|
A
peer-reviewed electronic journal published by the Institute for Ethics and ISSN
1541-0099 27(2)
– August 2017 |
Book
review: Nietzsche and Transhumanism:
Precursor or Enemy?, ed. Yunus Tuncel
Roberto Manzocco
John Jay College for
Criminal Justice, Department of Anthropology,
City University of New York
roberto.manzocco@gmail.com
Journal of Evolution and Technology - Vol. 27 Issue 2 – August 2017 - pgs 1-3
There
is a science fiction novella, authored in 1989 by Robert Silverberg, which
summarizes perfectly the state of the current debate about Nietzsche and
transhumanism: “Enter a Soldier. Later: Enter Another.” Set in the
twenty-second century, the story revolves around some technological wizards who,
using Artificial Intelligence and historical documents, manage to reconstruct
the personalities of two historical characters, Socrates and Francisco Pizarro,
in order to have them debate about philosophical and ethical issues. This idea
would probably appeal to transhumanists, as they are well known-supporters of
the so-called “avatars,” virtual copies of living or dead people. This would
also be the only way to settle definitively the debate at the center of Nietzsche
and Transhumanism: Precursor or Enemy?, edited by Yunus Tuncel (Cambridge Scholars, 2017).
This
stimulating philosophical anthology collects contributions from well-known
transhumanist thinkers and respected Nietzsche scholars, in an attempt to
answer a straightforward (yet controversial) question: What would Nietzsche
have thought of the transhumanist endeavor? Would he have considered the
transhumanist “posthuman,” an incarnation of his own “overhuman” or not? The
title of the book mentions the concept of “precursor” which, from a
historiographical viewpoint, is highly dubious: it assumes a crypto-Marxist or
crypto-Hegelian idea of historical process seen as necessary, non-contingent.
In other words: history would be made by fixed, necessary steps, one following
necessarily the other, and that’s exactly why something can be said to be the
“precursor” of something else.
The
main protagonist of this debate is Stefan Lorenz Sorgner, a German philosopher
and the author of an original approach that combines transhumanism and posthumanism,
in what he has christened “metahumanism.” In his opening essay, “Nietzsche, the
Overhuman, and Transhumanism,” Sorgner attempts to show that Nietzsche would
have endorsed the transhumanist concept of the posthuman, and that there is a
structural similarity between the Nietzschean concept of education and the
transhumanist idea of enhancement. This effort is supported, in his own short
essay, by Max More, who states that he was consciously influenced by Nietzsche
in developing transhumanist thought.
As
pointed out by one of the contributors, the Australian philosopher Russell
Blackford, transhumanism is a broad intellectual movement with no body of
codified beliefs and no agreed agenda for change; it is a cluster of
philosophies, based on few assumptions (human beings are in a state of
transition, change is desirable and it will happen through technological means,
and so forth).
Transhumanism
is a grassroots movement, composed and aggregated of loosely tied ideas,
concerning the possibility of enhancing human capabilities through
technological means, the radical extension of human life, youth, and health,
and of course the opportunity and desirability of self-directed human evolution
– that is, the opportunity for our species to take human evolution in our own
hands. Accordingly, transhumanism is compatible with any ideology,
religion, or philosophy willing to accept or at least not oppose these goals.
This is why we can find blends of transhumanism with liberalism, anarchism,
socialism, communism, fascism, atheism, Christianity, Mormonism and so forth.
Similarly, we can blend transhumanism with any philosophical view of reality,
for example with materialistic reductionism, naïve realism, posthumanism, and
of course with the thought of Friedrich Nietzsche – as attempted by Ted Chu in
his 2014 book Human Purpose and
Transhuman Potential (Origin Press).
The
core of Tuncel’s book is of course the – complicated? troubling? ambiguous? –
relationship between Nietzsche and transhumanism, from the viewpoint of the
Nietzschean concept of Übermensch. The anthology mirrors all the main knots we
can find in Nietzsche scholarship tout court: for example, the
relationship between the Übermensch and the eternal recurrence, the correct
interpretation of the latter (ironic device or cosmological-metaphysical
reality?), the “real” Nietzschean attitude toward life (acceptance and
affirmation or passing into an overhuman condition?), and the knot of
Nietzsche’s coherence (was his thought systematic from the very beginning until
the end, or is his work contradictory?), and so forth.
Understanding
why transhumanists want to distance themselves from the German philosopher is
easy; after all, Nietzsche has been saluted by the national socialists as one
of their own, and nobody wants to be associated with the ideology of Adolf
Hitler. Moreover, the debate is quite technical; this means that, if you have
even a little training in philosophy, you can definitely benefit from these
contributions, and maybe mature your own position. If, on the other hand, you
want to join fully into the debate, and you want to mature a personal educated
position on this topic, I am afraid you will need to develop a deep Nietzschean
background and understanding.
It
is difficult to summarize the dense philosophical content of the book; so
permit me to mention a few interesting suggestions that the reader can find and
benefit from.
Ashley
Woodward compares and confronts the concept of education in Nietzsche – which
he identifies with the “Technologies of Self” mentioned by Foucault, such as reading,
writing, meditation, dietary regimes, physical practices – with the
technologies that transhumanists are very fond of, the “GRIN” technologies of genetics,
robotics, information technology, and nanotechnology. Woodward hints at a
future in which these two expressions of the human spirit might interact and
interlace.
Paul S. Loeb
gives us an interesting take on the topic of the overman/posthuman and its
relationship with time. Far from being a prison, the eternal recurrence
represents – when taken as a real feature of the world, and not as an ironic
device – a powerful ontological tool, a way for the overman to will backward in
circular time, an eternal recurrence-enabled mnemonic control of the past. The overman
is thus able to defeat the contingency that informs our lives, gain complete
control over time, autonomy, self-affirmation, and self-knowledge. After all,
if you are able to will backward and turn your past, including any minimal
detail, into a personal choice, you can know absolutely everything about
yourself, your life, your relationship with your social and cultural context. This
entails absolute self-knowledge and absolute autonomy (and freedom from any
form of contingency, any type of external causation). This is quite an
evolutionary jump, for the Nietzschean overman!
Nietzsche
has been one of the greatest thinkers in the history of philosophy, and
innumerable scholars have dissected his works in order to understand the depths
of his thought. Notwithstanding their efforts of explication, his philosophy
seems to be an inexhaustible source of new insights into the philosophical
assumptions of our contemporary world. So, we should welcome this new anthology
with curiosity and fascination. Top-notch Nietzsche scholars and prominent
transhumanists cover this difficult topic in an accessible and yet rigorous
way, to outline the main core concepts of Nietzsche’s thought, the principal
ideas of the transhumanist movement, and their possible connections. The reader
will benefit from a lively and well-argued debate on a topic that, far from
being dry and “too scholarly,” concerns the transformations that our lives will
go through in the near future.