“My Little Cyborg”: Human, Machine, and the Philosophical Paradoxes of Difficult Humanism

In many ways, ideas about humans and humanity (often contested in modern decolonisation studies) are rooted in the Western European tradition. The humanities themselves arise from the European Renaissance. Thus, addressing the question of the importance of technology for modern humanities research leads to the question of the essence of the human and the technical. To answer this question, the authors turn to the interpretations of twentieth-century Western European thinkers, since Europe is the source of (sometimes contradictory) ideas about humanity. Every attempt at a philosophical analysis of the problem of modern technologies returns to the question about humans, their past, their future and, of course, their present. This article considers some philosophical, anthropological, and medical aspects of the process of cyborgisation of a modern human—from the implantation of microchips into human organs to the complete replacement of some organs with artificial ones, or even the creation of additional organs that do not exist in nature. The problem statement is accompanied by a philosophical analysis of texts by different European authors who have addressed the problems of technology. Technology, which inevitably accompanies humanity throughout the history of its existence, puts a person face to face with the radically Other, inhuman machine. Thus, a technical object is a product of culture and at the same time produces an ethos, a habitat. Cyborg, the technical improvement of human nature, derives from a purely human way of existence, but also produces a special world of technically advanced people—those who already possess non-human properties and qualities. What, then, is a cyborg? Is domestication possible by introducing technical, inanimate objects into living human beings? Will this process lead to the creation of a new cyborg ethics or to the destruction of humans and their replacement by the machine?