Transhumanism, Human Nature and Culture: a Preliminary Sociological Contextualization

The main objective of the article is to present a preliminary contextualization of transhumanism on the basis of some of the classical motifs in social theory. In the first section, I critically refer to the most popular definitions of transhumanism and comment on some of the inherent discrepancies within its own techno-progressive agenda. In the second section, I briefly scrutinize some of the critical reactions against the concept of biotechnological human enhancement with regard to its paradoxical appeal to religion, its ambivalent stance towards education, and to the concept of human nature. Finally, I confront the cultural implications of transhumanism by applying Émile Durkheim’s critique of modern humanism as well as Peter L. Berger’s and Thomas Luckmann’s theory of symbolic universes. In general, I interpret transhumanism as an anthropological paradigm shift that entails a cultural recentering of late-modern societies on the basis of a new, technology-centered symbolic universe