Vol.:(0123456789)
Postdigital Science and Education
https://doi.org/10.1007/s42438-021-00227-7
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REVIEWS
Review of Steve Fuller (2019). Nietzschean Meditations:
Untimely Thoughts at the Dawn of the Transhuman Era
Basel: Schwabe Verlag. 240 pp. ISBN 9783796539466 (Hardcover)
Alcibiades Malapi‑Nelson
1
Accepted: 13 March 2021
© The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021
Keywords Transhumanism · Morphological freedom · Necropolitics · Humanity
2.0 · Ecomodernism · Posthumanism · Cryonics
A Transhumanist Critique of Transhumanism
Almost a decade ago, I wrote a review of Steve Fuller’s frst book on transhuman-
ism, Humanity 2.0 (Malapi-Nelson 2013). There, I indicated that, to my knowledge,
it was the most philosophically informed and theoretically dense account of tran-
shumanism to date. Fuller later wrote two more books on the topic, further elab-
orating important themes in the literature introduced in that frst monograph (the
theological background of transhumanism, the posthumanism versus transhuman-
ism friction, the proactionary imperative, and others) (Fuller 2011, 2013; Fuller
and Lipinska 2014). Nietzschean Meditations: Untimely Thoughts at the Dawn of
the Transhuman Era (Fuller 2019) is not just his fourth book in this transhumanism
‘series’. There are two qualitative diferences. (1) There seems to be an overarching
assessment of what is treated in the previous books, in a manner of a meta-epilogue:
how he sees transhumanism faring today and what the movement will likely deal
with in the future. (2) As Laura Søvsø Thomasen (2020) rightly noted, it is decid-
edly more personal.
The second feature makes the book a very pleasant read—particularly for those
who have been following the author for some years and got to somewhat ‘know’ him
through not only his writings but also via his copious online talks
1
and social media
presence
2
. This book conveys the impression that Fuller was given carte blanche for
freely roaming unpursued avenues of thought without ‘scholastic’ restrictions. This
* Alcibiades Malapi-Nelson
alci.malapi@outlook.com
1
Faculty of Liberal Arts & Sciences and Innovative Learning, Humber Institute of Technology
and Advanced Learning, Toronto, Canada
1
See https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=steve+fuller . Accessed 13 March 2021.
2
See profstevefuller.net and (@profstevefuller). Accessed 13 March 2021.