroy human dignity. This should be the basis on which we evaluate technology. Does a certain technology promote human flourishing and meaning? Or does it undermine the essence of what it means to be human?
Anti-Human Pessimism
The second vector of transhumanism is the anti-human direction. British philosopher Nick Land foresees an anti-human future brought about by the relentless march of technology, in which mankind's creations will eventually supplant him as the main character of history.
What most today decry as transhumanism could better be described as cyborgism. It is the impulse to fully integrate man and machine so that there is no longer any distinction between the two.
This follows from the logic of modern materialism. Jean Baudrillard states: “For the system of political economy, the ideal type of the body is the robot. The robot is the accomplished model of the functional liberation' of the body as labour power, it is the extrapolation of absolute, asexual, rational productivity.”1 The scientific materialist project to technocratically engineer society welcomes the development of cyborgism.
Baudrillard continues: “Contemporary with the robot… the mannequin also represents a totally functionalised body under the law of value, but this time as the site of the production of the value-sign.”2 The functionalization of the human person flies in the face of human dignity. It is brought about by the desire for total technocratic control and evaluation of consequences through a purely materialist value system.
The cyborg world that this vector of transhumanism beckons the economic machine wishes for everyone to be augmented into a dehumanized automaton.
Cyborgist transhumanism finds its greatest proponents in the leftist progressive tradition. Social progressives aim to make all facets of identity fluid. Cyberfeminist Donna Haraway states:
The cyborg is a creature in a post-gender world, it has no truck with bisexuality, pre-oedipal symbiosis, unalienated labour, or other seductions to organic wholeness through a final appropriation of all the powers of the parts into a higher unity. In a sense, the cyborg has no origin story in the Western sense - a 'final' irony since the cyborg is also the awful apocalyptic telos of the 'West's' escalating dominations of abstract individuation, an ultimate self untied at last from all dependency, a man in space.3
Much like how Nietzsche describes the Earth being unchained from the Sun in Thus Spoke Zarathustra, the modern individual seeks to resist all prior value systems by unchaining themselves from everything that came before. Cyborgs are not far down the path of the leftist emancipation project, which seeks liberation from all unchosen bonds. It is an obvious next step after transhumanism, which already uses technological means of augmentation to fluidize identity. Cyborgism eliminates the need for any identity. This is the logic of cyberfeminism: ultimate emancipation from patriarchy.
Cyberfeminism and cyborgism claim to be an emancipation from the weight of traditional categories of identity (such as man, woman, child, parent, human, etc.) and instead will plunge the individual into a fluid space of nebulous and perpetual re-individuation and becoming. In reality, the human person becomes a programmable machine that can complete jobs and tasks even faster and more effectively. Transhumanist and cyberfeminist Munkittrick promotes transhumanism to liberate outsiders and create a new normal:
Transhumanists point to the pinnacle of what it believes humanity could become; where it might be going, and asks, 'why not?' and 'how do we get there?' Cyberfeminists (and postmodernists in general) look at the abject, the debased, the grotesque and the marginalized and ask why is it so? How did this become the fringe?' Transhumanism needs cyberfeminism because it functions to expose the way in which defining the human, and in turn the transhuman, can repress, reject, and otherize those it claims to help.4
Just as with feminism, the irony is that this left-coded project of liberation merely re-subjects humanity to ‘capital.’
The anti-humans are drawing us toward a post-gender technological singularity in which one’s body reflects nothing but a beacon for their digital imprint. Radical cyborgism, in which human identity is completely supplanted with digital and technological identity, is the dark future that awaits this vector. This is the one that must be resisted.
Conclusion
When the pundits of the day decry transhumanism, they are attacking the cyberfeminist/cyborg aspects of transhumanism. However, they lump in potentially pro-human technologies, such as Musk’s Neuralink, while embracing anti-human technologies at the same time.
The concern is not about what the technology is, but rather where it is taking us.
If you enjoyed this piece, please leave a LIKE and SUBSCRIBE. I plan to do at least two more essays on the transhumanism question.
For 15% off NicNac nicotine lozenges, use code AF15XSAVE15 at nicnac.com/drmonzo.
Baudrillard, Jean. Symbolic Exchange and Death. SAGE: 1976. Page 135.
Ibid.
Haraway, Donna. ‘A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century’, in Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature. Routledge, 1991.
Munkittrick, Kyle. ‘On the Importance of Being a Cyborg Feminist’. https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/kyle-munkittrick-on-the-importance-of-being-a-cyborg-feminist.
Nietzsche, and earlier Schopenhauer, made a point out of the interdependence between object and subject. What would the sun be without something to shine on? Who would Zarathustra be?
The "bad" transhumanist project is a project to make the subject into object, " independent" as you say.
But who would we be? Independent?
No we would just be another mirror, and the mirror of the world would reflect us, wholly reflective in an infinite race towards souls without substance. Thinking we would be independent, with worthless light captured between those mirrors, is laughable.
Making the world a mirror in itself, increasing our powers of reflecting our will in it, is nothing bad in itself, it depends on what human will is. And if the human will is good, the transhumanist project could be good. So i find myself agreeing.
Although I have already written about it at length in some sense, I did not truly understand transhumanism in the way that you have explained it here; to that end, I would like to thank you for this brilliant essay. It will help me work through some of my own ideas and anxieties. Indeed, as you point out, the enemy here is cyborgism, the beginnings of which our technocratic masters are using to demoralize us into an anti-human future.