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SOPHIA (2011) 50:101–112

DOI 10.1007/s11841-010-0214-4

Information, Bodies, and Heidegger: Tracing Visions

of the Posthuman

Bradley B. Onishi

Published online: 1 December 2010

The Author(s) 2010. This article is published with open access at Springerlink.com

Abstract

Discussion of the posthuman has emerged in a wide set of fields through a

diverse set of thinkers including Donna Haraway, Ray Kurzweil, Nick Bostrom, N.

Katherine Hayles, and Francis Fukuyama, just to name a few. Despite his extensive

critique of technology, commentators have not explored the fruitfulness of Heidegger's

work for deciphering the various strands of posthumanism recently formulated in

response to contemporary technological developments. Here, I employ Heidegger's

critique of technology to trace opposing visions of the posthuman, visions that are both

tied intimately to new information technologies. For those seeking to extend humanist

ideals, information technologies are employed to extend the vision of an ultra-humanist

view of a

‘scientific

posthuman’ that dangerously understands the body to be a

forfeitable nuisance, rather than an inherent aspect of being human. Along Heideggerian

lines, thinkers such as N. Katherine Hayles and Thomas Carlson have developed an

alternative trajectory related to Dasein's Being-in-the-world. This trajectory posits the

self as constituted by a lack or abyss, enabling the formulation of a

‘mystical

posthuman,’ celebrating, rather than forfeiting, humanity's embodied existence.

Keywords

Posthuman . Transhumanism . Heidegger . Nick Bostrom . Thomas

Carlson . N. Katherine Hayles . Information technologies

Introduction

Nietzsche's Zarathustra proclaimed,

‘Man

is something that must be overcome.’ Over

the last quarter century thinkers from every corner of the academic universe—

philosophers, critical theorists, science-fiction writers, scientists, literary critics, and

others—have come to agree with him. However, for the most part strategies for

overcoming the human have not been formulated in terms of the

Übermensch,

but

B. B. Onishi (*)

Religious Studies Department, University of California Santa Barbara, 729 De La Vina St.,

Santa Barbara, CA 93101, USA

e-mail: bonishi@umail.ucsb.edu

102

B.B. Onishi

rather in discourse surrounding the

‘posthuman.’

Discussion of the posthuman has

emerged in a wide set of fields, through a diverse set of thinkers including feminist

philosopher Donna Haraway, inventor Ray Kurzweil, transhumanist philosopher Nick

Bostrom, literary critic N. Katherine Hayles, and political theorist Francis Fukuyama,

just to name a few. Inevitably, with discussion and rumination coming from such

different academic contexts, visions of the posthuman vary tremendously. For some, the

notion of the the posthuman includes overcoming the humanist dream of a discrete,

autonomous subject—it is a way of re-envisioning models of selfhood. For others, the

vision is more radical—it could include living a bodiless existence as an avatar in

cyberspace, or inhabiting a completely artificial body connected to the brain—it is a

means for transforming both body and mind through radical technological innovation.

Despite this disparity, two characteristics are constant throughout posthuman discourse.

First, posthumanism must be understood as reflection upon and discussion of

humanism. To be somewhat trite, it is natural that one's understanding of the human

will inevitably influence their vision of the posthuman. As I will demonstrate below,

one can characterize the differing trajectories of posthumanism by placing them into

two general camps: ultra-humanists, those who want to extend the humanist project

to hyperbolic ends; post-humanists, those that want to overcome the humanist

understanding of the human in favor of a revised model.

Second, these theorists agree that if Zarathustra's dream of overcoming the human is

to become reality, it will take place through an intimate relationship with the

technological, more specifically, with new information technologies. This is no

coincidence. During the last quarter century information technologies have accompa-

nied humanity into previously unimaginable subjective and technological territory.

Every time one turns on satellite or digital television, uses a card for a cash withdrawal

from an automated bank teller, or makes a point of sale purchase at a restaurant, one is

using a technology that is able to store, send or transform information over a non-

physical, informational network. All of this is not to mention the most influential and

revolutionary information technology that has only been in widespread public use for

less than 2 decades—the Internet. For many people all over the globe, the Internet is

an integral aspect of daily life as they send e-mails to friends or colleagues, look up

information related to work or leisure, join chat rooms with people of similar interests,

play various roles in on-line communities, and explore the vast expanse of the

Internet’s informational space. Quite simply, the proliferation and dissemination of the

Internet has changed the ways in which we communicate with other human beings and

machines, but more importantly, it has changed how we interpret reality and interpret

what it means to be human. In response and in anticipation, theorists from various

fields have declared the emergence of the

‘posthuman’

as a means to account for the

developments wrought by these rapidly developing technologies.

In what follows I will employ Heidegger's critique of technology to trace opposing

visions of the posthuman, visions that are tied intimately to these technological

developments. For those seeking to extend humanist ideals, information technologies

The term

“humanism”

is used in a wide variety of contexts in relationship to a number of different

philosophical trajectories. As I discuss in my analysis of Heidegger's critique of technology below, the

term is used here in reference to the Cartesian formulation of a worldless ego that is understood to be the

basis of modern metaphysics.

Information, Bodies, and Heidegger: Tracing Visions

103

are employed to extend the vision of the human as an autonomous, self-legislating

subject, standing over against a world of objects. It is an ultra-humanist vision of a

‘scientific

posthuman.’ I will argue below that within this framework the human itself

is objectified as it is converted into a calculable and reducible set of informational

patterns participating in what Heidegger calls the standing-reserve, albeit in this

context, the standing-reserve of information. Following Heidegger, theorists such as N.

Katherine Hayles and Thomas Carlson have formulated an alternative trajectory that

develops along similar lines to Dasein's Being-in-the-world, positing the self as

constituted by a lack or abyss. Within this trajectory a

‘mystical

posthuman’ emerges;

networked, multiple, and fluid, it is never fully present, nor decipherable to itself.

Part I: The Standing-Reserve of Information and the Emergence

of the Scientific Posthuman

The ultra-humanist trajectory of the scientific posthuman is illustrated most vividly in

the scientific movement called

‘transhumanism,’

which promotes the radical alteration

of human minds and bodies in order to develop a new posthuman species with the

potential to transcend current human capabilities. While transhumanism is certainly not

the only discourse by which the posthuman has been formulated, it is an appropriate

place to investigate the logic underlying formulations of the posthuman based on

scientific advancement. Transhumanism is a prevalent posthuman trajectory that

represents, in hyperbolic form, the logic of ultra-humanist posthuman discourse.

Furthermore, while some of transhumanism's ideas for human enhancement and

transformation may seem more apt to a science-fiction novel than serious academic

discourse, transhumanism is an influential school of thought, formulated by world-

class scholars from all over the world.

Nick Bostrom,

the director of the Future of Humanity Institute at the James

Martin Twenty-first Century School of the University of Oxford, defines trans-

humanism as follows:

My use of the term

“mystical

posthuman” is indebted to Thomas A. Carlson’s analysis in

The Indiscrete

Image,

which draws comparisons between the apophatic anthropology characteristic of certain Christian

mystical texts with recent discourse on the posthuman. While the term

“mystical”

evokes a number of

different connotations, in the present context it signifies a subject never fully decipherable to itself—an

ineffable and dispossessed subject. It is not meant to imply subjective

“mystical

experiences” such as

visions, revelatory dreams, etc. See, Carlson, T. A. (2009).

The indiscrete image: Infinitude and creation

of the human.

Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

The two most important examples are Ray Kurzweil and Hans Moravec. Kurzweil is a scientist/inventor

who has received a $500,000 MIT-Lemelson Prize, received 12 honorary doctorates from various

universities, as well as received the National Medal of Technology in the United States. He has written a

couple of very influential texts, including

The Age of the Spiritual Machines: How We Will Live, Work,

and Think in the New Age of Intelligent Machines

(London: Orion Business, 1999).

Moravec is a scientist at Carnegie-Mellon University who has been researching and creating robots since

the 1960s. His book Mind-Children: The Future of Robot and Human Intelligence (London: Harvard

University Press, 1988) is one of the seminal texts for the transhuman movement and was one of the first

to explain the scientific possibilities of uploading a human mind onto a computer hard drive.

Nick Bostrom is currently the director of the Future of Humanity Institute, which is a member of the

James Martin 21st Century School at the University of Oxford, and also a member of the faculty of

philosophy at the University of Oxford.

104

B.B. Onishi

The intellectual and cultural movement that affirms the possibility and

desirability of fundamentally improving the human condition through applied

reason, especially by developing and making widely available technologies to

eliminate aging and to greatly enhance human intellectual, physical, and

psychological capacities.

Bostrom is clear that transhumanism understands itself as an heir of the humanist

project due to its understanding of individual freedom and autonomy as the highest

values of human existence. Thus, for transhumanists,

‘It

is not our human shape or

the details of our current human biology that define what is valuable about us, but

rather our aspirations and ideals, our experiences, and the kinds of lives we lead.’

These ideals can best be established through the development of technologies that

will allow humans to reshape material existence, especially the human body. Brent

Waters has argued critically that the main tenets of the transhuman vision are based

on the belief

‘that

the worlds' only underlying and universal feature is information.’

This core belief has serious consequences, as he points out:

Since information has no inherent meaning it can be recast, conveyed and

interpreted in virtually endless arrays. The fluidity of information means that

all borders are temporary, and any definition permeable. Reality is a construct

of shifting patterns of information within and through various media.

Noteworthy is how the technological advances being sought by the transhumanists

all share the goal of procuring, processing and distributing information for the

purposes of extending the humanist goals of freedom and autonomy to a

revolutionary level.

The transhuman ambition for technological advancement is undergirded by an

ultra-humanist logic that understands material existence, including the human body,

to be a hindrance to the goals of the human/post-human species. The technological

advancements proposed by transhumanists aim to reduce all material entities to

patterns of information in order to have the freedom to arrange and re-arrange them

at an anatomical level. Nanotechnology is based around the notion that microscopic

machines will someday be able to arrange and rearrange atoms. Bostrom explains,

‘Nanotechnology,

by making it possible to rearrange atoms effectively, will enable

us to transform coal into diamonds, sand into supercomputers, and to remove

pollution from the air and tumors from healthy tissue.’

Nanotechnology is not

unrelated to the second technological development, which is central to the

transhuman vision—what Bostrom and others have called

‘uploading.’

Uploading

consists of transferring the informational patterns of a human brain onto a hard

drive.

In transferring the brain from the biological body to a computer, all that is

needed to retain the identity of the individual would be the successful transfer of the

Bostrom, N. (2003).

The transhumanist FAQ.

Willington, CT: World Transhumanist Association, 4.

Ibid., 4.

Waters, B. (2006).

From human to posthuman: Christian theology and technology in a postmodern

world.

Aldershot: Ashgate, 31.

Ibid.

Bostrom,

Transhuman, 9.

Ibid., 17.

Information, Bodies, and Heidegger: Tracing Visions

105

informational patterns which were stored on the brain (to another medium):

‘The

rest

is mere jelly.’

Thus, transhumanists envision posthuman entities that will inhabit

prosthetic bodies, or live virtually as avatars in cyberspace. The point is that the

body is understood as an outdated model of hardware that needs to be replaced in

order to eradicate inherent human deficiencies—hunger, fatigue, disease, and, most

of all, death. In order to rectify these deficiencies the human is reduced to a set of

informational patterns that can be stored, manipulated, and transformed for the sake

of the possibility for limitless posthuman freedom and autonomy.

It is at this critical juncture that Heidegger's notions of

‘enframing’

and

‘the

standing-reserve’ are helpful for illuminating the consequences of the ultra-humanist

logic that undergirds the transhuman vision. While it is true that Heidegger admitted

that his critique of technology did not provide a basis for judging it to be defective,

Heidegger's critique is helpful for pointing out the relationship between modern

technology and the modern metaphysical paradigm instituted by Descartes—a paradigm

assumed by transhumanism. I use Heidegger's critique here to point out the specific

dangers of the transhumanist vision and to elucidate how alternative visions of the

human lead to different conclusions regarding humanity's relationship to technology.

In relation to transhumanism, Heidegger's critique is helpful for the way it

illuminates the metaphysical assumptions that structure the movement. Trans-

humanism is a conscious heir of humanism in that it purports to place the human as

the foundation of all values. The movement operates on the assumption of the

Cartesian ego as the autonomous, rational Being of beings that is distinct from the

world and even its own body. Thus, it is at this point that Heidegger's critique is

helpful. By taking the ground of reality to be the individual human consciousness—

the individual

‘I’—Heidegger

points out that Descartes effected a fundamental

change:

‘Man

becomes that being upon which all that is, is grounded as regards the

manner of its Being and its truth.’

With the human subject as the ground of the real,

following Nietzsche, Heidegger argues that existence becomes subjected to the

subject's endless desire for more freedom and autnonomy—the will to power:

‘The

ousia (beingness) of the subiectum changes into the subjectness of self-assertive self-

consciousness, which now manifests its essence as the will to will. The will is, as the

will to power, the command to more power.’

When the will to power is eventually

posited as the last metaphysical force governing the ego, the logic of mastery implicit

in the Cartesian framework comes to the fore:

‘There

begins that way of being . . . for

the purpose of gaining mastery over that which is as a whole.’

Heidegger's point is

that if the ego is understood to be the Being of beings, the material world is dominated

by the subject's arbitrary will for more power. As a result, the highest values are those

related to the freedom and autonomy of the ego—the transhuman vision follows suit

by seeking to fulfill these goals through the radical alteration of material existence,

including human bodies and brains.

Moravec, H. (1988).

Mind-children: The future of robot and human intelligence.

London: Harvard

University Press, 117.

Heidegger, M. (1977). The age of the world picture. In W. Lovitt (Ed.),

The question concerning

technology and other essays.

San Francisco: Harper and Row Publishers, 128.

Heidegger,

‘The

world of Nietzsche:

“God

is dead”. In

The question concerning technology and other

essays,

88.

Ibid.

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