For the past century, a preoccupation of anthropology has been “to make the strange familiar and the familiar strange.” But what happens to this endeavor when its subject and object – the human – undergo a paradigm shift of a magnitude that has not been seen since the Enlightenment? When it is not just what humans think and do that anthropologists rattle around, turn inside out and back again, and finally chronicle through a kaleidoscope of various cultural theories, but when it is many of the taken-for-granted and defining characteristics of our species?Stefan Sorgner tackles these questions in his elegantly written, and at times subtly humorous, consideration of many widely held prejudices against transhumanism. While he does not address these concerns with a specific disciplinary audience in mind, I suggest that he offers us a primer on many emerging social and ethical issues to which we have not awarded sufficient anthropological attention, such as bioenhancement, carbon- versus silicon-based humanity, and speciesism.Sorgner’s book was originally written in German, and to an extent with this sociopolitical context in mind, so I suggest the translator’s introduction by Spencer Hawkins as prereading before North Americans dive into the main contents. Hawkins rightly predicts that in an unequally distributed healthcare landscape, many readers’ reception of Sorgner’s perspectives on self-optimization technologies will serve as a Rorschach test for how well Americans perceive liberalism to be functioning as a dominant political model.As a jumping-off point for the introductory section, Sorgner references Habermas’s dim perspective on transhumanists (a “bunch of freaked out intellectuals”) to illustrate how detractors of the movement have mobilized claims of immortality as a way to divert attention away from time-sensitive – and much more nuanced and practical – discussions about the value of extending healthspan. He advises that these conversations should not be postponed much longer; scientists will take their research off the land grid (so-called “seasteading”) if they cannot pursue it within nation-states.The first chapter then starts with a stark question: Is transhumanism the leading intellectual movement of the future, one that will “make this a world worth living in” (6) through its embrace of developments in science, medicine, and technology? Or is it the “most dangerous idea in the world” (Fukuyama 2004) due to its Gattaca-like potentialities, such as the dystopian stratification of society into the gene-rich and -poor? Sorgner shrewdly uses these ideational extremes to frame his sleek tour through the history, objectives, and political orientations of the movement. The ears of applied anthropologists (attention – world systems theorists) will perk up at the mention of these polarities because they are distillations of their contemporary raison d’être – to improve the conditions of daily existence for people around the world while also illuminating the root causes of socioeconomic disparity. Sorgner describes his own stance as a “weak form of transhumanism” (14) – one that includes the Nietzschean practice of self-overcoming, a naturalist notion of humanity (i.e., that it differs from other organisms in degree, not type), and advocates the emergence of new technologies so that our evolution no longer depends on natural selection but on human selection. It is on this last point that Sorgner says we must call into question our maturity; while many will inevitably view their quality of life as improved though intellectual, emotional, and physical enhancement, their initial reaction to the idea of self-modification may potentially be one of disgust. Sorgner argues that the “yuck” factor can easily be turned to a “yeah” factor and that concerns about social stratification can be quelled if we stop to consider vaccination, a form of human biotechnological enhancement that was developed in the eighteenth century. Throughout its tenure and up to the very present cultural moment, vaccination has intermittently been held in suspicion. However, in places such as Germany, vaccination is universally accessible and in some cases covered by health insurance, all while not being mandatory. Sorgner extends this analogy to a universal roll-out of healthspan-extending technologies, to ensure that a “segmentation of society does not occur” (10). The raging current debate about COVID-19 vaccine imperialism and intellectual property rights waivers is likely to cast a significant pall on this line of thinking, though.The decisive feature of transhumanism – its promotion of technologies that will refine humans’ navigation of their own evolution – is the context for the next chapter. Here his focus is on whether a meaningful conceptual distinction can be drawn between techniques of enhancement and therapy. His discussion is pragmatic and takes pains to orient the reader to forms of enhancement that are of most immediate relevance to applied ethics. Sorgner’s consideration of a silicon-based humanity, aka “mind uploading” – the fantastical unicorn of transhumanist discourse – is therefore wrapped up in a few paragraphs, and he instead focuses his attention on the enhancement of healthspan and emotional, physiological, and intellectual capacities. It is on the point of moral enhancement that he has reservations. Primary among them are that “morality is generally in the interest of non-moral people” (29) and that a morally amplified national population may be less competitive in a global context. In any case, Sorgner cherishes the norm of negative freedom, and I hope that this can be another access point where anthropologists (who are united in their promotion of at least some version of cultural relativism) begin to enter transhumanist discussions in greater numbers.Chapters Three and Four respectively seek to distinguish transhumanism from related cultural movements and demonstrate that its principles share significant philosophical terrain with those of Nietzsche. As Sorgner explains, transhumanism is often conflated with other “beyond human” philosophies despite their different genealogies, principles, and conceptualizations of the posthuman, so their elucidation is critical, and this includes keeping in mind that each of these movements is internally heterogeneous as well. As with many of his other publications, Sorgner thrives at making theory accessible to a broad readership, but there are a few spots where he may overestimate his readers’ acquaintance with certain terminologies. While posthumanism, metahumanism, and transhumanism share the central element of viewing the human as neither exceptional nor categorically different from other organisms (and on this point, Sorgner provides an overview of the historical development of “humanism” as a point of contrast), from here they diverge. Transhumanism, with its goals of scientific progress and rationality, as well as its naturalistic, evolutionary, materialistic, and immanent understandings of the world, finds its roots in the Enlightenment. Transhumanists believe that we are not yet posthuman, but embrace the use of technologies that increase the likelihood of this development. Posthumanism, on the other hand, is an outgrowth of postmodernism, and it approaches the notion of the human – past, present, and future – as an open concept. Key to posthumanism is its aim of problematizing dualistic thinking (e.g., nature/culture, male/female) and decentralizing the human as a discursive focus. From this existential approach, we can already be posthuman – or perhaps we always have been. Finally, del Val and Sorgner’s (2011) metahumanism strives to establish a dialogue between the two discourses.Sorgner states elsewhere that his entree into the realm of transhumanism occurred via his earlier studies on Nietzsche,1 so it is his intimate knowledge of the philosopher that prompts his introductory statements in Chapter Four about Nietzsche’s unfortunate alignment with the Third Reich, and how this state of affairs encourages other transhumanists (who are already sensitive to potential indictments of eugenicist thinking) to steer clear of Nietzsche altogether. As I read Sorgner’s summary of Nietzsche’s dynamic will-to-power ontology – based upon the idea that humans and all other organisms are composed of power quanta that are interactive and in constant flux – I could not help but be reminded of the anthropologist Nigel Rapport’s (2003) I Am Dynamite and feel regret that more of us have not engaged with Nietzsche’s ideas about cultural agency, perspectivism, and relationality. As Max Weber (1946, 143), one of the patron saints of anthropology, once wrote, “Science is meaningless because it gives us no answer to … the only question important for us: ‘What shall we do and how shall we live?’” Philosophers are our guides in this endeavor, and Nietzsche reminds us that they too are affected by their personal and cultural prejudices. “The posthuman,” Sorgner concludes, “can be understood only if one acknowledges that it is a meaningful concept, which gives meaning to life for scientifically oriented people” (71). Perhaps this can be read as a caution to transhumanists to keep their reflexivity fresh, in order not to drift unawares into technologically deterministic thinking.In his concluding chapter, Sorgner provides an overview of the twelve pillars of his version of transhumanism and how they fit in with other foundational positions of this cultural movement. In so doing, he aims to lay bare how the heterogeneity of transhumanist thinking continues to be widely misconstrued in public discourse. These discursive pillars encompass an array of policy relevant issues including genetic selection, conceptualizations of the family, nonhuman personhood, and human–machine interfaces (i.e., cyborgization). The threads that Sorgner uses to weave these motley subjects together are the basic principles of his transhumanist vision: negative freedom, radical plurality, and self-overcoming. Of particular interest is Sorgner’s discussion of the future of the humanities against the backdrop of current digital technologies, a topic to which I hope he will soon return in more detail.2Jimi Hendrix once famously declared that we shouldn’t mind “if 6 was 9” because we all “have [our] own life to live through” and as such, we should “wave [our] freak flag high.”3 In the same vein, making the strange familiar and the familiar strange and reminding us of the importance of safeguarding a radical plurality of the good are something at which Sorgner excels. On Transhumanism is a bold reminder to anthropologists that the tenets of our discipline may still adhere in the most unexpected of contexts.