Transhumanism: Overcoming Death

Science fiction, Hannah Arendt tells us, has too long been undervalued by those who would seek to comprehend the human condition. It is in the human fantasies of our future that mankind reveals our desires, both possible and not yet possible. For Arendt, some of those deepest and longest-held desires included the desire to flee the earth, to play God and to make human beings, and to make labor unnecessary. Her book, The Human Condition, is in part an effort to think through the fact that many of these human desires were, for the first time in millennia, threatening to become possible.

We make a mistake to ignore science fiction, especially in an era where the unprecedented advance of technological ability makes it possible that today’s dreams will soon be realized. With that in mind, it is worth looking at Alex Mar’s profile of life, death, and cryogenic preservation of FM-2030, otherwise known as Fereidoun M. Esfandiary.

Writing in The Believer, Mar introduces FM-2030, one of the founders of the transhumanism movement. FM-2030 has a single defining dream for the future of man, that we overcome our given and earthly and biological limits. If man, as Arendt writes, is both someone who lives in a given and fated world and someone who can change and re-make that world, the transhumanists like FM-2030 imagine a time in the near future in which all biological, temporal, and physical limits will be overcome. Including death.

The ultimate goal for transhumanists has never been merely to improve mankind, but to defeat our greatest opponent: death. Of course, not all champions of Progress make the titanic leap to Immortality—the jump is so vast, so wildly immodest and presumptuous as to cross over into the realm of the kind of uncomfortably eccentric. But as FM would put it, “No one today can be too optimistic.” Transhumanists, in their crusade against time, have begun to buy themselves some of it, at the cost of a pricey life-insurance policy. With some cryoprotectants and a lot of liquid nitrogen, humanity—or at least the one-thousand-ish people affiliated with Alcor, currently the largest cryonics group in the country—has been gifted with the semi-scientific semi-possibility of radically extended life. Die a clinical “death,” go to sleep, wake up eons later, when existence is a whole new ball game. So when will immortality come?

If you want to understand the human condition, that means knowing well too our most human dreams. Today, technological optimism is at the center of those dreams. Fereidoun M. Esfandiary was for many the first great transhumanist of the late 20^th century, the precursor to Ray Kurzweil, who also dreams of his own immortality. This story of his untimely death, and efforts to preserve him, reveal much about the movement he helped to found.

Read the article here.

Read related essays on the human dream of a non-human future here.

You can also purchase the inaugural issue of HA, the Hannah Arendt Center Journal, which features a selection of articles by Nicholson Baker, Babette Babich, Rob Riemen, Marianne Constable, and Roger Berkowitz from our 2010 conference, “Human Being in an Inhuman Age.”