Transhumanism
Extending, augmenting, even abolishing the human condition through technology: aging, disease and death as problems to be solved.
1990 – …
A contemporary current of thought, born in the 1980s-1990s in the wake of cybernetics and biotechnology, which holds human nature to be not an untouchable given but a starting point to be surpassed: through medicine, genetics, prosthetics and artificial intelligence, the human being could , extend its life indefinitely, even . The word was coined by the biologist Julian Huxley in 1957, but the movement took organized form later around figures such as , and Ray Kurzweil, and the idea of the . Heir to the and its faith in progress, it extends the modern project of mastering nature to the human being itself, and stirs sharp ethical controversy over limits, equality of access, and the meaning of a life without end. The movement is itself diverse, from libertarian Extropians to democratic transhumanists: not all give equal weight to capacity enhancement, the end of aging and immortality.
Augmenting the human being beyond its natural limits is not a transgression but a task: "human nature" is a contingent starting point, not a norm to be preserved.
Death is not the fate that gives life its worth, but the greatest of evils and a technical problem: aging is a disease, and defeating it, a goal.
There is no finished human essence: the human is a being in transition, a bridge toward the , defined by what it can become, not by what it is.
Technology is the engine of human emancipation: what freed us from scarcity can free us from our very biological limits.
Justification
Where bioconservatism sees in human nature a limit to be respected, transhumanism treats the body and mind we are given as a contingent starting point, shaped by blind evolution. Nothing sanctifies this inheritance: to forbid medicine, genetics or cognitive enhancement from extending our capacities in the name of "nature" would be a superstition. Enhancement is merely the deliberate continuation of what culture and technology have always done.
More, 'Transhumanism: Toward a Futurist Philosophy' · Bostrom, 'In Defense of Posthuman Dignity'
Justification
Transhumanism breaks with the wisdoms of acceptance: death is neither an indifferent nothingness, as for , nor the horizon that would give life its worth, as for , but the greatest of harms and a technical problem. Aging is recast as a curable disease. It is revolt carried to its conclusion: to refuse finitude as an injustice to be fought, not a fate to be tamed.
We will no longer tolerate the tyranny of aging and death.'A Letter to Mother Nature' (1999)
Bostrom, 'The Fable of the Dragon-Tyrant' · de Grey, Ending Aging
Justification
There is no fixed human essence that enhancement would betray: what we call "human nature" is a transitory state within a process of self-transformation. The human is an unfinished work, a bridge toward the rather than a completed form; its value lies in the capacities and experiences a being can unfold, not in the preservation of a type. The stance remains naturalist, however: it does not deny any given nature, it denies that nature is sacred and final.
More, 'On Becoming Posthuman' · Bostrom, 'Why I Want to Be a Posthuman When I Grow Up'
Justification
Transhumanism carries the 's faith in progress to its limit: not only knowledge and institutions, but the human being itself can and must be improved. No tradition, no inherited order holds an authority that would withstand a demonstrable improvement; the past is merely a starting point that reason and technology are meant to surpass.
More, 'The Extropian Principles' · Condorcet, Sketch for a Historical Picture of the Progress of the Human Mind (lineage)
Justification
Technology is neither a neutral tool nor an alienating force, but the chief engine of emancipation from the human condition: what pulled us out of scarcity and disease can free us from our very biological limits. The it raises do not warrant renunciation, but a prudent, steered acceleration. A desirable future is built by pushing back the frontiers of the technically possible, not by distrusting them.
Kurzweil, The Singularity Is Near · Bostrom, Superintelligence
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Justification
Extending the Cartesian project of making ourselves "masters and possessors of nature", from which it drops even the prudent "as if", transhumanism stretches that mastery to human nature itself. The human is neither a mere member of the natural order to conform to, nor only its steward, but the agent called to reconfigure it and to consciously steer its own evolution: nature has no normativity, it is material to be transformed.
Descartes, Discourse on the Method, VI · More, 'A Letter to Mother Nature'