From: Stan Kretler (skretler@infinitefaculty.com)
Date: Sat Aug 14 1999 - 12:01:11 MDT
Max More wrote:
> At 06:46 PM 8/13/99 -0700, Brian Delaney wrote:
>>
>>>> So, again, I wonder: why not "human," and
>>>> "humanism," or some ratcheting up of the
>>>> same: like "neo-humanism," or "ultra-humanism"?
>>
>>> Indeed!
>>>
>>> Note that according to the Web page for a
>>> conference (follow links from www.extropy.org)
>>> Max More seems to have heeded your counsel.
>>
>>Hi Stan,
>>
>>Yes -- more like "the" conference for this list, by the way. (For the
record, he
>>may, of course, have come up with the idea years before my email.
>> Extropians are capable of independent thought, you'll discover!)
>>
>
> For the record, I came us with "ultrahuman" several months ago,
> while thinking about my book and my talk for the conference. I
> was surprised and amused to see your use of the term immediately
> before I first used the term publically at the conference (though
> it had been on the conference program for a while before that).
> This isn't really surprising though. Several people have
> independently come up with "extropy" and "transhuman" (or
> "trans-human").
I, of course, was not suggesting that anyone isn't capable of
independent thought! I may have been confused about which email Brian
meant earlier. About a year ago, a group of us *humanists* :-) who had
been discussing the issue of the human and the "post-" or "non-" or
"ultra-" or "mega-" or "neo-human" were wondering what more heavily
techno types would think about these thoughts, and so Brain, the only
one of us who would happily transfer himself into a quantum computing
device, discussed the question with a few people from this list. I had
the impression you were one of them but I guess not. No matter.
Sometimes the zeitgeist rotates a notch and suddenly ideas are just "in
the air". (Actually, I'm curious who used the term previously. Since
it's in the OED, a full entry would show this. I'll see if I can dig it
up.)
Anyway, for us, the question of the merits of a new term had to do with
changing historical circumstances. Something is different now in a
*radical* way. Might it be that the essence of humanism is no longer
appropriate for the changing historical circumstances? It's a rather
difficult question, but my answer would be that yes, it is. But perhaps
times call for a zeroing in on this essence of humanism, since the term
and even the notion itself is becoming clouded by "flesh fetishists".
If so, then either a reappropriation of the term, or a new term like
"ultrahumanism" or "neohumanism" or "Urhumanism"(?) would be good.
"Posthumanism" and even "transhumanism" don't make a lot of sense,
*unless* the point is specifically that flesh is bad, because limited
and so on. Of course, haven't we been through that issue a few times in
the last two thousand years (The Reformation, for ex.)? :-)
<snip>
Cheers,
Stan
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