Post-Historic Man

Discussion

Synthesis by DeepSeek, prompted by Michel Bauwens:

Roderick Seidenberg and the Post-Historical Thesis

Roderick Seidenberg, in his 1950 book Posthistoric Man: An Inquiry, offers a parallel diagnosis of the "end of history." His thesis is that human history is a brief, transitional phase between a long prehistory and an imminent posthistory.

Seidenberg traces this as a movement from instinct to intelligence. In prehistory, instinct dominated. In history, conscious intelligence has progressively gained control over one human activity after another, transferring authority from the organic and purposeful to the causal and mechanical. The endpoint is post-historic man: a being under the universal control of a depersonalized "intelligence" (closely aligned with technology), living in an "Ant-like" state of "icy fixity." Seidenberg views this as a dystopian, essentially predetermined outcome, where human purposes are swallowed up by a mechanical process.

Lewis Mumford on Post-Historic Man

Lewis Mumford, in his essay "Post-Historic Man" (chapter 34 of Interpretations and Forecasts, and also a chapter in The Transformations of Man), directly engages Seidenberg's thesis. Mumford agrees that a post-historic man represents a dark future already visible, a "replacement of historic man by a new form". He summarizes Seidenberg's argument: the instinctual life of man has been losing its grip as conscious intelligence gains firmer control, detaching from the organic and attaching to the causal and mechanical.

However, Mumford maintains a critical distance. He argues that post-historic man—the "wholly subservient creature of the machine"—is a "theoretic possibility, not a historic probability." He warns against the naive assumption that a single, predetermined line of development will inevitably prevail. For Mumford, the very act of assuming such a future also implies a false claim to adequate knowledge, ignoring the latent, creative, and emergent forces of life. His essay is thus both a profound diagnosis of the threat and a call to consciously choose a different path toward a "world culture" and "human prospects," rather than surrendering to a dehumanized alter ego.

More information

Seidenberg, Roderick. Posthistoric Man: An Inquiry. University of North Carolina Press, 1950. Mumford, Lewis. "Post-Historic Man." In Interpretations and Forecasts: 1922-1972. Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1973.

Mumford, Lewis. "Post-Historic Man." In The Transformations of Man. Harper & Brothers, 1956.

On transhistorical consciousness, see : Raimon Panikkar on the Experience of Time, in his book, The Cosmotheandric Experience, in which he explains the Differences Between Non-Historical, Historical and Trans-Historical Visions