Postmodernity, Transhumanism, and the Spirit of the Enlightenment

Abstract

This essay is a reflection on the nature of technology and agency in postmodernity. It was triggered by the recent book The Techno-Human Condition, by Braden Allenby and Daniel Sarewitz, in which the authors critically take up the claims of transhumanism to radically change what it means to be human. They see in this claim only the latest version of the hubris of Enlightenment rationality. In a different vocabulary, they thus contribute to the “ontology of actuality” that postmodern philosopher Gianni Vattimo tries to capture with his philosophy of weak thought. For Vattimo, technology has brought about a situation where the strong claims of Enlightenment rationality must give way to a conflict of interpretations. At the same time, there is no alternative to “Enlightenment 2.0”—if only as the practice of “muddling through,” as Allenby and Sarewitz put it. I read the necessity of muddling through, which results from the impossibility of finding a stable foundation to guide communal action, as evidence of Vattimo’s description of the present as the “weakening of the principle of reality”: this is our postmodern state of affairs, due to the lack of any ultimate foundation, belief, or narrative.