Contemporary Post-Humanism: Technological and Human Singularity

Abstract

Posthumanism entails the idea of transcendence of the human being achieved through technology. The article begins by distinguishing perfection and change (or growth). It also attempts to show the anthropological premises of posthumanism itself and suggests that we can identify two roots: the liberal humanistic subject (autonomous and unrelated that simply realizes herself/himself through her/his own project) and the interpretation of thought as a computable process. Starting from these premises, many authors call for the loosening of the clear boundaries of one's own subject in favour of blending with other beings. According to these theories, we should become post-human: if the human being is thought and thought is a computable process, whatever is able to process information broader and faster is better than the actual human being and has to be considered as the way towards the real completeness of the human being itself. The paper endeavours to discuss the adequacy of these premises highlighting the structural dependency of the human being, the role of the human body, the difference between thought and a computational process, the singularity of some useless and unexpected human acts. It also puts forward the need for axiological criteria to define growth as perfectionism.

Full text

ElEna ColombEtti Contemporary post-Humanism: teCHnologiCal and Human singularity
Cuadernos de BioétiCa XXV 2014/3ª
367
CONTEMPORARY POSTHUMANISM:
TECHNOLOGICAL AND HUMAN SINGULARITY.
POSTHUMANISMO CONTEMPORÁNEO: TECNOLOGÍA Y
SINGULARIDAD HUMANA
ElEna ColombEtti
Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore di Milano
L.go Gemelli, 1 - 20123 - Milano - Italia
elena.colombetti@unicatt.it
ABSTRACT:
Posthumanism entails the idea of transcendence of the human being achieved through technology.
The article begins by distinguishing perfection and change (or growth). It also attempts to show the
anthropological premises of posthumanism itself and suggests that we can identify two roots: the liberal
humanistic subject (autonomous and unrelated that simply realizes herself/himself through her/his own
project) and the interpretation of thought as a computable process. Starting from these premises, many
authors call for the loosening of the clear boundaries of one’s own subject in favour of blending with
other beings. According to these theories, we should become post-human: if the human being is thought
and thought is a computable process, whatever is able to process information broader and faster is better
than the actual human being and has to be considered as the way towards the real completeness of the
human being itself. The paper endeavours to discuss the adequacy of these premises highlighting the
structural dependency of the human being, the role of the human body, the difference between thought
and a computational process, the singularity of some useless and unexpected human acts. It also puts
forward the need for axiological criteria to define growth as perfectionism.
RESUMEN:
El Posthumanismo lleva consigo la idea que la trascendencia del ser humano debe ser obtenida a través
de la tecnología. El artículo empieza distinguiendo los conceptos de perfección y de cambio (o crecimiento).
También intenta monstrar las premisas antropológicas del mismo post-humanismo, sosteniendo que
tiene dos raíces: la de sujeto del humanismo liberal (autónomo, sin relaciones y que, simplemente, se
realiza a si mismo a través su propio proyecto) y la interpretación del pensamiento como un proceso
computacional. Desde esas premisas muchos autores afirman la necesidad de que el sujeto ya no tenga
confines bien definidos y que se contamine con otros seres. Según estas teorías, tenemos que llegar a ser
post-humanos: si el ser humano es pensamiento y el pensamiento es un proceso computacional, todo lo
que pueda tratar la información más amplia y rápidamente es mejor que el actual ser humano y, al mismo
tiempo, tiene que ser considerado la vía para realizar su verdadera plenitud. El artículo intenta discutir la
adecuación de estas premisas, y lo hace teniendo en cuenta la dependencia estructural del ser humano, el
papel del cuerpo, la diferencia que hay entre el pensamiento y un proceso computacional, la singularidad
de algunos actos humanos inútiles e inesperados. También propone la necesidad de identificar criterios
axiológicos para que se pueda decir que un crecimiento es un perfeccionamiento.
Keywords:
Enhancement,
posthumanism,
humanism, identity,
autonomy.
Palabras clave:
Perfeccionamiento,
posthumanismo,
humanismo,
identidad,
autonomía
Recibido: 23/10/2013
Aceptado: 10/06/2014
Cuadernos de Bioética XXV 2014/3ª
Copyright Cuadernos de Bioética

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1. Introduction
Talking about posthumanism today could venture
on the double path of a superficial simplification of
the issues and, therefore, a tragic misunderstanding of
its deep significance. What does posthumanism mean?
What kind of change can lead us to talk about someone
or something that can only be described with a referen-
ce to human traits and features as dumped in the past?
Nietzsche used to talk about the idea of an Uber-
mensch as to say: a man that has arrived beyond the
threshold of man. He is not a hero - although sometimes
we could think so because of the bad translation into
“Super-man” instead of “Over-man”-, but he is a sub-
ject that has brought the human to his own essence as
to say, to the fulfilment of its rationality and will. Such
fulfilment can only be thought of as losing the bounda-
ries of something that is simply given. We do not have
to abandon earth, but rather discover its greatness. The
earth has become small, he asserted, because the hopes
of the last man are small. There is a strong metaphysics
in this idea, although an immanent metaphysics. We
have not arrived to what we are, and this strange “we”,
the human beings, have to leave what they are to beco-
me what they can truly be. That is why he asserts that
«what is great in man is that he is a bridge and not a
goal: what is loveable in man is that he is an over-going
and a down-going»1. In this perspective what is actually
valuable is the pure will: Feuerbach fulfilled the passage
from the Hegelian absolute to the will of empirical man,
whereas Nietzsche (and Schopenhauer) proclaimed the
pure will as the essence of reality and, most important,
as the transcendental task of each man: we have to tres-
pass to will of life, will of will, will of power.2
I suggest that going back to the Nietzschean idea
of Ubermensch can help us to understand the contem-
porary discourse on posthumanism: this idea does not
present itself as an invitation to a metaphorical killing
of human being, but rather as an achievement of what
1 Nietzsche F., Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Wilder Publications,
Radford –VA, 2008, prologue part 4, 22.
2 Cf. Fabro C., God in exile: modern atheism. A study of the
internal dynamic of modern atheism, from its roots in the Cartesian
cogito to present day, Newman Press, Westminster Md, 1968.
she or he can truly be and has to be. Mainly, we find
the term posthuman as the result of an enhancement
through technology and pharmacology. It has to be the
outcome of the change (or elimination) of features of
the human condition (i.e. aging process) and of an en-
hancement of her/his intellectual, physical and psycho-
logical capacities3.
The concept of posthumanism is a derivation of the
previous idea of transhumanism. In quite a famous text
of 1957, the biologist Julian Huxley wrote that «we are
beginning to realize that even the most fortunate peo-
ple are living far below capacity and that most human
beings develop not more than a small fraction of their
potential mental and spiritual efficiency. The human
race, in fact, is surrounded by a large area of unrealized
possibilities, a challenge to the spirit of exploration»4. We
are called to realize, he wrote, a scientific exploration of
possibilities and of techniques to realize them, with the
strong «conviction that human life as we know in his-
tory is a wretched makeshift, rooted in ignorance»5. The
human species, not isolated individuals, can transcend
itself, and the name that Huxley found for this belief
is transhumanism: «man remaining man, but transcen-
ding himself, by realizing new possibilities of and for his
human nature»6. We have to stress, I think, two featu-
res. First of all the reference to a human nature, which
brings to light more than a simple possibility (although
that is the word he used), because the constant referen-
ce to human nature means more properly potentiality.
In this perspective, we could observe that it is proper of
human beings transcending themselves with projects,
new aims, promises, forgiveness, freedom commitments,
self-training. Understanding that a new achievement or
the improvement of a capacity is possible and trying to
get it, is not something new, but is part of the dynamic
of human beings as such. On the other side, there is the
3 Cf. the explanation of the official “Transhumanist decla-
ration”, available on <http://humanityplus.org/philosophy/transhu-
manist-declaration/> [Consulted: 2013.03.18th)], Nick Bostrum, The
Transhumanist FAQ v.2.1” Web: www.transhumanist.org. Published
by the World Transhumanist Association, (First version published in
1999).
4 Huxley J., In New Bottles for New Wine, Chatto & Windus,
London, 1957, 15.
5 Ibid, 16.
6 Ibid, 17.

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idea that the present condition of human beings is mi-
serable and that the self transcendence is only a matter
of scientific knowledge and techniques. It is from this
point that arises the idea that the real aim is a technical
enhancement, not in terms of having more powerful
tools, but meant as something that is embraced inside
the human being, that changes him. This second item is
not neutral: although it could seem a description, as a
matter of fact it is a thesis that needs to be discussed.
2. The idea of enhancement
Before we analyse this issue more deeply, I would
like to discuss briefly the appropriateness of the very
expression “enhancement”, that includes the meaning
of perfection. Perfection per se is a positive ideal: it is an
aspect of the existential dynamism of human life. I think
that we can not uphold a position “against perfection”,
despite the stance implied by the title of the interesting
and well known book by Michael Sandel7. What we have
to do instead is to try to understand what idea is em-
bedded in this use of the term “perfection”. Indeed, “to
perfect” entails a change, but not all changes do achieve
perfection. If we want to describe rigorously, we have to
use words like growth, or strengthening, or empowering
of a capacity. Perfection does not simply mean bigger, or
stronger, but it points forward completion, and needs
a normative criterion in order to establish whether this
growth is good or not. Of course, I am not saying that
such improvement cannot in any case be a perfection,
but I am taking into consideration that, in order to value
something related to human beings, we need a norma-
tive idea of what a human being is, and argue in each
case why a transformation of capacity’s power would be
good or not. On the contrary, if we think that there is
not a normative idea of what the human being is, we
simply cannot talk about enhancement, and we have to
use the more general idea of change.
The term enhancement is nowadays used to indica-
te growth beyond therapy purpose. Juengst, for exam-
7 Sandel M., The Case Against Perfection: Ethics in the Age
of Genetic Engineering, Harvard University Press, Cambridge MA,
1999.
ple, writes that this term is usually used «to characteri-
ze interventions designed to improve human form on
functioning beyond what is necessary to sustain or res-
tore human health»8, but on this point Conrad argues
that we can hardly understand what “beyond” means
because the same definition of health is changing and
is not universally accepted9. He asserts that there is a
social influence on defining what is normal or not, so
that the line between what we deem as a necessary
treatment and what can be unclear as enhancement
can shift, as well as the definitions of diseases change.
He brings the example of a hypothetical drug that can
empower memory: a widespread use of such a drug
could cause increased diagnosis of memory deficit di-
sorders because of the repositioning of the boundaries
of the “normality”. If it is true that there is a statistical
reference for the measuring of the “normal” range
of features or capacities and that the sense of it can
be different in a different social context, it does not
imply that normality is undetectable. Conrad mixes up
description, desires and normative levels; human action
can change reality, but the starting point is not wrong
only because of the human desire (or needs, or even
possibilities) to transform it. Even if the perception of
the level of performances socially required can change
– for example, because everybody uses a drug for me-
mory -, this does not necessarily imply that people that
are not on enhancers with a medium or average level
of a memory are pathological. The loss of any norma-
tivity of the human body and faculties transforms any
supposed enhancement firstly in a simple fact (it’s a
change) and then in a normative element. Moreover, as
soon as the new “standard” grows up, the empowered
level that has been achieved is looked as pathologi-
cal. This point is crucial to understand enhancement: a
proper description is indispensable for any evaluation.
8 Juengst E.T., «What Does Enhancement means?», in
Parens E. (ed), Enhancing Human Traits: Ethical and Social
Implication,Georgetown University Press, Washington D.C., 1998,
29-47, cit. 29.
9 Conrad P., The medicalization of society. On the Transfor-
mation of human Conditions in Treatable Disorders, The Johns Hop-
kins University Press, Baltimore, 2007, 71 y ss.

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enhancement itself. To do that, we also have to distin-
guish different issues: the consequences in the subject
and in the society of the improvement of a capacity (in-
tellectual, physical or psychological); the different ethi-
cal matter implied by modification produced on them-
selves or on new generations; the possible change of the
relationship between subject and reality; the idea of the
creation of a posthuman subject (what does it mean?).
All these issues require a deep analysis, but, first of all,
I think that it is of primary importance to understand
the theoretical background in which each one of these
singular topics lay on.
3. The ‘Human’ whence posthuman comes from
Too often, many discussions on modification of re-
ality are settled on the thought that reality is like a
gigantic living Lego. As with the little bricks of the fa-
mous toy, someone could build, undo and then rebuild
another scenario or object without any important long
term drawback for the totality. But reality is not the
simple result of different combinations of Lego bricks.
Since many years, many women and men resort to
different drugs searching for euphoria or to experience
hallucinations, or to take a break from the burden of
life. As everybody knows, this practice causes serious
health damages. What if we could program the moods
and feelings without these harmful organic consequenc-
es and, most of all, if we could perfectly control of it?
In one of his most famous novels, Philip Dick13 writes
about a situation in which a machine can do this task,
allowing the user to choose among hundreds of possible
moods. This practice facilitates to engage the tasks of a
working day but also to escape from the perception of
an unpleasant (dramatic or not) situation. It could seem
a wonderful possibility. However, by looking at it we
can discover some insanity in it because of the incapac-
ity to appropriately evaluate reality. Dick writes: «“I was
sitting here one afternoon,” Iran said, “and naturally I
had tamed on Buster Friendly and His Friendly Friends
and he was talking about a big news item he’s about
13 Dick P.K., Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, Del Rey,
New York, 1996.
Some of the supporters of the pro-enhancement po-
sition assert that we have been using enhancement for
a long time: shoes are an enhancement for feet, clothes
are an enhancement for the skin against cold or heat10.
However, these examples absolutely loose the difference
between enhancement and tools. It would be more in-
teresting to refer to vaccination, because of the change
it causes in the organism, but here, too, we forget a
critical distinction, which is the fact that a vaccination
facilitates the organism to develop its own antibody.
It is like a sort of training: a vaccine helps the body to
prepare in advance the defence against some illnesses
or diseases as it could be obtained after a successful
fight against an illness. It is not at all an enhancement
beyond the boundaries of a therapeutic purpose. On the
other hand, it is true that, in contemporary society, peo-
ple use enhancement a lot of times: for example, when
we implant silicon prosthesis to increase the breast size
without any clinical or medical indication (as would be
in case of a mastectomy), or employ drugs in order to
improve sexual performance in the absence of a clear
physical dysfunction, or use doping in sport competi-
tions. All these examples have to be defined as enhan-
cement rather than treatment. We could also think of
the use of deep brain stimulation not only to correct
neurological diseases (i.e. Tourette Syndrome or some
Psychiatric Disorders)11, but also to raise social attitudes
and brilliant behaviour when demanded12.
Although I consider more appropriate the use of
more neutral words like growth or empowerment (as
we said before), finally it is possible to define enhance-
ment as a chemical or technical intervention in order to
cause the growth of a human trait beyond a therapeutic
purpose. However, it is still not enough to understand
10 Cf. Bostrom N., Savulescu J., «Human Enhancement Ethics:
The State of the Debate», in Savulescu J., Bostrom N. (eds), Human
Enhancement, Oxford University Press, New York, 2009, 1-22.
11 About some ethical issues related to the Deep Brain Stimu-
lation cf. Colombetti E., «Etica delle neuroscienze», in Sironi V.A.,
Porta M. (eds), Il controllo della mente. Scienza ed etica della neu-
romodulazione cerebrale, Laterza , Roma-Bari, 2011, 208-221.
12 See for example the report of Paul Colyns (Belgium) at
the seminar of President’s Council on Bioethics in Washington D.C.
June 24 th-25th 2004. The transcription of the congress is available
on the web page of the President Council of Bioethics (see <http://
bioethics.georgetown.edu/pcbe/transcripts/june04/june24.html>
[Consulted: 2013.06-20th].

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to break and then that awful commercial came on, the
one I hate (…). And so for a minute I shut off the sound.
And I heard the building, this building; I heard the-“
She gestured. “Empty apartments,” Rick said. Sometimes
he heard them at night when he was supposed to be
asleep. (…) He had let the information remain second
hand; like most people he did not care to experience it
directly. “At that moment,” Iran said, “when I had the
TV sound off, I was in a 382 mood; I had just dialled
it. So although I heard the emptiness intellectually, I
didn’t feel it. My first reaction consisted of being grate-
ful that we could afford a Panfield mood organ. But
then I read how unhealthy it was, sensing the absence
of life, not just in this building but everywhere, and not
reacting – do you see? I guess you don’t. But that used
to be considered a sign of mental illness; they called it
‘absence of appropriate effect’.»14 Too often we do not
think that there is any equilibrium in the human being,
in the different domains of reality, and also between
human being and reality15. Of course, having a peaceful
and satisfied mood is subjectively better than despair,
but what is changing in the capacity of understand-
ing reality? This is not a moralistic argument: we are a
part of the reality, we are connected with all the other;
faking reality means to fake the understanding of our-
selves. When a feature, a faculty or a capacity of a hu-
man being becomes mute or extremely played up, the
equilibrium could be compromised. It is quite ingenuous
to think that there are not broader consequences when
we deeply and unilaterally change a treat of our own
being. This does not mean that, for this only reason,
any change is always wrong, but that we have to think
of it and discuss about it. As Barbara McClintock wrote
and Evelin Fox Keller stressed16, when we consider just
the causal efficacy of a single variable, we do not even
try to imagine other unexpected consequences in a large
period. McClintock asserts that such a narrow idea of
14 Ibid, 3.
15 An interesting analysis of the existential consequences
of an hypothetical immortality can be found in Jonas H., Technik,
Medizin und Ethik. Zur Praxis des Prinzips Verantwortung, Suhrkamp,
Frankfurt, 1985, chapter XII.
16 Fox Keller E., The Century of the Gene, Harvard University
Press, Cambridge, MA 2002; Id, A feeling of the Organism, Freeman,
New York, 1983.
causality is responsible of a lot of catastrophes. Dama-
sio’s studies on the cerebral impairment explain, for ex-
ample, how the complete absence of emotion can make
rational decisions practically impossible17: abstractly, we
could think that silencing passions and feelings could
be a good way in order to be more rational, but the
outcome of their absence proves to be an irrational be-
haviour.
We could add many examples from both the scien-
tific field and from science fiction, but what is crucial
to highlight at this point is the premise that underlies
the idea of an enhancement of human being in order
to transcend her/ his situation and make her/him a post-
human.
When in 1999 Hayles tried to explain “how we be-
came post human”18 (notice that the verb tense points
to the past: the Author thinks that we have already
become –not that we will become - posthuman), she
addressed four characteristics of posthumanism: 1) it
«privileges informational pattern over material instan-
tiation, so that embodiment in a biological substrate is
seen as an accident of history rather than an inevitability
of life»; 2) it considers consciousness (meant as the seat
of human identity) «as an evolutionary upstart trying
to claim that it is the whole show when in actuality it
is only a minor sideshow»; 3) it considers the human
body «as the original prosthesis we all learn to manipu-
late, so that extending or replacing the body with other
prosthesis becomes a continuation of a process that be-
gan before we were born»; 4) it configures the «hu-
man being so that it can be seamlessly articulated with
intelligent machines»: there wouldn’t be any essential
distinction between “bodily existence” and “computer
simulation”19. The generator of all these challenges is
the idea expressed in the prologue of the same text: an
erasure of the body in order to allow intelligence to be-
come a property of the formal manipulation of symbols
rather than a faculty of a subject, something proper of
17 Damasio A., Descartes’ Error: Emotion, Reason, and the
Human Brain, Penguin Books, London, 2005.
18 Hayles K., How We Became Posthuman? Virtual Bodies in
Cybernetics, Literature and Informatics, University of Chicago Press
Chicago, 1999.
19 Ibid, pp. 7-8.

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the human life-world. It does not matter the material
one is made of, because what is valuable is the informa-
tion passing through the “hardware”.
It is important to focus the anthropological theory
that posthumanism shows: it is settled, in fact, on the
base that human being is only his thought and con-
sciousness, while thought itself is a disembodied com-
putable process. We can discover in it, I think, two roots.
The first one is the liberal humanistic subject which
starts from the Cartesian anthropological scission, and
passes through the idea of an autonomous and unrelated
subject that simply realizes her/himself by her/his own
project. Despite the enormous attention we tribute to
the body and the quantity of knowledge concerning the
role of physicality in identity, the idea of a human being
as a sort of inhabitant in a body is still alive20. The second
root can be found in the interpretation of thought as a
computable process and of reality as a pattern of com-
putable information. We cannot understand posthuman-
ism without facing these two points. “Human” means
consciousness and thought; consciousness and thought
are computable process. The Nietzschean ‘will’ now has
to be related to this new landscape, and has to realize
that the power is a functionalist power. Why, then, post-
human and not simply human? The reason is simple. If
the human being is thought and thought is a computable
process, anything that is able to process information in a
broader and faster way is better than the actual human
being and has to be considered as the way towards the
real completeness of human being itself.
From this point of view, the body is only a change-
able and replaceable substrate; and technology becomes
a feature of human ontology. Consequently, there
would be aspects of the human being (not external
goals, but ontological traits) that could be achieved only
through technology21. The oxymoron of posthumanism
20 There are a lot of neo-lockian positions that, in different
ways, bestow human identity only on consciousness or thought. We
could easily remember many mental experiment of head transplant
-i.e. cf. Engelhardt H.T., The Foundation of Bioethics, Oxford University
Press, New York, 1996-, as well as the famous story by Zuboff of the
Brain in a vat: Zuboff A., «The story of a brain», in O Connor T., Robb
D. (eds), Philosophy of Mind: Contemporary Readings, Routledge,
London, 2003, 185-194.
21 Technology here has to be intended in a broad sense,
is that even if it starts from a material perspective, it
soon looses the body. This happens because the body
is understood, as Braidotti asserts, as a surface where
multiple and changeable informational codes can meet,
starting from genetic code up to the code of informa-
tion technology22. The core is what Donna Haraway calls
confusion or violation of boundaries: essentiality is not
relevant anymore because reality is information and,
thus, the key of reality is the passage of information.
The problem does not concern the definition of an ob-
ject (what is this? And, then, what are we allowed to
do in order to respect what it is?), but the construction
of interfaces that permit the passage of information
from one substrate to another one. She considers that
there is a violation of boundaries because, the confines
between human beings–animals do not exist by now, as
well as the distinction between natural and artificial is
nonsense. «In relation to objects like biotic components,
one must not think in terms of essential properties, but
in terms of design, boundary constraints, rates of flows,
systems logic, costs of lowering constraints»23. Ultimate-
ly, the world is translated in a problem of codification
and the only real threat would be an interruption of
communication. In this way, heterogeneity disappears,
and the instrumental control is in our hands. The result
is the appearance of a new kind of human being. The
idea is clear: «Any objects or persons can be reasonably
thought of in terms of disassembly and reassembly; no
‘natural’ architectures constrain system design»24 and for
this reason «the machine is not an it to be animated,
worshipped, and dominated. The machine is us, our pro-
cesses, an aspect of our embodiment. We can be respon-
sible for machines; they do not dominate or threaten us.
We are responsible for boundaries; we are they»25.
including different drugs, psychopharmacology, deep brain stimula-
tion, genetic engineering, artificial life.
22 Braidotti R., «La molteplicità: un’etica per la nostra epoca,
oppure meglio cyborg che dea», Introduction to the Italian edi-
tion of Donna Haraway, Cyborg manifest, –Haraway D., Manifesto
cyborg. Donne, tecnologie e biopolitiche del corpo, Feltrinelli, Mi-
lano, 1995–.
23 Haraway D., «A Cyborg manifesto», in Szeman I., Kaposy
T. (eds), Cultural Theory, an Anthology, Wiley Blackwell, Chichester-
West Sussex, 2011, pp.454-470, 459.
24 Ibid.
25 Ibid, p.466.

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Here, we have a powerful scenario: it is an (imma-
nent) metaphysics because it pretends to talk about the
whole reality; it pretends to explain the truth of real-
ity saying that it is not what appears: the real truth is
information and its functional manifestation; it allows
controlling reality simply by exchanging information.
The elimination of boundaries between things, includ-
ing human beings, is the obvious result. Human being
is, at the beginning, the only one who can understand
and control this information, but for the same reason,
her/his completeness needs, as noted above, an inti-
mate symbiosis with technology. He is called to do it.
It is what Heidegger wrote interpreting Nietzsche: the
“over-man” is the one who brings the human essence to
its truth and takes charge of this truth26.
Hayles tries to bring the body back into the middle
of this process and distinguishes between a good and a
bad posthuman: the latter would be a nightmare, con-
sisting in beings that «regard their bodies as fashion ac-
cessories rather than the ground of being»27. The way to
avoid this result would be to keep the control on tech-
nology, constantly and retrospectively recognizing the
difference between us and the technology enclosed in
our being. But from this perspective that is impossible: if
we can change our own body in order to change func-
tioning, regardless of the way in which we obtain it, we
are accepting the loosening of the boundaries. If reality
is the information and the functions that this informa-
tion allows to perform, there is a mutual inclusion of
human being and technology: the human project needs
technology which redefines, by changing her/him, the
human project. It is a system, and the properties of the
system are not the properties of its parts. The reason of
the part is embedded in the functioning of the system. A
fully realized posthuman being would be a subject that
has such a deep connection with technology (chemical
drugs as well as information technology) that she/he is
not at all aware of it.
If we think of the human being as an unrelated,
autonomous being and perfectly master of himself,
26 Heidegger M., Nietzsche, Harper San Francisco, San Franci-
sco, 1991, Vol. III.
27 Hayles, op.cit.5.
the necessary consequence is that we have to think of
the body – which allows us to do a lot of things, but
also which is born and grows up, becomes ill, can loose
strength, can hinder thought or cause a lack of memory
– as a tool; a tool that we have to use at will, and dismiss
when it is damaged, or that we can change to make it
more powerful. On the wave of a disembodied subject,
consciousness and thought – presented as the whole hu-
man identity - need some kind of material substrate, but
not necessarily human flesh: every human function, in-
cluding consciousness, is considered as information that
can be processed by different substrates. The self is the
result of all those processes, it is like a pattern of infor-
mation. If the problem is the power and the control of
information, then the human being is presently incom-
plete, and completeness can only be achieved through
technology.
Posthumanism is the extreme consequence of a
modern humanism. At the same time, the posthuman
discourse itself is a framework that reintroduces and
reinforces that idea of human being. However, its crucial
flaw lies in its anthropological perspective: the human
being is not the modern liberal subject and thought is
not a computational process.
4. The specificity of human being(s)
Too many times we forget that the human being
is primarily a bodily subject, even if she/he is not only
her/his body. In the economy of this text, we can not
fully discuss the role of the body in personal identity28,
although it is in close connection with the posthuman
subject, but we can easily see that there is no human
thinker without a body. The beginning of the existen-
ce of any of us is not a thought, but the position of a
concrete body with its limits, boundaries, potentialities,
traits. A body that precedes conscience and self-cons-
ciousness. When something occurs to our body, it occurs
to us, not to a tool of ours. As Hegel says, «Violence
28 About this issue cf. Pessina A., «Venire al mondo. Rifles-
sione filosofica sull’uomo come figlio e come persona», in Caribo-
ni C., Oliva G., Pessina A., Il mio amore fragile. Storia di France-
sco, XY.IT Editore, Arona, 2011, pp.63-93; Colombetti E., Incognita
uomo. Corpo, tecnica, identità, Vita e Pensiero, Milano, 2006.

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done to my body, by others is violence done to me. Be-
cause I feel, contact with or violence to my body touches
me immediately as actual and present. This constitutes
the difference between personal injury and infringe-
ment of my external property; for in the latter, my will
does not have this immediate presence and actuality»29.
We could add: not only because I feel, but because I am
not without my body.
Linked to, and starting from, this bodily existence,
we have also to reconsider the idea of an autarchic sub-
ject. A rigorous description of human being reveals that
she/he is not entirely autonomous: her/his autonomy is
always written in dependency30. We are all generated
from someone else, we learn a language in a community
of speakers, we need care to pass from what we can on-
tologically do (simply because we are humans) to what
we effectively can do if there are the conditions to do
it (or, using Nussbaum’s category, to pass from basic to
internal and combined capabilities). In other words: we
come from a relationship, and we need relationships in
our life and, still more, we need them for a flourishing
life. To develop one’s body as well as to build language
skills, to learn individual and social practices, we need
time and help from others. We can become ill, we may
loose strength and capacities and need even more care
from others than what is usual. The human being is
unintelligible when conceived outside relationship. Even
without going deeper in the analysis of our constitu-
tional dependency, it is clear that the suggestion of a
totally independent human being is unrealistic.
Similarly, we have to correct the idea that knowledge
and thought are a computable process. It is impressive
how many texts confuse processing data and unders-
tanding their meaning. At the same time, memory is
not simply a storage of records. The same purpose of
transmitting data requires some kind of previous un-
derstanding of the data itself. We can transmit a lot of
information through devices in and outside the body,
but the real question is not about the efficacy and effi-
29 Hegel F., Elements of the Philosophy of Right, Cambridge
University Press, Cambridge, 1991, cit. p. 79.
30 About the relation autonomy-dependency, cf. Musio A.,
L’autonomia come dipendenza, Vita e Pensiero, Milano, 2006.
ciency of this process, but about what is important to
transmit, what we have to choose to be transmitted and
why. That is one of the reasons why anthropocentrism is
unavoidable. Although posthumanism is demanding to
leave it and accept the blending of our boundaries with
other beings, anthropocentrism is inescapable: in order
to put peculiar treats of human being on the outskirts
of our attention, we, the human being, have to know it
and want it, understating the reasons that only humans
can, eventually, find out. The hypothetical acknowled-
gement that we do not have any higher value than
other beings, needs an intellectual and willing act (a
free action) that performatively proposes our different
ontological value again.
At this point, we have to take into account a relevant
counter-argument. As some authors suggest31, we have
to think of perfection in an evolutionary perspective as
to say, in terms of adaptation to the environment. Since
human beings are building instruments and culture, by
defining a new environment, the subject has to chan-
ge: every cultural acquisition has a dynamic feedback
that transforms the same human being. In order to do
it, in this technological landscape, we are supposed to
embrace technology inside us. In other words, it is be-
cause of what we are that we should pass over anthro-
pocentrisms, understanding our need for relationship
with other beings, organic or mechanical. Human iden-
tity required crossbreeding. It is the human action what
makes it necessary: by changing the context where we
live, the boundaries between human being and techno-
logical devices fall. Perfection would mean adapting us
to this new setting.
This thesis has its force but it confuses again diffe-
rent levels. We have to notice the paradox of a perspec-
tive that starts from an unrelated human subject and
finishes by putting at the top the idea of relationship
with the other, although it is a technological other. In
any case, adaptation to the environment is something
common to many living beings with the aim of survival,
from microorganism to complex animals. What is pecu-
31 Marchesini R., Post Human. Verso nuovi modelli di esisten-
za. Bollati Boringhieri, Torino, 2002.

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liar of human beings is, on the other side, the fact that
they change the environment adapting it to themselves
and not the contrary. Humans are able to formulate
intentional purposes. This intentionality requires to jud-
ge if a change is something good for what the human
being is, and not only in order to adapt to what the
human being is not. The modification could bring some
benefits, but if this transformation means losing human
identity, it would be contradictory to say that it is bet-
ter for the human being itself because she/he would
not be any more. Being controlled by what we build in
order to control reality is a complete loose of target, it
would mean hetero-direction. We could arrive to this
conclusion only if we accepted the idea of technology
as the destiny of mankind. But, as we explained before,
technology can be an ontological destiny if the core of
reality was encoded information and the inner human
identity consisted in decoding and controlling informa-
tion. In this case, technology would permit to transcend
the actual limited situation, to govern more data and,
therefore, realize ontological traits of the human being
itself. But, as we are showing, this anthropological view
is, simply, untrue.
There are many reasons why I contest the very idea
of a transcendence achieved through technology, but
here I will only take into account the knowledge issue.
If transcendence was the mere passing over the limit, it
would be constantly frustrated by the new line of limit.
We would have to constantly upgrade ourselves in the
attempt to achieve a higher technical level of informa-
tion and control, losing quite soon any reference to the
corporal human subject. On the contrary, the same capa-
city to know the limit as such is a form of transcending
it. It is because we realize that we do not have (and we
will never have it, not even when we use advanced te-
chnology) all the possible information on reality that we
are going over our limited situation; the human being
is able to recognize the part as a part, without interpre-
ting the part as the whole. It would be impossible if we
were totally close in the finitude.
Little by little we are understanding that the con-
ceptual premises of posthumanism offer a deformed
description of reality. Another issue it does not take
into account is that human specificity is not limited to
an instrumental knowledge32: for this reason we have
to think of the completeness (or, better, the flourishing
life) in a broader way. An instrumental approach, as well
as a deterministic-utilitarian view, cannot explain such
peculiar things as unpredictable acts and gratuity: the
human being has the power to do something for the
good of someone else, despite the awareness of a dama-
ge she/he can suffer. She/he can try to do a completely
useless thing as training her/himself to become able to
do something new, with a self-challenge. It is completely
different from including a technology or using a drug:
what is important is not the performance itself, but the
capacity to arrive to do it by her/himself. Even more:
sometimes, when taking a decision about the future, the
human being may deliberately not bear in mind some
important information related to the others’ possible
behaviour. It is not a deficit of information, but simply
a decision to give someone else another real chance. In
other words, humans are able to forgive and to look on
another woman or man according them a new full “sen-
seless” confidence. We cannot neither omit to consider
a specific and peculiar trait: the need to be recognized
and understood, to receive a confirmation of our value
from other free men and women, to share ideas and in-
terests, to see and be seen as someone unique, not as an
object. We could add considerations about thought as a
creative process, able to realize something new with an
intentional purpose, or about language, looking at the
ability of using symbols in new and different combina-
tions and saying completely different things every time.
Humans can also do something worthless things, as ad-
miring beauty. They also introduce beauty and creativity
in basic needs like food, by cooking it and even by de-
corating dishes.
All these traits do not say immediately which kind
of empowerment can be accepted or refused, but they
do say that the human description that posthumanism
offers is simply wrong. Among the supporters of the en-
32 On this argument see the famous text of Horkheimer M.,
On the Critique of Instrumental Reason: Lectures and Essays Since
the End of World War II, Seabury Press, New York, 1976.

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hancement perspective, Kamm imagines how we could
understand and choose the good objectives aiming at
which enhancement could be used safely. His conclusion
is that «it would be a safe end to enhance capacities
to recognize and fulfil our moral duties, at least if the
enhancement involved our appreciating the reasons for
these duties and not a purely mechanical purpose»33. It
is a good concern, but it goes back to what I am saying.
Understanding moral duties is not a physical matter, the-
refore, unless there is a physical impairment of thought,
it’s not by changing physics that we can achieve it; se-
condarily, we can’t speak about any moral duties if the
human being gives up the possibility to find out any
normative issue in reality. Moral duties require axiologi-
cal judgment, not only informational data, and that is
exactly what human beings, not technology, do.
In conclusion, I think that, before discussing any
possible and particular enhancement, we have to con-
sider that Posthumanism theory brings two dramatic
misunderstandings about men and women. Firstly it
loses sight of the question about meaning and, as we
discussed above when we talked about the use of the
term ‘growth’ in place of ‘enhancement’, it is not able
to offer evaluation criteria except an unrelated power
(physical or psychical) and a data processing. Of course
in terms of speed or power, artefacts not are paradoxi-
cally bigger than a human being, they overtake him, but
the specificity of human being is more complex and ri-
cher. Enhancement shifts attention from the uniqueness
of the subject to his functioning and performances. But,
because of the human transcendence with respect to the
technical problem, the question of meaning reappears
and introduces the teleology issue; we have to face the
question of aim: to enhance some trait - and become
posthuman - in order to achieve what?
The second - and perhaps deeper - problem concerns
the premises. Many times the debate on posthumanism
begins immediately by analysing the implications of the
enhancement of different faculties over therapeutic
purposes: I think that it is urgent to put in question the
33 Kamm F., «What Is and Is Not Wrong with Enhancement»,
in Savulescu J., Bostrom N. (eds), Human Enhancement, Oxford Uni-
versity Press, New York, 2009, 91-130, cit. 128-129.
theoretical background in which it is embedded. Posthu-
manism starts from a liberal and autonomous modern
subject, it reinforces this perspective by progressively in-
sinuating the idea that this autonomy can support any
change we can introduce: linked with a structural de-
pendency on technology, it contemplates the loosening
of the clear boundaries of one’s own subject. On the
contrary, I think that we have to accept an apparent pa-
radox: it’s only by recognizing one’s structural being-in-
relationship and dependency as well as recovering the
idea of some kind of normativity of what we are, that
a human being can keep her/his own autonomy and act
for a real flourishing life.
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