Alliance for Mystical Pragmatics

Alliance for Mystical Pragmatics

Harmonizing Evolutionary Convergence

Glossary Menus

transhumanism

Julian Huxley, author of Evolution: The Modern Synthesis, began his 1957 essay titled ‘Transhumanism’ with these words: “As a result of a thousand million years of evolution, the universe is becoming conscious of itself, able to understand something of its past history and its possible future. This cosmic self-awareness is being realized in one tiny fragment of the universe—in a few of us human beings.”

Four years later—in his foreword to The Human Phenomenon, the first English translation of Pierre Teilhard de Chardin’s Le phénomène humain—Huxley wrote that Père Teilhard was delighted with his vision that “in modern scientific man, evolution was at last becoming conscious of itself.”

For Teilhard had realized in the 1920s that we cannot understand evolution as a whole, without studying the leading edge of evolutionary development in the human species, as noogenesis. This led him to see that the ‘superarrangement’ of all thinking elements are converging in a “gigantic psychobiological operation—as a kind of megasynthesis”. Teilhard foretold the realization of humanity’s fullest potential at evolution’s Omega Point in this way:

The way out for the world, the gates of the future, the entry into the superhuman, will not open ahead to some privileged few, or to a single people, elect among all peoples. They will yield only to the thrust of all together in the direction where all can rejoin and complete one another in a spiritual renewal of the Earth.

Huxley had a similar vision, writing,

The human species can, if it wishes, transcend itself—not just sporadically, an individual here in one way, an individual there in another way—but in its entirety, as humanity. We need a name for this new belief. Perhaps transhumanism will serve: man remaining man, but transcending himself, by realizing new possibilities of and for his human nature.

Huxley thought that such a transhuman potential is within all of us, just as we can all learn to dance or play tennis. So, by “destroying the ideas and the institutions that stand in the way of our realizing our possibilities”, we could understand human nature, what it truly means to be a human being. We could thereby transcend our limitations, fulfilling our highest potential as spiritual beings, living in mystical ecstasy, free from the suffering that has plagued humanity through the millennia.

However, …

See also: 

Etymology

1957, from Latin trans ‘across, over, beyond’, perhaps originally present participle of a verb *trāre- ‘to cross’, from PIE base *tra-, variant of root *tere ‘cross over, pass through, overcome’. See also human.

Common ancestor(s):