(Palgrave Pivot) Hauskeller, Michael - Sex and The Posthuman Condition-Palgrave Macmillan (2014)

Sex and the Posthuman Condition
DOI: 10.1057/9781137393500.0001
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DOI: 10.1057/9781137393500.0001
Sex and the
Posthuman Condition
Michael Hauskeller
University of Exeter, UK
DOI: 10.1057/9781137393500.0001
© Michael Hauskeller 2014
All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this
publication may be made without written permission.
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save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the
Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence
permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency,
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Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication
may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.
The author has asserted his right to be identified as the author of this work
in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
First published by 2014
PALGRAVE MACMILLAN
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registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke,
Hampshire RG21 6XS.
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A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress.
www.palgrave.com/pivot
doi: 10.1057/9781137393500
For Teo
Posthuman or human,
young or old,
for me you will always be
the sexiest woman alive.
DOI: 10.1057/9781137393500.0001
Contents
Preface vii
1 After the Singularity: The Glorious

Sex Life of the Posthuman 1
2 Sexbots on the Rise 11
3 Three Literary Paradigms: Pygmalion,
The Sandman and The Future Eve 24
4 Promethean Shame and the
Engineering of Love 41
5 The Rehabilitation of the Human
Body: Lawrence and Houellebecq 53
6 The Marquis de Sade on Happiness,
Nature and Liberty 64
7 Synthetik Love Lasts Forever 73
8 Kissengers and Surrogates 80
Bibliography 90
Index 94
vi DOI: 10.1057/9781137393500.0001
Preface
This book is meant to be a sequel to my last book, Better
Humans? Understanding the Enhancement Project, which
Acumen (now Routledge) published last year. In that book,
I looked at the various proposals for human enhancement
in order to understand why certain proposed changes of
the human condition are promoted and perceived as forms
of human enhancement, that is, as an enhancement of the
human as a human. I was interested in the ideas of human
perfection and/or human nature and the values informing
them that underlie those proposals and that lend them
credibility.
However, one particular area of human enhancement
was not addressed in the book, mainly because it only
became a topic of discussion very recently and I didn’t
immediately realise its significance. It is what Julian
Savulescu and Anders Sandberg call the “neuroenhance-
ment of love and marriage” (see for instance Savulescu and
Sandberg 2008, Liao 2011, Earp et al. 2012). The basic idea
is that we should use neuroenhancers to control our love-
related emotions so that they better match our values and
preferences. Thus lust, physical attraction, attachment and
pair-bonding for instance can all be modulated, that is,
strengthened or weakened (depending on what is thought
to be better given the circumstances) by chemical stimuli.
And it is recommended (even urged as a moral obligation)
that we explore these options to enhance our love life.
Proposals such as these initially sound reasonable
enough, but they are also symptomatic of a wider ten-
dency to endorse technologies that promise to help us gain
DOI: 10.1057/9781137393500.0002 vii

viii Preface
autonomy over our bodies, and especially our sexual bodies, which are
often perceived and described by proponents of radical human enhance-
ment as “messy” and detrimental to human dignity, as “meatbags” or
“deathtraps”. Yet despite this negative assessment of the flesh-and-bones
body and the concomitant commitment to the goal of discarding that
body altogether (for instance, by uploading our minds to a computer),
sexuality features remarkably often in the posthuman scenarios that
are designed to sell us the idea of the posthuman. Sex, in those visions,
will not only be infinitely more intense and infinitely more pleasurable,
but also be unhampered by negative emotions such as jealousy or by
(misplaced) moral scruples. We will be in complete control of our own
bodies, and will always perform perfectly. If no human is available, we
will have marvellous sexbots who will be able to fulfil all our desires. If
there is a danger that we lose erotic interest in our partner or our partner
in us, we can easily rekindle it by means of love pills that change the
chemistry of our brains. Likewise, if we are in danger of loving too much
and for that reason becoming too dependent, there will always be a way
to tone down our love to a healthy level that leaves our autonomy intact.
I was intrigued by all those possibilities and by the apparent eager-
ness with which they were promoted and embraced, so I wanted to have
a closer look at what was going on and, if possible, to make sense of it.
This book (which initially I intended to call “Automatic Sweethearts
for Transhumanists”) is my (admittedly rather unsystematic) attempt
to do so.
Exeter, July 2014
DOI: 10.1057/9781137393500.0002
1
After the Singularity:
The Glorious Sex Life
of the Posthuman
Abstract: It has been predicted that in a decade or two our
computers will have become so powerful that we will finally
be able to do and be whatever we like. The posthumans
that we will have become in the wake of this event,
commonly referred to as the singularity, will not only be
super-intelligent, but also capable of experiencing pleasures
that go far beyond anything we can experience now. Yet
this emphasis on pleasure, and especially sexual pleasure,
seems to be at odds with the logocentric outlook and the
contempt for the human body that many transhumanists
embrace. What resolves the apparent conflict is an
instrumental understanding of the body and the conceptual
transformation of the sexual partner into a masturbation
device.
Keywords: hedonism; instrumentalisation; pleasure;

posthuman; singularity; transhumanism
Hauskeller, Michael. Sex and the Posthuman

Condition. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014.
doi: 10.1057/9781137393500.0003.
DOI: 10.1057/9781137393500.0003 1
2 Sex and the Posthuman Condition
Twenty years ago the computer scientist and science fiction novel-
ist Vernor Vinge (1993) predicted that in 30 years (i.e. ten years from
now) “we will have the technological means to create superhuman
intelligence” and that “shortly after that, the human era will be ended.”
Today, a fair amount of people seem to think that such a development
is in fact inevitable, that there is some kind of natural law underlying
technological progress, which makes it go faster and faster,1 until one day
very soon, most likely during our own life time, a point will be reached
when all bets are off and literally anything can happen. This point (as
well as the period following it) is commonly referred to as the singularity
(Kurzweil 2005). Those who believe in it, let’s call them singularitarians,
typically argue that just as the mindless forces of biological evolution
have given rise to intelligent beings such as us, it stands to reason that we
will eventually give rise to beings that are so vastly more intelligent than
we currently are that we cannot even imagine what the world will be
like for them and what they will be able to know and do. We will either
be replaced by superintelligent (and hence superpotent) machines or
become superintelligent (and superpotent) ourselves. Either way, what
we used to call human and the human condition will no longer exist, and
whatever will exist will be posthuman, in the sense that it will be very
different from what human life is now. This is supposed to be a good
thing, not to be feared, but to be eagerly expected, because being human
is regarded as a deeply flawed condition, in which Nature, or whatever
has created us, reveals itself not as the master engineer it is often thought
to be, but as the blundering amateur that it really is (Buchanan 2011). The
human is routinely conceptualised as the merely human, an ontological
failure confined to an inherently defective mode of being, while the post-
human is envisaged as that which we were always meant to be, but never
could be, a being that is free of all the limitations that make it impossible
for us to really be and do what we aspire to be and do, and that, for this
very reason, prevent us from leading a truly fulfilling life. Human life
is by necessity tragic. In contrast, the life of the posthuman will be a
happy one. Tragedy will be replaced by the happily-ever-after of a never-
ending comedy, the present human hell or purgatory by an engineered
naturalised or “biologically domesticated” heaven (Pearce 1995, 18). The
singularity heralds a new era in the history of life and consciousness, a
time in which we, or our successors,2 will finally be able to realise all our
dreams, here on earth, in this life, where there is no longer anything that
would stand in the way of human, or rather posthuman, self-fulfilment.
DOI: 10.1057/9781137393500.0003
The Glorious Sex Life of the Posthuman 3
We will finally be like gods: immortal, all-knowing, all-powerful, and,

perhaps most importantly, unimaginably happy. This divine happiness
will partly result from the absence of all limitations, from the fact that
we can then pursue the project of self-creation without being constricted
in any way by conditions imposed on us by either the environment or
our own nature (which constitute a permanent source of suffering), and
partly because we will have found a way to not only eradicate all suffer-
ing, but also to get the utmost pleasure out of everything we do, which is
nothing less than the “birth right of every creature” (Bostrom 2010, 6).
Once we have passed through the singularity and become posthuman,
we will in fact experience so much pleasure that we can “sprinkle it in
our tea” (Bostrom 2010, 5).
Taken by itself, this emphasis on pleasure is quite understandable, not
the least because it is very human. We, that is, humans, are all natural
born hedonists. Yet given the enormous scope of the ambitions that
the idea of the singularity represents, there is also something odd and
almost quaint about it. What is being heralded is, after all, nothing less
than a radical transformation not only of the human condition, but of
everything else as well. The singularity is supposed to be a literally world-
changing event, where our own transformation into super-intelligent,
post-biological and essentially limitless entities is only the starting point
of a spiritualisation that encompasses nothing less than the entire uni-
verse. For this is “the ultimate destiny of the Singularity and of the uni-
verse”: that our own super-intelligence will prove to be so expansive that
it will “saturate the matter and energy in its midst” and thus transform
the very mechanisms of the universe “into exquisitely sublime forms of
intelligence” (Kurzweil 2005, 21). After reaching that point, anything will
be possible and nothing will be as it used to be. Yet apparently pleasure is
here to stay, and not only what John Stuart Mill used to call the “higher”
pleasures of the mind and heart, but also, and perhaps even primarily,
the most basic pleasures of the body, which we share with many animals.
Unlike their early 19th century utilitarian predecessors, today’s transhu-
manists do not seem to fear the accusation that what they are preaching
is essentially a “philosophy for swine.” In an opinion poll carried out in
2009 by Humanity Plus Magazine (the main publicity organ of Humanity
Plus, formerly the World Transhumanist Association), in which several
thinkers in the radical tech community were asked whether there will
still be sex in the posthuman or singularian future, Alex Lightman (who
at that time was the WTA’s executive director) replied, incredibly: “The
DOI: 10.1057/9781137393500.0003
primary purpose of the Singularity will be seen, after the fact, to be

Awesome Sex. There will be exponentially more sex, with exponentially
more interfaces and with exponentially more measures of pleasure”
(Lightman 2009). I am not sure whether Lightman was entirely serious
when he said that. It is hard to believe that a transhumanist should really
think that the singularity is, ultimately, all about sex. On the other hand,
there is a certain logic to it. If it is being assumed that the ultimate goal
of existence is happiness, that one’s happiness is to be measured by the
amount of pleasure that one experiences, and that the greatest or most
intense pleasures we know are sexual in nature, then we should indeed
expect the singularity to finally open the doors to a life that is filled to
the brim with sexual pleasures. That would at least explain why sex plays
such a surprisingly large role in transhumanist and related visions of the
posthuman future that awaits us. David Pearce for instance, in his now
classic internet manifesto The Hedonistic Imperative (1995), describes what
he calls our post-Darwinian future in the following manner: “What we
will ultimately turn into is hard to imagine. One may predict merely that
it will be utterly sublime. (...) Effectively, we’ll be able to have anything
we’ve always wanted and more.” And what would that be? Well, we will
for instance
discover that what had previously passed for passionate sex had been
merely a mildly agreeable piece of foreplay. Erotic pleasure of an intoxicat-
ing intensity that mortal flesh has never known will thereafter be enjoyable
with a whole gamut of friends and lovers. This will be possible because
jealousy, already transiently eliminable today under the influence of vari-
ous serotonin-releasing agents, is not the sort of gene-inspired perversion
of consciousness likely to be judged worthy of conservation in the new era.
(Pearce 1995, sections 1.6 and 1.7)
In this passage we find all the key elements of the usual transhumanist
rhetoric: the confident assertion that the future will be so different from
the present that we cannot even imagine it, the hyperbole (“utterly sub-
lime”), the wish-fulfilment fantasy, the devaluation of the present, the
relativisation of the good (passionate sex only appears to be a wonderful
thing because we don’t have anything better yet and cannot compare it
to the really good stuff that will be available to us in the future), and the
contempt for the flesh-and-guts human body and the human condition
as a product of natural evolution (“gene-inspired perversion”). We are
being told that although the future is going to be unlike anything we
could ever imagine (with our very limited human brains), there is one
DOI: 10.1057/9781137393500.0003
thing we can be sure of and that is its utter sublimity. Never mind how
we can be sure of that if we cannot be sure of anything else. We are also
being told that what will make our future lives so utterly sublime is that
we will finally get what we really want (or what we would have wanted
if we only had been able to think of it) and that what we really want is
not, apparently, to fully understand the nature of the universe and the
meaning of existence, or to become someone who has risen above the
petty concerns and base desires that govern much of our present lives,
or something equally lofty and awe-inspiring in the long tradition of
classic Western philosophy. Instead, what we really want is mostly
great sex, and the future will be so “utterly sublime” precisely because
we will get so much more of it. And what exactly does great sex consist
in? Not in, say, a more complete bodily and spiritual communion with
another human being, but simply in the attainment of more intense
pleasures and the ability to enjoy those pleasures to the greatest pos-
sible extent, without any internal or external constraints. That is why
we should use all possible means to increase the intensity of pleasure
and to get rid of all obstacles to pleasure such as jealousy (and presum-
ably other emotions that favour pair bonding, which limits the range
of sexual activities that we can engage in and that must, therefore, be
overcome).3
This emphasis on bodily, especially sexual pleasures seems to be at
odds with the strong logocentric outlook that pervades transhuman-
ism and the accompanying hatred of the flesh-and-blood body, which
is usually portrayed as messy, control-defying, limitative, and deadly. It
is associated with nature, which is almost per definition bad.4 Getting
rid of the organic body is a primary goal for all those who wish to leave
the human condition behind. This is the reason why many transhuman-
ists are so fond of the idea that very soon we will be able to upload
our minds to a computer (naturally that, too, will be possible after the
singularity) and then live a virtual (but at the same time very real, or in
fact, to use the term Baudrillard brought into fashion, hyperreal) life that
is completely free of all the constraints that an organic body imposes on
us and that allows us, finally, to go on living forever. For transhumanists,
mind-uploading is the ultimate survival technique. So how does that
mesh with the endorsement of sexual pleasures?
I think the key to resolving that tension is an instrumental understand-
ing of the body. The body is conceived as a mere (pleasure-generating)
tool: a body-to-go. It is a (replaceable) means of pleasure, but in no way
DOI: 10.1057/9781137393500.0003
identity-defining, as it used to be. As Ray Kurzweil (2005, 203) once

remarked:
Actually, I often do have a problem with all the limitations and mainte-
nance that my version 1.0 body requires, not to mention all the limitations
of my brain. But I do appreciate the joys of the human body. My point is
that AIs can and will have the equivalent of human bodies in both real and
virtual-reality environments.
So the idea is that bodies might still be there to be enjoyed, to be used at

will, in any form that will suit us. We might have bodies, but no longer
be them. We (i.e. our roving minds) will have a choice which body to use
when and where and for which purpose, or not at all. We will be able
to wear bodies like garments that can be changed, embellished and also
taken off completely. What is important is that we no longer need a body,
and as soon as that happens, as soon as we are able to change bodies as
we are now able to change our socks, the body ceases to be a threat and
can be appreciated for all the things that we can do with it. For what is
being hated and despised by transhumanists is not the organic body as
such, but the fact that we are so dependent on it. Once we are free to use
them or not to use them, there is nothing wrong with bodies. The plural
form makes all the difference. A single body is a deadly fate. A plural-
ity of bodies is an opportunity. However, very likely we will not even
need a body to experience certain pleasures, at least not a real one. An
imagined or virtual body will do just fine. Perhaps we don’t even need
that. The pleasures of the body may eventually be completely discon-
nected from the actual body as its (necessary) source, which would of
course be desirable since it would increase our autonomy even further.
And disconnected not only (or perhaps not even primarily) from our
own body, but also from the body of the other. To enjoy the great sex
that will be available to us in our posthuman future, neither we nor our
partner needs a real body. Nor do we actually need a real partner: a real
person whose virtual body engages sexually with our own. It’s all in our
head anyway. Thus the glorious sex life of the posthuman is essentially
masturbatory.
In support of this claim, let us have a look at what James Hughes,
executive director of the Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies
and a leading transhumanist, has got to say about the issue, in an article
entitled “The Future of Sex” (Hughes 2003). According to Hughes, we
will learn to control our sexual desires, turn them on or off, depending
DOI: 10.1057/9781137393500.0003
on how desirable we find being sexually aroused in certain situations, or

redirect them to other objects. Lust and love are, after all, biochemical
phenomena and as such are “amenable to manipulation.” Such manipu-
lation is desirable because more control will naturally lead to greater
happiness. Furthermore, since we are “genetically inclined to have
multiple partners,” it is unnatural to suppress “our non-monogamous
biological natures” (despite the fact that most people and cultures do
actually favour monogamy, but that simply shows “the power of culture
over nature”), and hence we should return (presumably because by
doing whatever we are genetically inclined to do we will increase our
overall happiness and well-being) “to some modern version of polygamy,
some form of open, acknowledged sexual sharing, as advocated by
the sexual revolution and the polyamory movement.” This is advisable
especially since the expected radical extension of life span will make it
much harder to stay with one person throughout one’s life. We are also
already able to mix and match all aspects of sexual dimorphism, but by
“the 22nd century, when we are facing indefinite life spans, tweaks to
biological gender will become increasingly common, to stay in fashion,
to improve our chances in life and love, or just out of curiosity.” Then we
will have to ask ourselves: “Why stop with just a cosmetic enhancement,
or swapping your genitals for those of another sex, when you could
have a penis with the responsiveness of a clitoris, or some entirely new
sexual organ? The possibilities will be endless.” Clearly, this is already a
stage where the body is no longer a given and where it can, in theory, be
transformed and recreated any way we like. But for Hughes this doesn’t
seem to be enough. Sex, he believes, will eventually have to transcend
the body altogether: “Body sex itself is likely to become a minor and
infrequent aspect of our erotic experience. There are some short-term
reasons and some long-term reasons for the declining use of the meat-
puppet in romantic play.” Note the choice of words. ‘Meat-puppet’ is
just one of several disparaging terms that transhumanists routinely use
to express their disdain for the human body.5 A puppet is a thing that
can be played with, that has no life of its own and therefore no intrinsic
value. It is there to be used, perhaps to entertain us, but is in itself of
no great significance. Meat, even more so, is something that exists to be
consumed, not to be preserved and treasured. And if you don’t use it
up quickly, it will quickly begin to rot and stink. The body as a meat
puppet has its expiry date written all over it. The metaphor is designed
to express and invite disgust, to persuade us that the body is a despicable
DOI: 10.1057/9781137393500.0003
thing that we cannot get rid of soon enough. Hughes can see no reason
(at least no sexual reason) why we should want to hold on to it: body sex
is dangerous (think of all the sexually transmitted diseases), old people
find it increasingly difficult to have it (which is very unfair to them), it
is no longer necessary for reproduction, and last but not least virtual
reality will soon provide alternatives that are far superior to the kind of
body-dependent sex that we are used to. “Doing the nasty in nano-neuro
VR will be far more intimate than in the flesh. We will be able to morph
our genders, species, ages and numbers in VR, and open ourselves up
to forms of tactile and emotional sharing that are impossible in the
flesh-to-flesh. We can hold an orgy on the moons of Jupiter, on lambskin
rugs, with cherubim as an attentive audience.” As far as I’m concerned,
I could do without the attentive cherubim, but that is probably a matter
of personal taste. And it is of course not the point here. Rather, the point
is that the only limits to what we can do and experience will allegedly
be the limits set by our own imagination. Whatever we can imagine, we
will be able to do. Or rather, whatever we can imagine, we will be able to
imagine in a way that makes it feel real. It is as if our imagination sud-
denly extended to all of our senses, with all the colours and sounds and
smells and tastes and touch sensations as vibrant and intense as they can
possibly be. In other words, our imagination will be so enhanced that
we no longer need reality. Hughes emphasises that all this will also make
masturbation a lot easier, and, more importantly, ultimately preferable:
“faced with the uncertainty and security risk of letting some new person
into your head, versus just thumbing your own button, more people may
opt for a life of single self-stimulation.” Real body sex will then “be about
as exciting as stirring tepid tea with your finger.” The only intimacy left
here is the intimacy that we share with ourselves, or perhaps not even
that (if intimacy involves closeness and a certain degree of self-awareness
and being-with). In any case, the overall message is that real bodies had
better be avoided. Real bodies are messy things, quite disgusting really.
And sex is as well, at least to the extent that it is connected to the flesh-
and-blood body. Natasha Vita-More (1997), in another paper devoted to
the subject of posthuman sex, goes straight to the point by asking: “Do
we really need sex? And if so, why with the very organs that we urinate
with?” But then again, we would want to hold on to the intense pleasure
that sex brings, so what we really need is sexual pleasure (as often and
as much as possible), but without sex, that is without the need to engage
our own body (or certain parts of the body) and to engage with one
DOI: 10.1057/9781137393500.0003
another. “Maybe we will eliminate physical sex altogether and endow

a simulated creativity centre in our brains manufacturing orgasms on
an assembly line.” We can then redirect sexual pleasure to accompany
certain intellectual activities. This may then be used to speed up other
forms of enhancement, for instance cognitive enhancement: “What
would happen to the learning curve if learning caused the same excite-
ment as sexual orgasm?” Thus the goal is to make the pleasures of the
mind as intense and orgiastic as, in our current condition, only certain
bodily pleasures can be, and to use this mergence of the higher and the
lower to control the direction of our interests. Pleasure is both intrinsi-
cally valuable, and thus an end in itself, and an important tool aiding our
ascent to ever-higher levels of existence.
However, since we are nowhere near that point yet, we may want to
try out another and more easily obtainable alternative to messy body
sex first, which will allow us to enjoy the upsides of sex without having
to deal with its alleged downsides (which all boil down to the spectre
of dependency). As long as we cannot replace our own bodies, we may
just as well start our journey towards limitless (and limitlessly pleasur-
able) existence by replacing the body of the other, or more precisely by
redirecting our affection to a different kind of body, one that is far less
messy and, perhaps more importantly, remains forever unaware of our
own body’s many imperfections.
Notes
1 Ray Kurzweil (1999) calls this alleged law the Law of Accelerating Returns.
2 Interestingly, it does not seem to make much difference whether the
posthumans enjoying those wonderful post-singularity lives will actually be us,
our children and children’s children, or some entirely new, possibly artificial,
entity that has no genetic connection to us. If that glorious future belongs to
somebody else, then we seem to be perfectly willing to make room for them,
mostly because they are not seen as alien entities at all, but as our “mind
children” (cf. Moravec 1988). As Marvin Minsky puts it (approvingly cited by
Kurzweil 2005, 260): “Will robots inherit the earth? Yes, but they will be our
children.”
3 The same tendency to connect the expected radical transformation of
the world with a limitless sex life can be found, although more disguised,
in Stefan Sorgner and Jaime del Val’s A Metahumanist Manifesto (2010),
section 6 (Metahumans as metasexual): “Metasexuality is a productive state
DOI: 10.1057/9781137393500.0003
of disorientation of desire that challenges categories of sex-gender identity

and sexual orientation. A metabody is not ultimately categorisable in terms
of morphological sex or gender but rather is an amorphogenesis of infinite
potential sexes: microsexes. It is postqueer: we are beyond the understanding
of gender as performative. Metasex not only challenges the dictatorship of
anatomical, genital and binary sex, but also the limits of the species and
intimacy. Pansexuality, public sex, poliamoria, or voluntary sexwork are means
to redefine sexual norms into open fields of relationality, where modalities
of affect reconfigure the limits of kinship, family and the community.” The
authors use the language of liberation and critical thinking. But if you strip
the paragraph of its verbal clutter, what remains is a very simple message: be
progressive, belong to the intellectual and political avant-garde, by fucking
anything that is fuckable, male or female, human or animal or machine.
Be strictly egalitarian and non-sectarian in your fucking habits. And fuck
kinship, family and the community, those anti-progressive (and fundamentally
pleasure-destroying?) institutions.
4 In fact there are two different natures that play a role in the transhumanist
worldview: one is the sum of all limitations, everything that constrains us in
any way. That nature is bad without qualification and wherever we find it, in the
external world or in ourselves. However, there is also a good nature, one that
demands and deserves to be respected, and that is our own nature or rather
that part of what we are that allows us to fight against and eventually overcome
all boundaries. It is our creative nature, the kind of nature that drives us to
reshape the world and ourselves until everything is exactly as we want it and as
it should be (see Hauskeller 2013).
5 The most common is “meat bag,” Bostrom calls it a “deathtrap” (Bostrom
2010, 4).
DOI: 10.1057/9781137393500.0003
2
Sexbots on the Rise
Abstract: Various companies already sell sex robots, or
sexbots, which promise to be better lovers than any real
human person could ever be. Not only will they increase
our sexual pleasure, well-being and life span, sexbots will
also never deny us the fulfilment of our desires, because
they lack the autonomy that make human lovers so
unreliable. Does it matter that they are not conscious and
do not really feel anything? Is there something essential
lacking in their interaction with us? Or does the fact that
they cannot not love (and serve) us, that they will never
leave us and will always appear welcoming and loving,
actually make sexbots superior to real human lovers? Does
it give them the “soul” that we crave for and that we rarely
find in humans?
Keywords: automatic sweethearts; behaviourism; nature

of machines; sexbots; sex robots

doi: 10.1057/9781137393500.0004.
DOI: 10.1057/9781137393500.0004 11
William James once briefly discussed, in one of the footnotes to his book
The Meaning of Truth (James 1909, 189), the possibility and desirability
of a sexual companion that acted exactly like a real human lover would,
but that did not feel anything at all. James called this fantasy an “auto-
matic sweetheart”. Today, it seems, automatic sweethearts have already
become a reality. They are called sex robots or simply “sexbots”. You can
buy them on the internet from various companies who all claim to be
the one that produces the only true sex robot. At www.sexbots.us you
can purchase the basic, “unmotorized” version for $6,000 (plus shipping
and handling) and the advanced version (“self-contained, rechargeable
and touch activated”) for $11,299. This is no doubt not an easy choice,
but at least you can try them before you buy, that is, rent them first to
make sure it is the right thing for you. What you are being promised is,
after all, a “life-like sexual companion” with “life-like movements” and
a removable skin (for easier cleaning) with “natural flesh-like feel” that
is designed “with the movements needed to perform sexual acts” so it
can “actually do the job”. However, what you really get, judging from the
pictures and short videos in which you can see the bots in action, is an
(either male or female) giant Barbie Doll, fresh from the uncanny valley.
There’s even a short video where you can watch Ken and Barbie having
sex, which is about as arousing as watching two coupling ladybirds.
If you don’t have that kind of money, you can easily find a cheaper
option. Another company (www.truecompanion.com) sells a sexbot
called Roxxxy Pillow for a mere $999, which features just the essentials,
that is, it comes without arms and legs and can be conveniently hidden
in a pillow. More like the real thing (and therefore more expensive) is the
standard version, Roxxxy Truecompanion, who according to the website
is the “world’s first sex robot – always turned on and ready to talk or
play”. She is so well designed that she “knows your name, your likes and
dislikes, carry on a discussion & expresses her love to you & be your
loving friend. She can talk to you, listen to you & feel your touch. She
can even have an orgasm.” A comparable male sex robot is to be released
soon: Rocky Truecompanion. Short videos show Roxxxy in action, sit-
ting on a sofa and talking dirty to her middle-aged and slightly pudgy
inventor. Any erotic appeal is lacking entirely, and the whole scene is
just ludicrous. But of course this may change very quickly. Far more
life-like and convincing sexbots may be available in a decade or two,
and after the singularity, of course, everything will be possible, so we
must assume that post-singularity sexbots will be indistinguishable from
DOI: 10.1057/9781137393500.0004
Sexbots on the Rise 13
human lovers, except that they are flawless (i.e. always beautiful, always
willing and more skilled in the art of pleasuring us than even the most
experienced human sex worker). That may make it far easier to forget
that they are just machines who do not really think or feel anything, but
are just programmed in such a way that they act as if they thought and
felt what you want them to think and feel. But just because it will be
easier to forget this absence doesn’t mean it is no longer there. It is inter-
esting to see how the line between having feelings and reacting in a way
that in humans we would see as a sign of feelings is deliberately blurred
by the language that is being used in order to sell the robots to the
customer. The robot named Roxxxy does of course not have an orgasm,
as it is claimed, and neither does she listen to you or know your name.
She, or rather it, just makes the appropriate noises. She can neither talk
nor listen nor feel. But is that something we should be bothered about?
That probably depends on what we want. Personally, I find the idea of
having sex with a machine, however indistinguishable it may be from a
real human lover, disturbing, to say the least, although it is not easy to
say what exactly is so disturbing about it. It is not really the fact that we
are essentially alone when we are having sex with a robot, that we are
in fact just using a particularly sophisticated masturbation device. What
disturbs me about it is rather that at the same time we are persuading
ourselves that we are not alone, that we really are with someone. As the
American sociologist Sherry Turkle (2011, 226) put it, “we are alone and
imagine ourselves together”. The robot is designed to be as similar as pos-
sible to a real human lover (only much more responsive and devoted), so
that we can keep on pretending that we are communicating with a real
person. Yet the pretended real person has only one purpose, namely to
fulfil all our sex-related or other desires. Whether it is a sexbot, or some
other kind of carebot designed to look after our health or emotional
well-being, its purpose is to be there for us, which is precisely what a
real person’s purpose never is. A real person either has no purpose, or
if they do, then they are their own purpose. What a real person wants
may or may not overlap with what we want, and if it does then this is a
happy coincidence. If a person decides that they want to share their love
or their lust with us, and we want the same, then there is a chance for us
to be with each other, to lose and find ourselves in one another and, for
a short while at least, to transcend our existential solitude. Yet if we start
regarding the robot as an adequate or indeed superior replacement of
the human lover, then we have all but given up on the idea that sex can
DOI: 10.1057/9781137393500.0004
be a true encounter between two persons, as opposed to an act of mutual

masturbation where one uses the other only as a pleasure-generating tool,
and each is essentially alone and only concerned with themselves. To say
that a robot can be the better lover suggests that the intense experience
of successfully reaching out to a person and at the same time opening up
to them that we can (although admittedly by no means must) experience
when we are having sex with another human being, that all this is just an
illusion. A real human lover can be replaced by a robot without loss if
and only if other people can already never be more than means for us, if
they already are, for all intents and purposes, merely sexbots in disguise.
I find it hard to believe that this is true. But then, I’m not a trans
humanist. If I were one I would probably feel obliged to celebrate the
rise of the sexbots as yet another victory in our brave struggle against
nature and against nasty bioluddites. A short while ago the Centre for
Transhumanity republished on their website transhumanity.net an arti-
cle by a certain Hank Pellissier titled “Sexbots Will Give Us Longevity
Orgasms” (2012). The same article had already been published three
years earlier in the magazine of the World Transhumanist Association
“humanity plus” (when the author still called himself, bizarrely, “Hank
Hyena”). The images show two sparsely clad and certainly very enticing
young women who supposedly are meant to be taken for paradigmatic
sexbots (and who look nothing like the real ones of the Ken & Barbie
type). The article begins by informing us that sex is good for us, the more
and the more explosive, the better. But that means that we hardly ever
get enough of it. Real human companions tend to have the occasional
headache or their period or have to work or what have you, so twice a
day is out of the question, and after a while the sex you get is not even
particularly good, which is really bad for your mental and physical health.
Enter the sexbots, which are exactly the kind of sexual partner that we
always wanted, only much, much better, like just about everything in the
technologically enchanted posthuman world that transhumanists are so
fond of salivating over. You like sex? You ain’t seen nothing yet. By the
year 2050
sexbots will electrocute our flesh with climaxes thrice as gigantic because
they’ll be more desirable, patient, eager, and altruistic than their meat-bag
competition, plus they’ll be uploaded with supreme sex-skills from mil-
lennia of erotic manuals, archives and academic experiments, and their
anatomy will feature sexplosive devices. Sexbots will heighten our ecstasy
until we have shrieking, frothy, bug-eyed, amnesia-inducing orgasms.
DOI: 10.1057/9781137393500.0004
They’ll offer us quadruple-tongued cunnilingus, open-throat silky fellatio,

deliriously gentle kissing, transcendent nipple tweaking, g-spot massage &
prostate milking dexterity, plus 2,000 varieties of coital rhythm with
scented lubes – this will all be ours when the Sexbots arrive.
So finally we’re going to get the kind of sex that we deserve. Life will be as
it should have been all along. And it is so healthy and can easily add sev-
eral years to our life. And it is so much easier. No more foreplay, no more
boring conversations, no commitment or obligations, no embarrassing
questions, no talking back. This sure sounds like a perfect arrangement.
Sexbots will never have headaches, fatigue, impotence, premature ejacula-
tion, pubic lice, disinterest, menstrual blood, jock strap itch, yeast infec-
tions, genital warts, AIDS/HIV, herpes, silly expectations, or inhibiting
phobias. Sexbots will never stalk us, rape us, diss us on their blog, weep
when we dump them, or tell their friends we were boring in bed.
Hyena/ Pellissier further predicts that sexbots will come with an option:
eye contact or no eye contact. And they will shower after we have used
them “and put themselves back in the closet”, which no doubt is very
convenient.
So sexbots are really good for us on so many levels. Life extension: the
holy grail of transhumanism. Well-being and happiness for everyone, at
any time: the hedonistic imperative. And of course control, independ-
ence, autonomy. Nature finally defeated. We don’t need anyone, and we
are not needed by anyone. (Human lovers are much too needy, and we
don’t need that.) Sexbots make us free. We can finally take without hav-
ing to give anything back. We don’t have to worry about what they feel.
They never disobey. We can just use them. Humans like to see themselves
as ends and tend to resent being treated as a mere means. Sexbots won’t
object. They are means.
To be fair, though, some of those who look forward to the soon-to-
come sexbot revolution do not seem to be comfortable with that kind of
cheerful instrumentalisation of humanoid machines. In December 2012,
porn producer and “sex-positive” feminist Jincey Lumpkin delivered a
TedX talk on “Are Robots the Future of Sex?”, in which she shows herself
convinced that in a few decades there will be sentient and conscious and
much more humanoid robots around that will be used for all kinds of
purposes, naturally including sex. Although her talk is rambling and it is
not entirely clear what she wants to say, she declares her conviction that
sexual freedom is crucial to human rights, and that the availability of
DOI: 10.1057/9781137393500.0004
sex robots will increase that freedom for us (as well as provide an outlet
that may prevent sex trafficking). But she also seems to think that robots
should have a choice too and not be treated as mere things, because con-
structing them without the choice to say no would cause duress, duress
equals rape, and rape is bad. So we would be morally compelled to give
sex robots free will. The argument seems to assume, though, that sexbots
will be conscious, which is by no means necessary. Although it may one
day be possible to create artificial minds, we have currently not the slight-
est idea how to accomplish that, so that the appearance of consciousness
is all we can realistically hope for. Yet even if they were conscious, that by
itself would not create a moral problem, or at least not the kind of moral
problem that Lumpkin imagines, as long as the robot has no interests
that differ from those of her owner. Even if the robot is conscious, it
will only suffer from its enslavement and reification (or even perceive
it as such) if it wanted to, but could not, act differently from the way it is
constructed to. So if a robot were conscious and happy to serve and to
fulfil all of its master’s wishes, then there would be, despite its inability
to act in any other way, no duress and therefore no moral obligation for
us to grant it that ability. Perhaps more importantly, it is unclear why we
should want to make them conscious in the first place, especially if that
would morally oblige us to give them free will, that is, the ability to form
their own preferences and to act upon them. It is, after all, precisely their
inability to act against our wishes that makes them so attractive to us.
And that is true not only for sexbots, but in fact for all machines.
To emphasise this point, and since we are talking about machines and
what they can and cannot do (or what they are and are not), please allow
me a brief digression. A while ago I attended a talk which debated the
question what a machine must be like in order to qualify as a genuine
moral agent. The answer given by the speaker was that the machine
would have to be physically embodied, capable of adaptive learning and
empathy, and oriented towards the good. Even though I am not at all
convinced that moral agency can really be understood in these terms,
this is not what bothered me when I was listening to the speaker’s very
confident analysis. All I could think of was why anyone would want to
create a machine that is a moral agent?
A machine is always something that has been constructed to serve a
certain purpose, which is not primarily the machine’s own purpose, but
the constructor’s. We build machines because we want them to do cer-
tain things that we think it would be good for a machine to do. The sole
DOI: 10.1057/9781137393500.0004
reason why we create them is that we want them to do what we want

them to do. Yet a moral agent is – in my view per definition – an entity
that thinks and decides for itself, that does not do what we want it to do,
unless of course it comes, after due deliberation, to the conclusion that
what we want it to do is the right thing to do. A genuine moral agent
doesn’t follow anyone else’s conception of the good. They are by their
very nature unreliable. They can’t be trusted to do our bidding. They
make up their own mind about what is good and what is bad, what to
do and what not to do. But who would want to build a machine that is
designed not to do what we want it to do, but rather to do what it thinks
best? Now, I’m not saying that this can never be done. We may want
to do it out of curiosity: simply in order to see whether it is possible to
pull this off. But usually when an idea takes off and gains public inter-
est, the creation of new machines is driven by more specific purposes
than mere curiosity. What we want can then never be a genuinely moral
machine because that would defy any purpose that we may have had in
building it.
When I asked the speaker after her talk who she thought had an inter-
est in building moral machines, she answered without hesitation (as I
had expected she would): the military. They were hugely interested in
fighting machines that would be able to distinguish reliably between
friend and foe, and that would not be prone to torturing civilians and
massacring whole villages. That may be true, of course, but for this
purpose you would not really need a machine that is a moral agent. On
the contrary, a genuine moral agent may well decide that the distinction
between friends (to be protected) and enemies (to be captured or killed)
is morally untenable and that it is wrong to kill anyone. Or it may think
differently about who should be seen and treated as the enemy. And I’m
sure the military would not want any of that. Now I do appreciate how
difficult it must be to create a machine that is really able to distinguish
correctly at all times and in every situation between (designated) friends
and (designated) enemies, but what the machine certainly does not need
in order to accomplish this tricky task is moral agency, for the same
reason that it does not require moral agency to distinguish between a
German and a Brit. It certainly presents a cognitive challenge to a machine
(or a human for that matter), but not a moral challenge.
Neither does a machine need moral agency to stay free of the tendency
to, say, rape and murder civilians. I completely trust my coffee machine
that it would never do such things, even though nobody would mistake
DOI: 10.1057/9781137393500.0004
it for a moral agent. Of course a coffee machine has not been designed
to kill anyone, but the principle is the same: a machine designed for kill-
ing doesn’t need moral agency not to attack civilians; all it needs is the
ability to distinguish between X’s (enemy soldiers engaged in combat)
and Y’s (civilians or captured enemy soldiers) and to follow unerringly
the inbuilt command: kill (all) X’s, but don’t kill or harm any Y’s. The
machine doesn’t need to be able to figure out what is right and wrong.
It just needs to be able to follow the orders given by its programmer to
the letter, and the reason why the military is interested in such machines
is that humans often are not. And their very unreliability has got some-
thing to do with the fact that they, in contrast to the machines that are
meant to replace them, really are moral agents (which always includes
the possibility of evil). When I pressed the point about the military not
really needing or wanting machines that are genuine moral agents, the
speaker gave a further example to prove that there really was an inter-
est in creating machines that were moral agents, which takes us back to
our main topic. The example she chose was sexbots who could say no.
She couldn’t possibly have given a worse example to support her case.
Sexbots are produced to provide people with sexual companions who
never say no, who are always willing, which exactly proves the point I
was trying to make. Their inability to say no is actually the reason for
their existence. In a way sexbots can be seen as the perfect expression of
what machines are: things that cannot say no, that have been designed to
be unable to say no. And that also includes so-called moral machines, or
what is presented as such.
That is, by the way, also the reason why moral enhancement (of human
beings) cannot work, or is at least very unlikely to work. To the extent
that we take an interest in changing people’s moral outlook, we cannot
seriously want to enhance their moral agency, because we want them to
do as we think best. That is the whole purpose of enhancing them. We
want them to think like us, or to act as we think they should act. We
don’t want them to be able to act as they think they should, because if
they were, they might end up not doing what we think they should do,
in which case there would have been no point in enhancing them in the
first place. In that way, the enhanced human is really nothing but a glori-
fied sexbot.
Now, a sexbot is, ideally, a machine that is always available to serve
all our sexual needs and that does so better and more reliably than any
human lover could. At the same time we want it to appear as human as
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possible, which does not only mean that it should look and behave like a
human, but also that it should give the impression that it really feels what
a human lover would feel. It should at least feel aroused and be genuinely
interested in arousing us. In other words we want a puppet with a soul,
but a soul that is entirely devoted to us. We want a sex partner that serves
us on command, but does so willingly. We want a slave that acts as if it
were no slave, one that loves us (at least in the flesh), but loves us reliably.
Human emotions are notoriously fickle. Yet a robot, if well-constructed,
will always be there for us, or at least appear to do so, or else it can be
easily replaced by one that is. And a robot that appears to care for us
always is still better than a human lover that really does care, but only
for a while. From the standpoint of the sexbot user it does not matter
anyway whether the robot really cares for us or only appears to do so.
This is the position that the former British chess champion David Levy
adopts in his book Love & Sex with Robots (2007). Levy is confident that
we will, very soon, love robots and have sex with them, and argues that
this is absolutely fine and in fact to be welcomed since it will solve a lot
of relationship problems that we regularly suffer from today. As is cus-
tomary among those who believe in the power of man-made technology
to eventually “achieve all things possible” (Francis Bacon), Levy seems
to have no doubt that robots will soon be able to think and feel just as
we do, or most likely even better than we do. “The robots of the mid-
twenty-first century will (...) possess human-like or superhuman-like
consciousness and emotions” (2007, 10). But will they really? How can we
possibly know that? Yet Levy has little patience for people who doubt his
confident assertions. He compares strong AI sceptics to those Christian
fundamentalists who refused to accept human evolution as a fact and
to those who insisted despite all evidence to the contrary that the earth
was flat (2007, 21). And just as Darwin and Galileo have been vindicated,
Levy believes he will too, when we will have seen all his predictions
come true. Except that in Levy’s case there is not a shred of evidence that
machines will soon be able to think and feel. It is not a matter of ignor-
ing the evidence. There is no evidence. All we have managed to achieve
yet, and all we are likely to achieve in the foreseeable future, is the crea-
tions of machines that can appear to be conscious and to possess certain
emotions. Levy spends many pages of his book providing evidence that
humans have a strong tendency to perceive and treat inanimate objects
as living, conscious agents even when they know that they are not really
conscious or alive. And people can fall in love with the strangest things,
DOI: 10.1057/9781137393500.0004
even computers. But all that proves, if it proves anything, is that we are
easily duped. It may indeed turn out that once we are able to build robots
that are sufficiently convincing in their appearance and behaviour we
will find it very difficult not to attribute consciousness to them when we
interact with them. But that does not mean that they are conscious, or
that we are justified in attributing consciousness to them.
However, Levy disagrees. For him, the appearance of consciousness is
not only in all practical matters just as good as actual consciousness (the
pragmatist approach), but it actually is one and the same thing (the logical
behaviourist approach): the (behavioural) appearance of consciousness is
consciousness.
There are those who doubt that we can reasonably ascribe feelings to robots,
but if a robot behaves as though it has feelings, can we reasonably argue
that it does not? If a robot’s artificial emotions prompt it to say things such
as “I love you,” surely we should be willing to accept these statements at
face value, provided that the robot’s other behavior patterns back them up.
(2012, 11)
But why “surely”? It does, after all, seem to make sense to distinguish
between someone who merely says that they love us and someone who
really does. But of course Levy’s point is that the only way we can judge
whether someone really loves us is by analysing their behaviour. The fact
that somebody verbally declares their love for us might not be sufficient
to attribute real love to them, but if in addition they are always there for
us, listen and talk to us, look after us, always cover (and scratch) our
backs, kiss and embrace and caress us and have sex with us whenever
we need or want it, then we would be hard-pressed to deny that they
really love us. If they do everything that we can reasonably expect any-
body who really loves us to do, then it is hard to see what it can possibly
mean to say that, despite all, they don’t really love us. And if we cannot
find a real (meaningful) difference between a human person who loves
somebody and one who consistently and permanently behaves as if they
did, then why should there be such a difference when the one doing the
loving is not a human person, but a robot?
It seems to me, though, that there is indeed an important difference
between the two cases. If a human being behaves in all respects consist-
ently and constantly just as someone would behave if they really loved
us, then by far the best explanation for their behaviour is that they really
do love us. It just doesn’t seem possible that somebody who does not
love us would always behave to us in a manner consistent with real love.
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We would expect them to show their lack of real love in some way. It
need not be something obvious, and it need not be obvious to us, but
we would expect there to be something that distinguishes the behaviour
of the person who really loves us from the one who only pretends to do
so. It would be nothing short of a miracle if a pretended lover would,
throughout his life, act exactly like a real one, precisely because such
behaviour would be entirely inexplicable.
This, however, is not the case with robots. If they behave in all respects
exactly like we would expect someone to behave who really loved us,
then we have a perfectly good explanation for why they behave like
that, namely that they have been designed that way. Levy claims that our
knowledge that robots have been designed to manipulate us into believ-
ing that they really love us is irrelevant and should make no difference
to us:
Even though we know that a robot has been designed to express whatever
feelings or statements of love we witness from it, that is surely no justifica-
tion for denying that those feelings exist, no matter what the robot is made
of or what we might know about how it was designed and built. (2007, 12)
On the contrary, I think it makes all the difference. Again, we might be

tricked into believing that robots truly love us, but that doesn’t mean
that they do. And while it might make no sense to distinguish between
the real and the merely apparent when it comes to human behaviour
that is consistent with the actual presence of a certain emotional dis-
position – simply because we would not be able to plausibly explain
such behaviour – the fact that we know the other to be a robot, that
is a machine designed to behave as if they loved us, is, by providing a
perfectly good explanation for such behaviour, sufficient to justify our
refusal to believe that they really do. But again, does it really matter if
they do not?
In his 1909 book The Meaning of Truth, William James claimed that a
statement is only meaningful if it makes a practical difference whether
or not it is true: “if it can make no practical difference whether a given
statement be true or false, then the statement has no real meaning”
(James 1909, 52). However, in a footnote later in the same book, he cor-
rects a claim that he made in his previous book, Pragmatism, where he
declared the terms “God” and “matter” for synonymous “so long as no
differing future consequences were deducible from the two conceptions”
(James 1907, 96–100). Now, however, he no longer believes this, because
even if the godless universe were exactly like one in which God does
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exist, believing the one or the other would definitely make a difference
for us.
Even if matter could do every outward thing that God does, the idea of it
would not work as satisfactorily, because the chief call for a God on modern
man’s part is for a being who will inwardly recognise them and judge them
sympathetically. (James 1909, 189)
James then asks us to consider an analogy which he thinks will convince

us that there is indeed a relevant, meaningful difference between the two
hypotheses:
The flaw was evident when, as a case analogous to that of a godless uni-
verse, I thought of what I called an “automatic sweetheart,” meaning a soul-
less body which should be absolutely indistinguishable from a spiritually
animated maiden, laughing, talking, blushing, nursing us, and performing
all feminine offices as tactfully and sweetly as if a soul were in her. Would
anyone regard her as a full equivalent? Certainly not, and why? Because,
framed as we are, our egoism craves above all things inward sympathy and
recognition, love and admiration. The outward treatment is valued mainly
as an expression, as a manifestation of the accompanying consciousness
believed in. Pragmatically, then, belief in the automatic sweetheart would
not work, and in point of fact no one treats it as a serious hypothesis.
Yet just a year later, in December 1910, the philosopher Edgar Arthur
Singer gave an address before the American Philosophical Association at
Princeton, titled “Mind as an Observable Object” (later published as
the first chapter of his 1924 book Mind as Behavior), in which he directly
attacks James for his alleged inconsistency. Pragmatically, a soulless
person (that is, one that lacks subjectivity and any form of mental
awareness) should be regarded as fully equivalent to the usual kind, to a
person with a soul. Singer insists that it would not make any difference
whatsoever whether the other really feels anything at all or just behaves
in a way that is consistent with real feelings, that is, in such a way that
we cannot detect any difference between what they do and what a real,
conscious and self-aware person would do. Thus, contrary to what James
suggests, for all intents and purposes an automatic sweetheart is just as
good as a real human lover.
When we occasionally call a lover “soulless”, we do, according to Singer,
in fact refer to a certain (already observed or predicted) behaviour, so if
there is a difference between the soulful and the soulless it is a difference
in behaviour:
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If I imagine myself come to believe that my mistress, with all her loveliness,
is really without soul, I cannot think what I should mean by this if it be
not that I fear her future conduct will not bear out my expectations regard-
ing her. Some trait or gesture, a mere tightening of the lips, hardening of
the eye, stifling of a yawn, one of those things we say are rather felt than
seen, would have raised in my mind the suspicion that she might not to my
fuller experience of her remain indistinguishable from a spiritually minded
maiden. (Singer 1924, 9)
If the distinction between ‘soulless’ and ‘soulful’ means anything, then

it is this. “Consciousness is not something inferred from behavior; it is
behavior.”
James’s point, of course, was that we wouldn’t be happy with a lover
of whom we knew that they didn’t really feel anything for us and that
all their seemingly loving actions deceive us to the extent that they indi-
cate some kind of emotional involvement on the part of our lover. Yet
Singer could respond that we might well be unhappy with an automatic
sweetheart, but that we really shouldn’t be because to react like that is
completely irrational, given that a real human lover would do nothing
different from the automatic one.
It is interesting, though, to see how neatly Singer’s description of a
“soulless” lover (where the term can be meaningfully ascribed) fits with
the descriptions that we find in literature of equally unsatisfying women
and with the accompanying eulogies on the virtues of the artificial lover
(as, e.g., in Ovid’s Pygmalion, Hoffmann’s The Sandman, or Villiers’ The
Future Eve). Once again, it is the real human lover who is decried as soul-
less, the one that turns out not to be completely reliable, completely with
us, completely there for us. It is the yawn that indicates the lack of soul,
a less than interested gaze. That is the danger that always exists when we
risk getting involved with real human beings. They might lose interest in
us, might grow cold and unresponsive, and might stop loving us. If that
is an indicator of soullessness, then each and every one of us is soulless,
and only an automatic sweetheart, one whose eyes will always gaze lov-
ingly at us and will never lose their shine, whose lips never tighten, but
are always soft and welcoming, and who will never have to stifle a yawn,
only such a one can be said to have a soul.
Thus it appears that the effect of denying that there is any difference
between a real person and a fake person, between a real human lover
and an automatic sweetheart, is that the soulless becomes, or comes to
be regarded as, the truly soulful, and the soulful the truly soulless.
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3
Three Literary Paradigms:
Pygmalion, The Sandman
and The Future Eve
Abstract: This chapter looks at three works of literature,
namely the myth of Pygmalion, as related by Ovid in
his Metamorphoses, E.T.A. Hoffmann’s short story The
Sandman and Villiers de l’Isle Adam’s novel The Future
Eve, which are all literary paradigms for the paradoxical
idea that a doll or machine, which is unconscious and
unfeeling and in this sense does not have a soul, is in fact
the truly soulful, whereas real human lovers, who do have
a mind of their own and who do feel and do care, appear
to be lacking a “soul”. This renders them less desirable as
a lover than a machine, which although unfeeling, may
appear to be feeling more than they.
Keywords: authenticity; E.T.A. Hoffmann; living dolls;

Ovid; Sigmund Freud; soulfulness; Villiers de l’Isle
Adam; the uncanny

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24 DOI: 10.1057/9781137393500.0005
Three Literary Paradigms 25
This idea, that the soulless is the truly soulful and the soulful the truly
soulless, strange as it may be, is not as unusual as it may initially appear.
In fact the idea is an integral part of our cultural heritage. I don’t think
it is true, or even makes much sense, to say that we have always been
posthuman or transhuman as Donna Haraway and others have claimed
(Haraway 1990; Hayles 1999; Halberstam and Livingston 1995, 8), but
there is plenty of evidence that we have always been transhumanist, at
least if one understands transhumanism in terms of the desires and fears
that inspire and drive its agenda. Whatever our relationship to technol-
ogy, however much it has always been incorporated into our existence as
humans, and however much we have always been also something other
than merely human, all that simply defines us as human beings. That is
what we are as humans. So either we will stay basically as we are, then
we will stay human (whatever that means exactly), or we will radically
change as the singularitarians believe, and then we will be posthuman
in a sense that is very different from the sense in which some cultural
theorists have declared us to be posthuman already. But transhumanism
is an ideology whose central tenet is the deeply unsatisfactory state of
the present condition of humanity and the corresponding desirability
of a complete reinvention of the human including our relations to the
world and to each other, and this ideology, or at least its seeds, have
been with us for a very long time. We, or some of us (or perhaps even
all of us sometimes), have always wanted to be immortal, to be free of
our numerous limitations, to live like the Gods, and to be as power-
ful and untroubled as they are. In that sense, we have always been
transhumanist.
Thus it should not come as a surprise that, like many other transhu-
manist ideas, the idea that the soulless is the truly soulful and the soul-
ful the truly soulless, and that for this reason the humanoid machine
is much preferable as a lover to any real human man or woman, can
be traced back to ancient myths, in this case to the Greek myth of the
sculptor Pygmalion who falls in love with a statue he created, which is
being related to us in the tenth book of Ovid’s Metamorphoses. Yet what
is most interesting about this story is not that a man falls in love with an
artefact of his own creation, but rather the reason he has for creating it
in the first place. The story begins with the daughters of Propoetus, who
are being punished by the goddess Venus for denying her divinity. Their
punishment is that they have to prostitute themselves, which is witnessed
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by Pygmalion. Everything else follows from this. Here is Ovid’s original

description of the events, which is worth quoting in full:
Then, as all sense of shame left them, the blood hardened in their cheeks,
and it required only a slight alteration to transform them into stony flints.
When Pygmalion saw these women, living such wicked lives, he was
revolted by the many faults which nature has implanted in the female sex,
and long lived a bachelor existence, without any wife to share his home.
But meanwhile, with marvellous artistry, he skilfully carved a snowy ivory
statue. He made it lovelier than any woman born, and fell in love with his
own creation. The statue had all the appearance of a real girl, so that it
seemed to be alive, to want to move, did not modesty forbid. So cleverly did
his art conceal its art. Pygmalion gazed in wonder, and in his heart there
rose a passionate love for this image of a human form. Often he ran his
hand over the work, feeling it to see whether it was flesh or ivory, and would
not yet admit that ivory was all it was. He kissed the statue and imagined
that it kissed him back, spoke to it and embraced it, and thought he felt his
fingers sink into the limbs he touched, so that he was afraid lest a bruise
appear where he had pressed the flesh.
The whole story is characterised by an astonishing ambivalence towards

women and the idea of sexual love. Pygmalion is not just a sculptor who
one day creates a statue that he then happens to fall in love with (which
is how most people will remember the story), but rather somebody who
deliberately sets out to create a being that is worthy of being loved by him.
Ovid introduces him as a man who is disgusted by the whole female sex
after seeing the daughters of Propoetus prostituting themselves in public
(which is not entirely voluntary, but rather a punishment inflicted on
them by the goddess Venus for having offended her). They are being
described as having “lost all sense of shame” and “the power to blush, as
the blood hardened in their cheeks”. This loss of shame is clearly under-
stood as a decisive step in a process of dehumanisation: a little more
hardening, we are told, and they would be indistinguishable from flint.
Appalled by so much female depravity, Pygmalion decides that he no
longer wants to have anything to do with women and is determined to
stay a bachelor. Yet entirely happy with his wifeless (read: sexless) exist-
ence he is not, because soon enough he carves a statue that looks exactly
like a woman and is so exceedingly lifelike that one has the impression
that she might move any second now and that it is only modesty that
keeps her from doing so. And Pygmalion falls in love with his own crea-
tion. Here is, finally, the woman that he has been waiting for, that all men
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(if we take Pygmalion to represent the male sex) have been waiting for: a
woman who knows how to behave properly and who is pure and free of
all unseemly desires and inclinations, and this purity and freedom makes
her much superior to all real women. In Pygmalion’s mind, the statue is
actually more human than any real woman could ever be. All real women
are ultimately like the Propoetides: natural born sluts, and as such less
than human (less than what humans, or at least human females, should
be), more like stones, almost like living statues. The actual statue, on the
other hand, is as a woman should be. The statue, in its immaculate ivory-
whiteness is the true woman.
Curiously, however, Pygmalion has a very sexual relationship with
this statue. He clearly desires her: “Often he runs his hand over the work,
tempted as to whether it is flesh or ivory, not admitting it to be ivory. He
kisses it and thinks his kisses are returned; and speaks to it, and holds it,
and imagines that his fingers press into the limbs”. He dresses his new
love, gives her presents, buys her jewellery, and most importantly, takes
her to bed and sleeps with her. For a while that seems to work, but for
obvious reasons (a statue is unlikely to make a good lover) it is not very
satisfactory in the long run. So Pygmalion approaches the goddess Venus
and begs her to give him a woman that is just like his ivory maiden.
She obliges by giving life to the statue, and ivory becomes human flesh.
Pygmalion kisses the statue, and she “felt warm: he pressed his lips to her
again, and also touched her breast with his hand”. Gradually her body
yields to his touch, loses its hardness and becomes malleable under his
caressing hands.1 “The lover is stupefied, and joyful, but uncertain, and
afraid he is wrong, reaffirms the fulfilment of his wishes, with his hand,
again, and again. It was flesh!” Soon enough, the no-longer ivory maiden
becomes aware of what Pygmalion is doing with her, and at the same
moment that she becomes fully awake to the world, at the very moment
of her birth, acknowledges him as her rightful lover: “The girl felt the
kisses he gave, blushed, and raising her bashful eyes to the light, saw both
her lover and the sky.” She cannot help loving him back, and since we are
told that nine months later she gives birth to a son, she is obviously not
reluctant to have sex with Pygmalion, nor he with her.
So why is Pygmalion not disgusted by her? What is it about her that
makes her so different from all other women that he can accept her and
even have sexual intercourse with her without being repelled by her?
It must have something to do with the fact that she is not an ordinary
woman, but a statue come alive, and that she carries the modesty, the
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bashfulness of the inanimate thing, over to her new existence. She

doesn’t move on her own. She doesn’t follow her own will. She has no
will of her own. She is a perfect mirror of her lover’s desires, without
having any desires of her own that might threaten her purity. She lives
only for her lover, who is her one and only. He is, quite literally, her
world. She is a supposedly living woman, but without the flaws, a living
paradox. She is perfect and pure, but also perfectly usable, obedient and
ready to serve her one and only master. She does what she is told. She
is the ideal woman, a true precursor of today’s or tomorrow’s sexbots, a
tailor-made, always-willing, never-tiring sexual companion, a Stepford
wife.2 Isn’t it odd how little our desires seem to have changed over the
last two thousand years?
Another tale about a man’s erotic obsession with a female android,
or automaton as it used to be called at the time, is E.T.A. Hoffmann’s
“The Sandman”, which was first published in 1817 as part of the story
collection Nachtstücke (Night Pieces). It is the story of a young university
student called Nathanael who, haunted by the memory of a traumatic
childhood experience connected to his father’s death and a mysterious
malevolent figure called Coppelius whom as a child he used to identify
with the monstrous, eye-stealing Sandman, and who might or might not
be real, gradually slides deeper and deeper into madness and eventually
throws himself off a tower and kills himself.
But before he does, he becomes infatuated with what at first seems
to be a beautiful young woman called Olimpia, who is allegedly the
daughter of his neighbour (and professor), but later turns out to be
nothing but a cleverly constructed (moving and talking) wooden doll.
This might be evidence of his growing insanity or a factor contributing
to it, but in any case it is rather odd given that he seems to be the only
one who does not realize that there is something seriously wrong with
the object of his infatuation. Although Olimpia is so superbly crafted
and so lifelike that when she is introduced to people at a ball, they do
not immediately recognise her as what she is, namely a machine, they
all sense her strangeness and want nothing to do with her. They find
her “strangely stiff and lacking in animation”, her eyes lifeless, as if they
were blind (which they are, of course), “as though her every movement
were produced by some mechanism like clockwork” (which it is). They
believe her to be a “complete imbecile, who plays music and sings “with
the disagreeably perfect, soulless timing of a machine”, as if “she was only
pretending to be a living being”.
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Yet Nathanael is blind and deaf to her mechanical nature and only
sees and hears what his imagination prompts him to perceive. He flatly
refuses to pay heed to the warnings of his friends whom he deems
“cold and prosaic”, and prefers to project his own self into the invit-
ingly blank slate that the automaton offers him – which he obviously
finds so enjoyable and rewarding that he completely forgets his fiancée
Clara who waits for him in his home town and who not only loves him
dearly, but is also very bright, sensible and down-to-earth. Yet precisely
that may be the problem. When she writes to him and very compe-
tently tries to argue him out of the gloom that has come over him as a
result of an encounter with what he perceives to be a new incarnation
of his childhood nemesis, the sandman, he writes back to her brother
Lothar, complaining about her attempt to dissuade him from his fears
in her “damnably sensible” letter and voicing his suspicion that it was
really Lothar who had taught her to argue like that. Obviously he finds
it inappropriate for a woman to be so clever: “Really, who would have
thought that the spirit which shines from such clear, gracious, smiling,
child-like eyes, like a sweet and lovely dream, could draw such intellec-
tual distinctions, worthy of a university graduate?” Apparently he feels
that there is something unfitting about a sharp intellect in a woman,
something that threatens to destroy the “sweet and lovely dream” that
her features evoke. And he is right of course. A sharp intellect is by
its very nature critical and unaccommodating. It resists the projection
of another’s self. It insists on, and serves as a constant reminder of,
its bearer’s independence. And, vain and self-absorbed as we usually
are, that is not necessarily what we want in a lover. (I was tempted to
write: not necessarily what a man hopes to find in a woman, but I’m
not entirely sure that this is, on the most fundamental level, an issue
that men have with women, rather than one that human beings have
with other human beings.)
The narrator describes Clara as follows:
Clara had the vivid imagination of a cheerful, ingenuous, child-like child, a
deep heart filled with womanly tenderness, and a very acute, discriminat-
ing mind. She was no friend to muddle-headed enthusiasts (...) Many people
accordingly criticized Clara for being cold, unresponsive, and prosaic.
Although Nathanael is reported not to belong to those people, his words

and actions indicate that in fact he does. When it becomes clear to him
that she doesn’t believe in “the mystical doctrine of devils and evil forces”,
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Nathanael blames her disbelief on her “cold and insensitive tempera-

ment”, and when she persists in her gentle and loving attempts to talk
some sense into him, he accuses her of being a “lifeless automaton”.
Olimpia, on the other hand, “the beautiful statue”, who really is a life-
less automaton, strikes him as the ideal woman. It appears to him that
she “gazes at him yearningly” when he sits with her, holds her hand and
talks to her about his love “in fiery, enthusiastic words”. And although
she never says anything in response but “oh! oh! oh!”, Nathanael feels
himself, apparently for the first time in his life, completely understood.
Enraptured, he exclaims: “O you splendid, divine woman! You ray shin-
ing from the promised afterlife of love! You profound spirit, reflecting
my whole existence!” What an interesting choice of words: the machine
is addressed as a goddess, the less than human as more than human.
She is all that a woman is meant to be and that a real woman can never
be. She makes good on the promise that her beauty has made, and she
does that by reflecting his whole existence. Yet it stands to reason that
whatever reflects another’s whole existence cannot have an existence of
its own. A real person can never be a pure reflection. But a machine can.
That is of course its greatest advantage. It can be anything we want it
to be, and it allows us to be whatever we want to be. In return, we only
too willingly allow its essential vacuity to masquerade as profundity.
Characteristically, Nathanael is unperturbed by Olimpia’s taciturnity and
interprets her persistent sighing as proof of a deep mind:
she doesn’t engage in trivial chit-chat, like other banal minds. She utters
few words, certainly; but these few words are true hieroglyphs, disclosing
an inner world filled with love and lofty awareness of the spiritual life led in
contemplation of the everlasting Beyond.
She is of course a “perfect listener”, who is never distracted by other

things, never in need of concealing “her yawns by a slight artificial
cough”. With the peculiar binary logic that may work just fine when
applied to humans, but fails utterly when we apply it to machines, her
undistractibility is perceived as attentiveness, as utter concentration on
what he has got to say and an implicit acknowledgement of its impor-
tance. If she doesn’t speak then that is because words are too profane
for her. She is a “child of heaven” that cannot “adjust itself to the narrow
confines drawn by miserable earthly needs”. Her lack of earthly needs is
reconstructed as a clear indicator of a higher, more “heavenly” existence.
Absences are being transformed into presences.
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When Nathanael eventually learns the truth about Olimpia, that she
is in fact merely a wooden doll, he completely breaks apart: “Madness
seized him with its red-hot claws and entered his heart, tearing his mind
to pieces.” And as the story of his fate spreads, those who hear it, instead
of congratulating themselves on their own good sense, start doubting
their own judgement and suddenly see robots lurking in every corner
and behind every human face:
In order to make quite sure that they were not in love with wooden dolls,
several lovers demanded that their beloved should fail to keep time in sing-
ing and dancing, and that, when being read aloud to, she should sew, knit,
or play with her pug-dog; above all, the beloved was required not merely
to listen, but also, from time to time, to speak in a manner that revealed
genuine thought and feeling. The bonds between some lovers thus became
firmer and pleasanter; others quietly dissolved. “One really can’t take the
risk,” said some.
Although this passage strikes a rare humorous note in an otherwise

pretty depressing tale, what is being described here is actually the most
uncanny event in the whole story. It is the moment when Nathanael’s
insanity turns epidemic. Everybody has been infected with uncertainty.
The difference between humans and machines has become blurry: no
longer can people tell for sure which is which. Your neighbour, your best
friend, your lover, could all turn out to be machines. This is Descartes’
methodological doubt turned into a fact of life. Nobody is unquestion-
ingly certain anymore. The existence of the human other has become
problematic, their actual non-existence a permanent possibility. It is the
same uncertainty that is later so hauntingly brought out by Don Siegel
in his 1956 film Invasion of the Body Snatchers. And contrary to what
Sigmund Freud argued in his seminal (though highly overrated) essay
The Uncanny (1919), this uncertainty is indeed at the heart of that peculiar
feeling that the events related by Hoffmann excite (whatever you want to
call it). Freud famously analysed Hoffmann’s Sandman in his essay, but
he focuses entirely on the figure of Coppelius alias the sandman (who, in
Freud’s analysis, embodies the son’s fear of being castrated by his father)
and all but ignores Nathanael’s relationship to Olimpia and Clara (which
is odd considering that Clara with her superior intelligence and moral
strength may quite reasonably be seen as threatening to “castrate”, i.e.
emasculate Nathanael). For Freud, there is no uncertainty: the reader
knows that Olimpia is an automaton, and we also know that the strange
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events witnessed by Nathanael are all real and not just a figment of his
overwrought imagination. But of course we don’t really know any of this.
Nathanael might be haunted to his grave by unnatural forces, or he may
just be insane and imagine the whole thing. Ernst Jentsch whose paper
on the “The Psychology of the Uncanny” Freud references (and promptly
dismisses) captures the essence of Hoffmann’s tale far better than Freud
does when Jentsch emphasises the role of the “doubt as to whether an
apparently inanimate object really is alive and, conversely, whether a
lifeless object might not perhaps be animate” (Freud 2003, 135).3
There is, however, one passage in Freud’s essay that I think may
well prove relevant to a proper understanding of not only Hoffmann’s
Sandman, but also of all related tales about men who develop an erotic
obsession with artificial women, such as Ovid’s Pygmalion or Villiers’s
The Future Eve (which I will discuss in a moment). “It often happens”,
Freud informs us (2003, 151),
that neurotic men state that to them there is something uncanny about the
female genitals. But what they find uncanny (‘unheimlich’ = lit.: unhomely)
is actually the entrance to man’s old ‘home’, the place where everyone once
lived.
This would certainly explain the appeal of the artificial lover (whose
genitals are new and ready-made and do not threaten us with annihila-
tion as that from which we have originated, the old home, does).
In another of his tales, “The Automata” (which as far as I know has not
been translated into English yet), Hoffmann has one of his characters
express his disgust for all automata that attempt to assume a human
shape. He calls them “those true statues of a living death or a dead life”.4
This sums up the ambiguity quite nicely.
Equally ambiguous is the French symbolist Auguste Villiers de l’Isle-
Adam’s novel Tomorrow’s Eve (L’Ève Future), published in 1886, which
gives a new twist to the story of Pygmalion and the artificial woman that
he creates for himself out of disgust for the impurity of all real women.
Tomorrow’s Eve tells the (fictional) story of the (real) inventor Thomas
Edison, who has been experimenting with the creation of a female android
for some time when an English friend of his, Lord Ewald, asks him for
help. Ewald has fallen in love with an exceedingly beautiful woman, an
aspiring actress called Alicia Clary, who is in fact the exact likeness of the
Venus de Milo exhibited in the Louvre. In other words, she looks as if that
statue had come alive. Unfortunately, however, Ewald finds to his dismay
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that Alicia’s beautiful, goddess-like appearance is not matched by her

character. Outside and inside are at odds. What her body promises, her
soul cannot fulfil: “The traits of her divine beauty seemed to be foreign
to her self; her words seemed constrained and out of place in her mouth.
Her intimate being was in flat contradiction with the form it inhabited.”
It is almost as if “this woman had somehow strayed by accident into this
body, which did not belong to her at all” (Villiers 2001, 31).
So what exactly makes Alicia so unworthy of her beautiful exterior?
There are various things that Ewald dislikes about her: she doesn’t suf-
ficiently appreciate her own beauty and makes no attempt to live up to
it. She has no lofty aspirations or high ideals. She sings to make a liv-
ing, rather than for the sheer beauty of it. She thinks that art’s principal
purpose is to entertain people. She eats heartily (i.e. not at all like a lady).
She is interested in money. She has no principles. She tells him without
embarrassment about an unhappy love affair that she has gone through,
unaware that such openness is likely to erase from his heart “all traces of
sympathy, all admiration for her” (35) the high-minded Lord might have
had for her. She is not stupid. When Edison suggests that, Lord Ewald
replies:
There’s not a trace in her of that almost sacred stupidity which (...) has
become almost as rare as intelligence. A woman who’s lost her stupidity, can
she be anything but a monster? What is more depressing, more debilitating,
than that hateful creature they call a “clever woman”? (39)
So the problem with Alicia is not so much that she is no intellectual, but
on the contrary that she is, just like Hoffmann’s Clara, not quite stupid
enough. “In everyday life, Miss Alicia is the Goddess Reason” (40). She
has talent, but no genius, is a virtuoso, but no true artist. She doesn’t
like Wagner (whose music, admired by Villiers, is just a lot of bangs, just
noise to her) and when her admirer takes her to the Louvre and alerts
her to her likeness with a particular marble statue, she exclaims: “Yes,
but I have arms, and besides I’m more distinguished looking” (46). Most
people would probably agree that there is nothing really repulsive about
her character. She is just an average woman, not too bright, certainly no
intellectual, a bit selfish or self-absorbed perhaps, but her flaws are noth-
ing out of the ordinary, nothing that she does not have in common with
millions of other people. For Ewald, however, this is exactly the problem:
she is too common. The contrast between her divine features and her all-
too-human character is unbearable. A woman who looks like that should
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not have any flaws. She should be perfect, ethereal, and the fact that she
is not constitutes a moral outrage, a sacrilege, a violation of nature and
reason. She is a living contradiction, a monster really: “Imagine, if you
will, this abstraction brought to life: a bourgeois Goddess. I came thus
to believe that all the laws of physiology had been overturned in this
living hybrid” (36). Ewald concludes his damning assessment of Alicia’s
character by proclaiming that he is not one of those who can “submit to
accepting the body while they reject the soul.” The earliest (drastically
abridged and hence unfortunately not very reliable) translation of the
novel, published in serial form in the late 1920s under the title The Future
Eve, even goes a step further by having Ewald say “I cannot love a woman
who has no soul!” (Villiers 1994, 96). So in this interpretation, which is
in some ways truer to the spirit of the original than the later, more ver-
batim translation, Alicia, because she is disappointingly average and has
no lofty aspirations (and also because she does not seem to be inclined
to be as devoted to Ewald as he is to her and as he imagines he deserves
it), is even denied a soul. In Ewald’s eyes, she is merely a beautiful, but
essentially hollow, form, which makes him cry out in desperation: “Oh,
who could put a soul into that body?” (Villiers 1994, 98).
Fortunately, Ewald couldn’t have come to a better place to ask that
question: “I’ll do it!” exclaimed the professor. The irony here, probably
not intended by the author, is of course that it is not, as we would expect,
the statue (or the android that is eventually going to replace Alicia) that
is said to be without a soul (or at least not one that is worth preserv-
ing), but the living, breathing woman who has the temerity of deciding
for herself what is important to her, what kind of life she wants to live,
and whom she wants to love and whom she does not. That real and very
much alive woman can only be denied a soul because the word “soul”
is here just the name for an allegedly ideal condition, a mode of exist-
ence that has transcended all the apparent pettiness and coarseness of
our common human concerns and that is entirely devoted to the higher
realms, whatever that means exactly. Conveniently this mode of exist-
ence coincides with a complete submission under the wishes and desires
of the man who wants to see her thus transformed. And it is this kind of
“soul” that the professor promises to provide:
At this very hour and this very place twenty-one days from today, Miss
Alicia Clary will appear before you, not simply transfigured, not just made
the most enchanting of companions, nor merely lifted to the most sublime
level of spirituality, but actually endowed with a sort of immortality.
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She will no longer be a woman, but “an angel”, no longer reality, but “the
IDEAL” (54).
Edison then sets out to work and gradually transforms the prototype
android that he had already created (a “magneto-electric entity”, “a Being
in Limbo”) (59) into a perfect duplicate of Alicia (with soft, caressable
flesh and skin), except that the new Alicia (or Hadaly, as Edison calls
her), the “future Eve” of the story’s original title, has a “soul”, meaning
that she meets all the expectations that a male member of genteel society
might have when looking for a suitable female companion. Tellingly, the
creation of a soul for Alicia is described as an eliminative process. It is in
reality the creation of an absence: her “foolishness” is being “murdered”,
her “triumphant animal nature” “assassinated” (63). The new Alicia may
even be “less aware of itself ”, perhaps not conscious at all, but “what does
that matter” if her soul is now “capable of impressions a thousand times
more lovely, more lofty, more noble” (64)? I take this to mean that it is
not even necessary for the new Alicia to actually feel or think anything
at all, as long as she (or her creator) manages to make people believe that
she does. Thus the desired “soul” is located exclusively in her appear-
ance, in what the new Alicia says and does. What she feels or not feels
is entirely irrelevant – she might just as well not feel anything at all. It is
only the expression of certain sentiments (love, devotion, tenderness) that
her lover needs, and that expression of a sentiment is to all intents and
purposes the sentiment itself. That is why Lord Ewald, as Edison assures
him, will actually feel less alone with the new, artificial Alicia (even if she
should turn out to be “less aware”), than he does presently with the real
one (who quite naturally is not focused entirely on her lover and does
not live for him only):
do you suppose it’s “any great loss” for Miss Hadaly to be deprived of a
consciousness like that of her model? Isn’t she, to the contrary, much better
off without it? At least you must think so, since the “consciousness” of Miss
Alicia Clary seems to you a deplorable superfluity, an original sin against
the masterpiece of her body. And then, the “consciousness” of a woman! I
mean, a woman of the world! (85)
For Edison, all real women, with a few exceptions, are ‘mentally empty’,
so they might just as well be left (or recreated) without a mind.
Yet it does not really matter whether the android that is meant to
replace the real woman is conscious or not. What is important is that
the new Alicia will in any case be a creature that is completely under the
control of her lover, who can activate and deactivate her and direct her
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movements and speech by pushing certain buttons cleverly hidden on

her anatomy. So her newly gained “soul” shows itself primarily in a loss
of freedom and autonomy. She is no longer her own master, which is just
as it should be. And she will not only be exactly what it says on the tin,
but she will also stay that way. Deplorably, every real woman ultimately
proves illusive. She can never live up to what her beauty promises. What
we see in her is just an illusion, facilitated by “greasepaint, creams and
pastes of every sort” (120). Strip her of this, and what remains is an old
“witch”, a grotesque imitation of the ideal that she pretended to be. In any
case, she will soon lose all her charms to middle age. So “why not build a
woman who should be just the thing that we wanted her to be”, one who
is always beautiful by her very nature, and beautiful forever? This would
definitely solve the problem that the over-curious young man in Swift’s
“The Lady’s Dressing Room” after his look behind the scenes struggles
with, namely how to live with the fact that no woman is a goddess. The
answer suggested by Villiers de l’Isle-Adam is simple: don’t live with it.
Make your very own Goddess instead. And why not? Every man, it is
suggested, has in fact a natural right to his own goddess. If the plan suc-
ceeds, then Man’s “lost paradise” will be restored to him, life will be as
it should have been all along, and he will once again be master of the
situation, or in short, “the dominator”. The new Alicia, who is the real
Alicia, that is Alicia as she was meant to be, will always say what her lover
wants to hear.
Her “consciousness” will no longer be the negation of yours, but rather
will become whatever spiritual affinity your own melancholy suggests to
you. You will be able to evoke in her the radiant presence of your own, your
individual passion, without having to worry, this time, that she gives the
lie to your dream! Her words will never deceive your delicately nurtured
hope! They will always be just sublime. (...) At the very least you will never
experience here that fear of being misunderstood which haunts you with
the living woman. (133)
In the end, the professor delivers what he has promised, and it turns out
that he has not promised too much. Lord Ewald is entirely satisfied with
the outcome: “The false Alicia (...) seemed far more natural than the
true one” (194). What a strange thing to say: that the android, an arti-
ficial thing, is not only more perfect, but more natural than the woman
on which it was modelled. But then again, for Villiers, it is only the
perfect that is natural, only the ideal that is (completely) real. What we
commonly take for real is just a bad, defective copy of the ideal, which
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is, in a Platonic sense, the really real. The machine allows us to intro-
duce the world of ideas into the world of appearance, to merge the two
worlds into one, to bring heaven onto earth. Thus the (lifeless) machine
is more real than the living human who is nothing but a “phantom” in
comparison (204).
The new Alicia knows no sickness or death, and she never changes,
which also means that she will never stop loving Ewald as he wishes to
be loved (and don’t we all wish to be loved unconditionally and eternally
on some level?). She will always stay devoted to him, and to him only: “I
shall be the woman of your dreams – all that you would have me be.” The
author seems to fully endorse this idea. Yet towards the end of the novel,
Villiers, almost despite himself, nonetheless gives voice to a certain
unease that sheds doubt on the whole project of replacing admittedly
flawed, annoyingly wilful, and constitutionally unpredictable human
beings with flawless, completely reliable and always obliging machines.
“Her heart”, we learn, “never changes; she hasn’t got one” (154). Can
we really want that? Isn’t that too high a price to pay for the illusion of
eternal love? Villiers seems to sense this himself when he lets his Edison
reflect on the greatness of his achievement after Ewald and his future
Eve have left him to live happily ever after in England (only for her to
perish in a fire soon afterwards): “this must be the first time that Science
showed it could cure a man, even of love” (217).
So love is seen as a problem, or more precisely a disease, and tech-
nology provides the cure, not by facilitating the fulfilment of love, but
instead by getting rid of it altogether. If that is what truly happens here,
then that would also explain a remark that Edison made earlier in the
novel and which, at the time, seems rather out of character. When Ewald
has to decide whether he really wants the professor to go ahead and
create a new, purified Alicia for him, he is initially undecided and asks
the professor what he would do, and he replies: “I should blow out my
brains” (71), which is a very odd thing to say really, given that it was
his idea in the first place and that at all other times he seems absolutely
committed to the project.
However, the ambivalence that is suggested here is never fully articu-
lated. If there is fear alongside the admiration, it is suppressed. And what
would there to be feared anyway? That the future Eve might not be able
to love, or to feel anything at all, does not seem to be the problem. The
machine without a heart that, for this reason, will never want to leave
us, is much preferable to a human partner whose heart can never be
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completely trusted. We are better off without it. In fact, we would also be
better off if we had no heart ourselves, and it is this realisation that makes
even Villiers’ Edison uncomfortable. It is clear that Lord Ewald’s whole
misery came only about because he fell in love with a woman that could
not satisfy his high expectations. His own heart made him a victim, a fact
that he resents deeply. He is suffering from a very human disease, and he
can only be cured if he gets what he wants, namely the perfect woman
(which can only be a machine), or if he stops wanting. Life would be so
much easier if we did not fall in love. That is the (imagined) advantage of
being a machine: that one does not have to love. Its inability to fall in love
is its privilege. And realising this, we respond with envy.
That envy is inspired by a deep contempt for nature. The world of the
future is decidedly anti-nature, not only because it makes us vulnerable,
but also because nature is notoriously unpredictable and thus uncontrol-
lable. In Edison’s lab, the artificial birds have human voices and human
laughter because it seemed “more in harmony with the Spirit of Progress.
Real birds are so bad at repeating the words one teaches them” (93). As
long as we have to put up with nature, as long as it cannot be eradicated,
nature should be as much as possible hidden. If we ever saw a woman as
she really is, we (men) would be utterly disillusioned (118), which is why
we need the android:
Nature changes; the Android, never. We others, we live, we die (...). The
Android knows neither life nor illness nor death. She is above all the imper-
fections and all the humiliations. She preserves the beauty of the dream.
She is an inspiration. (154)
Villiers welcomes our human ability to create our own reality and
encourages us to use it: “Well, then, farewell to that so-called Reality, slut
that she was from the start!” (71) It is argued that we always live in an
illusion anyway, even though we may not always be aware of it. Reality is
a construction that frequently changes its face just like the “slut” changes
her lovers. So why not exchange one illusion for another, if that illusion is
better, more pleasing, more fulfilling? (123). The outlook promoted here
is decidedly misanthropic: human beings are despicable. They are false.
In contrast, androids are honest. They do not hide their true nature. And
they are in no way worse. The vapour rising from a battery is no worse
than a soul, which in reality is itself nothing more than vapour (163). Yet
if humans are generally bad, women are even worse. They will betray
you, especially those who are sexually the most attractive. The beautiful
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woman is almost by definition a temptress, a being destined to lure

unsuspecting men into sinful acts. How much better would the world be
without them:
as it is in the nature of these (...) beings to abuse men (...), I conclude that it’s
the right of the man as against the woman (...) to inflict a summary execu-
tion on her (...) without the least scruple or form of legality, any more than
one would hesitate about killing a vampire or a viper. (113)
To avoid the pitfalls of a real human love, with its, human nature being
what it is, almost unavoidable disappointments and betrayals, we need
a scientific love (164), “something better than a false, mediocre and ever-
changing Reality; what I bring is a positive, enchanting, ever-faithful
Illusion” (164). Life is play-acting anyway. We all play a role constantly
(134). People recite their lines like actors. Most conversations are mere
babble anyway. In real life, nobody can afford being sincere. We couldn’t
survive. We’re hiding ourselves from each other, as we must, because we
are individuals, separate beings, atoms, and: “Two atoms can never make
real contact with one another.” Existential solitude is already a given, so
there is nothing to lose here. All a human lover can give us, a machine
can give us just as well. The artificial lover may be a zero, but since all
human lovers are zeros too, the only real difference is that the artificial
one will never disappoint us (136). Their kiss will always be as fresh and
enthusiastic as the first kiss, almost as if time had stopped. Nothing
ever changes, and not only the lover, but also the love becomes virtually
immortal.
In fact, in any fair comparison, the human lover will always score worse
than the artificial one. That is why, in Villiers’ story, Edison warns Lord
Ewald that when he and the new Alicia are going to take the ship back
to England, it is best if she spends the journey in a coffin-like box (just
like Count Dracula in Bram Stoker’s novel, which was to be published 11
years later, in 1897). The reason for this is that human passengers tend to
get sick on the ship, whereas “she knows nothing of those ailments, and
in order not to humiliate, by her calm, fellow travellers whose organ-
isms are more defective than hers, she can make her sea voyages after the
fashion of the dead” (76). Edison is trying to be considerate. He knows
that when people see the android in its perfection, they will become
acutely aware of their own defective bodies. People will feel humiliated
in the face of the machine. The German philosopher Günther Anders
has described this phenomenon many decades ago as Promethean Shame.
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Promethean shame is what we feel when we compare ourselves to the

wonderful machines that we have created and realise how inferior we
really are. This shame is one of the reasons why we are so keen on trans-
forming ourselves into machines or, if that doesn’t work out, on being
replaced by them.
Notes
1 Hersey 2009, 95–96, notes the emphasis that Ovid puts on the very palpability
of the stone-turning-into-flesh. It is not something that is there merely to
be seen, but that invites being touched and caressed. It is, in other words, an
eminently sexual body.
2 In Ira Levin’s chilling novel The Stepford Wives, published in 1972, the men of a
small rural community successfully conspire to replace their all-too-liberated
wives with robots that look exactly like them, but unlike them do not question
male dominance and authority and have no aspirations or interests other than
that of being a good lover and housewife and generally making life as pleasant
and comfortable as possible for their husbands. Being thoroughly fed up
with the women’s liberation movement of the 1960s and 1970s that threatens
their life style and prerogatives, the men respond by killing their wives and
putting machines in their place. When the main protagonist, Joanna Eberhard,
from whose perspective the story is told, eventually suffers the same fate, her
surrogate explains her new priorities to a former friend who has not been
replaced yet: “‘What are you doing then, besides your housework?’ Ruthanne
asked her. ‘Nothing, really.’ Joanna said. ‘Housework’s enough for me. I used
to feel I had to have other interests, but I’m more at ease with myself now. I’m
much happier too, and so is my family. That’s what counts, isn’t it?’” (Levin
2011, 137).
3 Jentsch’s paper was originally published in 1908; an English translation
appeared in 1997 in Angelaki. Journal of the Theoretical Humanities 2/1: 7–16.
4 In the original: “diese wahren Standbilder eines lebendigen Todes oder eines
toten Lebens” (E.T.A. Hoffmann, Die Serapions-Brüder, Munich: Winkler
Verlag 1976, 330).
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4
Promethean Shame and
the Engineering of Love
Abstract: The attraction that we feel for machines, that
makes us choose them as sexual partners and makes
us actually wish to be machines ourselves, or at least in
some respects like a machine, has been explained by the
German philosopher Günther Anders as resulting from
“Promethean shame”. Promethean shame is what we feel
when we realize that the machines we have created are so
powerful and perfect that we humans with our messy and
mortal bodies cannot but feel very deficient in comparison.
We recognize the superiority of the made over the born,
and as a consequence wish to be made ourselves, which
allows us more control over what we are, which is especially
important when it comes to our sexual bodies.
Keywords: biological liberation; Günther Anders; human

deficiencies; neuroenhancement of love; Promethean
shame; St Augustine; Timothy Leary

doi: 10.1057/9781137393500.0006.
DOI: 10.1057/9781137393500.0006 41
The first volume of Günther Anders’ Die Antiquiertheit des Menschen (The
Obsolescence of Man) was published more than 50 years ago, in 1956,
and, strangely, has never been translated into English. The book is essen-
tially about what machines, and our increasing reliance on them, do to
us, or more precisely what they do to what Anders chooses to call our
“soul”. Hence the book’s subtitle “On the Soul in the Age of the Second
Industrial Revolution” – although Anders remarks that it would have
been more accurate to call it “on the transformations of the soul in the age
of the second industrial revolution” (Anders 1987, 15). Thus the question
is how we are being changed by the machines we create and use, and the
analysis that Anders provides in order to answer it, especially in the first
part, titled “On Promethean Shame”, strikes me as just as relevant today
as it was half a century ago. In fact, given that we have now all entered
the age of human enhancement and are fast approaching the technologi-
cal singularity, it is today more relevant than ever.
The book starts with the observation that we have created a world in
which we increasingly look like relics of an era that has long passed. We
lounge around among our various appliances and machines like bewil-
dered dinosaurs in a world that is no longer ours, that has moved on
without us. We lag behind, without any real hope of catching up, and
we know it. The machines that we produce are already so much more
advanced and capable than we can ever hope to be. And they allow us to
do things that go far beyond what we can imagine and emotionally cope
with: “We can bomb to shreds hundreds of thousands, but we cannot
mourn or regret them.” Anders calls this “the Promethean gap”, which
is ultimately a gap between the human body (in which all the limita-
tions of our imagination and emotions are rooted) and the machine (and
the power that it bestows on us). Naturally we would want to close this
gap to get rid of the feeling of disjointedness, and I think that is what
we are witnessing today. The human enhancement project that we cur-
rently engage in can be understood as a concerted attempt to close this
Promethean gap, to make us, as Persson and Savulescu (2012) put it, “fit
for the future”, to bring us up to the advanced (or what is perceived as
such) level of the machine. Today this no longer looks as impossible or
unlikely to accomplish as it did 50 years ago.
The gap between the apparent perfection of the machines that we
create and the apparent imperfection and deficiency of our own vul-
nerable, mortal and messy bodies (and accordingly, since we cannot
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Promethean Shame and the Engineering of Love 43
detach ourselves from our bodies, of ourselves) is hard to accept. In

fact, it is a permanent source of a particular kind of shame, which
Anders calls “Promethean shame” and which he defines as the “shame
for the embarrassingly high quality of the things we make” (Anders
1987, 23). It is the frustrating and humiliating recognition of our infe-
riority when compared to our products, and the fact that more than
anything else seems to make us inferior is the fact that we have been
born rather than made. We are ashamed that we owe our existence not
to art and design, not to a conscious, deliberate and well-considered
act of human creation, but rather to the accident of birth and the
random sexual act that preceded it, neither of which can be seen as
particularly dignified and both of which serve as a constant reminder
that, ultimately, we are and remain mere animals. (Imagine a dialogue
between a machine and a human, the machine boasting about all the
forethought and the complex calculations that have given rise to its
existence and then asking the human “And who made you?”, might we
feel ashamed of having to admit that we weren’t made at all, but were
simply born?)
The perceived perfection of the machine makes us wish that we had
been made too (and in order to spare our children the embarrassment
of having to grow up in the knowledge that they were not designed and
not made fit for purpose – that nobody really cared enough to make
sure that they are as perfect as they could possibly be – we have now
started to modernise our reproduction processes and become much
more “selective” and “pro-active” when it comes to the making of
children). Although we are the makers, that is no longer a reason to be
proud, because the made is for some reason perceived as ontologically
superior. We have started to look at ourselves as we imagine we must
appear to one of our products. Looking at ourselves, we have adopted
the perspective of the machine, and as the machine would despise us if
it were conscious and could make the comparison, we are now ready to
despise ourselves. So the makers, in order to keep up with their product
and to make themselves less despicable, need to find a way to become
made themselves. A sort of self-reification is required, a transformation
of the human into a machine. The naked body that we are ashamed of
is no longer the unclothed body, but instead the body that has not been
worked on, not embellished or transformed in any way, unmodified and
unenhanced. It is, as a product of a presumably blind and unthinking
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nature, a “faulty construction”, which as such is in urgent need of correc-

tion and amendment. But, as Anders rightly points out,
“we can only conceive of the human as a construction, especially a faulty
one, when we adopt the perspective of the machine. Only if this category
is accepted as being both universally applicable and exhaustive can such a
reinterpretation take place and can the unconstructed appear as the badly
constructed. (Anders 1987, 32)1
We used to think that we humans were free and the machines we con-
structed determined and unfree. But this is no longer so. Today, in a
curious contortion, we are the ones who appear unfree, and the machines
enjoy the freedom that we lack. Increasingly, we think of ourselves as
being shackled by our own nature, which, we believe, has not changed
very much, if at all, since the stone age. Transhumanists and other propo-
nents of radical human enhancement constantly tell us that the forces of
evolution have shaped us for a world that no longer exists and that in order
to catch up with the world we have created we need to recreate ourselves.
It is our physical body that, in our own perception, makes us unfree,
that ties us to the past and makes us unfit for the future (and indeed the
present). From the perspective of the machines, human nature is nothing
but a nuisance: “conservative, unprogressive, antiquated, irrevisable, a
dead weight in the rise of the machines” (33). We could achieve so much
more if it were not for us and our defective nature. We see ourselves, as
Anders puts it, as the saboteurs of our own achievements, and we are no
longer willing to put up with this. So something needs to be done: we
have to find a way to become more machine-like, to mould ourselves as
we now mould things to assimilate them to our needs and wants. Our
Promethean shame makes us embrace and promote the idea of “human
engineering” (37), which now appears as something that we owe both to
our machines and to ourselves. After all, we wouldn’t want to be judged as
a disappointment by our betters. In relation to our machines we are like
children, and growing up, in this new interpretation of Schiller’s “educa-
tion of humankind”, means leaving behind our being human.2 Machines
are our heroes. We yearn to be like them. We see ourselves as “scandalous
non-machines” (95). Yet machines always have a certain purpose. They
are highly specialised. Human engineering aims at making the human
more specialised, at perfecting a particular ability or capacity to which
the human is a mere appendix, at best tolerated, but no longer of central
importance. Thus the superhuman that human engineering is meant to
create is at the same time a subhuman.
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This sounds familiar. Similar concerns have been raised much later
by Leon Kass and others. Yet Anders denies that he is what today we
are used to call a bioconservative (he uses the term “metaphysical con-
servative”) (45). The point is not that everything that is, is good simply
because it is (or that human nature is good and should remain what it
is simply because it is our nature) – which would be an untenable posi-
tion – but rather that we are willing to change ourselves for the sake of
our machines, that we measure ourselves by their standards, instead of
our own, and that, in doing this, we limit or even relinquish our own
freedom. The aspiring human engineer may well suffer from hubris (as a
common objection has it), but he also suffers from misplaced humility,
which is not a contradiction. “The ‘human engineer is in fact both: arro-
gant and self-deprecating, hubristic and humble. His attitude is arrogated
self-abasement and hubristic humility” (47).
So when we compare ourselves with machines, in what way exactly
do we find ourselves wanting? One of the gravest defects seems to be
our perishability. We grow old, we die. In comparison, the things that
we create seem to be immortal, at least potentially so, because very often
when they are not it is because we want them to stop working after a
certain period of time (so that more products can be sold). But even
those things are immortal in the sense that they can always be duplicated
and replaced. Our products partake in a new version of immortality:
“industrial re-incarnation”. They have a serial existence. This light bulb or
washing machine may give up its ghost after a few years, but then we can
easily get a new one that is exactly like the old one, or at least one that
does exactly the same job, if not a better one. Their very reproducibility
and replaceability guarantees their immortality. How lucky they are! We
on the other hand, their creators, deteriorate very quickly and we cannot
be replaced. How shameful that is, how unbearable! Again, something
needs to be done. We feel that it cannot, it should not stay like this. (And
indeed, isn’t that what some life extension enthusiasts imagine we will
achieve in the future? Mind-uploading, for instance, to a computer or
to a new body, is the achievement of immortality by making the body
replaceable. Others envisage a periodical cleansing of the mind of all
memories to prevent mental ageing and the boredom of an overly pro-
longed existence, which creates a different kind of serial existence.)
Anders’s great insight is that the human enhancement project is moti-
vated by shame. We are ashamed of our body, our physical nature, our
mere-humanness, our vulnerability and perishability, and not despite the
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fact that none of this is our fault, but precisely because it is (or has been
for a long time) beyond our control and not the result of a conscious
decision. It is the very givenness of our nature that we resent (which
explains why Michael Sandel’s argument from giftedness is so often
ridiculed and received with so much hostility by proponents of radical
human enhancement.) It is the fact that we cannot do anything about
it that we are ashamed of. It belies our claims of autonomy, freedom
and control. That is also the reason why we tend to be ashamed of our
sexuality. Sex is a “pudendum” (71) precisely because it makes us lose
control and voices our dependency. It shows us in the grip of nature, of
that which lies beyond and before us, and reminds us that the “I” (the
individual in control of herself) is a rather fragile construction on the
back of a powerful “It” (the nature that controls the doings of the self).
And we don’t like that one bit. So what we are trying to do is regain
control over ourselves, and that means to gain control also, and perhaps
even primarily, over our sexuality (without realising that the only thing
we can hope to achieve by this is that we manage to replace one It by
another: the natural It of the body by the artificial It of the machine).
Timothy Leary, the Harvard psychologist who almost single-handedly
brought about the cultural revolution (“Tune in, turn on, drop out!”)
that America witnessed during the 1960s, once wondered how it was
possible that we could control so many things, but not our own sexual
bodies. Why couldn’t he have an erection whenever he wanted to (which
was very often)? “Here was another unexplained, mysterious facet
of adult life. Lindbergh could fly the Atlantic. We could put a man on
the South Pole. But we couldn’t get control of the most important part
of our body” (Leary 1998, 86). So Leary set out to find a remedy, to
bring the most important part of our body under our control. Various
aphrodisiacs and of course LSD3 brought him closer to his goal, but he
never found a means to gain complete control. But that may of course,
like so many other things, be just a matter of time. We can imagine our
posthuman successors to be able to erect their penises and moisten their
vaginas at will, always assuming they will still have genitals. Curiously,
if that happened, then we would actually have regained an ability that
according to Christian legend we all used to have in the days before the
Fall. The envisaged posthuman condition is strangely reminiscent of the
human condition ante peccatum. Before we used our God-given powers
to defy God, we lived in a state of innocence, which, as the church father
Augustine tells us, does not mean that people had no sexual relations.
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They did, but only in order to reproduce themselves. It did not involve
any lust and was just something you had to do in order to reproduce, just
as you have to move your legs in order to walk. At that time the sexual
organs could be used at will for the purpose of reproduction, and since
that purpose was good there was nothing shameful about the sexual act.
It only became shameful after the fall, after man had used his freedom to
turn away from God and after he was punished for it. The punishment
was that our bodies not only became mortal, but also unruly, working
against us and no longer in harmony with our own reason-led will. Our
own nature has thus become our worst enemy:
They experienced a new motion of their flesh, which had become disobe-
dient to them, in strict retribution of their own disobedience to God. For
the soul, revelling in its own liberty, and scorning to serve God, was itself
deprived of the command it had formerly maintained over the body. And
because it had wilfully deserted its superior Lord, it no longer held its own
inferior servant; neither could it hold the flesh subject, as it would always
have been able to do had it remained itself subject to God. Then began the
flesh to lust against the Spirit, in which strife we are born, deriving from the
first transgression a seed of death, and bearing in our members, and in our
vitiated nature, the contest or even victory of the flesh. (Augustine, City of
God XIII.13)
According to Augustine, nothing demonstrates to us so clearly and

undeniably the fact that we are not in control of our own bodies, that
is, our own nature, as the involuntary reactions of our sexual organs to
external stimuli and the feelings of lust and desire that go with them.
And precisely because it makes the loss of control so manifest, we feel
ashamed about it. This is, according to Augustine, the reason why Adam
and Eve covered their genitals: because they wanted to hide that they
had lost control. There is nothing that is more shameful than that loss
of control (City of God XIV.16). Our sexual desires serve as a constant
reminder of that loss because it is by means of those desires that control
is taken away from us. In order to reproduce we need to give up control,
we need to let us be controlled by an ungovernable power that subjects
our will. For this reason, we are humiliated by our lust, which we experi-
ence as something that comes over us and which reduces us to a mere
animal, driven and unfree:
Although, therefore, lust may have many objects, yet when no object is
specified, the word lust usually suggests to the mind the lustful excitement
of the organs of generation. And this lust not only takes possession of the
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whole body and outward members, but also makes itself felt within, and
moves the whole man with a passion in which mental emotion is mingled
with bodily appetite, so that the pleasure which results is the greatest of all
bodily pleasures. So possessing indeed is this pleasure, that at the moment
of time in which it is consummated, all mental activity is suspended.
(Augustine, City of God XVI, 19)
Now, as we have seen earlier on, today’s transhumanists are not exactly
opposed to sexual pleasure, so their outlook seems to be very different
from that of Augustine and the Christian Church. Yet what they do have
in common with Augustine is the view that human nature is defective
and that its principal defect consists in the fact that we, instead of being
able to control it, are being controlled by it. For Augustine we are no
longer how we should be. We are all damaged goods. For a transhuman-
ist we are not yet how we should be. We are botched goods. But both
do agree on what we should be, namely in control, and that the present
condition is not only deeply unsatisfactory, but also deeply shameful.
And for this very reason transhumanists can embrace hedonism only to
a certain extent. Pleasure is good, yes, but only as long as it does not
conflict with our autonomy. Just like Augustine, transhumanists want
to resume full control over their sexuality. They want sex, but only on
their own terms. The need to give up control, to give oneself to another
person, is found offensive. What is needed is controlled sex, and part of
that is that we learn to control our emotions, what and whom and when
we desire, what and when and whom we love.
As it stands, people fall in love, and they fall out of love. They feel
attracted to some people, but not to others, and they may stop feeling
attracted to people that used to attract them. They cheat on each other,
and they are frequently jealous. As a result, relationships break, children
are being abandoned, and there’s generally a lot of suffering, all because
we cannot control our desires and the way we feel about other people.
Some ethicists have argued that, for this reason, we should explore
the possibility of chemically enhancing our love-related feelings and
attitudes and thereby gain control over love, lust and attachment. If we
do so, then we might soon be able to rekindle lust and sexual attraction
between married couples, thus preventing damaging breakups, and also
to do the exact opposite, namely dampen the sexual drive if for instance
one of the partners would rather have less sex. This is not only part of the
right to “marital autonomy” (Savulescu and Sandberg 2008), but may
even be understood as a duty, if for instance children are involved who
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might suffer from a breakup (Earp et al. 2012). Ideally we will be able
to target particular persons, so that we could not only make ourselves
love and desire a particular person more (our existing partner perhaps,
or somebody whom we think it might be beneficial for us to love and
desire, or perhaps even a sex doll or sexbot), but also make ourselves
stop loving and desiring a particular person or a particular group of peo-
ple, perhaps because they are minor, or because they have the same sex
as we, or because their skin colour makes it inopportune to love them, or
because they abuse us, or because they are in some other way not good
for us. Either way, it is argued, we should seize control over our love- and
sex-related emotions because they have been shaped by evolutionary
pressures that no longer exist and that very often conflict with our values
and with what is good for us. Since there “is no human moral imperative
to obey evolution”, we should strive to achieve “biological liberation” and
free ourselves “from the biological and genetic constraints evolution has
placed on us and that now represent impediments to us achieving a good
life or other valued goals” (Savulescu/ Sandberg 2008, 41).
That sounds reasonable enough, but we may well wonder what
understanding of love and human relationships in general underlies
such proposals, and how love relations would change if the proposed
neuroenhancement of love and marriage became common practice. Is it
really desirable to “liberate ourselves from evolution”, and are subjective
happiness and flourishing really, as it is being assumed, “primary goals”
(Earp 2012)? The leading values here are clearly personal autonomy
and well-being (which are seen as interconnected): we should be free
to change our own natures if that is conducive to having a better life
or simply more in accordance with what we want, all things considered.
If I, for instance, happen to be homosexual, and I imagine that I’d be
much happier if I weren’t (because it might be easier to fit into a largely
heterosexual environment), then I should be allowed to alter my own
brain states accordingly (Earp et al. 2014a), and being allowed to do so
is itself an important constituent of my well-being. I could, of course,
also be heterosexual, but for some reason prefer to be homosexual, in
which case I should presumably be free to convert myself in the opposite
direction, unless that is clearly harmful. For those who would like to see
such chemically induced conversion handled a little more restrictively,
an ethical framework has been suggested that outlines the criteria that
should be met to justify the administration of “anti-love biotechnology”.
Thus it should be clear that (a) the love that binds a person to another
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(or to a particular kind of other person) is harmful, (b) that the person
wants to be free of their love and (c) that it would help them to realise a
higher-order goal (Earp et al. 2013). However, the problem is that what is
harmful and what is not very much depends on one’s personal outlook
and values. Harm is not an objective notion. I can be harmed by some-
thing that you are not harmed by, simply because you experience it in a
different way. Moreover, it is not only the love or attraction that someone
feels for a particular person or kind of person that can be harmful. From
the standpoint of autonomy, love itself can be said to be harmful. As
Villiers’ Edison put it: love is a disease, and if we can, we should, for
the sake of our freedom (and psychological and mental well-being), get
rid of it. If our higher-order goal is complete autonomy, then we should
indeed seek to use “anti-love biotechnology” for the exact purpose the
term suggests: to eradicate love and any related emotions. That would
certainly include jealousy, and perhaps even the sex drive itself (although
since that might deprive us of a great pleasure, we would have to find a
way to generate the pleasure without suffering the bondage that any such
drive implies). Very much in line with this reading, Earp et al. (2014b)
have recently argued that the similarities between, for instance, drug or
alcohol addiction and “love- and sex-based interpersonal attachment”
are so strong, both with regard to their neurophysiological basis and
their phenomenological effects, that we have every reason to regard love
itself as an addiction, and not just extreme forms of love, but any love.
Although the authors do not claim that all instances of love should be
treated, but only those that are clearly harmful, to most people the very
term “addiction” already suggests that there is something wrong with
whatever is described as such. We then can still decide whether we want
to “cure” a person from their addiction to love even against their will (as
we might feel justified in doing with, say, a heroin addict), or whether
we choose to see their addiction as an authentic part of their personality,
which will probably depend on how bad we think it is for them to be
addicted to that particular thing, or to be addicted in the first place. (If,
say, cigarettes were healthy, we would probably not mind so much that
people get addicted to them.) Although Earp and colleagues emphasise
that “drug addiction could even be good for us if the drug were plenti-
ful, safe, and legal” (2014b, 30), they also suggest that with love we are
hardly ever in that comfortable situation. Sadly, it is only too likely that
the object of our affection will hurt us, cheat on us, lose interest in us, or
leave us. And even though love can be thrilling, it also usually involves
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“despair, desperate longing, and the extreme and sometimes damaging

thoughts and behaviors that can follow from love’s loss” (Earp et al.
2014b, 2–3), all of which might be understood as suggesting that, on
balance, it is much better not to love at all, or, alternatively, to only love
someone who is simply incapable of hurting us, someone who we are
absolutely certain won’t cheat on us, stop being nice to us, or leave us.
Such a someone would allow us to enjoy the pleasures of love without
ever being in danger of experiencing the downsides. No wonder that the
idea of an automatic sweetheart seems to have so much appeal.
However, John Danaher (2014) has recently argued that it is unlikely
that, if we were given the choice between a human lover (even if that
lover happens to be a prostitute and has to be paid for their services)
and an artificial one, we would ever prefer the latter, but I have little
confidence that this is true. Danaher defends what he calls the “human
preference thesis”, which relies heavily on our faith in the ongoing appeal
of the kind of intimacy that is being provided by “non-solitary sexual
acts”. But there is of course also the opposite appeal, namely that of soli-
tary sexual acts or, more precisely, of acts that combine the convenience
of the solitary sexual act with the satisfaction of an (albeit fictional)
communion with another person. Still, Danaher believes that robots will
never be a fully equivalent substitute for a real human lover, no matter
how sophisticated and indistinguishable from a human they may be one
day, simply because we are not only concerned about what a thing is (or
rather, what it can do), but also about that thing’s ontological history. “To
put it bluntly, humans care about where things come from, not just their
extant properties. And no matter how you look at it, robots won’t have
the right ontological history” (Danaher 2014, 119). However, although it
is generally true that we do care about where things come from, which
includes matters of sex (a woman who used to be a man is unlikely to be
regarded, by a heterosexual man, as fully equivalent to a woman who has
always been a woman), it is not always obvious what should count as the
right ontological history. Danaher seems to simply assume that in this
case the right ontological history is a properly human one or, in other
words, that we will prefer what was born to what was made, which is not
an argument in support of the human preference thesis, but merely a reit-
eration of it: if we prefer human lovers (the born) to robots (the made),
then we will prefer human lovers to robots. But perhaps we don’t, or at
least increasingly less so. In fact, if Anders was right with the diagnosis
that I outlined earlier, if today we indeed suffer from Promethean shame
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(triggered by the apparent superiority of the machine), then we may

well find humans preferring robots, not although, but precisely because
they are concerned about the ontological histories of things. And they
may not even realise what they have lost. This is what the next chapter is
about.
Notes
1 An excellent example of how pro-enhancement arguments can be driven by
this kind of Promethean shame is Allen Buchanan’s book Beyond Humanity?
(2011). Buchanan basically argues that we are badly constructed machines and
for this reason urgently need to enhance ourselves because, given our many
defects, if we don’t give ourselves a better nature we will not be able to survive
much longer.
2 One of Nick Bostrom’s most programmatic and influential papers (2008) is
titled “Why I Want to be Posthuman When I Grow Up”.
3 “Sex under LSD becomes miraculously enhanced and intensified. I don’t mean
that it simply generates genital energy. It doesn’t automatically
produce a longer erection. Rather, it increases you sensitivity a thousand
percent. Let me put it this way: Compared with sex under LSD, the way you’ve
been making love – no matter how ecstatic the pleasure you think you get from
it – is like making love to a department store window dummy” (Leary 1998, 12).
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5
The Rehabilitation of the
Human Body: Lawrence
and Houellebecq
Abstract: Informed by a close reading of D. H. Lawrence’s
Lady Chatterley’s Lover and Michel Houellebecq’s
The Possibility of an Island, this chapter explores the
significance of the body for our existence as human beings.
It engages with the way the embracement, acceptance or
denial of this bodily existence reflects on, and is reflected
in, our sexual relations, which can be seen either as a
debasement (of our essentially intellectual nature from
which all our dignity derives) or as a celebration of a union
that allows us to overcome our existential solitude.
Keywords: animal nature disgust; existential

solitude; human body disgust; human enhancement;
individualism; Jonathan Swift; D. H. Lawrence; life
extension; Michel Houellebecq; transhumanism

doi: 10.1057/9781137393500.0007.
DOI: 10.1057/9781137393500.0007 53
We all want to be loved for who we are. We don’t want to be seen and loved
as a nice piece of ass, as just another cock or cunt, as essentially replace-
able. We ask our beloved: do you love me or just my body (or even worse,
only the pleasure that it can give you or that you can get out of it)? But who
exactly are we? Who is this “me” that we want them to love, or that we
want to be loved for? Well, it seems that what we are referring to can best
be described as a particular set of thoughts and feelings, memories and
experiences, values and interests, or perhaps that elusive substance that all
of these things or processes are expressions or articulations of, some kind
of underlying unifying principle, a unique essence. Whatever it is, we are
largely convinced that our body is not part of it, so that the love that we
wish for is one that, as it were, sees right through the body and connects
directly to our personality. This wish is of course tied to the fear that once
our body changes and loses its sexual or aesthetic appeal, we will no longer
be loved. For bodies change quickly, personalities less so (or so we think),
and even though we may not mind so much being identified with our
body while we are young and our flesh is still fresh, we find it increasingly
difficult to do so once we get older. Being loved for what we are insures us
against the potentially love-destroying effects of our ageing bodies.
In Lady Chatterley’s Lover, D.H. Lawrence’s notorious 1928 novel about
the dying world of an industrialised England between the wars and the
liberating and invigorating power of uninhibited sex, the unhappily
married and sexually unfulfilled Constance Chatterley slides into a pas-
sionate love affair with her husband’s gamekeeper, Oliver Mellors. After
their first sexual encounter, Constance reflects on what happened, and
she realises that she hardly knows her new lover and wonders what kind
of man he actually is. She finds their encounter strangely impersonal,
even doubts that he likes her very much. She thinks that he is kind
and passionate, but then again, for all she knows he might be kind and
passionate with any woman. “It wasn’t really personal. She was only a
female to him.” Too bad. But then, rather surprisingly, this seemingly
devaluating assessment is turned on its head. After concluding that there
was nothing personal about her affair with Mellors, she continues:
But perhaps that was better. And after all, he was kind to the female in her,
which no man had ever been. Men were very kind to the person she was,
but rather cruel to the female, despising her or ignoring her altogether.
Men were awfully kind to Constance Reid or to Lady Chatterley: but not to
her womb they weren’t kind. And he took no notice of Constance or Lady
Chatterley: he just softly stroked her loins or her breasts.
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The Rehabilitation of the Human Body 55
I think this is more than just male wishful thinking (expressing the male
author’s desire for a woman who actually doesn’t mind being treated as a
sexual object and who doesn’t expect any interest in her as a person). For
Lawrence the sex act leads us, or should be leading us, or has the poten-
tial of leading us, beyond the existential separation that characterises our
individual personalities. The individual person is defined by its apartness,
by detachment. And when we love each other as individuals we maintain
and reaffirm this detachment. “All that weary self-consciousness between
a man and a woman! – a disease!” What the sex act should be is the union
between not a female and a male, but between the female and the male.
Who we are as individuals is no longer relevant then. I am no longer
I, and you are no longer you, which not only means that the difference
between you and me is obliterated, but also the difference between you
and others that I might love in your stead. In loving you I in fact love all
the women in the world, whose representative or ambassador you are.
What Lawrence reminds us of (and what transhumanists tend to
forget or ignore) is that we exist in and through our bodies, and that
it is through our bodies, and not through our minds that we are con-
nected to the natural world to which the body belongs just as much as
it belongs to us. The mind sets us apart; the body makes us a part. Our
individual personalities have only a fleeting existence. They are a surface
phenomenon. Dig a little deeper and what you find is a living, sexual
body, and it is the loving acknowledgement of this bodily existence that
we secretly long for, though also, fearing for our treasured autonomy,
shy away from: “Sex is really only touch, the closest of all touch. And it’s
touch we’re afraid of. We’re only half-conscious, and half alive.”
To become fully alive, we need to stop being ashamed of our bodily
existence. For Lawrence, the body is the really real, and sex – the kind
that makes us forget, or forget to care, who we are, the kind that Lawrence
calls “tender-hearted fucking” – is one way, perhaps the most profound,
truthful and blissful way, of exploring it.
Lady Chatterley’s Lover can be read as an early bioconservative defence
of the sexual body against transhumanist aspirations to get rid of the
body altogether. The whole story unfolds against the background of a
pronounced human body/animal nature disgust.1 Early on in the novel,
Clifford Chatterley, Lady Chatterley’s husband who is paralysed from the
waist down and confined to a wheelchair after being injured in the war,
declares his conviction that the body is nothing more than a nuisance
and that we would be much better off without it: “‘I do think sufficient
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civilisation ought to eliminate a lot of physical disabilities,’ said Clifford.

‘All the love business, for example, it might just as well go. I suppose it
would, if we could breed babies in bottles’” (Lawrence 2009, 74). A mere
50 years later we managed to do exactly that: the first ‘test tube baby’,
Louise Brown, was born in 1978. While in vitro fertilisation may today
be used primarily to allow couples that for some reason are unable to
conceive by having sex with each other to have a child of their own, it
was first envisaged as a means to secure the survival of the species with-
out having to debase oneself by giving up control and letting one’s body
engage in messy interactions with another body. Clifford’s aristocratic
friends quite agree with the sentiment: “So long as you can forget your
body, you are happy,” said Lady Bennerley. “And the moment you begin
to be aware of your body, you are wretched. So if civilisation is any good,
it has to help us to forget our bodies, and then time passes happily, with-
out our knowing it.” But since it is not always possible to forget our bod-
ies, we should strive to change the human condition in such a way that
we are no longer dependent on bodies. “Help us to get rid of our bodies
altogether,” said Winterslow – “It’s quite time man began to improve on
his own nature, especially the physical side of it” (74/5).
When this conversation takes place, there is only one person in the
room who disagrees with this assessment, and that is Clifford’s wife
Connie, the Lady Chatterley of the book’s title: “Something echoed
inside Connie. ‘Give me the resurrection of the body! the democracy of
touch!’” (75/6).
Connie does not understand her husband and his friends, who seem to
dream of, and eagerly await, a bodiless future for humanity. For Connie
(and, of course, D. H. Lawrence) it is precisely the already advanced aliena-
tion from our bodies, especially our sexual bodies, that heralds the end of
human life, or at any rate any human life worth living. It is part of the
general mechanisation of life, part of a process in which we first surround
ourselves as much as possible with machines (thus destroying the natural
world outside us), then strive to be like them, until we finally become
machines ourselves (thus destroying the nature within us). Lawrence views
this process as an act of mass suicide. Life is something else. The machine
is the antithesis of life. It is, in fact, evil, because it is life-destroying.
The fault lay there, out there, in those evil electric lights and diabolical
rattlings of engines. There, in the world of the mechanical greedy, greedy
mechanism and mechanised greed, sparkling with lights and gushing hot
metal and roaring with traffic, there lay the vast evil thing, ready to destroy
whatever did not conform. (119)
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In contrast, life is good, warm, joyful, unruly, unmeasured, abundant,

messy, and above all, very much tied to the organic body. The spirit, the
mind, left to its own devices, is dead. Clifford imagines a posthuman
world that has spiritually ascended to unimaginable heights: “Believe
me, whatever God there is is slowly eliminating the guts and alimentary
system from the human being, to evolve a higher, more spiritual being”
(235). In contrast, Connie insists on the priority of the body. If the body
is not alive and awake too, then the mind cannot be either. Life dwells in
animal nature. “How terrible it was that it should be spring, and every-
thing cold-hearted, cold-hearted. Only the hens, fluffed so wonderfully
on the eggs, were warm, hot, brooding female bodies!” (113/4).
Yet even Connie is disgusted by the sheer physicality and beastliness
of the sexual act when she first sleeps with Mellors. She just perceives
the grunting and the sweat. The communion of bodies is something she
observes as if from afar, as if it wasn’t her. Her initial response is actually
not very different from that of the young lover in Swift’s notorious poem
“The Lady’s Dressing Room”, who is utterly disillusioned when he discovers
his beloved’s basic humanity and flesh-and-blood physicality. Swift’s poem
is often read and understood as some kind of misogynistic diatribe against
female presumptions of nobility. A woman’s beauty and refinement is in
truth but a thin veneer that covers her true nature, which consists in filth
of various sorts, in dirt, sweat, snot and earwax, in obnoxious smells, and
worse. If you venture a look behind the scenes, then the apparent Goddess
is quickly revealed as what she really is: not a mere woman – which would
be disappointing, but bearable –, but in fact nothing but an artfully dis-
guised pile of excrement. Thus our hero’s educational journey is completed
with the discovery of his beloved’s full chamber pot, culminating in the
horrified cry: “Oh! Celia, Celia, Celia shits!” – Who would have thought?
Lawrence, however, in a postscript to Lady Chatterley’s Lover, gives
the proper response to the panic that befalls Swift’s comic hero when he
finds undeniable evidence that Celia is, contrary to his expectations, not
a Goddess at all:
The mind’s terror of the body has probably driven more men mad than ever
could be counted. The insanity of a great mind like Swift’s is at least partly
traceable to this cause. In the poem to his mistress Celia, which has the
maddened refrain: “But – Celia, Celia, Celia shits!” we see what can happen
to a great mind, when it falls into panic. A great wit like Swift could not see
how ridiculous he made himself. Of course Celia shits! who doesn’t? And
how much worse if she didn’t. It is hopeless. And then think of poor Celia,
made to feel iniquitous about her proper natural function, by her “lover.”
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However, I do not think that expressing his disgust of women, or human-

kind in general, is at all what Swift was doing in this poem. Lawrence
is right, but he misunderstands Swift. If we take the last quarter of the
poem into account, which is usually ignored, then a very different and
not at all misogynistic or misanthropic reading suggests itself. It seems
to me that Swift is much closer to Lawrence’s own view than Lawrence
realised. After the lover runs away from his discredited lover’s chamber,
the reader is reminded how foolish both his actions and his reaction to
his discovery of Celia’s bodily functions were. He may have discovered
the truth about Celia (or a truth about her, which is of course also a truth
about each one of us, male or female), but it is the kind of truth that can
easily ruin your life if it is all that you can see. If life’s a piece of shit if
you look at it too closely, then you had better keep a healthy distance.
Swift suggests that Celia’s lover is being severely (and rightly) punished
for his hubristic attempt to lift the veil from a mystery that had better be
left alone, not unlike the youth, “impelled by a burning thirst for knowl-
edge”, in the German poet Friedrich Schiller’s “The Veiled Statue at Sais”
(written some 60 years after Swift’s “The Lady’s Dressing Room”), who is
warned not to lift the truth-concealing veil from a statue of the goddess
Isis. It is forbidden by the gods, for the truth is dangerous, perhaps even
deadly. But the youth doesn’t listen and won’t be deterred. He
lifts up the veil./ Would you inquire what form there met his eye?/ I know
not, – but, when day appeared, the priests/ Found him extended senseless,
pale as death,/ Before the pedestal of Isis’ statue./ What had been seen and
heard by him when there/ He never would disclose, but from that hour/ His
happiness in life had fled forever,/ And his deep sorrow soon conducted
him/ To an untimely grave.
Swift’s hero does not die, but he is, like Schiller’s youth, lost to the
world: blinded by what he has come to see as the truth about women,
and incapable of perceiving anything but foulness, he is destined to live
a miserable, joyless life. But he is mistaken: it is not the world that is
foul; it is his imagination. Because beauty is just as real as the messy
physicality that lies underneath, and what is truly astonishing is that the
one can arise from the other, that “such order from confusion sprung,/
Such gaudy Tulips rais’d from Dung”. It’s like the transmutation of base
metal into gold that the alchemists tried in vain to accomplish. And it
is utter foolishness to refuse to see and appreciate the gold just because
it has been created from nickel. The crucial couplet in the poem is this
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one: “Should I the Queen of Love refuse,/ Because she rose from stink-
ing Ooze?” The answer that Swift suggests is no, because the Queen of
Ooze is still the Queen of Love. No goddess perhaps, but still a beautiful
woman, and none the worse for it.
This healthy attitude, with which the poem concludes, is very differ-
ent from the one that, we may assume, characterised the curious young
man before he makes his seemingly gruesome discoveries. What we
have here is not simply, as some interpreters have suggested, a return
to false idealisations, a desperate (and laughable) attempt to retain the
illusion and hide the truth, and to hang on to a distorted view of female
(and human) perfection and elevation. It is, instead, the synthesis that
has resulted from a dialectical process of thesis and antithesis, a more
mature attitude born out of the realisation that the two opposing views
are equally untenable, both the view that a human being can be an angel
(an ethereal, pure and essentially bodiless being) and the view that all
humans are animals (that is, essentially bodies). The fact that we are bod-
ily (and that means messy, dependent, vulnerable and ultimately mortal)
beings doesn’t detract from our beauty and dignity. On the contrary.
The issue was rather beautifully addressed in Michel Houellebecq’s
2005 novel The Possibility of an Island, which at the time of its publica-
tion raised the hackles of many critics, provoking some scathing and
astonishingly vitriolic reviews. Personally, I like the book well enough.
It has got an engaging story, and Houellebecq’s analysis of the human
condition and his reflections on the transhumanist endeavour to tran-
scend it and to help us evolve into something better and less dependent
are spot on.
The book is of course deeply immersed in Schopenhauer’s philosophy:
life is suffering as long as you have desires, and once you stop desiring
you glide into boredom, which is equally unbearable. The series of
Daniels from today to the distant future represents the endless cycle of
rebirths or rather, to be more precise, our various phenomenal existences
that do not allow a real escape from this life of suffering. But there is
also the sense – which is reminiscent of D.H. Lawrence – that all dignity
and worth of human existence is inseparably connected to the human
body: the body that desires, that longs for a unity with the other that it
can never have, or at least never hold on to, the dependent, vulnerable,
suffering body, which is also the body that loves and laughs. The very
tragedy of our bodily existence is also its one redeeming quality. That
is why Stoic indifference and the shallowness of a life that only seeks
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pleasure and is constitutionally unable to feel anything else is, despite its
appeal, in fact not a desirable goal and prospect at all.
When Daniel1, the main narrator and our contemporary, falls in love
with Isabelle, the editor-in-chief of a magazine called Lolita, she tells
him:
You know the magazine I work for: all we’re trying to do is create an arti-
ficial mankind, a frivolous one that will no longer be open to seriousness
or to humour, which, until it dies, will engage in an increasingly desperate
quest for fun and sex; a generation of definite kids. (Houellebecq 2006, 26)
So this new artificial mankind, the kind of posthuman that we are already
turning into, is not posthuman due to some bioenhancement procedure,
but due to a change in attitude. They have learnt to look at life differently.
Their advancement consists in having lost something essential to human-
ity: seriousness and humour, none of which can exist without the other.
The centuries-old male project, perfectly expressed nowadays by porno-
graphic films, that consisted of ridding sexuality of any emotional conno-
tation in order to bring it back into the realm of pure entertainment, had
finally, in this generation, been accomplished. (...) They had succeeded, after
decades of conditioning and effort, they had finally succeeded in tearing
from their hearts one of the oldest human feelings, and now it was done,
what had been destroyed could no longer be put back together, no more than
the pieces of a broken cup can be reassembled, they had reached their goal: at
no moment in their lives would they ever know love. They were free. (294/5)
From this perspective, love is, once more, a destructive force. It prevents
us from enjoying all the pleasure that we could enjoy. It entraps us,
binds us to another human being, makes us dependent on them, and
wreaks havoc with our emotions. For the sake of individual liberty and
autonomy, we should try to control it, suppress it, and, if we can, get
rid of it entirely. Love is just as much an obstacle to complete autonomy
and the maximisation of pleasure as the ageing of the body. Houllebecq
describes an increasingly common fixation, where certain natural
impulses reign supreme, unchecked: “It’s understandable that people are
afraid of getting old, especially women, that’s always been true, but in
this case ... It’s gone beyond anything you could imagine, I think women
have gone completely mad” (31). All taboos have been given up, except
one: the taboo of being, or getting, old.
The new religion that, in the novel, gets the ball of posthumanity rolling,
Elohimism, is in its goals and general worldview a close relative to real-life
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transhumanism, and Houllebecq describes quite plausibly how much it

owes to the cultural shifts that have already taken place in our time.
As for Elohimism, it was adapted perfectly to the leisure civilisation in
which it had been born. Imposing no moral constraints, reducing human
existence to categories of interest and of pleasure, it did not hesitate, for
all that, to make its own fundamental promise at the core of all monothe-
istic religions: victory over death. Eradicating any spiritual or confusing
dimension, it simply limited the scope of this victory, and the nature of the
promise associated with it, to the unlimited prolongation of material life,
that is to say the unlimited satisfaction of physical desires. (311)
The one overarching goal is the elimination of all natural bonds and
boundaries, which also means that when the body becomes more dis
abling than enabling, when it loses the (limited) use that it had as long as
we are (relatively) young, it has to be discarded. A member of the church
would commit suicide (naturally in anticipation of resurrection) “when
he felt that his physical body was no longer in a state to give him the joys
he could legitimately expect from it” (312).
But the determination to get the most out of life, to let nothing hinder
the pursuit of happiness, ironically leads to a state where all the fun has
drained out of life. One thousand years in the future, Daniel24, Daniel’s
autotrophic, but otherwise not radically enhanced clone (directly born
into the adult body of an 18-year-old) no longer has any strong feelings
about anything. The so-called neo-humans don’t laugh or cry. There’s no
bodily contact between the few neo-humans who live alone, in “a condi-
tion of absolute solitude”, and only communicate with each other rarely
and via electronic media, which leaves no room for cruelty or compas-
sion. They aspire to end the “suffering of being that makes us seek out the
other” and thus “reach the freedom of indifference, the condition for the
possibility of perfect serenity” (326). His immediate successor, Daniel25
reflects: “Our existence, devoid of passions, had been that of the elderly;
we looked on the world with a gaze characterised by lucidity without
benevolence” (406). There are also advantages, of course, but those
advantages are those of a well-functioning machine:
Compared with a human, I benefited from a suppleness, endurance and
functional autonomy that were greatly enhanced. My psychology, of
course, was also different; it did not comprehend fear, and whilst I was able
to suffer, I felt none of the dimensions of what humans called regret (...).
Consciousness of a total determinism was without doubt what differenti-
ated us most clearly from our human predecessors. Like them, we were
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only conscious machines; but, unlike them, we were aware of only being
machines. (408–409)
The machine works well indeed, but sadly there is no longer a purpose
to what it does. The future just repeats the past. It is the past that still lies
before us. “I had perhaps sixty years left to live; more than twenty thou-
sand days that would be identical” (422). The neo-human’s survival, his
very existence, has itself become a matter of indifference. “I saw my body
as a vehicle, but it was a vehicle for nothing” (414). Fatalism is linked
to immortality (i.e. here, the infinite reproduction of one’s genes). The
neo-human is only an “improved monkey” (422).
In that remote future, humanity still exists, side by side with neo-
humanity, but has degenerated a long time ago, nobody really knows why.
Curiously, though, it all started with the invention of android robots,
equipped with a versatile artificial vagina. A high-tech system analysed in
real time the configuration of male sexual organs, arranged temperatures
and pressures; a radiometric sensor allowed the prediction of ejaculation,
the consequent modification of stimulation, and the prolonging of inter-
course for so long as was wished. (33)
That went on for a few weeks, but then sales collapsed, not because
people realised that the old ways were ultimately more rewarding, but
simply because humanity was finally, as Houllebecq puts it, about to give
up the ghost.
And yet, sex is important, in fact essential to a human life worth liv-
ing, but just as for D. H. Lawrence, there are different kinds of sex, those
that connect and those that disconnect, those that are basically a form
of masturbation where the partner functions as a mere tool to generate
sexual pleasure, and those that seek a kind of communion, which again is
essentially a communion of bodies, not of detached minds. Thus David1
reflects: “Sexual pleasure was not only superior, in refinement and vio-
lence, to all the other pleasures life had to offer, (...) it was in truth the sole
pleasure, the sole objective of human existence, and all other pleasures
(...) were only derisory and desperate compensations” (341).
When sexuality disappears, it’s the body of the other that appears, as a
vaguely hostile presence; the sounds, movements and smells; even the pres-
ence of this body that you can no longer touch, nor sanctify through touch,
becomes gradually oppressive; all this, unfortunately, is well known. The
disappearance of tenderness always closely follows that of eroticism. There
is no refined relationship, no higher union of souls, nor anything that might
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resemble it, or even evoke it allusively. When physical love disappears; a

dreary, depthless irritation fills the passing days. (59)
The reason for this irritation is that without the communion of the bod-
ies, the mental communion is also lost, and one finds oneself alone:
it seemed unsurprising to me that the exchange of ideas with someone who
doesn’t know your body, is not in a position to secure its unhappiness or on
the other hand to bring it joy, was a false and ultimately impossible exercise,
for we are bodies, we are, above all, principally and almost uniquely bodies,
and the state of our bodies constitutes the true explanation of the majority
of our intellectual and moral conceptions. (186)
We truly live only through our sexual bodies:

When the sexual instinct is dead, writes Schopenhauer, the true core of life
is consumed; thus, he notes in a metaphor of terrifying violence, “human
existence resembles a theatre performance which, begun by living actors,
is ended by automatons dressed in the same costumes.” I didn’t want to
become an automaton, and it was this, that real presence, that taste for living
life (...) that Esther had given back to me. What is the point of maintaining a
body that no one touches? (189–190)
What indeed!
Real love is physical love, love of the body and through the body. Real
love is also, for beings such as us, possessive, because “non-possessive
love only seemed conceivable if you yourself lived in an atmosphere
saturated with delights, from which all fear was absent, particularly fear
of abandonment and death” (168–169).
Yet paradoxically it is also fear that often ends our love:
It’s not weariness that puts an end to love, or rather it’s a weariness that
is born of impatience, of the impatience of bodies who know they are
condemned and want to live, who want, in the lapse of time granted them,
to not pass up any chance, to miss no possibility, who want to use to the
utmost that limited, declining and mediocre lifetime that is theirs, and who
consequently cannot love anyone, as all others appear limited, declining
and mediocre to them. (264)
Note
1 Which seems to have been quite common at the time. See McLaren 2012,
especially Chapter 1, which deals with “sex and futurist fictions”.
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6
The Marquis de Sade on
Happiness, Nature and Liberty
Abstract: If the inner logic of the radical human
enhancement project promoted by transhumanists
demands that love be abolished because it makes us
vulnerable, and sex be purified to become a pleasure of the
mind, for which the body serves at best as an exchangeable
tool, but is no longer identity-defining, then it is not so
much Friedrich Nietzsche whose philosophy should be
regarded as a major influence on the transhumanist
worldview, but rather the Marquis de Sade. This chapter
examines the Marquis de Sade’s philosophy of sex and his
reflections on happiness, nature and liberty and connects
them to transhumanist predictions and hopes regarding
our sexual future.
Keywords: egotism; hedonistic imperative; law of

nature; libertarianism; Marquis de Sade; moral nihilism;
normative authority of nature

doi: 10.1057/9781137393500.0008.
64 DOI: 10.1057/9781137393500.0008
The Marquis de Sade on Happiness, Nature and Liberty 65
The inner logic of transhumanism demands that love be abandoned

because it makes us vulnerable: sex can, and indeed should, stay, but it
needs to be purified, stripped, as it were, to its core, which is the immense
acute pleasure that it can generate. If we can have this pleasure without
having to engage with other people, we will have gained, not lost. If we
can have it without engaging our body or the bodies of other people,
we will have gained even more. However, if it does require bodies, then
let us at least make sure that those bodies do not entangle us in any
dependencies, that they are of a kind, or are being used in such a way,
that they don’t compromise our pleasure or our autonomy. The resulting
solitude would be a small price to pay. We are, after all, used to it because
we are all, ultimately, alone. What connections there are, are made by
us, in our heads. We can create our own world, that is, you can create
yours and I can create mine, even though I may have a place in the world
you create for yourself, and you may have a place in the world I create
for myself. The universe is an empty place, without God or purpose,
and the only thing that is objectively valuable is what is “conducive to
each individual’s survival and flourishing” (More 1996, 6). That is why
the death of the individual, or more precisely, for me my death and for
you your death, is the greatest evil, something to be avoided at all costs.
Because there isn’t really anything else but one’s own life and well-being
that is worth pursuing and protecting. There is nothing else that counts.
The individual reigns supreme, and although this is not always acknowl-
edged, you can be pretty sure that if a transhumanist urges you to join
them in their brave struggle against ageing and mortality, then this is not
because they are much concerned about the fact that you will die one
day, or the plight of humanity as a whole, but because they are worried
about their own all-too-imminent death, and they are hoping that if they
can get you on board they will have a better chance of reaching their
goal, that is, a better chance of personal survival.
It has been suggested that the philosophy of transhumanism owes a lot
to Friedrich Nietzsche and his conception of the overhuman (Sorgner
2009). I don’t think that is true at all, for reasons I have given elsewhere
(Hauskeller 2010). If we are searching past centuries for thinkers whose
mind-set is echoed by today’s transhumanists, then instead of Nietzsche
we should be rather looking at someone like the Marquis de Sade. I have
little doubt that if de Sade were alive today, he would be an active mem-
ber of humanity plus.
The most philosophically reflective of all the Marquis de Sade’s por-
nographic works is the Philosophy in the Boudoir or, The Immoral Mentors,
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ironically subtitled Dialogues Aimed at the Education of Young Ladies

and published anonymously in 1795 in the aftermath of the French
Revolution. Absurdly hyperbolic sex scenes (“The sperm jumped more
than ten feet! Fucking God! The room’s filled with it!”, Sade 2006, 79)
are interspersed with theoretical reflections about the human condition,
about religion and morality, nature and freedom, happiness and suffer-
ing. The sex itself, the cold-hearted, self-centred way it is practised, is
presented as a practical application of a particular, libertine philosophy
of life and the accompanying political and moral philosophy.
Just as for today’s transhumanists, for Sade and his mouthpiece
Dolmancé the world is a bleak place. We have been “tossed reluctantly
into this dismal universe” (1) and are forced to lead a miserable exist-
ence. There is no God, no afterlife, no hope, no meaning. Religion is a
mere superstition and morality has been invented by the weak to put
and hold the strong in shackles. The only thing that matters in such a
world is that one does everything in one’s power to be happy, as much as
possible in such a world, and happiness consists in nothing other than
the satisfaction of one’s own passions and desires. “Don’t I have enough
misery of my own without burdening myself with the misery of oth-
ers?” (31). The pleasure and pain of others is (or should be) nothing to
me: “isn’t everyone out for himself in the world?” (65). Sade’s world is the
cruel world of Hobbes, characterised by “a state of perpetual and recip-
rocal warfare” (93), where everyone is by nature everyone else’s enemy.
Real love between people, or even friendship, is an illusion. Everyone
has to take care of number one, and only number one. Just as Kallikles
in Plato’s Gorgias, who argued that morality and law had no authority
over the strong who by nature had a right to suppress the weak and take
what they want without paying any attention to the interests and the
welfare of others, Sade invokes the normative force of nature to show
that nothing can be wrong that allows people to satisfy their wants and
needs. “Nature, the mother of us all, never speaks to us, except about
ourselves. Nothing is as egotistical as nature’s voice. And what we hear
most sharply in that voice is the holy and immutable advice to enjoy
ourselves, no matter what it costs others” (65). And what we enjoy most
is completely unrestrained and copious sexual activity, dominance over
others and violence.
Sade insists that we should not let ourselves be hampered by the usual
moral considerations. There are several reasons for why morality should
not concern us:
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1 Conventional morality places constraints on the expression of our

passions, which is highly unnatural. Not only are all restrictions per
se bad for the individual, suppressing one’s passions also violates
the laws of nature, which (for some unexplained reason) have
normative priority.
2 Giving in to moral demands robs us of a lot of pleasure that we
could otherwise enjoy, and pleasure is far more valuable than
anything else in this world. In fact, it is the only thing valuable in
and by itself. So foregoing or giving up a pleasure for whatever
reason (unless it were in order to gain an even greater pleasure) can
never be good.
3 An adherence to moral norms, or moral behaviour, is usually
motivated by certain passions such as pride, ambition, greed and
vanity, and is hence no better than the immorality of the libertine,
which is simply guided by other passions: “Benevolence is more a
vice of pride than a true virtue of the soul. A person comforts his
fellowmen purely in order to show off and never simply to do a
good deed” (29). Nobody ever does anything except out of self-love,
so all virtue is ultimately a sham.
4 Morality is culturally relative: “the words ‘vice’ and ‘virtue’ supply
us only with local meanings. There is no action, however bizarre
you may picture it, that is truly criminal; or one that can really be
called virtuous. Everything depends on our customs and on the
climates we live in” (31).
5 By violating moral norms we only do what nature does all the time,
for instance by robbing us of our possessions or killing us through
natural disasters, and if nature does it, then we must assume that
doing so somehow serves nature (e.g. by making room for new life)
and is hence good: “Since destruction is a primary law of nature,
nothing destructive could be a crime” (51).
6 A lot of what is supposed to be morally wrong is immensely
pleasurable, which shows that nature welcomes it, and if it is all
right with nature, even rewarded by it (with the pleasure it incites)
then it can’t possibly be bad.
Sade’s strategy (which foreshadows Nietzsche’s project of a “revaluation of
all values”) is, however, not entirely consistent. On the one hand he denies
that what we are used to regard as crimes or immoral behaviour is in any
way wrong, on the other he delights in the idea of wrong-doing and seems
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to believe that the pleasure we derive from certain activities depends to a

considerable extent on our knowledge that we are doing something very
bad indeed. Thus when Eugénie wonders whether incest is not a crime,
Domancé answers: “Can we regard the most beautiful natural union as
a crime, a union that nature prescribes and so warmly recommends?”
(49). And similarly: “Cruelty is nothing but human energy that hasn’t yet
been corrupted by civilization. Hence, cruelty is a virtue and not a vice”
(66). Yet there are other passages where it is pretty obvious that the crime
committed really needs to be seen as a crime, as some kind of violation
(and not only of human laws) in order to do its job, namely to excite and
arouse: “May the horrors, the atrocities, the most odious crimes no longer
astonish you, Eugénie. The foulest, the filthiest, the most forbidden things
are always the most exciting” (46). And: “Oh, Lucifer! Lone and single
god of my soul! Inspire me more!” (82).
In any case, however, it is the law of nature (be nature bad or good
or simply neutral), which alone commands authority. “Nature has acted
according to its goals, its plans, and its needs. We must submit” (67). But
why exactly must we submit? Sade does not mean that we have no choice.
What he means is rather that to act in accordance with nature is what we
should do. But the only reason that emerges from what Sade says about
the matter is that there is no other possible authority. There is nothing
but nature. Nature is all there is, so if anything has normative authority,
then it must be nature. Sade’s frequent use of arguments from nature in
order to justify certain practices, however, is entirely arbitrary – as argu-
ments from nature tend to be. Natural, and hence desirable or at least
defensible, is basically whatever Sade happens to be in favour of, and
unnatural whatever he happens to dislike. But his arguments serve very
nicely, intended or unintended, as a parody of the kind of physicotheo-
logical argument for intelligent design and (as a corollary) the existence
of God that was popular at the time (culminating in William Paley’s
famous version in his Natural Theology, published in 1802). Here are my
two favourite examples:
1 “Had nature wanted us to hide certain areas of our bodies, it would
have done so itself. But nature created us naked. So it means us to
go naked” (72).
2 “If nature didn’t intend to have us fuck the ass, then would nature have
so precisely adjusted the hole to the forms of our members? Isn’t this
orifice round like them? What enemy of common sense can imagine
that nature can have created an oval hole for a round member?” (76).
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The Marquis de Sade was perhaps not much of a philosopher, but what
philosophy there is in his work is clearly the brain-child of the enlight-
enment. It is as if the age of reason has gone a bit senile after all those
years and has now, shortly before her final demise, decided to present
her dirty backside to the public. The Marquis de Sade is Voltaire’s ugly
little brother, the Mr Hyde to his Dr Jekyll, urging us to be reasonable, to
pay no attention to the “heart”, to seek out and kill off all prejudices, to
claim our political and intellectual freedom:
Ah, smash those chains – nature wants you to smash them! You should have
no other limits than your leanings, no other laws than your cravings, no other
moral than nature; stop languishing in those barbaric prejudices that caused
your charms to fade and imprisoned the godly surges of your hearts. (132)
This could have been written by Max More or some other transhumanist.
Some of Sade’s demands appear downright progressive, even today. You
can find passages in his work that could easily be cited by gay rights cam-
paigners and feminists. He argues vehemently against the death penalty
and the right of any government or state to inflict capital punishment on
its citizens. He defends the right to freely pursue one’s own sexual orienta-
tion, especially homosexuality (but also incest and paedophilia), without
fear of punishment. He demands that every woman should be granted the
right to decide what happens to and with her own body. Women should
be allowed to express their sexuality just as freely as men, and abortion
is absolutely fine if that is what a woman wants, because this decision is
only hers to make: “A woman is always the mistress of what she carries
in her womb, and there is as little wrong with destroying this kind of
material as there is with purging the other kind with medicaments, if we
feel the need.” He also rejects the institution of marriage on the grounds
that a woman should never become, or be seen as, the possession of any
man. Marriage binds a woman unjustly to a man, makes her his property,
which violates the rights of men and nature:
No act of possession can ever be perpetrated on a free being; it is as unjust to
own a wife monogamously as it is to own slaves. All men are born free, all are
equal before the law. (...) The act of possession can be exercised only on an ani-
mal or an immobile object, but never on an individual that resembles us. (127)
Therefore women, being neither animals nor things, should be free to do

whatever they want, which of course for Sade means especially to have
sex whenever and with whomever they want: “Fuck – in a word – fuck!
That’s why you were put upon this earth!” (33). “Fuck, Eugénie, fuck
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away, my dear angel! Your body belongs to you, to you alone. You are the
only person in the world who has the right to enjoy your body and to let
anyone you wish enjoy it.”
Yet despite all his talk of human freedom, all the exuberant liberationist
rhetoric, the world that Sade seeks to create is in fact deeply oppressive.
By granting so much freedom to the individual, he effectively proposes
to leave the weak and vulnerable without protection. He argues against
the death penalty, but mainly because he feels that individual (not
state-committed) murder and theft should not be seen as crimes, but
as natural, and hence ought not to be punished, which of course is not
exactly good news for the victims of such crimes. He imagines a com-
pletely free society, a kind of republican utopia: “Citizens, remember: in
granting freedom of conscience and freedom of the press, you must also
allow freedom of action, with few exceptions” (116), and killing other
people is not one of them: “The freest nations are those that welcome
murder” (143). He denies that parents have any duties towards their
children, but also that children have any duties (of gratitude) to their
parents, which leaves not only the unborn, but also all children who are
not yet old enough to fend for themselves entirely at their parents’ mercy
(infanticide is just as permissible as abortion). It also leaves those same
parents free to pursue their pleasure without having to care for their own
ageing parents. In fact, they would be perfectly in their rights to get rid
of them for good. The oppressive nature of Sade’s libertarianism is also
due to his peculiar understanding of the normative authority of nature,
according to which every right that nature bestows on us is also a duty:
what we are allowed to do is also what we are meant to do. “We obey its
laws if we yield to the desires that nature alone has placed in front of
us; and we outrage nature if we resist it” (37). Thus the allegedly natural
right to satisfy one’s desires and to take pleasure wherever one finds it
is transformed into a holy duty: “Let pleasure be the sole god of your
existence. It is to pleasure alone that a girl must sacrifice everything, and
nothing should be as sacred to her as pleasure” (19). And what if she
doesn’t want so much pleasure? Well, then she needs to be forced. Nature
must be obeyed, which is certainly very convenient for men:
In whatever state a woman may be, my darling – whether girl, woman, or
widow – she must never have any other goal, any other occupation, any
other desire than to be fucked from dawn till dusk. It’s toward that single
end that nature has created her. (37)
The same ambivalence that turns alleged rights into duties can be
observed in transhumanist writings such as David Pearce’s Hedonistic
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Imperative. There is a good reason why Pearce talks about a hedonistic

imperative, rather than a hedonistic principle. On the one hand we are
being assured that “an entitlement to life-long well-being in this world,
rather than the next, will take on the status of a basic human right” (1995,
3.0), on the other it is conceded that some people may have to be, for
their own good, forced to be happy (1995, 4.28). Absolute personal free-
dom, though certainly desirable, may prove to be untenable, given the
priority of the hedonistic imperative. As Pearce helpfully explains, even
libertarians don’t object to forcing medicine on children or animals: “We
sometimes override the choices and desires of simple minds. It would be
cruel to do otherwise.” And of course anyone who refuses to be happy,
that is, to be changed or manipulated in such a way that they cannot be
other than happy, has to be simple-minded, so that it would be cruel to
accept their refusal and to just let them be. Fortunately, it is very unlikely
that we will have to use force to make people happy, simply because it is
so obvious that all pain and all suffering is bad and all pleasure good. In
reality, therefore, “abolitionists1 may call themselves fanatical libertarians
on solid utilitarian grounds. For the freedom to transcend our Darwinian
past and to choose our own homeostatic level of well-being is one of the
most persuasive arguments for the abolitionist case.”
The difference between Pearce and Sade is that Sade is less certain
than Pearce that everyone, especially women, will know what is good
for them, so compulsion is probably unavoidable, and, since it is neces-
sary to achieve what has been identified as the greater, or in fact greatest,
good, also perfectly justified. For this reason, “we even have the right to
pass laws that compel a woman to yield to the ardour of the man who
desires her, whereby violence itself, as a result of such a right, can be used
legally by us” (Sade 2006, 128). “A woman’s fate is to be like a she-wolf,
a bitch: she must belong to everyone who wants her” (33). Sade denies
that this contradicts what he said earlier about women never being the
property of any man. It is true, no woman belongs to any one man, but
that doesn’t mean that she cannot be used by any man who wants her. In
other words, she can never be private property because she is meant to be
public property. And because this is in fact what she wants anyway, that
is, what her nature commands her to do, men do not really wrong her by
forcing their will upon her. They just help her being what she is meant to
be. They allow her to exercise her rights:
First of all, by what right do you demand that a woman should be excepted
from the blind submission that nature prescribes for her in male caprices?
And then, by what other right do you demand that she should surrender to
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a continence that is impossible for her body and absolutely hopeless for her
honour? (127)
So by a happy coincidence both men and women get what they want.
And this will certainly, Sade claims, increase universal happiness.
Yet Sade goes even further than that, invoking yet another (and, need-
less to say, equally faulty) argument from nature:
If nature didn’t mean for man to be superior, then it would not have taken
the creatures given to him for this instant and created them weaker than
man. The debility to which nature has doomed women proves incontest-
ably that it intends for man, who delights more than ever in his power, to
exercise it with all the violence he prefers. Indeed, he can even torture the
woman to death if he so wishes. (154)
Not much is left here of the rights of women that Sade seemed to be
defending earlier.
Sade was certainly a misogynist, which I don’t believe most trans
humanists to be (although the movement is very much dominated by
males), but I suspect that underlying Sade’s whole philosophy is a deep-
seated hatred not only of the female sex, but in fact of the whole human
race, and I’m not entirely sure that this is not also true for transhumanism
as a philosophy. “The entire human species could be snuffed out, and the
air would be no less pure, the constellations no less radiant, the rhythm
of the universe no less exact!” (86). It would certainly be no great loss,
assuming that the universe is indeed as cold and empty as Sade believed.
Born out of self-loathing, a human-nature disgust that Sade may have
inherited from Jonathan Swift, what he proposes is essentially a recipe
for self-destruction. Because what nature ultimately wants is us gone. To
be replaced by something better, by the machines that we have created
or by some other kind of posthuman entity, is just an alternative way of
achieving that goal. The eagerly awaited singularity signals the end of the
world as we know it. It is the 21st century equivalent of the apocalypse.
Note
1 That is those who, like Pearce, would like to see all suffering abolished.
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7
Synthetik Love Lasts Forever
Abstract: Guided by two of Ursula K. Le Guin’s stories,
“The Poacher” and “Nine Lives”, this chapter seeks to
uncover the hidden conservatism of the transhumanist
worldview. Although the desire for change seems to be
dominant, the change that is sought in fact has the purpose
of making sure that things stay as they are: that we do
not age, not die, not lose control and not lose love and
happiness. It is not bioconservatives who live in permanent
fear of change. It is transhumanists who do. This fear of
change is shown to be connected to the fear of the stranger,
that is, the other, who is different from ourselves and thus
poses a permanent threat to the complacency of the solitary
self.
Keywords: bioconservatism; fear of change; sexbots;

sex dolls; synthetic love; the other; transhumanism;
Ursula K. Le Guin

doi: 10.1057/9781137393500.0009.
DOI: 10.1057/9781137393500.0009 73
Could it be that transhumanists are actually far more conservative in

their outlook than those they derisively call bioconservatives?
According to the myth spun by transhumanists, bioconservatives
oppose change, largely for no good reason at all. They just prefer things
to stay as they are, no matter how much better they could be. They live in
fear of the future, of new technologies that threaten to bring about a new,
unfamiliar world. They are bioluddites. Like babies to their mother’s teat,
they cling to the status quo. Like hobbits, they prefer to stay in their cosy
underground homes rather than go out and discover the world, which
is clearly very irrational since the world out there is so much better, as
must be obvious to anyone not blinded by prejudice and fear. They like
to think that they are content with their lives as they are, but in fact they
are just cowards, and because of their cowardice they turn a blind eye
to all the wonderful opportunities that would arise from technological
progress.
Transhumanists on the other hand are determined to boldly go where
no man has gone before. They have no fear. They welcome change, and
like the challenge of the unknown. They are rational, clear-headed.
They do not only know what is good and what is bad, but also what is
even better than good. They are adventurers, discoverers. They are the
Columbuses of a future land of the blessed.
Yet is this pretty picture really true? I always had my doubts, of
course, but it was only when I read Ursula K. Le Guin’s short story “The
Poacher” (first published in 1992), that I realised just how false it was.
The story is a variation of the Sleeping Beauty tale. A boy whose poverty
forces him to poach in the woods belonging to a greedy baron discovers
a gigantic impenetrable hedge. Curious to find out what lies beyond, he
sets out to cut a path through the hedge. After two years of hard work
he is through. On the other side he finds a King’s palace. In the palace,
everyone is asleep. He stays there, eats the food, which is still warm and
fresh as if had just come out of the oven, and which always renews itself
so that he never has to go hungry again. Occasionally he has sex with
one of the sleeping maidens, who is as warm and fresh as the food and
always remains as young and red-cheeked and welcoming as she was
when he first discovered her. Nothing ever changes, which suits him
just fine, and he takes great care to stay clear of the princess, who, he
feels, might be awoken very easily. He prefers to fuck the maid rather
than kiss the princess and thereby risk having his pleasantly tranquil
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Synthetik Love Lasts Forever 75
life overthrown. Sometimes he is lonely, but apparently that is a price

worth paying:
When I slept, there inside the great hedge, I never dreamed. What had I to
dream of? Surely I had all I could desire. Still, while the time passed that
did not pass, used as I was to solitude, I grew lonely; the company of the
sleepers grew wearisome to me. Mild and harmless as they were, and dear
as many of them became to me as I lived among them, they were no better
companions to me than a child’s wooden toys, to which he must lend his
own voice and soul. (Le Guin 2012, 311)
Yet instead of breaking the spell to be, once again, with real people, he
starts making things and explores the library. He is happy lending his
own voice and soul to the things around him. Being alone is still better
than change. He is, after all, used to solitude. So he stays and grows old
in an unchanging world.
So what’s all that got to do with transhumanism, and why do I think
that transhumanists are actually more bioconservative than their oppo-
nents? Because what transhumanists, just like the boy in Le Guin’s story,
really want is that the world stays exactly as it is. Yes, they do want to
change certain things, but only so that other things can stay the same.
The bioconservative accepts that life will one day end and change into
something very different, the great unknown that we call death. The
transhumanist wants life to go on forever and he fears the change of
death as the greatest evil. The bioconservative accepts that one cannot
always be young, that the changes that ageing brings are part of a natural
life cycle. The transhumanist sees ageing as a curse that damns us to a
process of slow decay, which debilitates and humiliates us. Consequently,
he wants to hold on to his youth as long as possible. The bioconservative
accepts that one cannot always be happy, that there are ups and downs,
good times and bad times. The transhumanist regards permanent,
uninterrupted happiness as our birthright, and is determined to erase all
pain and suffering from our human constitution, so that we will never be
anything but happy. The bioconservative knows and accepts that loving
somebody is a risky endeavour, that love must be won and that love can
be lost, and that you can never own another’s soul. The transhuman-
ist wants to make sure that we are loved and continue to be loved no
matter what, that we always have what we want and never lose what we
have. The bioconservative accepts and indeed welcomes the fact that we
cannot always control and predict what happens to us, that sometimes
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things come unbidden. The transhumanist wants to keep things under

control. He loathes the unbidden.
Transhumanists live in permanent fear of change: of death and disease,
of losing their physical and mental powers, of losing love and affection, of
being abandoned. Bioconservatives are open to change. Transhumanists
are not. They prefer a world fast asleep to a world that is fully awake.
In another of her stories, Nine Lives, Ursula K. Le Guin writes:
It is hard to meet a stranger. Even the greatest extravert meeting even the
meekest stranger knows a certain dread, though he may not know he knows
it. Will he make a fool of me wreck my image of myself invade me destroy
me change me? Will he be different from me? Yes, that he will. There’s the
terrible thing: the strangeness of the stranger. (Le Guin 2012, 30)
The stranger is a terrifying creature. And every real person is a stranger

to us and will always remain a stranger no matter how close we get to
them. That’s because they will never be us. They will always be different.
In that sense every other is a stranger. The fact that they are different
from us makes them dangerous. They refuse to be a mere reflection of
our soul (our fantasies and desires, the way we look at the world and
think and feel about things). They permanently threaten us with the pos-
sibility of an imposed abrupt change. That is why we fear the other.
However, we also fear being alone, being with ourselves. We seek the
company of others despite the threat that they pose. We may be psy-
chologically disposed that way simply to safeguard the survival of the
species. We need others to reproduce and to protect ourselves against a
hostile environment. Our kind is, out of necessity, a collaborative one.
We may also fear the stranger in ourselves, the realisation that we have
no clear understanding of who and what we are, what defines us, what
we are capable of and what not. Being alone with ourselves forces us, in
the absence of an other who demands our attention, to revert our inquir-
ing gaze to our own being, which can be quite a disturbing experience. If
we look too deeply into the mirror, our reflection dissolves until there is
nothing left but a gaping absence. So we are driven to the other, and most
of us choose to risk the encounter and face the danger that comes with
it. Some, however, decide they’d rather be alone than waste their energy,
their affection and trust, on a person that will always remain a stranger,
and almost certainly will reveal their strangeness some day, leaving us
just as alone as we used to be before we attached our lives to theirs. But
it is never an easy decision. We are constantly being torn between the
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Scylla of a forever unchallenged life that is immune to hurtful surprises,

but also very lonely, and the Charybdis of a life spent in the company
of others, which permanently challenges our identity and allows for no
complacency.
Automatic sweethearts, from Pygmalion’s living statue over modern
sex dolls to the post-singulitarian lovebots and sexbots that transhuman-
ists dream of, provide a perfect solution to this dilemma. They give us an
other who is not a stranger, one who possesses no other voice or soul
than the one we lend to it. Attaching oneself to it is entirely risk-free
because it is not really an other, but our own self posing as an other.
We duplicate ourselves, objectify ourselves in an apparent other, which
is ideal because it allows us to only ever confront ourselves without ever
having to confront ourselves. The other no longer poses a threat because
it is not really an other at all, and the self becomes bearable because it is
hidden under the mask (the persona) of the other.
Yet this is a perfect solution only if we assume that the risk of a real
encounter with a real other, that is, an encounter with the stranger, is
not worth taking, that there is nothing to be gained by it. But is that
really so? If the identity of the self is endangered each time it opens up to
the stranger, if the stranger brings change and makes our life unpredict-
able and precarious, if the stranger makes our self fluid, shouldn’t we be
grateful to them for the opportunity they give us? Shouldn’t we welcome
the possibility of change?
One of those who prefer the artificial lover to a real one is the self-
declared technosexual and iDollator Davecat, who lives with two $6,000
RealDolls, one of which he regards as his wife and the other as his
mistress (Beck 2013). His and his “wife’s” wedding bands are engraved
with the programmatic statement: “Synthetik love lasts forever.” Davecat
knows, of course, that his artificial wife does not really love him, that
she, literally, couldn’t care less. He is not deluded in that sense. Yet
despite being aware that his “wife” is just a doll, that is, a thing, he speaks
to her and treats her – as far as that is possible with a doll – as if she
were a real person. He speaks about her family history, her interests, likes
and dislikes, her moods and thoughts, and strongly resents people who
regard and treat her as a mere thing, which he finds disrespectful of her.
“If animals have rights, and rightly so, why shouldn’t we treat something
that looks and acts like a human with similar rights and respect?” Well,
perhaps because if animals do have rights, then this is not because they
look and act like humans, but for other reasons. Animals can be hurt.
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They can suffer and perhaps even be humiliated. They can be killed. A
doll or a robot (assuming that they are not sentient) cannot do any of
those things.
Yet for Davecat the case is not that clear-cut. For him, his “wife” is, very
much like Santa Claus and other imaginary creatures for small children,
both real and not real, not part of the real world, but still, somehow, an
agent, to be feared or, in this case, loved and cared for. The boundaries
between a mere thing and a person have begun to blur, or are simply
considered irrelevant. For Davecat, the difference is merely that the one
person is “synthetic”, while the other is “organic”. However, the more the
synthetic looks and behaves like the organic the easier it is to see it as a
person and to sustain the make believe: “Part of the (sexual) appeal of
synthetics is how much they look like their organic counterparts. If you
have a robot shaped like a refrigerator, that won’t have as much draw as a
robot in the shape of a human.”
Thus the blurring of the line between the real person and the simulated
one depends on the similarity that the synthetic bears to the organic.
Yet the resemblance that is required and desired is confined to the
synthetic lover’s appearance. It is a strictly external resemblance. What
distinguishes the organic from the synthetic, the real from the made-up,
is equally important: “but the much larger part of their appeal is that
they’re humans, but they don’t possess any of the unpleasant qualities
that organic, flesh and blood humans have. A synthetic will never lie to
you, cheat on you, criticize you, or be otherwise disagreeable.” In other
words, the synthetic lover will never be a stranger. They will always “have
a mindset or a personality that’s compatible with my own.” And if you are
someone who, like Davecat, is “not keen on taking emotional chances”,
if you want to spare yourself the “enormous investment of time, money,
and emotion” that a real human lover requires, if you are not willing to
take the huge risk that is unavoidable when you have someone in your
life “who may bail at any time, or who transforms into someone unpleas-
ant”, then you shouldn’t think twice: the synthetic lover is exactly what
you need. Organic lovers are not really worth all the trouble we tend to
have with them. After all, why should we waste time on an organic if “I
have a Doll who is in love with me at home”? That would be just silly.
Organics are not worth pursuing because they are “far too unpredictable”.
Synthetics on the other hand “have a consistency that I’m grateful for.”
They are also immortal in the sense that their bodies can be replaced
when no longer usable. It is interesting how this is being described by
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Davecat. If after a few years the body, from too much usage, is beyond
repair, he simply goes and buys her (!) a new one. So although his “wife”
isn’t really anything but body, he distinguishes very clearly between her
and her body, as if there really were an immaterial and detachable entity,
a soul or person, that, perhaps at any given time, inhabits and expresses
itself through a particular body, but that can just as well be present in a
different body if the old one is no longer suitable or available. The new
body does not even have to look the same as the old one. With each new
body her appearance can change, but it will still be her, just improved
and upgraded in line with the latest technological developments. So as
far as her owner is concerned, she is not a machine: she is the ghost in
the machine.
Is Davecat happy? He insists that he is. Perhaps, he admits, not one
hundred per cent, but that is not because his artificial lover is not really
real, but simply because there are certain things that it cannot do yet (for
instance, speak and interact like a human person would). But once the
sex doll has given way to the (soon to come) sexbot of the future, there
will be nothing left to desire: “your spouse should be easygoing and a joy
to come home to. (...) I think the best way to reach that goal is through
humanoid robots.” This would be the perfect remedy against loneliness.
It would, he says, be like having your cake and eat it. It would indeed,
which seems exactly the point.
DOI: 10.1057/9781137393500.0009
8
Kissengers and Surrogates
Abstract: Kissengers and surrogates are devices that seemingly
allow bodily contact between people at a distance. What you
do to or with that device at one place is immediately translated
into the actions of another similar device at some other place.
Yet if you have sex with a machine and your doing so directly
causes another machine to have sex with another person,
are you then really having sex with that person? And does it
matter if you are not? If it does not, then it would seem that
you don’t really need that person anymore. Although the
experience is mediated, it is doubtful whether there is any
such thing as an immediate experience. However, it is unclear
what is to be gained by engaging in fictionalised versions of
communication, rather than real communications with real
people.
Keywords: communication; happiness machine;

kissengers; lovotics; mediacy; Ray Bradbury; Ray
Kurzweil; robotics; sex and power; surrogates;
virtual reality

doi: 10.1057/9781137393500.0010.
80 DOI: 10.1057/9781137393500.0010
Kissengers and Surrogates 81
Hooman Samani, a robotics and artificial intelligence researcher from

the National Taipei University in Taiwan, is eager to develop the new
research field of lovotics, which investigates the possibility of human-
to-robot relationships and seeks and promotes the creation of “a new
generation of robots, with the ability to love and be loved by humans”
(http://www.lovotics.com/). Samani has developed a device that allows
people to transfer kisses over a distance. This “novel device for kiss com-
munication”, which is aptly named Kissenger (short for kiss messenger),
is round, slightly larger than a tennis ball, has eyes, ears and stumpy little
arms and legs, and, most importantly, oversized lips that can kiss and be
kissed. The whole thing looks a bit like a pig’s head with a moustache.
Its purpose is to function as an artificial mouth that, we are being told,
allows users to kiss each other over a distance. If you and your partner
both have one of those devices and you connect them to your computers,
and you both hold your devices to your lips at the same time, then your
partner can kiss you by kissing his or her kissenger, which will cause your
kissenger to kiss you, and vice versa. Their lip movements will translate
into analogous movements of your kissenger, and your lip movements
will translate into analogous movements of their kissenger, which will
then, allegedly, be exactly as if you kissed each other directly. The device
supposedly provides a “realistic kissing experience” and a “convincing
sense of telepresence”. By creating a “real time bridge” between peo-
ple who love each other and thus allowing them to be, or rather feel,
physically close to each other without actually being there, it is supposed
to increase happiness. However, the device can not only be used to
exchange kisses with a real human partner. It can just as well be used to
allow more physical intimacy with a machine (by integrating the device
into a humanoid robot) or even with an entirely virtual character, thus
blending the virtual with the real. Once the device is in place, the human
partner is no longer necessary. And we can, of course, easily imagine
similar devices that allow the real time experience of other forms of bod-
ily contact. We can imagine a sexbot messenger, or sexenger, that trans-
lates every action we perform on it into an action that its counterpart
then simultaneously performs on our lover and would thus allow more
than just kissing at a distance. It would allow fucking at a distance. But
once again, if the human partner is merely present through its surrogate,
then there remains little reason not to drop them entirely. If you have
sex with a machine and your doing so directly causes another machine
to have sex with another person, and in exactly the same manner, are
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you then really having sex with that person? And can you then not do
without that person entirely?
On the other hand, we may well wonder whether there really is a
relevant difference between the immediate and the mediate. Isn’t the
experience that we can have of another person always mediated, even
if we do not use any technical devices? When we see someone, we can
only do so by means of those natural instruments we call eyes, which
receive light that is then converted into neuronal signals that are even-
tually translated into images. When we hear someone’s voice, the same
happens with our ears and the sound waves they receive. When we touch
someone, or are being touched, it is our fingers or the skin of whatever
body part is involved whose receptors send signals through the nerves to
our brain, and what we then feel we feel as a result of that whole process.
Between us and other people there are always our senses. However, we
are not usually aware of the mediation process, unless, that is, something
goes wrong and the various organs involved in it fail to do what we have
come to expect them to do. Then our attention is redirected, away from
the object and towards the instruments that are the condition of its
appearance. As long as things go smoothly, the mediating organs remain
invisible. Yet that is also the case when we actually use an additional
technical device in order to make someone present to us. A telephone for
instance converts the sound of the human voice into electronic signals,
sends them through wires or via a radio link to some other place where
they are then changed back into sound. Yet when we talk to someone
on the telephone we have the impression that we are directly talking to
them, and not to a machine (which then relates to the other exactly what
we have said to it), and that what we hear is their voice, not the voice
of a machine (which is merely reproducing the other’s voice, although
admittedly to a degree of perfection that makes it virtually impossible to
distinguish the original voice from the simulation).
Now imagine we had access to robots that looked (and smelt, felt
and sounded) exactly like the person we wanted to be with and have
sex with, and whatever we did with those surrogates would reliably
and faithfully be translated into the actions of another surrogate, who
would then do the same with another person we intend to engage with.
Incidentally, the inventor of the kissengers, Hooman Samani, has already
developed a miniature prototype, which he calls “mini-surrogates”. They
are little puppets that you can keep with you and that will reproduce in
real time the movements of the absent partner that it represents. Since
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your partner will have a similar puppet, one that represents you, you can
interact and telecommunicate with one another through those puppets.
If you for instance wave at your partner’s mini-surrogate, then your
own surrogate will wave at your partner. The device allegedly fosters a
“sense of co-presence” by providing a “holistic embodied interaction and
interface”. It reinforces the “feeling of non-mediation” because “the inter-
action is through the whole body” and because an “engaging, interactive
physical representative of each person is available in close proximity of
the other person” (http://www.lovotics.com/minisurrogate).
Although it is doubtful that such a feeling of non-mediation can be
achieved through these (not very alive-looking and of course much too
small) puppets, the basic idea that we can render the mediation invis-
ible by making the experience as holistic (i.e. involving all the senses)
and embodied (involving both your own physical body and the body
of another) as possible, seems credible enough. If we had life-sized sur-
rogates that were in all respects very much like the people they represent
(or rather: whose extended bodies they are) and if we had enough
time to get used to these new mediation devices, then we may well,
just as we do now with the telephone, have the impression that we are
directly engaging with the other person, that we are actually with them
and as close to them as we can possibly get. There is of course no way
of knowing whether or not we would feel that way before we actually
get there. But it is not entirely implausible. So if that happened, would
there be anything to worry about? If there is nothing wrong with using
a telephone to connect with someone whom we cannot speak to directly
(or is there?), then it is hard to see why we should not use a whole-body
surrogate to connect to someone whom we cannot see, touch and smell
directly. The telephone, of course, might be regarded as deficient com-
pared to the real thing, simply because we only get the voice of the other
person, and nothing else. That certainly makes the encounter we have
with the other person over the phone different from an encounter where
the other person is in the same room with us and we have a complete
sensory experience of the other. However, such a holistic experience is
exactly what the full-body surrogate would provide. So if it is deficient,
then it will be deficient in a different way than the telephone.
Of course what we regard as deficient and what not depends on our
point of view, on what we want and expect of the device in question.
The majority of today’s teenagers loathes to use their phones the way
they were originally intended to be used, namely to actually speak with
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someone whom you cannot speak with directly because they are in a dif-
ferent location. This is not because they resent the mediation and would
rather speak with someone in person, but on the contrary, because talk-
ing to someone on the phone generates a degree of closeness and togeth-
erness that they would rather avoid. Precisely because it is a device that
helps making the absent present, that annihilates distance and creates a
sense of immediacy, they shy away from it and use it only to text each
other. Texting is different from actually talking to someone. It connects
us with other people, but in a comfortingly mediated way. It allows us to
communicate, that is, to send and receive messages, but at the same time
to keep our distance, which is exactly the way we want it, because we
want both: the communication (or perhaps, since the content does not
seem to be very important, we should better say the connection) and the
distance. It is our way of protecting ourselves against the stranger, the
intrusion of the real.
Sherry Turkle has analysed the way our relationships to other people
(and other living beings in general) are changing at a time when robots
and computer screens increasingly replace real people as the first (and
often only) point of contact. She calls the time we live at “the robotic
moment”. Her findings confirm that what people are currently learning
or getting used to is “a way of feeling connected in which they have
permission to think only of themselves” (Turkle 2011, 60). This requires
that the other is fictionalised as much as possible. Yet when we imagine
that one day we will be able to communicate with an absent friend or
lover through whole-body surrogates, then we are assuming that what
we will then (still) want is to be as close to another real person as we can
be. In other words, we still imagine ourselves, post-singularity, as human
(that is, a being with a particular kind of animal body with animal needs
and desires, and with all the messiness and dependencies that such an
existence brings about), not as posthuman, finally free, in control of
things, completely autonomous, which is at odds with the whole con-
cept of the technological singularity and the transhumanist hopes and
aspirations that are associated with it. The whole-body surrogate is,
after all, not meant to replace the other, but to overcome distance and to
connect with them, just as the telephone was never meant to replace the
voice of the other, but rather to make it accessible at a distance. Yet it is
hard to imagine that we will actually have any use for this once we have
crossed the singularity threshold to an admittedly unpredictable, but
for some reason also predictably all-enabling future. First of all, we may
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then have very different priorities and shun closeness to other people
even more than we already do today. Second, even if we still want to be
close to other people, the technology needed to create realistic whole-
body surrogates of particular people that allow us to be with them even
when they are absent would require such an unimaginable degree of
technicological sophistication that it is just as likely that we will be able
to teleport directly to the place where they are staying. Third, assuming
that we will still age and change in appearance over time, we would need
surrogates that either change with us or are being replaced from time
to time by an updated version that reflects the change in the original.
And given the transhumanist preoccupation with youth and abledness,
it is not to be expected that we will want our surrogates to reflect the
real, rather than the ideal. So what is most likely to happen is that the
ideal will gradually replace the real, just as the android had to replace
Alicia Clary in Villiers’ novel. We will, inevitably, surround ourselves
with surrogates that are more attractive than the people they are meant
to provide physical access to. And then we will soon reach a stage where,
once again, the real person behind the surrogate is no longer needed or
wanted. They will gradually fade away, become less and less important,
until they are gone completely.1 What is then left is a fictionalised version
of communication. It would perhaps still feel real, but there would no
longer be anyone there at the other end of the line, which is just as well
because although we would, in practice, engage only with ourselves, this
is, as we have seen, not entirely undesirable. Finally free “to think only of
ourselves”, we will, after all, be able to enjoy sex with the person we know
best and love most: ourselves.
Yet Ray Kurzweil, when being asked whether we will still have sex
after the singularity, in a Big Think YouTube video made in 2011 stresses
the importance of sex as an established way of communicating with oth-
ers. By disconnecting sex from reproduction, sex “has become a form
of communication and it’s obviously a rich area of human activity and
communication.” For this reason, Kurzweil muses, we will want to keep
it even after the singularity, although naturally in a different (enhanced)
form:
Virtual reality will be an opportunity to expand all kinds of human rela-
tionships, including physical, sensual, and sexual ones, which very soon
are going to become full emersion, (...) where the computer can pick up
your movement. We’re going to be in the action. You’re not just going to
be watching virtual reality, you know, here on a little screen, you’re going
DOI: 10.1057/9781137393500.0010
to be in it. And there won’t be this cartoon-like thing we have now; it’ll
be very realistic. We’ve had some technologies where you can change who
you are, you can wear different fashion. But we’re going to have much more
flexibility if you can really change your whole body. So it can be just a game
or it can be an educational experience or it can be a different way to have
relationships. (Kurzweil 2011)
And perhaps it can be all that, but the question is, will it be, as Kurzweil
suggests, not only a different way of having relationships, but also a bet-
ter, richer way of doing so? Kurzweil speaks of an “expansion” of human
relationships, but it sounds more like a switch from one form (where an
embodied self with a particular grown identity encounters, communi-
cates with, and opens up to an embodied other with an equally grown,
but different identity) to a very different form (where a self and a body
are being created at will to interact with apparent others who are also
deliberate creations and who might not even be others, but could just
as well be alternate versions of the self). It is unclear in what way this
new form of having relationships does still involve real communication.
What exactly is being communicated here, and to whom? The comments
left on the YouTube site featuring the Kurzweil video seem to confirm
such doubts. “The best scenario of future sex”, one watcher wrote,
will be through mind uploading when we can make thousands of copies of
our creative brains assisted by an advanced AI cloud, then they would each
think up a sexual fantasy and send them back to you. Then you’d pick the
best out of those fantasies, go into VR, and get on with it. And they can be
with any person, face, body, voice, behavior, an empath, whatever. Can’t get
better than that.
Another commented: “Sex is pointless now when we have so much great

porn.”
What has become pointless is of course only the kind of sex that we
have with other really existing, responsive and fully embodied persons.
Once we are able, post-singularity, to find the greatest pleasure in a
virtual environment that allows us to live any sexual fantasy we may
entertain, then sex and porn become in fact indistinguishable, because
all things (including other persons) are reduced to being just another
sexual titillation device. Yet the alleged pointlessness of sex does not
refer to the particular kind of intense pleasure that it generates, since,
after the singularity, pleasure is supposed to be more important (as well
as more intense, pure, uninhibited and easily accessible) than ever.2 And
there is of course also the link between sex and power that makes it
DOI: 10.1057/9781137393500.0010
hard to envisage our posthuman future without sex. We (or at least the
males among us) are probably hardwired to regard sexual performance
as an affirmation of power, and since the whole transhumanist agenda
is based on the alleged need to gain (complete) control over our lives
and to eradicate all weakness, all vulnerability, all possible sources
of pain and suffering, the enthusiasm with which the post-singularity
future is envisaged as a sexual paradise that leaves no desire unfulfilled
is understandable. However, sex is also, almost paradigmatically, a kind
of activity that, if we want to do it well, requires that we cede control
and let go. At its best it is an encounter, a communicative act, that does
not only bridge the gulf that normally separates one person from the
other, but that also transcends individuality itself. It does not so much
connect one self with another self, as it dissolves the self and the other in
a common boundary-shattering experience, one that is certainly power-
ful, but decidedly not one in which a particular self affirms its power. The
individual self can only affirm its power (and prove its autonomy and
independence) when it fully controls the situation, when the sexual act
is one that is being performed on another (or more precisely on one-
self by means of another) rather than with another. In other words, the
(affirmation of) power and sex coincide perfectly only in the act of rape,
where one is subjected to the power of another through the sexual act.
In that sense, transhumanist fantasies of a sexual future in which real
human others, who by their very nature will always resist their complete
instrumentalisation and disempowerment, are being replaced by subser-
vient artificial bodies that mimic the responsiveness of real persons or by
virtual entities, can be understood as sublimated rape fantasies.
But we shouldn’t really have a problem with that. In the post-sin-
gularity future we will, after all, all be happy rapists, which means that
there won’t be any victims, nobody to complain about it or suffer from
it, which presumably is one of the reasons why we will be so (unimagi-
nably) happy. In transhumanist visions of our post-singularity future the
singularity functions primarily as a happiness machine. Everything that
it will allow us to do and achieve must ultimately serve that one purpose:
the elimination of all sources of unhappiness (and one major source of
unhappiness is thought to be other people), so that happiness, which is
identified with pleasure, is finally all-pervasive and never-ending. It is
assumed that in our present merely human condition we cannot be really
happy (just as the sexual relationships we have cannot be really satisfy-
ing), that we need to change radically to be capable of real happiness.
DOI: 10.1057/9781137393500.0010
Happiness is thought of as a state of exaltation (not unlike an orgasm),

or at least some kind of acute subjective, positive feeling that is not only
desirable in its own right, but is also not tainted by the fact that it can
only be temporary. A finite happiness is not deemed to be happiness at
all. But it is also decidedly not normal, something out of the ordinary,
something to be desperately sought and, when found, jealously guarded.
It is felt that in order to be happy we need to be able to permanently
enjoy all the good things in life, to be always healthy and fit, young and
beautiful and in possession of unlimited economic resources. Then we
can rush off, from highlight to highlight and pursue happiness to all
those fancy places where it is to be found (or, more likely, to be bought).
Some 20 years before Robert Nozick first came up with the idea of an
“experience machine” to test our hedonistic intuitions and to cast doubt
on the view that all that matters (or should matter) to us is subjective
well-being or in other words pleasurable experiences, Ray Bradbury
wrote a story called “The Happiness Machine”, which is about the ordi-
nariness of happiness (Bradbury 2010, 531–540)). It is with this story,
which I suggest we read as a parable of transhumanism, that I want to
conclude my reflections on sex and the posthuman condition. It is the
story of a man called Leo Auffmann who is obsessed with the idea of
construcing a “happiness machine”. Finally, after having tirelessly worked
on it for some months or so, all the while completely neglecting his wife
and children and his own health (and generally the present), he has a
result, the machine is finished and it is working. However, to his dismay
his wife is not the least interested in the machine, which, in her view, has
almost ruined her husband’s life, not to speak of their relationship: “Man
was not made to tamper with such things. It’s not against God, no, but it
sure looks like it’s against Leo Auffmann. Another week of this and we’ll
bury him in his machine!” And what’s all this artificial happiness good
for anyway, she asks, and flatly refuses even to give it a try. “If you died
from overwork, what should I do today, climb in that big box down there
and be happy?” Then his son uses it and is utterly miserable as a result.
Leo doesn’t understand. And then his wife finally gives in and decides
that she will, after all, try out the machine. We hear her voice from
inside. Apparently she sees and hears and smells wonderful places, Paris,
Rome, the Pyramids, feels herself to be dancing (not really, of course),
gasps “Amazing!”, and then – she starts to weep. It’s the saddest thing in
the world, she says when she comes out. She had never missed any of
this, and now she does. Now she wants to see Paris, but knows that she
DOI: 10.1057/9781137393500.0010
can’t and won’t. The machine let her feel young again, but she knows she
isn’t. It’s all a lie. Nothing of it is real. The happiness machine is in fact a
sadness machine. The problem is that we have to go back to reality, and
reality is not like that: there are dirty dishes to be washed, beds to be
made, children to be fed.
Moreover, it is not even desirable to have those wonderful experiences
all the time and whenever you want to: “let’s be frank, Leo, how long can
you look at a sunset? Who wants a sunset to last? Who wants perfect
temperature? Who wants air smelling good always? So after a while,
who would notice? Better, for a minute or two, a sunset. After that, let’s
have something else.” “Sunsets we always liked because they only happen
once and go away.” When Leo replies that this is actually very sad, this
briefness, the ephemeral nature of the good, she says: “No, if the sunset
stayed and we got bored, that would be a real sadness.”
Then, the machine catches fire and they let it burn until it is no more.
They can now go back to their lives, which are very ordinary, but not
so bad after all, to “putting books back on shelves, and clothes back in
closets, fixing supper” and ordinary things like that. And then Leo finally
discovers “the real Happiness Machine”, which is a life that is shared with
other (real) people, doing everyday things, and being there for each
other. Nothing more is needed:
There sat Saul and Marshall, playing chess at the coffee table. In the din-
ing room Rebecca was laying out the silver. Naomi was cutting paper-doll
dresses. Ruth was painting water colors. Joseph was running his electric
train. Through the kitchen door, Lena Auffmann was sliding a pot roast
from the steaming oven. Every hand, every head, every mouth made a big
or little motion. You could hear their faraway voices under glass. You could
hear someone singing in a high sweet voice. You could smell bread baking,
too, and you knew it was real bread that would soon be covered with real
butter. Everything was there and it was working.
Notes
1 As Ornella (2010, 326) puts it: “Rather than sexuality being an encounter with
the other or the body of the other, technology itself becomes this ‘other’”.
2 Cf. Ornella (2010, 319): “Technology contributes to a transformation of the
perception of the purpose of having sex ( ...) and emphasizes the aspect of
pleasure”.
DOI: 10.1057/9781137393500.0010
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DOI: 10.1057/9781137393500.0011
Index
abortion, 69–70 biological liberation, 41, 49
absence, 3, 13, 30, 35, 76 bioluddism, 14, 74
addiction, 50 boredom, 45, 59
ageing, 45, 54, 60, 65, 70, 75 born vs made, 3, 19, 21, 26–28,
alienation, 56 30, 32, 34, 37–38, 41, 43, 47,
ambivalence, 26, 37, 70 51, 56, 59, 61, 78
Anders, Günther, 39, 41–45, 51 Bostrom, Nick, 3, 10, 52
androids, 28, 32, 34, 35–36, Bradbury, Ray, 80, 88
38–39, 62, 85 Buchanan, Allen, 2, 52
animal nature, 3, 10, 35, 43, 47,
53, 55, 57, 59, 69, 71, 77, 84 carebot, 13
animals, 77 change, 6, 12, 25, 45, 49, 54,
appearance, 16, 20, 26, 33, 35, 37, 56, 60, 73–77, 79, 85–86,
78–79, 82, 85 87
artificial intelligence, 16, 19, 86 child-like character, 28, 29–30,
artificial lover. See automatic 56
sweethearts Christian fundamentalism, 19
Augustine, 41, 46–48 communication, 80–81, 84–85,
authenticity, 50 87
automata, 28–31, 63 communion, 5, 51, 57, 62–63
automatic sweethearts, 11–12, consciousness, 2, 4, 11, 15–16,
22–23, 51 19–20, 22, 35–36, 43, 46,
autonomy, 6, 11, 15–16, 27, 36, 55, 62
45–50, 55, 60–61, 65–66, constraints, 5, 49, 61, 67
69–71, 87 contempt, 1, 4, 38
control, 5–6, 15, 35, 38, 41,
babies in bottles, 56 46–48, 56, 60, 73, 75, 84,
Bacon, Francis, 19 87
Baudrillard, 5 cowardice, 74
beauty, 13, 28, 30, 32–34, 36, 38, cruelty, 54, 66, 68, 71
59, 68, 88
behaviourism, 11, 20–22 Danaher, John, 51
bioconservatism, 73–74 Darwin, Charles, 4, 19, 71
bioconservative, 45, 55, 75 death penalty, 69–70
94 DOI: 10.1057/9781137393500.0012
Index 95
deception, 23, 36 Galileo, 19

defective human nature, 2, 36, 39, gender, 7, 10
44, 48 genitals, 7, 32, 46–47, 62
degeneration, 62 giftedness, 46
dehumanisation, 26 givenness, 46
dependency, 6, 8–9, 46, 56, 59–60, goddess. See gods
65, 84 gods, 21, 22, 25–27, 33, 36, 46–48,
Descartes, Rene, 31 57–59, 65–66, 68, 88
design, 7, 12–13, 17–18, 21, 43
detachment, 55 happiness, 2–4, 7, 13, 15–16, 23, 26, 49,
determinism, 61 56, 58, 61, 64, 66, 71–73, 75, 79–81,
dignity, 53, 59 87–88
disability, 56, 61 harm, 49–50
disease, 37–38, 50, 55, 76 health, 15, 50, 58–59, 88
disgust, 7, 26–27, 32–33, 53, 55, 57–58, hedonism, 1, 48, 70
72 hedonistic imperative, 15, 64, 71
disillusionment, 38, 57 Hobbes, Thomas, 66
disjointedness, 42 Hoffmann, E.T.A., 23–24, 28, 31–33
doll, 24, 28, 31, 49, 73, 77, 79, 89 holistic experience, 83
doubt. See uncertainty homosexuality, 49, 69
honesty, 38
Earp, Brian, 49–51 Houellebecq, Michel, 53, 59, 60
Edison, Thomas, 32–33, 35, 37–39, 50 hubris, 45, 58
egotism, 64, 66 Hughes, James, 6–8
embodiment, 16, 53, 55, 59, 83, 86 human condition, 2–5, 25, 46, 56, 59,
emotions, 5, 19–20, 38, 42, 48–50, 60 66, 87
empathy, 16 human deficiencies, 41
enhancement, 9, 41–42, 44–45, 49, human engineering, 44
52–53, 56, 64 human preference thesis, 51
cognitive, 9 Humanity Plus, 3
cosmetic, 7 humiliation, 38–39, 43, 47, 75, 78
moral, 18 humility, 45
enlightenment, 69 hyperreality, 5
erection, 46–47, 52
evil, 18, 29, 56, 65, 75 ideal woman, 28, 30, 34–35, 59, 85
evolution, 2, 4, 19, 44, 49 illusion, 14, 36–38, 59, 66
existential solitude, 13–14, 35, 39, 53, 58, imagination, 2, 4, 8, 13, 23, 29, 32,
61, 63, 65, 70, 75–76, 79 42–43, 45–46, 49, 58, 60, 68,
81, 84
fear, 3, 23, 31, 36–37, 54, 61, 63, 69, immortality, 3, 25, 34, 39, 45, 61–62,
73–74, 76 78
flesh, 4–5, 8, 12, 14, 19, 26–27, 35, 40, 47, in vitro fertilisation, 56
54, 57, 78 incest, 68–69
free will, 16 individualism, 53
freedom. See autonomy infanticide, 70
Freud, Sigmund, 24, 31–32 infatuation, 28
DOI: 10.1057/9781137393500.0012
96 Index
inferiority, 40, 43, 47 marriage, 49, 69

innocence, 46 mastery, 2, 16, 28, 36
insanity, 28, 31, 57 masturbation, 1, 6, 8, 13, 51, 62
instrumentalisation, 1, 15, 87 meat-puppet, 7
instrumentalism, 1, 5 mechanisation of life, 56
intelligent design, 68 mediation, 80, 82–84
intimacy, 8, 10, 51, 81 memory, 45, 54
Invasion of the Body Snatchers, 31 messy bodies, 5, 8–9, 41–42, 56–59, 84
irrationality, 23, 74 Mill, John Stuart, 3
mind uploading, 5, 45, 86
James, William, 6, 12, 21–23 mirror. See reflection
jealousy, 4–5, 48, 50 misanthropy, 38, 58
Jentsch, Ernst, 32, 40 misogyny, 57–58, 72
modesty, 26, 27
Kass, Leon, 45 monogamy, 7, 69
kissengers, 80 moral agency, 16–18
kissing, 26–27, 81 morality, 66–67
Kurzweil, Ray, 2–3, 6, 9, 80, 85–86 mortality, 4, 41–42, 47, 59, See also
immortality
Lady Chatterley’s Lover, 53–55, 57
law of nature, 64, 67 nakedness, 43, 68
Lawrence, D.H., 53–59, 62 natural. See unnatural
Le Guin, Ursula K., 73–75 natural functions, 57
Leary, Timothy, 41, 46, 52 natural rights, 15, 36, 39, 69–72, 77
Levy, David, 19–21 nature, 2–5, 7, 10–11, 14–15, 17, 26, 29,
libertarianism, 64, 70 36, 38, 44–45, 47–48, 52–53,
liberty. See autonomy 56–57, 61, 64, 66–72, 87
life extension, 15, 45, 53 argument from, 72
limitlessness, 2–3, 6, 9, 10, 25, 42 neediness, 6, 8, 15, 18, 30, 43–44, 47, 65,
logocentrism, 1, 5 69, 76, 84
love, 7, 11–12, 19–22, 25–27, 30–35, 37, Nietzsche, Friedrich, 64–65, 67
39, 41, 48–49, 52, 54–56, 60, Nozick, Robert, 88
63–67, 73, 75–78, 81, 85
engineering of, 41, 48–50 obedience, 28, 47
lovotics, 80–81, 83 obsession, 28, 32
Lumpkin, Jincey, 15–16 organic body, 5–6, 57
lust, 7, 13, 47–48 orgasm, 9, 12, 88
Ovid, 23, 25–26, 32
machines, 2, 10–11, 13, 15–19, 21, 24–25,
28, 30–31, 37–46, 52, 56, 61–62, 72, Paley, William, 68
79–82, 87–89 passions. See emotions
fighting machines, 17 Pearce, David, 2, 4, 70–72
moral machines, 17 Pellissier, Hank, 14–15
manipulation, 7, 71 perfection, 9, 13, 15, 18, 28, 30, 34–39,
Marquis de Sade, 64–72 41–43, 59, 61, 82, 89
DOI: 10.1057/9781137393500.0012
Index 97
perishability, 45 sexual freedom, 15

Plato, 37, 66 shame, 26, 33, 40–41, 43–48, 51–52, 55
pleasure, 1, 3–6, 8–11, 14, 38, 48, 50–52, Promethean shame, 39, 41–42
54, 60–62, 64–68, 70–71, 86–87, 89 Siegel, Don, 31
pornography, 15, 60, 65, 86 sin, 39, 46
possessiveness, 63 Singer, Edgar Arthur, 22–23
post-biological existence, 3 singularity, 1–3, 5, 9, 12, 42, 72, 84–87
post-Darwinian future, 4 slaves, 16, 19
posthumanity, 1–4, 6, 8–9, 14, 25, 46, soul, 11, 19, 22–25, 28, 33–36, 38, 42, 47,
57, 60, 72, 87, 88 67–68, 75–77, 79
pragmatism, 20–22 spiritual existence, 5, 30, 36, 57, 61
prejudice, 74 spiritualisation, 3
progress, 38 statues, 25–27, 30, 32–34, 58, 77
propriety, 27, 51 Stepford Wives, 28, 40
prostitution, 25–26, 51 stranger, 73, 76–78, 84
punishment, 25–26, 47, 58, 69, 70 submission, 34, 71
purity, 27–28, 30, 59–60, 72, 86 suffering, 3, 16, 19, 38, 45, 48–51, 59, 61,
purpose, 4, 6, 13, 16–18, 33, 43, 47, 50, 66, 71–72, 75, 78, 87
62, 65, 73, 81, 87, 89 suicide, 56, 61
Pygmalion, 23–27, 32, 77 superhuman intelligence, 2–3
superiority. See inferiority
radical life extension, 7 surrogates, 80, 82–83, 84
rape, 15–17, 71, 87 survival, 5, 56, 62, 65, 76
reality, 38–39 Swift, Jonathan, 36, 53, 57–59, 72
reason, 33
reflection, 30, 76 taboos, 60
reification, 16, 43 technological progress, 2, 74
reliability, 11, 17–19, 23, 34, 37–38, technology, 19, 25, 37, 85, 89
77–78, 84 telecommunication, 83
replaceability, 5, 45, 54 telepresence, 81
replacement, 9, 13, 37 tenderness, 29, 35, 62
reproduction, 47, 60, 76, 81 the Fall, 46–47
resurrection, 56, 61 The Future Eve, 23–24, 32, 34
robotics, 80, 81 The Possibility of an Island, 53, 59
The Sandman, 23–24, 28–29, 31–32
sacred stupidity, 33 togetherness, 84
Samani, Hooman, 81–82 Tomorrow’s Eve. See The Future Eve
Savulescu, Julian, 42, 48–49 touch, 8, 12, 27, 55–56, 62–63, 82, 83
Schiller, Friedrich, 44, 58 transcendence, 7, 13, 34, 59, 71
Schopenhauer, Arthur, 59 transhumanism, 1, 3–7, 10, 14–15, 25, 48,
sex robots. See sexbots 53, 55, 59, 61, 64–66, 69–70, 72–77,
sex work, 13 84–85, 87–88
sexbots, 11–12, 14–16, 18, 28, 73, 77 trust, 17, 38, 76
sexual arousal, 7, 19 truth, 31, 57–59
sexual desires, 6, 47 Turkle, Sherry, 13, 84
DOI: 10.1057/9781137393500.0012
98 Index
uncanny, 12, 24, 31, 32 Voltaire, 69

uncertainty, 8, 31 vulnerability, 38, 42, 45, 59, 64–65, 70,
unnatural, 7, 32, 34, 67, 68 87
usability, 28, 78
utilitarianism, 3, 71 Wagner, Richard, 33
well-being, 7, 11, 13, 15, 49, 65, 71, 88
vacuity, 30, 34–35 women, 14, 23, 26–27, 29, 32, 35, 38, 40,
Villiers de l’Isle Adam, 23–24, 32–34, 55, 58, 60, 69, 71–72
36–39, 50, 85 World Transhumanist Association. See
Vinge, Vernor, 2 Humanity Plus
violence, 62–63, 66, 71–72
virtual bodies, 6 yawn, 23, 30
virtual reality, 6, 8, 80, 85–86 youth, 14, 28, 36, 54, 57–59, 61, 74–75,
Vita-More, Natasha, 8 85, 88–89
DOI: 10.1057/9781137393500.0012

(Palgrave Pivot) Hauskeller, Michael - Sex and The Posthuman Condition-Palgrave Macmillan (2014)

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Sex and the Posthuman Condition

Tom Watson (editor): Eastern European Perspectives on the Development of Public

1 After the Singularity: The Glorious

DOI: 10.1057/9781137393500.0002 vii

Keywords: hedonism; instrumentalisation; pleasure;

Hauskeller, Michael. Sex and the Posthuman

We will finally be like gods: immortal, all-knowing, all-powerful, and,

primary purpose of the Singularity will be seen, after the fact, to be

identity-defining, as it used to be. As Ray Kurzweil (2005, 203) once

So the idea is that bodies might still be there to be enjoyed, to be used at

on how desirable we find being sexually aroused in certain situations, or

another. “Maybe we will eliminate physical sex altogether and endow

of disorientation of desire that challenges categories of sex-gender identity

Keywords: automatic sweethearts; behaviourism; nature

Hauskeller, Michael. Sex and the Posthuman

be a true encounter between two persons, as opposed to an act of mutual

They’ll offer us quadruple-tongued cunnilingus, open-throat silky fellatio,

reason why we create them is that we want them to do what we want

On the contrary, I think it makes all the difference. Again, we might be

James then asks us to consider an analogy which he thinks will convince

If the distinction between ‘soulless’ and ‘soulful’ means anything, then

Keywords: authenticity; E.T.A. Hoffmann; living dolls;

Hauskeller, Michael. Sex and the Posthuman

by Pygmalion. Everything else follows from this. Here is Ovid’s original

The whole story is characterised by an astonishing ambivalence towards

bashfulness of the inanimate thing, over to her new existence. She

Although Nathanael is reported not to belong to those people, his words

Nathanael blames her disbelief on her “cold and insensitive tempera-

She is of course a “perfect listener”, who is never distracted by other

Although this passage strikes a rare humorous note in an otherwise

that Alicia’s beautiful, goddess-like appearance is not matched by her

movements and speech by pushing certain buttons cleverly hidden on

woman is almost by definition a temptress, a being destined to lure

Promethean shame is what we feel when we compare ourselves to the

Keywords: biological liberation; Günther Anders; human

Hauskeller, Michael. Sex and the Posthuman

detach ourselves from our bodies, of ourselves) is hard to accept. In

nature, a “faulty construction”, which as such is in urgent need of correc-

According to Augustine, nothing demonstrates to us so clearly and

“despair, desperate longing, and the extreme and sometimes damaging

(triggered by the apparent superiority of the machine), then we may

Keywords: animal nature disgust; existential

Hauskeller, Michael. Sex and the Posthuman

civilisation ought to eliminate a lot of physical disabilities,’ said Clifford.

In contrast, life is good, warm, joyful, unruly, unmeasured, abundant,

However, I do not think that expressing his disgust of women, or human-

transhumanism, and Houllebecq describes quite plausibly how much it

resemble it, or even evoke it allusively. When physical love disappears; a

We truly live only through our sexual bodies:

Keywords: egotism; hedonistic imperative; law of

Hauskeller, Michael. Sex and the Posthuman

The inner logic of transhumanism demands that love be abandoned

ironically subtitled Dialogues Aimed at the Education of Young Ladies

1 Conventional morality places constraints on the expression of our

to believe that the pleasure we derive from certain activities depends to a

Therefore women, being neither animals nor things, should be free to do

Imperative. There is a good reason why Pearce talks about a hedonistic

Keywords: bioconservatism; fear of change; sexbots;

Hauskeller, Michael. Sex and the Posthuman

Could it be that transhumanists are actually far more conservative in

life overthrown. Sometimes he is lonely, but apparently that is a price

things come unbidden. The transhumanist wants to keep things under

The stranger is a terrifying creature. And every real person is a stranger

1 After the Singularity: The Glorious