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Psychonauts and seekers here have long embarked on quixotic quests to transcend our common reality, employing everything from natural medicine and meditation to man-made chemicals and high-tech “transhumanism.”

I first encountered Rothblatt, a biotech entrepreneur and lawyer who founded satellite radio company SiriusXM, at a 2013 conference on futurism and transhumanism, a field focused on enhancing humans using technology.

Their most extreme form, so-called transhumanism—with its fixation on existential risk, digital minds, and genetic engineering—is the reigning ideology of some of the world’s most powerful individuals and institutions.

Yet, Nietzsche’s parable is not only remarkable in its anticipation of contemporary transhumanism as a philosophy centered on the belief that it is humanity’s destiny to bend the limits of mind and matter to our evolutionary advantage.

His work also anticipates transhumanism as a politics.