Philosophy and Literature

Abstract:

Mary Shelley's Frankenstein has been read and reread for decades as a cautionary myth about science. The interpretation is well known: a gentler, gradualist science is preferable to the aggressive Enlightenment rationality that spawned the Creature. However, I argue in this essay that such a distinction between "safe" and "dangerous" science is largely effaced in the novel itself. By reading Frankenstein alongside Adorno and Horkheimer's Dialectic of Enlightenment, I aim to demonstrate that Shelley levels a radical critique of how modern science mediates our moral world by dissolving the boundaries between civilization and nature, enlightenment and barbarism.