ART AND THE ENLIGHTENMENT

From the early eighteenth century on, the visual arts, from painting to interior dcor, were markers of class and harbingers of the Revolution to come. A late expression of the pompous and grandiose Baroque. the soft Rococo style was the Baroque turned pretty and domestic. The domaine of female patrons and even of women artists, the Rococo style was long given short shrift by art historians, who glossed over the pale pastel colors in favor of the more masculine style that supplanted it, Neo-Classicism. But even during the eighteenth century, this split between masculine and feminine and frivolous and sober, immoral and moral existed in the opposition between the aristocratic Rococo style and the genre paintings made for the middle class. The Rococo is a world of mirrored rooms with mirrors that had to be kept clean, of pale paneling trimmed in gilt that needed to be dusted and polished, of embroidered and brocaded fabrics that required careful maintenanceall of which demanded hundreds of servants. The sight of elegantly carved furniture and voluminous silk gowns and shirts with lace cravats and one understands the rage of a vengeful revolutionary mob.

The Rococo style is dualistic in that it is both private and aristocratic and public and accessible. The aristocratic Rococo reflects the aimless lives of the privileged elite but had a sense of humor, respecting neither church nor state. Rococo art was an anti-style with a palette and a type of brushwork all its own, rejecting the grandeur of the Baroque and aiming to simply please the spectators with its fleshy and witty eroticism. With Rococo art, the grandiose didactic Baroque was watered down to an art without serious purpose or, to put it another way, an art for pleasures sake only. At the hands of Joseph Marie Vien (1716-1809), antiquity became an excuse not to wear clothes and to exhibit plump and pink female bodies to the male spectators. After decades of religious strife and endless preaching of the Reformation, the sheer prettiness of the Rococo was a great relief to weary art patrons. The Rococo was an art of sexual allure rather than solemn instruction as to duty and country, an idyll beautifully imagined by Antoine Watteau () who pretended that life is an endless game, a fte galant for lovers who lived on a fantasy island or a Pilgrimage to Cythera(1717).

The world envisioned by the Rococo is a world of the court, where as Madame du Chtelet said, We must begin by saying to ourselves that we have nothing else to do in the world but to seek pleasant sensations and feelings. One can almost hear the clock of the Enlightenment ticking as it remorselessly reordered Madames world of pleasure into a world of democracy and equality. Todays interpretations of the pleasures of Rococo art and the pretensions of Baroque art would have been largely lost on the actual audiences at the time, who, like any other art audience were interested in what they liked not in the social and class sub-texts. The more famous of the Rococo paintings would have been private commissions, such as the quartet of paintings by Jean-Honor Fragonard (1732-1806) done in 1771 for the Kings mistress Madame du Barry. Now in the Frick Collectionthe Louveciennes panels,The Pursuit, The Meeting, The Lover Crowned,andLove Lettersare almost as famous as earlier 1767 work,The Happy Accidents of the Swing The Swing).To more discerning eyes, however, both Baroque art, as still alive and well in history paintings, and Rococo art represented outmoded styles of an exhausted art form.

Enlightenment writer and art critic Denis Diderot (1713-1784), one of the founders of the Encyclopdie, published in thirty two volumes between 1751 and 1765, used his pen to critique his age. Because his job was to critique society, everything caught his eye. As a hardworking journalist, Diderot used art criticism to press the cause of righteous and moral art, as seen in the genre scenes of Jean-Baptiste Greuze (1725-1805) and Jean-Baptiste Chardin (1699-1779), over the licentious art of Franois Boucher(1703-1770), such as Leda and the Swan(1741).The Diligent Mother (1740) byChardin displayed the sober and reasonable life style of the middle class. The Fathers Curse, The Ungrateful Son (1777) by Greuze was an object lesson in didactic morality. In these paintings, the middle class behaved rationally, pursing definite goals through industrious and productive work. Reason, Diderot claimed, must be our judge and guide in everything. In contrast to the private art of pleasure patronized by aristocrats, the simple human virtues of ordinary people could be compared to the ideals of a past that existed before the current age of decadence.

As opposed to the divine right of the monarchy and the idle lives of the nobles, another alternative morality was to be found in Nature and in Antiquity, the repository of ancient ideals and virtues. The middle class virtues and serious behavior were natural, compared to the artificial lifestyles of the court. Even Marie Antoinette sought nature in her Versailles retreat, Le Hameau (1783), where she played peasant and the acting out of the natural only underscored its un-naturalness. Nature became fashionable. Inspired by Discourse on Inequality (1755)byJean-Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778) who criticized modern life (culture) to the natural state of original human beings untainted by civilization. In addition, the world of nature itself, at that time in the process of being lost in its original state, was becoming an object of admiration, not of fear. Most importantly, Nature or the Natural, was mobilized as a critique of current social conditions being examined under the pens of the gens de lettres.

Hameau de la Reine (1782-83)

The kind of art preferred by Diderot the critic was moralizing and didactic that encourage the public to use reason instead of the senses. As one of the first art critics, his task was twofold, to describe the works of art to people who would never see them and to use art as a vehicle for his social ideas. Although Diderot learned about art through studio visits with the artists, his audience, European despots, who sported the sobriquet enlightened, were informed of French art through an internationally distributed newsletter, Correspondance littraire, philosophique et critique, edited by Baron Friedrich-Melchior Grimm. The newsletter was not subject to French censorship and could freely critique the social system. The irony of Diderot extolling middle class virtues to the lusty Czarina of Russia, Catherine, is intriguing and one can only wonder what the great queen thought when she read in his review of the Salon of 1763, First, I like genreit is moral painting.

In relation to the works of Boucher, Diderot wrote in 1765, Depravity of morals has been closely followed by the debasement of taste, color, composition, and suggested a year later that an appropriate alternative to aristocratic frivolity would be antiquity: It seemed to me that we should study the antique in order to learn to see Nature. But Diderot demanded more than mere stylistic servitude, First of all, move me, surprise me, rend my heart; make me tremble, weep, shudder, outrage me, delight my eyes, afterwards, if you canWhatever the art form, it is better to be extravagant than cold. Although Diderot did not live long enough to witness either Neoclassicism or Romanticism, both of which are anticipated in his writings, he articulated many important concepts in his art writing with his emphasis on navit, which led to primitivism in the Realist Movement and the grand ideal of Nicholas Poussin, grand manner painting based in classicism. He advocated restraint: Paint as though in Sparta.

The re-discovery of Pompeii (1748) and Herculaneum (1709) reignited an interest in ancient life. The towns, buried in a volcanic eruption in 79 CE, were perfectly preserved under layers of ash and lava and consequent (and ongoing) excavations revealed a way of life thought extinct. Fueled by the unearthing of wall paintings, history painting shifted more and more to the moral lessons of antiquity. The example of ancient virtue, especially the Roman virtue of the early days of the Roman Republic, provided an alternative to the current decline in social standards. Roman virtue was more than a dream, for Romeancient Romehad become the climax point of every Grand Tour for every well-to-do European during the eighteenth century. Scholars and tourists inspected the ruins and artists, such as Hubert Robert and Canaletto, responded to the demand for Italian vistas with vedutas. Archaeologists explored and discovered the remains of classical civilizations, and these recoveries were made available to the public and to artists through carefully engraved reproductions. Antiquity, from the reading of Homer to the use of the ancient as a suitable subject for artists, became the order of the day from the mid-eighteenth century on.

Diderot believed that art should teach moral development but at the same time he believed in the idea of genius, a new idea that was beginning to circulate and would be best articulated decades later in the writings of Emmanuel Kant. Although the moral sentiments of the works by Greuze were admirable, Diderot lamented that he was no longer able to like Greuze, who occasionally attempted the grand manner, and preferred Chardin, who was not only morally sound but also the superior artist. Reading Diderot, one thinks of Jacques-Louis David as the Messiah of art that the critic was waiting for, but Diderot died too soon and never saw Spartan art of David. In fact, the artistic period of the Enlightenment is one of transition, because intellectuals found it hard to either predict the future or to foresee the logical consequences of the newly forming ideals of reason, democracy, and equality.

Diderots public counterpart, the art writer, La Font de Saint-Yenne, author of Rflexions sur quelques causes de ltat present de la peinture en France, 1757, who also took a middle path and equated the aristocrats with the ancients, was typical in his inability to imagine a form of government or society without these hereditary rulers. The aristocrats, in turn, took the prudent course of denouncing their own decadence and corruption and joined in the vogue for the natural by praising simplicity and order. The nobles attacked royal despotism of King Louis XVI and the Austrian Queen, Marie Antoinette, in defense of their own privileges and positions, threatened by the wayward behavior of these hapless monarchs.

The stage was set for a new form of art that would more precisely reflect the Enlightenment ideals.

Also read: What is Modern?and The Enlightenment: IntroductionandThe Enlightenment and Reason andThe Enlightenment and SocietyandThe Enlightenment and the Art PublicandThe Political Revolution in America

Also listen to:What is Modern?

If you have found this material useful, please give credit to

Dr. Jeanne S. M. Willette and Art History Unstuffed. Thank you.

[emailprotected]

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The Enlightenment and Artistic Styles - Art History Unstuffed

Brief Zig Ziglar Biography: Zig Ziglar is an absolute star in the field of personal development and self improvement. If you've been following my blog then there is no doubt you've come across a few Ziglar quotes from time to time.

Ziglar was a relative unknown until his mid 40's when someone inspired him by making him realize that he had so much hidden talent. And the current Zig Ziglar was wasting it all. He got inspired, became the second best salesman in fleet of 7,000 and then he went on to encourage others through books, cassettes, DVD's, and mesmerizing speeches and seminars.

In the entire personal development industry you'll come across quotes by Zig Ziglar. He's likable, sincere, effective, and one of his best gifts is that he's also funny. His parables and stories strike so true that you can get sucked into the story telling and forget about the profound lessons that he has woven into all that he says. So, while you're reading all of these quotes by Zig Ziglar I urge you to really think about the lesson and apply it to your life today!

Motivation is the fuel, necessary to keep the human engine running.

You are the only one who can use your ability. It is an awesome responsibility.

Obviously, there is little you can learn from doing nothing.

If we don't start, its certain we can't arrive.

Your business is never really good or bad "out there" your business is either good or bad right between your own two ears.

The basic goal-reaching principle is to understand that you go as far as you can see, and when you get there you will be able to see farther.

Success is not a destination, it's a journey.

The most practical, beautiful, workable philosophy in the world won't work - if you won't.

The real opportunity for success lies within the person and not in the job.

It is easy to get to the top after you get through the crowd at the bottom.

Discipline yourself to do the things you need to do the things you need to do when you need to them, and the day will come when you will be able to do the things you want to do them!

Motivating gets you going and habit gets you there. Make motivating a habit and you will get there more quickly and have more fun on the trip.

What you get by reaching your destination is not nearly as important as what you will become by reaching your destination.

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People often say that motivation doesn't last. Well, neither does bathing. That's why we recommend it daily.

Obstacles are the things we see when we take our eyes off our goals.

Other people and things can stop you temporarily. You're the only one who can do it permanently.

When someone we love is having difficulty and is giving us a bad time, it's better to explore the cause than to criticize the action.

You cannot make it as wandering generality. You must become a meaningful specific.

Take time to be quiet.

You will make a lousy anybody else, but you will be the best "you" can lead someone else.

Your mate doesn't live by bread alone; he or she needs to be "buttered up" from time to time.

Start your child's day with love and encouragement and end the day the same way.

You already have every characteristic necessary for success if you recognize, claim, develop and use them.

The best thing a parent can do for a child his to love his or her spouse.

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Of all the "attitudes" we can acquire, surely the attitude of gratitude is the most important and by far the most life-changing.

Its not what happens to you that determines how far you will go in life; it is how you handle what happens to you.

Positive thinking will let you use the abilities, training and experience you have.

When you choose to be pleasant and positive in the way you treat others, you have also chosen, in most cases, how you are going to be treated others.

Positive thinking won't let you do anything but it will let you do everything better than negative thinking will.

You cannot tailor make the situations in life, but you can tailor make the attitudes to fit those situations before they arise.

I've go to say "no" to the good say "yes" to the best.

To respond is positive, to react is negative.

You can disagree without being disagreeable.

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Im so optimistic I'd go after Moby Dick in a row boat and take the tartar sauce with me.

Most of us would be upset If we were accused of being "silly" comes from the old English word "seilig" and it's literal definition is "to be blessed , happy, healthy and prosperous."

The chief cause of failure and unhappiness is trading what you want the most for what you want now.

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Selling is essentially transference of feeling.

The only way to coast is down hill.

Remember there is plenty of room at the top-but not enough to sit down.

You enhance your chances for success when you understand that your yearning power is more important than your earning power.

When management and labor (employer and employee) both understand they are all on the same side, then each will prosper more.

You don't "pay the price" for success-you enjoy the benefits of success.

Success is one thing you can't pay for. You buy it on the installment plan and make payments every day.

If you will pump long enough, hard enough, and enthusiastically enough, sooner or later the effort will bring forth the reward.

When we clearly understand that there is no superior sex or superior race, we will have opened the door of communication and laid the foundation for building winning relationships with all people in this global world of ours.

The price of success is much lower than the price of failure. Ability is important in our quest for success, but dependability is critical.

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There are seldom, if ever, any hopeless situations, but there are many people who lose hope in the face of some situations.

Character gets you out of bed; commitment moves you to action. Faith, hope, and discipline Enable you to follow through to completion.

Failure is an event, not a person. Yesterday ended last night.

Our children are our only hope for the future, but we are their only hope for their present and their future.

When you put faith, hope and love together you can raise positive kids in a negative world.

You cannot solve a problem until you acknowledge that you have one and accept responsibility for solving it.

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It's not the situation, but whether we react (negative) or respond (positive) to the situation that's important.

The best way to make your spouse and children feel secure is not with big deposits in bank account, but with little deposits of thoughtfulness and affection in the "love account."

Kids go where there is excitement. They stay where there is love.

Most x-rated films are advertised as "adult entertainment" for "mature adults" when in reality they are juvenile entertainment for immature and insecure people.

You can finish school, and even make it easy - but you never finish your education, and it's seldom easy.

There's not a lot you can do about the national economy but there is a lot you can do about your personal economy.

Everybody says they want to be free. Take the train off the tracks and it's free - but it can't go anywhere.

Money will buy you a bed, but not a good night's sleep a house but not a home, a companion but not a friend.

You've got to be before you can do, and do before you can have.

Lack of direction, not lack of time, is the problem. We all have twenty-four hour days.

Remember, you can earn more money, but when time is spent is gone forever.

Many marriages would be better if the husband and wife clearly understood that they're on the same side.

Duty makes us do things well, but love makes us do them beautifully.

When you give a man a dole you deny him his dignity, and when you deny him his dignity you rob him his destiny.

You don't drown by falling in water; you only drown if you stay there.

If you're sincere, praise is effective. If you're insincere, it's manipulative.

All of us perform better and more willingly when we know why we're doing what we have been told or asked to do.

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If standard of living is your major objective, quality of life almost never improves, but if quality of life is your number one objective, your standard of living almost always improves.

Keep your thinking right and your business will be right.

What you do off the job is determining factor in how far you will go on the job.

When I discipline myself to eat properly, live morally, exercise regularly, grow mentally and spiritually, and not put any drugs or alcohol in my body, I have given myself the freedom to be at my best, perform at my best, and reap all the rewards that go along with it.

If people like you they'll listen to you, but if they trust you they'll do business with you.

Ability can take you the top, but it takes character to keep you there.

The quality of a person's life is in direct proportion to his or her commitment to excellence, regardless of his or chosen field of endeavor.

What comes out of your mouth is determined by what goes into your mind.

With integrity you have nothing to fear, since you have nothing to hide. With integrity you will do the right thing, so you will have no guilt. With fear and guilt removed you are free to be and do your best.

You build a successful career, regardless of your field of endeavor, by the dozens of little things you do on and off the job.

When a company or an individual compromises one time, whether it's on price or principle, the next compromise is right around the corner.

When we do more than we are paid to do, eventually we will be paid more for what we do.

When you exercise your freedom to express yourself at the lowest level, you ultimately condemn yourself to live at that level.

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Before you change your thinking, you have to change what goes into your mind.

Far too many people have no idea of what they can do because all they have been told is what they can't do. They don't know what they want because they don't know what's available for them.

If you don't like who you are and where you are, don't worry about it because you're not stuck either with who you are or where you are. You can grow. You can change .You can be more than you are.

When your image improves, your performance improves.

You are what you are and where you are because of what has gone into your mind. You can change what you are and where you are by changing what goes into your mind.

Don't be distracted by criticism. Remember-the only taste of success some people have when they take a bite out of you.

Some people find fault like there is a reward for it.

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Quotes by Zig Ziglar - Personal development

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Ziglar Vault - All of Zig Ziglar's Speeches, Videos ...

"God is dead" (German: "Gott ist tot"(helpinfo); also known as the death of God) is a widely quoted statement by German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche. It first appears in Nietzsche's 1882 collection The Gay Science (also translated as "The science of joy" German: Die frhliche Wissenschaft)[1] However, It is most famously associated with Nietzsche's classic work Thus Spoke Zarathustra (German: Also sprach Zarathustra), which is most responsible for popularizing the phrase. The idea is stated in "The Madman"[1] as follows:

God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him. How shall we comfort ourselves, the murderers of all murderers? What was holiest and mightiest of all that the world has yet owned has bled to death under our knives: who will wipe this blood off us? What water is there for us to clean ourselves? What festivals of atonement, what sacred games shall we have to invent? Is not the greatness of this deed too great for us? Must we ourselves not become gods simply to appear worthy of it?

But the best known passage is at the end of part 2 of Zarathustra's Prolog, where after beginning his allegorical journey Zarathustra encounters an aged ascetic who expresses misanthropy and love of God:

When Zarathustra heard these words, he saluted the saint and said 'What should I have to give you! But let me go quickly that I take nothing from you! And thus they parted from one another, the old man and Zarathustra, laughing as two boys laugh.

But when Zarathustra was alone, he spoke thus to his heart: 'Could it be possible! This old saint has not heard in his forest that God is dead!'

Although the statement and its meaning is attributed to Nietzsche it is important to note that this was not a unique position as Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel pondered the death of God, first in his Phenomenology of Spirit where he considers the death of God to 'not [be] seen as anything but an easily recognized part of the usual Christian cycle of redemption'.[4] Later on Hegel writes about the great pain of knowing that God is dead 'The pure concept, however, or infinity, as the abyss of nothingness in which all being sinks, must characterize the infinite pain, which previously was only in culture historically and as the feeling on which rests modern religion, the feeling that God Himself is dead, (the feeling which was uttered by Pascal, though only empirically, in his saying: Nature is such that it marks everywhere, both in and outside of man, a lost God), purely as a phase, but also as no more than just a phase, of the highest idea.'[5] Of course the spirit in which it is intended is a verily Nietzsche manifestation, however it is important to consider the material that gave rise to this idea.

The phrase "God is dead" does not mean that Nietzsche believed in an actual God who first existed and then died in a literal sense. Rather, it conveys his view that the Christian God is no longer a credible source of absolute moral principles. Nietzsche recognizes the crisis that the death of God represents for existing moral assumptions: "When one gives up the Christian faith, one pulls the right to Christian morality out from under one's feet. This morality is by no means self-evident... By breaking one main concept out of Christianity, the faith in God, one breaks the whole: nothing necessary remains in one's hands."[6] This is why in "The Madman", a passage which primarily addresses nontheists (especially atheists), the problem is to retain any system of values in the absence of a divine order.

The death of God is a way of saying that humans are no longer able to believe in any such cosmic order since they themselves no longer recognize it. The death of God will lead, Nietzsche says, not only to the rejection of a belief of cosmic or physical order but also to a rejection of absolute values themselves to the rejection of belief in an objective and universal moral law, binding upon all individuals. In this manner, the loss of an absolute basis for morality leads to nihilism. This nihilism is that for which Nietzsche worked to find a solution by re-evaluating the foundations of human values. This meant, to Nietzsche, looking for foundations that went deeper than Christian values. He would find a basis in the "will to power" that he described as "the essence of reality."

Nietzsche believed that the majority of people did not recognize this death out of the deepest-seated fear or angst. Therefore, when the death did begin to become widely acknowledged, people would despair and nihilism would become rampant. This is partly why Nietzsche saw Christianity as nihilistic.

When first being introduced to Nietzsche, a person can infer the death of God as literal. To Nietzsche, the concept of God only exists in the minds of his followers; therefore, the believers would ultimately be accountable for his life and death. Holub goes on to state that God has been the victim of murder, and we, as human beings, are the murderers.[7]

Another purpose of Nietzsches death of God is to unmask the hypocrisies and illusion of outworn value systems.[8] People do not fully comprehend that they killed God through their hypocrisy and lack of morality. Due to hypocrisy God has lost whatever function he once had because of the actions taken by those who believe in him.[9] A god is merely a mirrored reflection of its people and the Christian God is so ridiculous a God that even were he to have existed, he would have no right to exist.[10] Religious people start going against their beliefs and start coinciding with the beliefs of mainstream society. [Moral thinking] is debased and poisoned by the influence of societys weakest and most ignoble elements, the herd.[11]

Humanity depreciates traditional ethics and beliefs and this leads to another misunderstanding of the death of God. During the era of Nietzsche, traditional beliefs within Christianity became almost nonexistent due to the vast expansion of education and the rise of modern science. Belief in God is no longer possible due to such nineteenth-century factors as the dominance of the historical-critical method of reading Scripture, the rise of incredulity toward anything miraculous ... and the idea that God is the creation of wish projection (Benson 31). Nietzsche believed that man was useless without a God and no longer possesses ideals and absolute goals toward which to strive. He has lost all direction and purpose.[12] Nietzsche believes that in order to overcome our current state of depreciated values that a strong classic pessimism like that of the Greeks is needed to overcome the dilemmas and anxieties of modern man.[13]

Either we died because of our religion or our religion dies because of us.[14] This quote summarizes what Nietzsche was trying to say in his concept of the death of God- that the God of Christianity has died off because of its people and their beliefs. Far too often do people translate the death of God into a literal sense, and depreciate the value of traditional Christian beliefs - all leading to the misunderstandings of Nietzsches philosophy of Gods death. Now in a world where God is dead we can only hope that technology and science does not take control and be treated as the new religion, serving as a basis for retaining the same damaging psychological habit that the Christian religion developed.[15]

Martin Heidegger understood this part of Nietzsche's philosophy by looking at it as death of metaphysics. In his view, Nietzsche's words can only be understood as referring not to a particular theological or anthropological view but rather to the end of philosophy itself. Philosophy has, in Heidegger's words, reached its maximum potential as metaphysics and Nietzsche's words warn of its demise and that of any metaphysical world view. If metaphysics is dead, Heidegger warns, that is because from its inception that was its fate.[16]

Paul Tillich as well as Richard Schacht were influenced by the writings of Nietzsche and especially of his phrase "God is dead."[17]

William Hamilton wrote the following about Nietzsche's view:

For the most part Altizer prefers mystical to ethical language in solving the problem of the death of God, or, as he puts it, in mapping out the way from the profane to the sacred. This combination of Kierkegaard and Eliade makes rather rough reading, but his position at the end is a relatively simple one. Here is an important summary statement of his views: If theology must now accept a dialectical vocation, it must learn the full meaning of Yes-saying and No-saying; it must sense the possibility of a Yes which can become a No, and of a No which can become a Yes; in short, it must look forward to a dialectical coincidentia oppositorum. Let theology rejoice that faith is once again a "scandal," and not simply a moral scandal, an offense to mans pride and righteousness, but, far more deeply, an ontological scandal; for eschatological faith is directed against the deepest reality of what we know as history and the cosmos. Through Nietzsches vision of Eternal Recurrence we can sense the ecstatic liberation that can be occasioned by the collapse of the transcendence of Being, by the death of God . . . and, from Nietzsches portrait of Jesus, theology must learn of the power of an eschatological faith that can liberate the believer from what to the contemporary sensibility is the inescapable reality of history. But liberation must finally be effected by affirmation. . . . .( See "Theology and the Death of God," in this volume, pp. 95-111.[18]

Nietzsche believed there could be positive possibilities for humans without God. Relinquishing the belief in God opens the way for human creative abilities to fully develop. The Christian God, he wrote, would no longer stand in the way, so human beings might stop turning their eyes toward a supernatural realm and begin to acknowledge the value of this world.

Nietzsche uses the metaphor of an open sea, which can be both exhilarating and terrifying. The people who eventually learn to create their lives anew will represent a new stage in human existence, the bermensch i.e. the personal archetype who, through the conquest of their own nihilism, themselves become a sort of mythical hero. The 'death of God' is the motivation for Nietzsche's last (uncompleted) philosophical project, the 'revaluation of all values'.

Although Nietzsche puts the statement "God is Dead" into the mouth of a "madman"[19] in The Gay Science, he also uses the phrase in his own voice in sections 108 and 343 of the same book. In the madman's passage, the man is described as running through a marketplace shouting, "I seek God! I seek God!" He arouses some amusement; no one takes him seriously. Maybe he took an ocean voyage? Lost his way like a little child? Maybe he's afraid of us (non-believers) and is hiding?-- much laughter. Frustrated, the madman smashes his lantern on the ground, crying out that "God is dead, and we have killed him, you and I!" "But I have come too soon," he immediately realizes, as his detractors of a minute before stare in astonishment: people cannot yet see that they have killed God. He goes on to say:

This prodigious event is still on its way, still wandering; it has not yet reached the ears of men. Lightning and thunder require time, the light of the stars requires time, deeds, though done, still require time to be seen and heard. This deed is still more distant from them than the most distant stars and yet they have done it themselves.

trans. Walter Kaufmann, The Gay Science, sect. 125

Earlier in the book (section 108), Nietzsche wrote "God is Dead; but given the way of men, there may still be caves for thousands of years in which his shadow will be shown. And we we still have to vanquish his shadow, too." The protagonist in Thus Spoke Zarathustra also speaks the words, commenting to himself after visiting a hermit who, every day, sings songs and lives to glorify his god as noted above.

What is more, Zarathustra later refers not only to the death of God, but states: 'Dead are all the Gods'. It is not just one morality that has died, but all of them, to be replaced by the life of the bermensch, the new man:

'DEAD ARE ALL THE GODS: NOW DO WE DESIRE THE OVERMAN TO LIVE.'

See the article here:
God is dead - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

What idea, if embraced, would pose the greatest threat to the welfare of humanity? This was the question posed by the editors of Foreign Policy in the September/October issue to eight prominent policy intellectuals, among them Francis Fukuyama, professor of international political economy at Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, and member of the Presidents Council on Bioethics.

And Fukuyamas answer? Transhumanism, a strange liberation movement whose crusaders aim much higher than civil rights campaigners, feminists, or gay-rights advocates. This movement, he says, wants nothing less than to liberate the human race from its biological constraints.

More precisely, transhumanists advocate increased funding for research to radically extend healthy lifespan and favor the development of medical and technological means to improve memory, concentration, and other human capacities. Transhumanists propose that everybody should have the option to use such means to enhance various dimensions of their cognitive, emotional, and physical well-being. Not only is this a natural extension of the traditional aims of medicine and technology, but it is also a great humanitarian opportunity to genuinely improve the human condition.

According to transhumanists, however, the choice whether to avail oneself of such enhancement options should generally reside with the individual. Transhumanists are concerned that the prestige of the Presidents Council on Bioethics is being used to push a limiting bioconservative agenda that is directly hostile to the goal of allowing people to improve their lives by enhancing their biological capacities.

So why does Fukuyama nominate this transhumanist ideal, of working towards making enhancement options universally available, as the most dangerous idea in the world? His animus against the transhumanist position is so strong that he even wishes for the death of his adversaries: transhumanists, he writes, are just about the last group that Id like to see live forever. Why exactly is it so disturbing for Fukuyama to contemplate the suggestion that people might use technology to become smarter, or to live longer and healthier lives?

Fierce resistance has often accompanied technological or medical breakthroughs that force us to reconsider some aspects of our worldview. Just as anesthesia, antibiotics, and global communication networks transformed our sense of the human condition in fundamental ways, so too we can anticipate that our capacities, hopes, and problems will change if the more speculative technologies that transhumanists discuss come to fruition. But apart from vague feelings of disquiet, which we may all share to varying degrees, what specific argument does Fukuyama advance that would justify foregoing the many benefits of allowing people to improve their basic capacities?

Fukuyamas objection is that the defense of equal legal and political rights is incompatible with embracing human enhancement: Underlying this idea of the equality of rights is the belief that we all possess a human essence that dwarfs manifest differences in skin color, beauty, and even intelligence. This essence, and the view that individuals therefore have inherent value, is at the heart of political liberalism. But modifying that essence is the core of the transhumanist project.

His argument thus depends on three assumptions: (1) there is a unique human essence; (2) only those individuals who have this mysterious essence can have intrinsic value and deserve equal rights; and (3) the enhancements that transhumanists advocate would eliminate this essence. From this, he infers that the transhumanist project would destroy the basis of equal rights.

The concept of such a human essence is, of course, deeply problematic. Evolutionary biologists note that the human gene pool is in constant flux and talk of our genes as giving rise to an extended phenotype that includes not only our bodies but also our artifacts and institutions. Ethologists have over the past couple of decades revealed just how similar we are to our great primate relatives. A thick concept of human essence has arguably become an anachronism. But we can set these difficulties aside and focus on the other two premises of Fukuyamas argument.

The claim that only individuals who possess the human essence could have intrinsic value is mistaken. Only the most callous would deny that the welfare of some non-human animals matters at least to some degree. If a visitor from outer space arrived on our doorstep, and she had consciousness and moral agency just like we humans do, surely we would not deny her moral status or intrinsic value just because she lacked some undefined human essence. Similarly, if some persons were to modify their own biology in a way that alters whatever Fukuyama judges to be their essence, would we really want to deprive them of their moral standing and legal rights? Excluding people from the moral circle merely because they have a different essence from the rest of us is akin to excluding people on basis of their gender or the color of their skin.

Moral progress in the last two millennia has consisted largely in our gradually learning to overcome our tendency to make moral discriminations on such fundamentally irrelevant grounds. We should bear this hard-earned lesson in mind when we approach the prospect of technologically modified people. Liberal democracies speak to human equality not in the literal sense that all humans are equal in their various capacities, but that they are equal under the law. There is no reason why humans with altered or augmented capacities should not likewise be equal under the law, nor is there any ground for assuming that the existence of such people must undermine centuries of legal, political, and moral refinement.

The only defensible way of basing moral status on human essence is by giving essence a very broad definition; say as possessing the capacity for moral agency. But if we use such an interpretation, then Fukuyamas third premise fails. The enhancements that transhumanists advocate longer healthy lifespan, better memory, more control over emotions, etc. would not deprive people of the capacity for moral agency. If anything, these enhancements would safeguard and expand the reach of moral agency.

Fukuyamas argument against transhumanism is therefore flawed. Nevertheless, he is right to draw attention to the social and political implications of the increasing use of technology to transform human capacities. We will indeed need to worry about the possibility of stigmatization and discrimination, either against or on behalf of technologically enhanced individuals. Social justice is also at stake and we need to ensure that enhancement options are made available as widely and as affordably as possible. This is a primary reason why transhumanist movements have emerged. On a grassroots level, transhumanists are already working to promote the ideas of morphological, cognitive, and procreative freedoms with wide access to enhancement options. Despite the occasional rhetorical overreaches by some of its supporters, transhumanism has a positive and inclusive vision for how we can ethically embrace new technological possibilities to lead lives that are better than well.

The only real danger posed by transhumanism, it seems, is that people on both the left and the right may find it much more attractive than the reactionary bioconservatism proffered by Fukuyama and some of the other members of the Presidents Council.

[For a more developed response, see In Defense of Posthuman Dignity, Bioethics, 2005, Vol. 19, No. 3, pp. 202-214.]

Continue reading here:
Transhumanism: The World's Most Dangerous Idea?

Barbara H. Peterson

Farm Wars

There is a move afoot to reprogram humanity. To redefine it in the limited terms of scientific understanding, place it in a box, and then, all wrapped up in a pretty package, attempt to deliver this convoluted mess to us as progress.

There are those who think that, given the chance, they could and should genetically manipulate the earth and the creatures that inhabit it, including man, to suite a purpose of their own imaginings. They want to experiment on all of our precious resources, turn our rivers into streams of pollution, and take each and every living thing on earth and use it to create something better.

According to whose design? Well, the so-called scientific one, of course. And if this means combining cows and humans, goats and spiders, man and machine in order to achieve the goal? Well, so be it. After all, the only thing that is important is the end result. And the end result is that a few will obtain immortality or so they think. And if a few eggs get broken in the process, well, that is the price paid for success.

This is Transhumanism the natural culmination of something called reprogenetics. Some call it designer evolution.

What is Reprogenetics?

In short, reprogenetics is the genetic engineering of man to create a human race according to scientific design. Here is a definition from Lee M. Silver, author of the book Remaking Eden: How Genetic Engineering and Cloning Will Transform the American Family (1998).

Reprogenetics will involve advances in a number of technologies not yet achieved, but not inherently impossible. Among these are improvements in interpreting the effects of different expressions of DNA, the ability to harvest large numbers of embryos from females, and a far higher rate of reinsertion of embryos into host mothers. The end result, according to Silver, is that those parents who can afford it will be able to pick out the genetic characteristics of their own children, which Silver says will trigger a number of social changes in the decades after its implementation. Possible early applications, however, might be closer to eliminating disease genes passed on to children.

According to Silver, the main differences between reprogenetics and eugenics, the belief in the possibility of improving the gene pool which in the first half of the 20th century became infamous for the brutal policies it inspired, is that most eugenics programs were compulsory programs imposed upon citizens by governments trying to enact an ultimate goal.

It becomes quite apparent, after reading the quote above, that the main difference between reprogenetics and eugenics is consent, according to Lee M. Silver. Eugenics forced. Reprogenetics consented to. Same thing, different mode of action. From the forced culling of those deemed inferior to creating a superior race through genetic engineering, the end result is the same. Those deemed inferior are eventually culled from the system using DNA manipulation techniques.

Eugenics renamed and defined as scientific progress. A life-saving technique that can reprogram the human race and create the ideal human family. Thats the spin. Im sure the promoters said the same thing about nuclear energy. Dangerous? Naw. We know what we are doing. Arrogance.

So, lets take this technique of reprogramming humanity through reprogenetics/eugenics and dig a little deeper, shall we?

Meet Genome Compiler

OUR STORY:

Genome Compiler is built on the idea that biology is information technology. We can design and program living things the same way that we design computer code. Genetic designers today are still writing in 1s and 0s they lack the missing tools to design, debug, and compile the biological code into new living things.

At Genome Compiler, weve built just that a simplified solution for designing DNA.

We are inspired by the breakthrough research done by the JCVI and Harvard with their achievement of whole bacterial genome engineering, as required for functional changes in the form of new codes, new amino acids, safety and virus-resistance and a vision of making biological design easier, cheaper, and open to people outside the research labs.

Genome Compiler Corporation New

After all, when all is said and done, DNA is simply DNA, and mixing it up has no inherent consequences, right? That is what we are supposed to believe. And who is to say what is human and what is not? Arent we all made of molecules?

The Transhumanist Agenda

The following quote pretty much sums up the Transhumanist attitude towards the relationship between you, me, the computer I am using to write this, and the chair I am sitting on:

Whether somebody is implemented on silicon or biological tissue, if it does not affect functionality or consciousness, is of no moral significance. Carbon-chauvinism, in the form of anthropomorphism, speciesism, bioism or even fundamentalist humanism, is objectionable on the same grounds as racism.

A Transhumanist Manifesto [Redux]

If we want to be half human, half frog, isnt that our right? If everything is the same, then anything goes. This is put forth in the guise of freedom of choice, freedom from disease, and freedom from suffering. Actually, this is a sure road to slavery, disease and suffering, and a path towards erasing who we are and simply becoming just another set of molecules on planet earth, much like a chair, or car, or vacuum cleaner.

The Transhumanist goal, based on this oneness of all things biologically and artificially created, is to use science and technology to control evolution of the species, because science is safer than nature.

Biological evolution is perpetual but slow, inefficient, blind and dangerous. Technological evolution is fast, efficient, accelerating and better by design. To ensure the best chances of survival, take control of our own destiny and to be free, we must master evolution.

A Transhumanist Manifesto [Redux]

This mastering of evolution is accomplished through a scientific dictatorship:

Scientific Dictatorship is the utopian concept of scientific managerism whereby all facets of political, social and economic life are managed solely by the scientific method and dictates of science. (Patrick Wood)

And precaution? Well, that goes out the window. Quote from Dr. Max Moore, a leader in Transhumanism:

Many factors conspire to warp our reasoning about risks and benefits as individuals. The bad news is that such foolish thinking has been institutionalized and turned into a principle. Zealous pursuit of precaution has been enshrined in the precautionary principle. Regulators, negotiators, and activists refer to and defer to this principle when considering possible restrictions on productive activity and technological innovation.

In this chapter, I aim to explain how the precautionary principle, and the mindset that underlies it, threaten our well-being and our future.

http://www.maxmore.com/perils.htm

Dr. Max More, the author of The Principles of Extropy, is one of the top leaders of the Transhumanist movement, and the two are tightly interconnected. One could consider Extropy as as the metaphysical backbone of Transhumanism. (Patrick Wood)

In other words, according to one of the top leaders in the transhumanist movement, the precautionary principle actually endangers us. How convoluted can you get?

So, throwing caution aside, onward we go by experimenting through DNA manipulation to create a world where the pseudo-science of a scientific dictatorship rules supreme.

Here are just some examples of DNA mixing going on right now:

http://s-special4you.com/10-insane-cases-of-genetic-engineering/

The future of war is going to look really, really weird. The super soldier research that DARPA (the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency) is working on right now is unlike anything we have ever seen before. If DARPA is successful, and if the American people dont object, the soldiers of the future will be genetically modified transhumans capable of superhuman feats.

http://www.jimstonefreelance.com/vanilla/discussion/322/u-s-super-soldiers-of-the-future-will-be-genetically-modified-transhumans-capable-of-superhuman-/p1

We are in for a lot more than those who actually believe in the medical benefits of DNA manipulation bargained for. All these examples are leading us down the road to the real Transhumanist agenda:

Transhumanism is the application of science to the condition of man to achieve characteristics of immortality, omniscience and omnipresence, among others, and to produce a God-like race of post-humans. (Patrick Wood)

Yes, there are people who are actively attempting a complete takeover of humanity in order to set themselves up as supreme beings. To transcend physical boundaries by intermixing any DNA that so-called scientists think is appropriate, discard the precautionary principle as too dangerous for proper evolution, full speed ahead, meld man, machine, computer, and eventually, transcend to Godhood. It doesnt matter if it works, it doesnt matter if it is sane, it is a plan in the works. And the people who are involved think that they know how to create a better man.

Here is a bit of the history of Transhumanism and its ties to eugenics:

Julian Huxley, brother of Aldous who authored Brave New World, first used this word (1957): Transhumanism. Huxley was a member of the British Eugenics Society, eugenics being the foundation of Transhumanism.

Quote:

Eugenics is a science dedicated to a Darwinist philosophy applied to humanity, that the strong should thrive and evolve, while the weak are culled and eradicated.

Eugenics rests on a necessity of there being superior and inferior genetic pools in the human population. It might be very socially unacceptable to speak publicly of there being some races, ethnic or cultural groups who are inferior to the rest, yet in secrecy this is exactly what elite Eugenicists believe.

The public is guided to love the idea of Transhumanism by being persuaded that it is not a goal attached to race or ethnicity, but simply a means of bettering all of humanity. This is quite untrue.

Elite Transhumanists have no desire to evolve all humankind, their goal is one which seeks to advance only their own bloodlines and to leave the rest in disadvantage to them so that these unfortunate ones have no choice but to become their slaves, their lab animals and their labor force.

The lowest strata are reproducing too fast. Therefore they must not have too easy access to relief or hospital treatment lest the removal of the last check on natural selection should make it too easy for children to be produced or to survive; long unemployment should be a ground for sterilization.

Julian Huxley

http://www.zengardner.com/transhumanism-techno-eugenics-usurping-humanity/

And wouldnt you know it, the Rockefeller Foundation can be found providing funding for the eugenics movement:

In 1927, the Rockefeller Foundation provided funds to construct the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Anthropology, Human Heredity, and Eugenics in Berlin, which came under the directorship of the appropriately named Eugen Fischer. Adolf Hitler read Fischers textbook Principles of Human Heredity and Race Hygiene while in prison at Landsberg and used eugenical notions to support the ideal of a pure Aryan society in his manifesto, Mein Kampf (My Struggle).

http://www.eugenicsarchive.org/eugenics/topics_fs.pl?theme=41

What was termed in its early stages as a pure Aryan society, is now being repackaged as a pure Transhumanist society in which DNA is programmed to conform to the design of a scientific dictatorship, and sold as the salvation of man. The New Age of ascention. Same story, new box. When will we learn?

And the motivation for all of this? As usual, there are many:

Profit

Human transcendence

Control

Power

Eternal life immortality

The justification? Thats easy: Progress always requires sacrifice. To quote a famous activist:

Human progress is neither automatic nor inevitable. Even a superficial look at history reveals that no social advance rolls in on wheels of inevitability. Every step toward the goal of justice requires sacrifice, suffering, and struggle; the tireless exertions and passionate concern of dedicated individuals. Without persistent effort, time itself becomes an ally of the insurgent and primitive forces of irrational emotionalism and social destruction. This is no time for apathy or complacency. This is a time for vigorous and positive action. (MLK Jr.)

Except in this case, it is not the beneficiary of the technologys sacrifice that is required, but the sacrifice of dedicated and ignorant servants and an unwitting populace. We sacrifice our health, wealth, and minds to the slavery of junk science that says it is okay to maim, torture, and impoverish millions so that a few may gain. It is okay to run widespread experiments on humanity so that a few may benefit from those experiments and transcend to a God-like state and rule over the universe. It doesnt matter if you believe it, or if I believe it. It doesnt have to be rational or sane. What matters is that people with enough money and power to go forth with this agenda do believe it, are working steadily towards it, and know how to market it in order to get the public to accept it as beneficial.

Transhumanism is being sold to the public as bringing forth a new age of enlightenment. This story is as old as the Biblical account of the Garden of Eden, where Lucifer, masquerading as the angel of light, tells Eve that he knows a better way. It is also being touted as an extension of Darwinism: another step in the evolutionary process the better, scientific way, because the slow, biological way is simply too dangerous and inherently unpredictable.

Humans are about to decommission natural selection in favour of guided evolution. Darwinian processes gave humanity a good start, but Homo sapiens can be improved. Owing to advances in genetics, cybernetics, nanotechnology, computer science, and cognitive science, humans are set to redefine the human condition. Future humans can look forward to longer lives, enhanced intelligence, memory, communication and physical skills, and improved emotional control. Humans may eventually cease to be biological and gendered organisms altogether, giving rise to the posthuman entity. Human enhancement will irrevocably alter social arrangements, interpersonal relationships, and society itself. And theres also the added potential for nonhuman enhancement.

http://www.sentientdevelopments.com/2007/01/must-know-terms-for-21st-century_11.html

Much better to trust in man and his scientific knowledge to create a better evolutionary path, and manipulating our DNA is that way. And just who comes to mind as an expert at manipulating DNA and public perception?

The Monsanto Connection

Remember when Craig Venture of Atlas Venture created Synthia, a synthetic life form, and partnered with Monsanto?

Monsanto and Atlas Venture

And now Monsanto has recently signed a deal with Atlas Venture for funding of, well, who knows? Monsanto does. And Monsanto isnt telling. But we do know that it will most likely be some sort of disruptive innovation because that is Atlas Ventures specialty. Atlas Venture is an early stage investment firm dedicated to financing disruptive innovation in Life Sciences and Technology.

In the Grip of Mad Scientists: Business as Usual for Monsanto, Fort Detrick, and Atlas Venture

Well, it appears that Monsanto and Atlas Venture are working on a new type of genetic engineering using RNA. Is this the disruptive technology that I mentioned in my article cited above?

Generations of high school kids have been taught that only about 3 percent of the human genome is actually usefulmeaning it contains genes that code proteinsand the rest is junk DNA. Cambridge, MA-based RaNA Therapeutics was founded on the idea that the so-called junk is actually gold, because it contains a type of RNA that can flip genes on inside cells, potentially offering a new approach to modulating diseases.RaNA is coming out of stealth mode today and announcing a $20.7 million Series A financing led by Atlas Venture, SR One, and agricultural giant Monsanto (NYSE: MON). Partners Innovation Fund also participated in the funding.

RaNA Raises $20.7M From Atlas, SR One, Monsanto, for RNA-Based Tech

What is RaNA Therapeutics?

RaNA Therapeutics is pioneering the discovery of a new class of medicines that target RNA to selectively activate protein expression, thereby enabling the body to produce desirable proteins to treat or prevent disease. RaNAs novel therapeutics work by precisely activating the expression of select genes within the patients own cells, increasing the synthesis of therapeutic proteins. The companys proprietary RNA targeting technology works epigenetically to make it possible, for the first time, to increase the expression of therapeutic proteins with exquisite selectivity.

Home

This has the potential to turn on and silence, with a great degree of accuracy, gene expression in anyones body. For example,

The patchy colours of a tortoiseshell cat are the result of different levels of expression of pigmentation genes in different areas of the skin.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gene_expression

Monsanto is not working at Curing world hunger through biotechnology. That is a successful smokescreen and marketing slogan gone viral. Edward Bernays, the father of marketing propaganda to the masses, would have been proud.

The Inevitable Conclusion

Remember the definition of reprogenetics in the beginning of this article? Reprogenetics is the genetic engineering of man to create a human race according to scientific design. Well, it is 2013, and we now have the tools to silence and turn on genes through RNA manipulation. And its coming to us courtesy of Monsanto, the chemical/life sciences company that brought us Agent Orange, PCBs, and most of the genetically engineered ingredients in 80% of the processed foods we eat every day.

We know that a pseudo-scientific agenda called Transhumanism, which is bankrolled by some very rich and influential people, is intended to change us as a species, knows no bounds, is set to replace biology as we know it and is inexorably connected to eugenics. We know that this Transhumanist agenda is well on its way to changing the world in ways that we cannot fathom, and we know that Monsanto is involved through its research and application of DNA manipulation techniques in our food supply. Happy eating, America

2013 Barbara H. Peterson

Go here to read the rest:
Transhumanism: Genetic Engineering of Man - the New ...

1.

Many philosophers argue that humans are a distinctive kind of creature and that some capacities that distinguish humans from nonhumans give us a moral dignity denied to nonhumans. This status supposedly merits special protections that are not extended to nonhumans and special claims on the resources to cultivate those capacities reserved for humans alone.

However, I will argue that if we are committed to developing human capacities and welfare using advanced (NBIC) technologies (see below) our commitment to other humans and our interest in remaining human cannot be overriding. This is because such policies could engender posthumans and the prospect of a posthuman dispensation should, be properly evaluated rather than discounted. I will argue that evaluation (accounting) is not liable to be achievable without posthumans. Thus transhumanists who justify the technological enhancement and redesigning of humans on humanist grounds have a moral interest in making posthumans or becoming posthuman that is not reconcilable with the priority humanists have traditionally attached to human welfare and the cultivation of human capacities.

2.

To motivate this claim, I need to distinguish three related philosophical positions: Humanism, Transhumanism and Posthumanism and explain how they are related.

Humanism (H)

For the purposes of this argument, a philosophical humanist is anyone who believes that humans are importantly distinct from non-humans.

For example, many humanists have claimed that humans are distinguished by their reasoning prowess from nonhuman animals. One traditional view common to Plato, Aristotle, Descartes, Rousseau, Kant and others is that humans are responsive to reasons while animals respond only to sensory stimuli and feeling. Being rational allows humans to bypass or suppress emotions such as fear or anger and (for better or worse) cultivate normatively sanctioned forms of action and affection.

Responsiveness to reasons is both a cognitive and a moral capacity. The fact that I can distinguish between principles like equality and freedom, for example, allows me to see these as alternative principles of conduct: The power to set an end any end whatsoever is the characteristic of humanity (as distinguished from animality) (Kant 1948, 51).

Most humanists claim that the capacities such as rationality or sociability that distinguish us from cats, dogs and chimps also single us out for special treatment.[1]

For Kant, this capacity to choose the reasons for our actions to form a will, as he puts it, is the only thing that is good in an unqualified way (Kant 1948, 62).

Even thinkers who allow that the human capacity for self-shaping is just one good among a plurality of equivalent but competing goods claim that autonomy confers a dignity on humans that should be protected by laws and cultivated by the providing the means to exercise it.

Thus most humanists hold some conception of what makes a distinctively human life a valuable one and have developed precepts and methods for protecting and developing these valuable attributes.

At the risk of oversimplifying, the generic humanist techniques for achieving this are politics and education.

For example, in Politics 1 Aristotle claimed that virtues like justice, courage or generosity need a political organization to provide the leisure, training, opportunities and resources to develop and exercise these valuable traits:

Hence it is evident that the state is a creation of nature, andthat man is by nature a political animal. And he who by nature and notby mere accident is without a state, is either a bad man or above humanity;he is like the

Tribeless, lawless, hearthless one,

whom Homer denounces- the natural outcast is forthwith a lover of war; he may be compared to an isolated piece at draughts

Rousseau and Marx, likewise see the political as the setting in which humans become fully human. Liberal political philosophers may be more wary of attributing intrinsic value to politics but most see the social goods secured by it as thesine qua non of a decent existence.

Transhumanism (H+)

Transhumanists share core humanist values and aspiration. They think that human-distinctive attributes like rationality and autonomy are good, as are human social emotions and human aesthetic sensibilities.

They also think that these capacities should be cultivated where possible and protected: e.g. by ensuring basic liberties and providing the resources for their fullest possible development.

However, they believe that the traditional methods that humanists have used to develop human capacities are limited in their scope by the material constraints of human biology and that of nature more generally.

Our biological and material substrate was not a political issue until relatively recently because we lacked the technological means to alter it. Although philosophers like Aristotle, Hume and Kant proposed theories of human nature, this nature was essentially an encapsulated black box. One could know what it did and why it did it, but not how it did it. Thus a basic cognitive function, such as imagination is described by Kant as ahidden art in the depths of the human soul, whose true operations we can divine from nature and lay unveiled before our eyes only with difficulty (Kant 1978, A1412/B1801).

Transhumanists believes that prospective developments in a suite of technologies called the NBIC technologies and sciences will at last allow humans unprecedented control over their own and morphology.

NBIC stands for Nanotechnology, Biotechnology, Information Technology, and Cognitive Science.

The smarter we are the more effectively we can develop techniques for developing human capacities: e.g. by eliminating starvation or scarcity with new agricultural and manufacturing techniques, finding cures for diseases or by becoming better democratic deliberators.

Thus if advancing human welfare is a moral priority, and extending human cognitive capacities is the best way of achieving this, we should extend our cognitive capacities using NBIC technologies all other things being equal (A supplementary argument for a transhuman politics assumes that certain capacities are necessarily characterized in terms of some end or fulfilment. Thus they are exercised appropriately when their possessor strives to refine and improve them See Mulhall 1998).

The exercise of rationality requires many cognitive aptitudes: perception, working and long-term memory, general intelligence and the capacity to acquire cultural tools such as languages and reasoning methods. There appear to have been significant increases the level of general intelligence in industrialized countries during the twentieth century particularly at the lower end of the scale. These may be explained by public health initiatives such as the removal of organic lead from paints and petrol, improved nutrition and free public education.

These increases, if real, are a clear social good. However, there seems to be a limit to the effect of environmental factors upon cognition because the efficiency of our brains is constrained by the speed, interconnectedness, noisiness and density of the neurons packed into our skulls.

Thus the best scientists, philosophers or artists currently alive are no more intelligent or creative than Aristotle, Descartes, Leibniz or Kant. There are far more thinkers on the planet than in Aristotles time and they are better equipped than ever before but their minds, it seems, are no more able than those of previous artists, scientists and philosophers.

For transhumanist thinkers like Nick Bostrom and Ray Kurzweil, this suggests that many major improvements of intelligence will require us to escape our biology by outsourcing our thinking to non-biological platforms such as computing devices. The components of the fastest computers operate tens of millions times faster than the spiking frequency of the fastest human nerve cell (neuron) so this suggests an obvious way in which humans transcend the biological limitations on our brains.[2]

Many early 21st century humans offload the tedious tasks like arithmetic, memorizing character strings like phone numbers or searching for the local 24-hour dry cleaner to computing devices. Transhumanists claim that the process of outsourcing biologically based cognition onto non-biological platforms is liable to accelerate as our artificially intelligent devices get more intelligent and as we devise smarter ways of integrating computing hardware into our neurocomputational wetware. Here the convergence of nanotechnology, information technology and biotechnology is liable to be key.

Brain Computer Interfaces like the BrainGate BCI show that it is possible to directly interface computer operated systems with neural tissue, allowing tetraplegic patients to control devices such as robotic arms with their thoughts.

Transhumanists see future humans becoming ever more intimate with responsive computer systems that can extend physical functions using robotic limbs or arms well as cognitive functions such as perception or working memory.

Thus it seems quite possible that future humans or transhumans will be increasingly indistinguishable from their technology. Humans will become cyborgs or cybernetic organisms like the Borg in the TV series Star Trek with many of the functions associated with thinking, perception and even consciousness subserved by increasingly fast and subtle computing devices.

As Star Trek aficionados will be aware, the Borg do not seem to represent an attractive ideal for the humanist who values individual autonomy and reason. The Borg area technological swarm intelligence like an ant or termite colony whose individual members are slaved to goals of the Collective.

Collectively the Borg possesses great cognitive powers and considerable technical prowess though these powers emerge from the interactions of highly networked drones, each of which has its human rationality, agency and sociability violently suppressed.

However, many argue that it is nave to associate the status of the cyborg with that of dehumanized machines.

The cognitive scientist and philosopher Andy Clark has argued that the integration of technology into biology is a historical process that has defined human beings since the development of flint tools, writing and architecture. We are, in Clarks words, Natural Born Cyborgs whose mental life has always extruded into culturally constructed niches such as languages and archives:

The promise, or perhaps threatened, transition to a world of wired humans and semi-intelligent gadgets is just one more move in an ancient game. . . We are already masters at incorporating nonbiological stuff and structure deep into our physical and cognitive routines. To appreciate this is to cease to believe in any post-human future and to resist the temptation to define ourselves in brutal opposition to the very worlds in which so many of us now live, love and work (Clark 2003, 142).

If this is the case, then perhaps the wired, transhuman future that I am sketching here will still be inhabited by beings whose aspirations and values will be recognizable to humanists like Aristotle, Rousseau and Kant.

These transhuman descendants might still value autonomy, sociability and artistic expression. They will just be much better at being rational, sensitive and expressive. Perhaps, also, these skills will repose in bodies that are technologically modified by advanced biotechnologies to be healthier and far more resistant to ageing or damage than ours. But the capacities that define that humanist tradition here are not obviously dependent on a particular kind of physical form.

For this reason transhumanists believe that we should add morphological freedom the freedom of physical form to the traditional liberal rights of freedom of movement and freedom of expression. We should be free do discover new forms of embodiment e.g. new ways of integrating ourselves with cognitive technologies in order to improve on the results of traditional humanizing techniques like liberal arts education or public health legislation.

Posthumanism (SP)

As someone who shares many of the humanist values and aspirations that Ive described, Ill admit to finding the transhuman itinerary for our future attractive. Perhaps some version of it will also be an ecological and economic necessity as we assume responsibility for a planetary ecosystem populated by nine billion humans.

However, there is a catch. While the technological prospectus Ive given may result in beings that are recognizably like us: only immeasurably smarter, nicer, weller and more capable. It might produce beings that are not human at all in some salient respect.

Such technologically engendered nonhumans or posthumans may not be the kinds of beings to which humanist values apply. They may still be immeasurably smarter and more robust than we are, but also alien ways that we cannot easily understand.

I call the position according to which there might be posthumans Speculative Posthumanism to distinguish it from posthuman philosophies not directly relevant to this discussion.

The speculative posthumanist is committed to the following claim:

(SP) Descendants of current humans could cease to be human by virtue of a history of technical alteration.

Clearly, this is a very schematic statement and needs some unpacking.

For example, it does not explain what ceasing to be human could involve. If Clark and the transhumanists are right, then ceasing to be human is not just a matter of altering ones hardware or wetware. A human cyborg modified to live in hostile environments like the depths of the sea or space might look strange to us but might use a natural language whose morphology and syntax is learnable unmodified humans, value her autonomy and have characteristic human social emotions such as exclusive feelings towards other family members or amour-propre.[3] Thus many of the traits with which we pick out humans from nonhumans could well generalize beyond morphology.

Some argue that the self-shaping, reflective rationality that Kant thought distinguished humanity from animality is an obvious constituent of a human essence. An essential property of a kind is a property that no member of that kind can lack. If this is right, then losing the capacity for practical rationality by some technological process (as with the Borg) is a decisive, if unappealing, path to posthumanity.

It can be objected of course that members of the human species (very young children) lack the capacity to exercise reflective rationality while other humans (individuals with severe mental disabilities) are not able to acquire it. Thus that it cannot be a necessary condition for humanity. Being rational might better be described as a qualification for moral personhood: where a person is simply a rational agent capable of shaping its own life and living on fair terms with other persons.

If posthumans were to qualify as moral persons by this or some other criterion we appear to have a basis for a posthuman republicanism. The fact that other beings may be differently embodied from regular humans intelligent robots, cyborgs or cognitively enhanced animals does not prevent us living with them as equals.

However, it is possible to conceive of technological alterations producing life forms or worlds so alien that they are not recognizably human lives or worlds.

In a 1993 article The Coming Technological Singularity: How to survive in the posthuman era the computer scientist Vernor Vinge argued that the invention of a technology for creating entities with greater than human intelligence would lead to the end of human dominion of the planet and the beginning of a posthuman era dominated by intelligences vastly greater than ours (Vinge 1993).

For Vinge, this point could be reached via recursive improvements in the technology. If humans or human-equivalent intelligences could use the technology to create superhuman intelligences the resultant entities could make even more intelligent entities, and so on.

Thus a technology for intelligence creation or intelligence amplification would constitute a singular point or singularity beyond which the level of mentation on this planet might increase exponentially and without limit.

The form of this technology is unimportant for Vinges argument. It could be a powerful cognitive enhancement technique, a revolution in machine intelligence or synthetic life, or some as yet unenvisaged process. The technology needs to be extendible in as much that improving it yields corresponding increases in the intelligence produced. Our only current means of producing human-equivalent intelligence is non-extendible: If we have better sex . . . it does not follow that our babies will be geniuses (Chalmers 2010: 18).

The posthuman minds that would result from this intelligence explosion could be so vast, according to Vinge, that we have no models for their transformative potential. The best we can do to grasp the significance of this transcendental event is to draw analogies with an earlier revolution in intelligence: the emergence of posthuman minds would be as much a step-change in the development of life on earth as the The rise of humankind.

Vinges singularity hypothesis the claim that intelligence-making technology would generate posthuman intelligence by recursive improvement is practically and philosophically important. If it is true and its preconditions feasible, its importance may outweigh other political and environmental concerns for these are predicated on human invariants such as biological embodiment, which may not obtain following a singularity.

However, even if a singularity is not technically possible or not imminent the Singularity Hypothesis (SH) still raises a troubling issue concerning our capacity to evaluate the long-run consequences of our technical activity in areas such as the NBIC technologies. This is because Vinges prognosis presupposes a weaker, more general claim to the effect that activity in NBIC areas or similar might generate forms of life which might be significantly alien or other to ours.

If we assume Speculative Posthumanism it seems we can adopt either of two policies towards the posthuman prospect.

Firstly, we can account for it: that is, assess the ethical implications of contributing to the creation of posthumans through our current technological activities.

Vinges scenario gives us reasons for thinking that the differences between humans and posthumans could be so great as to render accounting impossible or problematic in the cases that matter. The differences stressed in Vinges essay are cognitive: posthumans might be so much smarter than humans that we could not understand their thoughts or anticipate the transformative effects of posthuman technology. There might be other very radical differences. Posthumans might have experiences so different from ours that we cannot envisage what living a posthuman life would be like, let alone whether it would be worthwhile or worthless one. Finally, the structure of posthuman minds might be very different from our kind of subjectivity.

Moral personhood presumably has threshold cognitive and affective preconditions such as the capacity to evaluate actions, beliefs and desires (practical rationality) and a capacity for the emotions, and affiliations informing these evaluations. However, human-style practical reason might not be accessible to a being with nonsubjective phenomenology. Such an entity could be incapable of experiencing itself as a bounded individual with a life that might go better or worse for it.

Read more:
Humanism, Transhumanism and Posthumanism

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Originally posted here:
A2 Yoga, 2030 Commerce Blvd., Ann Arbor, MI:

How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives, Annie Dillard wrote in her timeless reflection on presence over productivity a timely antidote to the central anxiety of our productivity-obsessed age. Indeed, my own New Years resolution has been to stop measuring my days by degree of productivity and start experiencing them by degree of presence. But what, exactly, makes that possible?

This concept of presence is rooted in Eastern notions of mindfulness the ability to go through life with crystalline awareness and fully inhabit our experience largely popularized in the West by British philosopher and writer Alan Watts (January 6, 1915November 16, 1973), who also gave us this fantastic meditation on the life of purpose. In the altogether excellent 1951 volume The Wisdom of Insecurity: A Message for an Age of Anxiety (public library), Watts argues that the root of our human frustration and daily anxiety is our tendency to live for the future, which is an abstraction. He writes:

If to enjoy even an enjoyable present we must have the assurance of a happy future, we are crying for the moon. We have no such assurance. The best predictions are still matters of probability rather than certainty, and to the best of our knowledge every one of us is going to suffer and die. If, then, we cannot live happily without an assured future, we are certainly not adapted to living in a finite world where, despite the best plans, accidents will happen, and where death comes at the end.

What keeps us from happiness, Watts argues, is our inability to fully inhabit the present:

The primary consciousness, the basic mind which knows reality rather than ideas about it, does not know the future. It lives completely in the present, and perceives nothing more than what is at this moment. The ingenious brain, however, looks at that part of present experience called memory, and by studying it is able to make predictions. These predictions are, relatively, so accurate and reliable (e.g., everyone will die) that the future assumes a high degree of reality so high that the present loses its value.

But the future is still not here, and cannot become a part of experienced reality until it is present. Since what we know of the future is made up of purely abstract and logical elements inferences, guesses, deductions it cannot be eaten, felt, smelled, seen, heard, or otherwise enjoyed. To pursue it is to pursue a constantly retreating phantom, and the faster you chase it, the faster it runs ahead. This is why all the affairs of civilization are rushed, why hardly anyone enjoys what he has, and is forever seeking more and more. Happiness, then, will consist, not of solid and substantial realities, but of such abstract and superficial things as promises, hopes, and assurances.

Watts argues that our primary mode of relinquishing presence is by leaving the body and retreating into the mind that ever-calculating, self-evaluating, seething cauldron of thoughts, predictions, anxieties, judgments, and incessant meta-experiences about experience itself. Writing more than half a century before our age of computers, touch-screens, and the quantified self, Watts admonishes:

The brainy modern loves not matter but measures, no solids but surfaces.

[]

The working inhabitants of a modern city are people who live inside a machine to be batted around by its wheels. They spend their days in activities which largely boil down to counting and measuring, living in a world of rationalized abstraction which has little relation to or harmony with the great biological rhythms and processes. As a matter of fact, mental activities of this kind can now be done far more efficiently by machines than by men so much so that in a not too distant future the human brain may be an obsolete mechanism for logical calculation. Already the human computer is widely displaced by mechanical and electrical computers of far greater speed and efficiency. If, then, mans principal asset and value is his brain and his ability to calculate, he will become an unsaleable commodity in an era when the mechanical operation of reasoning can be done more effectively by machines.

[]

If we are to continue to live for the future, and to make the chief work of the mind prediction and calculation, man must eventually become a parasitic appendage to a mass of clockwork.

To be sure, Watts doesnt dismiss the mind as a worthless or fundamentally perilous human faculty. Rather, he insists that it if we let its unconscious wisdom unfold unhampered like, for instance, what takes place during the incubation stage of unconscious processing in the creative process it is our ally rather than our despot. It is only when we try to control it and turn it against itself that problems arise:

Working rightly, the brain is the highest form of instinctual wisdom. Thus it should work like the homing instinct of pigeons and the formation of the fetus in the womb without verbalizing the process or knowing how it does it. The self-conscious brain, like the self-conscious heart, is a disorder, and manifests itself in the acute feeling of separation between I and my experience. The brain can only assume its proper behavior when consciousness is doing what it is designed for: not writhing and whirling to get out of present experience, but being effortlessly aware of it.

And yet the brain does writhe and whirl, producing our great human insecurity and existential anxiety amidst a universe of constant flux. (For, as Henry Miller memorably put it, It is almost banal to say so yet it needs to be stressed continually: all is creation, all is change, all is flux, all is metamorphosis.) Paradoxically, recognizing that the experience of presence is the only experience is also a reminder that our I doesnt exist beyond this present moment, that there is no permanent, static, and immutable self which can grant us any degree of security and certainty for the future and yet we continue to grasp for precisely that assurance of the future, which remains an abstraction. Our only chance for awakening from this vicious cycle, Watts argues, is bringing full awareness to our present experience something very different from judging it, evaluating it, or measuring it up against some arbitrary or abstract ideal. He writes:

There is a contradiction in wanting to be perfectly secure in a universe whose very nature is momentariness and fluidity. But the contradiction lies a little deeper than the mere conflict between the desire for security and the fact of change. If I want to be secure, that is, protected from the flux of life, I am wanting to be separate from life. Yet it is this very sense of separateness which makes me feel insecure. To be secure means to isolate and fortify the I, but it is just the feeling of being an isolated I which makes me feel lonely and afraid. In other words, the more security I can get, the more I shall want.

To put it still more plainly: the desire for security and the feeling of insecurity are the same thing. To hold your breath is to lose your breath. A society based on the quest for security is nothing but a breath-retention contest in which everyone is as taut as a drum and as purple as a beet.

He takes especial issue with the very notion of self-improvement something particularly prominent in the season of New Years resolutions and admonishes against the implication at its root:

I can only think seriously of trying to live up to an ideal, to improve myself, if I am split in two pieces. There must be a good I who is going to improve the bad me. I, who has the best intentions, will go to work on wayward me, and the tussle between the two will very much stress the difference between them. Consequently I will feel more separate than ever, and so merely increase the lonely and cut-off feelings which make me behave so badly.

Happiness, he argues, isnt a matter of improving our experience, or even merely confronting it, but remaining present with it in the fullest possible sense:

To stand face to face with insecurity is still not to understand it. To understand it, you must not face it but be it. It is like the Persian story of the sage who came to the door of Heaven and knocked. From within the voice of God asked, Who is there and the sage answered, It is I. In this House, replied the voice, there is no room for thee and me. So the sage went away, and spent many years pondering over this answer in deep meditation. Returning a second time, the voice asked the same question, and again the sage answered, It is I. The door remained closed. After some years he returned for the third time, and, at his knocking, the voice once more demanded, Who is there? And the sage cried, It is thyself! The door was opened.

We dont actually realize that there is no security, Watts asserts, until we confront the myth of fixed selfhood and recognize that the solid I doesnt exist something modern psychology has termed the self illusion. And yet that is incredibly hard to do, for in the very act of this realization there is a realizing self. Watts illustrates this paradox beautifully:

While you are watching this present experience, are you aware of someone watching it? Can you find, in addition to the experience itself, an experiencer? Can you, at the same time, read this sentence and think about yourself reading it? You will find that, to think about yourself reading it, you must for a brief second stop reading. The first experience is reading. The second experience is the thought, I am reading. Can you find any thinker, who is thinking the thought, I am reading? In other words, when present experience is the thought, I am reading, can you think about yourself thinking this thought?

Once again, you must stop thinking just, I am reading. You pass to a third experience, which is the thought, I am thinking that I am reading. Do not let the rapidity with which these thoughts can change deceive you into the feeling that you think them all at once.

[]

In each present experience you were only aware of that experience. You were never aware of being aware. You were never able to separate the thinker from the thought, the knower from the known. All you ever found was a new thought, a new experience.

What makes us unable to live with pure awareness, Watts points out, is the ball and chain of our memory and our warped relationship with time:

The notion of a separate thinker, of an I distinct from the experience, comes from memory and from the rapidity with which thought changes. It is like whirling a burning stick to give the illusion of a continuous circle of fire. If you imagine that memory is a direct knowledge of the past rather than a present experience, you get the illusion of knowing the past and the present at the same time. This suggests that there is something in you distinct from both the past and the present experiences. You reason, I know this present experience, and it is different from that past experience. If I can compare the two, and notice that experience has changed, I must be something constant and apart.

But, as a matter of fact, you cannot compare this present experience with a past experience. You can only compare it with a memory of the past, which is a part of the present experience. When you see clearly that memory is a form of present experience, it will be obvious that trying to separate yourself from this experience is as impossible as trying to make your teeth bite themselves.

[]

To understand this is to realize that life is entirely momentary, that there is neither permanence nor security, and that there is no I which can be protected.

And therein lies the crux of our human struggle:

The real reason why human life can be so utterly exasperating and frustrating is not because there are facts called death, pain, fear, or hunger. The madness of the thing is that when such facts are present, we circle, buzz, writhe, and whirl, trying to get the I out of the experience. We pretend that we are amoebas, and try to protect ourselves from life by splitting in two. Sanity, wholeness, and integration lie in the realization that we are not divided, that man and his present experience are one, and that no separate I or mind can be found.

To understand music, you must listen to it. But so long as you are thinking, I am listening to this music, you are not listening.

The Wisdom of Insecurity is immeasurably wonderful existentially necessary, even in its entirety, and one of those books bound to stay with you for a lifetime.

Thanks, Ken

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Alan Watts on how to live with presence - Brain Pickings

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