The Future of Human Nature in a Post-human World: Habermas in Dialogue with Jonas' Philosophical Biology

In two lectures given at the beginning of the 2000s, Habermas focuses on the ethical problems linked to biotechnologies, notably to genetic engineering techniques. In an attempt to warn of the dangers inherent in liberal eugenics, Habermas proposes a definition of human nature with a metaphysical basis. In this paper, I argue that Habermas' analysis of the potential effect of biotechnology on human beings represents the theoretical outcome of a close dialogue with Hans Jonas' biological philosophy. The deconstruction of Habermas and Jonas' arguments not only provides the opportunity to reflect on the internal contradictions of an essentialist conception of human beings—still widespread today and directly or indirectly present in various critiques of post- and trans-humanist dystopias—but also allows for an exploration of some tendencies of 20th century German thought, which seeks to distance itself from the philosophical consequences of Darwinian evolutionism.

Since the beginning of the '70s, the development of several kinds of biotechnologies has laid the foundation for cultural debate about the future of human species. The ideological clash became intense when various philosophers and scientists highlighted the need to go beyond the classical humanist definition of Homo Sapiens, which was seen as an obsolete conception of human beings. These philosophical and, in a broad sense, cultural tendencies converged during the '80s in the post-humanist movement, whose main exponents believe that humans can improve their physical and moral condition and overcome the limits imposed by nature. In fact, several thinkers engaging in posthumanist discourse underline the necessity to transform humans into cyborgs whose actions can be controlled and directed through an extensive use of invasive biotechnologies from the prenatal stage. They argue that in the not-too-distant future everyone will be able to play God, becoming master of one's own evolutionary process.

The science fiction scenarios evoked by post- and trans-humanist authors have often been confronted by philosophical theories, aiming at deriving ethics and bioethics from an ontological definition of Being and Life. This is the case of two lectures collected in The Future of Human Nature, in which Habermas considers the inequalities that liberal eugenics, dependent on both the free market and the desires of individuals, can generate. In this article, I want to show that Habermas' perspective supports a theoretical position that can be traced back to the German ontological tradition, notably to Jonas' notion of life. Deconstructing Habermas and Jonas' arguments—which still today represent, whether directly or indirectly, the theoretical point of reference for authors who aim to stress different ethical and theoretical problems related to the so-called "human enhancement" and other bioethical issues—affords a unique perspective on a metaphysical worldview that wants to restore in the posthuman era what Edgar Morin calls "the lost paradigm of human nature."¹ In other words, the analysis of Habermas and Jonas' idea of life gives terms for grasping the main elements of a theoretical approach that represents the arrival point of a metaphysical tradition willing to critically distance itself from the most relevant consequences of Darwinian evolutionism.

Habermas' Interpretation of Kierkegaard and the socalled "Liberal Eugenics"

In two lectures delivered in the early 2000s, Habermas addressed the ontological and moral consequences of so-called liberal eugenics.² In the first lecture, entitled Are There Postmetaphysical Answers to the Question: "What is the Good Life"?, Habermas explored how interventions in the human genome can affect "our self-understanding as responsible agents"³ involved in a myriad of interpersonal relationships. Drawing on Adorno's theoretical position, according to which ethics became the "melancholy science" that allowed "only shattered aphoristic reflections from damaged life,"⁴ Habermas focused on Kierkegaard's ethics, seen as the first post-metaphysical answer to the question of what constitutes a good life. He underlines that "in contrast to the romantic picture of an egocentrically playful form of life that is lazily carried along by the present moment and dominated by reflected pleasure, Kierkegaard opposes the ethically resolute conduct of life."⁵ Kierkegaard thus aims to show how the subject, distancing herself from an "overwhelming environment," can give unity to the fragmented episodes of her ethical life. In other words, Kierkegaard's attention is:

on the structure of the ability to be oneself, that is, on the form of an ethical self-reflection and self-choice that is determined by the infinite interest in the success of one's own life project. With a view toward future possibilities of action, the individual self-critically appropriates the past of her factually given, concretely represented life history. Only then does she make herself into a person who speaks for herself, an irreplaceable individual.⁶

In an attempt to go beyond Kant and Socrates, Kierkegaard underlines that the acting subject must proceed to the understanding of herself and of her biological and existential finitude in order to choose from infinite possibilities and plan her own existence. To this end, the subject, among other things, has to build a new relationship with God. In fact, the Copernican revolution first questioned and then surpassed the idea of a finite universe in which the relations between beings are hierarchically ordered. The ancient and medieval cosmos, which from the Stoics to Aquinas represented the indisputable basis of western metaphysics, went into crisis when Copernicus and Galileo created the theoretical conditions for the passage from the closed world to the infinite universe, to borrow a phrase from Alexandre Koyré. This pivotal event, the overcoming of the Aristotelian-Ptolemaic universe, characterized by an intrinsic harmony and unity, destroyed the cosmological conditions based on the sacred alliance between lex divina, lex naturalis, and lex humana. When the metaphysical harmony and unity—by virtue of which, in the great medieval philosophical systems, such as that of Aquinas, the law governing human relations from an ethical and political point of view reflected the law that governed the universe itself—was set aside by both the historical emergence of the capitalist mode of production and the scientific revolution, human beings had to create new points of reference through which to justify their moral conduct.

According to Habermas, Kierkegaard's ethics took into consideration this new post-metaphysical scenario, proposing an ethical paradigm in which individuals could point to a particular form of self-understanding thanks to an interpersonal relationship with God. However, as Habermas points out, there are at least two issues to consider. First, it must be emphasized that in complex societies the relationships between individuals are based on logos, that is, on communication between human beings. An individual, in other words, builds her subjectivity through language, which is beyond the control of subjects capable of speech and action. Second, the possibility of self-understanding not only concerns individuals who live in complex societies and are entangled in exchanges of various kinds but becomes even more complex when genetic engineering allows "irreversible decisions about the natural traits of another person to be made."⁷ Habermas also stresses that:

liberal eugenics would not only affect the capacity of "being oneself." It would at the same time create an interpersonal relationship for which there is no precedent. The irreversible choice a person makes for the desired makeup of the genome of another person initiates a type of relationship between these two which jeopardizes a precondition for the moral self-understanding of autonomous actors. A universalistic understanding of law and morality rests on the assumption that there is no definite obstacle to egalitarian interpersonal relations.⁸

In other words, when genetic engineering allows for irreversible decisions about the natural traits of another person, the natural biological basis on which humans usually build their moral identities disappears. Thus, an individual born in a non-natural way not only cannot develop a spontaneous self-understanding of her initial condition, but also finds herself in a particular situation in which the way she relates to law and morality is the outcome of decisions made by others.

Some questions arise from this: on what is Habermas' conception of nature and human nature based? On what ontological foundations does the German philosopher build his philosophical critique of biotechnology? What is at stake from an ontological point of view when Habermas highlights that "eugenic interventions aiming at enhancement reduce ethical freedom insofar as they tie down the person concerned to rejected, but irreversible intentions of third parties, barring him from the spontaneous self-perception of being the undivided author of his own life"?⁹ Answering these questions means considering the main theoretical model on which Habermas draws to provide a metaphysical basis for his arguments.

Habermas and Jonas: A Metaphysical Critique of Biotechnologies

In The Future of Human Nature, Habermas references different authors and philosophical theories, not just Kierkegaard's post-metaphysical ethics, but also the Kantian categorical imperative and Arendt's concept of natality. However, the only author with whom Habermas seems to be in constant dialogue—notably, in the lecture entitled The Debate on the Self-Understanding of the Species—is Hans Jonas. Habermas, in fact, sees Jonas as the philosopher who shows how biotechnologies can be understood "in a context of self-destructive dialectics of enlightenment, according to which the species itself reverts from domination of nature to servitude of nature."¹⁰ In other words, Habermas considers Jonas' theoretical perspective an ontological critique of biotechnologies that are both the point of arrival of modern technology and the beginning of a new era in which humans become again dependent on Nature.

To grasp the theoretical core of the relationship between Jonas and Habermas, we must first consider how Jonas distances himself from Heidegger's deconstruction/destruction of the era of technology.¹¹ At the very beginning of The Question Concerning Technology, Heidegger argues for the necessity to set aside that "instrumental and anthropological definition" of technology according to which the latter is simply "a means and a human activity."¹² Through a unique interpretation of the Greek words téchne and epistéme,¹³ Heidegger shows that in Greek philosophy, notably in Plato and Aristotle, technology represents a mode of revealing, insofar as:

it reveals whatever does not bring itself forth and does not yet lie here before us, whatever can look and turn out now one way and now another. Whoever builds a house or a ship or forges a sacrificial chalice reveals what is to be brought forth, according to the perspectives of the four modes of occasioning. This revealing gathers together in advance the aspect and the matter of ship or house, with a view to the finished thing envisioned as completed, and from this gathering determines the manner of its construction.¹⁴

The ancient téchne is a form of poiésis that, like physis itself, creates the conditions for "the arising of something from out itself."¹⁵ To put it in other words, in ancient times technology does not aim at exploiting and destroying nature but represents a particular imitation of Nature itself, seen as the model par excellence of every type of poiésis.¹⁶

Unlike the ancient téchne, modern technology is seen as a "challenging [Herausfordern] which puts to nature the unreasonable demand that it supply energy that can be extracted and stored as such."¹⁷ In the era of the modern technology, nature is thus Bestand, that is, a reserve of raw materials that are subjected to constant and multiple technological manipulations. To emphasize how téchne has changed over the centuries, Heidegger, among other things, dwells on the difference between pre-industrial agriculture and mechanized agriculture. According to Heidegger, when agriculture stops depending on the work of the peasant "that does not challenge the soil of the field"¹⁸ and becomes an integral part of the "food industry," it is absorbed by a technological-productive system whose goal is to transform the entire natural environment into a material from which to obtain energy. In this way,

air is now set upon to yield nitrogen, the earth to yield ore, ore to yield uranium […]; uranium is set upon to yield atomic energy, which can be released either for destruction or for peaceful use.¹⁹

In the age of modern technology, the natural environment, in sum, is subjected to intense exploitation through increasingly invasive and dangerous technological tools, which can bring to light forms of energy capable of destroying any form of life on earth. The constant transformation/devastation of nature, for its part, must be seen as the most evident consequence of the fact that, thanks to the alliance between science and technology, humans aim at becoming the master of whole world. In Heidegger's reading, technology comes to embody the subject's will to power.

Jonas, like Heidegger, believes that modern technology is undoubtedly related to the will to power of modern man, who is seen as a sort of unbound Prometheus. Moreover, for Jonas, as well as for Heidegger, the historical development of science and technology is a direct consequence of certain philosophical transformations within western metaphysics. More specifically, both Heidegger and Jonas believe that the age of technology is the final destination of a long journey which, begun in antiquity, has gradually laid the foundations for the complete desacralization of nature.²⁰ However, between the two authors there are substantial differences that, when explored, can shed light on Habermas' theoretical and ethical approach to biotechnologies.

To bring out the ontological distance between Heidegger and Jonas, we must start from their diverse interpretations of Descartes. The latter represents for Heidegger—who follows Hegel and Dilthey's reconstruction of modern philosophy—the beginning of modern subjectivism, the starting point of a metaphysical path at the end of which Being is understood as pure objectivity. Heidegger underlines that Descartes presents the subject as subiectum, hypokeimenon, that is, fundamentum inconcussum veritatis. In this way, the so-called "external reality" exists only where there is self-consciousness, representing the subject.²¹ In Heidegger's destruction of the history of metaphysics, therefore, Descartes occupies a fundamental place, inasmuch as he inaugurates an extreme form of subjectivism, which is taken to the extreme by Kant, Hegel, and Nietzsche, and which paves the way for the Gestell, an ontological framework within which all beings as such are considered raw materials and can consequently be technologically manipulated and transformed.

Although starting from a theoretical approach close to the Heideggerian one, Jonas does not consider the epoch of modern technology as characterized by both the total oblivion of Being and the reduction of physis to pure manipulable raw materials. Jonas is moved by ontological and bioethical concerns different from those of Heidegger, since his main goal is to create the conditions for a new philosophical biology that is able to present a phenomenological analysis of life and to overcome what Jonas himself calls "ontology of death." Underlying his metaphysical and ethical approach is, indeed, the belief that

in his first attempts to interpret the nature of things, man saw life everywhere and identified being with being alive. Animism, or pan-psychism, is the widespread expression of this stage. Soul floods the whole of existence and encounters itself everywhere.²²

For this reason, the first elementary attempts to understand the surrounding reality are characterized by the fact that the true mystery is not life, but death. Over time, this relationship between life and death has radically changed. Jonas points out that the first dualism to emerge historically is that concerning the relationship between Being and Non-Being, which is immediately translated and viewed as a clear contrast between life and death. According to Jonas' reconstruction of the most important stages of western spirituality and metaphysics, in ancient times Orphism already understood the body as the grave of the soul: "life dwells like a stranger in the flesh which by its own nature—the nature of body—is nothing but corpse, seemingly alive in virtue of the soul's passing presence in it. Only in death, relinquished by its foreign visitor, does the body return to its original truth, and soul to hers."²³

Jonas also explains that:

with the growth of dualism, the features of the bewildering spectacle from which it had started—the spectacle of the corpse—spread more and more over the face of the physical universe. Death in fact conquered external reality […] The whole physical cosmos is tomb (prison-house, place of exile, etc.) to the soul or spirit, that foreign ingredient in what is otherwise unrelated to life. There, one might be tempted to say, the matter rests to this day—with the difference that the tomb has meanwhile become empty.²⁴

The dualism of Being/Non-Being, life/death, which is the matrix of all dualisms, is interpreted in a unique way by Descartes, who lays the foundations for the development of a radical mechanistic and mathematical vision of nature, taken to the extreme by modern physics. As summarized by Morris, Jonas' analysis of Descartes aims to show that "the most significant result of the Cartesian view of the duality of mind and body is the separation of life from substance. Substance or body, under this conception, is mere extension. Other qualities that we may associate with it are not essential to what it is."²⁵ In the space-time dimension of Cartesian physics, according to Jonas, there is pure matter, res extensa, moved by a "force without appetition, from whose operation result forms that are results without being ends. The force is in every case inertial, that is, a quantitative constant carried over from instant to instant in an endless series."²⁶ To put it in other terms, matter, by virtue of an inertial force, repetitively moves in space without a goal. In the whole reality, reduced to inert matter, there is thus no room for life, for a "spontaneous and teleological motion." In this way, according to Jonas, "not only the mindless but also the lifeless has become the intelligible as such, and dead matter the standard of intelligibility."²⁷ From Jonas' perspective, in short, Descartes' division of the substance into res cogitans and res extensa is a "wholesale overthrow of Platonism," by virtue of which matter takes ontological precedence over spirit, in the sense that the predicates of the latter depend on the essential predicates of the former.

From Descartes onwards, there develops a pan-mechanical vision of Nature that considers life as the true ontological mystery that can be explained only through an analysis of what is dead. All post-Cartesian dualisms are an expression of such a monistic image of reality. The most relevant consequence of this metaphysics is, in Jonas's reading, the development of an epistemology in which the anthropomorphic elements are completely absent. Starting from Descartes, in fact, science has limited itself to describing "sequences of positions in a space-time system of coordinates and […] quantitative regularities in such sequences as the laws of nature."²⁸ Describing mere regularities, science has progressively given up on providing causal and final explanations. In this way, "the long road from pristine pan-psychism via dualism to post-dualistic materialism ends in an agnostic renunciation of the idea of knowledge as an understanding of its objects."²⁹

Jonas opposes the idea of life as a teleological and self-regulating system to those ontologies that intend to explain the essence of life by starting from death. By virtue of its strictly temporal essence, life for Jonas is clearly distinguished from Descartes' res extensa. While the latter:

is, or can be presented as, wholly determined by what it was, life is essentially […] what is going to be and just becoming: in the case of life, the extensive order of past and future is intensively reversed. This is the root of the teleological or finalistic nature of life: finalism is in the first place a dynamic character of a certain mode of existence, coincident with the freedom and identity of form in relation to matter, and only in the second place a fact of structure and organization, as exemplified in the relation of organic parts to the whole and in the functional fitness of organism generally.³⁰

Life, therefore, is not res extensa, pure matter, whose future transformations can be predicted through the mathematical analysis of the spatial organization of the parts that compose it at a given moment. Rather, it is a finalistic system freely projected towards the future. In this sense, since life constantly goes beyond its "point-identity," it is essentially transcendent. Only secondarily can the finality of life be seen as the substantially teleological relationship that, for instance, within a given organism, binds the various parts to the whole.

According to Jonas, even the most primitive forms of life present themselves as a particular unity of spirit and matter—freedom and necessity, being and not being—which tends towards self-preservation. Human beings, for their part, represent the apex of creation, the finest example of teleological activity that does not aim at the simple satisfaction of biological needs. Jonas emphasizes that humans, unlike animals, are capable of questioning their place in the world, in the order of creation, providing answers that do justice to the nature of life. Human beings are also image-making creatures. In other words, they can devote themselves to "the making of useless objects," or can have "ends in addition to the biological ones, or can serve the latter in ways remote from the direct usefulness of instrumental objects."³¹

Considering life and all living beings, especially human beings, as teleological and transcendent systems, Jonas seeks to distance himself from Darwin's theories. He believes, in fact, that "it was the Darwinian theory of evolution, with its combination of chance variation and natural selection, which completed the extrusion of teleology from nature. Having become redundant even in the story of life, purpose retired wholly into subjectivity."³² Unlike Descartes, who starts from the analysis of "some definite mechanical structure, a given organism," Darwin considers the organism the result of the evolutionary process, that is, of life itself defined as "sheer adventure with an entirely unforeseeable course."³³ In doing so, Darwinian theories, on the one hand, bring to an end "the anti-platonism of the modern mind."³⁴ On the other hand, they propose a vision of life as something thrown into an "indefinite horizon," paving the way for those anti-teleological conceptions of human beings that will be taken to extreme consequences by existentialism.

Starting from a monistic conception of life as a teleological unity of spirit and matter, as well as from his idea of human beings as distinct from other living beings by the ability to transcend their own mere biological dimension, Jonas lays the foundations for a metaphysical ethics that radically questions the use of certain biotechnologies. Indeed, he points out that biotechnologies such as genetic engineering do not operate on "passive material," on a being seen as a machine made up of parts that perform precise functions:

in dealing with organisms, activity is confronted with activity: biotechnology is collaborative with the auto-activity of active material, the biological system in its natural functioning into which a new determinant has to be incorporated […] To produce, here, means to commit something to the stream of evolution in which the producer himself is carried along.³⁵

This passage, taken from an essay by Jonas, is quoted in full by Habermas, who sees it as an extreme summary of the ontological and ethical dangers linked to the development of genetic engineering. Habermas, citing Jonas, intends to demonstrate that biotechnology can destroy, ab imis fundamentis, the very notion of life, jeopardizing individual freedom and the possibility of genuine self-understanding, and eventually preventing "a symmetrical relationship between the programmer and the product thus designed."³⁶

To prevent this apocalyptic scenario, Habermas proposes an ethics of responsibility that almost systematically follows the ethical imperatives proposed by Jonas and aims to safeguard future generations from the immeasurable power of biotechnologies. As Jonas puts it,

an imperative responding to the new type of human action and addressed to the new type-of agency that operates it might run thus: "Act so that the effects of your action are compatible with the permanence of genuine human life": or expressed negatively: "Act so that the effects of your action are nor destructive of the future possibility of such life"; or simply: "Do not compromise the conditions for an indefinite continuation of humanity on earth"; Of, again turned positive: "In your present choices, include the future wholeness of Man among the objects of your will."³⁷

These categorical imperatives present themselves as a bioethical version of the Kantian imperatives. What emerges from Jonas' texts and even more from Habermas' is that acting morally means treating humanity and human nature as an end and never as a means. The categorical imperative, in fact,

requires every single person to give up the perspective of a first person in order to join an intersubjectively shared "we"—perspective which enables all of them together to attain value orientations which can be generalized. Kant's "formula of ends" already provides the bridge to the "formula of laws."³⁸

Such an ethics of responsibility wants to achieve two interrelated objectives. On the one hand, it intends to limit the effects of modern technology and biotechnologies, which seem to lead to the extreme consequences of the Baconian perspective according to which knowledge is power. On the other hand, drawing on Kant's ethics, it aims to safeguard the body, which "has to be experienced as something natural—as a continuation of the organic, self-regenerative life from which the person was born."³⁹ Only in this way, in fact, can the conditions be created for human beings to be respected as moral persons who have the right "to be at home" in their own body.

Conclusions

This theoretical and ethical approach to the problem of so-called human nature somehow seems to set aside the evolutionary complexity of life itself. Human evolution, as widely demonstrated by Darwin and other authors who draw on his philosophical biology, has a long and tortuous history, in which chance has played a relevant role. Darwinist authors such as Stephen Jay Gould, Jacques Monod, and many others emphasize that human life is the result of a non-teleological evolutionary process during which humans interacted with the surrounding environment to satisfy their own conatus essendi. To grasp what is at stake in the evolution, we should consider, as emphasized by Henry Gee, the idea of the "tangled bank" explored by Darwin at the end of The Origin of Species:

it is interesting to contemplate a tangled bank, clothed with many plants of many kinds, with birds singing on the bushes, with various insects flitting about, and with worms crawling through the damp earth, and to reflect that these elaborately constructed forms, so different from each other, and dependent upon each other in so complex a manner, have all been produced by laws acting around us.⁴⁰

In sum, in the evolutionary process there is no plan, but just random transformations that are the outcome of complex relationships between humans, animals, and natural environment. From this it follows that human beings do not hold any ontological primacy over other living species, nor can they be seen as bearers of an eternal, immutable essence.⁴¹ In fact, since human beings had to adapt to living conditions that have constantly changed over the course of their long evolution, they have related to themselves and other living beings differently, developing ever more sophisticated ethical mechanisms of self-understanding. Furthermore, from an evolutionary point of view, technology represents another important partner for humans. Driven by necessity, humans have built tools and instruments of various types, machines that have become more and more complex over time. Human beings have not only benefited from technology by improving their living conditions, but thanks to technology they have also managed to put in place ethical strategies through which to reach a profound relationship with themselves and the outside world.

Distancing themselves from Darwin, Jonas and Habermas subsume the complexity of the facts characterizing the evolution of human beings under a single principle: human nature, a quid that resists the innumerable transformations affecting the biological structure of human beings. In this way, a metaphysical tension between the sphere of transcendence and that of experience emerges, insofar as, as pointed out by Adorno, "the sphere of metaphysics in the precise sense only comes into being where this tension is itself the subject of philosophy, where it comes within the purview of thought."⁴² In Habermas, and in Jonas as well, singular events concerning the evolutionary history of man are traced back to a universal principle, which cancels their particularity. This universal principle, that is, the dimension of life, gives meaning to the infinitely plural world of experience, of events.

For this reason, Jonas and Habermas' metaphysical approaches to the effects of biotechnologies present two other elements worth considering. First, the stigmatization of the manipulation of DNA in the prenatal phase on the basis of an essentialist idea of human nature brings Jonas and Habermas' ethics closer to bioethicist positions attributable to authors and movements that reject a priori any biotechnological intervention on human beings. In fact, even if they rest on metaphysical bases far from Thomistic ontological personalism, Jonas and Habermas' categorical imperatives share with a certain theological approach—widespread in Europe, the United States, and Latin America—the idea that humans possess an intangible nature. This theoretical attitude is the main reason for the proliferation of neo-essentialist philosophies that reject biotechnological development and promote a worldview diametrically opposed to that present in post- and trans-humanist authors. The latter, in fact, argue the need to transcend the biological limits of Homo Sapiens through the development of increasingly invasive forms of genetic engineering, information technology, molecular nanotechnology, and artificial intelligence.

Second, in Jonas and Habermas' arguments there are few substantial references to the economic structure. Habermas, for instance, limits himself to emphasizing that "the market" can play a key role to the extent that it could direct the desires of human beings towards new and attractive goals. Apart from that, there is no analysis of the interconnection between the capitalist system of production and biotechnology, nor are there any references to how the historical development of biotechnology can lay the foundations for more aggressive forms of surplus extraction and new forms of primitive accumulation. In fact, at least since the 1980s, the development of biotechnologies has brought out the possibility of exploiting the human body by subjecting it to experiments through which, for example, there can be extracted genetic information that can bring about important scientific and technological advancements in the future.

What until a few decades ago was only present in science fiction books, today seems realizable. Faced with these new challenges, it is necessary to lay the foundations for an authentically post-metaphysical thought, which detaches itself from ontologically founded concepts such as "human nature" to move towards new theoretical directions that start from the assumption of the historicity both of human beings and of the ways human beings relate to themselves, to technology, and to the outside world. An authentic philosophical critique of post- and trans-humanist dystopias must start from a historical analysis of post-humanism itself rather than from the restoration of a monistic metaphysics. Post- and trans-humanism, in fact, are cultural movements whose origin can be found in postmodernism, seen as "the cultural logic of late capitalism." The new philosophies of history proposed by various representatives of the posthuman cultural galaxy represent a desperate attempt to project oneself into the future. Some transhumanist authors have even tried to predict the exact moment, the so-called singularity, in which Homo Sapiens will begin to transform in such a radical way that it becomes "something" completely different. As argued by Fredric Jameson, such a singularity "is projected as a leap or evolutionary mutation of some sort, something that can be dystopian or Utopian according to the context […] This kind singularity is the very epitome of the return of the repressed, of a future we are no longer able to imagine but which insists on marking its imminence with nightmarish anxiety. Dystopian singularity would be the emergence of a mechanical species that transcends the human in its intelligence (and malignity) as in the Terminator or Battlestar Galactica."⁴³ For this reason, only by analyzing the various posthumanist philosophies as an expression of a pathological discomfort deriving from a refusal to consider the future in the age of globalized capital can the foundations be laid for an adequate understanding of the essence of biotechnology and, as a consequence, of the near future of the human species.