Julian Huxley

"Human Enhancement", die technologische und pharmakologische Steigerung menschlicher Fähigkeiten, ist aktuell Gegenstand vielschichtiger ethischer und politischer Debatten. In diesem Buch werden häufig ausgeblendete geschichtliche Hintergründe und philosophische Aspekte der Thematik behandelt, so zum Beispiel die Utopiekritik Dostojewskis, die Zukunftsprognosen von H.G. Wells und J.B.S. Haldane sowie gegenwärtige "transhumanistische" Visionen im Blick auf die Romane von Michel
Houellebecq. Auch andere literarische Auseinandersetzungen mit einer "Verbesserung des Menschen", wie die von D.H. Lawrence, und verschiedene Ansätze einer ethischen Bewertung werden diskutiert.

Die Cyborgisierung des Menschen erzwingt eine „innere“ Disziplinierung, die ganz direkt auf der Ebene des Nervensystems wirkt. Die Institution, welche die Körperdisziplinierung trägt, setzt nicht mehr an der leiblichen Oberfläche an – sie ist keine gesellschaftliche Institution im klassischen Sinne mehr. Diese Institution ist nunmehr der Leib selbst.
Denkbar sind eine ganze Reihe verschiedener technisch-organischer Hybridmenschen. Der Essay schlüsselt das Feld des Techno-Körpers auf und versucht in kritischer Absicht den inneren Motiven nachzuspüren, die vielen Phantasmen der Technisierung des Leibes zu Grunde liegen.

W niniejszej pracy staram się odpowiedzieć na tytułowe pytanie, które należy rozumieć szeroko: czy transhumanizm jest nową religią, ale także czy i w jaki sposób czerpie z idei religijnych, pełni religijne funkcje, jest uznawany za religię i może ewoluować w stronę religii. W pracy definiuję transhumanizm i prezentuję jego nurty oraz sytuuję go we współczesnym kontekście przemian duchowych. Opisuję także okołoreligijne źródła tej idei oraz przykłady religijnych koncepcji i inicjatyw w ramach transhumanizmu, omawiam technologie transhumanistyczne i poruszane przez nie zagadnienia i przedstawiam społeczną recepcję transhumanistycznych idei i wizji przyszłości. W podsumowaniu rozważam przyszłość transhumanizmu jako religii i quasi-religijnej metanarracji.

The modern synthesis begins in Bloomsbury with a group of novelists, scientists, and philosophers that included two of the foremost geneticists of the time, J. B. S Haldane and Julian Huxley; the novelist who gave the world the most influential vision of a genetic future, Aldous Huxley; and the philosopher Bertrand Russell, whose The Scientific Outlook rivals Brave New World in its prophecies about the social transformations that genetics might unleash. Aldous Huxley’s vision of the modern world, with its dispassionate, impartial, and unsparing satire of all aspects of life, is closer to the scientific point of view of Haldane and other modern geneticists than to Huxley’s literary modernist peers. The failure to understand Huxley’s satiric vision has led to egregious misreadings of Brave New World to support attacks on twenty-first century genetics and has distorted public policy recommendations by influential conservative voices.

RESUMEN: En este artículo se analizan algunas obras de Julian Huxley con la intención de comprender el significa-do que le dio a la palabra transhumanismo. La búsqueda intelectual de Huxley a lo largo de su obra como científico y como humanista le llevó a ir transformando su idea hasta que encontró la palabra adecuada. Lo esencial de su inquietud filosófica y religiosa es que siempre buscó la manera de trascender los límites de la naturaleza humana. Para el biólogo británico, la misión religioso-científica que supone la creencia en el transhumanismo lleva al convencimiento de que el ser humano podrá trascender su condición de especie para llegar a concentrar todos los fragmentos de su conciencia en una autoconciencia cósmica total que dé plenitud a la sustancia universal y única de la que forma parte. ABSTRACT: In this article some works by Julian Huxley are analyzed with the intention of understanding the meaning that he gave to the word transhumanism. Huxley's intellectual search throughout his work as a scientist and as a humanist led him to transform his idea until he found the right word. The essence of his philosophical and religious concern is that he always looked for ways to transcend the limits of human nature. For the British biologist, the religious-scientific mission that supposes the belief in transhumanism leads to the conviction that the human being will be able to transcend his status as a species in order to concentrate all the fragments of his conscience in a total cosmic self-consciousness that gives fullness to the universal and unique substance of which it is a part.

Der Transhumanismus ist eine Sozialtheorie, die die moralische Pflicht zur Überschreitung der Grenzen des Menschen formuliert. Im Kontext des Wandels hin zu einer Optimierungs- und Upgradekultur sowie der umfassenden Digitalisierung kommt einer solchen Sozialtheorie besondere Bedeutung zu. Aber kann man aus den gesellschaftlichen Veränderungen, die Leben und Körper, Kommunikation und Arbeit sowie Selbst-und Weltverhältnisse in der Tat zutiefst betreffen, wirklich die Anzeichen einer inner-weltlichen transhumanen Erlösung herauslesen? Die Autoren des Bandes zeigen Perspektiven auf, die diese gesellschaftlichen Wandlungsprozesse ernst nehmen, aber zu ihrer humanen Gestaltung aufrufen.

In his famous paper, Julian Huxley gives the outline of what he believes future humanity could – and should – look like. By pointing out the numerous limitations and feebleness the human nature is – at the time – prone to, and by confronting them with the possibilities humankind has, Huxley expresses the need to research and put into use all possible measures that would enable man achieve utmost perfection.

The Spanish Doñana Biological Station, inaugurated in 1964, poses two historiographical puzzles. First, it was the first large project of the World Wildlife Fund, which is usually seen as a response to the very specific post-imperial challenges of African parks. Second, it was the first non-alpine park in Spain, and although it was designed and inaugurated in the midst of Francisco Franco’s nationalist dictatorship, it was an explicitly transnational project. This paper approaches Doñana’s unique story through the concept of ecological diplomacy. It points to the diplomatic strategies mobilized by a small group of ecologists with managerial and financial skills. Promoting Doñana, British ornithologists presented it as an African wilderness, which created tensions with Spanish ecologists, themselves colonial scientists. Ecological diplomacy, moreover, refers to a characteristic period between conservation diplomacy and environmental diplomacy. In it, conservation was understood as th...

Le transhumanisme est un courant de pensée, désormais international, prônant l'usage des sciences et des techniques, dans le but d'améliorer l'espèce humaine, en augmentant les performances physiques et mentales de L'homme. Il considère en outre certains aspects de la condition humaine tels que le handicap, la maladie, le vieillissement ou la mort subie comme inutiles et indésirables. À ce titre, il interroge et il inquiète... Pour éclairer une réalité incontournable et un sujet complexe, cet ouvrage commence par retracer l'histoire de ce courant de pensée.Il décrit ensuite ses différentes applications technologiques. Enfin, il revisite le débat et il interroge l'avenir.

American Humanism is a philosophy that tries to unite the value spheres of the good and the true, thus superseding religion as a then-defunct value sphere. But the strategy of reducing the social differentiation of value spheres by identifying one with the other is also being pursued from the religious side through movements like creationism and Christian Science. The fact that the value orientations represented in the Humanist movement proved to be rather stable implies that the conflict American Humanism has been engaged in throughout the 20th century is a conflict about the relation of the religious value sphere to other value spheres, the most important of which is the “intellectual sphere”. Weber states that “[t]he tension between religion and intellectual knowledge definitely comes to the fore wherever rational, empirical knowledge has consistently worked through to the disenchantment of the world and its transformation into a causal mechanism”.80 This definition, and the opposition towards religion included in it, fits both the Humanist and the sociological positions treated in this paper. This, then, is the reason for the commonalities pointed out before, but it explains also the differences between the two. Humanists can be defined as those members of the intellectual sphere who attempt to show that the rational treatment of the world as a causal mechanism can assume part of the function of the religious value sphere. In Weber’s terms, American Humanism is about an inner-worldly reenchantment of the world. From this perspective, the dynamics of the conflict between Humanism and religion can be stated in a clear fashion: Insofar as the Humanists regard religion as a legitimate contender for their claims to an ethical interpretation of the world, they tend to frame their position in a way that sets itself apart from anything religious. This is the case for the Secular Humanist Declaration. However, when Humanists perceive religion as being in crisis, they tend to formulate their project as one of functional integration of the religious in the value sphere from which they regard the world, thus adopting its functional replacement. This is clearly the case for Dewey’s and Huxley’s work.

In the final phase of his philosophical musings, D. H. Lawrence increasingly focused on the individual versus society. He sought to guide society to respect the individual by examining the nature of what it means to be a human, one that has both mental and physical natures or consciousnesses. In Lady Chatterley’s Lover (1928) and Pansies (1929), Lawrence worries about humankind’s constant shift toward mental consciousness, often to the detriment of what he called blood consciousness. In both works, he presents an extreme version of mental consciousness via imagined future technologies that would make aspect of the physical side of humans irrelevant. He pleads for balance and presents the love affair between Connie Chatterley and Oliver Mellors as an example of what people should strive for in their lives. Lawrence’s brief use of futuristic technologies precedes that of friend Aldous Huxley’s expanded treatment of similar concepts. For each of the writers, advances in technology pose risks that should be fully considered before being fully deployed.

From the 1930s to the late 1970s, American archaeologists pursued a paired agenda of science and salvage such that their focus on logical positivism converged with US foreign policy towards international technical assistance. River basin salvage archaeology, pioneered in the US by the Tennessee Valley Authority and exported to the Middle East in the 1950s, was a prime example of American Cold War techno-politics that accompanied other international aid and technical assistance programmes. Amphitheaters of archaeology along the Nile and Euphrates were fertile testing grounds for the development of what became known as the ‘New Archaeology’, but also new deals, new science, infrastructure, and agriculture within a Cold War setting, so that monumental heritage and dam projects became flashpoints between American visions for the Middle East and attempts by UNESCO to maintain the spirit of internationalism.

In the final phase of his philosophical musings, D. H. Lawrence increasingly focused on the individual versus society. He sought to guide society to respect the individual by examining the nature of what it means to be a human, one that has both mental and physical natures or consciousnesses. In Lady Chatterley’s Lover (1928) and Pansies (1929), Lawrence worries about humankind’s constant shift toward mental consciousness, often to the detriment of what he called blood consciousness. In both works, he presents an extreme version of mental consciousness via imagined future technologies that would make aspect of the physical side of humans irrelevant. He pleads for balance and presents the love affair between Connie Chatterley and Oliver Mellors as an example of what people should strive for in their lives. Lawrence’s brief use of futuristic technologies precedes that of friend Aldous Huxley’s expanded treatment of similar concepts. For each of the writers, advances in technology pose risks that should be fully considered before being fully deployed.

Gegenstand des Artikels sind die Zukunftsvisionen von J. D. Bernal, J. B. S. Haldane und J. S. Huxley. Besondere Berücksichtigung finden die Überlegungen der Autoren zur technisch vermittelten Veränderung der menschlichen Natur. Es soll aufgezeigt werden, dass ein Großteil der Motive, welche die damaligen Diskurse bestimmten, in den heutigen Diskussionen über Human Enhancement und den Transhumanismus weiterhin von großer Relevanz sind.

Julian Huxley, eminent biologist and humanist, not only coined the term "transhumanism" (Huxley 1957), but was also among the early visionaries of human enhancement. He proposed an improvement of man as early as 1931, based on the biological knowledge of that time. In current discourse the writings of early apologists of human enhancement are scarcely being referred to (but see e.g. Coenen 2007; Rubin 2005; Bostrom 2005), although a number of other well renowned natural scientists, such as John Desmond Bernal and John Burdon Sanderson Haldane, developed radical visions of the human future already in the 1920s.
Be it hive-minds, extension of life span, brain doping, changes in human physiognomy, the taking over of evolution by Man himself or even the splitting of humankind into different species: throughout their writings each of the fundamental ideas of today’s discourse can be found. In 1931, Huxley describes the hopes merged in the contemporary term of human enhancement: “Most of us would like to live longer; to have healthier and happier lives; to be able to control the sex of our children when they are conceived, and afterwards to mould their bodies, intellects and temperaments into the best possible forms; to reduce unnecessary pain to a minimum; to be able at will to whip up our energies to their fullest pitch without later ill effects”. (Huxley 1933).
What is new and original about this, as compared to older ideas of improving man such as those in classical humanistic discourse, is the focussing on the human body itself: the intention is no longer the development of human abilities or the adjustment of the environment to human needs, but the radical changing of the human body in order to adjust it to the requirements of a society shaped by new technologies. Huxley’s, Bernal’s und Haldane’s visions mark the transition from the „engineering for the body and for the mind“ to the „engineering of the body and of the mind“ (Nordmann 2007).
The aforementioned authors apply a paradigm of control (cf. Ferrari 2008): It is their goal to finally overcome the restriction of inner human nature as well as those of nature surrounding man. In 1929; Bernal defined the „Three Enemies of the Rational Soul”: “The World, the Flesh & the Devil” (Bernal 1929), "world" meaning external restrictions, "flesh" the restrictions of man's physical constitution and "devil" the human psyche. Bernal and Huxley were influenced by Haldanes „Daedalus and the Future“ (1924), which expressed Haldane's vision of a  potential future of human kind
The talk will reconstruct the basic statements of Huxley, Bernal und Haldane concerning human enhancement and highlight the role of these authors as intellectual harbingers of contemporary discourses of human enhancement and transhumanism. It is striking to find that much of what is understood as a (technological) threat for human nature and dignity in our own days has already been widely disputed almost a hundred years ago: It is not so much the visions and topics that have changed, but rather the possibilities of making the visions become reality as well as their reception throughout society. This will also be demonstrated by comparing the visions of the aforementioned authors to the ideas of John Harris, a contemporary spokesman of human enhancement and author of “Enhancing Evolution. The Ethical Case for Making Better People” (Harris 2007).

Bernal, John Desmond (1929): The World, the Flesh & the Devil, Indiana University Press: Bloomington and London.

Bostrom, Nick (2005): A History of Transhumanist Thought. In: Journal of Evolution and Technology, 2005, Vol.14, No. 1.

Coenen, Christopher (2007): Utopian Aspects of the Debate on Converging Technologies, in: G. Banse, A. Grunwald, I. Hronszky, G. Nelson: Assessing Societal Implications of Converging Technological Development, Berlin, pp. 141-172.

Ferrari, Arianna (2008): 'Is it all about human nature? Ethical challenges of converging technologies beyond a polarized debate', Innovation: The European Journal of Social Science Research, 21:1, pp. 1-24.

Haldane, John Burdon Sanderson (1924): Daedalus or Science and the Future. A paper read to the Heretics, Cambridge, February 4th, 1923, 31924, London.

Harris, John (2007): Enhancing Evolution. The Ethical Case for Making Better People, Princeton.

Huxley, Julian (1931): What Dare I Think?, London.

Huxley, Julian (1957): Transhumanism, in: Julian Huxley: New Bottles for New Wine. Essays by Julian Huxley, London.

Nordmann, Alfred (2007): If and Then: A Critique of Speculative NanoEthics. In: NanoEthics, 1:1, pp. 31-46.

Rubin, Charles T. (2005): "Daedalus and Icarus Revisited", The New Atlantis, Number 8, Spring 2005, pp. 73-91.