Explainer

Culture

Digital

1 May 2023

7 min read

Challenging transhumanism’s quest to optimise our future

Instead of separating the human from the hardware, Oliver Dürr recommends rediscovering other ways of self-formation and improvement.

Oliver Dürr

Oliver Dürr is a theologian who explores the impact of technology on humanity and the contours of a hopeful vision for the future. He is an author, speaker, podcaster and features in several documentary films.

A plastic sheet strewn with biology-related instruments.

A biohacking kit for a biology workshop.

Xavier Coadic, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Welcome to the age of transhumanism. In this world, the goal is to overcome all limitations and restrictions that hold human beings back. Science, technology, and medicine should allow us to live longer, healthier, and better lives. So runs the promise. But is there a peril that goes along with it? To answer that question, we need to take a closer look at the phenomenon of transhumanism, particularly the view of human beings that lies behind the glittery promises of an “optimised” future.

Improving humans, however possible

Transhumanism is a global movement that seeks to use all available technological means to “enhance” human beings. From curing illnesses and overcoming physical limitations to expanding mental abilities, the movement aims to overcome all obstacles to the current human condition.

More precisely, it seeks to overcome all obstacles to the individual’s freedom to live the life he or she wants to live. In the attempt to enhance life, transhumanism veers beyond traditional forms of curing impairments (like compensating for bad sight with a pair of glasses) and ventures into more experimental fields (like manipulating the human eye to see ultraviolet or infrared light). Emotional or cognitive deficits (such as lack of concentration) are supposed to be overcome by “smart drugs” (like Methylphenidate / Ritalin) and even genetic modifications, and prostheses are considered to expand human capabilities.

The goal is to create “superhuman” abilities. The holy grail of this movement is drastically extending the human lifespan (if it is in a state of health and vigour). Ultimately, transhumanists want to “overcome” death.

There are two paths within the transhumanist movement on which they hope to arrive at this sacred goal: a biological and a post-biological way.

Biological transhumanism

Let’s have a look at “biological transhumanism” first: The focus here is on our current, carbon and water-based bodies. Weak and fragile as they are, biological transhumanists must make do with them to achieve the greater things they envision. Human beings must be treated with drugs, and a host of prefixed technologies: bio-, gene-, and nano-.

Aubrey de Grey’s project of postponing death by achieving a “longevity escape velocity” is a good illustration of the movement. De Grey is convinced that novel biomedical technologies can achieve a limitless extension of the human life span: “If we can make rejuvenation therapies work well enough to give us time to make them work better,” he writes, “that will give us additional time to make them work better still” and so on. The time gained with a particular innovation must only be greater than the time needed to achieve another such advancement. Therefore, he argues, the effective death of people alive today can be staved off indefinitely.

De Grey is not alone in transhumanist circles to predict such outcomes. Google’s Ray Kurzweil has a similar view: “We have the means right now to live long enough to live forever”.

Such optimistic prognoses bank on a view of human beings as being essentially a body-machine that can be controlled and improved at will. The key to unlocking its potential is information theory.

Think of human beings as an algorithm, and, in principle, all their problems can be solved by engineering. Cultural critic Evgeny Morozov poignantly called this approach “technological solutionism”. From a ‘solutionist’ perspective, humanity is increasingly seen as the problem that needs solving. Thus, not only must we develop new technologies to guarantee human life and freedom, but humanity needs to adapt. Those necessary “transformations” of the “human” are what inform the first dimension of the term “trans-humanism”.

If human beings want a seat at the table in the digital future, they must find a way to merge with and dissolve into the digital sphere—or so the transhumanist narrative goes.

Post-biological transhumanism

The second path is “post-biological transhumanism”, which takes a more radical approach. Here, the focus is on leaving behind our current bodily form altogether and radically transcending the limitations of what it means to be human today. Those alterations, such transhumanists argue, will be so radical that calling the result “human” will no longer be adequate. The preferred means to achieve the future state are taken from the digital sphere: algorithms and information processes.

The view of “the human as a machine” becomes more specifically “the human as a computer”. Mind, spirit and consciousness are understood to be the software within the hardware of the body. Human beings are perceived to be biological computers and thus in direct competition with digital computers. And those are becoming increasingly powerful by the hour. If human beings want a seat at the table in the digital future, they must find a way to merge with and dissolve into the digital sphere—or so the transhumanist narrative goes.

Immortality in the Cloud?

For post-biological transhumanists, the ultimate goal is called “mind-uploading”. The idea is that we can upload our minds (selves) to the internet and achieve immortality—at least if all we are is the sum of information processes in the brain and as long as the internet infrastructure is still available. Mind uploading requires leaving behind our current biological form of life altogether and dissolving into virtuality.

This vision of virtual immortality is why post-biological transhumanists tend to place their hopes in information technologies, software algorithms, robotics and artificial intelligence research. They aim to overcome and entirely leave behind the “human” as it is. This move to “transcend” informs the second dimension of the term “trans-humanism”.

In classical humanism, at least from the Renaissance to the 1970s, “human improvement” meant education, moral, intellectual, and practical formation and refinement towards a concrete ideal of humanity and the shaping of a society that enables such formative processes.

Is there a solution?

But can those transhumanistic approaches really deliver on their promises?

Human beings have always tried to improve themselves—not least through technology. What is new today is how transhumanists define “better” and some means of realising those perceived benefits. With its solutionist approach to life, transhumanism discards large swaths of traditional techniques to “improve” human beings and their lives. In classical humanism, at least from the Renaissance to the 1970s, “human improvement” meant education, moral, intellectual, and practical formation and refinement towards a concrete ideal of humanity and the shaping of a society that enables such formative processes.

But in the age of transhumanism, there is a tendency to believe that we can delegate such hard work of the self to a new technocracy and their algorithmic tools—who, to put it mildly, may not always have our best interests at heart.

Freedom is best conceived, not as a mere “choice” to do what we please, but the liberty to live a truly fulfilling life, which almost always includes others .

The main problem, however, is that ultimately, we cannot delegate our future to machines because, after all, we aren’t machines. Instead, we must learn to live with ourselves, our limitations, and our finitude, or we will never be free. Freedom only ever begins once we learn to let go of ourselves and start living for and with others.

The reason for this is that freedom is best conceived, not as a mere “choice” to do what we please, but the liberty to live a truly fulfilling life, which almost always includes others. Many of the things that make a future worth wanting in the first place are shared goods, relational, communitarian, cultural values and practices that needn’t be optimised or automated at all—at least not technologically.

When building a sandcastle with my toddlers, that process needn’t be optimised (which realistically would mean excluding the toddlers from the process altogether). Rather, the process of doing it together is the point. Political decision-making processes, to take another example, also don’t have to be automated or made more efficient through algorithms. Struggle in deliberating how our society should look is the point. Without such moral deliberation, our public life is diminished. In many cases, the slowness, strenuousness and inefficiency of such processes is a feature, not a bug.

A tech future beyond transhumanism

Having this in mind changes the questions we pose in light of novel technologies: How (if at all) can they be integrated into our lives in such a way that they open up the world in its complexity, allowing us to experience the fullness of life and enabling us to shape the future we really want?

It is time to rediscover and bring back religious and humanistic traditions of self-formation into our public debates about the future. Far from being relics of the past, soon to be discarded, they can provide us with tried and true values, practices and virtues around which we can organise our societies in the digital future. They provide us with the tools to unlock the sources of care and the will to create a better social framework in which human beings and technology find their place. The future need not be transhuman to be better; being fully human is quite enough.

Article

Belief

Books

Culture

Morality

21 July 2025

5 min read

Jane Austen’s satire helped her survive a dark culture

Amid folly and frailty, she allowed her characters the possibility of forgiveness

Beatrice Scudeler

Beatrice writes on literature, religion, the arts, and the family. Her published work can be found here.

Juliet Stevenson stars in Jane Austen: Rise of a Genius.

BBC.

Do Jane Austen’s heroes and heroines really get the happy endings they deserve? Not exactly, argues writer and journalist Julia Yost in her recent essay, Jane Austen’s Darkness (Wiseblood Books, 2024).

Far from an escapist Regency fantasy, Yost paints Austen’s world as one ruled by mediocrity and hatred. While believing that ‘Marriage is the heroine’s only defense against darkness’, an institution where goodness can put up a fight against moral bankruptcy, Yost also ultimately argues that none of Austen’s heroines, with the exception of Elizabeth Bennet’s in Pride and Prejudice, manage to triumph over society’s corruption.

Most Austen readers will be able to recite a list of her villains: Mr. Wickham, Mr. Willoughby, Henry Crawford… but Yost goes beyond this, pointing out that certain universal social malaises – greed, unregulated anger, lack of charity – infect even the supposedly nobler characters in Austen’s novels. For example, Yost interprets Emma Woodhouse’s mocking of Miss Bates, Highbury’s verbally incontinent spinster, not as a sign of immaturity, but as an expression of ‘contempt’ for a social inferior. Another character in Emma, Frank Churchill, is not simply a foolish young man trying to hide an engagement to one woman by flirting with another; he actively ‘enjoys toying with Emma’, and even ‘enjoys torturing Jane [Fairfax]’, his secret fiancée, by spending time with Emma in public. Eleanor Dashwood, Sense and Sensibility’s calm and collected heroine, is guilty of moral compromise by marrying the undeserving Edward Ferrars. Mr. Bennet, Elizabeth’s father in Pride and Prejudice, is an unreformed misanthrope. Vice runs rampant in Yost’s reading of Austen’s novels.

Not even the truly admirable men and women of Austen’s stories are spared from suffering entirely. In Persuasion, Anne Elliot and Captain Wentworth marry under the threat of the soon-to-be-resumed Napoleonic Wars. In Pride and Prejudice, the Darcys’ marital happiness, we are told in the final chapter, is not quite enough to spread moral betterment among their family and friends: Elizabeth’s sister Kitty improves greatly, but Lady Catherine de Bourgh remains arrogant, Mr. Wickham retains his rakishness, and Lydia stays just as thoughtless.

For Yost, showing this universal moral malady does not weaken but rather strengthens the novels’ moral gravity. ‘Austen’s satire is salubrious’, she writes, and agreeing with the Austen scholar D.W. Harding, who, in his 1940 essay ‘Regulated Hatred’, argued that laughing at vice is a ‘means for unobtrusive spiritual survival’ amidst social and natural evils. Austen’s biting condemnation, in other words, is the only way to dispel the power of human vices.

As I was reading Jane Austen’s Darkness, I found myself agreeing with many of Yost’s observations. I’ve spent the better part of the last decade writing about why Jane Austen’s satirical tone serves to make us, the readers, more aware of our failings, so Yost finds a natural ally in me.

Despite this, I was left feeling that something was missing. There’s a dimension of forgiveness to Austen’s narrative pattern that remains largely unspoken. To be fair to Yost, that’s not the focus of the essay. And yet, I’d be remiss not to mention that, in Austen’s novels, we can’t speak of condemnation without also speaking of repentance.

Austen’s characters are undeniably fallible. But human frailty also allows for the possibility for repentance and, ultimately, forgiveness.

For every example of moral failure in an Austen novel, a corresponding example of true remorse can be found. Austen tells us that, after the incident where Emma mocks Miss Bates publicly, she experiences a mixture of ‘anger against herself, mortification, and deep concern’. ‘Never had she felt so agitated, mortified, grieved, at any circumstance in her life’, we’re further told, ‘She was most forcibly struck. The truth of this representation there was no denying’. Emma’s shame pushes her to admit her mistakes to herself. Something similar happens to Elizabeth in Pride and Prejudice, when she realises how blind she has been to Mr. Darcy’s goodness and Mr. Wickham’s deception. Similarly, Yost is right that Mr. Bennet’s misanthropy ‘disables him as a moral actor’, but after his daughter Lydia’s elopement with Mr. Wickham, he begins to feel the force of guilt, knowing that this might have been prevented, had he been more involved in his own children’s upbringing. And if Fanny Price, in Mansfield Park, is passive at the risk of ceasing to be a moral agent altogether, she more than makes up for it when she sternly refuses to marry the rakish Henry Crawford, a man she neither respects nor loves.

Austen’s characters are undeniably fallible. But human frailty also allows for the possibility for repentance and, ultimately, forgiveness. As the late philosopher and Austen devotee Alasdair Macintyre argued in After Virtue (1981), all of Austen’s heroines experience a moment when they recognise their own failings, and this newly acquired virtue of ‘self-knowledge’ allows them to repent and more consciously act as moral agents in the world.

In turn, these true acts of repentance open up the way to mutual forgiveness. After marrying Elizabeth, Mr. Darcy, who’d claimed that he couldn’t easily ‘forget the follies and vices of others’ agrees to reconcile with his aunt Lady Catherine, welcomes Lydia into his house, and even continues to financially support Mr. Wickham for Lydia’s sake. In Persuasion, Captain Wentworth eventually forgives Lady Russell for the role she played in ending his first engagement to Anne Elliot. In Sense and Sensibility, Elinor Dashwood forgives Mr. Willoughby for abandoning her sister Marianne after he confesses how much he regrets his actions.

Even when granted to someone we may consider undeserving, this central act of forgiveness heals broken social bonds. Perhaps, it’s even more healing than the ‘salubrious’ effect of Austen’s biting satire. There is darkness in Austen, but there is also much light. And if her novels prove that moral corruption is ubiquitous, they also make the case that, despite our corrupted nature, we’re not unsalvageable: forgiveness and redemption are always within reach of humankind.

Support Seen & Unseen

Since Spring 2023, our readers have enjoyed over 1,500 articles. All for free.
This is made possible through the generosity of our amazing community of supporters.

If you enjoy Seen & Unseen, would you consider making a gift towards our work?

Do so by joining Behind The Seen. Alongside other benefits, you’ll receive an extra fortnightly email from me sharing my reading and reflections on the ideas that are shaping our times.

Graham Tomlin
Editor-in-Chief

Pledge now