Autor(es): Wolfhart Totsching
Año: 2025
Revista: TELOS
Referencia:
Totschnig, Wolfhart. 2025. “The Paradox of Self-Transformation, or, Could Totalitarianism Ever Succeed?” Telos: Critical Theory of the Contemporary 2025 (210): 29–51.
The conception of the human being that we find in both existentialist and transhumanist thought gives rise to a puzzle: If, as these philosophical movements claim, human beings have the power of self-transformation, could they exercise this power in such a way as to eliminate this very power, i.e., to transform themselves into beings who can no longer transform themselves? This question concerns concrete historical possibilities. According to Arendt’s analysis in Origins of Totalitarianism, the Nazis’ Third Reich and the Soviet Union under Stalin actually tried to eradicate the human power of self-transformation. The historical fact is that they failed. But could they have succeeded? In this paper, I first highlight this issue in Sartre, Arendt, and Kurzweil, then present Arendt’s answer to it, and finally question that answer by drawing on Orwell’s novel 1984.
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