You will encounter these terms increasingly in Catholic documents, political debates, and tech circles. Here is what they actually mean, where they came from, and why they matter.
A note before we begin: this article approaches transhumanism and posthumanism on their own terms, from a broadly secular and philosophical standpoint. The goal is to understand what these movements actually claim before evaluating them. The final section briefly sketches where Catholic thought — from Pope Leo XIV specifically — locates itself in relation to both.
Two words keep appearing in Vatican documents, papal encyclicals, and technology ethics debates: transhumanism and posthumanism. They are often used interchangeably, sometimes confused, and frequently misunderstood. They are not the same thing. They share a family resemblance, insofar as both are concerned with what happens to the human being in an age of accelerating technological power. Still, they come from different intellectual traditions, make different arguments, and have different implications. Here is a plain guide to both.
Where did these ideas come from?
The word “transhumanism” was coined by the biologist Julian Huxley — brother of Aldous, author of Brave New World — in a 1957 essay titled, simply, “Transhumanism.” Huxley argued that the human species could and should use science and technology to transcend its current biological limitations. The idea had antecedents in Enlightenment optimism about human perfectibility, in Francis Bacon’s vision of science as the conquest of nature, and in Nietzsche’s concept of the Übermensch — though transhumanists tend to be careful about the Nietzsche connection, for obvious historical reasons.
The modern transhumanist movement took shape in the 1980s and 1990s, largely in California. Max More, a British-born philosopher who settled in Los Angeles, founded the Extropy Institute in 1991 and developed what he called “extropian” principles: perpetual progress, self-transformation, practical optimism, intelligent technology. In 1998, the Oxford philosopher Nick Bostrom — now probably the most influential transhumanist thinker — co-founded the World Transhumanist Association (later renamed Humanity+), which gave the movement an academic and organizational base.
Bostrom defines transhumanism as “a way of thinking about the future that is based on the premise that the human species in its current form does not represent the end of our development but rather a comparatively early phase.” The goal is not to replace the human being but to enhance it — using biotechnology, genetic engineering, artificial intelligence, and eventually nanotechnology — to the point where we overcome the biological limitations of disease, cognitive decline, and death.
Posthumanism has a different intellectual genealogy. The term gained currency in the 1990s through scholars like Donna Haraway — whose 1985 “Cyborg Manifesto” is the foundational text — and N. Katherine Hayles, whose 1999 book How We Became Posthuman traced the erasure of the boundary between human and machine in cybernetics and information theory. Where transhumanism is largely Anglo-American and optimistic, posthumanism draws more heavily on French theory — Deleuze and Guattari, Foucault, Derrida — and is considerably more skeptical, even ambivalent, about where these developments lead.
What is the difference?
The simplest way to put it: transhumanism wants to make the human being better; posthumanism questions whether the human being, as a stable philosophical category, still exists.
Transhumanism is, at its core, an enhanced “humanism.” It takes the Enlightenment project — the improvement of the human condition through reason and science — and accelerates it via technology. It believes in individual human beings, in their potential for development, and in the desirability of that development. It is, as its critics note, relentlessly optimistic, occasionally to the point of naivety. Its goal is a being that is still recognizably human — only smarter, healthier, longer-lived, and eventually perhaps immortal.
Posthumanism is more radical and more philosophically unsettling. It does not merely want to enhance the human being; it questions the entire framework of “the human” as a meaningful or stable concept. Haraway famously declared she would “rather be a cyborg than a goddess” — meaning she preferred the messy, hybrid, boundary-crossing reality of a being already entangled with machines to the nostalgic fantasy of a pure, autonomous human nature. Posthumanism challenges the distinctions between human and animal, human and machine, nature and culture. It is, in its most developed forms, a critique of humanism itself — of the assumption that “the human” is a special, privileged category deserving of particular moral concern.
Who are their apostles?
Transhumanism’s main figures are Nick Bostrom (philosopher, Oxford), Ray Kurzweil (futurist, Google), Yuval Noah Harari (historian, author of Homo Deus), and Eliezer Yudkowsky (AI theorist). More recently, Elon Musk’s Neuralink project — which aims to implant brain-computer interfaces in human skulls — is perhaps the most visible practical expression of transhumanist ambitions.
Posthumanism’s key thinkers are Donna Haraway (feminist science studies), N. Katherine Hayles (literary theory and cybernetics), Rosi Braidotti (philosopher, author of The Posthuman), and Cary Wolfe (literary theory). Their work tends to be more academic and less commercially visible than the transhumanists', but it has shaped how scholars in the humanities think about the technology question.
Why does any of this matter?
These ideas matter because they are no longer confined to academic seminars and Silicon Valley pitch decks. They are shaping investment decisions worth trillions of dollars, government AI strategies, bioethics policy, and increasingly the self-understanding of the tech industry’s most powerful actors. When Elon Musk talks about humanity becoming “multiplanetary” as a survival strategy, or about merging with AI to avoid being “left behind” by artificial superintelligence, he is operating within a broadly transhumanist framework. When scholars argue that the boundary between human and machine is already so porous as to be meaningless, they are doing posthumanism.
The questions these movements raise are genuine and important. Should we use genetic technology to eliminate heritable diseases? Should we develop brain-computer interfaces to enhance human cognitive capacity? At what point does enhancement become transformation? When does the being produced by these technologies cease to be human in any meaningful sense — and does that matter?
What are their weakest points?
Both movements have significant vulnerabilities, and their critics — secular as well as religious — have identified them clearly.
The most fundamental critique of transhumanism is that it has not solved the problem of who benefits. The technologies it proposes — genetic enhancement, life extension, cognitive augmentation — will, at least initially, be extraordinarily expensive. The result is likely to be not the enhancement of humanity but the creation of a new kind of inequality: between those who can afford “enhancing” and those who cannot. Leon Kass, the bioethicist and former chair of the President’s Council on Bioethics under George W. Bush, called this “the abolition of man” — borrowing C.S. Lewis’s phrase — meaning that the project of human enhancement, pursued without moral limits, risks destroying precisely the humanity it claims to improve.
A second weakness is its attitude toward death. Transhumanism treats death as a problem to be solved, an engineering failure. But the assumption that death is straightforwardly bad — that immortality is straightforwardly desirable — is philosophically much more contested than transhumanists tend to acknowledge. Bernard Williams’ famous argument that immortality would be not a blessing but a curse — that a life without death would eventually become unbearable, because human motivation is structured around finitude — has never been satisfactorily answered.
The deepest problem with posthumanism is that, in deconstructing “the human” as a stable category, it undermines the very concept of human dignity on which any ethics of technology must ultimately rest. If there is no meaningful distinction between human and non-human, it becomes very difficult to say why human beings deserve special moral consideration — or why the suffering of persons matters more than the malfunctioning of machines. Posthumanism can describe the dissolution of boundaries with great sophistication; it is less good at explaining why any of it should concern us.
A second weakness is a tendency toward what critics call “technodeterminism” — the assumption that because the boundary between human and machine is already blurring, it must and should blur further, and that resistance to this process is merely nostalgic. This is a non sequitur. The fact that something is happening does not make it desirable.
Where Leo XIV stands
Pope Leo XIV's engagement with these questions is marked by a sense of urgency. In Magnifica Humanitas, his encyclical on artificial intelligence, and in the International Theological Commission’s document Quo Vadis, Humanitas? — both of which engage transhumanism and posthumanism directly — the Catholic position is neither a simple rejection of technological progress nor an uncritical embrace of it.
The Church’s critique of transhumanism targets its anthropology: the assumption that the human being is essentially a bundle of capabilities to be enhanced, rather than a person — body and soul together — whose dignity precedes and grounds any achievement. The critique of posthumanism targets its epistemology: the deconstruction of the human as a stable category removes the very ground on which moral concern for persons rests.
Against both, the Catholic tradition proposes not a static or nostalgic account of human nature but a dynamic one: the human being is called to develop, to cultivate the world, to use intelligence and creativity in the service of the common good. But that development is ordered — toward the dignity of every person, toward the flourishing of the community, toward what Leo XIV called, at his September 23 audience, progress “animated and guided by charity.” The question the tradition keeps asking, in the face of every new technology, is not “can we?” but “for whom"?
