transhuman

English

Etymology

From trans- +‎ human, also attested as trans-human in the 1950s. Attributed to Teilhard de Chardin, as French trans-humain (noun, sometimes capitalised as (le) Trans-humain), who used it alongside ultra-humain ("the ultra-human"). As a countable English noun (plural transhumans) introduced by F. M. Esfandiary in the 1960s (here trans- is short for transitional).

Adjective

transhuman (comparative more transhuman, superlative most transhuman)

1. More than human; superhuman.
   • 2009, Vinoth Ramachandra, Subverting Global Myths, →ISBN:

     Turning fallible human foot soldiers into transhuman machines who need neither sleep nor food, and are incapable of resistance and independent thought, is a Napoleonic dream .

   • 2015, Laurence Moroney, TRANSHUMAN: Volume 1 : The Deconstruction of Hu Ying Chao:

     A template for those who will become transhuman.

2. Related to transhumanism.
   • 2011, Ronald Cole-Turner, Transhumanism and Transcendence, →ISBN:

     I believe that this is important, because taken in isolation the kind of enhancements portrayed by transhuman philosophers might seem relatively innocuous.

   • 2012, J. B. Stump, Alan G. Padgett, The Blackwell Companion to Science and Christianity, →ISBN:

     The transhuman ideal is based upon a reconception of evolution, a perfecting and transcending of the human race through the next step in progress: not through biological mutation but through science and technology.

   • 2014, Robert M. Geraci, Virtually Sacred: Myth and Meaning in World of Warcraft and Second Life, →ISBN:

     In a study of transhumanists and video games, fully twothirds of the participants claimed that video games incline players toward a transhuman sense of self.

3. Involving something beyond the merely human; transcending human limitations or boundaries.

   Near-synonym: posthuman (sometimes synonymous)

   • 2000, Victor Segesvary, Dialogue of Civilizations: An Introduction to Civilizational Analysis, →ISBN:

     This "other world" is transcendent because the experience of the sacred—an encounter with a reality transcending immanent life—gives birth to the idea that there are absolute, that is, transhuman, realities.

   • 2001, Anna Wierzbicka, What did Jesus Mean?, →ISBN:

     Thus, regardless of whether one prefers to replace the father symbol with other human symbols like mother and maternal—or with transhuman and transsexual symbols like first/last reality—none of these images or symbols are really integral to the message of the Gospels.

   • 2011, Richard M. Doyle, Darwin's Pharmacy: Sex, Plants, and the Evolution of the Noosphere, →ISBN:

     Subjectivity, as a paradoxically transhuman phenomenon of awareness renderred only in ecologies, is rendered into inscriptions and images even as no self is adequate to the report.

Noun

transhuman (countable and uncountable, plural transhumans)

1. (countable) An enhanced human:
   1. (strictly) An individual having characteristics transitional between a human and a posthuman species.
      • 2007, Kevin J. Vanhoozer, Charles A. Anderson, Michael J. Sleasman, Everyday Theology (Cultural Exegesis), →ISBN:

        In the same way that a transhuman is a transitional human, Christians are also humans in transition, living in a kingdom that has come and yet is coming, “strangers in the world.”

   2. (broadly) An individual of a posthuman species.
      • 2008, Christopher Ejsmond, Reflections on Life, →ISBN, page 100:

        On the coffee table rested a sculpture of the fundamental, recombinant DNA of the present transhumans.

      • 2011, Andrea Nightingale, Once Out of Nature: Augustine on Time and the Body, →ISBN, page 4:

        In practice, this technological transhumation would wreak havoc on the earth. While modern transhumans are meant to come into being through technology, Augustine offers two models of transhumans made by a divine rather than a human creator -- Adam and Eve in Eden and the resurrected saints in heaven.

      • 2014, Calvin Mercer, Tracy J. Trothen, Religion and Transhumanism: The Unknown Future of Human Enhancement, →ISBN, page 207:

        Will it happen again if we transition from human to transhuman?

2. A being that transcends humanity; a superhuman being.
   • 2002, Vernor Vinge, The Collected Stories of Vernor Vinge, →ISBN:

     I bet every critter that thinks it thinks—even the transhumans—worry about how to do right for themselves and the ones they love.

   • 2004, Lou Anders, Projections: Science Fiction in Literature and Film, →ISBN, page 123:

     Imagine a living computer running a simulation where math functions within the simulation think. Then consider an implication of anthrocosmology: if human consciousness created reality and transhumans can simulate any reality they can imagine, that suggest the physical universe has no special status above any other virtual reality.

   • 2015, David Lane, The Thinking Text, →ISBN, page 46:

     Now ask yourself a question, don't these transhumans have as much a right in killing us for food as we do in killing cows?