The transhuman being as means, not end

"By th[is] characterization of excellence in terms of [(sur le mode de)] power, the transhumanist being connects up with the superman of Nietzsche.  But this is nearly all the [two] have in common.  For the aspiration to the transhuman is anything but [(tout sauf)] the cult of the genius whose spontaneous [(primesautière)] superiority impresses his will on the ages of the human epoque.  The transhuman is in large part a product of the human.  The technological [imperative of] improvement [(perfectionnement)] that determines its contours does not come from nowhere.  It is the result of a human action.  Now, the instrumental[izing] thought that presides over its conception cuts into its autonomy.  One is [here] far from the Kantian dignity of a quality that pertains to a being who can never be considered as a pure means, but always also as an end in itself.  The transhuman being is the means of the realization of a certain concept of the human [(un certain concept humain)] in a beyond-the-human subject [(au subject d’un au-delà de l’humain)], a fabricated being (whatever the euphoria of progress and pathos of self-surpassment that one puts into its fabrication).  In this sense, transhumanism poses the same basic problems as every selection [made] prior to the conception—as much ideal as biological—of a human being."

     Otto Schäfer, “Travail de construction ou de sape?  Le chantier humain du transhumanisme,” Foi et vie 114, no. 4 (décembre 2014):  87-88 (80-94).  I'm not entirely comfortable with his endorsement of Teilhard de Chardin, though (93-94).

"We make no large claims"

"in the social world of corporations and governments private preferences are advanced under the cover of . . . the findings of experts. . . . .  The effects of eighteenth-century prophecy have been to produce not scientifically managed social control, but a skilful dramatic imitation of such control.  It is histrionic success which gives power and authority to our culture.  The most effective bureaucrat is the best actor.
     "To this many managers and many bureaucrats will reply:  you are attacking a straw man of your own construction.  We make no large claims, Weberian or otherwise.  We are as keenly aware of the limitations of social scientific generalizations as you are.  We perform a modest function with a modest and unpretentious competence.  But we do have specialized knowledge, we are entitled in our own limited fields to be called experts.
     "Nothing in my argument impugns these modest claims; but it is not claims of this kind which achieve power and authority either within or for bureaucratic corporations, whether public or private.  For claims of this modest kind could never legitimate the possession or the uses of power either within or by bureaucratic corporations in anything like the way or on anything like the scale on which that power is wielded.  So the modest and unpretentious claims embodied in this reply to my argument may themselves be highly misleading, as much to those who utter them as to anyone else.  For they seem to function not as a rebuttal of my argument that a metaphysical belief in managerial expertise has been institutionalised in our corporations, but as an excuse for continuing to participate in the charades which are consequently enacted.  The histrionic talents of the player with small walking-on parts are as necessary to the bureaucratic drama as the contributions of the great managerial character actors."

     Alasdair MacIntyre, After virtue (Notre Dame, IN:  University of Notre Dame Press, 1981), 102 ("The character of generalisations in social science and their lack of predictive power").  "the alleged laws . . . all turn out to be false and . . . so unquestionably false that no one but a professional social scientist dominated by the conventional philosophy of science would ever have been tempted to believe them" (84).  "the generalisations and maxims of the best social science share certain characteristics of their predecessors — the proverbs of folk societies, the generalizations of jurists, the maxims of Machiavelli" (99).  "the notion of social control embodied in the notion of [socio-scientific] expertise is . . . a masquerade.  Our social order is in a very literal sense out of our, and indeed anyone's, control" (101).

Not a project, but a task; not a promise, but an undertaking

"if the program of modernity is thus already sketched at the end of the ancient world and in the texts that founded the medieval world, in what sense does the modern project merit the adjective 'modern'?  The answer is found in the fuller phrase:  it is modern to the extent that it is, precisely, a project.  For it is not at all necessary that the human enterprise should conceive itself as a project.  The genus 'enterprise' in fact contains, alongside of project, another species that one could call task.  And task is opposed point for point to the three characteristics of the project that I laid out above.  Each in fact changes its sign:  with a task, (a) I receive the mission to do something from an origin I cannot control, but must discover; (b) I also must ask myself if I am up to my task, agreeing even to divest myself of what has otherwise been irrevocably entrusted to me; and finally, (c) I alone am responsible for what I am asked to accomplish, without being able to outsource it to an instance that would guarantee its success.
     "Now, with this idea of task, we are able to distinguish the Bible from modernity.  All the biblical images invoked above, including the idea of 'straining forward [epekteinomai] toward what lies ahead' (Phil. 3:13 NRSV), need to be understood in the light of task, not that of project.  The passage to modernity therefore can find its symbol, if not its symptom, in the evolution of literary genres from the epic, where the hero is invested  with a mission he must accomplish, to the novel, in which he departs seeking adventures, and hence following his fancy.
     "The relationship of humanity to nature can know many models.  It is not necessary that it be a conquest, nor that this conquest be connected with the idea of a 'kingdom of man,' nor, finally, that it take on the aspect of a domination realized by technology."

     Rémi Brague, The kingdom of man:  genesis and failure of the modern project, trans. Paul Seaton (Notre Dame, IN:  University of Notre Dame Press, 2018), 5.
     This reminds me so much of the distinction Philip Turner made between the undertaking and the promise ("Undertakings and promises:  sexual ethics in the life of the church:  the 1990 Zabriskie Lecture series," Virginia Seminary journal (March 1991):  3-27; First things (April 1991):  36-42; Studies in Christian ethics 4, no. 2 (August 1991):  1-13).

"the [very] center of theological thinking"

"To pursue the problem of church discipline to the depth of its rootedness and the breadth of its branchings out is to be referred to the [very] center of theological thinking.  Indeed, of all of the questions that beset the church today and demand resolution, I know of none upon which the themes of theology converge so decisively, none whose resolution is so urgent and would be of such fundamental and far-reaching significance, as that of church discipline."

     Gerhard Ebeling, a member of the Confessing Church that opposed Hitler, in a lecture (Kirchenzucht (1947)) delivered first in Berlin in 1943, as quoted by Dorothea Sattler, in her "Sündige Menschen in der Gemeinschaft der Heiligen?  Alte und neue Frage nach der Kirchenzucht in ökumenischer Perspektive," Zeitschrift für katholische Theologie 127 (2005):  272, as translated by me.

"the Lord takes thought for me"

"As for me, I am poor and needy; but the Lord takes thought for me."

וַאֲנִ֤י עָנִ֣י וְאֶבְיֹון֮ אֲדֹנָ֪י יַחֲשָׁ֫ב לִ֥י

     Ps 40:18, RSV.  In context, "the Lord devises [salvation, help, deliverance] for me."  (Interesting how close this is in form to Gen 15:6:  וְהֶאֱמִ֖ן בַּֽיהוָ֑ה וַיַּחְשְׁבֶ֥הָ לֹּ֖ו צְדָקָֽה, "And [Abram] believed the Lord; and he reckoned it to him as righteousness.")

"instruments of the human soul"

     "Werkzeuge der menschlichen Seele" is the ontological status that Marianne Schark, in her Lebewesen versus Dinge:  eine metaphysische Studie (Berlin:  de Gruyter, 2005), assigns the tools we create, according to Ludwig Jaskolla, "Der Mensch als 'homo faber'?  Überlegungen zur Philosophie der Technik," Stimmen der Zeit 233, no. 6 (June 2015):  389 (385-392).
     More from Jaskolla, who (it must be admitted) does here little more than re-state the obvious:

Technology is not a marginal phenomenon of culture-creating man, but a fundamental constant of man in general:  we are creative beings through and through!  [(386)] 

this creative activity can therefore only be good in the ethical sense when it serves the well being of man [(dem gelingenden Leben des Menschen)].  Only technology that contributes to our realization of the potential of man as an integral whole [(unsere ganzheitliche Potenziale des Manschen)] is good technology [(389)].

Yet because our understanding of the reality we modify, regulate, and change—not to mention our grasp of the consequences of our actions—is never complete, our creative, technological capacities must be exercised with great humility (391).

"the problem about real life"

"in any given social situation it is frequently the case that many different transactions are taking place at one and the same time between members of the same group.  Not one game is being played, but several, and, if the game metaphor may be stretched further, the problem about real life is that moving one's knight to QB3 may always be replied to with a lob across the net."

     Alasdair McIntyre, "The character of generalizations in social science and their lack of predictive power," chap. 8 in After virtue:  a study in moral theory (Notre Dame, IN:  University of Notre Dame Press, 1981), 93-94 (84-102).  Indeed with a "move" in no "game" (an row-raising insult, an upset of the board, a pulling of the fire alarm).