Transhumanism, which is attributed to Silicon Valley and GAFAwould he have French origins? The thesis, which links the utopia of artificial intelligence and human-machine hybridization to pre-war eugenic biology, is questionable. Report followed by a response from the Author.
The transhumanist movement was born in the United States in the 1990s, under the influence of the philosopher Max More. A utopian, he advocates the augmentation of humans through technoscience, and claims an assumed individualism, in line with anti-statist libertarianism. More thus claims to pursue the emancipation program of the Enlightenment. However, as external observers have shown, this self-presentation ignores other major, albeit underground, influences: eugenics, cybernetics, religious millenarianism, etc. Alexandre Moatti’s book is part of this perspective of re-evaluation by showing that the history of transhumanism is partly French. Coming from a thesis for accreditation to direct research, the work is useful and interesting, but not without criticism.
The idea of a French-style transhumanism is counterintuitive, as this movement seems so American. Moatti justifies his approach by emphasizing that the inventor of the term “transhumanism” is the French engineer Jean Coutrot, who was looking for a method to overcome the contradictions of humanity, particularly between the individual and society. Moatti also relies on a very broad definition: neglecting the technological dimension of the transformation of man, he considers transhumanist all discourses “that specify or suggest another type of human, by exalting it, by fearing it, or simply by evoking it” (p. 12). With such an extension of the concept, one can only admit the existence of a French transhumanism. But on this account, one could consider as transhumanists even the Pythagoreans or the Gnostics, who also considered the possibility of a new man. Fortunately, this broad definition does not prevent the author from targeting his subject precisely: essays and the media in France, from 1930 to 1980. The periodization gives its structure to the work, which paints a series of portraits.
From biological enhancement to cybernanthrope
The pre-war period saw the development of eugenic biology. According to Moatti, Georges Duhamel opposed a European path of human improvement through biology to a supposed American (and Soviet) desire to reduce humans to machines. Close to the extreme right, Alexis Carrel called for an “androtechnics” in order to create a “biocratic” elite to counter the degeneration of civilization, sick from its scientific and industrial development.
The second part of the book is devoted to Pierre Teilhard de Chardin and Jean Rostand, two pivotal authors, influential before and after the Second World War. The analysis of the theological-evolutionary gesture of the Jesuit paleoanthropologist is very fine, even if we regret the brevity of the developments on Julian Huxley (friend of Teilhard) and on the current controversy as to the pro- or anti-transhumanist character of the author of the Human phenomenon. As for Jean Rostand, he is portrayed as a half-scholar, a prolific popularizer with little knowledge of genetics and the theory of evolution, and disconnected from scientific networks. Also fearing the degeneration of humanity – which seems decidedly a commonplace of the time – Rostand is obsessed with the possibility of making humans a wise manthanks to eugenics, chromosome manipulation and pharmacology.
After the war, the themes shifted. Writers dreamed of removing the privileged status of humans: Michel Butor used the word “transhumanism” to aim at “rediscovering animal virtues, inventing mechanical virtues” (Butor, cited p. 170) while Jacques Audiberti coined the term “abhumanism” in order to put an end to “anthropochauvinism” (Audiberti, cited p. 161) making Man the end goal of evolution. The 1960s marked above all the emergence of an engineering imaginary from the United States that seemed to signal the failure of Georges Duhamel’s European path. In 1962, the anticipation review Planet publishes an article on the cyborg (short for cybernetic organism), a word invented just two years earlier by Manfred E. Clynes and Nathan S. Kline to designate a human being augmented by mechanical and electronic devices. The least that can be said is that the enthusiasm of French intellectuals is not there. If some authors use the term in a positive way, it is in an incredulous way that Jacques Ellul resorts to the Frenchification kibertwhile Henri Lefebvre describes a “cybernanthrope” reduced to his needs, shaped by science to correspond to the demands of capitalism.
These discourses on the cyborg are for Moatti the sign of a “shift from evolutionary biology towards cybernetics and electronics as regards the representation of the augmented man of the future” (p. 184), making France receptive to transhumanism as it is spreading today. The author seems to us to be both right and wrong on this point. Reason because indeed, contemporary transhumanism develops in abundance the themes of computer science and artificial intelligence, which are difficult to find in French discourses from the middle of the XXe century (although we should take a look at the spread of cybernetics in Europe from the 1950s onwards). But wrong too, and this is whereAt the roots of transhumanism reveals its frustrating aspect.
What kind of transhumanism is this?
Indeed, while the author demonstrates an indisputable mastery of his subject – France from the 1930s to the 1980s – the same is not true for what falls outside this framework. Let us pass over the imprecisions and errors of detail: Manfred Clynes is not a doctor but a musician and self-taught in physiology (p. 178), Clotilde de Vaux was not the second wife of Auguste Comte (note 52, p. 217), it is difficult to speak of “an evolutionism before the letter in the law of the three states” (p. 23, our emphasis) to the extent that the principle of evolution goes back at least to Lamarck.
What is problematic is the overly partial vision of contemporary transhumanism, which biases the author’s perspective. These flaws in perception relate to technology, philosophy and politics. As for technology, it is true that contemporary transhumanists discuss a lot about artificial intelligence and robotics. But it must be added that they have not abandoned questions of biological improvement of humans (see the recent book by Bernard Baertschi, or The death of deathby Laurent Alexandre, a classic of French transhumanist literature that Moatti does not mention once even though he quotes it extensively The war of intelligenceby the same author). As for philosophy, Moatti seems to ignore the influence on transhumanism of postmodernism and postfeminism, stemming among others from Nietzsche and the French Theory. These currents, which see technology as a means to contest the idea of an intangible human nature, would have deserved a comparison with Audiberti’s abhumanism analyzed by Moatti. However, the most serious bias is political. Although he takes care to specify that he is talking about “a part of contemporary transhumanism” (p. 203), Moatti reduces it to its libertarian variant theorized by Max More, passing over in silence the fraction that is dominant today, namely technoprogressivism. However, this social-democratic transhumanism, eager to make all humanity benefit from human improvement techniques, echoes that of Coutrot. Taking this majority current into account would have led the author to a more nuanced vision.
These comments invite us to put certain analyses of the work into perspective, but in no case to call it into question. Moatti himself has the wisdom to call, to complete his analyses, for the constitution of transhumanist studies within the historical discipline, “the study completed here being one of the possible volumes of such a project” (p. 201).
I would like to respond to the above review as follows.
According to the reviewer, I would rely “on a very broad definition (of transhumanism), neglecting the technological dimension of the transformation of man”: I, who have a scientific background, who have worked a lot for 15 years on the perversions of science, have on the contrary not been interested in transhumanism that by the scientific and technical aspect, rejecting any other approach of a “new man” of a purely political nature (I indicate this in my introduction, e.g. p.15 concerning G. Valois or Marinetti).
On this link to the science and technology of transhumanism (proof that I am interested in it – and I am not interested thatto this), I would have, according to him, favored the computer or cybernetic approach over the biological improvement approach. The argument makes people smile when I devote long chapters to the biocracy from Carrel, to superhuman from the biologist Rostand or to the notion ofanthropotechnicseminently linked to biology. And even on contemporary transhumanism (when I approach this theme which is not central to me), I recall with Alexandre Klein that “transhumanists will not be able, if they want to achieve their program, to ignore the human body (…) everything will bring them back to biology and physiology.”
On “the influence of postmodernism and postfeminism on transhumanism”, that is not my point at all. Perhaps the reviewer means that I could have included “Nietzsche and the French Theory ” in my historical perspective: but there, contradictory injunction on his part, we are moving away in my opinion for good from the link to technology and science! And I claim an approach that is not philosophical: if I was interested in the abhumanism of Audiberti (certainly not a philosopher, moreover), it is first of all because of the term, and in reference to the prefixes to humanism studied by G. Hottois (but not that one, precisely); the approach through terminology seems interesting to me, as I have repeatedly pointed out.
Finally, on the political approach, which would be the main point of divergence between the reviewer and me, I would have passed over in silence a “social-democratic transhumanism” in favor of a “libertarian transhumanism”, which would have led me to a position that was not very nuanced. Apart from the fact that my work is historical and not political, I draw in conclusion on P.-A. Rosental to recall the link between eugenics and social democracy (Sweden, USA) in the 1950s-60s; and if in this conclusion I allow myself to give a personal political position, yes indeed it is difficult for me to have a nuanced position on contemporary transhumanism.
In summary, and on this last point, this review seems to me to say more about university disciplinary positions than about my work itself: yes, one can do history without doing philosophy or the history of philosophy. Above all, one can be interested in the roots of a notion without necessarily being interested in the contemporary notion (which I claim in the foreword, by explaining how), unlike a certain number of philosophers who see in contemporary transhumanism material for reflection, again and again, on human nature and on an inaccessible humanism.
Alexandre Moatti
Associated researcher HDR at the University of Paris