'Nietzsche Gets A Modem': Transhumanism and The Technological Sublime
'Nietzsche Gets A Modem': Transhumanism and The Technological Sublime
'Nietzsche Gets A Modem': Transhumanism and The Technological Sublime
1, March 2002
Abstract
Transhumanism is a futuristic philosophy which celebrates the potential of
advanced technologies to augment human functioning to unprecedented
degrees, ushering in a new phase of `posthuman' evolution. Some trans-
humanists even regard digital technologies as capable of `re-enchanting'
the world. Such visions of `cyberspace as sacred space' conceal many value-
judgments, however, not least in the universalisation of a metaphysics of
technoscience founded on longings for invulnerability, incorporeality and
omniscience. Such propensities cloak ideologies of technocratic consumer-
ism that refuse to engage with the global implications of new technologies.
A theologically-derived critique not only exposes the ideology of
`transcendence' at the heart of transhumanism, but also challenges its
claim to represent a latter-day Nietzschean sensibility.
I. INTRODUCTION
Early futurologists such as Daniel Bell and Alvin Toffler promised the advent of
a knowledge-based society in which technologies of production and resource
management would be conducted according to rational principles.6 The
resulting `knowledge society' promised prosperity, efficiency and social equity
wrought by intelligent methods and technologies facilitated by enhanced
gathering and processing of information. In Marshall McLuhan's vision of the
global village, the information revolution would enable a kind of digital
democracy. More recently, national politicians in the UK and the US have
referred to the `information superhighway' as the key to economic prosperity,
largely as a result of the greater competitiveness of industry brought about by a
more skilled workforce.7 This is a vision of a post-industrial society that solves
its problems of wealth creation and distribution through advanced techno-
logies; a futurology characterised by technologically-driven abundance and
democratisation.
Other recent visions of the future continue this mood. Entitled `Your Bionic
Future', a recent edition of the popular science journal Scientific American
considered various dimensions of the future impact of genetic, cybernetic and
digital technologies, setting out a panorama of `How technology will change
the way you live in the next millennium'.8 Articles on artificial intelligence,
cloning, genetic modification and virtual reality offer real-life versions of the
probable lifestyle of Western societies into the twenty-first century. The articles
reflect a predominance of designer babies, cosmetic and spare-part surgery,
cyber-shopping, smart houses and genetically-attuned pharmaceuticals, repres-
enting priorities primarily comprised of cosmetic enhancement, leisure or
lifestyle. The overall impression is of luxury lifestyle options that enhance the
lot of those with the necessary resources to afford them. It is also a classically
`technocratic' vision in that it assumes technology will solve problems without
necessitating socio-economic changes. Technology needs no political will to
68 TRANSHUMANISM AND THE TECH NOLOGICAL SUBLIME
Posthumans may be partly or mostly biological in form, but will likely be partly
or wholly postbiologicalÐour personalities having been transferred `into' more
durable, modifiable, and faster, more powerful bodies and thinking hardware.
Some of the technologies that we currently expect to play a role in allowing us to
become posthuman include genetic engineering, neural-computer integration,
molecular nanotechnology, and cognitive science.17
limitations (of strength and intelligence) and finitude (decay, disease and death)
by means of implants, modifications or enhancements. As the product of
human imagination, technology provides the next catalyst to evolution, a
means through which a `posthuman synthesis'18 will be attained. Abetted by
the fruits of technoscience, transhumanism advances the licence for self-
improvement exponentially to pave the way into the next phase of human
history. Technology does more than undergird humanist principles; it promises
to create nothing less than a successor species. Machinic evolution will
complete the task of natural selection; and, having dethroned the gods,
humanity will ascend to take their place.
III. `TECHNO-TRANSCENDENCE'
Nietzsche's Modem
Kroker and Weinstein's reference to Friedrich Nietzsche as `the patron saint of
the hyper-texted body'50 occurs in the context of their paean to the
technological sublime of virtuality, `the perfect evolutionary successor to
twentieth-century flesh'.51 Given his popular association with ideas of the
`Overman' who, transcending Christian values, harnesses the `will to power' in
the pursuit of a courageous vision of self-actualisation, Nietzsche may seem
the perfect prophet of a libertarian, apocalyptic transhumanism. His thought
seems ostensibly to issue an open invitation for Extropians, transhumanists
and technocrats everywhere to cast aside the outmoded constraints of ethics,
altruism and humanism in favour of a technologically-realised super-
humanism. A closer reading, however, suggests that Nietzsche would have
abhorred what he might have regarded as an excessive and uncritical
transcendentalism.
Certainly Nietzsche subscribed to the principles of secular humanism,
continued by transhumanism in the form of a search for `the evolution of
intelligent life beyond its currently human form and limits by means of science
and technology, guided by life-promoting principles and values, while avoid-
ing religion and dogma'.52 Transhumanists such as Max More stand, like
Nietzsche, in the tradition of Ludwig Feuerbach, inveighing against traditional
theism. Feuerbach saw the exposure of the fiction of God as heralding the
dawn of a new age in which humanity, acknowledged as the true authors of
their world, could achieve emancipation. Writing at the other end of the age
76 TRANSHUMANISM AND THE TECH NOLOGICAL SUBLIME
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80 TRANSHUMANISM AND THE TECH NOLOGICAL SUBLIME
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