4.Prometheus Unbound

Prometheus Bound, like all classical tragedies, is part of a trilogy. In fact, it is the first part.From the second part, Prometheus Unbound, only a number of fragments, some 40 verses in all, are preserved.And of the third part, Prometheus the Fire-Bringer, not much more is known than the probable theme：the cult of Prometheus in Attica.However, since the first part of the trilogy contains a number of anticipations of what follows（which befits a tragedy about one who“looks ahead”），we can form an impression of the main subjects of the last two parts.In the second part of my lecture, the Titan Prometheus was described being chained to a rock‘for all eternity'by Zeus as a punishment for stealing fire and technology from the gods and giving them to mankind；every day an eagle came to pick out his liver.In Prometheus Bound however Prometheus foresees that one day“Zeus be hurled from his sovereignty”.[141]The foresighted Prometheus knows that fate has decreed that the sea nymph Thetis will one day bear a son who will become mightier than his father.And Prometheus also knows that Zeus has taken a fancy to her.Furthermore Prometheus, who has apparently“colonized”a large part of the future, knows that his visitor Io will once give birth to a son who will free him from his captivity.

In Prometheus Unbound Zeus, who is no longer a ruthless tyrant but has become a wise and mild god, makes peace with the other Titans. Only Prometheus refuses to submit to Zeus'authority so long as Zeus does not set him free.After the hero Heracles, a descendant of Io and Zeus, has shot down Zeus'eagle does Zeus agree to unbind Prometheus.Prometheus in his turn reveals his secret about Thetis.In Prometheus the Fire-Bringer Prometheus gets his own cult.All's well that ends well.

Although Prometheus Bound as I said has a rather static character, its reception history is impressive.“Yet Prometheus bound, despite the summary action and characterization, may well have become the most acclaimed tragedy of Antiquity：twenty-five centuries have stood in admiration for the Sufferer and Benefactor of mankind, symbol of progress and culture, fighter for human emancipation, the proud, self-confident Titan, who perishes in an overwhelming, apocalyptic spectacle”.[142]Among Prometheus'early admirers is Plato.Not only does Prometheus emerge in several dialogues, but in his Academy Plato had even dedicated an altar to this Titan.Considering Plato's interest in the technical control of human fate his interest in Prometheus is not so strange.Prometheus maintains this significance for Neo-Platonism.

In the Christian Middle Ages however Prometheus（despite his resemblance to Jesus：both save man by taking his suffering upon themselves）was mainly viewed as the negative counter image of the Christian creator. He symbolized human hubris.In the 18th and 19th century Prometheus begins to play an important role in literature, the arts and music.For the Enlightenment thinkers and the Romantics alike he becomes the pre-eminent symbol of theModern Age.It is in this period that Prometheus becomes“unbound”，for it is only since the 16th and 17th century that“science and technology”take a giant leap forward.Not only the physical sciences（culminating in Newton's mechanics）and related technologies（like the steam engine）but also cultural technologies such as printing, which, though already invented in the middle of the 15th century, was to transform Europe's social and cultural landscape deeply and on a wide scale only in the following centuries.

That it took so long for Prometheus to become unbound may have something to do with the exponential nature of technological development. In exponential developments the short-term effect is small but the long-term increase is spectacular.People—and apparently even forward-looking Titans, witness the fact that Prometheus is reported to have said in Prometheus the Fire-Bringer that he has been chained to his rock for 30，000 years—tend to overestimate the short-term effects of exponential developments while greatly underestimating those in the longer term.If we add to this that at the time of the Industrial Revolution there was also a crucial qualitative development in the history of technology—with the steam engine mechanical instruments were supplemented and soon supplanted by machine technology—then we start to gain an impression of the effects of Prometheus'unbinding！Within a few decades Europe was transformed fundamentally and on an unprecedented scale.The steam engine was more than an apparatus that allowed the hitherto largely agrarian and feudal society to perform certain tasks more efficiently and effectively than before.Machine technology played a crucial role in creating a capital and energy-based market economy and new social classes and conflicts of interest.Not only work conditions were changed by the Industrial Revolution, also the rise of large industrial centers drastically altered the housing and living conditions of the European population.Politics and government too underwent fundamental changes in this period.Partly owing to bourgeois liberalism and worker-based socialism European society became more democratic and egalitarian in a relatively short time.Prometheus unbound also affected the world view.Influenced by the rise of the modern physical sciences and industrialization there occurred a“mechanization of the world picture”[143]that was difficult to square with the Christian world view that had already lost much of its relevance as a result of the Enlightenment.

The transformation undergone by Europe since the 16th century may be called“awesome”in the double meaning of the word. On the one hand it filled people with huge admiration.Francis Bacon's call in The New Atlantis at the start of this period to“put nature on the rack”in order to control her and make her serve mankind did not fall on deaf ears.The“wonderful works”that would become possible—from the cure of previously incurable diseases and the improvement of crops to producing new materials and substances—very quickly left their visionary state to become daily reality.On the other hand these developments also encountered strong resistance and fears from the very beginning.They spelled the ruin of the old aristocratic culture and alienated man from traditional social networks and ideals.Conservative aristocrats argued for a return to the old political order and culture；Luddites followed Ned Ludd in smashing up machinery；Marxists and anarchists criticized the growing divide between rich and poor and pointed to the alienating influence of the capitalist method of production.It was clear that the new god Prometheus was Janus-faced.For modern man technology is both fascinans and tremendum.Prometheus embodies both the promise to liberate man from suffering and the spectre of a force that will intensify human suffering to unprecedented height.

That Janus-face is also poignantly expressed by the image that the arts have painted of Prometheus. For the romantic poet Percy Bysshe Shelley（1792—1922）Prometheus embodies the ultimate hope for a better world.In Prometheus Unbound（1818—19），which was inspired by the lost second partof Aeschylus'trilogy, Shelley presents Prometheus as the symbol of a wisdom that helps man to overcome his suffering and make the earth into“one brotherhood”.[144]Although Shelley as a romantic sees this blessed brotherhood as an alluring ideal rather than a state that could become reality, the view of nature and technology that it presupposes is nevertheless remarkably optimistic.Man has a natural goodness and does evil only out of ignorance.If man with Prometheus’help were able to overcome his ignorance he would spontaneously strife for the good and salvation would be his part.This optimism is more typical of Socratic man than of the tragic world view of the great tragedians！

Mary Shelley（1797—1851），daughter of the feminist Mary Wollstonecraft and wife of the poet, however, was of the opposite opinion—as sometimes happens in marriages. In 1818，the year Percy completed the first part of Prometheus Unbound, Mary published her novel Frankenstein, written three years earlier.Its subtitle was called A Modern Prometheus.[145]The protagonist of Mary's Gothic novel is Victor Frankenstein, who in his researches discovers a way to bring dead material to life.From a number of body parts of corpses he creates a companion.When the creature opens his eyes he does not seem to be evil but he looks so monstrous that Frankenstein rushes out of his laboratory.In the course if the story the monster kills several relatives and friends of Victor and finally even becomes responsible for the death of Victor, before he is overtaken by remorse and kills himself.

Mary Shelly's Frankenstein is sometimes called the first science fiction novel. It is one of the first in a long tradition of mostly dystopian imaginings of the unbridled growth of technology.Their central theme, that technology allows man the use of forces he can hardly contain, is already fully developedin Frankenstein.As the technologization of European culture progresses its dark sides become increasingly manifest.Especially the large-scale exploitation and devastation of nature and the creation of awesome weapons of mass destruction like the nuclear bomb are responsible for the growing anxieties about technology.Particularly when man himself becomes more and more“the main raw material”of technological control.[146]This is especially the case with biotechnology and information technology which are inaugurating an Informational Revolution whose impact may well turn out to be larger than that of the Industrial Revolution.In these sciences the body and mind of man become the ultimate object of technology.

Although uneasiness about technology is growing, developments continue unabated. That may partly be attributed to the fact that there are also many people who have not abandoned their faith in technology and are actively working to develop it further.Nor do technology's critics always put their doubts and criticism into action.Technological culture, after all, has proved very beneficial to Western culture, bringing with it a level of prosperity that even Bacon could never have imagined.The average European and North-American lives on a level of wealth and social security which in the feudal age was beyond the reach of even the mightiest rulers.It is not easy to say goodbye to all this.Moreover, technological development seems more and more to have become an autonomous, self-driven system, an extremely effective and efficient interplay of science, technology and the capitalist economy.[147]Science provides an understanding of the laws of nature and society, technology applies them and the capitalist economy, driven on by an unabating competition subject to permanent acceleration, provides the required means of production.Other economies are wiped out or forced to imitate the capitalist system.Whoever opposes the system will perish in this competition.The science/technology/capitalism system seems to become wholly independent of human control.It connects micro-rationality with macro-irrationality.“The aimlessness, the irrationality of the system as a whole is concealed by the extreme rationality of the component systems”（idem，29）.

It is not surprising that the 20th century saw the rise of a technological determinism in which the autonomy of technology is a crucial important concept.[148]According to this view technology develops independently of man in accordance with the principle of the technological imperative：what is technically possible will sooner or later be put into practice.That autonomy should not be taken too literally at first.Until now technologies have always been designed, created and used by people.Yet one can say that the unpredictable and uncontrollable side-effects of our intentional actions give technology a fate-like character.As Latour shows in his work, technology constantly generates new ends until it itself becomes the final end.And the rise of artificial intelligence and artificial life makes all our talk of an autonomously developing technology increasingly less metaphorical.

At the moment, however, we are still at the steering-wheel ourselves. But that does not mean that the future course of technology is really in our hands.The unmanageability of our technological mega-systems brings home to us the fact that there are clear limits to human freedom and self-determination.Our situation as tragic technicians is comparable to that of the tragic artist described by Nietzsche in Die Geburt der Tragödie.As we are artificial by nature we are carried along by technical powers that break loose from nature itself.In this orgiastic union of man and machine, human beings are—to transfer Nietzsche's analysis of the tragic artist to the domain of technology—no longer are technicians but have become instruments of these“techno-Dionysian”powers.

It would be a tragic illusion—due to miscalculation, blindness, or hubris—to think that we could fully steer, let alone stop the progress oftechnology. But this does not imply that we are not forced to makes choices or that we should not take responsibility for the future development of technology.We find ourselves on a vast and stormy ocean of unbound technologies.We must make the best of it, whether we like it or not.As a consequence of the ever increasing growth of the world's population, the impact of our way of life and production on the climate and the global ecosystem, and the unintended stimulation of new biological and virtual viruses we are simply forced to“play God”—however inadequately we are equipped for that.

In this age of technology we can no longer expect—as Nietzsche still did under the spell of Romanticism—art to save us. However, this doesn't mean that art has no role to play anymore.Just as the Greek tragedies such as Prometheus Bound did, art in the Age of Unbinding Technologies ought to articulate our technological condition beyond the illusionary opposition of optimism and pessimism.Art cannot save us, but it can help us to feel somewhat less unheimlich in the technological world we are are part of.Art can make us familiar with our“promethean prostheses”.And perhaps could make us at once somewhat less blind with regard to our technological hopes and desires.Though this will not prevent our technologies to crash and our selves to suffer.For that reason art should cherish the most precious gift Prometheus gave to man.The gift that in the final analysis distinguishes man from the gods：the ability of pity with those who suffer.

My stance would be than that art should learn us how best to play with fire. Or as Ronald Dworkin has fittingly expressed it：

Playing God is indeed playing with fire. But that is what we mortals have done since Prometheus, the patron saint of dangerous discoveries.We play with fire and take the consequences, because the alternative is cowardice in the face of the unknown.[149]

（作者为国际著名美学家，荷兰鹿特丹BRASMUS大学哲学教授，信息哲学与传播技术研究院导师。主要研究领域为美学、艺术哲学、新媒介与信息交流、技术哲学）