Tuesday, December 03, 2019
We all need a little Faust in our mental cupboard
Philip Humm’s Very Last
Faust
Dr.
Faustus plunges his deepest roots in our Middle Ages and the first great
artistic recuperation seems to be Marlowe's play, "Dr. Faustus." Then
there are a few great dates and moments for that Faust. Goethe is, of course,
essential with his "Faust 1 & 2." Then Berlioz's "Damnation
de Faust." Then Gounod's "Faust." Mephisto(pheles) was also the
subject of many musical compositions. The Latest Faust I know in this field is
Pascal Dusapin's "Faustus, The Last Night," 2006.
Philip Humm's "The Last Faust" is interesting by the desire to transfer Faust from the Middle Ages or bourgeois puritan Germany to the modern world and Artificial Intelligence. You may think the work is more about the dangers of AI than about Faust, but you can read it as if Faust had always represented the dangers of knowledge and science in the human world, which is the oldest fundamentalistic belief and imposed credo of the Catholic church, and in many ways of the Lutheran and Puritan churches and chapels, if not sects, starting after the more than 50% death toll of the Black Death starting its tour de force in 1449 in Europe. Faust is in a way a salvaging Danse Macabre (check the one in La Chaise-Dieu, France.
Faust
is one of the oldest myths in Europe that does not have to do with Christianity
directly but only indirectly, via the mythical Mepshitopheles and the
fundamentalism of the Catholic, Lutheran, and Puritan ethical/unethical
dictatorships. Can we think Faust in a modern technical and scientific world?
Can Artificial Intelligence be the perverting invention that could disrupt
humanity into extinction faster than Climate Change, or in association with
Climate Change? These questions are central for us and our students. Research
is just starting to envisage this question.
Publication Date: 2019
Publication Name: Medium.com
# posted by Dr. Jacques COULARDEAU @ 3:13 AM 
