The contemporary epoch of a knowledge society requires a new approach to understanding knowledge, which is different from what was basic during the modern era up to now. The foundation of knowledge can no longer be understood by assuming its ultimate origin in a rational subject. The implications of the new approach to knowledge have fundamental impact on ethics in the knowledge society.
The essay gives a detailed and selective overview over the discussion of transhumanism and posthumanism, taking account of the most influential authors‘ impact on the movement. Their most important texts are bound to mark the scientific development of posthumanistic and transhumanistic concepts. Examples taken from literature, film and artistic performance show their impact in public, being both enriched by the scien-tific approach and guiding also the latter.
The article deals with the idea of artificial people in literature and film, using examples from the literature and the history of film it is shown that the idea of artificial people has always existed. With the increase of technical innovations, more and more scenarios developed by artificial people, to the formation of the idea of the cyborg.
In the following, a new conceptual framework for investigating nowadays‘ „technical“ phenomena shall be introduced, that of formats. The thesis is that processes of formatting account for our recent conditions of life, and will do so in the very next future. It are processes whose foundations have been laid in modernity and which will further unfold for the time being. These processes are embedded in the format of the value chain, a circumstance making them resilient to change. In addition, they are resilient in themselves since forming interconnected systems of reciprocal causal circuits.Which leads to an overall situation that our entire „Lebenswelt“ became formatted to an extent we don’t fully realize, even influencing our very percep-tion of it.
In the first part of this paper a short history of Western humanisms (Socrates, Pico della Mirandola, Descartes, Kant) is presented. As far as these humanisms rest on a fixation of the ‘humanum’ they are metaphysical, although they might radically differ from each other. The second part deals with the present debate on trans- and posthumanism in the context of some breath-taking developments in science and technology.
Angeletics, a theory of messengers and messages, intends to give an answer to the leading question of this paper, namely: ‘what does it mean to go beyond humanisms?’ The conclusion exposes briefly an ethics of hospitality and care from an angeletic perspective.
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