The Debate on Immortality: Posthumanist Science vs. Critical Philosophy

Abstract

At different times Horkheimer, Adorno, and Marcuse argued that immortality is a condition of overcoming misery and achieving complete human freedom. Their arguments were made before “practical immortality” had become a concrete scientific project. The difference between what was then and what is now scientifically possible alters the ethical and political value of the idea of immortality. Had the first generation of critical theorists occupied the present historical moment, they would have realized that science harnessed to the demand for limitless life would not solve the kind of ethical and existential problems they hoped it would. I argue that the scientific struggle against human finitude is driven by the same egocentric concern for money and self-maximization that early critical theory diagnosed as the main psychological pathology caused by capitalism. Finitude, I conclude, is the price human beings must pay if they are to live free and meaningful lives. 

Notes

1. “Theory and Politics: A Conversation with Herbert Marcuse, Jürgen Habermas, Heinz Lubasz, and Telman Spengler,” Telos 38 (1978–79): 136.

2. Marcuse quoted in Jürgen Habermas, “The Differing Rhythms of Philosophy and Politics: Herbert Marcuse at 100,” in The Postnational Constellation: Political Essays (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press), 157.

3. Quoted in Jürgen Habermas, “Psychic Thermidor and the Return of Rebellious Subjectivity,” Berkeley Journal of Sociology 25 (1980): 12.

4. ⁴Quoted in Giuseppe Tassone, “The Politics of Metaphysics: Adorno and Bloch on Utopia and Immortality,” The European Legacy: Toward New Paradigms 9.3 (2004): 357.

5. Theodor Adorno, Minima Moralia (London: Verso, 2002), 176.

6. Quoted in Tassone, “The Politics of Metaphysics: Adorno and Bloch on Utopia and Immortality,” 357.

7. The idea of “practical immorality” is taken from Stephen S. Hall, Merchants of Immortality: Chasing the Dream of Human Life Extension (Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin, 2003), 204.

8. The radically altered demographics of a society in which some people (those who could afford to pay) achieved practical immortality would also cause significant practical problems, but my focus here will be on the underlying ethical and existential issues. An excellent overview of the social problems radical life-extension would cause may be found in Beyond Therapy: A Report by the President’s Council on Bioethics (New York: Harper Perennial, 2003), 192–97.

9. Aubrey de Grey, with Michael Rae, Ending Aging: The Rejuvenation Breakthroughs That Could Reverse Human Aging in Our Lifetime (New York: St. Martin’s Griffin, 2008), 330.

10. Ray Kurzweil, The Singularity is Near (New York: Penguin, 2005), 389.

11. J. P. Dupuy and F. Roure, quoted in Jean-Pierre Beland and Johane Patenaude, “Risk and the Question of the Acceptability of Human Enhancement: The Humanist and Transhumanist Perspectives,” Dialogue 52.2 (2013): 381.

12. James Steinhoff, “Transhumanism and Marxism: Philosophical Connections,” Journal of Evolution and Technology 24.2 (May 2014): 1–16.

13. Kurzweil, The Singularity is Near, 373.

14. Hans Moravec, Robot: Mere Machine to Transcendent Mind (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 167–68.

15. David Pearce, The Hedonistic Imperative, at: http://hedweb.com/hedethic/hedonist.htm#naturalisation (accessed 21 November 2013).

16. Nick Bostrom, “Dignity and Enhancement,” 20, at: http://nickbostrom.com (accessed 4 December 2013).

17. De Grey, Ending Aging, 250.

18. Seneca, Moral Essays, vol. 1 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1928), 15.

19. Bostrom, “Dignity and Enhancement,” 30.

20. Julien Savulescu, “New Breeds of Humans: The Moral Obligation to Enhance,” Reproductive Biomedicine Online 10, Supp. 1 (2005): 38, at: http://www.rbmonline/Article/1643 (accessed 8 September 2013).

21. René Descartes, Discourse on Method and the Meditations, trans. John Veitch (Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 1989), 48.

22. Max Horkheimer, The Eclipse of Reason (New York: Continuum, 1996), 93.

23. Horkheimer, The Eclipse of Reason, 151.

24. For a systematic demonstration of the cancerous nature of capitalist production cycles, see John McMurtry, The Cancer Stage of Capitalism, rev. ed. (London: Pluto), 2013.

25. Adorno, Minima Moralia, 156.

26. Kurzweil, The Singularity is Near, 96.

27. Herbert Marcuse, An Essay on Liberation (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1969), 16.

28. Jürgen Habermas, The Future of Human Nature (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2003), 21.

29. Hall, Merchants of Immortality.

30. The distinction between therapy and enhancement is regularly challenged by defenders of genetic engineering and technological transcendence of the biological. The standard argument is that both therapy and enhancement have the same goal—improvement of human life. If it is legitimate to cure blindness by genetic therapy because seeing is good, then it should also be legitimate to extend the powers of human sight (say, into the ultraviolet and infrared range) because if seeing is good, seeing more is better. I do not consider the therapy-enhancement distinction in any detail, because I regard it as a distraction from the main onto-ethical issue—the conflation of life-activity with machine functioning. If that remains the focus, then the therapy-enhancement debate is not centrally relevant to determining the value of genetic engineering. In my view, therapeutic uses of genetic engineering would be wrong too if they stem from the same instrumentalizing understanding of human health as efficient machine functioning. For a critique of Habermas’s distinction in particular, see Nicholas Agar, Liberal Eugenics (Malden, MA: Blackwell Press, 2004), 89–90.

31. Habermas, The Future of Human Nature, 61.

32. Agar, Liberal Eugenics, 119.

33. Hans Jonas, Philosophical Essays (New York: Atropos Press, 2010), 164.

34. Kurzweil, The Singularity is Near, 145.

35. Marcuse, An Essay on Liberation, 10.

36. John McMurtry, Unequal Freedoms (Toronto: Garamond, 1998), 23.

37. Marcuse, An Essay on Liberation, 46.

38. Jean-Paul Sartre, “No Exit,” in No Exit and Other Plays (Vintage: New York, 1989), 45.

39. For a fuller discussion of this “life-coherence principle,” see John McMurtry, “Human Rights versus Corporate Rights: Life-Value, the Civil Commons, and Social Justice,” Studies in Social Justice 5.1 (2011): 14.

40. Adorno, Minima Moralia, 156.

41. Herbert Marcuse, Eros and Civilization (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1966), 236–37.

42. Samuel Beckett, “Worstward Ho,” in Nohow On (New York: Grove Press, 1980), 89.

43. Karl Marx, Capital, vol. 1 (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1986), 174.