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[Expositions 1.2 (2007) 191–222] Expositions (print) ISSN 1747-5368  
doi:10.1558/expo.v1i2.191 Expositions (online) ISSN 1747-5376 

Humanity at the Turning Point: Philosophical Anthro-
pology and the Posthuman

DENNIS M. WEISS

York College of Pennsylvania

This essay aims to demonstrate that the philosophical anthropology of 
Michael Landmann provides important critical tools and resources for in-
tervening in the debate over the posthuman and the turning point that 
humanity faces due to the advancing powers of technologies such as genetic 
engineering, artificial intelligence, and cybernetics. Landmann’s view of 
the human being, which emphasizes the correlative conditions of creativity 
and culturality, freedom and determinacy, and malleability and fixity, pro-
vides the grounds on which to critique the current structure of the debate 
over the posthuman and resituate it in terms of our historicity and self-im-
ages. The rhetorically charged trope of the posthuman, with its emphasis 
on a break or turning point, risks cutting us off from significant resources 
for understanding human nature, including the resources of philosophical 
anthropology, and does not advance our understanding of our current situ-
ation and the current dilemmas human beings face in light of our advanc-
ing technological powers.

The February, 2000 issue of Wired magazine, the magazine of and for 
the digerati, features on its cover a photo of “cybernetics pioneer” Kevin 
Warwick, his shirt sleeve rolled up, as if ready for a fix. But in this case 
“the fix” is a superimposed x-ray image that discloses a glass-enclosed 
microchip surgically implanted in Warwick’s left arm. Warwick, the 
cover announces, is upgrading the human body—starting with him-
self. “Cyborg 1.0,” the accompanying article penned by Warwick, out-
lines his plan to become one with his computer. Writes Warwick: “I 
was born human. But this was an accident of fate—a condition merely 
of time and place. I believe it’s something we have the power to change. 
I will tell you why” (2000, 145). Warwick intends to implant a chip in 



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his arm that will send signals back and forth between his nervous sys-
tem and a computer. For Warwick, being human is merely an accident 
of time and place, an accident that given the right computing power 
and the right cybernetics, we might well be able to fix.

Two months later, Wired has had a change of heart—speaking only 
figuratively at this point in time. The cover of the April, 2000 edi-
tion features a crumpled page torn perhaps from a dictionary, maybe 
Webster’s Twenty-first Century Unabridged. On this discarded page we 
read: “human adj. 1. of, belonging to, or typical of the extinct species 
Homo sapiens <the human race> 2. what consisted of or was produced 
by Homo sapiens <human society> n. an extinct biped, Homo Sapiens, 
characterized by carbon-based anatomy; also HUMAN BEING.” Bill 
Joy, cofounder and Chief Scientist of Sun Microsystems, has been hav-
ing second thoughts about the computer revolution and in his article 
“Why the Future Doesn’t Need Us” explores how it is that “our most 
powerful twenty-first-century technologies—robotics, genetic engi-
neering, and nanotech—are threatening to make humans an endan-
gered species” (2000, 238). It’s time, Joy thinks, to wake up and smell 
the Terminator.

Warwick versus Joy. Human versus Post-human. It would seem from 
this battle being played out on the cover of Wired that humanity has 
indeed arrived at a turning point. We have reached a point where we 
are poised to take control of our evolutionary future, transforming 
ourselves and our progeny from the accident of our humanity into 
well-designed posthumanity. Or, in our hubris, we have reached the 
point where we are poised to eliminate the human being once and 
for all. This narrative, of the end of the human and the coming of the 
posthuman, is a fairly common one today, played out not only on the 
covers of magazines such as Wired but in movies, television talk shows, 
and academic tomes. It is this narrative regarding the turning point at 
which humanity has arrived that I wish to interrogate in this essay. For 
all the attention that our posthuman future receives today, much of the 
narrative surrounding this currently popular trope is ill-conceived. The 
claim that we have arrived at a turning point, represented either by the 
promise or the threat of the posthuman, is mistaken. Furthermore, it 



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is a mistake premised upon an inadequate understanding of what we 
human beings are in the first place. Before we embrace the posthuman 
or run in fear from it, it would be worthwhile for us to think a little 
more clearly about what it means to be human. There is a long tradi-
tion of anthropological thought in Western philosophy that provides 
the grounding for such a task. For the purposes of this essay, I will draw 
on the work of the twentieth-century German philosophical anthro-
pologist Michael Landmann and his discussion of the fundamental 
characteristics of the human being in order to lay the groundwork for 
a rethinking of the posthuman and humanity’s turning point.

I begin by briefly mapping the terms in which debates over humani-
ty’s turning point occur, discussing the popularity of the trope of the 
posthuman and the widespread assumption that humanity has indeed 
arrived at a turning point. I catalog the two typical responses to this 
notion of a turning point, an optimistic embrace of the posthuman 
and a pessimistic dread of its coming. Following this, I turn to Land-
mann’s philosophical anthropology, a rich and holistic account of the 
human being that draws on some of the best elements of the tradi-
tion of philosophical anthropology. From this more complete account 
of the human being, I will suggest that the posthuman is still-born: 
humanity is not facing a turning point represented by the loss of our 
humanity. We do, though, face some difficult choices and decisions in 
the coming years, made especially urgent by the rapid development 
and spread of bio- and cybernetic-technologies. But the image of the 
posthuman, with its attendant dread or delirium, is not going to help 
us make those decisions. Proponents and opponents of the posthuman 
alike have it wrong in that respect. Landmann’s philosophical anthro-
pology provides us with the critical tools and insights for resituating 
the debate away from the rhetorically charged figure of the posthuman, 
and paying closer attention to the historical, cultural, and social con-
text of the human being. While Landmann’s philosophical anthropol-
ogy is largely silent on normative issues, his framework provides a bet-
ter context in which to debate the future of humanity than one driven 
by concerns over the apparent coming of the posthuman. 



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I

In setting out to describe our current situation, it is clear that there is 
a widespread presumption that humanity is indeed at a turning point. 
Issuing from a variety of perspectives and motivated by a cross-sec-
tion of theoretical concerns, comes the claim that especially owing to 
technological developments human beings are on the cusp of profound 
change. Consider, for instance, two diametrically opposed figures in 
the current debate regarding the future of humanity, Gregory Stock 
and Francis Fukuyama. Stock begins his largely approving discussion 
of human germline engineering, Redesigning Humans: Our Inevitable 
Genetic Future, by noting, 

We know that Homo sapiens is not the final word in primate evolu-
tion, but few have yet grasped that we are on the cusp of profound 
biological change, poised to transcend our current form and character 
on a journey to destinations of new imagination. (2002, 1)

While Fukuyama is best known for his critique of the posthuman, he 
agrees with Stock that we are on the cusp of profound change: “we 
appear to be poised at the cusp of one of the most momentous peri-
ods of technological advance in history” (2002a, 5). The President’s 
Council on Bioethics voices a similar claim, quoting the National Sci-
ence Foundation: “at this unique moment in the history of technical 
achievement, improvement of human performance becomes possible,” 
and such improvement, if pursued with vigor, “could achieve a golden 
age that would be a turning point for human productivity and quality 
of life” (2003, 6–7).

Leon Kass, Chairman of the President’s Council, has often taken the 
lead in articulating similar claims that we are the verge of a profound 
transformation. As he writes in Life, Liberty and the Defense of Dignity,

Human nature itself lies on the operating table, ready for alteration, for 
eugenic and psychic “enhancement,” for wholesale re-design. In lead-
ing laboratories, academic and industrial, new creators are confidently 
amassing their powers and quietly honing their skills, while on the 
street their evangelists are zealously prophesying a posthuman future. 

(2002, 4)
In his Foreword to Beyond Therapy, Kass suggests that what is at stake 



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in these discussions of our posthuman future is “the kind of human 
being and the sort of society we will be creating in the coming age of 
biotechnology” (2003, xvi). Indeed, this claim has now become quite 
commonplace, even more so if we take into consideration the many 
ways in which technology seems to be impacting our understanding of 
human nature, from biotechnology to digital technologies such as ar-
tificial intelligence, virtual reality, cybernetics, and robotics. In Radical 
Evolution: The Promise and Peril of Enhancing Our Minds, Our Bodies—
and What It Means to Be Human, Joel Garreau focuses on “the future of 
human nature” and explores the “biggest change in tens of thousands 
of years in what it means to be human” (2005, 3). Garreau’s discussion 
focuses on robotics, information science, nanotechnology, and genetics 
and ponders the question “will human nature itself change? Will we 
soon pass some point where we are so altered by our imaginations and 
inventions as to be unrecognizable to Shakespeare or the writers of the 
ancient Greek plays?” (2005, 21). 

As with many of these accounts of the coming turning point, Gar-
reau’s work draws on the notion of a coming Singularity, first pop-
ularized by Vernor Vinge and most recently the focus of Raymond 
Kurzweil’s book The Singularity is Near: When Humans Transcend Biolo-
gy (2005). In “The Coming Technological Singularity: How to Survive 
in the Post-Human Era,” (1993), Vinge argues that “we are on the edge 
of change comparable to the rise of human life on Earth. The precise 
cause of this change is the imminent creation by technology of entities 
with greater than human intelligence.” His claim has been taken up 
by technoenthusiasts such as Kurzweil, Hans Moravec (1988, 1998), 
and the transhumanists. Indeed, the increasing integration of digital 
technologies in our lives has led many to argue that the once clear 
boundaries separating human beings from machines are disappearing 
and we are on the verge of a fundamental transformation in our under-
standing of what it means to be human. In The Mode of Information, 
Mark Poster suggests that “[a] symbiotic merger between human and 
machine might literally be occurring, one that threatens the stability of 
our sense of the boundary of the human body in the world. What may 
be happening is that human beings create computers and then com-



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puters create a new species of humans” (1990, 4). In The War of Desire 
and Technology at the Close of the Mechanical Age, Allucquere Rosanne 
Stone suggests that we are in the midst of a paradigm shift from the 
mechanical age to the virtual age and we now inhabit the cyborg habi-
tat of the technosocial, in which technology is viewed as natural and 
human nature becomes a cultural construct. The ubiquity of technol-
ogy, Stone suggests, rearranges our thinking apparatus and calls into 
question “the structure of meaning production by which we recognize 
each other as human” (1995, 173). In The Age of Spiritual Machines, 
Ray Kurzweil argues, “the primary political and philosophical issue 
of the next century will be the definition of who we are” (1999, 2). 
Ed Regis explores our “transhuman, postbiological” future in Great 
Mambo Chicken and the Transhuman Condition, suggesting that per-
haps the human condition is a condition “to be gotten out of” (1990, 
175). O.B. Hardison too suggests that the human being is flawed and 
that the relation between carbon “man” and our silicon devices is “like 
the relation between the caterpillar and the iridescent, winged creature 
that the caterpillar unconsciously prepares to become” (1989, 335).

There is widespread agreement, then, on the idea that human beings 
are fast approaching a turning point where we may cease to exist owing 
to the impact of technology on human nature. There is less agreement, 
however, regarding how we ought to respond to these technological de-
velopments. Returning briefly to our opening contrast between War-
wick and Joy, we can read them as fairly paradigmatic of two contrast-
ing, diametric responses to these issues raised by technology and the 
posthuman. Warwick approaches these issues with a sense of optimism 
and willing involvement. As he notes:

Since childhood I’ve been captivated by the study of robots and cy-
borgs. Now I’m in a position where I can actually become one. Each 
morning, I wake up champing at the bit, eager to set alight the 21st 
century—to change what it means to be human. (2000, 151)

Warwick argues that it is completely natural for human beings to ex-
plore and change, that cybernetic technologies represent a natural de-
velopment in our co-evolution with machines, and that our failure to 
advance along with our machines risks our survival. 



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Linking people via chip implants directly to those machines seems 
a natural progression, a potential way of harnessing machine intel-
ligence by essentially creating superhumans. Otherwise, we’re doomed 
to a future in which intelligent machines rule and humans become 
second-class citizens. My project explores a middle ground that gives 
humans a chance to hang in there a bit longer. Right now, we’re mov-
ing toward a world where machines and humans remain distinct, but 
instead of just handing everything over to them, I offer a more gradual 
coevolution with computers. (2000, 151)

The Australian performance artist Stelarc, whose creations have long 
questioned the nature and limits of the human body, argues that we 
must adopt a posthuman philosophy of erasure in which we recon-
figure notions of the body, evolution, and gender distinction as hy-
bridities of human-machine. The body, Selarc writes, is obsolete in the 
current technological environment. Stelarc envisions a future in which 
technology “invades” the body, giving us the freedom to transcend the 
limitations of our DNA.

It’s time to question whether a bipedal, breathing body with binocular 
vision and a 1,400 cc brain is an adequate biological form. It can-
not cope with the quantity, complexity, and quality of information it 
has accumulated; it is intimidated by the precision, speed, and power 
of technology and it is biologically ill-equipped to cope with its new 
extraterrestrial environment. (1998, 117)

Similar claims embracing and promoting the turning point made 
possible by technology are made by a number of enthusiasts for the 
posthuman, including Stock, the roboticist Hans Moravec, new age 
techno-enthusiasts such as the Extropians, and many others.

Lest we get caught up in this wave of posthuman euphoria, however, 
we need only recall the (paradoxical?) sight of proto-cyborgs, their cell 
phones, palm pilots, pagers and other personal internet devices strapped 
to their sides, queuing up to see The Matrix, one in a long line of Hol-
lywood films that pit humans against machines and imagine a future 
in which human beings become little more than battery packs for com-
puters, who hold us hostage by generating a virtual reality twentieth 
century to preoccupy us and keep us busy while they feed off of our 
bodies’ electromagnetic energy. This is the concern given voice by Bill 



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Joy, who worries that “our most powerful 21st-century technologies—
robotics, genetic engineering, and nanotech—are threatening to make 
humans an endangered species” (2000, 238). Joy worries about the 
dehumanizing influences of this advancing technology.

But if we are downloaded into our technology, what are the chances 
that we will thereafter be ourselves or even human? It seems to me far 
more likely that a robotic existence would not be like a human one in 
any sense that we understand, that the robots would in no sense be our 
children, that on this path our humanity may well be lost. (2000, 244)

Joy’s perspective is shared by Joseph Weizenbaum who, in Computer 
Power and Human Reason, labels obscene any projects that propose to 
substitute a computer system for a human function that involves inter-
personal respect, understanding, and love (1976, 269). Weizenbaum 
argues that there are important differences between humans and com-
puters and we dehumanize human beings by adopting computers as 
a metaphor for understanding ourselves. Sven Birkerts agrees that we 
may be on the verge of species mutation but argues that this mutation 
pits technology against soul. 

My use of soul is secular. I mean it to stand for inwardness, for that 
awareness we carry of ourselves as mysterious creatures at large in the 
universe. The soul is that part of us that smelts meaning and tries to 
derive a sense of purpose from experience. (1994, 212)

Others, such as Stephen Talbott in The Future Does Not Compute, Alan 
Wolfe in The Human Difference, Bill McKibben in Enough: Staying Hu-
man in an Engineered Age, and Hubert and Stuart Dreyfus in Mind 
Over Machine, agree with Birkerts and Weizenbaum that the computer 
threatens what is most distinctive about humanity. Reflecting on ge-
netic technology, Leon Kass similarly declares:

Here in consequence is the most pernicious result of our technological 
progress—more dehumanizing than any actual manipulation or tech-
nique, present or future: the erosion, perhaps the final erosion, of the 
idea of man as noble, dignified, precious, or godlike, and its replace-
ment with a view of man, no less than of nature, as mere raw material 
for manipulation and homogenization. (2000, 86–87)



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Technologies from genetic engineering to artificial intelligence have 
wrought fundamental changes in our understanding of human nature. 
Indeed, technological developments have challenged much of our tak-
en-for-granted knowledge about human nature and the future of the 
human species. At the close of the twentieth century, there is, as Scott 
Bukatman notes, “an uneasy but consistent sense of human obsoles-
cence, and at stake is the very definition of the human.…[O]ur ontol-
ogy is adrift” (1993, 20).

II

We have seen that there is widespread agreement that owing to the 
developments of modern technology, humanity appears to be at a 
turning point. There is less agreement, though, on responses to that 
supposed turning point. The reflections in the previous section raise a 
number of important questions. Is the human being soon to be obso-
lete? Are we entering a posthuman or postbiological age? If so, ought 
we to be fearful of these developments or should we embrace them as 
the next logical step in human evolution? The challenge of addressing 
these questions today is complicated by the fact that for the past several 
decades at least, it is precisely discussions of human nature that have 
been most absent from the contemporary scene. While technologi-
cal developments have been such that our very humanity is seemingly 
placed in the balance, scholars and theoreticians have been dismissive 
of accounts of human nature. As Charles Taylor notes, we’ve become 
very nervous and squeamish about “human nature.” “The very words 
ring bells. We fear that we may be setting up some reified image, in 
face of the changing forms of human life in history, that we may be 
prisoners of some insidious ethnocentrism” (1985, vii). Calvin Schrag 
concurs, noting, “Even a casual observer of the current state of the arts 
and sciences is able to discern that humanism, both as a philosophical 
position and as a cultural attitude, is under suspicion. The project and 
language of humanism alike have fallen into disfavor and have become 
fashionable targets of critique” (1986, 197). But failing to reflect on 
human nature at precisely this point in time seems especially paradoxi-
cal. As Ronald Cole observes: 



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To me, at least, it is distressing that precisely at the moment in hu-
man history when we are poised on the threshold of the possibility of 
the technological manipulation of human nature, we have very little 
consensus on what we mean by human nature. In fact, we have very 
few candidate theories of human nature, philosophical or theological, 
and so it is quite likely we will proceed to alter what we do not even 
pretend to understand. (1998, 156)

Indeed, it is perhaps owing to these technological developments that 
more recently there has been a growing recognition of the need for 
more comprehensive accounts of human nature. The important work 
of the British philosopher Mary Midgley (1995) has been attracting 
increasing attention for similar reasons. Even in the Anglo-Analytic 
tradition, Owen Flanagan (2002), in his recent work on a natural-
ized ethics, characterizes his account of ethics as human ecology as a 
variety of philosophical anthropology. Feminist theory, where for very 
legitimate reasons theories of human nature have been dismissed, has 
recently seen the reemergence of human nature as a viable concept, as 
in the work of Martha Nussbaum (2000) and her Aristotelian capabili-
ties approach to human nature. This recent work is suggestive of the 
need to address more squarely questions about our nature as human 
beings. We fail to adequately address the question of humanity’s turn-
ing point if we cannot address the more fundamental issue of human-
ity’s nature. In order to do that, I turn to the tradition of philosophical 
anthropology.

Philosophical anthropology has been most closely associated with a 
series of German philosophers writing between the two world wars. It 
is generally thought to have begun with Max Scheler’s Man’s Place in 
Nature. In that book, which was first published in 1928, Scheler begins 
by recognizing the human being’s problematic nature. Scheler writes, 
“Man is more of a problem to himself at the present time than ever be-
fore in all recorded history” (1961, 4). It is the precariousness revealed 
by the human being’s self-reflection that leads Scheler to address the 
twin questions, “What is man?” and “What is man’s place in the na-
ture of things?” These two questions set the tone for the development 
of philosophical anthropology over the next several decades, in works 
by such leading figures as Helmuth Plessner (1981), Arnold Gehlen 



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(1988), Ernst Cassirer (1944), Martin Buber (1965), and Erich Roth-
acker (1965), among others. A rather diverse lot, these thinkers were 
in agreement that one of the fundamental questions facing human be-
ings was the matter of their nature and place in the cosmos. While 
mostly forgotten today, the philosophical anthropologists produced 
some of the most perceptive analyses of human nature in the history 
of philosophy, reason enough perhaps to warrant a second look. Ad-
ditionally, philosophical anthropology emerged at a time analogous to 
our own in which there was a widespread recognition of our crisis of 
self-knowledge. As Paul Pfeutze voiced it, “Modern man has become a 
problem to himself, and all over the world men are inquiring with fresh 
zeal into the nature of man. What is man? What is the meaning of hu-
man existence?” Similar points were made by Gehlen (1988), Cassirer 
(1944), and others. This sense of crisis was driven in part, both then 
and now, by the rapidly developing sciences and the growing power of 
technology. As Pfeutze continues,

On all sides one finds moral disaster, political confusion, spiritual dis-
content, mental breakdown, and a growing suspicion, now amounting 
to a certainty, that during the last few centuries man has so far misin-
terpreted his own nature as to make tragic and catastrophic use of his 
powers and technics. (1954, 19)

A number of philosophical anthropologists, including Gehlen, Bu-
ber, and Plessner, wrote explicitly about technology and its relation 
to human nature. A strength of philosophical anthropology was its 
insistence that reflections on human nature must be equally informed 
by the scientific, technical, and empirical as well as the cultural and 
philosophical. As Plessner notes, “there can be no philosophy of man 
without study of nature” (quoted in Dallmayr 1974, 72). Indeed, the 
most interesting discussions of human nature found in philosophical 
anthropology draw on and illuminate diverse disciplines and perspec-
tives, a still further warrant for looking to this tradition.

For the purposes of this essay, and in order to push further this ex-
amination of humanity’s turning point, I shall focus on the philosophi-
cal anthropology of Michael Landmann. There are several reasons why 
Landmann specifically is worthwhile in this context. First, Landmann 



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was as much a commentator on the tradition of philosophical anthro-
pology as he was a practitioner of the discipline. His philosophical an-
thropology is one of the most developed and comprehensive, incorpo-
rating his own reflections on the western historical tradition from the 
Greeks and Hebrews to the very best insights of his fellow philosophi-
cal anthropologists. Secondly, Landmann’s work remains widely avail-
able today, since it has been translated into English and is still available 
in print, while the same is unfortunately not true for many of the key 
works in philosophical anthropology, many of which have yet to be 
translated into English and many of those that have, have been allowed 
to fall out of print. While Landmann’s work remains available, how-
ever, it is less well known than that of some of the other philosophical 
anthropologists and remains a neglected resource. Jos de Mul’s work 
(see references in de Mul 2003) on digitally mediated embodiment 
has brought renewed and deserved attention to Plessner’s philosophical 
anthropology and its implications for a better understanding of infor-
mation and communication technologies. Much of the oeuvre of this 
philosophical discipline remains unknown, however, and a third rea-
son for turning specifically to the work of Landmann is to make some 
small effort towards bringing his philosophical anthropology some of 
the attention it deserves.

In his key texts, Philosophical Anthropology (1974) and Fundamental 
Anthropology (1985), Landmann seeks to develop a view of human 
nature that is adequate to our complete being and understands the hu-
man being as an original totality (1974, 178). Landmann argues that 
philosophical anthropology ought to examine the underlying human 
structure while remaining cognizant of the contextual anthropology of 
particular images of man. 

As man is forming culture, he makes history. Philosophical anthro-
pology can, therefore, be only a formal anthropology: it, so-to-speak, 
draws the geometric curve on which cultures lie, but their content 
of concrete particularity results not from binding universal ideas but 
from life, which institutes them. (1985, 118)

Philosophical anthropology studies the permanent preconditions and 
forces that underlie all images of man (1985, 57). 



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Landmann organizes his account of human nature around what he 
refers to as the “anthropine gap” and what he identifies as “anthropina,” 
unchanging fixed, timeless basic structures of human existence (1985, 
125). By the anthropine gap, Landmann means the lack of specializa-
tion of the human being in comparison to animals. A key insight in 
many philosophical anthropologies is the world openness of the human 
being, which is meant to capture the peculiarly human characteristic 
of being existentially liberated from the vital and instinctual sphere of 
animals. This characteristic has been widely remarked on in the history 
of philosophy and has been the bedrock of every major philosophical 
anthropology. As Landmann points out, a recognition of the human 
being’s openness to the world extends from Protagoras to the Renais-
sance and the Goethe Period (1974, 177).

According to Landmann, the “anthropine gap” is filled by two fun-
damental “anthropina”—culture and creativity—and his discussion of 
this point provides clues into the primary features of his philosophical 
anthropology:

Creativity and culturality, shaping the future and depending on the 
past, being open to the new and shaped by tradition, freedom and de-
terminacy: these are the two fundamental anthropina. All others are just 
specifications or derivatives.… They not only coexist, they cooperate. 
Their relation is not just aporetic, but dialectical. … Man is the media-
tion of this thesis and antithesis .… But man’s mediation is not given 
once and for all but must constantly be reproduced. (1985, 129)

Human beings are such that they come into the world unfinished, so to 
speak, and they are completed in a cultural context. Human beings are 
cultural, social, and traditional beings completed by their participation 
in specific cultures. But human beings are also creative beings, the very 
same beings who create the culture that completes them. Landmann 
sees creativity and culturality, freedom and determinacy, malleability 
and fixity as correlative conditions of the human being. We cannot un-
derstand either in isolation from the others. Man, he argues, lives from 
these polar forces and “faces the task of mastering their interplay and 
interrelating them in each respective situation” (1985, 120). 

Significantly, Landmann warns us against seeing these forces as du-



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alistic. “Receptivity corresponds to productivity. The productive being 
is also the receptive one. That is no contradiction. The two things are 
mutually conditioned” (1985, 132). Landmann draws on the work of 
Adolf Portmann (1990) and Clifford Geertz (1973) in support of his 
claim that biological and cultural development go hand in hand, in 
what he often refers to as a “mighty system of circular causality” (1985, 
60). “No sharp distinction can be made in man between the natural 
creature and the cultural being, nor between the cultural and the his-
torical being” (1985, 92).

More precisely, as man creates culture, it floods back to him and in 
turn creates him. He is both cause and effect, retro-shaped product 
of his own product. The human mind is not a transcendental point, 
which itself standing outside becoming, constitutes everything else 
and therefore has a comparatively higher, pre-mundane, more original 
existential dignity. Man and culture … form a bipolar system in con-
stant flux caused by dynamic feedback. (1985, 94)

While this brief sketch of Landmann’s philosophical anthropology 
only hints at the outlines of his approach to human nature, it does 
suggest several important insights relevant to our discussion. First 
Landmann recognizes that inquiring about existence is a fundamental 
feature of the human condition: 

The concept of man implies anthropology. This is not mere optional, 
theoretical speculation; it springs from the deepest necessity of a being 
that must shape itself and therefore needs an orientational model or 
Leitbild to go by. (1974, 23)

Given that the human being is unfinished, unspecialized, and must be 
completed by culture, we face the perennial task of our self-creation. 
This characteristic of the human condition was often remarked upon 
by philosophical anthropologists. As Cassirer pointed out in An Essay 
on Man, man “is that creature who is constantly in search of him-
self—a creature who in every moment of his existence must examine 
and scrutinize the conditions of his existence” (1944, 6).

In addressing this anthropological question, however, Landmann is 
clear that there are avenues not open to the human being. Landmann 
is critical, for instance, of both ahistorical views of human nature and 



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naturalistic views. Indeed, Landmann rejects any kind of essentialism 
in accounts of human nature. References to an unchanging and time-
less core of human being or to a natural state ignore one of the funda-
mental “anthropina” of human nature, our malleability and plasticity, 
our very historicity. 

Every appearance of naturalness is deceptive….What is innate in man 
and could be called our a priori is not a preexistent norm of culture, 
but a functional energy: only the undifferentiated capacity to design 
culture and to work toward it. But in content we remain unbound.

(1974, 222)
Landmann repeatedly refers to the insights of Goethe and Herder that 
the human being is an historical being and as such has no timeless or 
unchanging essence.

A timeless unchanging core of man is an illusion which historical con-
sciousness must destroy. This illusion is shared by naturalism, which 
seeks to interpret this specific core-reality of man from below, from the 
bio-pyschological substratum, and by supernaturalism, which seeks to 
interpret it from above, from reason or the God-given soul. It is the 
current conviction, however, that the influence of the changing cul-
tures extends down into the innermost being of self-changing man. 

(1985, 57)
A third point worth remarking upon is Landmann’s recognition that 

our historicity extends to the issue of norms as well. There is no single 
cultural norm desired by nature or reason, he suggests (1985, 58). 

If our creativity is a genuine creativity, it cannot be limited by pre-
existing norms. Again and again attempts have been made to find cul-
tural norms that result necessarily out of man’s nature … In reality this 
idea of a natural culture is self-contradictory. In man’s nature, only the 
fact of culture and not its modality is predesignated. “Artificiality is 
man’s nature.”…The only thing mapped out for us in advance is the 
necessary tendency to completion in general. (1985, 56)

Finally, Landmann suggests that we not read the previous points to 
suggest that individual human beings are capable of radical acts of free-
dom in relation to their own culturality and historicity.



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The man whom we encounter physically as an individual is nonethe-
less not self-sufficient as an individual and cannot be understood just 
in his singularity… Man’s placement in a community is a constitutive 
anthropinon. (1985, 48)

Human beings, Landmann suggests, are embedded in culture some-
what like a fish in water (1985, 53).  Indeed, Landmann is explicitly 
critical of existentialism for over-emphasizing creativity as a radical, 
free act of the individual. While pointing out that tradition’s compul-
sion is not absolute, Landmann also argues that we become complete 
only by growing up in tradition-carrying groups (1985, 62).

III

How does Landmann’s philosophical anthropology help us to make 
some progress towards addressing humanity’s turning point? It is my 
contention that philosophical anthropology does indeed provide im-
portant critical tools and resources for addressing those questions raised 
by the posthuman and posed at the opening of section two. It is to this 
claim that I turn in this section.

On the surface, one might be forgiven for thinking that Landmann’s 
philosophical anthropology is not adequate to the task of discussing our 
current situation and the dilemma of humanity at the turning point. 
Here is an account of human nature whose origins predate many of 
the technological and scientific developments forcing these questions 
upon us. It is a view of human nature that is largely silent on the role of 
technology, though Landmann does take note of the cybernetic revo-
lution in Fundamental Anthropology. And yet it is here precisely that 
Landmann might insist that we begin not from an account of the tech-
nology and its impact on the human condition but with the fact that 
we are inevitably led to raise once again the question of what it means 
to be human. Landmann’s philosophical anthropology begins with the 
recognition that the human being “inquisitively asks about and inter-
prets himself ” (1974, 3) and that our self-interpretations or self-images 
are not static but have a “formative effect” (1974, 20). Philosophical 
anthropology is, for Landmann, not simply an academic discourse, but 
a universally felt need. We are problematic and we need a self-image. 



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“Our human self-knowledge is … of the most drastic significance for 
us; work at self-knowledge is our greatest responsibility” (1985, 27). 
Indeed, most philosophical anthropologists, including Landmann, 
recognize that philosophical anthropology becomes most insistent in 
times of crisis and change. So it is the essence of our humanity that we 
remain an open question, that we seek self-interpretations, and that 
in especially difficult times of crisis and transition, these questions be-
come most insistent.

Recognizing this as an aspect of the human condition and in light 
of such technological developments as the Human Genome Project, 
artificial intelligence, and the growing interface between human and 
machine, we are bound to renew these questions about what it means 
to be human. It would be in some sense in-human not to raise these 
questions at precisely this time. But that suggests that rather than seek-
ing some discontinuity or break between the human and the post-
human, rather than suggesting that we are entering some posthuman 
condition, the questions and issues that human beings are now facing 
are continuous with the ones that they have always faced. The posthu-
man does not represent the emergence of some radically new state of 
humanity but rather highlights one ineluctable fact of our very hu-
manity: we face openly its question. As Landmann suggests, “To be 
human includes a constant tension and caution” (1985, 152). Fur-
thermore, the recognition of this continuity suggests that we find and 
draw on critical resources in our cultural and historical traditions for 
addressing our current situation. The call to embrace the posthuman 
as a rupture or break from the past risks cutting us off from significant 
resources for understanding human nature. If in fact we have made a 
turning point, if we are now posthuman, this might lead us to think 
that resources available in the past are no longer worth consulting. 
Landmann’s insistence that as a cultural being the human being is a 
historical and traditional being underscores the importance of these 
traditional resources as part of a full understanding of our humanity. 
The notion of a turning point undermines critical reflection on how we 
arrived at this point and what the elements of tradition and history are 
that may help us understand where we are, how we got here, and how 



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we might move forward. And the question of how we got here is not an 
insignificant question to raise given our current situation.

In further re-examining accounts of the posthuman through the lens 
of philosophical anthropology, it is apparent that these accounts are 
premised upon rather thin and under-developed accounts of human 
nature, especially in light of the more robust and thick descriptions 
typically offered in philosophical anthropology. In fact, while oppo-
nents and proponents alike agree that the fundamental issue in these 
debates is what it means to be human (Stock, for instance, suggests 
that at a fundamental level, the current discussion about human en-
hancement is about philosophy and religion: “it is about what it means 
to be human, about our vision of the human future” [2002, 155]), 
there is surprisingly little attention paid to this issue in discussions of 
humanity’s turning point and our posthuman future. This is remark-
able in light of the fact that in key respects, the posthuman is parasitic 
upon our notion of the human. Our attitudes towards our posthuman 
future are going to be conditioned by our attitudes towards our hu-
man present. Is humanity something to be preserved, or enhanced, or 
a condition to be gotten over? How we answer that question depends 
heavily on what we take humanity to be. And what we take human-
ity to be, who we are and what we are to become, is precisely what is 
seldom fully addressed in these discussions. Consider, for instance, two 
paradigmatic responses to this debate. 

The first can be seen in the work of critics of posthuman biotechnol-
ogy such as Francis Fukuyama and Leon Kass. In Our Posthuman Fu-
ture, Fukuyama argues that human beings have deeply rooted instincts 
and a human nature which ought to have a special role in defining for 
us what is right and wrong (2002, 7). Nature, Fukuyama suggests, im-
poses limits (2002b, 38) and can serve as a ground for morality (2002b, 
115). His account of human nature draws on a sociobiological frame-
work which locates human nature in specific genes. By human nature 
he means the “sum of the behavior and characteristics that are typical 
of the human species, arising from genetic rather than environmental 
factors” (2002b, 130). Fukuyama is in essence a sociobiologist but one 
who wants to preserve the human genome. While his argument is de-



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tailed and spelled out over several chapters of Our Posthuman Future, 
the basic outlines of Fukuyama’s position do not differ substantially 
from rather standardized notions of human nature in liberal political 
thought. Stripping away the historically and culturally contingent, we 
are left with some human essence, the basic meaning of what it means 
to be human, which is unique, distinctive, and universal to all human 
beings, gives us a dignity and moral status higher than any other liv-
ing creature, and defines a set of characteristics and behaviors, includ-
ing emotions and feelings, fundamental to our humanness and which 
serve as a foundation for human values. Central to this account of the 
posthuman is a fixed, trans-historical human nature that serves as the 
foundation for modern humanist values. Embracing the posthuman 
risks that foundation.

In Life, Liberty, and the Defense of Dignity, Kass offers a similar though 
more nuanced view. Avoiding Fukuyama’s sociobiological framework, 
Kass argues that we need a new approach to biology, indeed a new 
philosophical anthropology, premised upon the psycho-physical unity 
of the embodied human person. As Kass notes, “I believe that one 
cannot give a true account even of animals without notions of forms, 
wholeness, awareness, appetite, and goal-directed action—none of 
them reducible to matter-in-motion or even to DNA” (2002, 138). 
Kass argues that “the dignity of real life” (2002, 18) demands that we 
respect the full human being, including those sentiments, aversions, 
and intuitions that “belong intimately to the human experience of our 
own humanity” (2002, 198). Respect demands that we approach hu-
man nature with awe and reverence and a sense of mystery, things 
threatened by the technological project. As Kass writes: “Enchanted 
and enslaved by the glamour of technology, we have lost our awe and 
wonder before the deep mysteries of nature and of life” (2002, 144). 
Intent upon denying our rootedness to nature and tradition, we pursue 
our narcissistic projects of self-re-creation in a vain attempt to control 
our futures and transcend our biology. Our repugnance in response 
to these projects is, as Kass puts it, “the emotional expression of deep 
wisdom, beyond reason’s power fully to articulate it” (2002, 150). Kass 
suggests that we intuit and feel, immediately and without argument, 



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the violation of things that we rightfully hold dear. Like Fukuyama, 
Kass ultimately has recourse to a fixed notion of human nature that 
serves as a moral standard on which to reject the posthuman: “If…
we can no longer look to our previously unalterable human nature for 
a standard or norm of what is good or better, how will anyone know 
what constitutes an improvement?” (2002, 132).

This fixed, ahistorical view of human nature is at odds with the typi-
cal account of human nature found in those that embrace and cel-
ebrate the posthuman, the second paradigmatic response in the debate 
over humanity’s turning point. This is the approach taken by Stock in 
Redesigning Humans; indeed, Stock elevates it to the very essence of 
human nature. As he notes, 

A key aspect of human nature is our ability to manipulate the world 
.… We are now reaching the point at which we may be able to trans-
form ourselves into something “other.” To turn away from germline 
selection and modification without even exploring them would be to 
deny our essential nature and perhaps our destiny. (2002, 170)

While Stock doesn’t address how precisely we could have a destiny giv-
en that malleability is our essential nature, the important point he fixes 
on, if not fixates on, is our capacity to remake ourselves. “Remaking 
ourselves is the ultimate expression and realization of our humanity” 
(2002, 197). Biology, Stock argues, is malleable and bio-technology, 
more specifically germinal choice technology, is ultimately continuous 
with all the other forms of human self-modification we have pursued; 
it’s a short step, he reasons, from popping expensive vitamin boosters 
to undergoing cosmetic surgery to opting for germinal choice tech-
nology. As he notes: “if biological manipulation is indeed a slippery 
slope, then we are already sliding down that slope now and may as 
well enjoy the ride” (2002, 151). Furthermore, Stock suggests that in 
the face of this human malleability, philosophy and ethics are largely 
impotent. Our projects of self-fashioning, he suggests, are completely 
self-directed: “We and our children increasingly will be reflections of 
our personal philosophies and values” (2002, 195). But what goes into 
one’s personal philosophies and values? What few guidelines Stock of-
fers revolve solely around cost, risk, and other market-driven factors: 



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“Whatever people’s philosophies of human enhancement, their deci-
sions about using specific procedures often hinge on cost, safety, and 
efficacy rather than political or social consequences” (2002, 159).

Stock’s acceptance of and Kass and Fukuyama’s rejection of the post-
human are premised upon and conditioned by accounts of human na-
ture that are little more than mirror images of one another. For Kass 
and Fukuyama and other critics of the posthuman, there is a substan-
tive human nature which exists independently of its cultural manifes-
tations and is the source of a uniquely human dignity that serves as a 
limit to technological development. For the proponents of the posthu-
man, such as Stock, Stelarc, the Extropians and transhumanists and 
their like, there is no stable, constant human nature. Rather the human 
being is fundamentally malleable, with a flawed and obsolete biology 
that we are now in a better position to control, manipulate, and re-
engineer. Both camps portray nature/culture, biology/technology as at 
odds with one another. Either the human being is completely collapsed 
into the technological which becomes itself synonymous with nature, 
or the human being is preserved as something completely apart from 
the technological/cultural. Embracing the posthuman is often defined 
as negating materiality in the name of technology, while resisting the 
posthuman is portrayed as negating the technological in the name 
of the natural. The debate over the posthuman, as it is represented 
here, remains mired in a series of false dichotomies over nature versus 
culture, freedom versus determinism, self versus society, that are not 
productive, don’t help in addressing the difficult issues we face, and 
dramatically misrepresent human nature. 

Landmann’s philosophical anthropology helps us appreciate the lim-
its of these discussions of human nature. Drawing on the work of an-
thropologists such as Samuel Washburn (1959) and Clifford Geertz  
(1973), on the ethology of Adolf Portmann (1990), and previous phil-
osophical anthropologies, Landmann articulates a view of the human 
being in which no sharp distinction can be made between the natu-
ral creature and the cultural being (1985, 92). We are, he writes, the 
already-formed and the yet-to-be-formed, the at once determined and 
determining form (1985, 78). Landmann rejects any form of natural-



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ism or essentialism that fails to adequately attend to the cultural crea-
tivity of the human being but he equally rejects attempts to collapse 
the human being into mere malleability and plasticity. These are two 
correlative basic conditions in human life. They define the possibil-
ity of human existence, cannot be addressed independently of each 
other, and Landmann warns that any attempt to separate these two 
intermeshing parts from this unity must necessarily be artificial (1974, 
218–29).

We see clearly then that Landmann would reject the ahistorical natu-
ralism of Kass and Fukuyama, arguing that it fails to consider the role 
of culture and history in defining human nature. And indeed the kind 
of universal and ahistorical view of human nature underlying Kass’ 
and Fukuyama’s frameworks has come under what from some quarters 
is withering critique for embodying an implicit and illegitimate nor-
mative dimension, often reflective of a particular time and locale. We 
see this clearly in Fukuyama’s defense of liberal capitalist democracies, 
whose success he attributes to grounding in “assumptions about hu-
man nature that are far more realistic than those of their competitors” 
(2002, 106). While aspiring to strip away the contingent and focus 
on the essential, these views of human nature often reflect instead the 
cultural and political biases of their proponents.

While Kass recognizes the role that institutions, education, and ha-
bitual practice play in shaping character, and ultimately moral life, he 
too has recourse to a realm of human nature which remains untouched 
by culture and so serves as an ahistorical and essentialized foundation 
for our moral intuitions. Kass’ many references to the deep mysteries of 
human nature or the deep truths of the human condition, the manner 
in which the silent body speaks, the natural and proper and unambigu-
ous and ontological meaning of sexuality, his references to our given, 
traditional self-understanding and to our natural desires and passions, 
all seem to point to a realm of human nature that lies beyond culture 
and historicity. His references to our common conception of our own 
humanity (2002, 85), the central core of our humanity (2002, 150), 
and the core of our culture’s wisdom, raise troubling questions about 
just whose culture, whose humanity he is referencing. Kass’ notion of 



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the “dignified journey of a truly human life” (2002, 18) ultimately 
stands for something essential beyond the realm of culture and history. 
The philosophical anthropologist rejects these references to a realm of 
human nature set apart from culture. As Landmann notes, “Nature 
itself forces us to have culture. It is our nature that even on the animal 
level we freely acquire the forms our life will take by cultural creativity. 
Even this level is in man a cultural level” (1974, 215). From a similar 
perspective,  Marjorie Grene notes: 

Even our perception, our direct way of being with things and events 
around us, is always already mediated by the pervasive nexus of hu-
man contrivance into which at birth we are cast and within which we 
develop. (1976, 192)

From the perspective of Landmann’s philosophical anthropology, we 
might also question the manner in which Kass and Fukuyama and 
conservative critics of bio-technology foreclose upon human creativity 
and innovation. Self-fashioning, Landmann might observe, is central 
to what it means to be human. After all, we’ve been making ourselves 
over for centuries, from Renaissance self-fashioning to Nietzsche’s 
Übermensch (1954, 124–6) to Foucault’s more recent celebration of 
Baudelaire’s dandy (Foucault 1984, 41–2). Recall Pico della Miran-
dola’s Oration on the Dignity of Man, in which he imagines God speak-
ing to man, that creature of indeterminate image: “We have made you 
a creature neither of heaven nor of earth, neither mortal nor immortal, 
in order that you may, as the free and proud shaper of your own be-
ing, fashion yourself in the form you may prefer” (1956, 7). Now it’s 
true that God suggests we might descend to the lower, brutish forms 
of life, just as easily as we might rise to the superior orders whose life is 
divine. Nonetheless, it’s human nature to fashion one’s nature and this 
is a point Kass and Fukuyama remain oblivious to. Somewhat incon-
sistently, Kass himself recognizes that technologies are not neutral and 
bring out changes in our norms, beliefs, and self-conceptions (2002, 
121–22). But he characterizes these changes as challenges to our hu-
manity and our given self-conception, rather than recognizing that our 
“given” self-conception(s) are no doubt the product of still earlier in-
fluences and are a reflection of our cultural and historical location. 



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We shouldn’t read this, however, as an endorsement of our absolute 
Protean nature, as many proponents of technological change do. Land-
mann would be equally critical of Stock’s emphasis on malleability in 
the absence of any discussion of culture and tradition. By focusing on 
this one dimension of human nature, our plasticity and malleability, 
Stock denies us any basis on which to make decisions regarding how 
we ought to change. Indeed, having described the human being as little 
more than pure potentiality, the individual agent is left with little to fall 
back on other than popular stereotypes and cultural norms. Landmann 
is critical of views of the human being that carry the idea of creativity 
to the extreme of mere creative arbitrariness. While recognizing that 
creativity is “rooted as a necessity in the existential structure of man as 
such” (1974, 204), Landmann also warns us against carrying the idea 
of creativity to the extreme of mere creative arbitrariness. He is critical 
of Sartre’s existentialism for precisely this reason: “Sartre’s Promethean 
creationism runs into error by its very exaggeration” (1974, 213). As 
Robert Bellah (et al.) notes in a slightly different context, views of the 
human being such as Stock’s leave us with a completely unencumbered 
self with no basis on which to act other than what it is popular. 

“Values” turn out to be the incomprehensible, rationally indefensible 
thing that the individual chooses when he or she has thrown off the 
last vestige of external influence and reached pure, contentless free-
dom. The ideal self in its absolute freedom is completely “unencum-
bered ”.  .  .  (1985, 80)

But the human being, Landmann argues, is never unencumbered. 
Creativity always goes hand-in-hand with history: “history is the store-
house of man’s former creativity; it shows how he always chiseled away 
at himself formatively” (1985, 23). Human creativity does not happen 
in a vacuum and the individual human being does not begin from a 
blank slate from which values are created out of whole cloth. “We must 
first internalize prior culture: even the greatest genius is to a far greater 
extent caused by his culture than its causer” (1985, 50).

Drawing together these points, it seems clear that the rhetoric of 
the turning point and the posthuman is not significantly advancing 
our understanding of our current situation and the current dilemmas 



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that the human being faces. Discussions of humanity’s turning point 
and the posthuman seem to function most as a call to arms. They are 
“fighting words,” so to speak, motivating us perhaps to take action 
and embrace a posthuman existence that moves beyond tired and old-
fashioned ways of being human or act as a rallying cry to safeguard and 
preserve the dignity and value of what it means to be human. Implied 
by either route is the belief that we have an adequate account of hu-
man nature. And yet, as I have suggested, this is precisely what is most 
lacking in discussions of the posthuman. If we are to accept claims 
that humanity is facing a turning point and that we are witnessing the 
emergence (for good or for ill) of the posthuman, we ought to insist 
on a clear and persuasive account of that human nature we will soon 
be leaving behind. Accounts of the posthuman foreclose upon such re-
flection by suggesting that we already know what human nature is and 
that we need not trouble with it any further. The debate is structured 
around ideal images of the human being that never existed and that 
function to impel us to take a particular stance on the posthuman, but 
there is no defense of these ideal images of the human being. Discus-
sions of the posthuman take place as if we have already decided what it 
means to be human and yet, as Landmann suggests, that is a question 
that always remains open. These discussions displace onto the question 
of the posthuman the difficult question of what it means to be human 
and, in so doing, they attempt to make that discussion seem easy and 
straightforward. The response to the posthuman is made obvious by 
reliance on simplistic but ultimately inadequate accounts of the hu-
man that only serve to obscure the more important issue we ought to 
be concerned with namely, what is the human being.

Ultimately, then, the notions of a turning point and of our posthu-
man future are being used primarily as rhetorical devices to motivate 
the troops. What is needed, though, is not motivation but careful criti-
cal attention to the choices that humanity faces. We get little out of the 
notion of a turning point or the posthuman when it comes to making 
these difficult choices. Here too it might seem that Landmann’s philo-
sophical anthropology offers little or no guidance. After all, he explic-
itly rejects any connection between philosophical anthropology and 



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ethics and disavows reaching normative conclusions on the basis of 
descriptive accounts of human nature. Philosophical anthropology, he 
writes, “is not interested in making metaphysical or ethical statements” 
(1974, 19). As we have seen, he emphasizes our creative and malleable 
nature, suggests that artificiality is our nature, and rejects any essential 
or natural or ideal model of human nature. “If our creativity is a genu-
ine creativity, it cannot be limited by pre-existing norms” (1985, 56). 
He recognizes that our freedom to shape our form historically contains 
a danger but notes as great a danger from the imposition of norms.

Man can cling to poor and base forms; he can strike upon false and 
destructive forms. Ethics fears that he could violate the norms; philo-
sophical anthropology has the deeper fear that the norm itself could be 
disastrous. (1985, 118)

Landmann is, moreover, explicitly critical of philosophical and po-
litical systems that limit human freedom out of fear that human beings 
will misuse freedom. 

To avoid risk, these systems try to bring the historical process to a halt. 
But the loss of freedom is a deadly handicap. For man learns by trial 
and error from his sufferings. His mistakes can lead antithetically to 
improvement. (1985, 119)

This apparently suggests that we will find few resources in philosophi-
cal anthropology for coming to terms with the difficult choices that 
humanity faces in light of developments with bio-technology and cy-
ber-technology. And yet I think so sweeping a generalization as this is 
unwarranted. While it is true that Landmann warns against drawing 
normative conclusions on the basis of a formal and descriptive philo-
sophical anthropology, his account of human nature better structures 
the debate we ought to have than does a discussion of the posthuman. 
There are several reasons for thinking so. First, Landmann’s philosophi-
cal anthropology discloses precisely why these debates are so fraught. 
At their core, they are debates over our self-image. We must already 
understand that our self-image is an open question, that our self-imag-
es are not static, and that they have a formative effect (in Landmann’s 
terms, “man’s knowledge of man is not without effect on man’s be-
ing” [1974, 20] ), in order to fully appreciate the dilemmas we cur-



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rently face. The conflicting responses we have to the potential impacts 
of technology on human nature remind us most directly and urgently 
that our self-image is an open question. Landmann’s philosophical an-
thropology serves to remind us that these questions are as unavoidable 
as they are risky. We are always in process, so to speak, and cannot 
foreclose upon that question. “We can always give only a temporary 
clarification for the ‘open question’ that we always remain for ourself at 
the heart of our being” (1974, 226).

Landmann argues that the human being “may and must again and 
again give himself his features from his ultimate amorphousness, this 
intermixture of unstructuredness, plasticity, and the mission of self-
education” (1974, 226). But that of course is not the whole story. For 
the human being is also a historical and social and traditional being. 
While our self-image is always an open question, it is a question that is 
answered in particular concrete historical situations. As we have seen, 
culture is correlative to creativity and Landmann reminds us:

There is no such thing as a general man with timelessly permanent 
structures or an invariable human nature. Theory must therefore begin 
with society and history. These are primary; man must be understood 
in terms of them, and not vice versa. (1974, 269)

That we are an open question means that we can find no final, defini-
tive, and fixed answer to the questions that technology currently poses. 
It also means that the answers that we might give can only come from 
our cultural, social, and historical traditions. Rather than cut us off 
from these traditions by emphasizing the coming turning point and the 
transformation of the human into the posthuman, Landmann’s philo-
sophical anthropology suggests that the only resources we have for ad-
dressing these questions is in those traditions. From such a social and 
historical perspective on human nature, one cannot characterize the 
human being in terms of some single, isolable property which serves to 
define our essence or our dignity. Rather, one must have a recourse to 
what Midgley refers to as a “rich and complex arrangement of powers 
and qualities” (1995, 207). This of course means that there can be no 
easy answer to the questions posed by the development of new tech-
nologies. But why should we ever expect otherwise?  We human beings 



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are a complex lot. It is only from false and simplifying perspectives that 
these choices would ever seem easy. And while norms and values can-
not be read off our nature directly and transparently, it doesn’t mean 
that our nature cannot provide some indirect and practical guidance. It 
suggests that we should be wary of claims such as Kass’s or Fukuyama’s 
that a previously unalterable human nature can supply a standard or 
norm for human self-improvement. It suggests as well, contra Stock, 
that human beings are not simply malleable stuff to be engineered and 
remade at will. It further suggests that as social and historical beings, 
we must remain sensitive to the ways we are multiply constructed in 
and by culture and cognizant of the concrete social and political con-
text of our schemes for self-fashioning. It suggests, too, that we reject 
an overly instrumentalist and atomistic approach to these questions. As 
Landmann observes, we become human only in the context of other 
humans. Our choices, our plans for self-modification, our ways of re-
sponding to technology, only make sense in a broader cultural and 
social context. Landmann suggests that there is no paradigmatic norm 
hovering over the human being, no germ that he need merely develop. 
“His mission,” he writes, “is to design and form himself responsibly” 
(1985, 267). That of course is not an easy task. Nor is it a posthuman 
task. It is the task of human beings facing directly each day the difficult 
task of determining the meaning of what it is to be human.

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