TRANSLATOR’S INTRODUCTION

Transhumanism in Translation

This introduction situates Stefan Lorenz Sorgner’s On Transhumanism

within the thematic context of technological innovation, but also within
the situational context of the tools and techniques available for translat-
ing German philosophy into English. In this book, Sorgner speaks highly
of controversial biotechnologies, like xenotransplantation, which would
replace, for instance, damaged human lungs with healthy lungs from a
pig bred for that purpose. Like an organ transplant in words, a trans-
lation introduces foreign ideas into a new cultural body, which could
easily reject those ideas just for being foreign. Among other goals, this
introduction intends to provide a kind of antirejection drug to offset
effects of this book that might lead North American readers to put it
down too soon.

This Transhumanist Moment

What unites transhumanists is an enthusiasm for research and devel-

opment into life-changing technologies. They want more technology
legalized and made widely available faster, and they come with varied
motivations, including curiosity, conviction, medical necessity, and
financial interest. In transhumanist visions of the future, unprecedented
technologies will release human lives from bodily constraints that medi-
cine has thus far regarded as inevitable. Scientists are now in a position to
translate the human genetic code out of the messy handwriting of nature
into the exquisite calligraphy of our wildest dreams. More relaxed regu-
lations on new biotechnology (especially gene modification) will open
the door to life in the superlative: superior health, supreme cognitive
 TRANSLATOR’S INTRODUCTION

functioning, unheard of athletic potential, and super-well-being. On

Transhumanism weighs in on the ethical questions around the pursuit
of technologically assisted self-enhancement.
viii It is a defining feature of technology that it exists to serve human
wishes. What is so controversial then about saying that it is better to have
more sooner? The following examples give a sense of the controversial
flair of transhumanist enterprises. Since the late 1970s, at the cryogen-
ics facility in Scottsdale, Arizona, Alcor Life Extension Foundation has
been “extending medical care past when the doctors give up on you,”
as one member describes it (Alcor Cryonics 2015). An Alcor member
becomes a patient immediately upon clinical death, at which point “cryo-
protectant concentration” is circulated through patients’ major arteries.
They are then laid in liquid nitrogen-cooled chambers where they are
preserved indefinitely.
Even though Alcor has not attempted to revive a patient yet, “it is
assumed that the cryopreservation process will someday be reversible”
(Alcor Procedures, n.d.). Cryogenics falls within the kind of experimen-
tal medicine not covered under health insurance policies, and therefore
members typically secure payment to Alcor by naming it as the benefi-
ciary of life insurance policies, taken out in the amount of the $200,000
full-body preservation fee—or $80,000 for the head alone. Members can
also pay to have pets preserved for up to $30,000. One Alcor member
cancelled her cell phone plan to pay the $600 yearly membership fee
and explained to a reporter: “I’m sorry, but I’m just not that excited
about phones. I’m excited about teleportation devices or my own per-
sonal spaceship. I want to see the future” (CNBC 2016). Of course, Alcor
cannot promise that the procedure is reversible, and other futurists, like
Michio Kaku and this book’s author, are not optimistic that cryonics
will work.
Like so many health care procedures, self-optimization tends to be
expensive, and it tends to break skin. From late 2016 to early 2019 (at which
point the Food and Drug Administration intervened), a San Francisco-
based company called Ambrosia was injecting blood plasma from
donors under twenty-five, purchased from blood banks, to older clients
for $8,000 per liter.1 Ambrosia hoped to replicate the antiaging effects
of this procedure (known as parabiosis) that improved the appearance
 TRANSLATOR’S INTRODUCTION

of fur and internal organs in mouse trials. Although there have been
no human test trials, one Ambrosia client, a sixty-two-year-old math-
ematician with injuries from a motorcycle accident, reported that his
sleep improved significantly after a year of infusions (Carville 2019). ix
An example of a cheaper, less speculative “biohack” is the micro-
chipping of people. Microchipping is already the favored way of tracking
house pets, and in 2015, Biohax International began implanting micro-
chips in the webbing between people’s thumb and index finger for only
$180 per chip. Within Sweden, where the company operates, thousands
of residents rely on their implants in place of credit cards, train tickets,
and passports in everyday transactions.2 E-tickets and online payments
are similarly convenient and do not require chip implants (which were,
after all, first implemented as tracking devices), but in the world’s most
paperless society, where fewer than 1% of transactions involve cash, the
motivation to streamline transactions is higher than elsewhere (Alder-
man 2018).
This brief overview gives a sense of the sci-fi appeals of transhu-
manist enhancements on human existence: from mere convenience to
enhanced vitality to immortality. Although the effectiveness of some
of these technologies remains speculative, what matters to transhu-
manists is the relaxation of laws around innovative biotech. Perhaps
more so than in other luxury industries, the clientele is mostly male.3
Transhumanists frame their visions as inclusive of all humans, though,
and Sorgner insists that transhumanist goals could benefit nonhuman
animals and artificially intelligent machines as well. The US Transhu-
manist Party thus demands research with the intention of improving life
“should be rendered fully lawful and their products should be made fully
available to the public, as long as no individual is physically harmed
without that individual’s consent or defrauded by misrepresentation
of the effects of a possible treatment or substance” (US Transhumanist
Party / Transhuman Party—Official Website, n.d.). By expressing the
wish for self-optimization in familiar political language, transhuman-
ism calls for its place in the contemporary policy discussion. Academic
work on transhumanism, like the present book, strikes a cooler tone
than the movement’s political and economic spokespeople, but their
shared enthusiasms make these discourses difficult to disentangle.
 TRANSLATOR’S INTRODUCTION

The Present Book in Context

The English edition of this book can be read as a kind of reverse trans-
x lation in the sense that the transhumanist movement has already had
a more visible following in the Anglophone world than in Europe, as
Sorgner points out, and this book originally addressed a German-speak-
ing audience. The US Transhumanist Party, for instance, was the first
political party dedicated to the transhumanist movement in the world,
and—although American transhumanists come in all political stripes—
the party’s deregulatory platform appeals to the libertarian contingent
so prevalent in the United States. Within Europe, Swedes show the most
eager embrace of transhumanism. Swedish society reportedly exhibits
fewer fears than its neighbors about data privacy, which some believe
explains why they have been quicker to implement transhumanist ideas,
like microchipping. Another possible reason why transhumanism com-
mands more respect in Sweden than in other European countries is
that Swedes regard their tech sector as foundational to their prosper-
ous economy (Petersén 2018). Whatever the reason, Swedish law is
what transhumanists would call “bioliberal” when it comes to legal-
izing elective enhancement technologies. Since Sweden also provides
government-sponsored health care to all its citizens, its laws most closely
match the stance of this book’s German-born author, who brings Euro-
pean political sensibilities to the transhumanist movement—otherwise
dominated by the voices of American tech CEOs.
Sorgner is currently a philosophy professor at John Cabot University
in Rome. His centrality in the transhumanist discourse is unmistakable:
he is a prolific author, editor of a journal and book series on transhu-
manism, sought-after as a public speaker, and trained as a Nietzsche
scholar. He completed his PhD with Gianni Vattimo, author of over
one hundred philosophy books, who himself argues, drawing on
Heidegger and Nietzsche, for a “weak” concept of Being that he finds
compatible with both Christianity and nihilism. Sorgner is an equally
idiosyncratic philosopher. The present book positions transhumanism
in unexpected ways philosophically, institutionally, and politically. It
argues that Nietzsche’s ethics of self-overcoming, his ontology of power,
and his quasi-Lamarckian evolutionary views can (and should) be read
 TRANSLATOR’S INTRODUCTION

as supportive of transhumanism, and that a weak transhumanism, or

metahumanism, rejects the premises of humanism in ways compat-
ible with minority rights discourses and leftist posthumanism. The
author describes transhumanism as politically unspecific enough for xi
its adherents to combine it with political views as various as libertari-
anism, classical liberalism, and social democracy.
In 2018, Sorgner spoke on a panel with other Nietzsche scholars,
as part of the radio-broadcast Phil.Cologne public debate series. After
pointing out that enhancement technologies (vaccines, Viagra, smart-
phones—our omnipresent sixth sense) already structure our everyday
life, Sorgner described a new enhancement on the horizon: implants
to measure blood sugar, which could detect oncoming insulin shocks
before a person suffered symptoms. The moderator expressed perplex-
ity at Sorgner’s great enthusiasm for the implant: “You would have to
be awfully worried about yourself to be so excited about such a device.
Are you so worried about yourself?”4 Sorgner replied that he considered
blood sugar levels a generally reasonable concern. The question with
any new technology, though, is whether it raises more worries than it
addresses. In the case of real-time health monitoring tools, one concern
(that Sorgner raises below) would be that insurance companies could
access the data, discover symptoms before the client even notices them,
and disqualify clients for care on the basis of preexisting conditions.5
In its adoration for tech, transhumanism can look like the inversion
of the antiresearch platform of America’s religious right, and transhu-
manism occasionally dovetails with leftist positions. This book argues
for the ethical legitimacy of a new reproductive technology legalized
in Britain in 2015 that can produce a child with sex cells from three
biological parents. That technology has found some resonance with
cyber-feminist leader Donna Haraway, who sees three-parent fertiliza-
tion as an alternative to patriarchal heterosexual coupledom (Haraway
2016, 8, 138). Yet even when such points of overlap occur, most academ-
ics see transhumanism’s premises as glorifying idealized humanity over
everything and everyone else (including humans deemed inferior). Since
the book primarily defends transhumanism against its German-speak-
ing critics, I will introduce some Anglophone critical positions below
in greater detail. But first I want to introduce transhumanism’s most
 TRANSLATOR’S INTRODUCTION

prominent supporters—mostly based in California—some of whom

are briefly mentioned in this book.

xii
Of University Professors and Technology Executives

In the fourth chapter, Sorgner summarizes Nietzsche’s view that power-

ful individuals shape our perceptions of reality, even our perception of
power itself: “The content of the concepts of power is always bound to
the perspective of the powerful.” The media portrayal of transhumanism
in the Anglophone world is highly attuned to this Nietzschean insight
and focuses on the wealthiest transhumanists: technology executives,
like Elon Musk and Peter Thiel. I will therefore devote this section of
the introduction to supplementing the book’s focus on transhuman-
ist ideas by introducing the social positions of transhumanism’s most
prominent academic critics and its most influential spokespeople, begin-
ning with the latter.
This book introduces Nick Bostrom and Natasha Vita-More as
a Swedish-born Oxford professor and an American artist; they are
also cofounder and executive director of Humanity Plus, respectively.
Humanity Plus is a think tank whose mission is “to deeply influence a
new generation of thinkers who dare to envision humanity’s next steps”
(Humanity+, n.d.). Their goal of increasing public acceptance of biotech-
nology has attracted an international base as well as some questionable
American donors. Humanity Plus recently made headlines for having
benefitted from notorious billionaire eugenicist and convicted sex traf-
ficker Jeffrey Epstein’s $20,000 donation in 2011 (Stewart, Goldstein, and
Silver-Greenberg 2019).
Bostrom and Vita-More make attention-getting statements in keep-
ing with their role as spokespeople for the transhumanist movement.
Natasha Vita-More for instance has raised the possibility of holding a
“Super Olympics” with biologically enhanced athletes.6 Just picturing
that image could reframe the doping debate for some sports fans: anti-
doping regulations are standing between investors and their dreams
of sponsoring supersports for bioenhanced titan-athletes whose feats
will be more entertaining than we can even imagine today.7 Bostrom,
 TRANSLATOR’S INTRODUCTION

a philosophy professor at Oxford University, has also worked hard to

reframe the discourse; he offers a memorable analogy between the main-
stream global tendency to accept death as inevitable and the mores of
a fictional, backward society that practices human sacrifice and tells xiii
children to accept “the sacrifices . . . as a fact of life” (Bostrom 2005c).
Through such images and analogies, transhumanist intellectuals enter a
cultural war by raising an optimistic bulwark against dystopian films that
portray enhancement technologies as primarily oppressive or exploitive,
such as Gattaca (1997) or Get Out (2017).
Tech journalists tend not to report heavily on these transhumanist
intellectuals. They instead follow the money by asking who stands to gain
most directly by capitalizing on the enhancement technology market.
The answer is clearly those with capital invested in biotech industries.
For decades now, one of the most prominent transhumanist entrepre-
neurs has been Ray Kurzweil, director of engineering at Google. After
revolutionizing keyboard synthesizers in the 1980s, he turned to bio-
technology in the 1990s. He is most famous today for predicting that
a singularity event will occur before the year 2050, wherein humans
will no longer rely on bodies to process information because they can
interact directly over a data cloud (Kurzweil 2005). When a Google
executive promises mind-uploading within our lifetimes, a signal to
investors cannot help but slip into the prediction: Google technology
is about to change the world again, and now is the time to invest more
capital in Google or else miss out on massive profits.
Other tech CEOs advertise their transhumanism in ways that sound
designed to shock. PayPal founder, biotech investor, and outspoken
Trump supporter Peter Thiel has expressed interest in receiving trans-
fusions of young people’s blood as a way of fighting off death, like what
Ambrosia was offering (Kosoff 2016). Tesla’s Elon Musk argues that
autonomous vehicles will soon replace all jobs involving the driving of
automobiles, but he comes prepared with a risky, dystopian-sounding
solution: turning unskilled workers into highly efficient cyborgs. In
his words: “Some high bandwidth interface to the brain will be some-
thing that helps achieve a symbiosis between human and machine
intelligence and maybe solves the control problem and the usefulness
problem” (Clark 2017). Such workplace innovations sound especially
 TRANSLATOR’S INTRODUCTION

risky coming from someone whose labor practices around health and
safety at Tesla are already under close scrutiny (O’Kane 2018). In his
2018 book, Schöner Neuer Mensch (Brave new human), Sorgner argues
xiv that prominent transhumanists, such as Elon Musk, make absurd state-
ments—like claiming that we currently live in a computer simulation
à la The Matrix—because good or bad media attention enhances their
brand recognition.
Tech entrepreneurs may seem especially prone to overblown state-
ments, and those statements may dominate the public conversation
excessively, but it makes sense to pay attention to them. After all, they
are motivated to be well informed about the potential applications of
new technology and thus are poised to present provocative bioethical
arguments. Dan Faggella, for instance, is CEO and founder of TechEm-
ergence, a marketing research company dedicated to promoting artificial
intelligence technologies. Despite his investment in the industry, even
Faggella warns that two dangerous extremes of bioenhanced humans
will emerge: the “lotus-eaters,” who will use AI and bioenhancement
to experience escapist pleasures, and the “power-eaters,” who will use
simulations and self-enhancements to train harder, sleep less, feel fewer
distracting emotions, and accomplish more than their rivals: “In the
coming century, almost all economic competition, political competition,
and war will ultimately be a proxy for obtaining this pinnacle of tech-
nological control and power” (Faggella 2018). Faggella’s warnings make
historical sense when we consider that the internet had its first instan-
tiation in ARPANET, the US military network designed to enhance
geopolitical control in Southeast Asia, and that the United States primar-
ily conducts its twenty-first-century wars in front of computer screens
(Levine 2018, 13–35). Technology empowers the most powerful most of
all. This historical context must be addressed for a transhumanist ethos
to be persuasive.
Persuasive ideas for a just and pluralistic posthuman future do
sometimes come from biotech industry leaders, such as “transgender
transhumanist” Martine Rothblatt, former outer-space-domain lawyer,
founder of SiriusXM radio, and current CEO of United Therapeutics, an
experimental pharmaceutical company.8 Throughout the book, Sorgner
pleads that laws should be less restrictive against research on technology
 TRANSLATOR’S INTRODUCTION

that could transform human potential. Rothblatt frames transhuman-

ism as a matter of minority rights in her blog, books, interviews, and
articles. Sorgner makes the same move, for instance, when he discusses
three-parent fertilization. This argument for transhumanist reform shifts xv
the focus away from individual achievement toward forms of collective
solidarity.
Transgender rights may even be the most provocative “social jus-
tice” case for transhumanism. Some transgender people identify as
neither “he” nor “she,” and they suffer from discrimination wherever
binary gender identifications are legally required: when they go to the
restroom, complete an application for work, or apply for government
or medical services. In the 1960s, medical articles began to report that
some patients regarded their need for sex-change surgery as a matter
of life or death. For many trans people, a socially ostracized life full of
special medical needs is still preferable to the debilitating depression
they suffer before their surgery (Meyerowitz 1980). The struggles for
legal recognition by those who experience gender-related body dys-
morphia makes an apt analogy for those transhumanists for whom laws
against mental or physical enhancement (by surgery or medication)
stand in the way of biotechnological optimization. When Rothblatt says
in a TED talk, “There are seven billion people on this earth, and there
are seven billion unique ways to express one’s gender,” she calls into
question the law’s codification of gender (Rothblatt 2015). Rothblatt’s
transhumanism (which Sorgner finds compelling) opposes the state’s
right to endorse some biotechnologies as medically necessary9 and to
reject others on grounds of being excessively self-interested. Writers
who rely on amphetamines like Adderall face a stigma similar to trans-
gender people: because they were medicated, their success is therefore
regarded as less “real.” While it is a privilege to have access to medi-
cations and to sex reassignment surgery, and the government should
probably still regulate new technologies, transhumanism may have its
ethical center in rejecting notions of “realness” and “naturalness” that
stigmatize getting high-tech help.
Let us briefly survey transhumanism’s various critics. After all, this
book takes its polemical tone in response to them. The book’s sub-
title refers to a special issue of Foreign Policy magazine where each
 TRANSLATOR’S INTRODUCTION

contributor discusses one of “The World’s Most Dangerous Ideas.” Fran-

cis Fukuyama, the center-right political scientist and regular guest author
at Foreign Policy who once codeveloped the Reagan Doctrine but more
xvi recently came out against the Iraq War, selects transhumanism as the
“most dangerous” contemporary idea because its deregulatory impulse
could change our bodies and societies irreversibly before we know it:
“The seeming reasonableness of the project, particularly when consid-
ered in small increments, is part of its danger. Society is unlikely to fall
suddenly under the spell of the transhumanist worldview. But it is very
possible that we will nibble at biotechnology’s tempting offerings with-
out realizing that they come at a frightful moral cost” (Fukuyama 2004).
In 2002 Fukuyama had already published an entire book warning
against the risks of bioengineering (Fukuyama 2002), but in the very
short 2004 Foreign Policy piece cited above, Fukuyama condenses his
bioconservative argument against genetic engineering in the name of
preserving the “essence” of the human “at the heart of political liberal-
ism.” If we do not guard against the transhumanists’ “genetic bulldozers
and psychotropic shopping malls,” the risks would be the neglect of those
“left behind” and the possibility that posthumans would be so morally
different that they may not even be worthy of human rights. Beyond
the political dimension, Fukuyama warns that we cannot anticipate the
biological risks for humanity’s survival if genetic modifications were
widely adopted.
Sorgner opposes this view with a bioliberal stance he articulates at
the end of the first chapter: “I believe that constant self-overcoming is
central to promoting my own quality of life. I also consider scientific
research, especially in biotechnology, extremely important and advocate
for greater sponsorship of those research fields. I consider the availabil-
ity of anesthetics, vaccinations, and antibiotics important achievements.
I hope that further achievements will follow to address important chal-
lenges. This stance can be parsed as a weak form of transhumanism.”
Sorgner calls his stance “weak” transhumanism because it leaves the
choice to adopt emergent biotechnologies up to individuals. Sorgner
thinks that most other transhumanists basically concur: “Transhuman-
ists embrace the liberal-democratic order as foundational and thus attach
great importance to the norms of freedom and equality.” At the same
 TRANSLATOR’S INTRODUCTION

time, he makes it clear that a few outspoken “strong” transhumanists

argue publicly that genetic engineering and antiaging technologies are
morally imperative and that some of these not-so-liberal, “strong” trans-
humanists do lobby for the use of new biotechnologies to be required xvii
universally.
Reviewers of the German version of the book reflect the extent of the
controversy. One German bioethicist, Konrad Ott, points out that Sor-
gner’s reasons for believing that humanity will evolve into a new species
through biotechnology “ultimately remain unexplained.” And another
German bioethicist, Marcus Knaup, finds the book intellectually unsat-
isfying and ethically disquieting: “Considering that it advocates liberal
eugenics as a self-evident good, draws a grotesque image of humanity,
and rejects the core of the ethics of reason by attacking the notion of
human dignity, it is indeed a dangerous book, which has nothing to do
with serious philosophy” (Knaup 2017, 35). Knaup dismisses Sorgner’s
arguments by calling on humanistic principles (Knaup is also a Roman
Catholic theologian). Like Fukuyama, Knaup is appalled at transhu-
manism’s rejection of traditional notions of “the human” in favor of a
flux tethered only to the tech market. According to such worries, every-
thing we associate with being human—war and social justice, medicine
and pleasures, our family and social life, access to information, what-
ever we call culture —may be transformed irreversibly, not necessarily
for the better, at the whim of a few entrepreneurs whose motivation is
short-term profit.
Where humanists fear transhumanism for rejecting the image of
humanity they find indispensable to a meaningful life, the movement
is just as controversial among the posthumanists, who generally deny
that transhumanism goes “beyond” humanism. Posthumanist philos-
opher Cary Wolf calls transhumanism “an intensification of humanism”
for its focus on a generalized human experience to be set apart from the
rest of nature and enhanced (Wolfe 2010, xv). Pramod Nayar explains
further that transhumanism does not share posthumanism’s skepti-
cal insight because the former fails to see “the human as a construct
enmeshed in other forms of life” and instead insists “that there is a dis-
tinctive entity identifiable as the ‘human’” (Nayar 2014, 6–7). Nayar thus
criticizes transhumanism for overlooking complexity at every turn: it
 TRANSLATOR’S INTRODUCTION

is “techno-deterministic, and techno-utopian” in that it sees its goals as

being “achieved almost exclusively through technology.” Furthermore,
transhumanism implies body-mind dualism in that it “relies on human
xviii rationality as a key marker of ‘personhood’ and individual identity, and
sees the body as limiting the scope of the mind.” Sorgner discusses these
accusations over the course of the book, mostly by distancing himself
from this or that transhumanist who does indeed fall directly into one
of the simplistic claims that Nayar describes and insists that none of
these particular views are definitive of transhumanism.
Why is complicity in humanism such a damning accusation? After
all, humanism is linked to foundational modern ideals, like human
rights and humanistic education. During the rise of colonialism, how-
ever, the exclusiveness of humanism was in full view as it was used to
justify horrific violence against colonized people by linking humanity to
the specifics of European upbringing and, when convenient, making pale
skin a qualification for basic human rights. In the wake of the Holocaust,
global thought leaders began calling humanism into question. Inspired
by developments in feminism, decolonization, and civil rights, twenti-
eth-century thinkers from Franz Fanon to Donna Haraway unmasked
the implicit imperialism, white supremacism, speciesism, and misog-
ynistic biologism of humanism by showing that there has always been
more to belonging to humanity than possessing a set of biological traits.
Homo sapiens are always already more than human owing to our deep
enmeshment with both the natural and the technological world. Sorgner
cites this theoretical overthrow of classical humanism under the name
“critical posthumanism.” And such critical rethinking of the human
is currently redefining “humanistic” academic disciplines around the
globe. Transhumanism too counters humanistic axioms, but by differ-
ent means: with an aspirational program claiming that humans are in
fact still all too human and that our humanity is holding us back from
an unknown potential.
Because transhumanism advocates changes in the laws, behaviors,
and attitudes around biotechnology, its adherents aspire to a better future,
whereas “posthumanists are indifferent to the concept of progress,” as
Sorgner puts it in his third chapter. The tide-that-lifts-all-ships scope
of transhumanism differentiates it from other aspirational alternatives
 TRANSLATOR’S INTRODUCTION

to classical humanism, such as Afrofuturism, an artistic and intellec-

tual movement, which performer Janelle Monáe defines as “us, Black
people, imagining ourselves in the future . . . as magical as we want to
be” (Zhou 2018). Spokespeople for specific minority groups often feel xix
that their own group could be left stranded by technological process, a
view well encapsulated in Gil Scott-Heron’s poem: “I think I’ll sen’ these
doctor bills, Airmail special, to Whitey on the moon” (Scott-Heron 1970).
If transhumanism is an enthusiastic response to progress thus far,
Afrofuturism is a response to “the digital divide, a phrase that has been
used to describe gaps in technological access that fall along lines of race,
gender, region, and ability but has mostly become a code word for the
tech inequities that exist between blacks and whites” (Nelson 2002).
As scholar of Afrofuturism Alondra Nelson points out, “Blackness gets
constructed as always oppositional to technologically driven chroni-
cles of progress.” Meanwhile, prominent futurists, like Timothy Leary
and Allucquère Rosanne Stone, are “seemingly working in tandem with
corporate advertisers.” Some transhumanists, like Sorgner, claim that
transhumanism is not meant to benefit only technocratic elites but is for
everyone who desires novelty through biotechnology. Sorgner is aware
that the most common sources of resistance to transhumanist visions
are doubts—based on history and experience—that the benefits of new
biotechnology could ever be distributed fairly.
Despite the ferocity of the debates, staking a position may have a
minimal or even a reverse effect on policy. Leading artificial intelligence
researchers like Yann LeCun warn that “AI winters,” periods of stagna-
tion in research and development, result from too much hype around
what new technologies can offer (Marcus 2013). The public already finds
achievements in AI underwhelming when the state of technology trails
too far behind popular sci-fi scenarios, and a similar risk could accom-
pany transhumanism’s efforts to attract interest in biotech through
promises of unprecedented new experiences. The best parts of the pres-
ent book thus do not hype the technologies on the horizon, nor promise
wonders, but remind us that further research and more bioliberal laws
are still necessary to discover the most life-changing technologies.
Healthcare is already distributed extremely unequally in much of
the world; self-optimizing technologies would presumably go to those
 TRANSLATOR’S INTRODUCTION

who could afford to buy a competitive edge. How persuaded you are by
Sorgner’s response to that argument might be a Rorschach test for your
views on technocracy in the present. Sorgner cherishes “liberalism” as
xx the predominant political model that would achieve a just regulation
of new biotechnologies. If you rate the successes of liberal regulation
of technology well so far, then you may agree with him. If you are con-
cerned about inadequacies in the distribution of health care today (in
much of the United States, for instance), then you may be more skeptical.
Although Sorgner does not endorse outright libertarianism, he opposes
“patriarchal” states that ban, restrict, or criminalize the research, appli-
cation, and marketing of self-enhancement technologies that would
benefit individuals who wish to use them. The book makes gestures,
however, to quell readers’ fears that, in the posthuman future, the gene-
rich will have a new form of capital to lord over the gene-poor, so that
the human capital would sink even more for those who cannot afford
enhancements (of strength, intelligence, perhaps advantageous forms
of emotional coldness) in a competitive economy.
The present book’s third chapter argues for a rapprochement between
academic posthumanism and pragmatic transhumanism. Sorgner calls
this middle ground metahumanism, which “strives to mediate among
the most diverse philosophical discourses in the interest of letting the
appropriate meaning of relationality, perspective, and radical plurality
emerge.” He argues that metahumanities would acknowledge the need
for technologically mediated progress while also engaging in theoretical
debates about the place of the human within the natural world. Accord-
ing to Sorgner, liberal laws on biotechnology are universally desirable
on the grounds that liberalism generally is meant to account for the
flourishing of all citizens. What the chapter does not discuss is the
range of harms that might arise from enhanced humans’ new potential.
By contrast, when founding theorist of liberalism John Stuart Mill dis-
cusses why citizens must be legally entitled to potentially self-harming
freedoms, for instance, to consume alcohol, he also discusses why laws
must limit the freedom of drunk people to become nuisances (Mill 1859,
181). That is one problem for future work. But liberal theory has always
born a sinister problem at its core: no matter how antipaternalistic lib-
eral laws are, the histories of liberal nations notoriously thrive off of the
 TRANSLATOR’S INTRODUCTION

exploitation of “barbarian” societies—a line of action that Mill endorses

in the same essay. The most widespread current enhancements, like
smartphones, already depend on cruel and environmentally unsustain-
able labor practices abroad. To stage a dialogue between transhumanism xxi
and the rest of academia would require the “metahumanists” to show as
much curiosity about past and ongoing abuses in healthcare and bio-
technology as they show about possible bright futures.

Translating Transhumanism

Translating from German (a language with around 4.2 million words)

into English (a language with around 100 million words) yields abun-
dant opportunities to transform and enhance a text (Jones and Tschirner
2015). In my research on translation, I have argued that one of the most
important philosophical tasks of a translator is to look for distinctions
that may not exist in a source language, and which the author thus
downplays, and to introduce those nuances into the target text (die Tech-
nik, for instance, can mean “technique” or “technology”—as I discuss
below). “Differential translation,” as I call it, exposes the reader to the
mental flexibility (or terminological conflations) that foreign languages
offer (Hawkins 2017). Such translations empower readers to make an
informed judgment as to whether they agree with the wisdom implicit
in a source language, which sometimes combines concepts that their
own language would distinguish, or whether they find the use of these
words as terms imprecise. For this empowerment of the reader to work,
translators must mark these moments of creativity in introductions,
commentaries, or brackets so that readers can trace the use of which-
ever terms are transformed in the translation. Below I will discuss six
words that required creativity in this translation: er, bejahen, fördern,
Technik, Technologie, Anthropologie, and Möglichkeit.
Er simply means “he,” but the German language contains an instance
of grammatical sexism not present in English; it uses er in places where
“he” would stand out as gendered in English. Furthermore, gender stands
to be completely rethought in the transhuman future drafted in this
book. At one point in the translation, I mark this transhumanist gender
 TRANSLATOR’S INTRODUCTION

neutrality by turning the grammatical difference between English and

German gender specificity into an opportunity to indicate that future
humans will not conform to gender binaries: “Who is the posthuman?
xxii What qualities does he, she, they, or it have?” (Wer ist der Posthumane?
Welche Eigenschaften hat er?)
Likewise, bejahen simply means “affirm,” but in this book affirmation
means support for ontologically varied objects: both for technol-
ogy and for the values of daring, speed, and innovation. A variety of
objects implies varied acts of support, which I represented with vari-
ous words—including “defend,” “embrace,” “champion,” “argue for,” and
“tout.” This range of words was necessary to convey the transhuman-
ist’s multifarious enthusiasm for biotech research, development, and
implementation. Bejahen defends the rhetorical citadel overlooking the
crossroads between improved technology and enhanced lives. Freight-
ing these words with ambiguity reinforces the book’s main dare: legalize
technology.
Standard English translations of fördern include “promote” and “sup-
port,” but I sometimes translate it with “foster” or “enhance” when the
context relates to the aims of biotech research (happiness, intelligence,
health, etc.), as opposed to describing supporting the research itself.
The argument describes a two-part dynamic process where fördern is
the motor on both sides: if we support new technology, new technol-
ogy will enhance us. “Technology can already promote (fördern) greater
diversification of the means of human reproduction.” In other words,
the technology is already there to make reproduction serve humanity
better than it currently does. But new technology still must be imple-
mented in order to foster human thriving: “The traits and capacities
that are especially relevant for fostering a good life (eine Förderung des
guten Lebens) are emotional, psychological, and intellectual capacities
along with a long healthspan.” Varying the term makes for a more fluent
translation, but the message can be stated with one translation: support
R&D so that new technology can support your well-being.
The German word Technik has a range of meanings including both
“techniques” performed and “technologies” implemented. In con-
temporary English, the key difference is between the internalization
of knowledge as technique and the externalization of knowledge as
 TRANSLATOR’S INTRODUCTION

technology. Philosopher Bernard Stiegler’s Technics and Time differenti-

ates between several meanings of Technik’s French cognate, la technique,
through inflections of the word, but Stiegler’s translators Richard Beard-
sworth and George Collins use the catch-all neologism “technics” to xxiii
express the fundamental ambiguity of the term (Stiegler 1998, 280).
Like Stiegler’s translators, I always rendered Technologie as “tech-
nology,” but unlike them I was unwilling to resort to a neologism for
Technik because Sorgner sometimes means techniques, sometimes
technologies, and sometimes both, and I think these differences give a
sense of the transhumanist’s role in developing techniques that endow
technologies with aspirational value. For instance, in a programmatic
sentence from chapter 3, Sorgner writes: “Transhumanism embraces
the use of technologies to increase the likelihood that posthumans may
emerge” (Transhumanismus bejaht den Gebrauch von Techniken, um die
Wahrscheinlichkeit der Entstehung des Posthumanen zu erhöhen). One
could argue that Sorgner selected Techniken, not Technologien, because
he is referring to the implementation of technologies, rather than their
mere capabilities for potential use. However, what we normally call
“technology” is at stake: these Techniken are as of yet external tools even-
tually to be integrated into the body.
In the chapter, techniques of self-improvement, like mindfulness
training, are grouped alongside the technologies of self-enhancement
that could result in humans’ becoming capable of seeing UV light. “Tech-
niques and technologies (Techniken) can both be means to change a
human genome” (Beide Techniken können Mittel sein, um ein menschli-
ches Genom zu verändern). The fact that human efforts to shape oneself
through self-discipline are more familiar to most people than the tools
that would permanently alter sensory experience make self-improvement
“techniques” fully compatible with bioenhancement “technologies” in
this context.
Stiegler’s work presents the philosophical stakes of this loose con-
cept’s ambiguity. Consider sentences such as “Technics is the object of
a history of techniques, beyond techniques. . . . Technics is not a fact,
but a result” (Stiegler 1998, 30). We can only speak of technics by artic-
ulating the historical factors that produce a “technical system,” which
Stiegler defines as “a point of equilibrium concretized by a particular
 TRANSLATOR’S INTRODUCTION

technology” (Stiegler 1998, 31). Particular technologies—like the steam

engine, internal combustion engine, or the Bessemer smelting furnace—
transform societies. These transformations have less to with inventive
xxiv genius and more to do with response to a system of technological and
economic possibilities, an analysis that Stiegler borrows from historian
Bertrand Gille (Stiegler 1998, 35).
Anthropologie is tricky to translate because its meaning overlaps only
partly with its English-language cognate. It is a philosophical term in
German, whereas its English cognate designates only an academic field.
Anthropologie has meant something like theory of human existence in
German philosophy at least since Immanuel Kant lived and wrote. About
Kant’s idea of human dignity, Sorgner writes, “This term is an ontological
one, since it implies a certain anthropology.” German-language Anthro-
pologie is also a discipline, one that answers questions about humanity’s
“position” (Stellung) in the universe, what distinguishes humans from
other animals, and the extent to which biology can explain rational-
ity. Its canonical founding fathers came from a variety of educational
backgrounds: Helmut Plessner (1892–1985) from biology, Max Scheler
(1874–1928) from theology, and Arnold Gehlen (1904–1976) from phi-
losophy. Anthropology is a highly interdisciplinary field in the United
States as well, but its bent is more distinctly empirical, at least since
German immigrant Franz Boas (1858–1942) popularized the four fields
approach (archaeology, linguistics, physical anthropology, and cultural
anthropology). In German, Anthropologie still retains a speculative tenor.
I often translate it as “theory of the human” to convey that context, espe-
cially when the word is preceded by an indefinite article.
The ordinary German word Möglichkeit can be translated unprob-
lematically as “possibility,” and that is how I usually translated it. The
word often occurs in contexts about the “possibility” of human enhance-
ments, where its meaning primarily suggests choice. But sometimes,
as toward the end of the book in the discussion of Kevin Warwick’s
work, the idea is that there is, at least semantically, a latent potential in
the technology itself, as opposed to possibilities available to a person:
“Kevin Warwick’s works clearly show the potential (Möglichkeiten) of
the latest technologies.” Earlier in the same chapter, Sorgner writes
about three-parent fertilization and calls this a Möglichkeit because it
 TRANSLATOR’S INTRODUCTION

is legally possible in Great Britain: “This technology (Möglichkeit) seems

to offer an appealing option” to parents who might want that for disease-
prevention reasons, in order to include two lesbian parents and a sperm
donor, or for other reasons. Nevertheless, here too the syntax in English xxv
suggests that Sorgner is drawing our attention to a potential within the
technology itself, and he thus deemphasizes the human agency that
implements it. This was a particularly symptomatic ambiguity within
a book about the affirmation of liberal choices regarding technology.
These subtle rhetorical relocations of agency from human to tool
(akin to the transferred epithets of Homer, e.g., “Zeus’s angry light-
ning bolt”) are themselves not problems that can be trusted to machine
translation. Nonetheless, as I describe below, the DeepL translation soft-
ware had surprisingly good suggestions on the level of syntax, many of
which I incorporated when translating this book. However, the software’s
strengths rarely extended to semantic distinctions, such as differenti-
ating “technique” and “technology” in uses of the word Technik, and
telling Anthropologie, the philosophical school of thought, apart from
Anthropologie, the discipline associated with ethnography.

Enhanced Translation

Like all writing, translation has always been a tool-assisted technol-

ogy and is increasingly a computer-assisted one. Translation cannot
be reduced to technology, however. As demonstrated in the exam-
ples of ambiguity above, it is also a labor-intensive technique based on
extremely careful reading, a craft that improves with training and prac-
tice, and the work is still primarily performed by humans. About halfway
through my work on the first draft of this translation project, I began to
explore the functions of the Cologne-based DeepL Translator, a web-
based machine-translation system. Appropriately enough, the book’s
author thoughtfully counseled me to try out this cutting-edge transla-
tion assistance tool to translate a book whose message was to embrace
the expanding human-tool interface.10
For all of its strengths, tools like DeepL cannot replace a translator’s
care with such complex texts. Even the more personalized translation
 TRANSLATOR’S INTRODUCTION

memory programs, like Trados, generally help translators only with the
least rhetorically complex aspects of technical, legal, and medical texts.
Software fails precisely in differentiating the tonal and collocational
xxvi hallmarks of academic texts from those of other genres like literature,
advertisements, or court documents. Machine translations of philoso-
phy texts require time-intensive revision. Yet the embrace of translation
software strikes me as transhumanist in the best sense: the labors of read-
ing, understanding, and translation never occur solely in brains, and
there is no pure reader to wall off from translation software’s “artificial
neural networks”—which perform many complex tasks besides trans-
lation, including detecting objects on a camera feed and diagnosing
diseases. Artificial intelligence is transforming the style and economy
of translation now that “deep learning” software is increasingly capable
of learning new syntax and idioms. By recognizing patterns in one lan-
guage, applications like DeepL can recognize word combinations even
if the words appear separated within the sentence. Because the software
draws on a large corpus of published texts in English, it can then rear-
range the words in the proper order in the target language.
Our belief in the autonomy of individual minds (authors and transla-
tors) is difficult to relinquish, no matter how much we trust the insights
of Freud or Kahneman (Freud 2003 [1920]; Kahneman 2011). Here is
a heuristic analogy for understanding the role of the machine in my
work on this book. The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket is
written in the voice of the fictional character Pym. In the preface, Pym
acknowledges the novella’s actual author, Edgar Allen Poe, as the highly
involved editor who wrote the beginning of the novella for Pym. Pym
reports that he allowed Poe to “draw up, in his own words, a narrative of
the earlier portion of my adventures . . . under the garb of fiction” (Poe
2008 [1838], 3). However, the author and the fictional narrator occupy
different positions in relation to the novella: Poe has a reputation as an
author of fiction, whereas Pym calls the very same work an authentic
history. At the end of the introduction, Pym claims that the reader will
be able to differentiate Poe’s fiction from his own history simply because
“the difference in point of style will be readily perceived.” Though the
reader is unlikely to notice that difference, the passage of time while
reading a novel facilitates the suspension of disbelief: one forgets that
 TRANSLATOR’S INTRODUCTION

one is reading a fictional story and becomes engaged with it, simply as
a story. The same occurs with translations: when the reading experi-
ence is engrossing, we easily forget that we are reading a translation—we
simply read. xxvii
Unlike this introduction, Poe introduces his novella in the voice
of a fictional character and thus produces an irresolvable irony: a fic-
tional character claims that he wrote the historically accurate part of
the work and that an actual historical person wrote the fictional part.
The introduction reads as a literary effect, a verisimilitude with no
claim to historical veracity. To accommodate the transhumanist view
here, I reserve the opposite judgment for machine-assisted translators.
Although I translated as a cyborg, my human judgment ordered the
entire process, and I thus do not expect readers to notice any “differ-
ence in point of style” in the passages where I considered machine input.
Computer languages can express a great deal, but computers have
yet to demonstrate the capacity for the human experience of mean-
ingfulness; for the computer, language functions only as a system of
differences between words. The putatively “unsupervised” autonomy of
machine learning cannot yet simulate a brain’s openness to the manifold
of experience. We machine-assisted translators are still performing the
labor of translation ourselves, using foreign language skills acquired by
living in languages, even as external technologies enhance our technique.
Like the liberal transhumanist who wishes no one harm in his pursuit
of an enhanced life, we cyborg translators hope that you will not judge
our hybrid creations defective or inauthentic writing. The responsibil-
ity for any mistranslations is therefore mine alone.

—Spencer Hawkins, Berlin, 2020