Sorgner vs. Bostrom, or Nietzsche’s philosophical relevance to transhumanism

ENMore than fifteen years have passed since the acclaimed paper “Nietzsche, the Overhuman, and Transhumanism” by Stefan L. Sorgner was published (Sorgner, 2009). In that paper, Sorgner challenged the presentation of the relationship between transhumanism and Nietzsche’s philosophy as provided by Nick Bostrom (Bostrom, 2005), another renowned researcher in the field of transhumanism. Bostrom attempted to offer reasons why Nietzsche’s philosophy cannot be treated as an essential conceptual resource in terms of the transhumanist worldview. In turn, Sorgner tried to prove that Bostrom’s approach, which underestimates the relevance of Nietzsche’s philosophy to the development of transhumanist thought, is misleading, and consequently made an effort to demonstrate why Nietzsche’s philosophy should be considered as the conceptual basis of transhumanism (Sorgner, 2009). This paper returns to the controversy opened up by Sorgner and Bostrom regarding transhumanism and its relationship with Nietzsche’s philosophy. An analysis of these authors’ arguments reveals a paradoxical and seemingly even contradictory theoretical situation: in evaluating the status of Nietzsche’s philosophy in the context of transhumanist thinking, both thinkers were simultaneously mistaken and correct. The paper demonstrates that such a situation has emerged because of transhumanism’s own lack of definitiveness—or the possibility of understanding it variously. The paper asserts that an adequate theoretical evaluation and definition of the relationship between transhumanism and Nietzsche’s philosophy is possible only by looking for aspects of reconciliation between Bostrom’s and Sorgner’s explanations of this relationship. Keywords: Sorgner, Bostrom, Nietzsche, transhumanism, weak transhumanism, overhuman.