Humanity's End is Men Overcoming Man
Will soul take its final stand?
Humanity’s end will not happen through annihilation; possibly through transformation.
To be transhuman with a post-humanist end means transcending humanity.
It is men overcoming man.*
In his Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Friedrich Nietzsche called us bridges between animals and something that we do not yet know. We stretch over the chasm between humanity and something altogether new.
Today’s Übermensch is the transhuman. The post-human. He has overcome man by becoming something beyond it.
He wants to live forever by immortalizing technique. He wants to upload his consciousness, although he can only mean brain, not nous.
His technique is sublation; the denial of something in us, the affirmation of something in us, and the adaptation of a new thing (say, night vision eyes for war). What we become is something new. A metamorphosis happens.
That day, which governs only my poor frame,
May come at will to end my unfixed life,
But in my better and immortal part
I shall be borne beyond the lofty stars
And never will my name be washed away.
This immortal part for the transhuman is not soul, nous, but neurons and signals. We count it, measure it, quantify it. It is calculable by nature.
And so transformation occurs by sublation. And this act of sublation happens now in “lower or bottom surgeries.” One can perform a vaginectomy to remove the vagina (a denial of something), remain a gendered being (an affirmation of something), and receive a “phalloplasty, which uses skin from other parts of your body to create a penis” (a transformation).
But the transhumanist project transcends surgeries and brain-uploads. Some desire a virtual or mechanical or digital existence for humanity. One company advertises the necromantic act of using an AI to reproduce a virtual chatbot of a dead relative, with their physical form and voice. Death undergoes a transhuman event. If we can upload brains to data centres, which can learn and grow, will we consider the chatbot human—all too human? Or is this just post-human life per se?
Others advertise IVF as a way to select traits in some embryos that are superior to others, including higher IQ and even height. So some embryos are chosen; others are not. Some overpower many through technique. This form of IVF transcends human limits in pregnancy, preserves the good of childbirth, yet transforms it into a new way of bearing life. Scientific birth is new; not wholly, but by metamorphosis.
Humanity’s end is men overcoming man. By overcoming, we become post-human. We cease being a bridge. We leave animality and its anima. We take with us the will to power, the will of some over many, the will to dominate all natural limits.
Or might our limits be harder to overcome than we think? Could some powerful force within prevent us from dominating nature as we will?
Will soul take its final stand?
*The phrase men overcoming man probably comes from George Grant, but I cannot remember why I think this. But just in case, I note it here.