AN EVALUATION OF UNDERSTANDING OF HUMAN IN TRANSHUMANIST AND POST-HUMANIST APPROACHES WITHIN THE CONTEXT OF EXISTENTIALIST PHILOSOPHY

Abstract

The artistic, cultural, and philosophical foundations of the concepts of transhumanism and posthumanism date back several centuries. However, since the early 21st century, these concepts have become increasingly prevalent in the literature, particularly in parallel with rapid advancements in scientific fields such as biotechnology, nanotechnology, genetic engineering, and artificial intelligence, and have increasingly become subjects of discussion in philosophical contexts. Rooted in science and technology, both concepts of transhumanism and posthumanism emerge as two distinct yet interconnected philosophical and cultural approaches that focus on the future of humanity and the limits of human-centered thought.

The concepts of transhumanism and posthumanism, which constitute the focus of this study, share a common stance in the idea of transforming humanity and reconstructing the notion of the technological human. The most fundamental difference between the two lies in the way they approach technology: while transhumanism views the technological age as a tool in the process of human development, posthumanism not only employs it as a tool but seeks to fully integrate the human with the technological age. Particularly, unlike humanism, posthumanism does not adopt a human-centered perspective. It critiques all humanist approaches and cultural assumptions that attribute uniqueness to the human and position the human above other beings.

At this point, in the age of artificial intelligence and advanced technology, the entity that emerges, part human, part machine, at the culmination of the transhumanist process is referred to as the ‘posthuman.’ While the transhuman can be described as the transitional form between Homo sapiens and the posthuman, the posthuman represents the being reached at the end of this transformative process. Contrary to these two technologically centered conceptions of the human, existentialist philosophy places the human at the center, emphasizing the principle that existence precedes essence, and that the conscious human constructs themselves through free and deliberate actions. In this context, this study aims to evaluate the understanding of the human found in transhumanist and posthumanist approaches, both of which center on the technologically enhanced human, particularly within the context of artificial intelligence, through the fundamental concepts and principles of existentialist philosophy.