Transhumanismo e suas oscilações prometeico-fáusticas: tecnoapoteose na era da ciência demiúrgica

Abstract

We have the pretension, with this work, to examine Transhumanism, a philosophical and cultural movement that longs for the overcoming of the human organic condition as a result of the exponential techno-scientific advance, expressed into a human enhancement that comprises a broad spectrum of human action. For this, in view of a historical rescue of its archimedean points or roots, we assert that the movement can be understood in accordance with the two technoscientific traditions, Promethean and Faustic, both constituted in the light of Hermínio Martin's philosophy and sociology, by peculiar traits. The first is in a technoscientific structure impelled by the idea that, through reason, we can modify the world for something better, to morph it in the desire to obtain the human good, whose point of culmination is Humanism; the second expresses an excessive, unbridled character, a hubris that establishes a fissure in the Humanist ideal. We hold, in addition, under the prism of Hermínio Martins and Victor Ferkiss, that the movement resonates a kind of "neognosticism" or "technological gnosticism", since it promotes, to some extent, a transcendent high-tech salvationism, in detriment of pure organicity that we are constituent. We also want to make it evident that the Transhumanist movement does not exhaust itself in monolithic terms, given that it is expressed in disparate nuances of the political spectrum, adapting itself, bringing new lines of discussion and focuses of analysis and proposition, inscribed in two categories: Promethean Transhumanism and Faustic Transhumanism. Finally, in elucidating the exponential development of the demiurgic sciences, we aim to establish ways for a clear understanding that, notwithstanding the Transhumanism being permeated by the risk of intensifying the global injustice, by flexibilizing the natural human constitution in favor of an abstract human, therefore potentially dangerous, movement can be conceived as a way to solve countless problems of the human sphere. And in the face of the impacts from the advancement of these technologies, we aspire to, finally, highlight how colossal is the relevance of this discussion in the philosophic and academic field.