Transhumanism: Evolutionary Futurism and the Human Technologies of Utopia Page 5
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