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Are Transhumanists Being Inspired By The Overhuman?

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Are Transhumanists Being Inspired by The Overhuman? Essence of A Human Being Philosophy in its intellectual sense is “critical thinking about basic ideas” (Alexander, 2010, p.2). Not all controversial ideas are to be counted as philosophical, so to speak; however, philosophy’s inquisitive nature allows us to determine whether two philosophical ideas correlate. In this case, the goal is to determine whether Nietzsche’s Overhuman strengthened transhumanist’s perception of the posthuman. Superman (Übermensch or Overhuman) relies on the “will to power” which depicts the main driving force in humans. Transhumanists strive to create a posthuman, an “enhanced future ideal being” (Aydin, 2017, p. 305). Nietzsche’s thoughts on human enhancement …show more content…

This ideal Overhuman has detached from everything, including the Platonic-Christian worldview, a naive concept ubiquitously spread among society. Plato argues that human beings have an “invariable and ahistorical essence”, which shall be continuously cultivated according to previously established sets of beliefs and norms, not leaving any room for change (Aydin, 2017, p. 309). Nietzsche’s superhuman avoids dependence and aims for the “development of unique creative abilities” (Alexander, 2010, p. 36). Nietzsche believes that the world is “will to power and nothing else,” and allowing the creation of standards by determining what is “normal” and what is “enhanced” is an expression of will to power which can always be argued by someone else’s will to power (Aydin, 2017, 310). Discarding arguments and settling for a criterion of what is standard and what isn’t, is a dangerous move since it limits us from creating improved life forms and meanings. Therefore, there is no standard human being and believing so would rob us of our unique essence. The Overhuman is pure essentialism, and its mission is to liberate us from the Platonic-Christian heritage and the modernist ideas that have procured to live by. Ultimately, the Overhuman does not exist and I doubt it will ever be, whereas we use this term to synthesize …show more content…

A Posthuman sweats and breathes singularity and uniformity which conveys an anti-essentialist structure. Transhumanists ignore heterogeneity on their non-stopping journey to defy reason. As we scrutinize Nietzsche’s ideology, his personal intent to expose the dull concept that all humans are equal thus they must follow the same moral codes is crystal-clear (Alexander, 2010, 36). My main concern about the creation of the posthuman is that transhumanists have ignored the human factor; they are convinced that technology will, in fact, modify all the subjects uniformly. They tend to disregard “social and material circumstances of real-flesh and bones-people”; on the other hand, Nietzsche focusses in the body’s embeddedness in a particular context as he acknowledges that not everyone responds the same way to certain technologies (Aydin, 2017, p. 321). The “will to power” helps to prove that transhumanists set standards based on their worldview and their shortsighted definition of normality and enhancement which can always be discredited by another individual’s will to

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