Stealing Fire from the Gods (and the Weak)

Abstract

positively connoted concept of (human) nature, according to which nature is not that which needs to be overcome, but rather both that which enables us to go beyond those “natural” limitations and that for the sake of which we should go beyond them. We turn against nature as limitation, as we must precisely because it is our nature to do so. As Gregory Stock (2003, 2) once put it, stealing fire from the gods “is too characteristically human”. This chapter analyses the normative understanding of human nature that often underlies current demands for a biotechnological enhancement of the human. Hauskeller shows how the public denouncement of human nature as that which confines us is complemented by an embracement of nature as that which enables and indeed urges us to overcome all limits and boundaries and that for the sake of which we should overcome them. Indeterminacy itself becomes the primary goal and is at the same time regarded as the normative core of human nature. The inconsistencies of this view are shown through a discussion of Nietzsche’s philosophy of the overhuman, C.S. Lewis’s critique of the ideology of empowerment, and Zoltan Istvan’s novel The Transhumanist Wager.