SHS Web of Conferences 72, 0 3006 (2019) https://doi.org/10.

1051/shsconf /20197203006
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“Inorganic body of man”: the transhumanist

ideas in Marx
Andrey Maidansky 1,, and Nikolai Biryukov2
1
Belgorod National Research University, 308015, Belgorod, Russia
2
Moscow State Institute for International Relations (MGIMO University), 119454, Moscow, Russia

Abstract. Transhumanism is a young ideology, and its creators have hazy

and confused notion of their forerunners and philosophical roots. The
authors attempt to show that some of the ideas and concepts of Karl Marx
meet the aspirations of transhumanists to radically transform the human
body. This is, first of all, the idea of the revolutionary role of labor and
technology in the history of mankind, along with the concepts of the
“inorganic body” of man and the essence of man as an “ensemble of social
relations”.

1 Introduction
Those who aspire to glimpse into distant future should, as Newton advised, climb onto “the
shoulders of giants”. For an ideology as newborn and as unfledged as transhumanism is, it
is vital to lean on firm points of support in the history of human thought. So far,
transhumanists have failed in this task, nor have they displayed any particular interest in
undertaking it. They have been more passionate about the technological side of the matter,
viz. androids, cyborgs, nootropic drugs, etc. Nick Bostrom’s effort to identify the
ideological roots of the transhumanist movement can hardly be considered a serious
contribution to the history of science [1].1 Nick Bostrom is a Director of the Oxford
Institute for the Future of Humanity, and a co-founder of the World Association of
Transhumanists.
Christian theologians’ excursions to the background of the problem, from Francis
Bacon to Pierre Teilhard de Chardin [2], have been more impressive, but remain a view
from the outside, not the kind of self-critical introspection transhumanism requires as, for
that matter, any other ideology or research program does.
Following is an attempt to see whether and how Marx’s philosophy of history can help
solve the problems on the transhumanist agenda.

2 Marx as a Precursor of Transhumanism

The cornerstone of transhumanist constructions is the idea of the infinity of human being.
Philosophers have been familiar with it since the time of Heraclitus (B 45 DK): “By setting
off you would never find out the ends of soul, though you should travel along every path:


Corresponding author: amaid@rambler.ru

© The Authors, published by EDP Sciences. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative
Commons Attribution License 4.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).
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so deep a measure does it have” [3]. Plato, too, stressed the difference between the infinity
of soul and the limited capacities of human body. He would even call the body the prison of
the soul.
As Plato writes in Phaedo (82e), “the lovers of knowledge are conscious that their
souls, when philosophy receives them, are simply fastened and glued to their bodies: the
soul is only able to view existence through the bars of a prison, and not in her own nature”.
Transhumanism tries to resolve this contradiction of classical metaphysics in its own
way. It seeks to transform the human body by means of technologies, endowing it with
countless degrees of freedom, overcoming, indeed, death itself, and thus to force open the
door of the “prison” of our corporeity.
Marx was the first to point out the revolutionary role of technologies in the history of
mankind. (Incidentally, Bostrom enlisted Marx in the party of “bioconservatives”, without a
shadow of a doubt and without a single argument.) Marx showed how technological
development changed the structure of society, creating new social classes and forms of
property. “The hand-mill gives you society with the feudal lord; the steam-mill, society
with the industrial capitalist” [5]. And earlier, Marx wrote about man’s universality “which
makes all nature his inorganic body”. Plants, animals, stones, air, etc., that “constitute
theoretically a part of human consciousness, ... in the realm of practice ... constitute a part
of human life and human activity” [6].
A man, therefore, has not one body, but two. He constructs his second, inorganic, body
by his own labor from the material of external nature. All strictly human, i.e. the ideal,
programs of human behavior, including habits and norms of everyday life, rules of
language, moral and legal imperatives, dogmas of religion, etc., are “recorded” in this man-
made body. Laboring man can turn any natural thing or any phenomenon of nature into a
“chromosome” that stores information about his personality, the character of his thought
and behavior. It is this technology of “programming” man’s own vital activity with the help
of external things that is human race’s major advantage over other living species: it gives us
freedom. Every time man changes the surrounding world, he changes himself, and in this
improves the common “genotype” of mankind. Man is both a subject and a product of his
own labor: “The entire so-called history of the world is nothing but the creation of man
through human labor” [7]. Marx called this conceptual novelty a materialistic
understanding of history.
Marx, to be sure, understood “the human essence” to be “the ensemble of the social
relations” and, by no means, an “abstraction inherent in each single individual” (as this is
stated in his Sixth Thesis on Feuerbach). There is neither a trace nor a shadow of
“biosocial” dualism in this definition. The essence of man is one hundred percent social. As
to the body, it is a violin the “ensemble of social relations” plays.

3 The “Bio-conservative” Objections

Critics of transhumanism put the concept of human “biological nature” in the forefront of
their argument. This is precisely the concept Marx rejected, that of the “abstraction inherent
in each single individual”. The guarantee of our human identity is seen in some
anthropological constant or in the human genome, technological interference with which
threatens to destroy both “our generic-ethical self-understanding”, and “the necessary
conditions for an autonomous way of life, and universalistic understanding of morals”,
Francis Fukuyama writes [cited in 8].
From Marx’s point of view, the “biological nature” of man is but a naturalistic myth
rooted in the misunderstanding of human practical life, of the fundamental difference in the
way of life of man and animal. If so, the entire line of reasoning of the opponents of
transhumanism is beside the point, and this applies not only to the rationalist arguments of

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enlightened “bio-conservatives”, such as Fukuyama, but also to anathemas from the lofty
perspectives of “theological anthropology”.
The prime example of the latter can be found in Vladimir Kutyrev’s writings.
“Transhumanism is an anthropo(humano)phagia, a direct challenge to the identity of man,
as we know him, as we know ourselves having evolved over millions of years in the tempos
of reason living and born on that basis or having been created by God “who saw that it was
good” [9].
The nature of human body or, for that matter, the nature of any other body is no obstacle
to labor. Practical transformation of nature, including and primarily the nature of human
body, is the “generic activity” of man. To attempt to impose any kind of anthropological
taboos on our practical abilities would be both senseless and useless. Labor has long since
changed our natural body and changed it irreversibly, has straightened our spine vertically
(despite a whole bunch of adverse health effects), has transformed the anthropoid’s upper
limb into that “tool of tools” we call human hand. Modernization of the body will doubtless
go on, no matter what its opponents, the “biohumanists”, say.
In general, transhumanism should not be portrayed as an alternative to classical
humanism. The “hard core” of the humanistic worldview, as shaped in the age of the
Renaissance, remains safe and sound: man is the ultimate goal, the end in itself of any
human activity. Man’s self-perfection, including that of his body, mind and social relations,
is the principal vector of world history. It is not difficult to find this basic provision in the
transhumanist manifestos provided they are read without prejudice and with a minimum of
scientific honesty.
There may be theorists and practitioners of transhumanism, of course, who might try to
destroy this core, but any research program must be judged by its best, advanced
developments. Marxism, it will be remembered, did not avoid being deformed and
discredited by some of its adherents already during Marx’s lifetime, prompting Marx to
refuse to identify himself as “a Marxist”.

4 Human Nature and the Problem of Freedom

For Marx, human freedom is directly proportional to man’s command of nature, including
command of his own biological nature. Command of nature depends, in turn, on the
development of productive forces. i.e. tools and technologies. Freedom is, therefore, a
dimension of sociohistorical, not individual life. The paradox of history is that societies
have developed enormous productive forces at the expense of crippling bodies and minds of
men of labor. Some social classes have expanded their freedom by enslaving others.
Marx called this paradoxical development alienation. A great social revolution was
needed for the progress to cease resemble a pagan idol drinking the nectar of freedom from
sculls of the dead.
What does this mean as far as the problem of transformed human corporeity is
concerned?
Technological progress is a necessary, but far from sufficient condition for liberating
the body. Human bodies cannot be free unless human society is free. In situations of
alienation freedom of some implies bondage of others. This deplorable fact is virtually
ignored by transhumanists.
As James Steinhoff correctly observes, “most transhumanist thought tends to place little
emphasis on the social nature of the human – and this is where transhumanists should take a
point from Marx. The transformation of the human seems to be regarded by most
transhumanists as a process undergone by atomistic individuals who each exist in no more
than a loose aggregate with others” [10].

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Since human body is an element of the productive forces, indeed, their primary, key
element, development and transformation of human body has to and will continue. From
this standpoint, bioconservatives’ protests are hardly more than Luddite-type naïveté
devoid of any historic sense. But bioconservatives are right to highlight threats and risks
new technologies entail for living individuals. In the world of alienation these threats are
more than real. However, new technologies entail not only threats, they promise new
possibilities, hence greater freedom. Would this not justify the risks?

5 Conclusion
For all their apparent differences, Marxist and transhumanist theoretical programs turn out
to be blood relatives, at least, in a number of aspects. However, we have no intention to
present Marx as an apostle of transhumanism. No doubt, he would have found his own
objections, and severe those are likely to have been, to the basic tenets of transhumanism,
not to mention the former’s historical predictions. The scope of this paper forces us to limit
ourselves to highlighting the affinity of Marx’s understanding of human nature and
technology with the implicit, still not properly understood, premises of the transhumanist
project.
Man is an artistic and artificial creature, from head to toe. Humans are creators of their
own identity, “and this is good”, as the author of the book of Genesis used to say.

References
1. N. Bostrom, Journal of Evolution and Technology, 14 (2005)
2. Transhumanism and Transcendence: Christian Hope in an Age of Technological
Enhancement (Georgetown University Press, 2011)
3. Heraclitus (The Los Andes University Press, Merida, 1967)
4. Plato, The Dialogues, 411 (Armstrong, Scribner, 1873)
5. K. Marx, The Poverty of Philosophy, 95 (Progress Publishers, Moscow, 1973)
6. K. Marx, Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, 75–6 (Prometheus Books,
New York, 1988)
7. K. Marx, Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, 113
8. S. Žižek, In Defense of Lost Causes, 435 (Verso, London, 2008)
9. V.A. Kutyrev, Voprosy filosofii, 7, 24 (in Russian).
10. J. Steinhoff, J. of Evolution and Technology, 24 (2), 9