1/12/2024 0 Comments Prometheus unboundBacon, however, treats that which was traditionally a means as an end unto itself. Traditionally, power had been the means to some greater end: monarchs for instance, justified their absolute power (fallaciously) in a Hobbesian sense as a means to peace, social harmony, and order. The end of Baconian knowledge is power, and this is precisely why it is nefarious. These inhibitions represented his four “idols,” which prevented the advancement of the “kingdom of man”-his words, not mine.īacon was the man who famously declared that “knowledge itself is power,” ushering in the new age of scientific management and applied science. Bacon deemed traditional social institutions and long-held philosophical convention as dogmatic and therefore erroneous. What was new, however, was Bacon’s disdain for knowledge other than that ascertained through empirical means, observable and tested via the senses. In the 17 th century, Francis Bacon revolutionized epistemology with his radical empiricism, which spawned his Novum Organum, or “new instrument,” which we know today as the “scientific method.” In actuality, there was nothing new about it, as inductive reasoning or small truths coalescing together to form some semblance of a logical conclusion, had been practiced since the time of Aristotle or even before. Gruesome and grotesque was the punishment of Prometheus, though his revolution against the gods was the impetus for Mary Shelley’s Victor Frankenstein. While Prometheus is the benefactor and creator of humanity, his revolution against the divine order cost him dearly, as he was chained to a rock, whereby an eagle (the iconographized form of Zeus) would incessantly peck out and regurgitate his internal organs. In one ilk, he molded humanity (and then subsequently furnished humans with fire) out of clay to aid the titans in their struggle against the gods. In the Promethean Allegory, Prometheus is both hero and villain. Mary Shelley however, hearkened back to the more conservative, previous generation of Romantics, who grounded their enthusiasm for the natural world in Christianity. Percy and Godwin, and to a lesser extent Mary Shelley’s own mother, Mary Wollstonecraft, were cavalier provocateurs, social radicals and self-described atheists-who lived to push the envelope in their quest to “liberate” humanity from long-established social convention and hierarchies. In response to her husband, Percy Shelley, and her father, the renowned William Godwin, Mary Shelley penned Frankenstein, or the Modern Prometheus. In Romantic circles of the 19 th century, allusions to the Promethean allegory “abounded.” Percy Shelley wrote Prometheus Unbound while Lord Byron wrote Prometheus. how dangerous is the acquirement of knowledge and how much happier that man is who believes his native town to be the world, than he who aspires to become greater than his nature would allow.” -Victor Frankenstein Certainly if he goes on his present course much further man can not be trusted with knowledge” -C.S. “I agree Technology is per se neutral: but a race devoted to the increase of its own power by technology with complete indifference to ethics does seem to me a cancer in the Universe. Today humanity continues its quest to maximize its knowledge, not to attain truth, but in a bid to achieve a new age of heaven on earth, powered by the rule of applied science. Mary Shelley was perhaps the first to illuminate modernity’s insatiable appetite for temporal progress.
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