Transhumanism and Posthumanism
Article by Luc Bigé
2/26/20249 min read


We are at a crossroads. Transhumanism is shaping a new human species with technology, artificial intelligence and genetic manipulation of the body. Post-humanism proposes to expand human consciousness by taking it out of its narcissistic jar. In any case, man after man is on the march.
Humanism was born discreetly in the Quattrocento from 1399. It took on a scientific face with Francis Bacon (1561-1626) and then shone through in the discoveries of Newton (1642-1727) and the philosophy of Descartes (1596-1650). Finally, with the Enlightenment of the 18th century, it became a philosophical ideal with many nuances.
At the beginning of the 20th century, these ideals, which placed man and his freedom above everything else, above nature and the sacred, were shattered by two world wars and numerous social inequalities. This was their death warrant, as we became aware that human freedom and free thought can also lead to the most extreme violence. Nevertheless, its strength and its imprint continue to permeate our consciousness.
One of these futuristic imprints is transhumanism, which seeks to materialise Descartes' metaphor of the man-machine. Placing man at the centre of the universe and above everything leads to the production of a hyper-narcissistic type of man, with societies to match, who loses his connection with the biosphere and with the spirit. In the Middle Ages, nature was sung, praised and magnified as a mysterious world in which the deepest human qualities could flourish: courtly love and initiation into mystery, metaphorised by the quest for the Grail. For the first peoples, plant nature was the epiphany of the great goddess. Today, humanist narcissism develops the vision of man with powers enhanced by technology. Like Ovid's adolescents[i], these men seek physical perfection, eternal youth and immortality. They are also insensitive to the suffering that their desire for omnipotence inflicts on all living beings. Without going as far as transhumanism, which is only the logical and almost caricatural consequence, old age is hidden away in specialised homes and death behind the walls of cemeteries. Our society values youth, bodies in motion, parties and distractions, while our old people are just tired teenagers. In other times, in other places, it was the 'elders' to whom we turned for advice, advice born of a long, mature life, where suffering still led to a form of wisdom.
Narcissus, a myth of self-knowledge
When Narcissus was born, his mother, the nymph Liriope, went to Tiresias and asked him this question: "Will my son live to a ripe old age? The soothsayer replied: "He will live long if he does not know himself". So Narcissus is essentially a myth of self-knowledge[ii]. ii] But it also says that the immature desire to live an eternal youth must be sacrificed in order to discover and experience the Self through death. From this point of view, transhumanism is "dehumanism" because it wants to keep the subject in a state of immature consciousness, of omnipotence, free from suffering. Those who subscribe to this line of thought are narcissists who seek immortality[iii] (eternal youth) and do not have the courage to die to themselves for fear of the dissolution of the self, for fear of opening up to their fragile sensibilities, for fear of suffering. However, when Narcissus really looks at himself in the mirror, at the source, he succeeds in abandoning his cherished images in order to be born to himself. Agonisingly, he descends into the underworld and finally transforms into the flower that bears his name: the daffodil. He finally discovers his true identity and knows himself, fulfilling the prophecy of Tiresias.
Transhumanism is the logical consequence of our hyper-narcissistic society, which has forgotten the first commandment inscribed on the pediment of the Temple of Delphi: "Know thyself". Thanks to certain Promethean technologies, such as nanotechnology and genetic engineering, transhumanists seek to bring the subject to his or her full potential, to what is most beautiful and most accomplished, but only in terms of ego enhancement. They ignore the other kingdoms of nature because they are not in the heart consciousness. Until the personality has touched this heart space, it cannot really understand that there is anything other than itself in the universe[iv].
Without going as far as transhumanism, the rational logic that still pervades so much of our Western civilisation leads us to think of our lives as a series of situations to be mastered, to plan our lives, to envisage career plans, to sign up for self-improvement and body-improvement programmes, for fitness sessions, to go jogging and to think about investments for a future retirement. Those mysterious and irrational things called faith, grace, fate, destiny, honour, gratitude, love, joy, imagination, intuition and poetry. Imagination, intuition and poetry disappear when humans compete with machines to achieve zero defects.
However, if we read the exceptional events of the 1900s symbolically, we can see that we have entered a new era of civilisation, a post-humanist era. This era proposes the dissolution of narcissistic security references in order to open human consciousness to the Immense.
The new world is already here
It began in the twilight of the 19th century at the dawn of the 20th with Freud, Einstein, Max Planck, Niels Bohr, Husserl, Cantor and Kandinsky. What do psychoanalysis (1900), relativity (1905), quantum entanglement (1900), transcendental phenomenology (1913), the affirmation of the ontological reality of infinite sets (1874) and abstract art (1903, The Blue Rider) have in common? Absolutely nothing in form, but they all share the same idea: that what we have hitherto called "reality" is underpinned by a surreality that exceeds our intellectual capacity to represent it. How can we realise that the 'I' is a mere emergent part of an unconscious of which we know almost nothing (Freud)? How can we realise that we live in a four-dimensional universe in which time cannot be separated from space (Einstein)? How can we realise that the electrons that gravitate around the nuclei of the atoms that make up our bodies have a non-zero probability of also being at the other end of the universe (Bohr)? How can we recognise the essences that underlie our objective reality (Husserl)? How do we know that some infinities are objectively greater than others (Cantor)? And finally, how do we perceive and paint the formative forces that underlie objective forms (Kandinsky)? Alice Bailey's work also dates from this period.
These questions can be summed up in a single observation: human intelligence has become capable of questioning a surreality that our current consciousness is incapable of grasping. The challenge of the present five centuries is to expand our worldview to include this surreality, to the point where it can one day be considered something normal. To understand this difficulty, we need only think of the Italian Renaissance, which gave us the world view, the printing press and humanism. How difficult it was then for a contemporary to break away from a view of the world based on the Christian faith, holy images, the feudal system and blind obedience to the argument of authority! Today we have the same problem, but it is a question of freeing ourselves from Cartesian rationality, from narcissism confused with individuation, from a certain idea of free will, from the belief that the world is made up of separate things and that man and his society are at the centre of everything. To think of post-humanism is like an intellectual scandal... just as humanism was in its time in relation to Christianity, when Brunelleschi introduced perspective into art.
What would a post-humanist world be like, based on a consciousness of the surreal?
The dominant myth will no longer be the collective Dionysian ecstasy of the Middle Ages, metaphorised in Christian culture by the sacrament of transubstantiation, the sharing of bread and wine, a ritual borrowed from both the Greek god and the Roman Mithras. Nor will it be Prometheus, awakened from his long sleep by the philosophers of the Enlightenment, the disruptive inventor who imagines that a new theory and its sharing with promising subjects will improve society by bringing it more reason, consciousness and light. Surreality is protean in nature. It resembles the ancient Proteus, the guardian of Apollo's seal herd. Like the boundless waters of the ocean, Surreality is formless but can take any form. Like water, it ignores boundaries and categories. Like water, it slips into the interstices of the phenomenal world to irrigate it with the meaning of the Immense. Like water, it eludes the hand that tries to hold it back. When the human consciousness enters the flow of surreality, it frees itself from its identification with this little pebble that it calls its "self". It then feels in a very tangible but non-physical way what "quantum entanglement" means; it perceives, in a subject-to-subject communication, the life of the plants, animals and minerals of the earth; it senses the weave of the cosmic carpet that draws the guidelines of a metahistory; it "touches" the presence of archetypes, those waves of the collective unconscious that are constantly forming and deforming themselves. The organisation of the human brain, in its extraordinary plasticity, changes to become like water sensitive to starlight, thus realising the other meaning of the word "reflect".
Today, the exploration of the surreal, discovered by psychoanalysis, quantum mechanics and modern art, is still based on the old paradigm of rationality, born of the last five centuries, with all the paradoxes that this entails. It is possible that the Neptune-Pluto square of 2064-2066 and then the opposition of 2135 will accompany the development of new ways of exploring surreality and developing experimental models based on immaterial factors such as consciousness, 'magic' and non-causal remote action. The focus will be on the interdependence experienced internally to transcend the subject-object relationship we have with the world today. It will then be possible to objectively explore our universe, near and far, as a set of subject-to-subject relationships[v]. Much more than new discoveries, the Neptune-Pluto cycles speak to us about the collective mentality and our representation of the world as a civilisation[vi].
Hegel (1770-1831) held up the light of the ancient world of reason, established by the humanism of the quattrocento. Nietzsche (1844-1900), who so lucidly swept away the wanderings of Christianity and Rationalism, is perhaps the prophet of the new world. It was in 1889 that he fell into madness. Leaving his hotel, he saw a coachman mistreating his horse. Unable to bear the sight, he approached the horse, embraced it and wept on its cheek. Caught up in a 'delirium' born of contact with the surreal, he sang and shouted incessantly, claiming to be Napoleon's successor, who had come to re-found Europe and create a 'great policy'. His consciousness then identified itself with two great mythical and mystical figures: Dionysus and Christ. These divinities have in common that they unfold in man the space of his heart, that they open the doors that guard the entrance to the palace of the self, where love transforms collective suffering in order to heal human communities. The last words of the philosopher were "I am Dionysus". In 1892, at the exact moment of the Neptune-Pluto conjunction, Nietzsche fell into a vegetative state. The contact with the surreal, i.e. the protean nature of the world soul, which had absorbed so much bitterness throughout history, opened the philosopher to an immense compassion that suddenly made his awareness of the collective suffering triggered by the unfortunate experience of the horse literally unbearable.
The human Narcissus, unaccustomed to opening up to anything other than himself, then realises how badly he treats other living beings. Are we ready to integrate such a shock? Are we ready to live interdependence consciously in order to develop a model of civilisation consistent with it? We still have four centuries to integrate the memories of suffering and the promises of the soul of the world into our collective consciousness, to find our place in the living world.
Of course, this new world will also have its dark sides, such as the risk of madness; addiction to an artificial surreality shaped by technology; psychic confusion due to the dissolution of markers of 'good and evil'; the loss of individual, national and transnational identities, which can create visceral fears capable of fuelling new forms of fascism; the manipulation of crowds that will conform to surrealist discourses. A society based on compassion will only be possible when the majority of its members have shifted their consciousness from their narcissistic navel, with its unlimited need for recognition, to the immense simplicity of the heart. Otherwise, the reactions of the 'I', worried about the loss of its prerogatives and finally confronted with its own death, will produce a submissive, manipulable humanity, oblivious to the great achievements of five centuries of science, namely doubt and the questioning of reality.
Transhumanism is the narcissistic culmination of the involutionary process. Man then "legitimately" considers himself to be a god and seeks to attain the qualities formerly attributed to divinity: immortality, omniscience and omnipotence. Post-humanism, on the other hand, represents an era of conversion: the moment when the collective human consciousness turns towards the Immense, the moment when it enters "body and soul" into the mystery of the Surreal. Then creation will no longer come from the narcissistic subject. It will be the unexpected fruit of the spontaneity of the first thought and gesture that emerges.
Luc Bigé
[i] Ovid,https://reenchanterlemonde.com/2013/03/26/les-metamorphoses-ovide/, Les belles lettres
[ii] Luc Bigé, https://reenchanterlemonde-com.translate.goog/produit/leveil-de-narcisse-ebook/?_x_tr_sl=fr&_x_tr_tl=en&_x_tr_hl=frThe Awakening of Narcissus, Janus
[iii] Bill Gates and Bernard Alexandre, two champions of transhumanism, have a Narcissus myth in their astrological charts.
[iv] Luc Bigé, Le Parchemin Magnifique, vol. 3,https://reenchanterlemonde.com/produit/le-parchemin-magnifique-vol-3-diaphragme-cage-thoracique-poumons-et-coeur/.
[v] Wolfgang Pauli, Modern Physics and Philosophy, Albin Michel; Werner Heisenberg, The Part and the Whole, Champs sciences.
[vi] Humanism was born with the Neptune-Pluto conjunction of 1399 in Gemini, the next in 1892 in the twilight of the 19th century.
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