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

  start of the Enlightenment. On the one hand, the mythic hero persists in popular adventure literature (“what indeed is the Count of Monte Cristo,

  or Rocambole, or Sherlock Holmes, but a modern expression of the same

  idea of a strong, powerful being, against whom ordinary men cannot

  fight . . . ?”) but also in the kind of neutered futurism Nietzsche asso-

  ciated with Christian salvation history.54 In this latter mode, the Übermensch “was to come, arrange their affairs, govern them, teach them to

  obey the law, or bring them a new law, a new teaching, a new knowledge,

  a new truth, a new revelation. The superman was to come to save men

  from themselves, as well as from the evil forces surrounding them. ”55 As

  lawgiver and order maker, “the image of superman in this case loses all

  colour and grows almost repulsive, as though from the very fact of becom-

  ing lawful and inevitable. ”56 For Ouspensky, this model of Übermensch as savior represents the corrosive quality of Cartesian humanism.

  In contrast to this passive model of futurity, in which humanity must

  only await rescue by a future Übermensch, Ouspensky praises the active,

  adventurous Übermensch of popular fiction. This component of adven-

  ture proves the linchpin to Ouspensky’s second point, which concerns

  magic— not science— as the method for actualizing an overcoming of the

  human. Specifically, Ouspensky’s account of magic is tied to an under-

  standing of evolution that significantly and importantly complicates sim-

  ple understandings of an evolutionary telos. Specifically, he is critical of

  how “evolutionary theories have become the basis of a naive optimistic

  view of life and of man,” coupled to the colorless Übermensch bearing a

  passive future history of salvation.57 He continues: “It is as though people said to themselves: now that evolution exists and now that science recognizes evolution, it follows that all is well and must in future become still

  better. ”58 Ouspensky recognizes the importance of Darwinian evolution for the Übermensch but understands that this mechanism still presents a

  problem. As R. J. Hollingdale puts it in his biography of Nietzsche,

  natural selection was for Nietzsche essentially evolution freed from every

  metaphysical implication: before Darwin’s simple but fundamental discov-

  ery it had been difficult to deny that the world seemed to be following some

  course laid down by a directing agency; after it, the necessity for such a di-

  recting agency disappeared, and what seemed to be order could be explained

  as random change.59

  For Ouspensky, the reception of this “random change” has led to another

  evolutionary passivity: a scientific reinscription of religious salvation

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

  history in which natural selection replaces God as the mechanism by

  which the savior Übermensch arrives in the future. Under this understand-

  ing of biological evolution as destiny, humanity must, again, merely await

  its inevitable salvation.

  Ouspensky, reminding us of this danger, instead suggests that Darwin-

  ian evolution must be understood as risk:

  Evolution, however it be understood, is not assured for anyone or for any-

  thing. The theory of evolution means only that nothing stands still, nothing

  remains as it was, everything inevitably goes either up or down, but not at

  all necessarily up; to think that everything necessarily goes up— – this is the

  most fantastic conception of the possibilities of evolution.60

  Given this up- and- down character, evolutionary change is not inevitable.

  Instead, Ouspensky spends much of his commentary making the case

  for removing both evolutionary positivism and the passive logic of sal-

  vation history from discussions of the Übermensch. Evolution, for Ous-

  pensky, is something humans make for themselves only through blind

  experimentation.

  This emphasis on experimentation reveals both Ouspensky’s nascent

  transhumanism and his divergence from contemporary transhuman

  thought. On the one hand, both systems share an understanding that

  because of intelligence, humanity is now driving its own evolution. How-

  ever, for Ouspensky there is no one path toward this next stage in evolu-

  tion; the path to the Übermensch will necessarily be littered with failed

  experiments. As he explains,

  The evolution of consciousness, the inner growth of man, is the “ascent to-

  wards superman.” But inner growth proceeds not along one line, but along

  several lines simultaneously. These lines must be established and deter-

  mined, because mingled with them are many deceptive, false ways, which

  lead man aside, turn him backward or bring him into blind alleys.61

  For Ouspensky, the process of becoming transhuman, of evolutionary

  futurism itself, lies in mapping out these various pathways. These exper-

  iments, however, are not into the scientific qualities of mystical phe-

  nomena. Instead, “the development of the inner world, the evolution of

  consciousness, this is an absolute value, which in the world known to us

  can develop only in man and cannot develop apart from him. ”62 Here Ouspensky is arguing for an experimental magic that actualizes human

  evolutionary change.

  A N I N N E R T R A N S H U M A N I S M . 45

  In building this case, Ouspensky makes an extended argument that a

  theory of evolution rooted in the traditions of magic, rather than in the

  traditions of science, will be the best methodology for this experimenta-

  tion. In aligning his methodology against science, Ouspensky participates

  in a larger discussion percolating into various facets of European culture

  at the turn of the century. Ouspensky encapsulates this conversation:

  The literature on magic and occultism was for a long time entirely ignored

  by Western scientific and philosophical thought or rejected as an absurdity

  and a superstition. And it is only quite recently that people are beginning to

  understand that all these teachings must be taken in a symbolical way, as a

  complex and subtle picture of psychological and cosmic relations.

  However, this reanimation of magic may, in fact, be unclear even to those

  of us who live ostensibly on the other side of this return.

  As rhetorician William Covino observes in making the case for a return

  of “magical rhetoric” at the core of postmodern rhetorical theory, for most

  of us, “magic means the inexplicable and spontaneous materialization of

  a finished product; this is the familiar rabbit- out- of- a- hat definition. ”63

  Instead, Covino offers “an alternate definition, grounded in anthropo-

  logical and sociological conceptions of magic. ”64 This alternate definition reverses the common understanding of magic, suggesting instead that

  magic is not the instant and arhetorical product of an otherworldly incanta-

  tion; it is the process of inducing belief and creating community with refer-

  ence to the dynamics of a rhetorical situation. Magic is a social act whose

  medium is persuasive discourse, and so it must entail the complexities of

  social interaction, invention, communication, and composition.65

  Covino’s anthropological definition allies with Ouspensky, and thinkers

  such as
Ouspensky and his teacher Gurdjieff spent their lives trying to

  return this definition of magic to a position of cultural prominence.

  Additionally, Ouspensky’s substitution of magic for science is embed-

  ded within a much more complicated conversation around the nature of

  magical or, more broadly, occult phenomena such as telepathy and ghosts

  during the dawn of modernism. Documented in Leigh Wilson’s Modern-

  ism and Magic (2012), this debate was important for shaping modernist

  avant- garde practices for a number of reasons, especially given that mod-

  ernist usage of mimesis is inherently magical in conception. This rela-

  tionship between mimesis and magic emerges in James Frazer’s hugely

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

  influential text The Golden Bough (1890– 1915), in which magic “assumes that the same powers are present in the material objects once in contact

  with a person (a lock of hair, nail clippings) as they are in obvious copies

  of the person— the doll, for example. The repetition of the materiality of

  the world is mimesis, but a mimesis which . . . mistakes representation

  for the real thing, the ideal for the real. ”66 This association is important for modernists, Wilson argues, because with the magical mimesis that fascinated the modernists, “if the copy is more than the original . . . that more is precisely and only the formal work which has produced it as a copy. ”67

  Wilson suggests that for the staunchly Victorian Frazer, unlike the mod-

  ernist avant- garde who used his work to other ends, this mimetic relation-

  ship is why magic fails. He writes that “the fatal flaw of magic is not in its

  general assumption of a sequence of events determined by law, but in

  its total misconception of the nature of the particular laws which govern

  the sequence. ”68 Wilson diagnoses the causes of this failure by clarifying that, “while magic is like science in that it is a systematic form of thinking,

  where it differs is in its incapacity in testing its assumptions. ”69 This distinction opens a discussion of the Society for Psychical Research, a society

  dedicated to the serious study of paranormal phenomena that included

  as a member Henry James and, in 1913, was presided over by Henri Berg-

  son.70 The Society, departing from Ouspensky’s method, sought to extract experimental results to “reveal occult phenomena as part of the laws of

  nature as they were being revealed by science. ”71

  As mentioned, this legitimation of occult research through experimen-

  tation is at odds with what Ouspensky is doing with Nietzsche’s concept

  of the Übermensch. Ouspensky uses magic for the generative association

  that rhetoric and magic held prior to the Enlightenment. As George Ken-

  nedy summarized (and as anyone familiar with the history of rhetoric no

  doubt knows),“for some two centuries rhetoric made a claim to be the

  queen of the arts” in Renaissance Italy.72 This regal importance derived, as Covino argues, out of the fact that, from the Classical era “through the

  Renaissance, words possess actual (rather than symbolic) power as agents of magic, and their effects are understood to vary with changing contexts. ”73 This understanding of rhetorical force through literal word power is, as Covino argues, due to the magical tradition inherited from the Classical period. In contrast to understanding magic and rhetoric as entwined

  power acts that work by manipulating the social, the “mechanical uni-

  verse issuing from the Enlightenment” imagines that “mind exists apart

  A N I N N E R T R A N S H U M A N I S M . 47

  from matter. ”74 This mind/body split, beyond being the foundational gesture of any Cartesianism, is inherently antimagical, and as Covino argues,

  antirhetorical.

  For Covino, this antimagical, anti- Classical science sought to replace a

  world in which action was a rhetorical practice with the “clear observation

  language” needed for both empirical science and logical positivism.75 Like

  the Society for Psychical Research that tried to subject magic to scientific

  practices of verification and truth, Covino argues that the revival of Classi-

  cal rhetoric represented by the current- traditional turn in rhetorical stud-

  ies76 defangs this magical understanding of rhetor as magus who “must align the elements and the right words and the paths of the stars. ”77 In

  both cases, what results are systems that do not embrace the full and radi-

  cal potentials originally invoked by the discourses they tame. For Covino,

  “the magic and rhetoric that disappeared [during the Enlightenment]—

  with their emphasis on imagination, phantasy, and amplification— were

  progressive forces. ”78

  Ouspensky’s reading of the Übermensch hews close to this progressive

  understanding of both rhetoric and magic. Ouspensky does not want to

  construe magic as an object of scientific methodology. Rather, he attempts

  to construct evolution as this kind of progressive, magical, inventive pro-

  cess by which humanity (in an appropriately modernist aim) makes itself

  new. In an antimagical, Cartesian science, language exists as a descriptive

  force and, as Ouspensky argues, the “aim” of European culture is “man as

  he is, as he always was and always will be. ”79 In such a regime of knowledge, describing in more and more perfect detail the human as it exists is

  the end point of all knowledge. As Ouspensky details, taking for his first

  case the question of scientific man and for his second case the question

  of magical man:

  In the first case man is taken as a completed being. Study is made of ana-

  tomical structure, his physiological and psychological functions, his present

  position in the world, his culture and civilisation, the possibility of better

  organisation of his life, his possibilities of knowledge, etc.; in all this man is

  taken as what he is. . . .

  In the second case man is taken as an uncompleted being, out of which

  something different should result. And the whole meaning of the existence

  of this being lies, in this case, in its transition into this new state. Man is re-

  garded as a grain, as a larva, as something temporary and subject to trans-

  formation.80

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

  Despite his insistence on the second case, the first case is the dominant one within Europe following the Enlightenment. For Ouspensky, evolution

  beyond the human is never possible so long as the process of overcoming

  is understood as a scientific operation.

  This condition also relegates manipulators of language and the pro-

  ducers of written art to the peripheries of the powers that shape and create

  the world. This relegation, Leigh Wilson argues, is the reason for returning

  to magic during modernism. For the modernists,

  magic mediates between the world as it is and the world as we would like it

  to be as a result of our own actions. It makes it possible to act in the world

  in such a way that, if successful, the action would change the world, even

  though we know we may fail because of the world as it exists before and

  beyond our action.81

  This act of world creation is also connected to the topic of invention, espe-

  cially in postmodern rhetorical theory and in Fredric Jameson’s under-

  standing of Utopia (which is heavily mediated through the imagination

>   in his discussion of the concept in Archaeologies of Knowledge). Through

  this connection to Utopian invention— to literal world- making— we can

  start to see the shape of transhumanism as a magical discourse. For all of

  its very serious commitments to science and technology, the uncomfort-

  able aspects of transhumanism mentioned earlier in this chapter, namely

  the specifically evolutionary futurist ones, point not to the description

  of the human but toward the creation of an imagined new world, just as

  magic and the imagination were thought to work by modernists such as

  Ouspensky.

  We can intensify this claim about transhumanism and magic by think-

  ing about transhumanism as a science. If it is a science, what is its object

  of description? What does transhumanism seek to understand? If any-

  thing, the object most described in scientific terms by evolutionary futur-

  ist rhetoric is the future, but how can we make a science of the future?

  Specifically, how would a science of the future work within the confines

  of Karl Popper’s influential theorization of science through the falsifiable,

  in which “the scientific status of a theory is its falsifiability, or refutability,

  or testability. ”82 For Popper, the ability of a hypothesis to be scientific is in its ability to be tested and found to be false. Theories about the future,

  for all their basis in science, cannot, then, be scientific, as evidenced by

  the ever- receding date for the Singularity in each of Raymond Kurzweil’s

  books on evolutionary machines.83 The future always arrives through the A N I N N E R T R A N S H U M A N I S M . 49

  passage of time, but if a prediction does not, it just signals that it may still be yet to come, not that it was false (after all, “wait and see” is not a

  great method for verifying experimental findings). Thus, we have to find

  another term for the belief system motivating transhuman action, which

  includes scientific research. Given that it is not descriptive of the human

  as it is but instead a system for imagining and then creating another world,

  I have shown that, following Ouspensky, transhumanism functions analo-

  gously to magical systems that seek to use collective will and language to

  actualize a desired future.

  Magic satisfies two methodological goals for Ouspensky. On the one