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But all human history is the rejection of man's "natural condition" to recreate him using technics. The Enlightenment marks an acceleration in this but it's not like humans weren't trying to improve on their natural lot before it, it's just that around the time of the Enlightenment they got much better at it, so much better at it that scientific progress started to seem like it would just keep going and going rather than being something that happened once in a blue moon. Man's "natural condition" is to live naked without knowledge of agriculture or even how to make fire. Man has been rejecting it for hundreds of thousands of years.
I also think that philosophy's impact on politics is overestimated. Totalitarianism would probably have come about one way or another because of the rise of modern technologies that allow near-instant communication and dissemination of propaganda.
As for transgenderism, haven't there been versions of it in various human cultures for thousands of years? Modern transhumanism is not what created it. I doubt that transhumanism even did much to give it its modern, Western shape. Probably most transgender people don't even think in abstract terms of freeing their mind from their body, their concerns are more specific.
This is absolutely untrue, and you only believe this because you're a man of the Enlightenment living in a society made according to its principles.
People of the past did not think like this. Technological escape from man's condition was a very secondary concern if you actually look at what they left as artifacts of their thinking.
What you value of what they produced and what they valued of themselves are not the same categories, and people always confuse the two.
You're thinking in tautologies here. All you're attempting to relate nature to here are relationships of production. There are other things in life than making transformed goods that can fit on a spreadsheet. And before the advent of this period dominated by merchants, people thought of those are more important.
Are war, honor, faith and family more or less constitutive of man's natural condition than agriculture and business?
As you know, this is a longstanding debate in historiography. But I think sole technological determinism the likes of which you seem to be supporting here is almost entirely falsified. If only because we're not currently living under Both great men and ideology have a seat at the table of causality. Were Marx and Kant not to exist, the manifestations of the industrial revolution would take a distinctly different character, if through similar means.
Consider how similar and yet different those totalitarianisms of the XXth century are from each other despite being determined by supposedly similar technology.
No. Androgyny is eternal and its popularity recurs. Transgenderism in particular (both in ideological terms and in technical terms) is wholly new.
Gender theorists are constantly producing propaganda to pretend the past agrees with their novelty, a stratagem borrowed from the one used for homosexuality, but people of the past did not thing of things in those terms and it doesn't make sense to paint social edge cases of completely different social orders using contemporary social theories. No person born before the 1990s ever was "queer" in the sense these people mean.
This is like saying the proletariat always existed because at any time in history you can point at people who have more than others. Useful propaganda. But sociologically moronic.
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The Enlightenment didn't just accelerate the rejection of the natural condition, it marked a turn where the rejection of that natural condition became the end goal.
For most of history, in Christian Europe at least, technology progressed and people worked to improve their lot, but the main motivation (culturally if not individually) was to help the poor, and to improve people's lives in order to help them better serve their community and God. This motivation wasn't necessarily written down anywhere, because everything in this worldview was about serving God.
The ultimate purpose, the thing that gave people the motivation to get up in the morning and work on improving their lot despite their often terrible material circumstances, was the love of God. The belief that the divine was on their side and cared about them personally, that they were fundamentally flawed in many ways, and that by doing good they could save their soul:
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