Filippo Tomasso Marinetti, founder of Futurism in the early 20th century, figures as one of its “Patron-Saints” in Marc Andreessen’s Techno-Optimistic Manifesto (2023)[i]. This manifesto glorifies the techno-capital machine—“the engine of perpetual material creation”—comparing societies to sharks, destined to “grow or die”. Andreessen attempts to convince us that technology is the solution to all of humanity’s problems and those of us who do not agree belong to the unfortunate category of the “deceived”.

Andreessen’s techno-optimistic discourse is not new. Over a century ago, Marinetti was already calling for the destruction of libraries and the rejection of feminism, glorifying war and praising the beauty of speed as embodied by machines. Nowadays, we are saturated with the false promises and planetary futures by which the Silicon Valley mindset justifies its policies and evades their social responsibilities. Paris Marx has dismantled the fallacies and falsehoods proselytized by what he calls the “techno-optimistic religion”.[ii] Marx emphasizes a significant detail: the novelty lies not in the message, but in its form, now framed as a threat. He writes, “[…] they have extended a fist with the threat that if we do not accept their future, there will be hell to pay”.[iii] It is the same threat that some of us had already bore witness to during the conversation between Musk and Trump held on the X platform in August 2024, during the US election campaign. “The main message: if Trump doesn’t win the election, and if Musk doesn’t become the emperor of the universe, you’re not going to have a country anymore” wrote David Smith, in The Guardian.[iv] Now that Musk’s horse has won, questions linger in the settling dust: How much of the country—and the world— will remain? Will we rise from our ashes?

In 1909, only two months after Marinetti published his Futurist manifesto, the Spanish philosopher Miguel de Unamuno (1864-1936) was already fed up with the fanaticism surrounding machines. Unamuno was always a slap in the face to scientism—the abusive practice of solving all of life’s problems by means of science (and technology). His hilarious satire Love and Pedagogy (1902) denounces the era’s misguided hopes of manufacturing “perfect” human beings through a strict sociological pedagogy.[v] At the beginning of this novel, one of the characters asserts that in the future it would be possible to generate human beings directly from laboratory test tubes.

Unamuno’s Transhumanism vs. Marinetti’s Futurism

By the time Marinetti published his manifesto, Unamuno was already tired of this cult of science which he associated with “cerebralism”, a degeneration of the intellect caused by the rapid acceleration and mechanization of urban environments. The industrialization of life, warned Unamuno, imposes work rhythms that human beings are unable to “digest”—surprisingly,  he wrote this in 1902, more than a century before the infamous robotization of workers by companies like Amazon or McDonald’s.[vi] Unamuno characterized “cerebralism” as the degeneration of thinking and feeling into purely cerebral processes, ignoring the rest of the body —and its natural rhythms— which now merely accompanies the brain like a skeleton.

When European journalists advertised Marinetti’s manifesto in the media, the intellectual Gabriel Alomar published an article in a Catalan newspaper claiming that he had created the word “futurism” five years before Marinetti. All of this awakened the jester which  Unamuno had always carried within him. Let’s not forget that this philosopher always defended humor as a weapon of thought.

Unamuno decided to fight back by creating his own movement. He would invent a new avant-garde movement, one that also adored the utopian future of something ––à la Marinetti––, but with the sole purpose of encouraging readers to appropriate it as their own. He would give it to the world in the hope that someone would endow it with philosophical substance in the future. Guess what this new movement was? None other than “Transhumanism”.

Transhumanism was founded by Miguel de Unamuno in 1909, in a manifesto published in the Spanish newspaper El Imparcial, under the title: “Trashumanismo” (“Transhumanism”).[vii] This manifesto anticipates by more than half a century the “Transhumanist Manifesto” by Natasha Vita More (1983)[viii] and implies that the word ‘transhumanism’ did not come from the pen of the biologist Julian Huxley, to whom the neologism is now commonly attributed.[ix] Transhumanism was born of philosophical parody, not of literature with scientific aspirations:

“I––and this is the most philosophical way to begin an article and a manifesto––Miguel de Unamuno y Jugo, born in Bilbao, married, forty-four-and-a-half years old, a resident of Salamanca and a professor at its University, appear before the public today––here following the date on which this article comes to light––and declare urbi et orbe to have created a new school, system or whatever you want to call it, with the name of transhumanism.”[x]

Does this Transhumanism have anything to do with the contemporary movement advocated by Nick Bostrom or David Pearce? Yes and no. Unamuno’s brief manifesto had a satirical intention. He decided to leave his new system empty of content, confident that the future ––which he was parodying––would take care of making sense of it. This deliberate lack of program allowed Unamuno to declare himself the founder of whatever would be called “Transhumanism” in the future. He could not have imagined that his little joke would evolve into the giant it is today. And although he did not explicitly speak of human enhancement through technology, in explaining the origin of the term he did make it clear that his Transhumanism has everything to do with the enhancement of the human species.

From “transwheat” to transhuman

The term ‘transhumanism’, Unamuno explains in his manifesto, is the result of the fusion between Nietzsche’s “superman” (Übermensch) and the notion of “transwheat” (Spanish: “trastrigo”) mentioned in Cervantes’ Don Quixote. Just as Cervantes referred to transwheat to evoke a superior nutritive substance or a sort of “enhanced” wheat, we should use the term ‘transhumanism’ to refer to the enhancement of the human species. This explanation of transwheat by Unamuno is not without humor, for Cervantes was far from referring to an “enhanced cereal”. The popular expression “looking for bread made from transwheat” goes back in Spanish literature to Gonzalo de Berceo (XIII CE) and was used to indicate that someone was looking for difficult or impossible things unnecessarily.[xi] Also those who seek love affairs outside of marriage are “looking for bread made from transwheat”. Unamuno decided to endow the expression with a transcendent meaning, turning the search for the “super-wheat” into a guiding model for the search for the “super-human”:

“[…] and I, in my eagerness to also create something, even if it is only a word, I have created, to translate the Nietzschean term [Übermensch], the word “trashombre” [transman]. How? By analogy, with a voice of illustrious Castilian pro sapia, with the term “trastrigo” [transwheat]. We all know the famous Cervantine phrase of “looking for bread made from transwheat”, implying that one is looking for bread made with a substance superior to wheat, more exquisite, more tasty or more nutritious than wheat, and I have said to myself: if Cervantes were to express something superior to wheat, which seemed to him to be a supreme and ultimate term of nutritional value, if to express a species that is like the enhancement of wheat, he used the voice transwheat, we, to express a species superior to man and that sprouts from it, we can well use the voice “transman”. And once I had the immense joy of coming across this precious word –a word that may be stolen from me in Paris in five years from now– I took from it the word transhumanism.”[xii]

Prophetic Parodies

In his manifesto, Unamuno predicted that someone else would reinvent the term in the future and give it meaning over time. Less than fifty years would pass before Julian Huxley unknowingly fulfilled Unamuno’s prophecy, reinventing the word in his  book New Bottles for New Wine (1957) and stating in all seriousness: “I believe in transhumanism”.[xiii] Only a few years before this manifesto, Unamuno had ridiculed the idea of human enhancement through sociological pedagogy in his novel Love and Pedagogy (1902). In this satire, Avito Carrascal is convinced that he will be able to bring a genius into the world by choosing a biologically suitable woman and applying scientific methods to the conception, pregnancy, childbirth, upbringing and education of the child. The son conceived in this way ––dramatically in love with poetry and deviated from his “original design” ––ends up taking his own life to free himself from his father’s pedagogy. This is the tragic consequence of the constant battle that scientism wages against life throughout the novel.

It is remarkable how Unamuno’s novel anticipated the tragic case of Hildegart Rodríguez Carballeira, which would occur in Spain only a few decades later. Raised in the laboratory of scientistic pedagogy by a mother who defended eugenics, at the age of seventeen Hildegart already had a law degree, wrote in the main Spanish newspapers, was affiliated to the Spanish Socialist Workers Party, and corresponded with personalities of the stature of H.G. Wells, Havelock Ellis and the physician Gregorio Marañón. Unlike the main character of Unamuno’s novel, Hildegart did not take her own life, but was murdered by her own mother at the age of eighteen. As explained on the website of the Spanish Ministry of Culture:

“Her mother Aurora, in her determination that her daughter should be a guide for the women of the time, subjected all her movements to severe control, which produced desires of emancipation in the young girl, which were not tolerated by her mother. As a consequence of all this, on June 9, 1933 Hildegart died murdered by her own mother in her sleep, when she understood that her daughter was moving away from the prototype with which she had been conceived, at a time when the figure of Hildegart was beginning to stand out internationally.”[xiv]

Unamuno’s buffoonery, perhaps reactionary in the eyes of his time, are revealed to be prophetic when contemplated from ours. And although for epochal reasons he could not write a satire in which Avito Carrascal, instead of a scientistic pedagogue, was a transhumanist engineer, at least he managed to plant the seed of Transhumanism from Cervantes’ “enhanced” wheat. One could argue that by founding it, Unamuno mocked Transhumanism before it had even taken root.

Notes:

[i] Marc Andreessen’s “Techno-Optimist Manifesto” can be read here: https://a16z.com/the-techno-optimist-manifesto/

[ii] Paris Marx, “The Religion of Techno-Optimism”, December 11, 2023, Disconnect Blog. See https://www.disconnect.blog/p/the-religion-of-techno-optimism

[iii] Idem.

[iv] David Smith, “The Musk-Trump X Interview”, August 13, 2024, The Guardian. See https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/article/2024/aug/13/elon-musk-donald-trump-x-interview-delay

[v] See Miguel de Unamuno, Love and Pedagogy. Translated by Michael Vande Berg. New York: Peter Lang, 1996.  [Original: 1902].

[vi] See Kate Crawford, Atlas of AI. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2021), pp. 53-87

[vii]   https://hemerotecadigital.bne.es/hd/es/viewer?id=9c3a179a-7334-4b08-861f-1a3fd6e514ff&page=3

[viii] For a revised version of this manifesto, see: https://www.humanityplus.org/the-transhumanist-manifesto

[ix] In his historical overview of the transhumanist thought, Nick Bostrom attributed the creation of the term to Julian Huxley, erroneously alluding to his work Religion without Revelation (1927), in which Huxley had not yet developed the concept. See Nick Bostrom, “A History of Transhumanist Thought”, Journal of Evolution and Technology ‐ Vol. 14 (1), 2005.  https://nickbostrom.com/papers/a-history-of-transhumanist-thought/  However, it is Fereidoun M. Esfandiary’s book Are you Transhuman? (1989) which is considered to be one of the pioneering works of the movement now referred to as Transhumanism and the first to introduce the term ‘transhuman’ in its contemporary sense.

[x] Unamuno, “Trashumanismo”, El Imparcial, March 29, 1909.

[xi] José Ramón Fernández de Cano y Martín, “Del trasiego del trastrigo al trasero del teatro: Nuevas interpretaciones del vocabulario erótico cervantino”. Cervantes: Bulletin of the Cervantes Society of America. Volume XIX (2) (Fall 1999), pp.87-100. See https://www.cervantesvirtual.com/obra/del-trasiego-del-trastrigo-al-trasero-del-teatro-nuevas-interpretaciones-del-vocabulario-erotico-cervantino/

[xii] Unamuno, “Trashumanismo”, El Imparcial, March 29,1909.

[xiii] Julian Huxley, New Bottles for New Wine, (London: Chatto & Windus, 1957), p.17.

[xiv]Documentary Information Center of Archives, Spanish Ministry of Culture. See https://www.cultura.gob.es/cultura/areas/archivos/mc/centros/cida/4-difusion-cooperacion/4-1-guias-de-lectura/escritoras/rodriguez-hildegart.html  Her life continue to receive attention in Spanish cinema and literature. The film La Virgen Roja (2024), directed by Paula Ortiz, has recently retold the story of Hildegart and her mother Aurora.