Unfit for the future? The depoliticization of human perfectibility,from the Enlightenment to transhumanism

More than human: transhumanism and the technological quest for perfection

Arising in the 1980s and taking shape mainly throughout the 1990s in the United States, transhumanism designates 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’ (More, 2013a: 3). Gathering several thousand members in the international association Humanity+, including philosophers, bioethicists, engineers, and entrepreneurs, transhumanism and its ideals for the technoscientifically enhanced human being enjoy solid institutional support. ⁴ The philosopher Nick Bostrom, an LSE graduate and the co-founder of the World Transhumanist Association, teaches at the University of Oxford, directs the influential Future of Humanity Institute, and sits on numerous bioethics committees. Supported by the US National Science Foundation, which, in 2002, published the influential report, Converging Technologies for Improving Human Performance (Roco and Bainbridge, 2002), transhumanist ideals are also on the agenda of economic giants like Google. Created in 2013 in the Google X Lab, the biotechnology company Calico (California Life Company) is mandated with developing in-depth knowledge of the biological characteristics of aging to indefinitely prolong human life expectancy: ‘We will use that knowledge to devise interventions that enable people to lead longer and healthier lives. We’re tackling aging, one of life’s greatest mysteries’ (http://www.calicolabs.com/). At the crossroads of business and scientific research, transhumanism is fully in keeping with contemporary biocapitalism and the quest for a biomedical optimization of human performance. As Nikolas Rose points out, the contemporary biopolitical model

is neither delimited by the poles of illness and death, nor focused on eliminating pathology to protect the destiny of the nation. Rather, it is concerned with our growing capacities to control, manage, engineer, reshape, and modulate the very vital capacities of human beings as living creatures. (2007: 3)

These superior capacities provided by technosciences first and foremost enable a remodelling of the human body to perfect it. Countering the body’s limited capacities, transhumanists call for the body to become stronger by developing more resistance to illness and stress, or by enhancing greater sensory acuity, even creating new senses. In short, this would be a version 2.0 of the human body (Kurzweil, 2003), experienced most notably in the military with exoskeleton-equipped cyber-soldiers. Improving one’s body also means opening up the possibility of freely determining one’s gender and sexuality, as supporters of postgenderism demand (Dvorsky and Hughes, 2008). Second, transhumanists seek to use technoscientific and biomedical progress to become more intelligent. This applies as much to the use of smart drugs that optimize attention and concentration as to implanted electronic chips that sharpen intellectual aptitudes (Bostrom and Sandberg, 2006). Third, for transhumanists, technoscientific progress promises happier humans by increased pharmacological control of emotions, qualified by David Pearce as ‘paradise engineering’ (Pearce, 2003). These would also increase human empathy to pacify human relationships (Persson and Savulescu, 2012) or even pharmacologically optimize romantic relationships (Earp et al., 2013; 2015). Finally, transhumanists are also in favour of biotechnological control of birth through a kind of liberal eugenics (Savulescu, 2001; Agar, 2004) and the pushing back of death to live longer, even indefinitely. Seen as no less than a disease to be cured, old age is indeed the ultimate obstacle for transhumanists (Kurzweil and Grossman, 2006).

Though transhumanist ideals fit into a tradition of thought that its members trace back to the English biofuturism of the 1920s (see Hughes, 2008; Tirosh-Samuelson, 2012), the movement does like to solidly anchor its battle in human history to better legitimize it. Some thinkers, like Ray Kurzweil, do not hesitate to trace transhumanist ideals back to the deepest origins of human history. ‘Expanding our potential is precisely the primary distinction of our species,’ he says (Kurzweil, 2003). The most commonly defended idea, however, is that transhumanism’s ideology is rooted in the eighteenth-century Enlightenment’s emancipatory philosophy. For many of today’s defenders of human enhancement, transhumanism is indeed anchored in the humanist tradition of thought and its ideal of human perfectibility, the intention and scope of which transhumanism only seeks to extend and develop. Philosopher James Hughes stresses this point: ‘Transhumanism, the belief that science can be used to transcend the limitations of human body and brain, is an ideological descendant of the Enlightenment, a part of the family of Enlightenment philosophies’ (Hughes, 2010: 622). This is also how ‘The Transhumanist FAQ’ presents it:

Transhumanism can be viewed as an extension of humanism, from which it is partially derived…Just as we use rational means to improve the human condition and the external world, we can also use such means to improve ourselves, the human organism. In doing so, we are not limited to traditional humanistic methods, such as education and cultural development. We can also use technological means that will eventually enable us to move beyond what some would think of as ‘human’. (Bostrom, 2003a: 4)

But is this genealogy truly justifiable? Does it really do justice to the eighteenth-century philosophers’ view of human perfectibility? As we will now see, thought on human perfectibility and its means and goals is indeed central to Enlightenment philosophy. Driven by the aspiration for liberation from the old paradigm, in the eighteenth century, the Enlightenment thinkers clearly affirmed the indefinitely perfectible nature of the human being. And their quest for perfectibility already displayed a technoscientific dimension in which today’s transhumanism is undeniably rooted. However, the humanist idea of the perfectible human was never reduced to just this technical dimension; rather, it encompassed a much deeper meaning and social and political scope.

The humanist conception of human perfectibility in Enlightenment philosophy

After having addressed, so curiously, the means of making more beautiful and better animal races or more useful and pleasant plants; after having remodelled a hundred times over horses and dogs; after having transplanted, grafted, and worked in every possible way the fruits and the flowers, is it not shameful to have totally neglected the race of Man? It is time, in this respect as in many others, to adhere to a system of seeing things worthy of an era of regeneration: it is time to dare to do to ourselves what we have so positively done to so many of our living companions; to dare to revisit and correct the works of nature. (Cabanis, [1802] 1844: 298; translation)

The philosopher Sir Francis Bacon is one of the first to express this modern aspiration to perfect the human body in his famous utopian novel The New Atlantis (Bacon, [1624] 2000), in which he sketches a portrait of a society located on an island in the Southern oceans. Entirely devoted to science and experimentation, its ultimate goal is ‘the enlarging of the bounds of Human Empire, to the effecting of all things possible’ (Bacon, [1624] 2000: 119; translation). The novel ends most notably with a list of several ‘natural wonders’ that quite strikingly reflect contemporary transhumanist claims:

The prolongation of life; the restitution of youth in some degree; the retardation of age; the curing of diseases counted incurable; the mitigation of pain; the increasing of ability for suffering torture, or pain…the altering of stature; the altering of features; the increasing and exalting of intellectual parts; versions of bodies into other bodies; making of new species; transplanting of one species into another…force of the imagination, either upon another body, or upon the body itself; acceleration of time in maturation…(Bacon, [1624] 2000: 132–3; translation)

We owe our thanks to Jean-Jacques Rousseau for coining the neologism ‘perfectibility’ in his famous Discourse on the Origin and Basis of Inequality among Men (Rousseau, [1755] 1992). As Rousseau defines it, the notion of perfectibility designates a new conception of humans and their action on the world that values their indetermination and autonomy. The notion is therefore not really a synonym of ‘perfection’ or ‘progress’. Just as euphoric as it is dysphoric, it cannot be dissociated from ‘a painful reflection on the powers of Man, his boundaries, thresholds, and limits, that are also their excesses and errors’ (Lotterie, 1998, p. 384; translation). As Rousseau points out:

It would be sad for us to be forced to agree that this distinctive and almost unlimited faculty is the source of all man’s misfortunes; that this is what, by dint of time, draws him out of that original condition in which he would pass tranquil and innocent days; that this is what, through centuries of giving rise to his enlightenment and his errors, his vices and his virtues, eventually make him a tyrant over himself and nature. (Rousseau, [1755] 1992: 183–4)

This social and undetermined nature that characterizes humans in Rousseau’s view, and that he grasps through the concept of perfectibility, opens a political horizon of action in the world. It is no coincidence that Rousseau shapes the notion of perfectibility in his Second Discourse, which is devoted to the issue of inequality and its sources. By defining humans as perfectible beings – meaning social and autonomous beings – formed in and by society, Rousseau works to denaturalize the question of social inequalities. As Couze Venn points out: ‘Central to the politics of Enlightenment thinkers was the rejection of the deep-seated belief that inequality and poverty were inevitable and reflected the natural state of human societies’ (2006: 479). By showing that society is a human construction and not the result of divine will or nature’s hidden plan, Rousseau indeed establishes that human beings are able to build for themselves a more just and decent society. The issues of bondage and social inequality, until then examined almost exclusively in metaphysical terms, become for Rousseau solid social and political problems on which humans can henceforth take action. In other words, through the notion of human perfectibility, Rousseau contributes to denaturalizing the traditional social order and its host of inequalities and, in the same vein, applauds the human power to take political action on oneself and on the world to belie the fatalisms that power uses to assert its strength.

At the core of Enlightenment philosophy and its model of perfectibility lies the recognition of humans’ social nature and the fact that it is not true human perfectibility except in, by, and for society. ⁵ Establishing political promise for a better world, the idea of human perfectibility indicates here a true social and political project, in which education and citizen action are key instruments. For Enlightenment thinkers, the perfectible Man is a being whose duty is first and foremost to master his own autonomy, in other words, to be able to question religious dogma and dominant social mores (see Kant, [1784] 1967). According to this meaning, the finality of human perfectibility in Enlightenment philosophy is far from being reduced to the idea of a technical mastery of nature. More fundamentally, it refers to a social and political emancipation of the human being, to founding a fully autonomous society that is the foundation for modern democratic thought, according to the principle of a reflexive self-institution of society, as described by philosopher Cornélius Castoriadis: ‘The project of autonomy is the cultural horizon of democratic institutions, inasmuch as they involve an explicit self-constitution of society’ (Arnason, 1989: 330). If technoscientific mastery can contribute to bettering human destiny, for Rousseau, and more broadly for all Enlightenment-era philosophers, it comes on the condition of remaining subordinate to more fundamental social and political imperatives. Technoscientific mastery is, in other words, embedded in the broader project of politically improving social living conditions. As we will now see, that it is precisely this social and political aspect of the humanist conception of human perfectibility that tends to be concealed in contemporary transhumanist discourses.

Transhumanism or the contemporary reversal of human perfectibility

Through the ideals of human enhancement – the perspective of a more attractive, stronger, more intelligent human – it is no longer a question of social and political improvement of the human condition (see also Winner, 2002). Quite the contrary, what prevails is an essentially depoliticized and adaptive conception of human perfectibility. The perspective adopted by transhumanism is definitely always that of technically changing humans and engineering life itself at a molecular level (Rose, 2001; 2007), rather than politically questioning and improving our social environment from a critical and reflexive perspective. This reversal does not regard just libertarian transhumanism, centred on the individual and the optimization of its performance. More broadly, it looks at the transhumanist trend that has called these last years for a social and democratic approach (see Hughes, 2004; Persson and Savulescu, 2012). If it is interested, as we will see, in contemporary social and environmental problems, this so-called social transhumanism also participates in ‘depoliticizing’ human perfectibility by systematically concealing the social determinants at play in these issues. In other words, the transhumanist view of perfectibility – even by the branch of the movement that claims to be more ‘social’ and ‘progressive’ – is built on complete political disinvestment, and thus marks a reversal of the Enlightenment thinkers’ project of autonomy.

This reversal is founded first on a depreciative view of humans and the human body, through what we could call an anthropology of deficiency. The promotional showcase of a better performing human indeed is based on a systematic stigmatization of life and the human body (see also Hauskeller, 2016). ⁶ Transhumanist thought posits that it is never our social and political environment that is maladapted or problematic; rather, it is the human beings in flesh and blood. While the humanist conception of human perfectibility contributed to ‘denaturalizing’ social problems for better political action, the transhumanist conception draws on the total ‘naturalization’ of social problems, attributing them to a ‘deficient’ human nature. This pathological view of the human as a feared and handicapped biological being is at the core of transhumanist philosopher Max More’s theory in his famous ‘letter to Mother Nature’:

Mother Nature, truly we are grateful for what you have made us. No doubt you did the best you could. However, with all due respect, we must say that you have in many ways done a poor job with the human constitution. You have made us vulnerable to disease and damage. You compel us to age and die—just as we’re beginning to attain wisdom. You were miserly in the extent to which you gave us awareness of our somatic, cognitive, and emotional processes. You held out on us by giving the sharpest senses to other animals. You made us functional only under narrow environmental conditions. You gave us limited memory, poor impulse control, and tribalistic, xenophobic urges. And, you forgot to give us the operating manual for ourselves! What you have made us is glorious, yet deeply flawed. (More, 2013b: 449)

The work significantly entitled Unfit for the Future: The Need for Moral Enhancement, written by thinkers Ingmar Persson and Julian Savulescu (2012) – a work often cited as the model of a progressive transhumanism that is attentive to the social and moral well-being of humanity – develops a similar reasoning that, this time, blames not the human body, but the human sense of morality from a biological perspective. The authors of this book begin with the observation that humanity has entered a new era where humans face issues and risks on a planetary scale. Humanity has never before acquired, in particular with new technologies, such power to act on itself and on the world with the major potential of destroying itself and the world. For these thinkers, we are not morally competent to overcome the challenges we face. But far from incriminating our social models or political and social choices, the authors attack our so-called archaic psychology to explain this moral deficit:

Even if human beings were psychologically and morally fit for life in those natural conditions in which they have lived during most of the time that the human species has existed, humans have now so radically affected their conditions of living that they might be less psychologically and morally fit for life in these new conditions. These new conditions consist in societies with an enormous population density and an advanced science and technology, which enable their citizens to exercise an influence that extends all over the world and far into the future. If human beings do not better adapt psychologically and morally to these new conditions, human civilization could be threatened. (Persson and Savulescu, 2010: 660)

This transhumanist stigmatization of the human body leads to a radical depoliticization of human perfectibility. As opposed to Enlightenment philosophy, which opened the horizon for taking political action in the world through an appreciation of citizens’ critical autonomy, transhumanism encourages an adaptive and essentially technoscientific view of human perfectibility. There is just one solution in the transhumanist world: adapting through human engineering, not political revolt. ⁷ Pointing to the deficiency of the human body rather than the limits of a contemporary hyper-consumer society, Ray Kurzweil calls for the complete technical reengineering of the human organism. The first phase, he specifies, ‘will be largely biochemical, in the form of drugs and supplements that will block excess caloric absorption and otherwise reprogram metabolic pathways for optimal health’ (Kurzweil, 2003). In the second phase, the human body will cohabitate with nanobots: ‘nanobots in the digestive tract and bloodstream will intelligently extract the precise nutrients we need, call for needed additional nutrients and supplements through our personal wireless local area network, and send the rest of the food we eat on its way to be passed through for elimination’ (Kurzweil, 2003). From human heart to brain, the whole body should be subjected, says Kurzweil, to a technoscientific remodelling to be able to meet the requirements of a modern technological world. James Hughes agrees: ‘Only safe and cheap genetic and pharmaceutical therapies can successfully stop the deadly world-wide rise of obesity’ (2004: 20).

From a similar perspective and after having blamed our biologically deficient morality, Savulescu and Persson call obviously not to politically transform our social living conditions, but to technically increase humans’ moral sensibility and empathy. The researchers’ solution to current social issues indeed is creating human beings equipped with technically boosted empathy:

[O]ur knowledge of human biology, in particular of genetics and neurobiology, is now beginning to supply us with means of directly affecting the biological or physiological bases of human motivation, e.g. by the use of pharmacological and genetic methods, like genetic selection and engineering. We shall suggest that there are in principle no philosophical or moral objections to the use of such biomedical means of moral enhancement – moral bioenhancement, as we shall call it…(Persson and Savulescu, 2012: 2)

Conclusion

In his speech at Liberty Plaza Park during Occupy Wall Street, on October 9, 2011, philosopher Slavoj Žižek shed light on a strange division between what is considered possible and what is rejected as unrealistic in contemporary Western societies. He specifies:

Today, the possible and the impossible are distributed in a strange way, both simultaneously exploding into an excess. One the one hand, in the domains of personal freedoms and scientific technology, the impossible is becoming increasingly possible (or so we are told): ‘nothing is impossible,’…we can enhance our physical and psychic abilities through interventions into the genome, right up to the techno-gnostic dream of achieving immortality by transforming our identity into a software program transferable from one piece of hardware to another…On the other hand, especially in the domain of social and economic relations, our era sees itself as having reached the age of maturity in which…humanity has abandoned the millenarian utopian dreams and accepted the constraints of reality (read: of capitalist socio-economic reality) with all its attendants impossibilities: You cannot… engage in collective political acts (which necessarily end in totalitarian terror), or cling to the old Welfare State (it makes you non-competitive and leads to economic crisis), or isolate yourself from the global market, and so on. (Žižek, 2010: 419)

As philosopher Cornélius Castoriadis states: ‘[N]ot only does autonomy have nothing to do with any kind of “adaptation” to the state of existing things, it is the opposite, since it precisely means the capacity of questioning this order’ (Castoriadis, as quoted in Caumières and Tomès, 2011). Precisely, transhumanism does not stand out by its capacity to question the capitalist order and its central values of performance, surpassing one’s limits, growth, and permanent productivity and flexibility. Instead, it naturalizes it completely by instructing us to chemically and biologically adjust. From the transhumanist point of view – and again, even the branch calling for social and progressive commitment – it is always the human being that is unfit for the future; a future which is always naturalized and so taken for granted. Never does transhumanism, whatever its variation, seriously consider that it is this very future – the capitalist future of indefinite growth and technical progress – that is fundamentally maladapted to establishing a truly human society. Actually, the enhanced human is the typical ideal not of an emancipated human, but a human perfectly adapted to the new biotechnological spirit of capitalism. However revolutionary, this biotechnological quest for perfection certainly is not revolutionary in the political and fundamental meaning of the term. Instead, quite to the contrary, transhumanism shows, to borrow Hannah Arendt’s words, a ‘becoming indifferent to politics, which means renouncing thought and judgment, and the struggle for making the world human again’ (Arendt, 1995: 33; translation).

But this struggle ‘for making the world human again’ now also involves a deep rethinking of the humanist conception of human perfectibility inherited from the Enlightenment, particularly its element of technoscientific ‘rational mastery’. Indeed, the modern project of autonomy cannot be pursued on an anthropocentric basis of removing humans from nature and the living world. Claude Lévi-Strauss forewarned, following in Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s footsteps,

We started by cutting man off from nature and establishing him in an absolute reign. We believed ourselves to have thus erased his most unassailable characteristic: that he is first a living being. Remaining blind to this common property, we gave free rein to all excesses. (Lévi-Strauss, 1973: 53)