The Dialectics Of Enlightenment And Myth: A Critique Of Scientific And Technological Rationality

Mary Shelly,a prominent English female author in 19 th century,the wife of the great poet Percy Bysshe Shelly.Frankenstein,her magnum opus,is regarded as the founder of modern western science fiction.The paper,based on the rational reflection of the western ideological and theoretic realm in the 20 th century,combines the tragic fate of the rational subject in the novel,and reveals the “alienation” crisis brought by the development of scientific and technical rationality to the times and individual mind.The paper is divided into three parts.The first chapter describes the tragic fate of the rational subject in the novel,mainly taking “Victor” and “monster” as the examples,combining the origin and development of subject philosophy,and discusses the different origins of the two tragedies.The “mad scientist”,such as Victor and Walton,are the most typical examples of the spirit of conquering the nature in that era.On the one hand,they believe that the power of reason is omnipotent and human can conquer and control the nature with the development of science and technology.On the other hand,it is “superstition of science” that causes a sharp expansion of the subject spirit,making them compare themselves to the “creator”.With Victor's miserable life,Mary Shelly reveals the falsity and fragility of the so-called “Cogito” rational subject.In addition to Victor,the female writer has made great efforts to shape the image of “monster”,especially after the rise of psychoanalysis in 20 th century,the “monster's” desire to “pursue the recognition” and the bloody feuds after his failure of identity have been given a more reasonable explanation.Under the perspective of psychoanalysis,the reflection and interpretation of the formation of “monster's” subjectivity outline the profound destiny of the subject philosophy.The second chapter analyzes the alienation of science and technology to the development of human beings embodied in the novel.On the one hand,The instrumental tendency of rationality results that people want to go out of blindness with the rationality to “self-preservation” originally,but they turn into a path with no way back of “self-sacrifice”.Under the mechanization production,countless ordinary people,like Victor,who toil over drafting boards all day,have lost their ability to listen to Siren's song of nature,and they could only be bound to the mast of a ship like Odysseus.The alienation of science and technology rationality also reflects the increase in bloody violence.Whether the endless killing caused by the “monster”—the product of science and technology in the novel,or the two world wars that swept the world in the real world,which are all related to the development of science and development.The homogeneity pursued by the science and technology turns death into mechanized assembly that erases individual human differences,and massacres are reduced to a small button on a missile controller that can take away tens of thousands of lives easily.The third chapter starts from the criticism of scientific and technological rationality,teases out the origin and development of rationality of science and analyzes the cultural roots of the critique of scientific and technological rationality.The paper discusses the profound influence of Mary Shelly's husband on her writing,and analyzes the aesthetic features of Gothic novel and disproves the development of scientific and technological rationality from the perspective of the evolution of literary history.Finally,from the standpoint of the alternation of the old and new eras,the paper combines with the occurrence and development of “post-human” revolution in the age of artificial intelligence,and looks forward to how human beings will achieve their foothold and orientation in the new around of “artificial man” movement across the Rhodos.