Dissertationsprojekt Paul Glen Fischer, M.A.

What relationship to his body does a person have who hopes to be able to upgrade it with technical means in such a way that he will be spared illness, old age and even death?

My emerging dissertation is dedicated to what I would like to describe - not without provocation - as the greatest civil religion of the present, namely self-optimization and the transformation of the body pursued with diverse, often radical means, which can be attributed to the transhumanist paradigm. Rapid digitalization and the spread of artificial intelligence have ensured that a large part of humanity allows itself to be guided and structured by it in its everyday life, largely without hesitation. Talk of a "posthumanist" age is making the rounds, sometimes with euphoric, sometimes with fearful undertones. To what extent are contemporary humans already alienated from the idea that suffering and death are a necessary part of life, and how much approval does the idea of physical immortality possess? I first work out parallels in content and rhetoric between self-optimization and transhumanists in order to argue for a broader application of the term, which stands for a movement whose ideas have long since captured large parts of the population. It will be shown that they unleash similar mechanisms of action for the 21st century with regard to everyday human behavior and notions of right and wrong, as is also true for "classical" religions, with which they show manifold overlaps.