超人类主义:人的完善化与非政治化

On Transhumanism as the Perfection and Depoliticization of Human Beings

超人类主义通过新技术尤其是生物技术改善或增强人的体能、智力、情感以及道德等方面,代表了一种将人完善化的新方案。在理论上,超人类主义往往被解释为启蒙思想的遗产。但是,如果我们回溯到启蒙关于人的完善化的语境,就会发现这种通过新技术完善人的方案的狭隘性。它仅仅将人理解为自然性和生物性的存在,排除了人的完善化的社会和政治条件,甚至将人变成了技术处理的“材料”。超人类主义对人的完善化,在本质上属于技术控制与主宰自然、否定生命的虚无主义。要摆脱这种虚无主义,我们仍然需要从启蒙对人的完善的理解中借鉴思想资源,将人的完善化理解为一个有厚度的概念。

Transhumanism represents a new scheme whereby human beings can be perfected by improving or enhancing their physical,mental,emotional,and moral abilities through new technologies,especially biotechnology.Although transhumanism is often interpreted as one legacy of the Enlightenment,re-examining the notion of the perfection of human beings in that historical context demonstrates the narrowness of the transhumanism scheme for optimizing human beings through new technology.Transhumanism eliminates the social-political conditions for human perfection because it only recognizes the natural and biological existence of human beings,thereby turning human perfection into a technical problem.The transhumanist notion of the perfection of human beings still belongs to a kind of nihilism that negates life in the attempt to control and dominate nature.In order to do away with this kind of nihilism,this paper argues for the need to re-examine the Enlightenment notion of the perfection of human beings and deepen it in accordance with current findings in contemporary thought.