ARTICOLI / 7 / Roberto Manzocco /
One of the main concepts promoted by the transhumanist ideology is what we can call ‘self-directed evolution’: the idea that using more and more sophisticated technologies, we will be able to alter in a non-univocal way our bodily and cognitive configuration. And if we bring this suggestion to the limit, we can easily envision a distant future in which our species will undergo a process of ‘hyper-speciation’, multiplying itself in an almost endless set of new species. More than that: the notion of species itself would lose any meaning, to the advantage of the single individual, which will be able to choose any and every kind of trait he will deem worthwhile. In other words, the evolutionary process will most likely be introjected by the individual, which will become in a certain sense a species in and of itself. If this will be case, self-directed evolution will not bring about one or more new species, but it will rather dissolve the idea of species in itself: the individual will become ontologically preeminent in regard to its relationship with the notion of species, acquiring a new kind of ‘essential individuality’. In other words it is an ‘ontological leap’, which would prevent us to apply to our post-human descendants any concept of species. In the first part of this paper I will cover some inter-related ideas of transhumanism, like ‘self-directed evolution’ and ‘morphological freedom’. In the second part I will analyze some points of the philosophical debate about the nature of the ‘species’ concept. In the last part I will merge the two topics, trying to extract the philosophical consequences of these transhumanist ideas for the concept of ‘species’.
