Seeing beyond the Machine
Why transhumanism offends the soul
I am often surprised by the zeal with which our technocracy pursues this idea of human beings evolving beyond our relatively feeble biological origins – even to the extent of attaining immortality by uploading ourselves into a computer. It surprises me there are still fundamentalist materialists around who believe it possible, for it seems more of a category error to me. But it also chills me to the bone as this technological adventure sucks down ever more research dollars, while taking us further and further away from solving the more fundamental crisis of meaning that haunts our era.
Generally known as transhumanism, the subject presents itself as a bold promise of transcending the limitations of the body and the mind. It imagines we can be physically perfected by tech and then our consciousness uploaded to a computer matrix, immortality assured so long as we keep up with the payments. And if not? I presume deletion.
But behind this dazzling premise lies, to my mind at least, something profoundly offensive to metaphysical decency. For what it offers is not transcendence at all, but more a form of obliteration – not a deepening of humanity, but its reduction to machine logic, to computation, an algorithm, a cog in a machine, binary coded and entirely ignorant of soul language. To dream of survival as a file, as an infinitely modifiable digital avatar, on a server, is to collude in our own disappearance. It is truly astonishing to me how such a vision could ever come to command such power in the modern imagination, eclipsing other, more human, more poetic accounts of our being – richly poetic voices drowned out by the noise of a roaring Machine.
Of course, there have always been cautionary thinkers among us, visionaries repelled by the notion of a mechanical universe. Long before transhumanism was a word, writers like E. M. Forster, Aldous Huxley, and George Orwell had described for us vast future dystopias where the technological order crushed our souls. Writing as early as 1909, Forster, in his short story The Machine Stops – at a time when the telegraph and early telephones were considered the height of innovation – had clearly already seen the danger: a society handing itself over to the Machine until the Machine itself became God, until suddenly it wasn't. And by then it was too late.
This early story has often struck me as a first warning shot, against the human temptation to surrender freedom for convenience, to sacrifice soul for efficiency. Most notably it was Huxley and Orwell who then carried these themes forward, showing how the mechanical dream lent itself most readily to authoritarianism, to mechanisms of mass control. Technology, by its very structure, centralises: it creates systems that thrive on uniformity, predictability, and compliance. In the hands of a powerful elite, it then becomes the perfect instrument for surveillance and command, capable of reshaping not only behaviour but the very way we think. Together these writers created a vision of our future in which we become so enthralled by our own inventions, so seduced by their ease, their clinical perfection, we retreat into their convenience and become estranged from the oftentimes messy depths that make life meaningful.
Yet for all of the cautionary voices crying STOP, this transhumanist fantasy gathers momentum. The dream of uploading the Self into a computer, of engineering immortality, of creating life itself in the form of conscious machines, seems to exert an irresistible fascination. It is absurd to me, but this is what the transhumanists sincerely believe is possible, and they possess the PhD's, the power and the money to pursue it. But why should a vision of our own erasure strike so resonant a chord among such educated people? Perhaps because the ego, terrified of its fragility, finds comfort in imagining itself as indestructible code. Also, this fantasy of a purely mechanical transcendence allows us to sidestep the metaphysical reality of death, by translating it into a technical problem, one to be solved by code and ever more complex circuitry. It flatters us perhaps, to think of mortality as a glitch, not a mystery. In this way technology becomes not only an instrument of power but also a psychological anaesthetic, numbing the very anxiety that drives us toward spiritual reflection. Yet what it offers instead is only a hollow shell of immortality, one that betrays the soul it makes no pretence of even acknowledging exists.
Against this misguided Promethean myth, lies the thin red line of another world-view – less dramatic, more poetic, and therefore less visible. This is the Romantic vision, which arose at the dawn of the industrial revolution, partly as a reaction to the dark satanic mills, and which sought to remind us that imagination, subjectivity and nature, are not illusions but the very ground of being and meaning. Poets like Wordsworth and Coleridge described an inner life no machine could ever capture, and a sacred depth to the world revealed only through sublime feeling, and imagination. Often derided as absurd by the industrial overlords, the Romantics have always lacked power. From the beginning it was more like a monastic seed, preserving fidelity to the soul in an age that threatened to extinguish it.
Although Romanticism was declared dead by its critics not long after its birth, it never really went away. It resurfaced in more mystically inclined modernists like the poet Yeats, then again in the work of Carl Jung and James Hillman, who translated Romantic sensibility into the language of depth psychology. Here, imagination was no longer merely an aesthetic flourish, but the very mode by which a soul discloses itself. These thinkers took the somewhat nebulous Romantic conviction that life cannot be reduced to mechanism and made it less vulnerable to dismissal as mere sentiment. It became a psychology of the deep, a recognition of the daemonic, and of the archetypal forces that shape human life from beyond the ego.
From there the current has flowed again into philosophy, into analytical idealism, where the work of Bernardo Kastrup and others has begun to articulate with rigorous clarity what the Romantics knew more by intuition: that consciousness is not an epiphenomenon of matter, but the ground of reality itself. The Essentia Foundation, which gathers and disseminates these ideas, functions almost like a secular monastery, preserving and elaborating this metaphysics of consciousness in an age otherwise still enthralled by materialism. Here, the Romantic conviction that the world is dreamlike, soul-suffused, and daemon-haunted finds its most compelling intellectual defence. Where the Romantics spoke in verse and Jung in symbols, idealism speaks in rational, philosophical argument. But the lineage is unmistakable, and from that early thin red line, it gains strength by its rigour.
This continuity matters, because it shows how the Romantic counter-current has persisted in the human psyche by a process of adaptation. True, it does not cut through the culture with the force of an ideology, but it was never meant to. Its nature is different: understated, scattered, carried in poetry, in dream, in solitary practices of soul. But in such dispersal lies its strength. Like seeds dormant in the soil, it waits for conditions in which it may germinate again. Its purpose is not to dazzle us with revelation, but to preserve for all time the possibility of another way of seeing, one that honours imagination, depth, and metaphysical decency.
That said, we still find ourselves at a crossroads. The transhumanist dream, for all its glamour, is an old fallacy: the desire to escape the burden of being human by essentially turning ourselves into robots, and handing ourselves over to a collective Machinery. The Romantic lineage, by contrast, reminds us our destiny is not to transcend our humanity through mechanism, but to deepen it through soul. This is not to diminish the usefulness – indeed the miracle – of robots or artificial intelligence, only to remind ourselves that humans will always make poor robots. So, let robots be robots, and us be ourselves.
Analytical idealism gives this intuition a modern voice, one that can meet materialism on its own terms but also, crucially, without losing the poetic undercurrent. Thus it is between these two myths – the machine that would preserve us by erasing us, and the imagination that would preserve us by remembering us – we are asked to choose.
The choice is not only cultural. It is also personal. Each of us is now challenged every day, every time we pick up a device, whether we will treat our own life as data to be optimised, or as a soul to be cultivated. To choose the latter is to align oneself with the hidden monasticism of the Romantic tradition, to affirm that consciousness is primary, that imagination matters, and that our task is not to escape death through the Machine, but to meet life in its depths. That choice may never command headlines, and certainly fewer research dollars, but it is the only one that keeps faith with what we truly are.