A Time of Monsters

Frankensteinism Old and New

Jacob Elordi and Bryan Johnson as Frankenstein’s monster.

Victor Frankenstein, the “Modern Prometheus” of Mary Shelley’s 1818 novel, draws on his biochemical studies at the University of Ingolstadt to create life by reanimating the dead. While the gothic elements of Shelley’s narrative have ensured its place in the pantheons of popular horror, it is also arguably the first instance of science fiction, used by its young author to interrogate the Prometheanism that animated the intellectual culture of her day.

Prometheus—the titan who steals fire from the Olympian gods and for humankind, suffering imprisonment and torture at the hands of Zeus as a result—was an emblem for both socio-political emancipation and techno-scientific mastery during the European enlightenment. These two distinct models of progress are often confused, then and now, with disastrous results, as Shelley dramatizes over the course of her novel.

Frankenstein embarks on his experiment to demonstrate that “life and death” are merely “ideal bounds” that can be surpassed. His aim is to conquer death and “pour a torrent of light into our dark world.” Yet Frankenstein’s motives are not entirely beneficent, as we can see in the lines that follow:

A new species would bless me as its creator and source; many happy and excellent natures would owe their being to me. No father could claim the gratitude of his child so completely as I should deserve their’s. Pursuing these reflections, I thought, that if I could bestow animation upon lifeless matter, I might in process of time (although I now found it impossible) renew life where death had apparently devoted the body to corruption.

The will to Promethean mastery over nature merges here with a will to power over other humanoid, if not entirely human, beings. Frankenstein abandons his creation, with catastrophic results for the creature, his family, and himself.

Oscar Isaac as Victor Frankenstein in Guillermo del Toro’s Frankenstein (2025).

Over the two centuries since its publication, “The Modern Prometheus” has been read too simply—as a cautionary tale regarding the pitfalls of techno-scientific hubris, invoked in regard to the atomic bomb or genetic engineering, for example, which it is in part. It should be read as its author’s incisive meditation on a pair of “false friends”—authentic freedom and its corrupted, demonic Doppelgänger.

If we survey the history of the twentieth century, this caution is understandable. Even in the twenty-first, a new Frankensteinism has taken hold among the digital overlords of Silicon Valley. Our neo-Frankensteins include techno-capitalists from Elon Musk and Peter Thiel to Ray Kurzweil and Sam Altman in addition to transhumanist fellow traveler Bryan Johnson, who draws on the blood of his son in a techno-Gothic flourish worthy of Shelley (or perhaps Stoker). These transhumanist Frankensteins explicitly pursue immortality and divinity, as they strive to build indestructible bodies or merge with their supercomputers; preferably on their own high-tech floating island, or perhaps off-world, as the earth and its masses burn in a climate catastrophe entirely due to the depredations of industrial capitalism and its growth imperative.

Elon Musk with a model of Tesla’s Optimus robot.

This last point is significant, as it represents the most recent example of the way progress-as-emancipation—social and political freedom and equality for all, including non-human nature—is distinct from and often at odds with progress as technological development: a distinction that many of today’s techno-utopians embrace under the rubric of a “dark enlightenment,” in a seemingly deliberate echo of Victor Frankenstein.

Mary Shelley’s great theme, again, is exactly the substantive difference between these two models of progress and enlightenment, which are intertwined for historical and ideological reasons: a tragic marriage. It is no coincidence that she chose to explore this problem in a tale of tortured familial relationships, which includes a fantasy of male birth alongside immortality.

Such ruminations were both a personal and family matter for her, as the daughter of radical enlightenment intellectuals, Mary Wollstonecraft and William Godwin. While her mother died a few days after her birth, Mary was raised according to strict radical enlightenment principles by her father, who in his 1793 Enquiry Concerning Political Justice and its Influence on Morals and Happiness argues against the state, private property, and marriage. In this text, Godwin also predicts a future when human beings, perfected through the force of reason, would achieve a sexless, sleepless, god-like immortality. Is this not a 1790s-era version of the technological Singularity?

James Northcote, William Godwin, 1802. Oil on canvas.

Godwin would later modify these proto-futurist views—in the wake of his wife’s death and a debate with the Reverend Thomas Malthus—even as he maintained his radical political commitments. Nevertheless, his early work demonstrates the extent to which radical enlightenment thinking was entwined, from the very start, with “dark enlightenment” in today’s parlance, ranging from accelerationism to singulatarianism and ecomodernism. By the same token, his subsequent revision of his earlier views offers us an early example of how we might separate an emancipatory social and political program from those Promethean dreams of technological mastery used by capitalist and state socialist ideologues to justify development at any cost.

Godwin defines the “justice” that animates his 1793 Enquiry Concerning Political Justice as that “which benefits the whole, because individuals are parts of the whole. Therefore to do it is just, and to forbear it is unjust. If justice have any meaning, it is just that I should contribute every thing in my power to the benefit of the whole.” Godwin illustrates his definition with a hypothetical scenario that provoked accusations of heartlessness among both conservative detractors and radical allies at the time. He asks us to imagine a fire striking the palace of François Fénelon, the progressive archbishop of Cambray, author of an influential attack on absolute monarchy:

In the same manner the illustrious archbishop of Cambray was of more worth than his chambermaid, and there are few of us that would hesitate to pronounce, if his palace were in flames, and the life of only one of them could be preserved, which of the two ought to be preferred. But there is another ground of preference, beside the private consideration of one of them being farther removed from the state of a mere animal. We are not connected with one or two percipient beings, but with a society, a nation, and in some sense with the whole family of mankind. Of consequence that life ought to be preferred which will be most conducive to the general good. In saving the life of Fénelon, suppose at the moment when he was conceiving the project of his immortal Telemachus, I should be promoting the benefit of thousands, who have been cured by the perusal of it of some error, vice and consequent unhappiness. Nay, my benefit would extend farther than this, for every individual thus cured has become a better member of society, and has contributed in his turn to the happiness, the information and improvement of others.

This passage illustrates the consequentialist perfectibilism that distinguished the philosopher’s theories from those of his better-known contemporaries, such as Thomas Paine, with his theory of natural right and social contract, or even utilitarian Jeremy Bentham. As Mark Philp explains, “only by improving people’s understanding can they become more fully virtuous, and only as they become more fully virtuous will the highest and greatest pleasures be realized in society.” In other words, the unfortunate chambermaid must be sacrificed if that is what it takes to save the philosophe whose written output will benefit multitudes by sharpening their rational capacities, congruent with the triumph of reason, virtue, and human emancipation.

Or, as Godwin himself goes on to make this line of reasoning clear, imagining himself in the position of the chambermaid:

Justice would have taught me to save the life of Fénelon at the expence of the other. What magic is there in the pronoun “my,” to overturn the decisions of everlasting truth?

Godwin amends the puritan rigor of these positions in subsequent editions of his work, as he came to recognize the value of affective bonds and personal attachments. But here in the first edition of Political Justice we see a pristine expression of his rationalist radicalism, for which the good of the whole necessitates the sacrifice of a chambermaid, a mother, and one’s own self to Reason, which Godwin equates with the greatest good.

The early Godwin here exemplifies a central antinomy of the European enlightenment, as he strives to yoke an inadvertently inhuman plan for human perfection and mastery to an emancipatory vision of egalitarian social relations. Godwin pushes the Enlightenment-era deification of ratiocination to a visionary extreme in presenting very real inequities as so many cases of benighted judgment waiting for a personified, yet curiously disembodied, Reason’s correction in the fullness of time and entirely by way of debate. It was this aspect of Godwin’s project that inspired John Thelwall, the radical writer and public speaker, to declare that while Godwin recommends “the most extensive plan of freedom and innovation ever discussed by a writer in English,” he “reprobate[s] every measure from which even the most moderate reform can be rationally expected.” E.P. Thompson would later echo this verdict in his Poverty of Theory, when he compared the vogue for structuralist—or Althussererian—Marxism among certain segments of the 1970s-era New Left to Godwinism, which he described as another “moment of intellectual extremism, divorced from correlative action or actual social commitment.”

Godwin blends a necessitarian theory of environmental influence, a belief in the perfectibility of the human race, a perfectionist version of the utilitarian calculus, and a quasi-idealist model of objective reason into an incongruous and extravagantly speculative rationalist metaphysics. The Godwinian system, in its first iteration at least, resembles Kantian and post-Kantian German idealism as much as it does the systems of Locke, Hume, and Helvetius, Godwin’s acknowledged sources. So, according to Godwin’s syllogistic precepts, it is only through the exercise of private judgment and a process of rational debate—“the clash of mind with mind”—that Truth will emerge, and, with Truth, Political Justice; here is a model of enlightenment that resonates with Kant’s roughly contemporaneous ideal-type of progress and Jürgen Habermas’s twentieth century reconstruction of that ideal in the form of a “liberal-bourgeois public sphere.” It is for this reason, and in spite of his conflicted sympathies with French revolutionaries and British radicals alike, that the philosopher rejects both violent revolution and the kind of mass political action exemplified by Thelwall and the London Corresponding Society, hence Thelwall’s and Thompson’s damning judgments. Rational persuasion is the only feasible way of effecting the wholesale revolutionary transformation of “things as they are” for Godwin.

But this precise reconstruction of Godwin’s philosophical and political system does not capture the striking novelty of Godwin’s project. In the example above, we find a supplementary argument of sorts running underneath the consequentialist perfectibilism. Although we can certainly read in Godwin’s disparagement and hypothetical sacrifice of both a chambermaid and his own mother a historically typical, if unconscious, example of the class prejudice and misogyny the radical philosopher attacks at length in this same treatise, I would instead call attention to the implicit metaphor of embodiment and natality that unites maid, mother, and Godwin’s own unperfected self. The chambermaid is one step closer to the “mere animal” from which Fénelon, or his significantly disembodied work, offers an escape. If the chambermaid were rational in the Godwinian sense, she would easily offer herself as sacrifice to Fénelon and the Reason that finds a fitting emblem in the flames that consume our hypothetical building. While Godwin underlines the disinterested character of this choice in next substituting himself for the chambermaid, his willingness to hypothetically sacrifice his mother points to his rigid rejection of personal attachments and emotional ties.

The figure of the mother—whose embodied life Godwin would consign to the fire for the sake of Fénelon’s future intellectual output and its refining effects on humanity—is an overdetermined symbol that unites affective ties with the irrational fact of our bodily and sexual life: all of which must and will be mastered through a Promethean process of ratiocination indistinguishable from justice and reason. If one function of metaphor, according to Hans Blumenberg, is to provide the seedbed for conceptual thought, Godwin translates these subtexts into an explicit vision of a totally rational and rationalized future in the final, speculative, chapter of Political Justice. It is here that Godwin responds to those critics who argued that population growth and material scarcity made perfectibilism impossible with a vision of humans made superhuman through reason.

Here is the characteristically Godwinian combination of “striking insight” and “complete wackiness,” which emerges from the “science fictional quality of his imagination” in the words of Jenny Davidson. Godwin moves from a prescient critique of oppressive human institutional arrangements, motivated by the radical desire for a substantively just and free form of social organization under which all human beings can realize their capacities, to a rationalist metaphysics that enshrines Reason as a theological entity that realizes itself through a teleological human history. Reason reaches its apotheosis at that point when human beings become superhuman, transcending contingent and creaturely qualities, such as sexual desire, physical reproduction, and death, eviscerated like so many animal bodies thrown into a great fire.

We can see in Godwin’s early rationalist radicalism a significant antinomy. Godwin oscillates between a radical enlightenment critique that uses ratiocination to expose unjust institutional arrangements—from marriage to private property and the state—and a positive, even theological, version of Reason, for which creaturely limitations and human needs are not only secondary considerations, but obstacles to be surpassed on the way to a rationalist super-humanity that resembles nothing so much as a supercomputer, avant la lettre.

Many critics of the European Enlightenment—from an older Godwin and his younger romantic contemporaries through twentieth-century feminist, post-colonial, and ecological critics—have underlined the connection between these Promethean metaphysics, ostensibly in the service of human liberation, and various projects of domination. Western Marxists, like Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno (1947) overlap with later feminist critics of the scientific revolution, such as Carolyn Merchant (1980), in naming instrumental rationality as the problem. As opposed to an ends-oriented version of reason—the ends being emancipation or human flourishing— rationalism as technical means for dominating the natural world, or managing populations, or disciplining labor, became the dominant model of rationality during and after the European enlightenment, in keeping with the ideological requirements of a nascent capitalism and colonialism.

But in the case of the early Godwin and other Prometheans, we can see a substantive version of reason which overlaps with the critical philosophy of Hegel, the philosophical foundation of Marxism and the Frankfurt School variant on display in the work of Adorno and Horkheimer. Perhaps the problem with Prometheanism is that its proponents’ ideal-type of technological rationality is not instrumental enough: rather than subordinating reason or technology to human flourishing and collective human agency, the proponents of Prometheus enslave collective human (and creaturely) ends to a vision of reason indistinguishable from a fantasy of an autonomous technology with its own imperatives.

Langdon Winner, prime theorist of autonomous technology as idea and ideology in twentieth-century industrial capitalist (and state socialist) societies, underlines this reversal of means and ends or what he calls “reverse adaptation.” It entails, as he puts it:

The adjustment of human ends to match the character of available means. We have already seen arguments to the effect that persons adapt themselves to the order, discipline, and pace of the organizations in which they work. But even more significant is the state of affairs in which people come to accept the norms and standards of technical processes as central to their lives as a whole.

Winner’s critique of “rationality in technological thinking” is made even more striking when we consider that the early Godwin’s Promethean force of reason, as evinced by the final chapter of the 1793 Political Justice—in contradistinction to the ethical and political rationalism that is also present in the text—anticipates twentieth and twenty-first century techno-utopianism. For Winner, “if one takes rationality to mean the accommodation of means to ends, then surely reverse-adapted systems represent the most flagrant violation of rationality.”

This version of rationality, still inchoate in the eighteenth-century speculations of Godwin, takes mega-technological systems as models, rather than tools, for human beings, as Günther Anders argues—against those who depict anti-Prometheans as bio-conservative defenders of things as they are just because they are that way. The problem with Prometheanism does not reside in its adherents’ endorsement of technological possibilities per se so much as their embrace of the “machine as measure” of individual and collective human development. Anders converges with Adorno and Horkheimer, his Marxist contemporaries, for whom this “machine” is a mystified metonym for irrational capitalist imperatives.

Unknown, Ned Ludd or Leader of the Luddites, 1812. Hand-colored etching.

Rationalist humanism becomes technological inhumanism under the sign of Prometheus, which, according to present day “accelerationism” enthusiast Ray Brassier, must recognize “the disturbing consequences of our technological ingenuity” and extol “the fact that progress is savage and violent.” Brassier, operating from avowedly nihilist premises, nonetheless recalls the 1793 Political Justice in once again defining rationalism as a reinvigorated Promethean “project of re-engineering ourselves and our world on a more rational basis.”

Accelerationists strive to revive both rationalist radicalism—with the omniscient algorithm standing in for the perfectibilists’ reason—and the Promethean imperative to reengineer society and the natural world, because or in spite of the ongoing global climate change catastrophe. Rather than the great driver of an ecologically catastrophic growth, self-described “left” accelerationists Nick Williams and Alex Srnicek argue that capitalism must be dismantled because it “cannot be identified as the agent of true acceleration”; their motto #accelerate is a shorthand for their attempt to reboot a version of progress that arguably finds its first apotheosis in the 1790s. Brassier’s defense of Prometheanism takes the form of an extended reply to various critics, whose emphasis on limits and equilibrium, the given and the made, he rejects as in thrall to religious, and specifically Christian, notions. Brassier, who outlines his rationalism as systematic method or technique without presupposition or limits—along the lines of “God is dead, anything is possible”—seems unaware of actual material limitations and the theological, specifically Gnostic, origins of a very old human deification fantasy, the Enlightenment-era secularization of which was arguably first recognized by Godwin’s daughter in her Frankenstein.

The Godwin of 1793 in this way also and more dramatically looks forward to our own transhumanist devotees of the coming technological singularity, who claim that human beings will soon merge with immensely powerful and intelligent supercomputers, becoming something else entirely in the process, hence “transhumanism.” According to prominent Silicon Valley “singulatarian” Ray Kurzweil, “The Singularity will allow us to transcend these limitations of our biological bodies and brains. We will gain power over our fates. Our mortality will be in our own hands. We will be able to live as long as we want (a subtly different statement from saying we will live forever).”

Kurzweil explicitly frames this transformation as the inevitable culmination of a mechanically teleological movement; as such, he illustrates the paradoxical character of a Promethean futurism that, in seeking both human perfection and mastery, seeks to dispense with the human altogether:

The Singularity will represent the culmination of the merger of our biological thinking and existence with our technology, resulting in a world that is still human but that transcends our biological roots. There will be no distinction, post-Singularity, between human and machine or between physical and virtual reality. If you wonder what will remain unequivocally human in such a world, it’s simply this quality: ours is the species that inherently seeks to extend its physical and mental reach beyond current limitations.

Even more than the accelerationists, Kurzweil’s Singulatarianism illustrates the “hubristic humility” that defines twentieth- and twenty-first century Prometheanism or Frankensteinism, according to Anders. Writing in the wake of the atomic bomb, the cybernetic revolution, and the mass-produced affluence exemplified by the post-war United States, Anders recognized how certain self-described rationalist techno-utopians combined a hubristic faith in technological achievement with a “Promethean shame” before these same technological creations. This shame arises from the perceived gap between human beings and their technological products; how, unlike our machines, we are “pre-given,” saddled with contingent bodies we neither choose nor design, bodies that are fragile, needy, and mortal. The mechanical reproducibility of the technological system or industrial artifact represents a virtual immortality that necessarily eludes unique and perishable human beings, according to Anders. Here Anders seemingly develops the earlier work of Walter Benjamin, his cousin, on aura and mechanical reproduction—but in a very different direction. As Anders writes: “in contrast to the light bulb or the vinyl record, none of us has the opportunity to outlive himself or herself in a new copy. In short: we must continue to live our lifetimes in obsolete singularity and uniqueness. For those who recognize the machine-world as exemplary, this is a flaw and as such a reason for shame.”

Rutger Hauer as Roy Batty in Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner (1982).

Although we can situate the work of Godwin at the intersection of various eighteenth- and nineteenth-century discourses, including perfectibilist rationalism, civic republicanism, and Sandemanian Calvinism, on the one hand, or anarchism and romanticism, on the other, I will argue here that in juxtaposing Godwinism with present-day analogs like the transhumanism or accelerationism briefly described above, we can see the extent to which older—late eighteenth- and early nineteenth- century—utopian forms are returning, lending some credence to Alain Badiou’s claim that

We are much closer to the 19th century than to the last century. In the dialectical division of history we have, sometimes, to move ahead of time. Just like maybe around 1840, we are now confronted with an absolutely cynical capitalism, more and more inspired by the ideas that only work backwards: poor are justly poor, the Africans are underdeveloped, and that the future with no discernible limit belongs to the civilized bourgeoisie of the Western world.

We can also see in recent conflicts between accelerationists and certain partisans of radical ecology the return of another seeming antinomy—one which pits cornucopian futurists against Malthusians, or at least those who emphasize the material limits to growth and how human beings might reconcile ourselves to those limits—that has its origin point in the Reverend Thomas Malthus’s anonymously published An Essay on the Principle of Population, as it affects the Future Improvement of Society with remarks on the Speculations of Mr. Godwin, M. Condorcet, and Other Writers (1798). Though a full discussion of this thinker would take us too far afield (for that I refer the reader to the original version of this essay in boundary 2), suffice it to say that Malthus’s demographic response to Godwinism led in turn to a long running debate and the rise of an ostensibly empirical political economy that took material scarcity as its starting point.

If we examine Malthus’s initial response, alongside the Political Justice of 1793, we can observe several shared assumptions and lines of continuity that unite these seemingly opposed perspectives, as each of these thinkers delineates a recognizably bio-political project, for human improvement and population management, in left and right variants. Each of these variants obscures the social determinants of revolutionary movements and technological progress. Finally, it was as much Godwin’s debate with Malthus as the philosopher’s tumultuous and tragic relationship with Mary Wollstonecraft that precipitated a shift in his perspective regarding the value of emotional bonds, personal connections, and material limits: seemingly disparate concerns linked in Godwin’s imagination through the sign of the body. The body also functions as metonym for that same natural world, the limits of which Malthus brandished in order to discredit the utopian aspirations that drove the revolutionary upheavals of the 1790s; Godwin later sought to reconcile his utopianism with these limits. This intellectual reconciliation—which was very much in line with the English romantics’ own version of a more benign natural world threatened by incipient industrialism, as opposed to Malthus’s brutally utilitarian nature—was a response to Malthus and the early Godwin’s own early Prometheanism, best exemplified in the final section of 1793 Political Justice.

Indeed: two generations of Romantics—from Wordsworth and Coleridge through De Quincey, Hazlitt, and Shelley—sought to counter Malthus’s version of the natural world as resource stock and constraint with a holistic and dynamic model of nature, under which natural limits and possibilities are not inconsistent with human aspirations and utopian hopes.

A hint in this direction can be found in the work of those great Romantics, and one of their notable forebears, themselves. In his late Essay on Sepulchers, Godwin reaffirms his commitment to the utopian anarchism of Political Justice, with the caveat that any radical future must recognize both the past and remember the dead. He draws a tacitly anti-Promethean line between our embodied mortality and utopian political aspiration, severing the two often antithetical modes of progress that constitute a dialectic of European enlightenment. While first-generation Romantics, such as Wordsworth and Coleridge, abandoned the futurist Godwinism of their youth, alongside their “Jacobin” political sympathies, for an ambivalent conservatism, the second generation of Romantics, including the extended Godwin-Shelley circle, combine the emancipatory social and political commitments of Political Justice with an appreciation of the natural world and its limits. One need look no further than Frankenstein and Prometheus Unbound—the Shelleys’ revisionist interrogations of the Prometheus myth and modern Prometheanism, which should be read together—to see how this radical romantic constellation represents a bridge between 1790s-era utopianism and later radicalisms, including Marxism and ecosocialism.

Instead of the science fictional fantasies of total automation and decoupling, largely derived from the pre-Marxist socialist utopianisms that drive today’s various accelerationisms, this Romanticism provides one historical resource for thinking through a decelerationist radicalism that dispenses with the grand progressive narrative: the linear, self-sustaining, and teleological model of improvement, understood in the quantitative terms of more, shared by capitalist and state socialist models of development. Against Frankensteinism both old and new, let us reject the false binaries and shared assumptions inaugurated by the Godwin/Malthus debate, and instead join hands with the Walter Benjamin of the “Theses on the Philosophy of History” (1940) in order to better pull the emergency brake on a runaway capitalist modernity rushing headlong into the precipice. Toward another green world.

Leonora Carrington, Map of The Human Animal, 1962. Watercolor and ink on paper.