Transhumanism: Evolutionary Futurism and the Human Technologies of Utopia Read online

  limitations”— is not also a way out of our current geopolitical bind. The

  core insights of evolutionary futurism suggest a variety of novel solutions

  for thinking beyond the blockage in the Utopian imaginary created by the

  failure of the welfare state. Transhumanism, then, is a Utopian rhetoric

  for an age of informational bodies and neoliberal subjects. Rather than

  dismiss transhumanism as naive or overly religious or too heavily invested

  in neoliberal subjectivity, this book instead argues that the multiheaded,

  polyvocal constellation of ideas we can label as transhuman are a gold-

  mine for radical thought in the present.

  We must start digging.

  24 . I N T R O D U C T I O N

  1 AN INNER TRANSHUMANISM

  Modernism and Cognitive Evolution

  When explaining the topic of this book to colleagues and friends, inevita-

  bly the topic of Nietzsche emerges: “Isn’t this just the Übermensch?” they

  inevitably ask. Given Nietzsche’s proclivity for imagining an overcoming

  of limiting human factors and declarations such as this one from Thus

  Spoke Zarathustra, “I want to teach humans the meaning of their being,

  which is the overman, the lightning from the dark cloud ‘human being,’”

  there appears to be strong affinity between evolutionary futurist rhetoric

  and Nietzsche’s philosophy of human overcoming.1 The truth of this relationship, as this chapter will unpack, is that it is complicated.

  In this chapter, I trace early instances of evolutionary futurist tropes

  through European modernism at the dawn of the twentieth century—

  specifically in the mystical account of evolution authored by P. D. Ous-

  pensky and in the feminist futurism of Mina Loy— to illustrate Nietzsche’s

  influence on the early formation of the rhetorical mode I call evolutionary

  futurism. Despite its Nietzschean heritage, however, the contemporary

  transhumanism movement maintains a much more fraught relationship

  with Nietzsche’s philosophy. In a deliberately controversial passage of

  his generally divisive “A History of Transhuman Thought,” philosopher

  Nick Bostrom dismisses the surface similarity many people note between

  Nietzsche and transhumanism:

  What Nietzsche had in mind, however, was not technological transforma-

  tion but rather a kind of soaring personal growth and cultural refinement in

  exceptional individuals (who he thought would have to overcome the life-

  sapping “slave- morality” of Christianity). Despite some surface- level similar-

  ities with the Nietzschean vision, transhumanism— with its Enlightenment

  roots, its emphasis on individual liberties, and its humanistic concern for the

  . 25

  welfare of all humans (and other sentient beings)— probably has as much or more in common with Nietzsche’s contemporary J. S. Mill, the English

  liberal thinker and utilitarian.2

  Bostrom is not wrong to make these claims. While contemporary instan-

  tiations of the transhuman project are primarily connected with evolu-

  tions of the body— through acceleration, simulation, and augmentation

  of the body’s various systems (including the brain)— the longer history

  of evolutionary futurism is strongly marked by a focus on spiritual and

  cognitive evolution.

  This second strand, what I will be calling “inner transhumanism,” is

  more closely attuned to Nietzsche’s concept of the Übermensch. Moreover,

  a focus on modernism in this chapter shows how, despite divergences

  and mutations further forward in time, Nietzsche was hugely influential

  in first suggesting the possibility of breaking from the human and the

  idea of evolutionary futurism. However, Bostrom argues that the stories

  of Gilgamesh’s quest for immortality and the fountain of youth are also

  transhuman precursors, further discrediting Nietzsche as an origin point

  in his version of transhuman history.3 That said, Nietzsche was important for the modernists I discuss in this chapter because his vision of overcoming human limits is posited in terms of a radical break from the very idea

  of the human. In the hands of theosophists, futurists, and similar Euro-

  pean avant- gardes, Nietzsche’s idea of a break from the human becomes

  coupled with modernist topoi that mark the cognitive pressures of indus-

  trialization, globality, and urbanization as forces driving us beyond the

  human. Specifically, P. D. Ouspensky and Mina Loy are the first among

  modernist thinkers to connect Nietzsche’s philosophy to what are recog-

  nizable as contemporary transhuman arguments. Their rhetoric is strik-

  ingly similar to more current examples of evolutionary futurism, but, as

  I argue, they both focus on a kind of hybridization of spiritual/cognitive

  enhancement coupled to a technological reconfiguration of evolution

  from biological to machinic, combining both the more common outer

  transhumanism and a hugely important inner transhumanism.

  Nietzsche’s Transhumanism?

  The quotation above from Bostrom’s “A History of Transhumanist

  Thought” set off a specifically revealing exchange in the pages of The Jour-

  nal of Evolution & Technology ( JET), the premier peer- reviewed journal 26 . A N I N N E R T R A N S H U M A N I S M

  of contemporary transhumanism. Following the statement that transhu-

  manism owes more to John Stewart Mill than to Friedrich Nietzsche, Ste-

  fan Lorenz Sorgner, a philosopher whose work grapples with Nietzsche’s

  posthuman thought, published “Nietzsche, the Overhuman, and Trans-

  humanism” in response. For Sorgner, Nietzsche’s understanding of evolu-

  tion beyond the human has much in common with transhumanism. He

  writes, contra Bostrom’s insistence,

  Nietzsche does not exclude the possibility that technological means bring

  about the evolutionary step. His comments concerning the conditions for

  the evolutionary step toward the overhuman are rather vague in general, but

  in this respect his attitude is similar to that of transhumanists. However, he

  thinks that the scientific spirit will govern the forthcoming millennia and

  that this spirit will bring about the end of the domination of dualist con-

  cepts of God and metaphysics, and the beginning of a wider plausibility for

  his way of thinking.4

  Sorgner’s thinking accords with the position I take in this chapter: that

  transhumanism owes at least an originary debt to Nietzsche’s thought.

  However, many of the regular contributors to JET took exception to this

  claim. Following Sorgner’s essay, a 2010 issue of the journal was dedicated

  solely to debating the role of Nietzsche’s thought in transhuman philoso-

  phy and rhetoric, presenting several short position papers, longer articles,

  and culminating in Sorgner’s own response to his respondents.

  As these responses make clear, there are a variety of transhumanisms,

  even within what could be recognized as the contemporary orthodox

  community. Despite this range of thought, a general consensus seems to

  be to reject Sorgner’s assertion that Nietzsche is a transhumanist. Reasons

  for this insistence vary, but a common thread emerges most glaringly in

  William Sims Bainbridge’s “Burglarizing Nietzsche’s Tomb,” a rather
ram-

  bling account of Nietzsche’s Apollonian/Dionysian distinction, Roman-

  tic Europe, and Nazism. Its introductory paragraph concludes, “Perhaps

  Nietzsche himself was the first transhumanist. Perhaps he really was a

  Nazi. ”5, As Sorgner points out in his response, Bainbridge seems to be arguing that, despite the previous assertion, Nietzsche was a Nazi and that

  this Nazism means that Nietzsche cannot be a transhumanist (though, of

  course, as Sorgner points out, this is both ideologically problematic and

  historically impossible). Many of the readings of Nietzsche by Bainbridge’s

  transhumanist peers, while not as explicitly depicting this concern for

  Nietzsche’s contributions to Nazism, are wary of the philosophy of the

  A N I N N E R T R A N S H U M A N I S M . 27

  Übermensch due to the tainting horrors of National Socialism. As Sorgner carefully indicates in his response, this view of Nietzsche suggests that

  many transhumanists have not been keeping up with current scholarship

  on Nietzsche beyond the general revival in his thought started by Walter

  Kaufmann with the now- distant publication of Nietzsche: Philosopher,

  Psychologist, Antichrist in 1950.

  Overall, the conversation between Sorgner and his respondents in

  this issue of JET is marked by missed connections, with Sorgner, in his

  response, continuing to reject the other contributors’ assertions about

  Nietzsche. Sorgner takes recourse to “the current state of the art in

  Nietzsche scholarship” (especially obvious in his continued rejection of

  assertions that Nietzsche was antiscience).6 It becomes clear throughout the debate that, despite not being familiar with the proliferation of

  studies dimensionalizing Nietzsche’s thought over the past few decades,

  many of JET’s regular contributors remain emphatic that Nietzsche is not

  a transhumanist and that his thought has little to offer transhumanism.

  Philosopher Max More’s response to Sorgner, though, is an exception.

  Based on Sorgner’s comments in his response, More’s argument appears

  to be the only one with which Sorgner does not take issue— at least at the

  level of Nietzsche interpretation. More’s most salient contribution to the

  debate in JET, as well as to my argument in this chapter, is that

  What we can infer is that differing variants of transhumanism are possible.

  Certainly there is no inconsistency between transhumanism and a utilitar-

  ian morality. But neither is there any inconsistency between transhumanism

  and a more Nietzschean view of morality. While Nietzsche viewed morality

  as essentially perspectival, we can easily enough fit him loosely within the

  virtue ethics approach classically represented by Aristotle. Yes, transhuman-

  ism can be sanitized and made safe so that it fits comfortably with utilitarian

  thinking. Or we can take seriously Nietzsche’s determination to undertake a

  “revaluation of all values. ”7

  More is right in pointing out that there are certainly many ways of getting

  at the essential evolutionary paradigm represented by transhumanism;

  documenting these paths is one of the main projects of this book, after all.

  However, I would like to make one key departure from More’s account of

  the history of transhuman thought: I do not think the foundational idea

  of transhumanism— positing a limit to the human that must be overcome

  by the creation of some kind of posthuman (whether such a posthuman

  be informatic, cybernetic, or some other channel for overcoming)— is

  28 . A N I N N E R T R A N S H U M A N I S M

  possible to imagine through utilitarianism. As with Bostrom claiming

  Gilgamesh as a fellow transhumanist, desires for improving the human

  condition have surely existed since the dawn of any kind of human record;

  however, transhumanism, if it is to refer to anything in particular, must be

  focused on the portion of evolutionary futurist argumentation at which

  the radical or alien comes out the other end of technologically mediated

  humanity. While the concept of using technology to improve human life

  is as old as history itself, the transhumanist idea that we will soon become

  unrecognizable to ourselves through our technology is not.

  While such an evolutionary future is not implied in utilitarian philoso-

  phy, it is at the core of Nietzsche’s understanding of the Übermensch: the

  being that will emerge after the limits of the human have been overcome.

  The frustrating aspect of this discussion, from the perspective of evolu-

  tionary futurism, is that many of the JET writers think they are discussing

  philosophical issues whereas Sorgner’s original essay in 2009 attempts

  to draw a line from Nietzsche’s thought to real- world scientific practice:

  Nietzsche upheld that the concept of the overhuman is the meaning of the

  earth. I think that the relevance of the posthuman can only be fully appreci-

  ated if one acknowledges that its ultimate foundation is that it gives meaning

  to scientifically minded people.8

  Sorgner here suggests that Nietzsche’s concept of the Übermensch pro-

  vides an imaginative foundation for the entire project of actualizing a

  posthumanity— which is, of course, one of the generally agreed upon goals

  unifying transhumanists across the world. Contra More, the question is

  not of what moral position a transhumanist might take (Nietzschean or

  utilitarian), but of the ideas that made other later knowledge formations

  possible. We can imagine a Nietzschean or a utilitarian ethical stance for a

  transhumanist to take, but the idea of a future- as- radical- break is not pos-

  sible without Nietzsche. In quibbling over philosophical issues between

  this or that system, the point that Nietzsche inaugurated the idea of the

  human as a limit to be overcome gets lost.

  To restore and intensify this concept’s originary insight for trans-

  humanism, I now turn to explore two aspects of transhuman rhetoric

  through the anxiety of Nietzsche’s influence on the discourse. I examine

  the origin of evolutionary futurist rhetoric in the culture of avant- garde

  modernist movements born in the confluence of Nietzsche and Henri

  Bergson’s creative evolution in early twentieth- century Europe. Drawing

  from Mina Loy’s writings on feminism and futurism and P. D. Ouspensky’s

  A N I N N E R T R A N S H U M A N I S M . 29

  mystical speculations on Darwin and the Übermensch, I trace an early thread of transhuman rhetoric chiefly concerned with topoi of cosmic

  consciousness and cognitive evolution. From these modernist origins, I

  trace how this trope of mental evolution drops in and out of evolutionary

  futurist practice throughout the twentieth century. This flickering ulti-

  mately establishes a dialectical relationship between the mind and the

  body in discussions of transhumanism, one that is increasingly important

  given the political and economic stakes associated with the commodifica-

  tion of cognition as outlined in the introduction.

  Modernism’s Transhumanism?

  As I suggested above, my understanding of tranhumanism’s modernist

  origins hinges primarily on Nietzsche’s concept of the Übermensch. In

  constructing the human as a limit to be overco
me, regardless of how spe-

  cific overcomings may manifest themselves in various transhuman philo-

  sophical programs, Nietzsche’s core insight cannot be overestimated.9 In

  further making this case, I explore two specific modernist artist/philoso-

  phers who both, on encountering Nietzsche in their wanderings, almost

  immediately began producing work that conforms to the patterns of evo-

  lutionary futurist rhetoric. I first discuss Mina Loy’s contributions to the

  Futurist movement and her deep commitment to evolutionary futurism

  before switching to P. D. Ouspensky’s singular commentary on Nietzsche,

  in which Ouspensky uses the figure of the Übermensch to square dis-

  courses of magical philosophy with Darwinian evolution. In both cases,

  we see how contact with the idea of the human- as- limit produces an

  immediate and specifically evolutionary futurist graphomania.

  Cosmic Consciousness, Futurism, “Woman”: Mina Loy’s Transhumanism

  Janet Lyon’s excellent account of Mina Loy’s avant- garde feminism intro-

  duces the poet, playwright, manifesto writer, futurist, and painter with

  the following biographical gloss, tracing Loy’s response to the trope of

  irrational female chaos in the writings of her male futurist counterparts

  (especially F. T. Marinetti):

  It stretches through several of the works that she produced while in Flor-

  ence, where she lied with and was then estranged from her English husband,

  where she bore three children and lost one in infancy, where she cultivated

  30 . A N I N N E R T R A N S H U M A N I S M

  a friendship with the Americans Mabel Dodge, Gertrude Stein, and Carl van Vechten, and where she exhibited paintings at the First Free Exhibition of

  International Futurist Art. These were the years when she experienced what

  she called “the throes of conversion to Futurism.” She allied herself with

  the iconoclastic energy of futurist aesthetics and— just as important for her

  critique of futurism— had affairs with Marinetti and Giovanni Papini, the

  political editor of Lacerba.10

  Initially swayed by the eugenic, hygienic approach to futurity projected

  by the early days of the futurist movement in Italy, Loy became critical of

  the model of republican motherhood being advocated in tracts such as