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

  Being realization

  Can

  Vitalized by cosmic initiation

  Furnish an adequate apology

  For the objective

  Agglomeration of activities

  Of a life

  LIFE

  A leap with nature

  Into the essence

  Of unpredicted Maternity32

  In this section, she describes “consciousness in crises” racing “Through

  the subliminal deposits of evolutionary / processes” on the way to an

  experience of what, in certain circles, would be described as ego death.

  Transpersonal psychologist Stanislav Grof clarifies ego death as,

  When experienced in its final and most complete form, the ego death means

  an irreversible end to one’s philosophical identification with what Alan Watts

  called skin- encapsulated ego. When the experience is well integrated, it results not only in increased ability to enjoy existence, but also in better func-

  tioning in the world. The experience of total annihilation and of “hitting the

  cosmic bottom” that characterizes the ego death is immediately followed by

  visions of blinding white or golden light of supernatural radiance and beauty.

  A N I N N E R T R A N S H U M A N I S M . 37

  It can be associated with astonishing displays of divine archetypal entities, rainbow spectra, intricate peacock designs, or pristine natural scenery. The

  subject experiences a deep sense of spiritual liberation, redemption, and

  salvation.33

  Grof’s description fairly accurately captures the narrative trajectory of

  Loy’s poem, moving from the pain of her “congested cosmos of agony” to

  a fuller experience of being:

  Stir of incipient life

  Precipitating into me

  The contents of the universe

  Mother I am

  Identical

  With infinite Maternity

  Indivisible

  Acutely

  I am absorbed

  Into

  The was— is— ever— shall— be

  Of cosmic reproductivity34

  In this moment, Loy finds her suffering transmuting into an experience

  of the cosmos as totality, the realization that her act of birthing connects

  her to a universal, transhistorical cycle of birth and death. She follows this

  moment with two episodes rising “from the subconscious. ”35 The first is a cat giving birth outside her apartment, surrounded by the “Same undulating life- stir”; Loy concludes “I am that cat. ”36 The second experience is of “Impression of small animal carcass / Covered with blue bottles”

  that, because of the feasting flies, “Waves that same undulation of liv-

  ing. ”37 In both cases, living and dying, Loy realizes that her experience of birth connects her to a larger force than herself, what Henri Bergson

  might label “élan vital,” a cosmically unified being (in addition to pro-

  viding the “pristine natural scenery” Grof notes as being associated with

  experiences of ego death). This experience Loy narrates is the break from

  “skin- encapsulated ego” as the burst into “spiritual liberation” beyond

  egoic individuality.

  I iterate on this idea of cosmic consciousness in Loy’s poetry because

  Bucke refers to the process of attaining cosmic consciousness as a pro-

  cess by which we must “transhumanize.” As Bucke suggests (“this is what

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

  is called in the East the ‘Brahmic Splendor,’ which is in Dante’s phrase capable of transhumanizing a man into a god”), the most ancient documented use of “transhuman” occurs in Canto I of Dante’s Paradiso, where

  it is “transumanar” in the original Italian. R. Allen Shoaf glosses this curi-

  ous neologism as referring to the need for Dante’s narrator to undergo a

  series of morphological changes in his vision to experience the divinity of

  Heaven directly and then to convey it to his readers.38 It is in this divine morphological manner that T. S. Eliot also uses the verb in The Cocktail

  Party (1949), where it refers to the suffering of a soul on its way to a more

  complete experience of divinity.39 Although this term obviously shares ety-mological roots with “transhumanism,” it is used in a slightly different way

  in Bucke and Dante than it is in Max More or Bostrom. However, in explor-

  ing more fully this earlier use of the term “transhuman” (as a verb), the link

  between Loy, Bucke, and transhumanism becomes more apparent. Such

  a reading is, importantly, not to argue that Bucke or Dante are transhu-

  manists (though there are a number of forum and blog posts attempting

  to argue this very point based on Dante’s usage). Instead, Dante’s usage

  as a kind of mutation of the body for the better contemplation of the

  divine provides a thread of shared thought between the mystical over-

  coming of human cognitive limits and the transhuman overcoming of

  human physical ones. In its explicitly religious usage, the verb “transhu-

  manize” refers to advancing human morphology so that our limited sen-

  sorium may contemplate the divine. It would not be until the work of

  FM- 2030 in the 1970s that the noun form (“transhuman”) or the ideology

  (“transhumanism”) emerged fully into our lexicon. Although contempo-

  rary transhumanism— with its emphasis on rationalism, scientific proof,

  and bureaucratic planning— places a strong emphasis on reason, the link

  to Dante through Bucke and Loy helps to explain why transhumanism is

  so often discussed in millenarian terms and why the movement so often

  ends up articulating a kind of cybernetic mysticism.

  In any case, Bucke’s work is significant for synthesizing Western and

  Eastern concepts of attaining divinity and articulating a potent set of

  concepts and topoi for what would become New Age thought. However,

  for an emergent evolutionary futurism, his specific revision and place-

  ment of these concepts within a secular framework of psychology is per-

  haps even more important. Additionally, his use of cosmic to capture this

  mystical- scientific concept is telling. As I argued in the Introduction, a

  major contributing factor to evolutionary futurism is the insistence that

  technological change provokes biological evolution. By thinking with

  A N I N N E R T R A N S H U M A N I S M . 39

  Bucke, we can see that the kinds of technology often signaled as exerting these pressures are, in his model, cosmic in nature. The next step up from

  consciousness of consciousness is, for Bucke and like- minded thinkers,

  consciousness of the totality of all: the cosmos. According to Alexander

  von Humboldt, author of Kosmos (1843)— the work that first returned the

  more expansive meaning of cosmos to our lexicon— in Ancient Greek,

  κόσμος, in the most ancient, and at the same time most precise, definition

  of the word, signified ornament (as an adornment for a man, a woman, or a

  horse); taken figuratively for εύταξία [meaning order, discipline, or method], it implied the order or adornment of a discourse. According to the testimony

  of all the ancients, it was Pythagoras who first used the word to designate

  the order in the universe, and the universe itself.40

  “Cosmos,” at the time of von Humboldt, was often thought of and trans-

  lated as a kind of rhetorical style or adornment. However, by tracing the

 
Pythagorean legacy of this term, he recovers the meaning for the term

  used by Bucke: the order of all that is. By linking Dante’s “transhuman-

  ize” with this understanding of cosmos, Bucke inaugurates an important

  rhetorical figure in evolutionary futurism: the idea that an evolution in

  consciousness yields an expanded awareness of the all. For Loy, the pain

  of childbirth inaugurates this experience in her writing, but in treating the

  figure of the machine, so important to the Italian futurists, she begins to

  imagine truly startling, recognizably transhuman visions of our evolution-

  ary future. The tropic intensification of Mina Loy’s transhuman poetics

  continues in her long cycle of thirty- four poems, Songs to Joannes (1917).

  As Lyon observes, the poem uses the cosmic perspective Loy experi-

  mented with in “Parturition”: “in a series of short irregular poems, we are

  shown the fragments of a discontinuous sexual and intellectual relation-

  ship; but we are also shown alternative fragments, equally discontinuous,

  of a relationship that might have been. ”41 These interlocking perspectival fragments force us to confront the true nature of cosmic consciousness:

  “that ‘what is’ is only one of several sets of charged fragments, the pres-

  ence of which undermines any definitive claims to comprehensive repre-

  sentation. ”42 Songs creates a shifting crystalline network of poems documenting a distinctly Pythagorean version of cosmos: literally all that can

  or could or did or will or might exist. As Lyon makes clear, this cosmic

  perspective is opened up through Loy’s usage of sex as a fragmentary,

  transpersonal becoming to counteract the masculine, linear, penetrative

  topoi of lust in orthodox futurist thought.43 Rather than the temporary 40 . A N I N N E R T R A N S H U M A N I S M

  experience of cosmos described in “Parturition,” Songs is a continued evocation of a higher form of consciousness.

  Animated by futurism’s tropic matrix, though highly critical of its meth-

  odologies, Loy’s collection of poems begins to manifest imagery of this

  cosmic evolution in terms that, in a contemporary context, can be read as

  recognizably transhuman. In Song 25, she imagines a group of characters

  becoming “machines . . . cutting our foot- hold / With steel eyes. ”44 Later, in Song 29, Loy imagines the possible outcome of these newly machinic

  human beings:

  Evolution fall foul of

  Sexual equality

  Prettily miscalculate

  Similitude

  Unnatural selection

  Breed such sons and daughters

  As shall jibber at each other

  Uninterpretable cryptonyms

  Under the moon45

  These new products are the result of “unnatural selection,” of something

  other than an evolution that implies sexual inequality. These “sons and

  daughters” grow up to “jibber” in “[u]ninterpretable cryptonyms,” which

  speaks to a specifically Nietzschean understanding of cosmic conscious-

  ness. Just as Nietzsche describes the Übermensch as “the lightning from

  the dark cloud of ‘human being,’” these offspring of an unnatural evolu-

  tion remain cryptic to us: unknowable and untranslatable.46 The remainder of Song 29 educates these products of “unnatural selection” to develop

  differently and not fall foul of human emotional suffering. This poem con-

  cludes while these children “clash together . . . / In seismic orgasm” and

  ends with the final failure of recognition on the part of parents: a “[w]ince

  in the alien ego. ”47 Thus Loy shifts the tropic landscape of futurism from the red- cape- wearing individual Übermensch to a model of a coming

  overhumanity— one similar to contemporary interpretations of Nietzsche,

  suggesting Loy to be one of the foremost readers of Nietzsche during this

  period. In her poetic experimentation with cosmic transhumanization

  and the machinic trappings of a rejected hypermasculine futurist art, Loy

  begins to craft a vision of becoming that is mediated through technol-

  ogy and focused on the refinement of thought itself, the kind of inner

  A N I N N E R T R A N S H U M A N I S M . 41

  transhumanism I am tracing in the modernist avant- garde during this

  period. In the next section, I show how P. D. Ouspensky intensifies this

  claim while inserting an inner transhumanism into the discourse of Dar-

  winian evolution, documenting the cognitive stakes involved, from a bio-

  logical perspective, with actualizing any kind of Übermensch.

  Mysticism, Psychology, Darwinism: P. D. Ouspensky’s Transhumanism

  While Mina Loy’s avant- garde poetics traces an evolutionary futurist tra-

  jectory for Italian futurism through a synthesis of Nietzsche’s concept

  of the Übermensch and Bucke’s concept of cosmic consciousness, the

  commentary on Nietzsche offered in P. D. Ouspensky’s New Model of the

  Universe (1917) further intensifies the connection between the mystical

  experiences suggested in Bucke and the idea of an evolutionary futur-

  ism for humanity. A mathematician by training, P. D. Ouspensky was also

  a practicing magus and disciple of G. I. Gurdjieff, a teacher who articu-

  lated a radical version of Perennialism. Ouspensky, one of Gurdjieff’s most

  devoted disciples, was responsible for introducing Gurdjieff’s work to Eng-

  land in the 1920s, as well as directly introducing the system to a number of

  modernist authors and artists.48 Moreover, his commentary on Nietzsche was important to an emerging evolutionary futurist sensibility, namely,

  through Ouspensky’s synthesis of this magical milieu and Darwinian dis-

  courses of evolution. Ouspensky, even more than Loy, reveals the mystical

  impulses at the core of transhuman thought and suggests profound ways

  of rethinking the fringe status of the contemporary movement, especially

  from a rhetorical context.

  This commentary on Nietzsche is part of the larger argument traced by

  New Model of the Universe. In his preface to the second edition, Ouspen-

  sky introduces the collection as being about esotericism and evolution:

  The idea of esotericism is chiefly the idea of higher mind. To see clearly

  what this means we must first of all realize that our ordinary mind (includ-

  ing the mind of a genius) is not the highest possible order of human mind.

  The human mind can rise to a level almost inconceivable for us, and we can

  see the results of the work of higher mind . . . in the Upanishads, in the Ma-

  habharata; in works of art such as the Great Sphinx of Gizeh, and in other

  memorials though they are few in literature and art.49

  As he unpacks the whole collection, this higher mind (analogous to

  “cosmic consciousness” in Bucke) results from training in esoteric and

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

  mystical methods. Additionally, this higher mind is, as he explores through Nietzschean themes, specifically evolutionary in nature. However, where

  Bucke uses evolution as a method in which higher order is extrapolated

  from lower, Ouspensky means to argue that the move toward the Über-

  mensch is evolutionary in the biological specifics discussed by Charles

  Darwin.

  Ouspensky’s commentary on the Übermensch explores two major ave-

  nues: genealogy and syn
thesis. In the first of these two threads, he histo-

  ricizes Nietzsche’s concept within a longer lineage of Jungian archetypal

  heroes and villains. The second thread considers the role of magic as a

  proto- transhumanist evolutionary method in the face of the reductive

  and increasingly dominant paradigm of Cartesian science. Both of these

  threads are important to understanding the status of evolutionary futur-

  ism in modernism, as the topoi of the modernist avant- garde begin to

  mutate into recognizably transhuman formations in the work of Ous-

  pensky. In this section, I will briefly unpack Ouspensky’s genealogy of the

  Übermensch before exploring, in more depth, his construction of magic

  as a rhetorical, Utopian method for actualizing transhuman overcoming.

  For Ouspensky, Nietzsche’s concept of the Übermensch is a tool for

  overcoming the flattening and simplifying Cartesian humanist frame-

  work— in other words, the framework that has successfully asserted that

  the proper object of knowledge production and philosophizing is “man

  as he is, as he always was and always will be. ”50 In contrast, Ouspensky claims that the Übermensch represents a rhetorical break that is “never

  satisfied with man as he is,” an understanding that is both a rhetoric of

  “the masses” and a holdover from pre- Enlightenment philosophies.51 As we will see below, this premodern trace enables Ouspensky to claim magic

  as a preeminently transhuman methodology.

  To this end, Ouspensky’s genealogy of the Übermensch concept in

  Nietzsche begins by asserting that “the idea of superman is as old as the

  world. Through all the centuries, through hundreds of centuries of its his-

  tory, humanity has lived with the idea of superman. ”52 Before the onset of a logical, rational human framework, the Übermensch was a mythical

  figure associated with “a legendary Golden Age,” in which “life was gov-

  erned by supermen, who struggled against evil, upheld justice and acted

  as mediators between men and the Deity, governing them according to

  the will of the Deity, giving them laws, bringing them commandments. ”53

  Alluding to figures such as Gilgamesh, King Arthur, and Odysseus, Ous-

  pensky suggests two mutations to this mythic Übermensch following the

  A N I N N E R T R A N S H U M A N I S M . 43