To be or not to be fully human?
Where Ancient Wisdom confronts our Modern Age:
The Sauvage, the Transhuman and our hoped for Archaic Renaissance
Where Ancient Wisdom confronts our Modern Age:
The Sauvage, the Transhuman and our hoped for Archaic Renaissance
Paul Wildman and Iona Miller
Abstract
Today we do our best to live in a world going mad. It’s as if we need to give ourselves a ‘psychic vaccination’, to inoculate ourselves from this madness. This injection protects us on a contemplative or archetypal journey to the foreign lands of our unconscious.The shamanic tincture allows us to safely explore the darkness and light of our own depths. Only by going through and making the darkness conscious and conscious darkness do we arrive at the light. Here we explore the possibility that Transhumanism can be part of this journey. But it is a game-changer, altering the cultural landscape as we go. We conclude that an ‘artificer’ approach allows anyone to position themselves where they are comfortable in the humanist ↔ transhumanist continuum. An orientation that helps us retain our archaic instinctual root and manual adaptability helps us navigate this unfamiliar territory even as our own future inexorably invades us in ways that radically change our lives and bodies.Key Words: Transhumanism(TH, H+),posthumanism,ancient wisdom, modern age, archetypal journey, Archaic Renaissance, shaman, mason, artificer
In this article we suggest the view that the Humanist |Transhumanist debate urgently needs to introduce a vertical dimension to balance the dominant horizontal one. In short we need a bridge between the Human and the Transhuman. And to this end we posit that the Bushy/Artificer as one such bridge/link between the shaman and the mason, between the chthonic and the ethereal. For us this is, in many ways, a last gasp for humanity that TH as a version of the Bushy/Artificer can assuage this yang yin tension.
Abstract
Today we do our best to live in a world going mad. It’s as if we need to give ourselves a ‘psychic vaccination’, to inoculate ourselves from this madness. This injection protects us on a contemplative or archetypal journey to the foreign lands of our unconscious.The shamanic tincture allows us to safely explore the darkness and light of our own depths. Only by going through and making the darkness conscious and conscious darkness do we arrive at the light. Here we explore the possibility that Transhumanism can be part of this journey. But it is a game-changer, altering the cultural landscape as we go. We conclude that an ‘artificer’ approach allows anyone to position themselves where they are comfortable in the humanist ↔ transhumanist continuum. An orientation that helps us retain our archaic instinctual root and manual adaptability helps us navigate this unfamiliar territory even as our own future inexorably invades us in ways that radically change our lives and bodies.Key Words: Transhumanism(TH, H+),posthumanism,ancient wisdom, modern age, archetypal journey, Archaic Renaissance, shaman, mason, artificer
In this article we suggest the view that the Humanist |Transhumanist debate urgently needs to introduce a vertical dimension to balance the dominant horizontal one. In short we need a bridge between the Human and the Transhuman. And to this end we posit that the Bushy/Artificer as one such bridge/link between the shaman and the mason, between the chthonic and the ethereal. For us this is, in many ways, a last gasp for humanity that TH as a version of the Bushy/Artificer can assuage this yang yin tension.
All the great caravan routes of the mind are littered with the bones of ancient journeys.[Frye (2000:60)]
To see the newness of the old aswell as the oldness of the new.[Adorno (2003:xxvi)]
Transcendence through quintessence.As the alchemists realized, humanity is indispensable for the completion of creation, which is to say that we ourselves are the second creators of the world. The archetypal figure of the artist is the alchemical transformer of evil and the healer of the world. So TransHumanism (TH) is simply doing this for us that is the Ghost in the machine (technology) has become the God in the manchine (usthrough TH) and then manchine(as the Alchemists thought) will birth our-franken-selves. Here we have not taken thetechne route but the techni path where our machines shape us rather than the other way round as the Ancient Greeks conceived. [Levy (2012:26)]
There is no possibility of awakening from our collective nightmare without first becoming aware of what it is that is keeping us asleep, [PW i.e. re-membering what is keeping us asleep]. We therefore need to be able to examine our Western diseasefrom a perspective that is as aware as possible of the assumptions and processes created by that very disease, for itscontinuance in our thinking, unconscious and society thatis under critical review. So how do we not simply become the answers to our own questions? [Levy (2012:16-17)]
No day without shadows; The corpses of Vukovar teach us compassion; The ovens of Auschwitz and Belsen blazed enlightenment virtue across the night sky. Suppressing my lusts I deny the life that creates them, But yet I trust here is a light that casts no shadow, and in that light someday I hope to be. [John Knight -St Vincent’s Hospice Brisbane, Australia, where he died of Prostate Cancer -24-02-2012. PW had known John for 30years]
We shape our tools and then our tools shape us.[Marshall McLuhan]
Transhumanism, Asklepios not Vukovar, the imago of the enlightenment a chance for a new beginning. [PW]
Introduction
To see the newness of the old aswell as the oldness of the new.[Adorno (2003:xxvi)]
Transcendence through quintessence.As the alchemists realized, humanity is indispensable for the completion of creation, which is to say that we ourselves are the second creators of the world. The archetypal figure of the artist is the alchemical transformer of evil and the healer of the world. So TransHumanism (TH) is simply doing this for us that is the Ghost in the machine (technology) has become the God in the manchine (usthrough TH) and then manchine(as the Alchemists thought) will birth our-franken-selves. Here we have not taken thetechne route but the techni path where our machines shape us rather than the other way round as the Ancient Greeks conceived. [Levy (2012:26)]
There is no possibility of awakening from our collective nightmare without first becoming aware of what it is that is keeping us asleep, [PW i.e. re-membering what is keeping us asleep]. We therefore need to be able to examine our Western diseasefrom a perspective that is as aware as possible of the assumptions and processes created by that very disease, for itscontinuance in our thinking, unconscious and society thatis under critical review. So how do we not simply become the answers to our own questions? [Levy (2012:16-17)]
No day without shadows; The corpses of Vukovar teach us compassion; The ovens of Auschwitz and Belsen blazed enlightenment virtue across the night sky. Suppressing my lusts I deny the life that creates them, But yet I trust here is a light that casts no shadow, and in that light someday I hope to be. [John Knight -St Vincent’s Hospice Brisbane, Australia, where he died of Prostate Cancer -24-02-2012. PW had known John for 30years]
We shape our tools and then our tools shape us.[Marshall McLuhan]
Transhumanism, Asklepios not Vukovar, the imago of the enlightenment a chance for a new beginning. [PW]
Introduction
