Since humanism has been the core of the Western tradition through the centuries, the emergence of anti-humanism and post-humanism represents an inflection point of our civilizational crisis. In confronting this crisis, conservative humanism aims not to erase the positive achievements of modern humanism, but to graft them back onto their roots where they can draw vitality from life-giving tradition.
Is humanity coming to an end? Is the great drama of human history drawing to a close? One could be forgiven for thinking so. The misanthropic narratives of “post-humanism” and “trans-humanism “are very much in vogue. Yuval Noah Harari—one of the most acclaimed and popular authors of our time, not least among Silicon Valley elites—writes that technology is in the process of making humans beings obsolete:
For thousands of years history was full of technological, economic, social and political upheavals. Yet one thing remained constant: humanity itself…. However, once technology enables us to re-engineer human minds, Homo sapiens will disappear, human history will come to an end and a completely new kind of process will begin, which people like you and me cannot comprehend. (Harari, Homo Deus, 46).
For misanthropes, post-humanism is something to be earnestly embraced. Anti-natalists philosophers call for the voluntary extinction of the human race as a blight upon nature and its animals. There are surely others as excited as 20th-century eugenicists about the prospect of using machines or gene-editing to take control of human evolution and produce a “higher” species of supermen. But for many, post-humanism provokes revulsion against the entire trajectory of Western modernity. In the spirit of romantic protest, the Russian right-wing anti-liberal philosopher denounces the “…properly postmodern, post-humanism, promoting cybernetics, genetic modification, cybernetics, and chimeras” (Dugin, The Fourth Political Theory, 75).
...The possibility of reducing man to a consciously designed product was already envisioned by the German philosopher Martin Heidegger. In a 1969 interview with Richard Wisser, Heidegger spoke of:
… what is today developed as biophysics: that we may soon have the possibility to create the human, that is … regarding his organic nature…to construct him just as we need him to be.
Heidegger´s main point was that technology was a force that had entirely slipped beyond human control; it was instead becoming an alien force threatening to subordinate humanity to itself:
I see in technology, namely its essence… that the human being is standing in the range of influence of a power, which challenges him, and in regard to this power he is no longer free.
This contemporary vision of man enslaved to the machine could not be further from the original humanist vision of those great pioneers of modern technological civilization some four centuries ago. Sir. Francis Bacon famously imagined that the knowledge of nature opened by inductive science would lead to “… the relief of man´s estate…” (Bacon, The Advancement of Learning, I.v.11), while Rene Descartes believed that by science “… we would render ourselves the lords and possessors of nature.” (Descartes, Discourse on Method, VI). How is it that this modern project which envisioned the development of technology as a tool to establish human mastery over a domesticated nature culminated in a vision where the tool becomes the master? How in short did the project of humanism culminate in post-humanism?...
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Originally Posted by Chris
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