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Communication Dans Un Congrès Année : 2024

The Question of Time, from Death to Disease: Examining Transhumanist Discourses on Immortality from a Phenomenological Perspective

Résumé

By discussing transhumanism from a philosophical and phenomenological perspective, this paper will examine one of the Trojan horses of transhumanist discourses: immortality. Death is usually seen as an individual, social and political issue, which is dealt with by according means: cemeteries, grief, legacy… However, transhumanist authors and associations envision how the human being would transcend his mortality and how the transhuman could be immortal or amortal. For them, death is not the biological limit of living beings anymore, but rather an unnecessary disease. Consequently, this paper firstly argues that transhumanist authors show death as a biological issue which should be dealt with by technical breakthroughs. This transhumanist plea makes the human life all the more biological by strictly considering it as an object of natural, biological and medical sciences, in a perspective that reminds us about the Cartesian animal-machine, i.e., an application of automaton thinking to living beings. Therefore, this paper will ask if the transhumanist plea for immortality is a paradoxical reduction of the transhuman to any automatic machine. Indeed, by discussing Heidegger’s groundbreaking explanation of Sein zum Tode (being-toward-death) in its Being and Time, we will explain how Heideggerian phenomenology presents death not only as a biological event that occurs to Cartesian automata, but as an ontological structure of human existence. According to Heidegger, the prospect of death opens us to our lived temporality; and to achieve immortality would abolish the original limit of this temporal horizon of existence. This paper claims that to see death as an external disease that could or could not happen to the human being is to bring the human back to his primary biological state, to his automatic animalitas; instead of seeing Dasein as an existing being that is fundamentally organized towards finitude. By doing so, transhumanist authors anticipate an ontological change in the concept of finitude itself, that could change the measure of our existential sphere.
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Dates et versions

hal-04590303 , version 1 (28-05-2024)

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  • HAL Id : hal-04590303 , version 1

Citer

Jessica Lombard. The Question of Time, from Death to Disease: Examining Transhumanist Discourses on Immortality from a Phenomenological Perspective. Theoretical Lessons from the Biology of Aging, Philippe Huneman, Apr 2024, IHPST, Paris, France. ⟨hal-04590303⟩

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