However, we need to return to the fact that a bridge can only stand when it is grounded on both sides, on two shores. The human/bridge escapes this fate and bypasses the abyss, by connecting to the other side of the animal, which in modern Transhumanism is often envisioned as the trans-human morphing of human and machine. It is the blindness of the evolutionary process of natural selection, which leads most species to disappear into the depths of oblivion and extinction. The image of the abyss conjures danger, darkness, even horror. “A rope”, Nietzsche’s line continues, “over an abyss”. We choose to interpret this concept as an instance of both the “trans-human” and the “post-human”. Here we choose to read it as “that which lies beyond and above the human”, where for us “above” does not imply a reference to any kind of power relation, but simply a further step in the evolutionary tree. It is much more controversial, and historically fraud with distortions and misinterpretations, how one should read Nietzsche’s choice of the word Übermensch. The use of the word “animal” as a translation of the German “Tier” is reasonably accurate, even though the German word more exclusively refers to non-human animals, unlike its English counterpart, which can be construed as inclusive of the human and referring to the general animal kingdom of biology. In this line the same statement is reiterated and expanded: “the human is a rope, stretched between the animal and the trans-human”. (Friedrich Nietzsche, “Also sprach Zarathustra”) We can delve deeper into this image by considering another famous line of Zarathustra where the idea is further expanded: Der Mensch ist ein Seil, geknüpft zwischen Tier und Übermensch – ein Seil über einem Abgrunde.
The latter we may also call a trans-human future. The process continues to the other side of the bridge: the human has a non-human past as well as a non-human future. If the human is not a goal but a bridge, in particular, it is also not a dead branch of the evolutionary tree. We will return in the next section to discuss more in depth the relation of Nietzsche to Darwin, and the approach of Anarchist-Transhumanism to the evolutionary view of life and nature.įor now, we want to focus some more on the use of the bridge image: a bridge is primarily a connection and its structural stability relies on it being structurally anchored at both ends, to the two shores it connects.
The human species, like any species, is not a goal of the evolutionary process but a part of the process itself. Intrinsic in the idea of the human as a bridge is the evolutionary view of life: evolution is non-teleological, and the human is not the pinnacle of evolution, just another transient state in a process that keeps modifying the development of species and organisms. So, according to these famous lines of Nietzsche’s “Also sprach Zarathustra”, “what is great about the human is that it is a bridge and not a goal”. Mensch is a non-gendered word that is best translated into English as “the human”. Was groß ist am Menschen, das ist, daß er eine Brücke und kein Zweck ist: was geliebt werden kann am Menschen, das ist, daßer ein Übergang und ein Untergang ist. This article is an elaboration of a shorter text on the same topic, contributed by the author as a part of the ongoing collective work “The Anarcho–Transhumanist Manifesto”. Our focus will therefore be more on clarifying what Anarcho-Transhumanism is and how it approaches the controversial figure of Nietzsche than on a historical reading of the philosopher or a philologically rigorous exegesis of his cryptic writings. We will occasionally touch upon some of these broader themes, but our focus is more narrowly concentrated on how the philosophical and political movement of Anarcho-Transhumanism has acquired a new reading of some of the most classical and widely discussed passages of Nietzsche’s work.
In both cases, it is clear that the way Anarchists, as well as Transhumanists, approach the corpus of Nietzsche’s writings is fraud with controversy. It should be pointed out right away that separate discussion of the readings of Nietzsche within the Anarchist tradition, and within the Transhumanist movement in a broader (and ideologically quite different) setting have been analyzed in-depth in Moore and Tuncel (see also Ansell-Pearson, Sorgner, respectively). What we are going to discuss here is a particular reading of Nietzsche, which inevitably carries its own peculiar type of misinterpretation, a reading that develops within a specific political and philosophical context, that of the emergent and fast-growing movement of Anarchist Transhumanism. The purpose of this contribution is not to provide a philologically accurate reading of Nietzsche’s writings.
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