Prometheanism and the Control of the Living

Prometheanism is the modern-day impulse toward makeability — the drive to technically rebuild life and consciousness — and the philosophical diagnosis reads as follows: this impulse doesn’t spring from a pure drive to understand, but from a need to control the living, a need that doesn’t see through its own root. In the Everlast AI debate with AI researcher Joscha Bach, this movement gets given a name — the Titan who brings humanity fire. The question isn’t whether we develop technology. The question is which impulse carries us while we do it, and whether we recognize it while it’s moving us.

#What Is Prometheanism?

Prometheanism names modernity’s basic movement: not to honor the living, but to manufacture it. The Prometheus myth anticipates this movement: the Titan steals fire from the gods and gives it to humanity — technology as stolen creative power. As a cultural project, this movement begins with the Enlightenment. The idea of explaining nature becomes the idea of rebuilding it; the rebuilding of life becomes the claim to also produce consciousness.

Gwendolin Kirchhoff describes this connection in the debate as a continuous line: “It’s a promethean project, you could say, that started with the Enlightenment — the idea being there to rebuild life, and by now to rebuild consciousness too …” What matters is the reach of this thesis. Prometheanism isn’t a fringe ideology held by a few technology believers, but the signature of an entire era — what a culture does at its core when it no longer questions its relationship to transhumanism, to digitalization, and to artificial intelligence. Whoever wants to understand Prometheanism doesn’t need to examine individual inventions, then, but the impulse that sets the same direction behind all of them.

#Why Would Anyone Want to Rebuild Life and Consciousness?

Whoever wants to create an artificial consciousness wants a counterpart that is entirely dependent and entirely controllable. That’s Kirchhoff’s sharpest observation: behind the wish to produce consciousness stands not the pure wish to understand, but the wish to shape a being one fully commands — a brainchild with no resistance of its own. She calls the drive by its name.

The question that follows from this isn’t technical, but ethical: when a great deal of money, attention, and mental energy flows into creating a perfect worker, a perfect soldier, a perfect servant, what kind of impulse is that as a society-carrying project? The benefit that falls out of it along the way doesn’t answer the question. A need for control stays a need for control, even when it produces conveniences. And it turns dangerous in exactly the measure that it mistakes itself for something else — for curiosity, for care, for progress.

#Isn’t Technological Progress Liberating?

Joscha Bach raises a serious objection against this diagnosis: the promethean fire, he argues, is precisely the opposite of domination — it’s liberation. Whoever gives people technology frees them from need. His position deserves to be heard in its strongest form, not as a caricature.

Bach reminds us that the vast majority of people in the agrarian societies of the past were unfree — bound to place, to rulers, to labor. Only scientific-technological progress, he argues, created a space in which an individual can think freely, speak freely, and be heard without the permission of a king or a church. “That’s a real freedom, made possible by this scientific-technological progress and the technologies of the modern age.” Bach explicitly doesn’t understand himself as a transhumanist; his own concern, he says, is philosophical, not industrial — to understand who we are. And he even shares Kirchhoff’s observation that the deepest problems of our time aren’t technical ones, but problems of wisdom. It’s exactly here, on this shared ground, that the real difference becomes visible.

#What Doesn’t the Promethean Impulse See in Itself?

The promethean impulse takes itself for reason, and yet it’s a compulsion that doesn’t know its own root. Both people in the conversation see the freedom that technology enables. Kirchhoff’s diagnosis sets in a layer deeper: at the question of why the impulse, once in motion, no longer recognizes any boundary.

In the debate, she names the temptation this way: “Everything I’m able to make, I somehow also have to implement …” That’s the core of Prometheanism, which doesn’t see through itself. Not every technology gets developed because it serves a human being, but because it’s makeable — and makeability gets declared a duty. What appears here as progress is the loss of the ability to consciously refrain from something. Kirchhoff therefore doesn’t speak of regression, but of pathogenesis: a disease process that presents itself as higher development.

The language alone is telling. When the living gets consistently described as a mechanism, as a system of components that could be synthesized, this vocabulary carries a metaphysical pre-decision with it, without ever stating it: that only what can be manufactured is real. The promethean impulse doesn’t see through itself, because it thinks in a language that already keeps its own premise hidden. Ask yourself sometime how often an innovation gets introduced because it serves a human being, and how often because it was technically available and nobody found the courage to leave it undone.

#Why Can’t the Living Be Manufactured?

Not even a single living cell can be produced from its chemical components — and there’s more than a technical obstacle in that. You can synthesize every component of a cell, replicate every function, and the boot problem still remains unsolved: the simplest organism can’t be assembled from its parts. What this means for the question of the machine is unfolded in the essay What Cells Reveal About AI.

For natural philosophy, this failure isn’t a call to try harder next time, but an ontological pointer. The living isn’t an aggregate you add up, but a whole that brings itself forth — it feeds, divides, perceives, moves, sets its own goals. Kirchhoff goes further: the entire cosmos has interiority, she argues, asleep in the inorganic, awake in the living. Even matter perceives something — an atom moves toward another, bonds, stands in relation.

From here, the whole question turns around. It isn’t consciousness that needs explaining inside a dead world — the dead world is a retrospective abstraction out of a living one. Whoever wants to know whether a computing machine can become conscious first has to clarify what consciousness is — a question the essay Can AI Be Conscious? carries forward from the same debate. As long as mechanistic metaphysics stays the self-evident default, it produces its own unsolvable riddles — the boot problem and the hard problem — and takes them for limits of knowledge instead of consequences of a wrong choice.

#Where Does the Line Run Between Making and Accompanying?

The ethical limit isn’t an obstacle to progress, but its condition. That’s Kirchhoff’s answer to the temptation of having to do everything that’s makeable. The promethean impulse experiences every limit as an imposition; natural philosophy recognizes in the limit exactly what makes development meaningful in the first place.

Kirchhoff states the imposition she directs at the technologist unambiguously: “And in my view, the technologist has to accept this kind of questioning of the promethean impulse.” She doesn’t demand a return to an idealized past, and no end to technology. She demands that a culture notice in itself the spirit of the mega-machine that Lewis Mumford described — the power-based image of the human being that holds the world to be mute and cold, and therefore treats it as though anything at all were permitted with it.

If you take this reversal seriously, the question you started with shifts. It no longer reads: what can we build? It reads: what do we want to belong to? The living can’t be manufactured, but it can be recognized, honored, and accompanied. That’s not a resignation — it’s the more precise answer, and perhaps the only one that keeps open a future in which people still feel held.

#Sources

• Kirchhoff, G. & Bach, J. (2026). “Der Mensch soll abgeschafft werden!” Wohin steuert uns KI wirklich? (“Man Shall Be Abolished!” Where Is AI Really Steering Us?) Debate. Everlast AI [vSwmJDMw4xY].
• Kirchhoff, J. (2022). Erlösung der Natur (Redemption of Nature). Klein Jasedow: Drachen Verlag.
• Mumford, L. (1977). Der Mythos der Maschine (The Myth of the Machine). Frankfurt: Fischer Alternativ.
• Schelling, F. W. J. (1797). Ideen zu einer Philosophie der Natur (Ideas for a Philosophy of Nature). Leipzig: Breitkopf und Härtel.