Between the Middle Ages, the Contemporary, and the Future: (Towards) a Trans-Post-Humanist Body

Faced with the challenges of emerging technologies and impossibility of thinking human beings in the humanistic sense, I propose a convergent philosophical approach to Posthumanism(s) and Transhumanism(s). So, by means of ideas drawn from (medieval and contemporary) philosophy, my contribution is informed by conceiving a non-anthropocentric and Posthumanist Transhumanism. My focus is the body as a crucial node of both Transhumanism(s) and Posthumanism(s), in that its consideration by one and the other seems to mark a major front of divergence between them (tool body according to Transhumanism(s), dimensional body according to Posthumanism(s)). My reflection is carried out, by drawing two theoretical reservoirs: the thought of Roger Bacon (13th century) and of Michel Serres. I take the former as a reference for transhumanist front and the latter as a reference for posthumanist one. I thus hypothesize that Bacon’s doctrine of the prolongation of life can be considered as an anticipation of the transhumanist research of earthly human immortality. So, I examine Bacon’s idea that the adhesion of human activity (alchemy and medicine) with the course of nature can produce, through the preparation of a long life drug, the aequalitas terrena, which is an operation of restoration/conservation of the state of bodily natural balance (health), with the connected prolongation of life within the limits allowed by nature. I therefore dwell on the Baconian idea of a body in whose wholeness of person the solution of continuity between the biological and the spiritual is attenuated, and on the connected idea, not of transcending the earthly man, but of the restoration of his fullness of person. In my thesis, Baconian ideas, anticipating transhumanism(s), can induce positions in it of care of body, without transpassing in the empowerment; of body normalization, without going beyond it; of consideration of the body as a dimension of the human and not as an instrument or burden; of the consideration of man as a natural form and not as a center. These positions can also find convergences with posthumanism(s) and Serres, that carry forward the idea of informational irreducibility of the body as well as that of its irreproducibility, and therefore of its dimensionality for man (in hybridization with nature and technology). I assume that these convergences can lead to an idea of the body as a meeting ground between Transhumanism(s) and Posthumanism(s): a trans-post-humanist body.