ABSTRACT
A critique of transhumanism faces two challenges—whether the game is lost, because we’re already transhuman, and whether now is the point at which we should slow or stop technoscientific development. Transhumanism is described as the de facto policy of academic and research culture. It could hardly be otherwise, when there is no endpoint to any part of knowledge production. Today, however, it’s time to ask, shouldn’t there be a point where knowledge production should end? Might there not be an Aristotelian mean to knowledge, in the sense that we can have too much as well as too little of it? This chapter investigates the question of measure. Is it possible to establish a reasonable standard for determining too much, too little, or the right amount of technology, or of knowledge generally? This question troubled Werner Marx, who identified measure, the dividing line between the fit and unfit, the proper and improper, as the first issue of ethics. Similarly, both Nietzsche and Heidegger viewed the lack of a measure for our lives—a standard for judging human behavior, and a way to distinguish between good and evil—as the source of the cultural crisis of nihilism.
