Prometheus is regarded as a hero. He stole fire from the gods and gave it to humanity, he taught them technology and craft, he made them independent. So runs the standard reading, and so the modern human being likes to understand himself: as heir to an act of liberation that creates autonomy through knowledge. The question this reading screens out is the punishment. Zeus chains the Titan to the Caucasus, and an eagle eats his liver from his body every day, which regrows overnight. The myth tells not only of gain but of a cycle of transgression and self-destruction that never ends.
#The Temptation, Not the Liberation
The promethean impulse is not a single technological achievement. It describes a fundamental attitude: the civilisational drive to do everything that can be done, no matter how pointless or destructive the result. Not the invention of the wheel, but the compulsion to invent is the signature. Whoever diagnoses the promethean impulse is not asking about this or that device but about the motivation that carries an entire civilisational project.
This motivation has a structure: destroy and replace. The alchemical-promethean basic trait of modernity consists in substituting living systems with technical artefacts and booking the resulting destruction as a side effect or transitional phase. The robotic bees designed to replace extinct pollinator populations are not progress. They are a symptom that this civilisation’s priorities do not lie with the living.
#From Spengler Through Mumford to Kirchhoff
Oswald Spengler argued in Der Mensch und die Technik (1931) that in its late phase, the Faustian striving of Western culture becomes its own undoing. The technical power that humanity has unleashed obeys no inner order any longer, only its own logic of escalation (cf. Spengler, 1931). Spengler saw in Prometheus not the liberator but the tragic figure who breaks upon his own hubris.
Lewis Mumford concretised this diagnosis through the concept of the mega-machine: a social and technical structure that converts every life-process into a mechanical procedure. The decisive point of Mumford’s analysis in The Myth of the Machine (1967) is that the mega-machine is not an apparatus but a principle. It describes the self-perpetuation of technical rationality in which liberation no longer means a gain in alternatives (cf. Mumford, 1967). The machine produces a freedom that is no freedom, because it systematically shrinks the space for the non-mechanical.
Jochen Kirchhoff (1944-2025) radicalised this line by tracing the promethean impulse back to its metaphysical foundation. In his Anti-Geschichte der Physik (1991), he showed that technological civilisation rests upon an unconscious metaphysics: the assumption that the cosmos is a dead mechanism which can be disassembled, replicated, and improved. In this perspective, the promethean drive to replace life and reconstruct consciousness is not an expression of human greatness but a symptom that access to the living has been buried. Where Spengler described cultural-morphological exhaustion and Mumford the self-perpetuation of technology, Kirchhoff named the metaphysical core: a civilisation that considers the cosmos dead has no choice but to want to replace the living with artefacts.
#Clever, but Not Wise
The subtlest form of the promethean impulse wears a friendly face. It does not want to destroy; it wants to understand. It does not want to abolish consciousness; it wants to rebuild it. It argues that the alternative to technological modernity is the slavery of the feudal society, and that any attempt to question the promethean path amounts to a relapse into pre-modern conditions. The argument is not trivial. The freedoms that scientific and technological progress has created are real. The possibility that two people can publicly discuss the meaning of civilisation while thousands listen, without any gatekeeper deciding whether the church or the state permits it, is an achievement. Whoever denies this becomes unbelievable.
But the argument has a blind spot. The only two options it admits are promethean progress or regression. The possibility that there is a third direction — one that possesses technical capability yet is not subject to the compulsion to implement everything feasible — does not appear within this framework. Precisely this third direction is the point of departure for natural philosophy.
The difference lies not between more or less technology, but between cleverness and wisdom. The clever person can build, disassemble, optimise. The wise person can judge whether they should. Where cleverness asks how something can be done, wisdom asks what kind of spirit motivates the desire to do it. The technologist must permit this question — not as an attack, but as a diagnosis.
#Herzensbildung as Counter-Direction
The promethean impulse operates in the mode of escalation: faster, more powerful, more comprehensive. What it lacks is not technical competence but what Gwendolin Kirchhoff calls Herzensbildung — the cultivation of the capacity to take one’s own feeling, one’s own relatedness to the cosmos and to other human beings, seriously as a compass. This is not sentimentality. It is the return to the question that the promethean impulse skipped: what is our relationship to living nature? What is our relationship to death? What is our relationship to transcendence?
The question of a full-humanist future — not a transhumanist one — begins precisely here. It does not start with technology but with the inner constitution of the person who applies technology. The promethean human being invests their ingenuity in escalation, while the ingenuity that serves the living can barely gain traction in society’s incentive structures. A landscape architect who can stabilise regional climate patterns is more ingenious than an algorithm that monetises attention. Yet the incentive structure of the mega-machine rewards the second and ignores the first.
When you observe the promethean impulse in yourself — the drive to solve a problem through optimisation rather than pausing — this is not a character flaw. It is the milieu in which you live. The diagnosis makes visible the impulse that masquerades as normality. And only what becomes visible can be questioned.
The pathogenesis diagnosis describes the structure of what the promethean impulse causes. The cosmic anthropos describes what the human being is beyond this narrowing.
#Sources
- Kirchhoff, J. (1991). Anti-Geschichte der Physik: Neue Vorstellungen ueber die Natur. edition dionysos.
- Mumford, L. (1967). The Myth of the Machine: Technics and Human Development. New York: Harcourt, Brace & World.
- Spengler, O. (1931). Der Mensch und die Technik. Munich: C.H. Beck.