Transhumanism

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Transhumanism is the proposal that the oldest human complaints — aging, frailty, the narrow ceiling of intelligence, death itself — are engineering problems, and that solving them is both possible and desirable. Where older traditions sought passage beyond the human condition through grace, discipline, or knowledge, transhumanists propose to build it: medicine against aging, machines joined to minds, bodies revised at will, and, in the far projections, persons carried out of biology altogether. The movement’s formal documents are candid about the scale. The human species in its present form, the Transhumanist FAQ states, represents not the end of development but a comparatively early phase.

The word is older than the movement, and its pedigree is instructive. Dante coined trasumanar — to pass beyond the human — in the Paradiso, around 1320, for what happened to him as he gazed at Beatrice; he glossed it through Ovid’s fisherman Glaucus, who tasted an herb and became a god of the sea. The word family’s first referent, in other words, was deification. The modern term belongs to Julian Huxley — biologist, first director-general of UNESCO, brother of Aldous — who proposed it in 1957 as a name for his evolutionary humanism, in a sentence the movement’s historians still quote: “man remaining man, but transcending himself, by realizing new possibilities of and for his human nature.” The narrowing to technology came later. The futurist FM-2030 — born Fereidoun M. Esfandiary in 1930, renamed for the hundredth birthday he hoped to reach — taught “new concepts of the human” at the New School in the 1960s and used “transhuman” for the transitional being he believed was already appearing. In 1990 the philosopher Max More wrote the first definition in the current sense, describing transhumanism as the class of philosophies that seek to continue and accelerate the evolution of intelligent life beyond its human form and limitations by scientific and technological means.

The organized movement assembled itself piece by piece in the second half of the twentieth century. Robert Ettinger’s The Prospect of Immortality (1962) founded cryonics on a single wager: chemical activity stops in the cold, so the newly dead might be preserved now and repaired by a more capable future. The journal Extropy (1988) and the Extropy Institute after it incubated the first organized transhumanist community — libertarian-leaning, mailing-list-borne, committed to “dynamic optimism” — until the institute closed in 2006, declaring its work essentially done. The World Transhumanist Association, founded in 1998 by the philosophers Nick Bostrom and David Pearce and renamed Humanity+ in 2008, gave the movement its formal charter: a collectively drafted FAQ, and the Transhumanist Declaration — written in 1998 by twenty-three authors, adopted in 2009 — which calls for overcoming aging, cognitive shortcomings, involuntary suffering, and confinement to Earth, and ranks the reduction of existential risk among the urgent priorities. FM-2030 did not reach the birthday in his name: he died of pancreatic cancer in 2000 and became the first person at Alcor to be vitrified rather than frozen.

The program runs from the near to the speculative, and the movement insists the near suffices: screening, drugs, prosthetics, anti-aging research — the agenda, the FAQ argues, is already practical. At its center sits “morphological freedom,” Anders Sandberg’s term from 2001 for the right to modify one’s own body, derived as an extension of self-ownership and framed strictly as a negative right — no one compelled to change, no one prevented. At the far end stand cryonics, uploading, and machine superintelligence. The cryonics provider Alcor (founded 1972) calls its procedure “an ambulance to the future” and rests it on an information-theoretic definition of death: a person is truly gone only when the brain structures encoding memory and personality are disrupted beyond recovery. Uploading would scan those structures and run them as software; transhumanists themselves disagree about whether what wakes is the same person. Beyond both lies the intelligence explosion — I. J. Good’s 1965 observation that an ultraintelligent machine would be the last invention its makers ever need to make, Vernor Vinge’s 1993 forecast that superhuman intelligence would end the human era within decades, Ray Kurzweil’s law of accelerating returns. The movement is split on the singularity, and Bostrom’s own history pointedly sets aside its frankly religious variants — Teilhard’s noosphere, Tipler’s Omega Point — as mysticism rather than analysis.

The strangest tributary runs through Moscow. In the late nineteenth century the librarian Nikolai Fedorov — a devout Orthodox layman his admirers called the Socrates of Moscow — taught that humanity’s Common Task was to regulate the forces of nature, defeat death, and resurrect every person who has ever died, regathering their “scattered molecules and atoms” into bodies. Immortality for the living alone struck him as ethically incomplete; the dead hold a claim on the living. His thought touched Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, and Solovyov, and his mentorship of Konstantin Tsiolkovsky, the founding theorist of spaceflight, carried the impulse into the rocket age. Histories of transhumanism trace the lineage explicitly, and the difference instructs as much as the descent: Fedorov’s task was Christian to its core — resurrection a duty owed to the fathers, technology an instrument inside providence. The later movement kept the shape of his program and removed its God.

The critics arrived with the biotechnology. Francis Fukuyama named transhumanism “the world’s most dangerous idea” in 2004, arguing that liberal equality rests on a shared human essence that enhancement would dissolve, and that human virtues are too entangled with human defects to be edited separately. Leon Kass, chairing the President’s Council on Bioethics, defended repugnance itself as the expression of a wisdom deeper than reason can articulate. Jürgen Habermas argued in 2003 that a genome designed by one’s parents makes one person the author of another’s existence, corroding the “ethical self-understanding of the species” — the presumption that persons are equally born and author their own lives. Bill McKibben argued that meaning itself depends on the limits enhancement would remove. The newest critique aims wider: in 2024 Timnit Gebru and Émile Torres bundled transhumanism with six allied currents under the acronym TESCREAL and argued that the race toward artificial general intelligence the bundle animates is “rooted in the Anglo-American eugenics tradition”; defenders, the transhumanist sociologist James Hughes among them, answered that the bundle is “a left-wing conspiracy theory” fusing disparate philosophies into one. Each side now writes the other’s genealogy.

A quieter scholarship reads the movement less as a danger than as a recurrence. Hava Tirosh-Samuelson treats transhumanism as an outgrowth of secular humanism whose boldest hope — the mind made immortal by porting it out of the flesh — is an eschatological vision with medieval precedents: Ibn Rushd and Maimonides taught an immortality of the intellect while keeping the boundary between human and divine intact, and it is “precisely the boundary between the human and the divine,” she writes, that transhumanism “seeks to erase.” Theologians have called uploading the disembodied soul returned under a new name; commentators religious and secular alike have reached for “neo-gnostic.” The FAQ half-concedes the geometry: transhumanism is not a religion, it says, yet it discusses prospects — very long life, unfading bliss, godlike intelligence — that “used to be the exclusive thunder of the religious institutions,” reclassified now as engineering. Some religions have simply said yes. The Mormon Transhumanist Association, founded in Salt Lake City in 2006, affirms that scientific knowledge and technological power are “among the means ordained of God” for transfiguration, immortality, and resurrection; a Christian Transhumanist Association followed in 2014.

What an encyclopedia of the Hermetic current is bound to notice, the movement noticed first. Bostrom’s standard history opens its genealogy with Gilgamesh and runs it through the alchemists laboring at the Elixir of Life and Pico’s oration on man as shaper of his own being, conceding that the boundary between magic and technology was once genuinely blurred. Read side by side, the correspondences run point for point: the elixir become anti-aging medicine and the liquid-nitrogen dewar; the transmutation of base matter become molecular manufacturing; the work the alchemist performed upon himself become enhancement and the hoped-for posthuman; apotheosis become superintelligence on a roadmap. Critics saw the same shape from outside — “algeny,” alchemy crossed with genetics, was coined as an accusation. On this site’s reading the lineage is as well attested as such a lineage can be — claimed from within, pressed from without — and still the two arts are not one. Alchemy worked inside a cosmos of correspondences where perfecting matter and perfecting the soul were one operation, conducted under a theology of limits that could be tested but not repealed. Transhumanism is naturalist by charter: it rejects hubris as a category, declines any irreducible soul, and relocates the person into pattern — information in a substrate, in principle portable. The alchemist’s work was to transform soul and matter together; the transhumanist’s would modify pattern and substrate. The vocabularies rhyme; the ontologies do not. What survives the translation is the wager itself. Neither art has yet produced its proof, and what stands in the meantime is the claim both make against the given — that the human being, as found, is not finished.

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