Steve Fuller - The_posthuman_and_the_transhuman.pdf

THE POSTHUMAN AND THE TRANSHUMAN AS ALTERNATIVE MAPPINGS OF THE SPACE OF POLITICAL POSSIBILITY S T E V E F U L L E R , U N I V E R S I T Y O F WA R W I C K

ABSTRACT

This paper takes a loosely “quantum” approach to political possibility. In other words, depending on how the present is characterized, both past and future possibilities are defined simultaneously. Political history is full of such quantum moments, which revolutionize our understanding of the historical subject. It is normally assumed that some version of Homo sapiens is the historical subject. However, post-and trans-humanism challenge that assumption, albeit in rather different ways. For example, the “genetic” and the “superorganic” figure in both but are given quite different spins, neither implying that the morphology of the upright ape is inviolate. Posthumanists stress our overlap with other species and interdependency with nature, while transhumanists stress the variability and mutability of genes, which allow enhancement. Posthumanist sociology ­emphasizes the “superorganic” biological and evolutionary roots of social ­behavior, while transhumanists emphasize humanity’s extension into technology and our accelerating cultural evolution. Both posthumanists and transhumanists see our simian nature as a platform or way station that opens up into a much wider range of possible ancestors and descendants than conventional politics normally countenances. KEYWORDS

chronos, kairos, posthuman, quantum, revisionism, transhuman THE SPACE OF POLITICAL POSSIBILITY AS A QUANTUM PHENOMENON

We tend to have a flat-footed understanding of how history works. For example, much is made of the predictive failures of Marxism, starting with Marx’s own failure to predict that the first revolution done in his name would occur not Journal of Posthuman Studies, Vol. 1, No. 2, 2017 Copyright © 2018 The Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA

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in the country with the best organized industrial labor force (Germany) but in a country with a largely disorganized and preindustrial labor force (Russia). Yet this way of putting matters gives the misleading impression that Marxists and their opponents were simply spectators to history, when in fact they were anything but that. Indeed, the phrases “self-fulfilling” and “self-defeating prophecy” were coined in the twentieth century to cover the peculiar forms of success and failure to which not only socialists but also capitalists—in terms of investor confidence in the market—have been prone in the modern era. People deliberately act to both increase and decrease the probability that specific predictions come true. The resulting phenomena are often discussed as the “interactive” effects of “observer” and “observed,” a distinction that posthumanists sometimes like to associate with the workings of quantum reality. But we do not need to buy into the esoteric metaphysical world views that Karen Barad (2007) and others have erected on top of this connection to see that quantum mechanics offers some clues to how we should think about politics in a post-/trans-humanist era. The most natural way to interpret the mathematics of quantum mechanics is that it envisages reality as a possibility space, in which the actual world consists in the ubiquitous collapsing of this space into moments, which provide portals to understanding what is possible in both the past and the future. These portals are what we normally call “the present,” the arena in which cause and effect are most clearly played out. But as the content of the present changes, so too does our sense of what has been and will be possible. In that respect, nothing need be forever impossible, because the right event could alter the possibility space decisively. But similarly, something that had been possible may subsequently become impossible. To be sure, this characterization is much too crude for a physicist. However, it may suffice to launch the metaphysical horizon needed to distinguish posthumanist and transhumanist politics. Thus, in what follows, I will not delve into the mysteries of “quantum causation” (aka action at a distance), let alone how a vision of reality that was designed to understand the smallest of events can be scaled up so easily to make sense of normal-sized events and even overarching tendencies. However, I recommend Wendt (2015) as a clear step in that direction, as he ambitiously attempts to turn quantum mechanics into the metaphysical horizon of the social sciences. The idea that events determine the course of history is a commonplace— albeit a contested one among philosophers of history. This idea is normally understood either in terms of a “founding moment” or of a “turning point.” In the former, the past appears as a chaotic field, which the founders bring into some sort of lasting order; in the latter, the past is presented as a default pattern, which the turning point upends and redirects. Thomas Kuhn’s (1970 [1962])

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famous theory of scientific change combines the two as alternating phases of “normal” and “revolutionary” science. But common to both versions of the idea, seen as either distinct or complementary historical horizons, is that the “stuff of history” is better captured—at least metaphorically—as transformations of matter than the reconstitution of possibility space. An example of the difference is the common sense proscriptions against “affecting,” let alone “changing.” the past, even though we seem to have no problem talking about “affecting” and even “changing” the future. Our intuitions about time having a direction are grounded in this observation. In contrast, taking the “quantum turn” in the sense promoted here would entail recognizing every event as potentially altering both the past and future at once. The late Oxford metaphysician Michael Dummett astutely observed that the asymmetry in our default judgements of temporality suggests that our ordinary intuitions about the nature of causation are incoherent, which in turn may reflect an excessively underdetermined conception of free will (Dummett 1978, Chaps. 18–21). In other words, when we talk about “changing the future,” we imagine giving shape to something that remains unformed at the time of our action, full stop. Yet it is only in retrospect—that is, once that “something” has been given shape—that we can judge our action’s efficacy in turning what had been a possible future into the actual present. We think we made a difference because the difference we see is one which we see ourselves as having made. (This is the problem that the law faces when trying to determine who should “take responsibility” for an action during a trial.) In short, our understandings of the past and the future are formed simultaneously. Indeed, the present may be defined as the site where a possible future located in the past is converted into the necessary ground for constructing the future. What applies as a principle of our own mental equilibrium extends to our judgements of history as a whole. For example, to claim that Isaac Newton and Henry Ford changed the course of history presupposes a correspondence between what we take them to have wanted to achieve and what we take them to have achieved. It strikes a cognitive balance between the future they were projecting from the past and the present that we project into the future. Understood as an economic exchange, we forfeit a measure of our free will by letting Newton and Ford set the initial conditions under which we are able to act, but in return we acquire a sense of the direction of travel, in terms of which we can exercise our own free will in a way (we bet) that will be appreciated by future observers. In quantum terms, we concede position to receive momentum. The easiest way to see this point is in terms of our ability to insert Newton or Ford into our own world by casting what we are now trying to do in terms of something they too were trying to do. That is the concession. But that concession then

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enables us to claim that we are doing things that they were unable to do. This is the power we receive from the concession, which turns the future into a field of realizable prospects. A crucial feature of this arrangement is that we do not say that we are now doing things that Newton or Ford could not have imagined or recognized as part of some project they were pursuing. Were that the case, it would be difficult to credit them with having changed the course of our history. They might still be, in some sense, “great” or “interesting” figures—but not of our world. Indeed, there are many such figures who are, so to speak, marooned on the shores of history because they fail to offer us existential leverage. This is normally what we mean when we say they have been “forgotten.” Yet these figures always remain to be appropriated to construct the basis on which we might move into the future. When Kuhn described the history of science’s default self-understanding as “Orwellian,” he had something like this in mind (Kuhn 1970 [1962], 167). Put more explicitly, scientists do not normally realize how the significance of past research and researchers is routinely tweaked, if not airbrushed, to motivate current inquiries. During a “scientific revolution,” certain researchers and/or research may be added or subtracted altogether. For historians of science this modus operandi does a gross injustice to the past, but for working scientists it is an acceptable price to pay for whatever new findings might result. It involves the sort of ruthlessness that would meet with Marxist approval, as I shall suggest below. POLITICS AND SCIENCE AS BASES FOR A “QUANTUM” HISTORIOGRAPHY

For the past fifty years or so, it has been common for historians to enjoy the moral high ground in this particular disagreement. In other words, scientists generally understand that the versions of the history of science that are purveyed in science textbooks or popular science writings do not primarily perform the function of saying what happened in the past. In practice, the scientist cedes jurisdiction to the historian for deciding what is true or false about what those accounts say. In return, the historian refrains from pronouncing over the truth or falsehood of what scientists say about the future. To be sure, this division of labor—or cordon sanitaire—is not strictly observed, but it captures the normative expectations of the world in which we live. In contrast, political history is much more self-consciously “quantum,” in that professional historians do not generally enjoy the same privilege of framing the terms in which claims about the past are validated. The Holocaust is an interesting exception—a major political event in which professional historical judgement rules, perhaps most dramatically in the 1996 UK court case, David

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Irving v. Penguin Books Ltd. But that may be simply because no major political party finds it in its interest to capitalize on the Holocaust by linking it to events with which it wishes to be associated. Thus, the Holocaust exists as a self-contained moment surgically separated from the field of political play. Otherwise, as George Orwell declared in the 4 February 1944 edition of the UK democratic socialist magazine Tribune, “History is written by the winners.” Little surprise, then, that the most self-consciously revolutionary movement of the modern era, Marxism, has been always susceptible to bouts of historical revisionism, when attempts are made by more learned partisans to redirect the future by refocusing the past. Revisionism is perhaps most sympathetically seen as a more economical means of achieving what might normally require bloodshed, namely, what Leon Trotsky called a “permanent revolution.” The politics of permanent revolution amounts to a quantum approach to history. Interestingly, in his famous 1965 debate with Kuhn, Karl Popper (1981) also spoke of his own falsifiability criterion as licensing a permanent revolution in science. The analogy can be understood as follows. A common stock of knowledge can be extended in many different, even contradictory directions, depending on which bit of it is put at risk in an experiment. Popper argued that science advances only when such risks are taken, the inevitable consequence of which is that scientists discard—or at least radically reinterpret—what they previously held to be true in order to enter the horizon of possibilities opened up by the experimental outcome. Popper always had in the back of his mind Einstein’s move to interpret time not as universally constant but as relative to an inertial frame of reference, given the outcome of the Michelson–Morley experiment. This move did not merely overturn Newton’s hegemony in physics, but transformed Newton’s dogged opponents over the previous two centuries, such early advocates of relational theories of time as Gottfried von Leibniz and Ernst Mach, from cranks and sore losers to heroic and prescient figures whose works were subsequently reread for clues as to what might follow in the wake of the Einsteinian revolution (Feuer 1974). The difference between the views of Kuhn and Popper on the role of ­revolutions in science can be summarized in terms of their contrasting approaches to time: chronos versus kairos, the two Greek words that Christian theologians sometimes use to contrast the narrative construction of the Old and the New Testament. In chronos, genealogical succession drives the narrative flow, with revolutions providing temporary ruptures which are quickly repaired to resume the flow. Thus, the order of the books of the Old Testament follows the order of ­patriarchs and dynasts. This is also the spirit in which Kuhn’s historiography of science proceeds—that is, according to paradigms that generate normal science, occasionally punctuated by a self-inflicted crisis that precipitates revolution,

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the outcome of which serves to restore the natural order. In contrast, in kairos, there are recurrent figures who constitute the narrative but no default narrative flow, as the world order is potentially created anew from moment to moment. Thus, the New Testament begins four times with the varying Gospel accounts of the rupture that was Jesus, with all but the final book presenting various roughly contemporaneous directions in which Jesus’ teachings were taken after his death, virtually all adumbrating more ruptures in the future. This is more in the Popperian spirit of presenting science as a sensibility that can be actualized at any moment to reconfigure all that had preceded and will succeed it. The chronos approach corresponds to the linear time of classical physics, and the kairos approach to the more ecstatic conception of time afforded by quantum physics. Before moving on, it is worth mentioning an in-between position, focusing on the idea of perpetuity, especially as understood in early modern philosophy to refer to the choice that God always has whether to continue or alter the universe from moment to moment. It was designed to get around a concern introduced by Aristotle’s main Muslim interpreter, Averroes, that in creating a world governed by natural law, God forfeits his own free will. This would seem to imply that natural law exists eternally without divine intervention. In contrast, the perpetualist says that God actively maintains—or does not maintain—the law. As a conception of divine agency championed by the likes of Descartes, perpetuity did not survive the Newtonian revolution in physics. However, it persisted in political debates concerning human self-governance, especially with regard to the duration of any social contract that is struck b­ etween free agents. The idea of regular elections is perhaps the principal legacy of the perpetualist mindset, reminding citizens that ultimately they are free to decide (collectively) whether or not to carry on with the current regime. More ambitious thinkers, not least Immanuel Kant, believed that if all regimes were of this sort, then perpetualism could be scaled up as a principle of world governance, resulting in what he dubbed “perpetual peace,” one of the inspirations for the United Nations. The relevance of the foregoing discussion to trans-and post-humanism is that neither position is easily afforded legitimacy by a chronos-based approach to history. A more kairotic approach, perhaps perpetualist, is needed. This is because trans-and post-humanism in their respective ways fundamentally displace the default subject of all historical narratives, a being most easily identified with Homo sapiens, who is presumed to be sui generis. This position is familiar from the Bible, Aristotle, and Linnaeus—but even in Linnaeus’ own day, the second half of the eighteenth century, it had begun to lose its currency, as the continuity of species became more empirically substantiated, culminating in the otherwise opposed evolutionary worldviews of Lamarck and Darwin. But

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the staying power of Homo sapiens cannot be underestimated. The pioneer of “neurohistory,” Daniel Smail (2008), expressed dismay at how his humanist colleagues continue to explain human affairs in a manner that is compatible with a Young Earth Creationist’s philosophy of history—in terms of not only the limited explanatory timeframe (i.e., “recorded history”) but also the assumption that human behavior is mainly the product of acts of human consciousness. To appreciate the source of Smail’s dismay, recall that when Wilhelm Dilthey coined the term Geisteswissenschaften (“sciences of the mind/spirit”) in the late nineteenth century for what we now call the humanities or the human sciences, he believed that the field’s special capacity to understand people across vast expanses of time and space was based on humanity’s biological unity, by which he meant the unity of Homo sapiens. In effect, humans recognize each other as subject to common life problems by virtue of similarity in material makeup and circumstances, which to be sure human cultures have addressed in often radically different ways. Here Dilthey was simply naturalizing Friedrich Schleiermacher’s hermeneutical treatment of the Bible, which proceeded on the (prebiological) assumption that because the Bible’s original and current readers are all equally born in the image and likeness of God, they can understand each other’s existential concerns, even if they express and handle them rather differently. They can overcome any linguistic barriers to agree on common meaning. The same courtesy, of course, does not extend to our simian cousins, let alone other animal species, who would neither “recognize” us nor we them in the sense that Schleiermacher and Dilthey are talking about—and certainly would not be able to read the Bible! The last remark is not as flippant as it sounds, given that a common “standard of civilization” for the target audiences of Christian missionaries to meet in the early modern period involved recognition of the “Word of God” when presented in their native tongues (Gong 1984). POST-AND TRANS-HUMANISM’S ALTERNATIVE HISTORIOGRAPHIES OF THE HUMAN

From a trans-and a post-humanist standpoint, even beyond the truncated sense of past and future possibilities implied by this avowedly chronos-based “humanistic” perspective, what stands out here is the rather ambivalent attitude that hermeneutics has to the relationship of language and meaning. On one hand, language is presented as the criterion that distinguishes humans from other creatures as meaning makers; on the other, the relevant sense of “language” remains mysterious, though it clearly refers to a capacity that is more abstract than that which would be required for the different natural languages in which people normally communicate. Noam Chomsky, Jerry Fodor, and

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others, following the lead of Descartes and Leibniz, have spoken of a “universal grammar” or a “language of thought” as a species marker of the human. The quest for this elusive entity is ultimately about finding a biological seat for the Biblical logos, which enables each person—at least in principle—to learn any and all natural languages. (The term “panlogism,” normally reserved to characterize Hegel’s philosophy, would not be out of place here.) Of course, there may be various developmental limits to any individual’s ability to learn more than one language, but proponents of this thesis are quite clear that they would not treat the limited linguistic capacity of nonhuman simians so charitably. Those other apes simply lack what Chomsky dubbed the “language organ.” While such human exceptionalism is not so surprising in itself, it is striking that these intuitions continue to be sustained, despite the lack of headway in neuroscience in finding the proverbial language organ. To be sure, not everyone in the modern period has been so easily seduced by logocentric accounts of human exceptionalism. In particular, Martin Heidegger, himself trained in hermeneutics, made a radical counterproposal, called “deconstruction,” which was inspired by that of the fallen classicist Friedrich Nietzsche, who argued that universal principles of translation founded in an “original” discourse—the so-called Ursprache of the classical philologists—is a ruse designed to create a need for an otherwise nonexistent deity who allegedly instils the logos in each of us, while at the same time allowing us to exercise power over each other by means of strategic miscommunication, as in the Italian saying Traduttore, traditore (“to translate is to betray”). This “suspicious” approach to hermeneutics, as Paul Ricoeur (1970 [1965]) memorably put it, became the basis of the linguistic nominalism that turned deconstruction into a method associated with Jacques Derrida and assorted poststructuralists, starting in the 1970s. In their rather different ways, Edward Said’s Orientalism and Martin Bernal’s Black Athena are among the more impressive pieces of scholarship that have taken a deconstructive attitude to claims of universal humanity. By their own account, deconstructionists are doubtful that “meaning” means anything other than an afterthought—more exactly, the texts that respond to a text. Unsurprisingly, the method has been widely seen as antihumanist and even nihilist. Indeed, future historians will wonder why the deconstructionists did not make common cause with behaviorists in linguistics and psychology—the very people Chomsky originally opposed—who tried as hard as they could to explain the human in nonhuman terms. In any case, for nearly a half century now, deconstruction has wrought havoc on self-styled “progressive” political movements—both liberal and socialist—which had been historically united in presuming that humanity is a potential waiting to be fully realized. However, if there is no humanity but only multiple self-serving “humanities,” then it

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becomes difficult to arrive at agreement over which direction we/they should go in. At most, one can speak of solidarity united in resistance to common foes. Indeed, this has been the tenor of “left” political assertion in the deconstructive mode, often under the somewhat misleading label of “identity politics.” Nevertheless, the deconstruction of the human has benefitted transhumanism and posthumanism by calling into question the naturalness of Homo sapiens as the default normative setting of history. After all, when Linnaeus coined the name Homo sapiens in the mid-eighteenth century, he was keen to distinguish humans from somewhat similar-looking apes, which by that time Europeans were regularly encountering in their far-flung explorations of the globe. Previously, as Michel Foucault (1970 [1966]) emphasized, the human had been an intermediate category between the divine and a generic understanding of the animal—that is, not specifically the ape. Thus, Aesop and the other ancient fabulists were equal opportunity employers of animal species in their tales, and when in the thirteenth century Francis of Assisi claimed to have seen God in all his creatures, he did not single out the apes for special treatment. Indeed, the Renaissance Humanists did not fuss over humanity’s morphological ­resemblance to apes as perhaps providing a clue to our origins. On the contrary, the humanists were so convinced by the start of John’s Gospel—which says that we descended from the divine logos—that they proceeded to master the original languages in which the books of the Bible were written. And when one considers the cosmic conception of humanity that they countenanced, which included the prospect of humans encountering like-minded beings on other planets, one might reasonably conclude that the humanist attachment to the human body was mainly as a platform for launching into previously unexplored realms of being. An underappreciated feature of Renaissance humanism is that its epoch-defining embrace of “humanity” by name corresponds to the cosmic vision just sketched, one that would not be out of line with the avowedly transhumanist vision of, say, Elon Musk today. Given also the Renaissance tendency to see the human body as a microcosm of the universe, one might even regard the period’s revolutionary transformation of anatomy and physiology as operating in the spirit of reverse engineering a spacecraft, by which we might discover who we are by figuring out where we came from. This would help to explain the Renaissance fascination with air and space travel more generally, which greatly contributed to the assignment of “genius” to Leonardo da Vinci. To be sure, in terms of what preceded the Renaissance, all of this is strange because what might have been called a “humanist” position—of the sort one finds in, say, Thomas Aquinas— was traceable to Aristotle, who identified the human with the grounded, not only on the Earth but also in the polis, which was ultimately based on family

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origin. This led Aristotle to define the human as the zoon politikon, the political animal. In contrast, the Renaissance revived a more Platonic definition of the human as an embodied mental force of indefinite extension, the sort of being that could recognize the myth of Faust as its own. I have suggested in earlier work that underlying the West’s transition from Aristotle’s grounded view of the human to Plato’s more cosmic vision was a redefinition of the meaning of “possible,” from something empirically probable to something logically conceivable (Fuller 2011, Chap. 2; Fuller and Lipinska 2014, Chap. 1; Fuller 2015, Chap. 6). This sense of the possible, which remains in common parlance, was clearly past-oriented, based on track record. The shift to a more conceptual understanding of the possible—basically anything that was logically coherent—was wrought by the early-fourteenth-century scholastic John Duns Scotus. To cut a long story short, the shift enabled Christians to think about the world from God’s point of view, as a result of which a path of self-discovery was started to learn what it means to have been created “in the image and likeness of God.” This was something that Christians had always believed but which they had yet to take literally and hence fully exploit. The result was the rise of modern science. Another, more sociological way to put the point is that Scotus’ sense of the possible opened up an alternative lineage for humanity, one that was much more open-ended and encompassing than Aristotle had circumscribed because it traced our descent directly from the divine logos rather than its various materializations. The revived Platonic sense of the possible involves imagining that the actual world is literally the realization of something that could have been otherwise—and may be otherwise, given the fullness of time. In other words, you are licensed to treat the actual world as no more than a rough draft on ultimate reality. There is nothing especially natural or sacred about actuality—including the actuality of human condition. David Hume can be understood as having capitalized on the conflicting intuitions between the Aristotelian and Platonic senses of “possible” in the eighteenth century, when he proposed his notorious “problem of induction,” which became the bugbear of modern epistemology: After all, if we cannot justify the future by repeating the past, then on what rational basis can we talk about what will happen? At the same time, the future-oriented sense of the possible opened up by Scotus animated that Renaissance political classic, Thomas More’s Utopia, which arguably invented the genre of literature called “science fiction.” To be sure, the emergence of post-and trans-humanism can be told in terms of conventional, chronos-based political history. In that narrative guise, they appear as fringe movements, exotic spinoffs of more mainstream contemporary political tendencies. Thus, posthumanism is portrayed as partly inspired by the “deep ecology” movement, which takes environmentalism to the next level by

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calling for a displacement of the locus of value from specifically human life to life per se. Alongside this sensibility is a strong sense of caution if not opposition to the pace at which scientific and technological innovation has been unleashed into the lifeworld, especially given the human track record of despoiling and destroying members of its own and other species. Advanced machines, including artificial intelligences, figure in this narrative to further demonstrate the dependency of humans on beings other than themselves, which underscores the profound fragility of the human condition. In contrast, transhumanism is seen as a largely antistatist response to the failure of twentieth century progressive politics to deliver on its own promises for human improvement. Silicon Valley’s role as the leading edge of postindustrial capitalism provides both a financial and an ideological basis for the spread of this mindset, which in policy terms would have humanity embrace entrepreneurial risk-taking as a general worldview. Moreover, like older forms of progressivism, transhumanism holds that humans prove to be their worst enemy, when it comes to the constraints that we place on our own capacity to produce knowledge and benefit from its fruits. However, given freer license, humanity could soon realize its species potential to the benefit of everyone, even if it means extending our reach beyond planet Earth. RECASTING POST-AND TRANS-HUMANISM IN A QUANTUM HISTORIOGRAPHICAL KEY

I do not wish to dispute the validity of these narratives—especially if we insist on depicting post-and trans-humanism as sharing the temporal horizon of conventional politics, which is ultimately about charting the career of Homo sapiens. But what makes both post-and trans-humanism so politically radical is their instinctive denial of this central premise, which in turn reflects their ­acceptance of the deconstructive turn in the human sciences. In other words, both movements presume that Homo sapiens is at best a way station from somewhere else to somewhere else. However, it does not follow that “human” has lost all meaning; otherwise the appearance of “human” in the names of the two movements would be completely misleading! But what meaning of the “human” do post-and trans-humanism share, on the basis of which they then part company? My proposal is that both are sensitive to a distinction in how we think about the human, between the anthropocentric and the anthropomorphic. The former is about where we start and the latter about where we end up (cf. Fuller 2016a). The history of science can be neatly told as an anthropocentric pursuit that has endeavored to divest itself of anthropomorphism. This process of self-estrangement is associated with the sort of abstraction and generalization that has been the calling card of the scientific mindset. Nevertheless, an alien

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visiting our planet could probably infer a lot about the self-understanding of humans by studying the order in which the history of science has proceeded. After all, barriers to scientific progress have typically come at points when we have been trying to make sense of something that we take to be essential to who we are. But once sense has been made of that feature, it soon comes lose its “essential” quality as it becomes either reproducible by means or recognizable in beings that differ from us in other ways. In terms that should appeal to both logicians and economists, a property has been converted thereby into a function (cf. Cassirer 1923 [1910]). Notice that the overcoming of these barriers constitutes “quantum” moments, in that both our understanding of the past and our prospects for the future are simultaneously altered. To take just one example: The more we find forms of intelligence in other creatures—especially nonsimians—that demand the respect of humans, the less our specific descent from apes is likely to matter to who we think we are. Indeed, taken together, the histories of science and technology have been about pushing back the frontiers of what it means to be human. They show humanity to have a fugitive essence, as each proposed criterion of the human is discovered to have been either anticipated—if not surpassed—by an animal or satisfied—if not surpassed—by a machine. The “human” is therefore the placeholder for the residue that has yet to be so captured in one of these two ways. This has implications for the history of politics, which can be told as an explicitly anthropomorphic pursuit that has become ever less anthropocentric. Like science, politics also abstracts and generalizes, but in the opposite direction—namely, to see the human in a wider variety of beings, which ultimately means granting them legal recognition, “as if ” they were human. This point is most clearly seen in terms of the claims made on behalf of the “rights” of animals and, increasingly, advanced machines. A striking feature of the history of politics, also shared by the history of science, is that progress has been made on the nonhuman side even as progress proceeds fitfully on the human side. After all, physicists came to agree on the atomic theory of matter only a generation before women were granted the right to vote. Some have gone so far as to claim—unjustly, in my view—that relatively little progress has been made in the science and practice of politics since ancient Athens. However, the little justice there is to the claim lies in the fact that our intuitions about both what it means to be human and how to deal with the world defined as “human” have not shifted nearly as much over the past 2500 years as our intuitions about how to understand and handle the world defined as “nonhuman.” Both post-and trans-humanism aim to redress the balance by radicalizing our understanding of what it means to be human.

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A good way to appreciate the different range of possibilities that post-and trans-humanism open up to the past and the future of humanity is to consider what each takes from Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection. Two features of this theory distinguish it not only from earlier conceptions of life, in which species were defined in terms of essential properties, but also from other versions of evolution, such as Lamarck’s, which included a conception of life’s purposefulness. First, life is fundamentally a chance-based process that does not acquire an overarching, let alone irreversible, direction over time. Second, all life forms are always equally subject to the same forces of nature, with any particular species advantage (or “fitness”) being local and temporary in the great scheme of things. In Darwin’s theory, these two features are interrelated, but they need not be: One feature could receive greater emphasis. Post-and trans-humanism differ in just such terms (cf. Fuller 2012, Chap. 3). Posthumanism gives a normative spin to the second feature of Darwin’s theory with its presumption of species egalitarianism (aka “biodiversity”), which is typically glossed as species codependency, issuing in a symbiotic ecological vision. It is accompanied by a precautionary attitude toward innovation, be it biological or technological, which is designed to protect life as it has been known. Taken to the limit, humanity is absorbed into James Lovelock’s Gaia Hypothesis, whereby our species is reduced to being a supporting actor in the unfolding drama entitled “Planet Earth.” In contrast, transhumanism normatively spins the first feature of Darwin’s theory by elevating the chance occurrence of the emergence of Homo sapiens to a unique opportunity for evolution to be given a direction that it had previously lacked. This was the position of Julian Huxley, who coined “transhumanism” in the 1950s to capture his brand of “evolutionary humanism,” which converted a biological accident into a moral imperative. Its signature project was eugenics, which notwithstanding its track record for great harm also held the potential to extend our control over the planet. Later transhumanists have followed Max More’s lead in characterizing this sensibility as involving a “proactionary” attitude to risk. The narrative dynamics of the two movements could not be more different: The posthumanist history of humanity is about our coming to learn our multiple indebtedness to nature, which in turn provides an empirical basis for our sense of belonging on the Earth. In contrast, the transhumanist historical narrative is a process of human awakening, whereby we come to terms with our distinctive identity, which may eventuate in radical self-transformation, including an ­expansion into the cosmos. Inspired by the original space age transhumanist, F.M. Esfandiary (aka FM-2030), I have captured the difference between the post-and trans-human historical narratives in terms of an emerging ideological polarity, one with the potential to replace the right–left polarity

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that has dominated Western politics for the past two centuries: “downwinging” posthumanists versus “upwinging” transhumanists (Fuller and Lipinska 2014, Chap. 1). Integral to both narratives is a story about our genetic makeup and whatever superorganic status “Humanity 2.0” might aspire to. Where posthumanists stress our massive genetic overlap with other species as a deep source of our interdependency with the rest of nature, transhumanists stress the variability and mutability of genes, which allows a future of genetic enhancement. In the case of the superorganic, each narrative promotes an interpretation with precedent in early twentieth century social science. Posthumanists follow Alfred Espinas, the French translator of Herbert Spencer, who defended the first Ph.D. in “sociology” by name. Interestingly, it focused on what humans might learn from social animals, especially the role of such organic arrangements as colonies and hives, the members of which literally constitute a living environment. We would now see this as a work of sociobiology or evolutionary psychology. In contrast, transhumanists borrow their sense of the superorganic from the anthropologist Alfred Kroeber, for whom it referred to humanity’s technological extension of the lifeworld, which eased the acculturation process of each successive generation, thereby accelerating the pace at which humans can exert control over the world (cf. Fuller 2016b). Although post-and trans-humanism clearly give the genetic and the superorganic quite different spins, a common feature is that neither really sees the morphology of the upright ape—the calling card of Homo sapiens—as inviolate. Rather, both see our simian nature as no more than a platform or a way station that opens up into a much wider range of possible ancestors and descendants than conventional politics normally countenances.

is Auguste Comte Professor of Social Epistemology in the ­Department of Sociology at the University of Warwick, UK. Originally trained in history and philosophy of science, Fuller is best known for his foundational work in the field of social epistemology, which is concerned with the normative grounds of organized inquiry. “Social epistemology” is also the name of a quarterly journal that he founded in 1987, as well as of the first of his twenty books. He has most recently authored a trilogy relating to the idea of a post-or trans-human future, all published by Palgrave Macmillan: Humanity 2.0: What It Means to Be Human Past, Present and Future (2011), Preparing for Life in ­Humanity 2.0 (2012) and (with Veronika Lipinska) The Proactionary Imperative: A Foundation for Transhumanism (2014). STEVE FULLER

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WORKS CITED

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