Volume 13, Issue 1, 2016
Janina Sombetzki
Pages 161-180
How “Post” Do We Want to Be – Really?
The Boon and Bane of Enlightenment Humanism
Popular posthumanist theories are revealing a lot about their origin from enlightenment humanism. In this paper I will firstly have a closer look on the history of the enlightenment-humanistic concept of human nature and its roots in the Mesopotamian Epic of Gilgamesh. Afterwards I will show how this notion of human nature will be broadened in transhumanist thinking, turned upside down as a modern enlightenment humanism, or even deformed and perverted in the popular posthumanist vision of the immortal and from its body completely abstracted mind in the Singularity of a computer interface.