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THE TRANSHUMAN
NIETZSCHE
‘Transhumanism’ also has the resonance of being beyond, or a
going across from, or being on, or to the other side of, ‘humanism’.
Notes on Sorgner (2009):
“I think that significant similarities between the posthuman
and the overhuman can be found on a fundamental level.” [Sorgner Nietzsche, the Overhuman, and Transhumanism,
1;1]
[Sorgner refers to Nietzsche’s Superman [Uebermensch] as the
overhuman.]
“When I first became familiar with the transhumanist
movement, I immediately thought that there were many fundamental similarities
between transhumanism and Nietzsche’s philosophy, especially concerning the
concept of the posthuman and that of Nietzsche’s overhuman.” [ib.]
“I think that significant similarities between the posthuman
and the overhuman can be found on a fundamental level.” [ib.]
[Nietzsche’s position on evolutionary theory is unclear – he
inherited from Schopenhauer and some Pre-Socratics a general evolutionary
outlook, although he was critical of Darwinism.]
“However, a certain kind of Lamarckism can also be found in
Nietzsche, as he stresses that certain tendencies can get inherited. If a man
likes to eat well, and to enjoy the company of women, then it is advisable for
his son not to live a chaste and ascetic life (KSA, 4, 356-68).” [ib.]
[It is this Lamarckism that GB Shaw’s Nietzsche-influenced
Prefaces to Man and Superman and Back to Methuselah engage with]
“Given a certain social and individual state, which
Nietzsche does not describe in detail, evolution can take place, and the
species can evolve – something also maintained by transhumanists.“ [ib.]
[Nietzsche seems to suggest that the human species will
evolve into another species].
“Both Nietzsche and transhumanists have an outlook on the
world which diverges significantly from the traditional Christian one, or one
which has inherited many Christian values. As one can still find many elements
of Christian thinking in the value system of many people today, both Nietzsche
and transhumanists are in favour of bringing about a revaluation of values.”
[IB. 1:2]
[Sorgner emphasises Nietzsche’s respect for science;
however, Nietzsche’s view of ‘science’ was far wider than the contemporary one,
and at any rate, he regarded philosophy as superior to science. To him,
philosophy was ‘the *most* spiritual will to power’.]
“Nietzsche’s high regard for the sciences has been
recognized by most leading Nietzsche scholars [e.g., Babich, Moore/Brobjer].
His theory of the eternal recurrence is based upon premises which have been
held by many scientists. His will-to-power anthropology bears many similarities
to scientific ones. Even though he is critical of Darwin, he also holds a
theory of evolution. Nietzsche very often is most critical of thinkers who are
closest to his own understanding of things. In Darwin’s case, Nietzsche’s critique
is mainly rooted in his concept that human beings strive solely for power.
Hence, a concept which implies that a struggle for existence or a will to life
was the fundamental human drive is one from which he feels the need to
distinguish himself. Human beings strive for power. The struggle for existence
represents only a marginal type of expression of the fundamental
will-to-power.” [ib.]
“If you will power, then it is in your interest to enhance
yourself. Enhancement, however, is just what transhumanists aim for.
Transhumanism is in favour of technologies and other means which could be used
for “enhancement of human intellectual, physical, and emotional capacities”
(Bostrom, N. “Transhumanist values”.
Version of April 18, 2001: http://www.nickbostrom.com/tra/values.html) so that
posthumans could come into existence.” [ib.]
Genetic Engineering
Courage is a significant virtue within Nietzsche’s favoured
morality. In addition, he stresses the importance of science for the
forthcoming centuries, and does not reject that development. Given these two
premises, I cannot exclude the possibility that Nietzsche would have been in
favour of genetic engineering [...]
He affirmed science, and he was in favour of enhancement,
and the bringing about of the overhuman. [ib.]
“In transhumanist thought, Nietzsche’s overhuman is being
referred to as ‘posthuman’.” [ib. 1:3]
“The new species that represents a further stage of
evolution is referred to as the posthumans.” [ib. 1:4]
“ ... posthumans [and humans] would not [have the capacity
to reproduce themselves with each other], in the same way that we cannot
reproduce ourselves with great apes, at least not in a sexual manner. It might
even be the case that posthumans need to rely on technological means for
reproduction.” [ib.]
“Transhumanists seem to identify a further type of eugenics
which I suggest could be called autonomous eugenics. People may decide for
themselves whether they wish to be transformed into posthumans by technological
means.” [ib.]
“Like every species, the species of the overhuman has
limits, but their limits are different from the limits of the human species.
The overhuman comes about via an evolutionary step which originates from the
group of higher humans. 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 concepts of God and metaphysics, and the beginning of a
wider plausibility for his way of thinking.” [ib.]
“Transhumanists, at least in the articles which I have
consulted, have not explained why they hold the values they have, and why they
want to bring about posthumans. Nietzsche, on the other hand, explains the
relevance of the overhuman for his philosophy. The overhuman may even be the
ultimate foundation for his worldview.
Nietzsche sees philosophers as creators of values, which are
ultimately founded in personal prejudices. He regards his own prejudices as
those that they correspond to the spirit which will govern the forthcoming
centuries. ‘Spirit’ here does not refer to an immaterial nous in the Platonic sense, or some ghostly spiritual substance.
‘Spirit’ in Nietzsche’s writing refers to a bodily capacity of interpretation
by means of language, which is based upon physiological strength. He
distinguishes between a religious and a scientific spirit.
Weak reactive human beings, who cannot fulfil their wishes
in the here and now, incorporate the religious spirit, which makes them long
for a good afterlife. This spirit was dominant among human beings for a very
long time. However, eventually human beings grew stronger and consequently more
and more developed a scientific spirit. The importance of the scientific spirit
has increased significantly, particularly since the Renaissance. Nietzsche
expects this spirit to become even more dominant in the future. As his
worldview is supposed to appeal to the scientific spirit, it is supposed to
become more and more attractive to the people of the future.” [ib., 2]
The overhuman [in Nietzsche] represents the meaning of the
earth. The overhuman is supposed to represent the meaning-giving concept within
Nietzsche’s worldview which is supposed to replace the basically Christian
worldview [of an afterlife]. It is in the interest of higher humans to
permanently overcome themselves. The ultimate kind of overcoming can be seen in
the overcoming of the human species, and whoever has been keen on permanently
overcoming himself can regard himself as an ancestor of the overhuman. In this
way, the overhuman is supposed to give meaning to human beings. It is not a
transcendent meaning but an earthy, immanent one which is appropriate for
scientifically minded people who have abandoned their belief in an after world.
As C. G. Jung stresses: ‘Man cannot stand a meaningless life’.” [ib.]
“I suspect that the value of the bringing about of the
posthuman cannot be ultimately justified, except to an individual who believes
that that the concept makes his life meaningful: ‘I wish to be the ancestor of
a posthuman’.” [ib.]
“Given our biotechnological advances, human beings have
entered an era in which they are able to actively influence evolutionary
processes. I am not claiming that given our progress chance does not play any
role for evolutionary processes anymore. However, our technological
possibilities enable us to have some influence on qualities relevant for
evolutionary processes.” [Sorgen, ]
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Nietzsche’s Thus Spake
Zarathustra, and its doctrines of the Superman,
and Eternal Return can be interpreted
in the light of futuristic technological transhumanism.
The assumption is that technology will enhance and radically
change the human form, to such an extent that a new species of humans will be
built who will have the kinds of powers we associate with gods.
It is suggested that the gods described in the ancient tales
of the Greeks etc., were actually those radically enhanced overhumans of the
future travelling back in time [as they would master time travel too].
Superhumans from the future.
Why haven’t the gods been seen in the last 1,000 years?
Simple: they cannot afford to alter anything that happened in the modern era in
case they affect or even nullify their own self-invention.
So Nietzsche prophesied the transhuman/overhuman with his
Superman. Indeed, the Transhumans of the future take Nietzsche’s Thus Spake Zarathustra as their ‘bible’.
Essentially, the transhumanist is ‘playing god’ – and the
posthuman Superman *is* a god – ‘how could I bear not to be a god, if
there are gods? It is therefor a supramoral enterprise.
Notes from the
Digital Dionysus
Cybernetics - from Greek kybernetikos - 'good at steering',
i.e., helmsman [cf. govern] - used by
Plato to refer to governance - 19th century physicist Ampere [1775-1836] used
it to mean the science of the control of governments.
Term 'android' first popularised in 1886 French novel L'Eve future [Tomorrow's Eve] by Auguste
Villiers de l'Isle Adam [author of Axel]; Villiers had met Wagner at the Swiss
village Triebschen in 1869 - about the same time as Nietzsche also visited
Norbert Weiner, 'Cybernetics', 1948. Cybernetics is
"the science of control and communications in the animal and
machine."
Think of terms - eg., superandroid
- overandroid - superanthropoid - superhumanoid - overhumanoid - supercyborg -
overcyborg - weaponised cyborg - superbiorobot
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From: “Philosophizing
With a Scalpel”: From Nietzsche to Nina Arsenault by Shannon
Bell 2013
As Bill Hughes states in “Nietzsche: Philosophizing with the
Body,” “It takes a body to lift a hammer and smash it down. It takes a body to
write philosophy. Therefore it takes a body to philosophize with a hammer.”3)
If one brings together Hughes’s enunciation with Nandita Biswas Mellamphy’s
claim in 'The Three Stigmata of Friedrich Nietzsche' that the
psycho-physiological theory of the body is the key link between Nietzsche’s two
most overworked concepts: eternal recurrence and will to power;4) if we take
the living enactment of Nietzsche’s transvaluation of values as a manifestation
of will to power and couple it with his urge to write with blood: “Of all that
is written, I love only what a man has written with his blood. Write with
blood, and you will experience that blood is spirit”;5) this will get us to the
Nietzschean excess of Bataille combined with the shamanic interpretation of
Nietzsche à la Bataille by Nick Land.6) It doesn’t, however, get us to Arthur
Kroker’s “Future that is Nietzsche.”7) Kroker questions: “Written today, would
the Genealogy be compelled to conclude with an essay on artificial flesh,
electric eyes and robotic intelligences — a transhuman legacy […]?”8).
I would answer yea… and who better as a techno-upgrade to
the Nietzschean sage Zarathustra than a transhuman, transsexual, bio-techno
medically created cyborg artist who makes her body the ground of her artwork
and carves out a new body every few years, who attains ecstatic bliss “as the
surgeon’s scalpel carves pockets of fat out of her skin”?9)
And I would add that she is also “a trans-gender heiress” to
Zarathustra. Nina is continuing the project of devaluation of existing
meanings; she is doing what Nietzsche identifies as “philosophizing with a
hammer”; however, she is doing it with her body and a scalpel. Arsenault’s
will-to-plasticity enacted by over sixty return trips to the surgeon and then
back to the people in manifold art spaces to bring new values to the concepts
of body, self, human, female, and feminist is a return with a difference to
Zarathustra’s way from the cave in the mountain to the people, again and again.
Nina Arsenault seems to be the answer to the riddle that
Nick Land poses in “Meat”: “What is an animal at dawn, a human at noon, and a
cyborg at dusk, passing through […] genetic wetware […] [and] technocultural
software […] into the tertiary schizo[Venus]machine?”10)
3) Bill Hughes, “Nietzsche: Philosophizing with the Body,”
in Body and Society, Vol. 2, No. 1 (London, Thousand Oakes and New Delhi: SAGE,
1996), 31–44, at 31.
4) Nandita Biswas Mellamphy, 'The Three Stigmata of
Friedrich Nietzsche' (London: Palgrave MacMillan, 2011), 14.
5) Friedrich Nietzsche, “On Reading and Writing,” Thus Spoke
Zarathustra, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Penguin, 1954), §40.
6) Nick Land, “Shamanic Nietzsche,” in 'Fanged Noumena:
Collected Writings 1987–2007', ed. Ray Brassier and Robin Mackay (Falmouth:
Urbanomic, 2011), 203–28.
7) Arthur Kroker, 'The Will to Technology and The Culture of
Nihilism: Heidegger, Nietz sche and Marx' (Toronto: University of Toronto
Press, 2004), 85.
8) Ibid.
9) Nina Arsenault, “The Ecstasy of Nina Arsenault,” 40 Days
& 40 Nights: Working Towards a Spiritual Experience (henceforth, 40–40)
(Toronto SummerWorks, Aug. 2012).
10) Nick Land, “Meat,” in Fanged Noumena, 428.
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Networked
Nightmares: On Our Dionysian
Post-Military Condition
Manabrata Guha 2010
In the context of war and combat, the weaponized cyborg
is the most refined version of the human–machine conjoining project thus far.
....
While cyborgs, given their individual and collective
computing capabilities, may be able to act on and respond to rapidly changing
events, they cannot contend with transformations in their conditions of
possibility. In other words, cyborgs can only operate against non-animated
backgrounds (alternatively, in “dead spaces”), which the
protocologically-organized networks provide. This is why cyborgs can seamlessly
operate in computationally underwritten conditions of which they are
themselves, in part, a product. Floridi refers to such cybernetic organisms as
information organisms or inforgs.35) Floridi’s understanding of inforgs, while
a functionally oriented one, is nevertheless interesting. What is at stake in
Floridi’s understanding is the evolutionary adaptation of human agents to a
digital environment.
Floridi claims that the “threshold between here (analogue,
carbon-based, offline) and there (digital, silicon-based, online) is fast
becoming blurred.”36) As a consequence, Floridi claims that “we are all
becoming connected informational organisms (inforgs). This is happening not
through some fanciful transformation in our body, but, more seriously and realistically,
through the re-ontologization of our environment and ourselves.”37)
Nietzsche, perhaps best of all, captured the intensity of
this state of affairs in an elegant manner. In Nietzschean terms, the
conditions instituted and marked by the veritable flood of information may be
described as being ‘a monster of energy,
without beginning, without end; a firm, iron magnitude of force that does not
grow bigger or smaller, that does not expend itself but only transforms itself;
as a whole, of unalterable size, a household without expenses or losses, but
likewise without increase or income; enclosed by “nothingness” as by a
boundary; not something blurry or wasted, not something endlessly extended, but
set in a definite space as a definite force, and not a space that might be
“empty” here or there, but rather as force throughout, as a play of forces and
waves of forces, at the same time one and many, increasing here and at the same
time decreasing there; a sea of forces flowing and rushing together, eternally
changing, eternally flooding back, with tremendous years of recurrence, with an
ebb and a flood of its forms; out of the simplest forms striving toward the
most complex, out of the stillest, most rigid, coldest forms striving toward
the hottest, most turbulent, most self-contradictory, and then again returning
home to the simple out of this abundance, out of the play of contradictions
back to the joy of concord, still affirming itself in this uniformity of its
courses and its years, blessing itself as that which must return eternally, as
a becoming that knows no satiety, no disgust, no weariness: this […] Dionysian
world of the eternally self-creating, the eternally self-destroying, this
mystery world of the twofold voluptuous delight […] “beyond good and evil,”
without goal, unless the joy of the circle is itself a goal; without will,
unless a ring feels good will toward itself — do you want[…] [a] solution for
all of its riddles? […] — This world is the will to power, and nothing besides!
And you yourselves are also this will to power — and nothing besides!’ 38)
35) Floridi, “A Look into the Future Impact of ICTs in our
Life,” 9. Note that Floridi is not the only theorist who speaks of “inforgs.”
See also his Philosophy of Information (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011),
311–36.
36) Floridi, “A Look into the Future Impact of ICTs in our
Life,” 4.
37) Ibid., 9–10.
38) Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power, trans. Walter
Kaufman (New York: Vintage Press, 1973), 550, §1067.
----------------------------
Nietzsche’s Amor
Fati: Wishing and Willing in a
Cybernetic Circuit
Nicola Masciandaro
The natural connection between the cybernetic and
Nietzsche’s 'amor fati’; is evident
in their intersection within the principle of interface as the site of steering
or helmsmanship (kubernēsis).
Nietzsche names this love under the double sign of 'Januarius' — at once the two-faced god
of beginnings/doorways/gates and the saint whose annually liquefying blood
signals the miracle of spiritual renewal — and installs it as a navigational
protocol in the form of a new year’s resolution: “Let that be my love from now
on!”
'Amor fati', I
will affirm, is the protocol for navigating interface itself, a pure cybernetic
law that steers steering per se around the radically immanent negative
interfacial pole of looking away: “Let looking away be my only negation!”
From Nietzsche, The
Antichrist 57:
"A high
civilization is a pyramid: it can stand only on a broad base; its primary
prerequisite is a strong and soundly consolidated mediocrity. The handicrafts,
commerce, agriculture, science, the greater part of art, in brief, the whole
range ofoccupational activities, are compatible only with mediocre ability and
aspiration; such callings would be out of place for exceptional men; the
instincts which belong to them stand as much opposed to aristocracy as to
anarchism. The fact that a man is publicly useful, that he is a wheel, a function,
is evidence of a natural predisposition; it is not society, but the only sort
of happiness that the majority are capable of, that makes them intelligent
machines. To the mediocre mediocrity is a form of happiness; they have a
natural instinct for mastering one thing, for specialization. It would be
altogether unworthy of a profound intellect to see anything objectionable in
mediocrity in itself. It is, in fact, the first prerequisite to the appearance
of the exceptional: it is a necessary condition to a high degree of
civilization. When the exceptional man handles the mediocre man with more
delicate fingers than he applies to himself or to his equals, this is not
merely kindness of heart—it is simply his duty.... Whom do I hate most heartily
among the rabbles of today? The rabble of Socialists, the apostles to the
Chandala, who undermine the workingman’s instincts, his pleasure, his feeling
of contentment with his petty existence—who make him envious and teach him
revenge.... Wrong never lies in unequal rights; it lies in the assertion of
“equal” rights.... What is bad? But I have
already answered: all that proceeds from weakness, from envy, from
revenge.—The anarchist and the Christian have the same ancestry...."
