THE POSTHUMAN AND THE TRANSHUMAN

AS ALTERNATIVE MAPPINGS OF THE

SPACE OF POLITICAL POSSIBILITY

S T E V E F U L L E R , U N I V E R S I T Y O F WA R W I C K

ABSTRACT

This paper takes a loosely “quantum” approach to political possibility. In other

words, depending on how the present is characterized, both past and future
possibilities are defined simultaneously. Political history is full of such quantum
moments, which revolutionize our understanding of the historical subject. It is
normally assumed that some version of Homo sapiens is the historical subject.
However, post-and trans-humanism challenge that assumption, albeit in rather
different ways. For example, the “genetic” and the “superorganic” figure in both
but are given quite different spins, neither implying that the morphology of
the upright ape is inviolate. Posthumanists stress our overlap with other species
and interdependency with nature, while transhumanists stress the variability
and mutability of genes, which allow enhancement. Posthumanist sociology
­emphasizes the “superorganic” biological and evolutionary roots of social ­behavior,
while transhumanists emphasize humanity’s extension into technology and
our accelerating cultural evolution. Both posthumanists and transhumanists
see our simian nature as a platform or way station that opens up into a much
wider range of possible ancestors and descendants than conventional politics
normally countenances.

KEYWORDS

chronos, kairos, posthuman, quantum, revisionism, transhuman

THE SPACE OF POLITICAL POSSIBILITY AS A QUANTUM PHENOMENON

We tend to have a flat-footed understanding of how history works. For example,

much is made of the predictive failures of Marxism, starting with Marx’s own
failure to predict that the first revolution done in his name would occur not

Journal of Posthuman Studies, Vol. 1, No. 2, 2017

Copyright © 2018 The Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA

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in the country with the best organized industrial labor force (Germany) but
in a country with a largely disorganized and preindustrial labor force (Russia).
Yet this way of putting matters gives the misleading impression that Marxists
and their opponents were simply spectators to history, when in fact they were
anything but that. Indeed, the phrases “self-fulfilling” and “self-defeating
prophecy” were coined in the twentieth century to cover the peculiar forms
of success and failure to which not only socialists but also capitalists—in
terms of investor confidence in the market—have been prone in the modern
era. People deliberately act to both increase and decrease the probability that
specific predictions come true. The resulting phenomena are often discussed
as the “interactive” effects of “observer” and “observed,” a distinction that
posthumanists sometimes like to associate with the workings of quantum
reality. But we do not need to buy into the esoteric metaphysical world views
that Karen Barad (2007) and others have erected on top of this connection to
see that quantum mechanics offers some clues to how we should think about
politics in a post-/trans-humanist era.
The most natural way to interpret the mathematics of quantum mechanics is
that it envisages reality as a possibility space, in which the actual world consists
in the ubiquitous collapsing of this space into moments, which provide portals
to understanding what is possible in both the past and the future. These portals
are what we normally call “the present,” the arena in which cause and effect are
most clearly played out. But as the content of the present changes, so too does
our sense of what has been and will be possible. In that respect, nothing need
be forever impossible, because the right event could alter the possibility space
decisively. But similarly, something that had been possible may subsequently
become impossible. To be sure, this characterization is much too crude for a
physicist. However, it may suffice to launch the metaphysical horizon needed to
distinguish posthumanist and transhumanist politics. Thus, in what follows, I will
not delve into the mysteries of “quantum causation” (aka action at a distance),
let alone how a vision of reality that was designed to understand the smallest
of events can be scaled up so easily to make sense of normal-sized events and
even overarching tendencies. However, I recommend Wendt (2015) as a clear
step in that direction, as he ambitiously attempts to turn quantum mechanics
into the metaphysical horizon of the social sciences.
The idea that events determine the course of history is a commonplace—
albeit a contested one among philosophers of history. This idea is normally
understood either in terms of a “founding moment” or of a “turning point.”
In the former, the past appears as a chaotic field, which the founders bring into
some sort of lasting order; in the latter, the past is presented as a default pattern,
which the turning point upends and redirects. Thomas Kuhn’s (1970 [1962])

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famous theory of scientific change combines the two as alternating phases of

“normal” and “revolutionary” science. But common to both versions of the idea,
seen as either distinct or complementary historical horizons, is that the “stuff
of history” is better captured—at least metaphorically—as transformations of
matter than the reconstitution of possibility space. An example of the difference
is the common sense proscriptions against “affecting,” let alone “changing.” the
past, even though we seem to have no problem talking about “affecting” and
even “changing” the future. Our intuitions about time having a direction are
grounded in this observation. In contrast, taking the “quantum turn” in the
sense promoted here would entail recognizing every event as potentially altering
both the past and future at once.
The late Oxford metaphysician Michael Dummett astutely observed that the
asymmetry in our default judgements of temporality suggests that our ordinary
intuitions about the nature of causation are incoherent, which in turn may
reflect an excessively underdetermined conception of free will (Dummett 1978,
Chaps. 18–21). In other words, when we talk about “changing the future,” we
imagine giving shape to something that remains unformed at the time of our
action, full stop. Yet it is only in retrospect—that is, once that “something” has
been given shape—that we can judge our action’s efficacy in turning what had
been a possible future into the actual present. We think we made a difference
because the difference we see is one which we see ourselves as having made.
(This is the problem that the law faces when trying to determine who should
“take responsibility” for an action during a trial.) In short, our understandings
of the past and the future are formed simultaneously. Indeed, the present may
be defined as the site where a possible future located in the past is converted
into the necessary ground for constructing the future.
What applies as a principle of our own mental equilibrium extends to our
judgements of history as a whole. For example, to claim that Isaac Newton and
Henry Ford changed the course of history presupposes a correspondence between
what we take them to have wanted to achieve and what we take them to have
achieved. It strikes a cognitive balance between the future they were projecting
from the past and the present that we project into the future. Understood as an
economic exchange, we forfeit a measure of our free will by letting Newton and
Ford set the initial conditions under which we are able to act, but in return we
acquire a sense of the direction of travel, in terms of which we can exercise our
own free will in a way (we bet) that will be appreciated by future observers. In
quantum terms, we concede position to receive momentum. The easiest way
to see this point is in terms of our ability to insert Newton or Ford into our
own world by casting what we are now trying to do in terms of something
they too were trying to do. That is the concession. But that concession then

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enables us to claim that we are doing things that they were unable to do. This
is the power we receive from the concession, which turns the future into a field
of realizable prospects.
A crucial feature of this arrangement is that we do not say that we are now
doing things that Newton or Ford could not have imagined or recognized
as part of some project they were pursuing. Were that the case, it would be
difficult to credit them with having changed the course of our history. They
might still be, in some sense, “great” or “interesting” figures—but not of our
world. Indeed, there are many such figures who are, so to speak, marooned
on the shores of history because they fail to offer us existential leverage. This
is normally what we mean when we say they have been “forgotten.” Yet these
figures always remain to be appropriated to construct the basis on which we
might move into the future. When Kuhn described the history of science’s
default self-understanding as “Orwellian,” he had something like this in mind
(Kuhn 1970 [1962], 167). Put more explicitly, scientists do not normally realize
how the significance of past research and researchers is routinely tweaked, if
not airbrushed, to motivate current inquiries. During a “scientific revolution,”
certain researchers and/or research may be added or subtracted altogether. For
historians of science this modus operandi does a gross injustice to the past, but
for working scientists it is an acceptable price to pay for whatever new findings
might result. It involves the sort of ruthlessness that would meet with Marxist
approval, as I shall suggest below.

POLITICS AND SCIENCE AS BASES FOR A “QUANTUM” HISTORIOGRAPHY

For the past fifty years or so, it has been common for historians to enjoy the
moral high ground in this particular disagreement. In other words, scientists
generally understand that the versions of the history of science that are purveyed
in science textbooks or popular science writings do not primarily perform the
function of saying what happened in the past. In practice, the scientist cedes
jurisdiction to the historian for deciding what is true or false about what those
accounts say. In return, the historian refrains from pronouncing over the truth
or falsehood of what scientists say about the future. To be sure, this division of
labor—or cordon sanitaire—is not strictly observed, but it captures the normative
expectations of the world in which we live.
In contrast, political history is much more self-consciously “quantum,” in
that professional historians do not generally enjoy the same privilege of framing
the terms in which claims about the past are validated. The Holocaust is an
interesting exception—a major political event in which professional historical
judgement rules, perhaps most dramatically in the 1996 UK court case, David

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Irving v. Penguin Books Ltd. But that may be simply because no major politi-
cal party finds it in its interest to capitalize on the Holocaust by linking it to
events with which it wishes to be associated. Thus, the Holocaust exists as a
self-contained moment surgically separated from the field of political play.
Otherwise, as George Orwell declared in the 4 February 1944 edition of the
UK democratic socialist magazine Tribune, “History is written by the winners.”
Little surprise, then, that the most self-consciously revolutionary movement
of the modern era, Marxism, has been always susceptible to bouts of historical
revisionism, when attempts are made by more learned partisans to redirect the
future by refocusing the past. Revisionism is perhaps most sympathetically
seen as a more economical means of achieving what might normally require
bloodshed, namely, what Leon Trotsky called a “permanent revolution.” The
politics of permanent revolution amounts to a quantum approach to history.
Interestingly, in his famous 1965 debate with Kuhn, Karl Popper (1981) also
spoke of his own falsifiability criterion as licensing a permanent revolution
in science. The analogy can be understood as follows. A common stock of
knowledge can be extended in many different, even contradictory directions,
depending on which bit of it is put at risk in an experiment. Popper argued that
science advances only when such risks are taken, the inevitable consequence
of which is that scientists discard—or at least radically reinterpret—what they
previously held to be true in order to enter the horizon of possibilities opened
up by the experimental outcome. Popper always had in the back of his mind
Einstein’s move to interpret time not as universally constant but as relative to
an inertial frame of reference, given the outcome of the Michelson–Morley
experiment. This move did not merely overturn Newton’s hegemony in physics,
but transformed Newton’s dogged opponents over the previous two centuries,
such early advocates of relational theories of time as Gottfried von Leibniz and
Ernst Mach, from cranks and sore losers to heroic and prescient figures whose
works were subsequently reread for clues as to what might follow in the wake
of the Einsteinian revolution (Feuer 1974).
The difference between the views of Kuhn and Popper on the role of
­revolutions in science can be summarized in terms of their contrasting approaches
to time: chronos versus kairos, the two Greek words that Christian theologians
sometimes use to contrast the narrative construction of the Old and the New
Testament. In chronos, genealogical succession drives the narrative flow, with
revolutions providing temporary ruptures which are quickly repaired to resume
the flow. Thus, the order of the books of the Old Testament follows the order of
­patriarchs and dynasts. This is also the spirit in which Kuhn’s historiography of
science proceeds—that is, according to paradigms that generate normal science,
occasionally punctuated by a self-inflicted crisis that precipitates revolution,

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the outcome of which serves to restore the natural order. In contrast, in kairos,
there are recurrent figures who constitute the narrative but no default narrative
flow, as the world order is potentially created anew from moment to moment.
Thus, the New Testament begins four times with the varying Gospel accounts
of the rupture that was Jesus, with all but the final book presenting various
roughly contemporaneous directions in which Jesus’ teachings were taken after
his death, virtually all adumbrating more ruptures in the future. This is more in
the Popperian spirit of presenting science as a sensibility that can be actualized
at any moment to reconfigure all that had preceded and will succeed it.
The chronos approach corresponds to the linear time of classical physics,
and the kairos approach to the more ecstatic conception of time afforded by
quantum physics. Before moving on, it is worth mentioning an in-between
position, focusing on the idea of perpetuity, especially as understood in early
modern philosophy to refer to the choice that God always has whether to con-
tinue or alter the universe from moment to moment. It was designed to get
around a concern introduced by Aristotle’s main Muslim interpreter, Averroes,
that in creating a world governed by natural law, God forfeits his own free
will. This would seem to imply that natural law exists eternally without divine
intervention. In contrast, the perpetualist says that God actively maintains—or
does not maintain—the law. As a conception of divine agency championed
by the likes of Descartes, perpetuity did not survive the Newtonian revolu-
tion in physics. However, it persisted in political debates concerning human
self-governance, especially with regard to the duration of any social contract
that is struck b­ etween free agents. The idea of regular elections is perhaps the
principal legacy of the perpetualist mindset, reminding citizens that ultimately
they are free to decide (collectively) whether or not to carry on with the current
regime. More ambitious thinkers, not least Immanuel Kant, believed that if all
regimes were of this sort, then perpetualism could be scaled up as a principle
of world governance, resulting in what he dubbed “perpetual peace,” one of
the inspirations for the United Nations.
The relevance of the foregoing discussion to trans-and post-humanism is
that neither position is easily afforded legitimacy by a chronos-based approach
to history. A more kairotic approach, perhaps perpetualist, is needed. This is
because trans-and post-humanism in their respective ways fundamentally dis-
place the default subject of all historical narratives, a being most easily identified
with Homo sapiens, who is presumed to be sui generis. This position is familiar
from the Bible, Aristotle, and Linnaeus—but even in Linnaeus’ own day, the
second half of the eighteenth century, it had begun to lose its currency, as the
continuity of species became more empirically substantiated, culminating in
the otherwise opposed evolutionary worldviews of Lamarck and Darwin. But

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the staying power of Homo sapiens cannot be underestimated. The pioneer of

“neurohistory,” Daniel Smail (2008), expressed dismay at how his humanist
colleagues continue to explain human affairs in a manner that is compatible
with a Young Earth Creationist’s philosophy of history—in terms of not only the
limited explanatory timeframe (i.e., “recorded history”) but also the assumption
that human behavior is mainly the product of acts of human consciousness.
To appreciate the source of Smail’s dismay, recall that when Wilhelm Dil-
they coined the term Geisteswissenschaften (“sciences of the mind/spirit”) in
the late nineteenth century for what we now call the humanities or the human
sciences, he believed that the field’s special capacity to understand people across
vast expanses of time and space was based on humanity’s biological unity, by
which he meant the unity of Homo sapiens. In effect, humans recognize each
other as subject to common life problems by virtue of similarity in material
makeup and circumstances, which to be sure human cultures have addressed in
often radically different ways. Here Dilthey was simply naturalizing Friedrich
Schleiermacher’s hermeneutical treatment of the Bible, which proceeded on the
(prebiological) assumption that because the Bible’s original and current readers
are all equally born in the image and likeness of God, they can understand each
other’s existential concerns, even if they express and handle them rather differ-
ently. They can overcome any linguistic barriers to agree on common meaning.
The same courtesy, of course, does not extend to our simian cousins, let alone
other animal species, who would neither “recognize” us nor we them in the sense
that Schleiermacher and Dilthey are talking about—and certainly would not
be able to read the Bible! The last remark is not as flippant as it sounds, given
that a common “standard of civilization” for the target audiences of Christian
missionaries to meet in the early modern period involved recognition of the
“Word of God” when presented in their native tongues (Gong 1984).

POST-AND TRANS-HUMANISM’S ALTERNATIVE HISTORIOGRAPHIES

OF THE HUMAN

From a trans-and a post-humanist standpoint, even beyond the truncated

sense of past and future possibilities implied by this avowedly chronos-based
“humanistic” perspective, what stands out here is the rather ambivalent attitude
that hermeneutics has to the relationship of language and meaning. On one
hand, language is presented as the criterion that distinguishes humans from
other creatures as meaning makers; on the other, the relevant sense of “lan-
guage” remains mysterious, though it clearly refers to a capacity that is more
abstract than that which would be required for the different natural languages
in which people normally communicate. Noam Chomsky, Jerry Fodor, and

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others, following the lead of Descartes and Leibniz, have spoken of a “universal
grammar” or a “language of thought” as a species marker of the human. The
quest for this elusive entity is ultimately about finding a biological seat for the
Biblical logos, which enables each person—at least in principle—to learn any and
all natural languages. (The term “panlogism,” normally reserved to characterize
Hegel’s philosophy, would not be out of place here.) Of course, there may be
various developmental limits to any individual’s ability to learn more than one
language, but proponents of this thesis are quite clear that they would not treat
the limited linguistic capacity of nonhuman simians so charitably. Those other
apes simply lack what Chomsky dubbed the “language organ.”
While such human exceptionalism is not so surprising in itself, it is striking
that these intuitions continue to be sustained, despite the lack of headway in
neuroscience in finding the proverbial language organ. To be sure, not every-
one in the modern period has been so easily seduced by logocentric accounts
of human exceptionalism. In particular, Martin Heidegger, himself trained in
hermeneutics, made a radical counterproposal, called “deconstruction,” which
was inspired by that of the fallen classicist Friedrich Nietzsche, who argued
that universal principles of translation founded in an “original” discourse—the
so-called Ursprache of the classical philologists—is a ruse designed to create a
need for an otherwise nonexistent deity who allegedly instils the logos in each
of us, while at the same time allowing us to exercise power over each other
by means of strategic miscommunication, as in the Italian saying Traduttore,
traditore (“to translate is to betray”). This “suspicious” approach to hermeneu-
tics, as Paul Ricoeur (1970 [1965]) memorably put it, became the basis of the
linguistic nominalism that turned deconstruction into a method associated
with Jacques Derrida and assorted poststructuralists, starting in the 1970s. In
their rather different ways, Edward Said’s Orientalism and Martin Bernal’s Black
Athena are among the more impressive pieces of scholarship that have taken a
deconstructive attitude to claims of universal humanity.
By their own account, deconstructionists are doubtful that “meaning” means
anything other than an afterthought—more exactly, the texts that respond to a
text. Unsurprisingly, the method has been widely seen as antihumanist and even
nihilist. Indeed, future historians will wonder why the deconstructionists did
not make common cause with behaviorists in linguistics and psychology—the
very people Chomsky originally opposed—who tried as hard as they could to
explain the human in nonhuman terms. In any case, for nearly a half century
now, deconstruction has wrought havoc on self-styled “progressive” political
movements—both liberal and socialist—which had been historically united in
presuming that humanity is a potential waiting to be fully realized. However,
if there is no humanity but only multiple self-serving “humanities,” then it

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becomes difficult to arrive at agreement over which direction we/they should

go in. At most, one can speak of solidarity united in resistance to common foes.
Indeed, this has been the tenor of “left” political assertion in the deconstructive
mode, often under the somewhat misleading label of “identity politics.”
Nevertheless, the deconstruction of the human has benefitted transhumanism
and posthumanism by calling into question the naturalness of Homo sapiens as
the default normative setting of history. After all, when Linnaeus coined the
name Homo sapiens in the mid-eighteenth century, he was keen to distinguish
humans from somewhat similar-looking apes, which by that time Europeans
were regularly encountering in their far-flung explorations of the globe. Previ-
ously, as Michel Foucault (1970 [1966]) emphasized, the human had been an
intermediate category between the divine and a generic understanding of the
animal—that is, not specifically the ape. Thus, Aesop and the other ancient
fabulists were equal opportunity employers of animal species in their tales,
and when in the thirteenth century Francis of Assisi claimed to have seen
God in all his creatures, he did not single out the apes for special treatment.
Indeed, the Renaissance Humanists did not fuss over humanity’s morphological
­resemblance to apes as perhaps providing a clue to our origins. On the contrary,
the humanists were so convinced by the start of John’s Gospel—which says
that we descended from the divine logos—that they proceeded to master the
original languages in which the books of the Bible were written. And when
one considers the cosmic conception of humanity that they countenanced,
which included the prospect of humans encountering like-minded beings on
other planets, one might reasonably conclude that the humanist attachment
to the human body was mainly as a platform for launching into previously
unexplored realms of being.
An underappreciated feature of Renaissance humanism is that its epoch-defining
embrace of “humanity” by name corresponds to the cosmic vision just sketched,
one that would not be out of line with the avowedly transhumanist vision of,
say, Elon Musk today. Given also the Renaissance tendency to see the human
body as a microcosm of the universe, one might even regard the period’s revo-
lutionary transformation of anatomy and physiology as operating in the spirit
of reverse engineering a spacecraft, by which we might discover who we are by
figuring out where we came from. This would help to explain the Renaissance
fascination with air and space travel more generally, which greatly contributed
to the assignment of “genius” to Leonardo da Vinci. To be sure, in terms of what
preceded the Renaissance, all of this is strange because what might have been
called a “humanist” position—of the sort one finds in, say, Thomas Aquinas—
was traceable to Aristotle, who identified the human with the grounded, not
only on the Earth but also in the polis, which was ultimately based on family

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origin. This led Aristotle to define the human as the zoon politikon, the political
animal. In contrast, the Renaissance revived a more Platonic definition of the
human as an embodied mental force of indefinite extension, the sort of being
that could recognize the myth of Faust as its own.
I have suggested in earlier work that underlying the West’s transition from
Aristotle’s grounded view of the human to Plato’s more cosmic vision was a
redefinition of the meaning of “possible,” from something empirically probable
to something logically conceivable (Fuller 2011, Chap. 2; Fuller and Lipinska
2014, Chap. 1; Fuller 2015, Chap. 6). This sense of the possible, which remains
in common parlance, was clearly past-oriented, based on track record. The shift
to a more conceptual understanding of the possible—basically anything that
was logically coherent—was wrought by the early-fourteenth-century scholastic
John Duns Scotus. To cut a long story short, the shift enabled Christians to
think about the world from God’s point of view, as a result of which a path of
self-discovery was started to learn what it means to have been created “in the
image and likeness of God.” This was something that Christians had always
believed but which they had yet to take literally and hence fully exploit. The
result was the rise of modern science. Another, more sociological way to put
the point is that Scotus’ sense of the possible opened up an alternative lineage
for humanity, one that was much more open-ended and encompassing than
Aristotle had circumscribed because it traced our descent directly from the
divine logos rather than its various materializations.
The revived Platonic sense of the possible involves imagining that the actual
world is literally the realization of something that could have been otherwise—and
may be otherwise, given the fullness of time. In other words, you are licensed to
treat the actual world as no more than a rough draft on ultimate reality. There is
nothing especially natural or sacred about actuality—including the actuality of
human condition. David Hume can be understood as having capitalized on the
conflicting intuitions between the Aristotelian and Platonic senses of “possible” in
the eighteenth century, when he proposed his notorious “problem of induction,”
which became the bugbear of modern epistemology: After all, if we cannot justify
the future by repeating the past, then on what rational basis can we talk about
what will happen? At the same time, the future-oriented sense of the possible
opened up by Scotus animated that Renaissance political classic, Thomas More’s
Utopia, which arguably invented the genre of literature called “science fiction.”
To be sure, the emergence of post-and trans-humanism can be told in terms
of conventional, chronos-based political history. In that narrative guise, they
appear as fringe movements, exotic spinoffs of more mainstream contemporary
political tendencies. Thus, posthumanism is portrayed as partly inspired by the
“deep ecology” movement, which takes environmentalism to the next level by

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calling for a displacement of the locus of value from specifically human life to
life per se. Alongside this sensibility is a strong sense of caution if not opposition
to the pace at which scientific and technological innovation has been unleashed
into the lifeworld, especially given the human track record of despoiling and
destroying members of its own and other species. Advanced machines, includ-
ing artificial intelligences, figure in this narrative to further demonstrate the
dependency of humans on beings other than themselves, which underscores the
profound fragility of the human condition. In contrast, transhumanism is seen
as a largely antistatist response to the failure of twentieth century progressive
politics to deliver on its own promises for human improvement. Silicon Valley’s
role as the leading edge of postindustrial capitalism provides both a financial
and an ideological basis for the spread of this mindset, which in policy terms
would have humanity embrace entrepreneurial risk-taking as a general worldview.
Moreover, like older forms of progressivism, transhumanism holds that humans
prove to be their worst enemy, when it comes to the constraints that we place
on our own capacity to produce knowledge and benefit from its fruits. How-
ever, given freer license, humanity could soon realize its species potential to the
benefit of everyone, even if it means extending our reach beyond planet Earth.

RECASTING POST-AND TRANS-HUMANISM IN A QUANTUM

HISTORIOGRAPHICAL KEY

I do not wish to dispute the validity of these narratives—especially if we insist

on depicting post-and trans-humanism as sharing the temporal horizon of
conventional politics, which is ultimately about charting the career of Homo
sapiens. But what makes both post-and trans-humanism so politically radical
is their instinctive denial of this central premise, which in turn reflects their
­acceptance of the deconstructive turn in the human sciences. In other words, both
movements presume that Homo sapiens is at best a way station from somewhere
else to somewhere else. However, it does not follow that “human” has lost all
meaning; otherwise the appearance of “human” in the names of the two move-
ments would be completely misleading! But what meaning of the “human” do
post-and trans-humanism share, on the basis of which they then part company?
My proposal is that both are sensitive to a distinction in how we think about
the human, between the anthropocentric and the anthropomorphic. The former
is about where we start and the latter about where we end up (cf. Fuller 2016a).
The history of science can be neatly told as an anthropocentric pursuit
that has endeavored to divest itself of anthropomorphism. This process of
self-estrangement is associated with the sort of abstraction and generalization
that has been the calling card of the scientific mindset. Nevertheless, an alien

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visiting our planet could probably infer a lot about the self-understanding of
humans by studying the order in which the history of science has proceeded.
After all, barriers to scientific progress have typically come at points when we
have been trying to make sense of something that we take to be essential to
who we are. But once sense has been made of that feature, it soon comes lose
its “essential” quality as it becomes either reproducible by means or recogniz-
able in beings that differ from us in other ways. In terms that should appeal
to both logicians and economists, a property has been converted thereby into a
function (cf. Cassirer 1923 [1910]). Notice that the overcoming of these barriers
constitutes “quantum” moments, in that both our understanding of the past
and our prospects for the future are simultaneously altered. To take just one
example: The more we find forms of intelligence in other creatures—especially
nonsimians—that demand the respect of humans, the less our specific descent
from apes is likely to matter to who we think we are.
Indeed, taken together, the histories of science and technology have been
about pushing back the frontiers of what it means to be human. They show
humanity to have a fugitive essence, as each proposed criterion of the human
is discovered to have been either anticipated—if not surpassed—by an animal
or satisfied—if not surpassed—by a machine. The “human” is therefore the
placeholder for the residue that has yet to be so captured in one of these two
ways. This has implications for the history of politics, which can be told as an
explicitly anthropomorphic pursuit that has become ever less anthropocentric.
Like science, politics also abstracts and generalizes, but in the opposite direc-
tion—namely, to see the human in a wider variety of beings, which ultimately
means granting them legal recognition, “as if ” they were human. This point
is most clearly seen in terms of the claims made on behalf of the “rights” of
animals and, increasingly, advanced machines.
A striking feature of the history of politics, also shared by the history
of science, is that progress has been made on the nonhuman side even as
progress proceeds fitfully on the human side. After all, physicists came to
agree on the atomic theory of matter only a generation before women were
granted the right to vote. Some have gone so far as to claim—unjustly, in
my view—that relatively little progress has been made in the science and
practice of politics since ancient Athens. However, the little justice there
is to the claim lies in the fact that our intuitions about both what it means
to be human and how to deal with the world defined as “human” have not
shifted nearly as much over the past 2500 years as our intuitions about how
to understand and handle the world defined as “nonhuman.” Both post-and
trans-humanism aim to redress the balance by radicalizing our understanding
of what it means to be human.

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A good way to appreciate the different range of possibilities that post-and

trans-humanism open up to the past and the future of humanity is to consider
what each takes from Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection. Two
features of this theory distinguish it not only from earlier conceptions of life, in
which species were defined in terms of essential properties, but also from other
versions of evolution, such as Lamarck’s, which included a conception of life’s
purposefulness. First, life is fundamentally a chance-based process that does
not acquire an overarching, let alone irreversible, direction over time. Second,
all life forms are always equally subject to the same forces of nature, with any
particular species advantage (or “fitness”) being local and temporary in the
great scheme of things. In Darwin’s theory, these two features are interrelated,
but they need not be: One feature could receive greater emphasis. Post-and
trans-humanism differ in just such terms (cf. Fuller 2012, Chap. 3).
Posthumanism gives a normative spin to the second feature of Darwin’s
theory with its presumption of species egalitarianism (aka “biodiversity”), which
is typically glossed as species codependency, issuing in a symbiotic ecological
vision. It is accompanied by a precautionary attitude toward innovation, be
it biological or technological, which is designed to protect life as it has been
known. Taken to the limit, humanity is absorbed into James Lovelock’s Gaia
Hypothesis, whereby our species is reduced to being a supporting actor in the
unfolding drama entitled “Planet Earth.” In contrast, transhumanism normatively
spins the first feature of Darwin’s theory by elevating the chance occurrence
of the emergence of Homo sapiens to a unique opportunity for evolution to be
given a direction that it had previously lacked. This was the position of Julian
Huxley, who coined “transhumanism” in the 1950s to capture his brand of
“evolutionary humanism,” which converted a biological accident into a moral
imperative. Its signature project was eugenics, which notwithstanding its track
record for great harm also held the potential to extend our control over the
planet. Later transhumanists have followed Max More’s lead in characterizing
this sensibility as involving a “proactionary” attitude to risk.
The narrative dynamics of the two movements could not be more differ-
ent: The posthumanist history of humanity is about our coming to learn our
multiple indebtedness to nature, which in turn provides an empirical basis for
our sense of belonging on the Earth. In contrast, the transhumanist historical
narrative is a process of human awakening, whereby we come to terms with
our distinctive identity, which may eventuate in radical self-transformation,
including an ­expansion into the cosmos. Inspired by the original space age
transhumanist, F.M. Esfandiary (aka FM-2030), I have captured the difference
between the post-and trans-human historical narratives in terms of an emerging
ideological polarity, one with the potential to replace the right–left polarity

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 164 | S T E V E F U L L E R

that has dominated Western politics for the past two centuries: “downwinging”
posthumanists versus “upwinging” transhumanists (Fuller and Lipinska 2014,
Chap. 1).
Integral to both narratives is a story about our genetic makeup and whatever
superorganic status “Humanity 2.0” might aspire to. Where posthumanists
stress our massive genetic overlap with other species as a deep source of our
interdependency with the rest of nature, transhumanists stress the variability
and mutability of genes, which allows a future of genetic enhancement. In
the case of the superorganic, each narrative promotes an interpretation with
precedent in early twentieth century social science. Posthumanists follow
Alfred Espinas, the French translator of Herbert Spencer, who defended
the first Ph.D. in “sociology” by name. Interestingly, it focused on what
humans might learn from social animals, especially the role of such organic
arrangements as colonies and hives, the members of which literally constitute
a living environment. We would now see this as a work of sociobiology or
evolutionary psychology. In contrast, transhumanists borrow their sense of the
superorganic from the anthropologist Alfred Kroeber, for whom it referred to
humanity’s technological extension of the lifeworld, which eased the accultur-
ation process of each successive generation, thereby accelerating the pace at
which humans can exert control over the world (cf. Fuller 2016b). Although
post-and trans-humanism clearly give the genetic and the superorganic quite
different spins, a common feature is that neither really sees the morphology
of the upright ape—the calling card of Homo sapiens—as inviolate. Rather,
both see our simian nature as no more than a platform or a way station that
opens up into a much wider range of possible ancestors and descendants than
conventional politics normally countenances.

STEVE FULLER is Auguste Comte Professor of Social Epistemology in the

­Department of Sociology at the University of Warwick, UK. Originally trained
in history and philosophy of science, Fuller is best known for his foundational
work in the field of social epistemology, which is concerned with the norma-
tive grounds of organized inquiry. “Social epistemology” is also the name of a
quarterly journal that he founded in 1987, as well as of the first of his twenty
books. He has most recently authored a trilogy relating to the idea of a post-or
trans-human future, all published by Palgrave Macmillan: Humanity 2.0: What
It Means to Be Human Past, Present and Future (2011), Preparing for Life in
­Humanity 2.0 (2012) and (with Veronika Lipinska) The Proactionary Imperative:
A Foundation for Transhumanism (2014).

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