Description
Prometheus
oil on gesso board, 30″ x 40″
Original Painting Available! Please send private email inquiry if interested.
As recounted in Plato’s dialogue, Protagoras, in a time before man, the gods formed mortal creatures out of substances of the earth fused with fire. Prometheus and Epimetheus were given the duty of endowing the living things attributes based on a principle of compensation, to aid each species in their survival. Epimetheus begged his brother to allow him the honor of distributing the qualities himself, insisting that Prometheus could review his work after he had finished. Exhilarated, he set to task; he armed some creatures with weapons, others with keen faculties of preservation. Some beasts were granted strength over speed, while others who were given smallness were afforded feathers for winged flight. In his delight, Epimetheus managed to use up the extent of the allotted powers before realizing that man had been left unequipped.
When Prometheus returned to inspect his brother’s efforts, to his dismay he found man had been forgotten and remained naked and unarmed. In a state of distress, he ascended the heavens and stole directly from Hephaestus and Athena the aptitude of skill in the arts paired with fire, as without divine fire there would be no way to be afforded the use of the skill. Providing this supplement for man’s ontological deficiency, it essentially became man’s first technology, which granted him his very means for survival. Thus, as Bernard Stiegler accounts in his continuing thesis of Technics and Time, the name “man” inherently means “technical life”, as the reality of man is tantamount to its relationship with the technical; the mortal being is doomed to endlessly construct new artifices in order to survive and flourish. Steigler believes this connection is key towards revealing the processes of our future dynamic as a species, where the fusion of the human and the technical will inevitably persist.
“Sophia and tekhné are nothing without fire, with all that this connotes of duplicity, given that it concerns the fire stolen by Prometheus. Fire, in the hands of mortals, is a power of the divine origin through whose mediation, in sacrifice, the mortals put themselves in the place of the gods. Fire is not, however, the power of mortals, it is not their property; it is much more a domestic power that, when escaping the technical mastery of this domesticity, reveals, reveals its wild violence, disclosing the powerlessness of mortals, only appearing in their hands, yet again, through disappearing.”[1]
[1] Stiegler, Bernard, Technics and Time, 1: The Fault of Epimetheus. Page 199
