In Which (Against the Pope, and Perhaps Unwisely) I Give Thanks for Posthumanism & Creaturely Life

I DON’T ACTUALLY intend to go up against the pope; my title is a little hyperbolic. I spend a lot of time thinking about theology, and over the last several years I’ve also spent a lot of time thinking about AI. So, I agree with much of what Pope Leo XIV has to say in his new encyclical, especially what he has to say about the role that schools and education play in his moral vision. Our educational systems are so incredibly overdue for a renaissance, and I really want to believe that this might help to push our schools in that direction.

I also found myself genuinely surprised by how pluralistic this encyclical was. The last time I was this intrigued by a papal encyclical was upon the release of Pope Francis’s Laudato si’—a document that I’ve frequently used, in my classes, and have much appreciation for. But, when I read Francis’s encyclical, as a non-religious theologian, I found myself disappointed by the limits of his pluralism. As much as he celebrated biodiversity, it seemed to me that he lacked an appreciation for what ecofeminist theologian Ivonne Gebara called religious biodiversity. As someone who is essentially a pluralist, I was irritated enough that I ended up publishing an article with this critique. So, I was pleased that Leo’s encyclical seemed more capacious in this regard.

The value that Leo places on pluralism and diversity comes, in part, from his critique of AI as a new Babel; it’s a technological project, he argues, that seeks to build a kind of unified language and, as such, it’s part of an ancient (and constantly doomed) human temptation toward a hubristic violation of our actual limits. Against this, Leo celebrates the “plurality of voices and visions which, even though they sometimes remind us of the confusion caused by the diversity of spoken language, a bright possibility emerges.” I get the sense, from his encyclical, that Leo is genuinely interested in the church’s vision of a just future joining together with other visions (rather than dominating them, or towering over them with moral superiority).

And yet, as I wandered deeper into the encyclical, I was able to see where Leo’s pluralistic visions crumble. And I think it points to a limitation on Leo’s own analysis, particularly his celebration of the power of limits, contingency, and limitedness, that I think is worth taking account of.

THE MOST GLARING EXAMPLE of the limits of Leo’s pluralism is, to me, exhibited in his critical dismissal of posthumanism. In his analysis Leo (like many other commentators today, especially here on Substack) essentially collapses transhumanism and posthumanism together. Transhumanism, he writes, is an intellectual movement that “envisions the enhancement of human beings through technologies—such as biomedicine, body engineering, devices and algorithms—with the aim of increasing performance and capabilities.” Posthumanism, on the other hand, is something even worse. It’s an intellectual movement, he argues, that “challenges anthropocentrism” and even more than that, “envisions a hybridization of human beings, machines and the environment” even anticipating “a threshold where humanity surpasses itself in a new evolutionary stage.”

It’s clear to me that his critique of transhumanism is targeting thinkers like Ray Kurzweil, whose theory of the singularity eagerly anticipated the moment when the rate of technological change would advance so rapidly that it would permanently alter our world and our lives. But I don’t really know who Leo has in mind when he critiques posthumanism, and the scarecrow that he’s built actually just sounds like transhumanism. He needs posthumanism to be a kind of scapegoat because it’s kind of a perfect foil for him: it invokes the more than human but, for Leo, it’s the wrong kind of more than human. And so it essentially provides what he sees as the necessary corrective.

I think there are many reasons to critique posthumanism. I don’t identify as a posthumanist, and I’ve even been questioning my own embedded critiques of anthropocentrism in recent years, as life in America has become increasingly more dehumanizing. I used to think that anthropocentrism was a cardinal sin. Now, I’m a little less sure. But I know enough about posthumanism that I had to say something, because I actually think that Leo is making an enemy out of an intellectual movement that might have a few resources for him.

What Leo completely misses is the ecological side of posthumanism. As an intellectual movement, posthumanism has been pulled in different directions. In essence, posthumanism is little more than a critical examination of what humanism elided, evaded, left out of the story, or tried to silence. It’s a critique of the boundary lines that humanism drew around us: who and what it suggested that we are. What distinguishes posthumanism from humanism is not that it was simply an intellectual movement attempting to fuse humans with technology (as the pope and many other commenters assume) but that it was a movement examining and exposing both the narrowness and the hubris of humanism. Posthumanism wanted to make explicit what humanism was designed to naturalize, or hide. It took on a view of the human from its own liminal edges.

A figure like Donna Haraway (who I wrote about, not long ago, here on Substack) is perhaps the paradigmatic example of a posthumanist thinker. Haraway shocked readers in the mid-1980s by exploring, in full intellectual seriousness, the figure of the cyborg. This was, for her, a challenge to acknowledge that the actual line between humans and machines is much blurrier than we tend to assume. Many of us are already cyborgs in ways that we think of as blessings: we have pacemakers in our hearts, and titanium in our legs, and these are things that help us survive and thrive. But Haraway also pointed out the fact that the human, in intellectual culture, had long been gendered (by default) as typologically male. And she noted that the figure of the human had long been sustained by the denial of its own animality.

Posthumanist thinkers like Haraway were not interested in “upgrading” the human into some sort of limitless technological beings. She was interested in exposing these complications, and asking people to think about them. Haraway wanted us to see ourselves as caught up in a web of sorts: her aims were fundamentally ecological. It was a deconstructive gesture, and even Jacques Derrida (the “progenitor” of deconstruction) became invested in unsettling the lines between the human and the animal, gesturing towards an excluded zone or space just beyond human subjectivity where the gods and animals have hovered, haunting the human. We could call that zone, as some have been drawn to do, more than human.

This figure of the more than human appears not only in the title of my forthcoming book (yes, shameless plug) but in Leo’s encyclical. In his encyclical Leo again engages critically with posthumanism by claiming—for Christian theology—a kind of authoritative existential monopoly on more than human power. Leo is especially intent on clarifying what “authentic” more than human power looks like: his vision in this regard is not pluralistic. In essence, it looks like God, articulated and described by Christian theologians like him. This authentic more than human power, Leo writes, is only to be found in the Christian faith. It’s a power that “does not arise from technological divinization, but through God’s grace received in Christ.” Authentic more than human power is Christ-shaped grace.

Leo seems to know, on some level, that this figure of more than human power has something to do with posthumanism. But he’s mistaken in his understanding of where it comes from. The figure of more than human power is not (in its origins) a dream of transhumanists and technologists like Ray Kurzweil. It comes from ecological thought.

So far as I can tell, the term “more-than-human” (typically with hyphens like this, marking it off as a phrase) comes from the work of ecological philosopher David Abram. The term appears in the title of his 1996 book The Spell of the Sensuous: Language and Perception in a More-Than-Human World. The idea, of the more-than-human world, was meant to get around a problem with the word “nature”: it’s become a term that we often see opposed to the human, and our cultures. The more-than-human world is the figure of our ecological context: a world of beings, powers, forces, and potencies that are broader than the human and yet also carry, contain, and sustain the human. It’s not an antihuman or inhuman form of power; it’s constitutive of, and supportive of, our humanity. Abram is anything but a technologist. Indeed, he is even critical of the technology of alphabetic language!

Abram is someone who would probably agree with much of what Leo has to say, in his new encyclical. But more than that, I think he’s someone whose ideas resonate pretty deeply with Pope Francis’s ecological orientation. In fact, I even think that people like Donna Haraway are pretty resonant with his ideas. By making enemies of them, and characterizing the entirety of posthumanism as the dream of technologists, Leo is exposing the extent to which an ecological orientation isn’t really part of his critical frame, perhaps to his own detriment. He frequently cites Francis, and lauds him for the way that he uses ecological thought to charge people with the responsibility to care for their common home. But, whether he can see it or not, Leo’s project is much more defensively anthropocentric. That’s its project and focus.

In that sense, I think it’s very much in keeping with the general direction that intellectual culture seems to be pushing right now. I can see this defensive anthropocentrism creeping up even in myself (in my willingness to question what I’d once understood as a given). But I also see it in the evaporation of ecological politics. Over the last couple of years it seems to me as if conversations about the environment have, increasingly, been fading from public view. As technology has been dehumanizing us, and dissolving the boundaries between human and machine, it seems to me that people are also less and less willing to challenge or dissolve the boundaries between humans and animals, or humans and nature. And even the loudest conversations about the environment now seem to oscillate around AI (and its environmental impact).

The dissolution of boundaries is, we could say, a kind of erotic project that’s been particularly important to idealizations of American democracy. I’ve been reading Walt Whitman lately, and I’m thinking of the kinds of promiscuous mixing and blending that he saw as so fundamental to the project of American democracy. I see the dissolution of boundaries like this in posthumanist projects like Donna Haraway’s. I think it’s genuinely aimed at a hopeful democratization of life, whether it succeeds in that task or not. It’s part of a political sense that there’s something urgent in questioning the lines between things, and categories, that have conventionally been drawn and experimenting with what it might look like to draw those lines differently.

But everyday life in America has become too deeply riddled with uncertainty and suddenly it seems as if all we talk about now are where to draw lines, how to build walls, and how to protect whatever it is we might still have. I see this, in Leo’s encyclical, too. For all that he is celebrating the magnificence of humanity, it’s clear that he’s doing this as a protective measure, because he feels that the dehumanizing forces are closing in around us. He’s drawing a hard protective line, and that hard line is being drawn around the human. I’m not saying that this is wrong. I’m just pointing it out.

PERHAPS IT’S BECAUSE OF his dismissal of posthumanism, and the particular way in which he elevates the human, that I find Leo’s celebration of limits, limitation, contingency, and finitude a little disingenuous. Against the culture of optimization that we’re caught up in, Leo encourages us to celebrate (rather than deny) our limits. The hopes and dreams of the AI boom are built on exceeding the productivity limits of human beings. “We must remember that humanity flourishes not despite limitations, but often through them,” he writes, adding that “the light of faith offers a perspective on reality that helps us recognize what we call the ‘contingency’ of the things of this world.” Against the hubris of a new Babel, Leo encourages us to accept the limitations of our finitude—the limitations of our human being. I appreciate all of this. But I also know that, in theology and in humanism, the human has often been appealing precisely because of its apparent lack of limits.

I wrote my PhD dissertation, in theology, on the figure of the creature. I was interested in mortality (evidenced by the fact that I later wrote a book on death) and I’d come to see that humans, in much of the theological tradition, seemed to have become something more than mere mortals. This annoyed me, a bit, because it seemed to me that the mortality we share with other animals was deeply and ecologically important, especially if we want to talk about things like ethics. So, I wanted to better understand why the figure of the creature had been so theologically sidelined, or ignored.

Some of this, I learned, had to do with Jesus: the figure at the center of Christian faith was both human and divine. And, while centuries of Christian theologians recognized that humans weren’t gods (and that it was inappropriate hubris to be confused on this matter), many theologians really did wrestle with what this upgrade for humanity meant, metaphysically, ontologically, existentially, and morally. So, in the history of Christian thought, while many theologians conceded that humans were creatures, there was equally as much theological work presenting humans as so much more than mere creatures, as better than creatures, as destined for a form of greatness that mere creatures could never hope for.

Eventually, it was secularization that threw this into sharper relief. In modernity, as secular artists and thinkers began to translate and transform theological concepts, they put on display what was only subtly implied in Christian theology. Those dimensions of theology that weren’t actively erased came into sharper relief. These secular thinkers understood that it was the human who had the promise, as a figure or a subject. It was the human who deserved to be celebrated. It was the human that was, essentially, divine. Or closer to the divine than any other living being. It was around the littlest of gods, the least transcendent of gods, that humanism itself was shaped and formed.

Creatureliness was just a form of contingency. Creatureliness was mortality incarnate. Creatureliness was limitation, imposed without escape. And so, creatureliness was what had to be escaped, in order to become truly human. Creatureliness was not an ideal, but a monstrosity. Creatureliness was Shakespeare’s creature Caliban, or Mary Shelley’s creature (Frankenstein’s perverted creation): dejected, rejected, foreclosed, pathetic, and always less than human.

This wasn’t secular thinkers mauling or maligning a cherished concept that theologians had been holding as sacred. It was secular thinkers making explicit (in their translation of theological figures) what had become a dominant (though not uniform or exclusive) theological point of view. It was secular thinkers recognizing that, while the human did indeed have some limits (it wasn’t God), it had far fewer limits than any other existent being on earth and it was to be celebrated not despite, but precisely because of, that. It was the closest one could get to living without limitation. And the job (or the central task, or perhaps the impulse) of the human was to always and forever keep pushing against those limits.

As a PhD student, I found myself gravitating towards posthumanism because it was clear to me that the figure of the creature was a bit at odds with the figure of the human in ways that only posthumanists could really help me explain. I didn’t become a posthumanist, but I did come to appreciate the way that their critique helped me understand the reality of human limits (finitude and mortality) in ways that neither theology nor humanism did.

Of course, theology and humanism are complex intellectual traditions and there are many, many visions and images in their archives of the wisdom of acknowledging our limits. And there are many celebrations of finitude. But we certainly can’t say that either theology or the humanist tradition offers an unambiguous or uniform celebration of finitude and contingency. Theology has, in ways that Leo seems not to see or acknowledge, an incredibly complex relationship with the limitations of finitude.

WHY DOES ANY OF THIS MATTER right now? Because it might appear that Leo wants to highlight the value or importance of limitation, finitude, and contingency. But I think it’s worth noting that he only does this because his real focus is actually that which infinitely exceeds and structures that finitude and contingency. He can celebrate and accept finitude because he believes that it’s the loving creation of an infinite God. And humans, for Leo, are magnificent not simply because they are finite, but because they are the one being that has no real limit except for God. He’s not really saying “accept that you are mortal,” but something more like, “accept that your mortality was designed by, and is held by, and will be returned to God.” Those are different visions.

There’s a part of me that wants to critique him for this reason. It’s a sign that he’s being a little disingenuous, in his encyclical. It’s a sign that finitude isn’t quite what he’s making it out to be. It’s not valuable in and of itself. It’s valuable because it points to God. But I’m not sure that I can really fault him for this, in the end. Because I will admit that I’ve come to see the acceptance of limits as, itself, limited.

You might know that my first book was about death. And one of the things I’m doing, in that book, is critiquing the hostility towards death that was perpetuated by centuries of mainstream Christian theologians (and secularists who adopted their frameworks for thinking, without even really trying). People have often asked me how I could stomach thinking so much about death. And, honestly, it’s because that book forced me to acknowledge that I was holding onto something I felt was a bit stronger than death: love. It’s something that can cross over, or in some ways dissolve, the boundaries between life and death. We are sustained, in life, by our love for those who have died. And anyone who has ever been born and touched with the love of another manifests, in life, in a way that exceeds their own mortal limits. We probably wouldn’t love one another the way we do, if we weren’t mortal. But our love is so excessive, it pushes back against limits that death appears to impose.

We can embrace limits, and limitation. But, perhaps, only so far or only for so long. I’m not sure that it’s possible to remove (at least collectively) our desire to survive, against the odds. And perhaps it’s important to have some sense of what it is we are folded into, when we run up against our ultimate limits. Contingency is always contingent to something. Isn’t the temptation always going to be that we will celebrate what’s bigger than the contingent, or what exceeds it? Can a limit ever really be loved for what it is? Or is the temptation always going to be to love or give reverence to what makes that limit exist? Are we destined to push up against our limits, and seek to dissolve them?