Claire Isabel Webb
Claire Isabel Webb directs the Future Humans program at the Berggruen Institute, where her work explores the radical scientific transformations shaping life, mind, and outer space. She is a historian and theorist of biology, space exploration, and speculative science.
Note
Always a world for us, never
the nowhere minus the no:
that innocent, unguarded
space which we could breathe,
know endlessly, and never require.
— Rainer Maria Rilke, "Eighth Duino Elegy"
Diotima asks: “What will life become?”
Synthetic biologists invent chimerical objects that defy traditional boundaries of biology and machine; AI researchers train computational media toward cognitive and agential properties; artists create virtual worlds that transport us beyond familiar embodiments. These and many other phenomena trouble the ontological outlines of “the human” that we have inherited in Western modernity. They reframe this enduring question.
The question should not promise predictive or prophetic answers, but instead stimulate imaginations and materializations of what we hope life will be for future humans and the multifarious creatures with whom we will always be entwined. “What will life become?” prompts us to seek wisdom without requiring satiation. It is this perpetual striving for, not landing on, wisdom that shapes beneficial futures.
We can look back to the ancient philosophers for inspiration:
Imagine a banquet in Athens, 24 centuries ago. As Plato tells us, poets and philosophers deep in their cups debate the quality of Eros. Does love require an object of passion and affection?, they wonder. Is it equivalent to lust? Is it a sensation, a figure? Agathon, the party’s young and beautiful host, identifies with Eros, imagining a god with a “beauty of his skin [that] shines for the life he lives with the flowers.”
Wry Socrates refutes the poet’s concept, arguing that Agathon doesn’t appreciate that Eros emerges always in relation to what one doesn’t possess. Love then occupies an interstitial place, always caught between desire and lack. Socrates tells the party how he learned about Eros from the wise woman Diotima.
Eros’ parents forged his fate: from his mother, Poverty, Eros is “always impoverished…always in need” but from his father, Resource, is at the same time “a schemer for beautiful and good things.” Eros is thus in a perpetual state of longing, yearning for the good and beautiful but always operating in a lack. Love is not static or decided upon; it is instead a dynamic performance that glimpses the beautiful while never fully grasping it. Eros strains toward, but never captures, the divine.
Diotima explains: “[Eros] is intermediate between mortal and immortal. He is a great daemon. All mingling and dialogue between the gods and men take place through this intermediary, both in wakefulness and dreams. Mortal nature always seeks as much as it can to exist forever and achieve immortality.”
Eros, then, speaks to the human desire to transcend our mortal state to inhabit, not merely perceive briefly, wisdom, a most beautiful thing. “Eros is a philosopher,” a lover of wisdom, always seeking, always seeking.
For the ancient Greeks, Eros, the pursuit of wisdom, and true beauty were profoundly correlated. These concepts have defined the pillars of modern philosophy and morality. Wisdom-seekers today—writers, scientists, explorers, artists—experience the divine as an ephemeral, not sustained phenomenon.
But it is in these brief moments of transcendence that humans now and in the future should seek out, cultivate, remember, stretch toward:
The deep kiss of a lover when time falls away;
an epiphanic understanding of some gnarled, esoteric text;
a flow state when playing Bach’s Cello Suites;
the clicking into place of scientific theory and experiment, yielding a flash of insight about the cosmos.
Such moments are not quite of this realm. Yet the pursuit of wisdom and beauty—Eros’ cycling between the mortal and the immortal—describes what it means to be human, alive, and to love. Life, like love, is always in a state of becoming.
Launched in 2026 as a publication of Future Humans, Diotima takes the Greek wise woman as its namesake.
Diotima represents humans’ quest for beauty, knowledge, and wisdom—a never-ending, always incomplete, celebration of life on Earth and beyond.