Delivered at the Savage Collective Conference, November 8th, MMXXVº AD.1
A common feature among transhumanists is the objective of transcending limits. We are surrounded in this world by all sorts of limits. The constraints of tradition, habit, social expectation. The limits of our enfeebled, carbon-based bodies, our chemically imbalanced and only sometimes rational brains, our language frustrated by the obligation to express one word after another. By sickness, hunger, and many other adversities. We are slower, dumber, less powerful, and less provided for than some believe is possible.
What stands in our way is uncontrolled nature. Or rather, what stands in our way is the current arrangement of nature. We want the shortest distance between what we want and it actually happening. The world around us is not well suited to this, it seems. It hinders us in all sorts of ways: the whim of chance, the gnawing menace of scarcity, the mass of other individuals, stuffed into meat-suits, ready to sacrifice each other for even minor advantage. These conditions in nature impede the enjoyment of unlimited happiness.
As it turns out, however, that cruel mistress, nature, can turn into an opportunity. We are finding that our ability to shape things can go very deep. Writing in the decades after the world wars, the evolutionary bioligist, Julian Huxley, was one of the early adopters of the term, Transhumanism. Writing enthusiastically about technology’s potential to improve our world — a curious optimism in the wake of August 1945 — he declared:
It is as if man had been suddenly appointed managing director of the biggest business of all, the busines of evolution — appointed without being asked if he wanted it, and without proper warning and preparation. What is more, he can’t refuse the job. Whether he wants to or not, whether he is unconsciousof what he is doing or not, he is in point of fact determining the future direction of evolution on this earth. That is his inescapably destiny, and the sooner he realizes it and starts believing in it, the better for all concerned.
The more we come to understand nature and her ways, the better we are able to form and manipulate and fashion a world better suited to satisfy rather than to hinder our desires. We might, in fact, build a world as nearly unlike what it was to begin with as is imaginable: a world within which our limits have been converted into a space of near endless availability and capacity. It is only a matter of transformation, requiring a great deal of retooling.
Transhumanism would not survive as an idea if it were not for the sense that nature becomes marvelously malleable in our hands. We can trick cells into producing pieces of a virus in order for our bodies to combat disease; we can store and manipulate unbelievable amounts of data on silicon; we can reintroduce extinct species as we select for the preferred genetic characteristics of our offspring. And we will, by god, establish a colony on mars. With enough know-how and the right machine, is there nothing we cannot alter?
The sophistication — and the promise of it getting ever greater — lends credence to the belief that many things, perhaps even everything, can be extended past what we believed was its permanent state. As Huxley puts it,
The zestful but scientific exploration of possibilities and of the techniques for realizing them will make our hopes rational, and will set our ideals within the framework of reality, by showing how much of them are indeed realizable.
Movement forward, breaking past limitations, is itself the message of transhumanism. One must not only break through limitations on the way to the limitless; one must not be satisfied with any given expanse, as if to say, ‘here will do and no further.’ This is well captured in Marc Andreessen’s Techno Optimist Manifesto, in the short line: “Techno-Optimists believe that societies,like sharks, grow or die.” Cessation is itself a sin against our destiny. The only way is forward, and constantly so.
Going back at least to the work of Francis Bacon, the promise of technology has been essential to the transhumanist ambition. Progress in scientific knowledge, the production of devices, the refinement of techniques, even the installment of entirely re-thought structures of living are all tooks in his hand by which he strikes and bends the world into a different shape. But technology is not only the “means by which;” the change required is so great, because nature is so ill-directed, that the world built up by the transhumanist is itself the real technology. It is just another word for the world once it has ceased to be an obstacle and has been made suited to our deepest desires, desires which do not abide limits. It will take many gradual steps to get there, but with each step, the limits are being stretched and may hopefully one day explode out. One might think of transhumanism as an experiment in paradoxical geometry. The drama of it is to take a sphere, with its pitiful, defined inner volume, and turn it inside out to see that volume rush indefinitely outward.2
In response to this vision, one feels an intuitive urge to defend the limitations which are being so stretched, contorted, and transgressed. Limitations are, in fact, good things, goes the response; they provide a kind of harmony between us and nature and between us and each other. Limits give us shape, and shape offers meaning.
To break past boundaries is to mess with those relations, risking all manner of discord. Liberating women from the limitations of childbirth, men from the limitations of monogamy, and children from the limitations of this reality by way of virtual realities, local household economies to economies of international scale. Limitations are being challenged every day, and require as much safeguarding. We should limit our screen time; trespassing robots will be shot on sight; we must honor the fragility of our bodies.
Without exactly disagreeing with this way of responding to transhumanism, I want to suggest that this line of attack is too reactionary to be enough. What I mean by reactionary is that this way of responding to transhumanists has granted too much to the transhumanist position. This is likely done for very understandable reasons. If the transhumanism says, away with limits, the reactionary feels the right thing to say is, respect limits. For if the desire to breach all limits has granted the transhumanist license to commit such violence and wreak so much havoc, surely it was their initial premise of pursuing limitlessness where everything went badly wrong. This makes sense. Whenever we strongly disagree, we are especially wary of agreeing with them precisely where it counts the most for their position. The posture of holding the opposite view and pursuing an opposite conclusion seems at least a wiser tactic than affirming the crucial claim and showing how you understand it better than they do.
Alongside the arguments in favor of limits, I want to explore one way in which we might affirm a sense in which limits are not our friends, where they must be broken through, and where the limitless is the goal. This may amount to nothing more than muddying the waters; as if transhumanism wasn’t already confusing enough, I am suggesting that our response to it should involve in one sense defending and in another sense rejecting limits.
To support this view, I turn to an author who writes very little if at all about technology: Gregory of Nyssa. A bishop and theologian in the fourth century, Nyssa did not write a treatise about building the world through technology, or an essay on evolution. Perhaps relevant to the issue of transhumanism, however, Nyssa was part of the Christian tradition, where, among other mysterious beliefs, is included the formula, first proposed by Athanasius in his treatise on the bodily presence of God in the world, that “God became man so that man might become god.”
Among other works, Nyssa wrote a kind of letter, The Life of Moses, in which he aims to answer a question posed to him by an annymous friend: what does the perfect life look like?
He begins by describing of two kinds of perfection. He writes
The perfection of everything which can be measured by the senses is marked off by certain definite boundaries. Quantity, for example, admits of both continuity and limitation, for every quantitative measure is circumscribed by certain limits proper to itself. The person who looks at a cubit or at the number ten knows that its perfection consists in the fact that it has both a beginning and an end. (pg. 30)
The first kind of perfection is found in material things — things which can be measured. A number or a shape is perfect when the quantity it requires has been met. When building a bunk bed, a 2x4 is cut perfectly when its length is exactly what the bunk bed calls for. Too long, or worse, too short, and something is imperfect. But the length is perfect because it is exactly 5’ 6”, not because it goes off indefinitely. In these things, limits are part of what makes the thing perfect.
In the case of one’s actions, however, the opposite is true. Virtue, that is, living out one’ s life so as to reach what is good, does not possess a limit. This is not a material object, or even something that could be measured by abstract units. “But in the case of virtue,” Nyssa says,” we have learned from the Apostle that its one limit of perfection is the fact that it has no limit,“or as he puts it elsewhere, “The horizon of virtue is having no horizon.”
Not only is there no limit, no place where one has achieved perfect virtue, but we have an obligation never to cease in our striving towards more virtue. We may not live as if we have arrived at the limit. This is not merely mistaken, cessation from progress in virtue is an evil:
Just as the end of life is the beginning of death, so also stopping in the race of virtue marks the beginning of the race of evil. … for it has been pointed out that what is marked off by boundaries is not virtue. (pg. 30)
The idea that perfection demands constant movement forward, past all supposed limits, arises from the nature of its end or purpose. Nyssa writes,
The Divine One is himself the Good (in the primary and proper sense of the word), whose very nature is goodness. … Since, then, it has not been demonstrated that there is any limit to virtue except evil (its opposite), and since the Divine does not admit of an opposite, we hold the divine nature to be unlimited and infinite. Certainly whoever purses true virtue participates in nothing other than God, because he is himself absolute virtue. Since, then, those who know what is good by nature desire participation in it, and since this good has no limit, the participant’s desire itself necessarily has no stopping place but stretches out with the limitless. (pg. 31)
Here Nyssa makes two points, one perhaps more apparent than the other. First, the good which we desire in our heart of hearts — God himself — is infinite. This is a common theme among both pagan and Christian philosophers. Material, measurable things, as Nyssa noted, have a beginning and an end. Our deepest desires, on the other hand, are for something actually endless. Perfect virtue, goodness, happiness — they do not have a discrete beginning and end. They are boundless, admitting of no opposite. This perfection is not the sort we find in a 2x4 cut precisely at 5’ 6”, but like a friendship we wish had always been there and hope never comes to an end.
This leads us to the second, perhaps more subtle point he is making: our deepest desire is for what is already infinite. How is this important? Think again of transhumanism’s goal: it hopes to make the world, if you will, ever more capable of serving our hungriest desires. To live longer than we do now, to be freer than we are now, to be better than we once were. It is a project of starting from very little and building toward the infinite. Exponential or logarithmic growth they promise is within our reach, but any rate of progress will do. As technology becomes more powerful and more intricate, so our insatiable desires are provided with incrementally more to enjoy. Like a growing crab shedding its skin, our technological apparatus grows so as to accommodate our restless desires.
By contrast, the good we truly and finally desire, as described by Nyssa, is not potentially or eventually or progressively unlimited. What we desire is what is already able to satisfy us, where the limiting factor is our own capacity, not the latest version of the goal. In other words, according to Nyssa and a great many other philosophers and theologians of many traditions, what we desire is not merely the next, marginal addition of perfection; we do desire more, but that is because more gets us to what we truly want the most. We do want one more day with our friend, but that is because we truly want all days with him.
Without the distinction between an already-existing limitlessness and a ‘gradually approached but not really existing’ limitlessness, Nyssa and the transhumanist might be suggesting similar projects. After all, in both cases, our experience of approaching the goal looks quiet similar. In both cases, we are gradually, incrementally approaching the goal, becoming fuller, happier, more powerful, and in some sense more god-like.
So why does this ever-so-slight difference in the nature of goal matter, if the experience of approaching them seems so alike?
It is crucial since the nature of the goal will inform where we look when planning out how to attain it. If we believe the limitless is something we must build toward ourselves, our decisions will be very different than if we believe the limitless is already there. If the infinite must be built toward, the way we get there is by definition to expand the sum of parts; it is a function of an endless process of addition. Quiet understandably, the measureable, material world becomes the natural arena for its achievement. Yes, we may never get there, but even asymptotic approach is its own thrill, and there is no reason to believe we cannot get damn near close to it.
If, however, the limitless is already there, if perfection already exists, we realize something immediately: first off, this limitless perfection cannot be found (or achieved) among material objects or within some configuration of objects in the world. They are always measurable, which is another way of saying, not already limitless. The place to look for the limitless is not in this world, but beyond it. Our deepest calling is not, as Huxley would have it, to command the destiny of an evolutionary process, but, as Nyssa would say, to become like God.3 The source of the perfect life is literally out of this world.
This in turn guides our plans. Building toward the infinite no longer looks necessary or valiant, but pointless, and even a little insane. It’s a bit like spending decades refining hardware, expending billions of dollars, using megawatts of electricity, and re-training untold of versions of algorithms in order to craft the perfect companion when there’s already a pub down the road where people gather to drink a lot and sing loudly and lose money at darts. If one is the comedy of falling, stumbling, haphazardly attaining what is already there, the other is the tragedy of urgent, hopeless redundancy.
Transhumanism is not entirely mistaken when it prizes the limitless, or despises talk of proper boundaries, or spends enormous effort in the attainment of the limitless. It is wrong in where it believes perfection is to be found, and hence what stands in its way. The final obstacle to our deepest desires is not the configuration of the world, but the condition of our souls, for whose perfection we must vigorously strive.4
Footnotes
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Slightly edited. ↩
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(This is perhaps all very fanciful, but they will try as long as there are resources allocated to the goal. Leave to the side if any part of this project is possible, the translation of the mind into a computer, e.g.) ↩
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There is the obvious question: Becoming like God does not imply not developing technology or acting in some fashion as “dominus” of the world. So, isn’t it possible that Huxley’s world and Nyssa’s looks the same? (Answer: yes and no. It’s still true that the deepest desire is different, and when the desire is different, the disposition toward the world is different, and thus we are not challenged in the same way by the configuration of the world.) ↩
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I am indebted to Michael Toscano for this observation: another line in The Techno-Optimist Manifesto runs thus: “Technology is the glory of human ambition and achievement, the spearhead of progress, and the realization of our potential.” Replace “technology” with “virtue” and you can appreciate the difference between Nyssa and the transhumanist: “Virtue is the glory of human ambition and achievement, the spearhead of progress, and the realization of our potential.” ↩