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Victor Frankenstein’s technoscientific dream of reason - C C - Dec 31, 2024
Victor Frankenstein’s Technoscientific Dream of Reason
https://thereader.mitpress.mit.edu/victor-frankensteins-technoscientific-dream-of-reason/
EXCERPTS: For Mary’s readers in 1818, Victor’s aspirations did not fit “in this enlightened and scientific age”; they were out of sync with rational theory and the modern discoveries of chemistry.
Cover for "Frankenstein"
So the creature is not a product of modern science, and yet we fancy Victor as a mad scientist in a laboratory filled with fumes and sparks from modern apparatus. How is it that this premodern mystical alchemist appears so contemporary today?
The answer is as easy as it is provocative: perhaps today’s “Frankenfoods” and “Frankenmaterials” are not the products of modern science, either, but a return to alchemical dreams of reason. Undisturbed by reality, they are “animated by an almost supernatural enthusiasm.”
Indeed, Mary’s novel suggests not only that magic and alchemy preceded science but also that science can infuse and revive their prescientific ambitions. Victor’s teacher M. Waldman points him in this direction when he portrays modern science as a rite of passage that will allow Victor to reclaim the alchemist’s desire to “bestow animation upon lifeless matter.” In and of itself, the world of science is a disenchanted world with causal knowledge about the arrangements of facts. But before and beyond the enlightened and scientific age lies a rather more magical world, enchanted and animated by almost unlimited powers
[...] Contemporary technoscience is undisturbed by reality in that it flaunts its inventions that surpass the limited vocabulary of forms and shapes in nature; it is undisturbed by reality in that it draws on scientific understanding to generate a degree of complexity that exceeds the natural intellectual power of human minds; and it is undisturbed by reality in that it creates monsters — lifeless things that appear to be animated by a mind or a soul as well as lively, talkative, and animated things that are merely machines. And as we are learning to live and interact with such monster... (MORE - missing details)