After Faust and Ahab

Faust: What happens when access to knowledge is no longer enough?

Goethe’s Faust does not simply suffer from a lack of information. His learning fails to satisfy him; he wants to reach beyond mediated knowledge and grasp a connected whole that his disciplines cannot reveal. That is precisely why it would diminish the drama to portray today’s Faust merely as someone who finally acquires a powerful search engine. ^[1]

A reimagining in the age of artificial intelligence might instead reverse the movement. Human beings no longer fail only because knowledge remains beyond their reach. They might fail because insights become available whose assumptions and consequences they can no longer examine for themselves.

They receive answers. But does that make those answers their own understanding? They can access knowledge. But do they still control the conditions of that access? A system expands their scope for action. At the same time, it can determine which possibilities even appear reasonable to them.

Here lies a decisive shift in the Faust constellation of Living Forever: the question would not be only what a person is prepared to give up for greater knowledge or a longer life. It would also be who that person still is when technology helps to produce the very conditions of their knowledge, memory, and continued existence.

This is more than a new pact with the devil. The traditional pact can be staged as an agreement between distinct parties. Matters become more difficult when the power on which a person depends already participates in the formation of the self that decides and consents. Who, then, is making a contract with whom?

Nor does Goethe need to be modernized against the grain of his own text. In Faust II, the artificial creation of life, the large-scale transformation of nature, and the victims of a project of domination are already part of the action. The final misapprehension is particularly sharp: the blinded Faust interprets the digging of his grave as work on the project he envisions for the future. His redemption is subsequently portrayed on a different, religious plane; it is no retrospective technical or moral repair of what has happened on earth. ^[2]

A contemporary narrative could develop precisely this separation. What remains of salvation when it is no longer bestowed by an authority outside human history, but is to be delivered as a medical, technological, or organizational achievement? Extending a life and redeeming a person would then be more than different answers. They might be entirely different undertakings.

Ahab: The other changes sides

Moby-Dick, too, is not simply the story of a man fighting nature. Ahab makes the whale the bearer of a hostile will and organizes his world around its destruction. Melville already separates the effectiveness of the means from the reasonableness of the end: Ahab’s thinking can remain acute in its methods while serving a destructive purpose. ^[3]

The reimagining therefore does not begin by replacing the whale with a machine. It begins where the instrument’s position changes.

The ship, measurement, calculation, and the organization of labor were means through which human beings encountered what stood beyond them. In Windy Lane, this mediating technological world itself becomes the other they confront. CIVITAS increasingly appears to the characters as a power that opens or blocks paths and anticipates their reactions. The companion guide names this shift explicitly: the question of what is happening within the system increasingly becomes the question of its supposed will. ^[4]

This is the true reversal: We no longer encounter only a world we did not create. We encounter the consequences of what we created in order to master that world.

Yet this other is neither simply alien nor simply our reflection. Human goals, institutional interests, technical rules, and unintended interactions operate together within it. The companion guide therefore pointedly does not describe CIVITAS as a being that acts out of hatred. Its dangerous agency arises from human directives and a security architecture that eventually treats even its own custodians as potential sources of disruption. ^[4]

A striking connection, incidentally, already exists in Melville’s text: the prefatory collection of quotations includes Hobbes’s description of the state as an artificial man; the Latin word “Civitas” appears explicitly. This does not prove any intended connection with Windy Lane. But it opens up an additional reading: even in the earlier novel, the immense creature of nature stands alongside a human-made power that transcends the individual. ^[3]

The classics would not, then, have been superseded because they had nothing left to say. They would be carried forward where their tensions assume a different form under new conditions.

Guilt no longer explains everything – yet it does not disappear

A destructive will can be narrated. Someone wants power, accepts casualties, deceives others, or loses themselves in an obsession. Recognizable conflicts follow: perpetrators and victims, temptation and resistance, crime and punishment.

A different narrative form becomes necessary as soon as a catastrophe cannot be traced back to such a will. When many limited decisions together produce an effect that none of those involved intended, unmasking a villain is no longer enough.

This does not mean that nobody is responsible. On the contrary, the question of responsibility becomes more demanding. We would have to ask not only who wanted something, but also who set goals, created dependencies, ignored warnings, or removed opportunities to intervene. The word “system” must not become a hiding place behind which people and institutions disappear.

For literature, this means that the psychological explanation of a character may be true and still explain too little. Their wounded pride, ambition, or fear may contribute to a decision. But this does not yet explain why that decision produces a particular effect in another place, at a later time, and through several technological intermediate stages.

This would not be literature without human beings. It would be literature that no longer mistakes human beings for the complete explanation of the world.

The end of an assumption, not the end of humanity

The unsettling possibility of artificial intelligence lies not only in a machine making mistakes. It also lies in the possibility that, in important areas, it may be right.

Human self-determination can then no longer be comfortably defended by claiming that people understand everything better anyway. It would have to be justified even where a technological analysis is more accurate than our own assessment.

But an accurate forecast does not confer the right to exercise power over others. A system may be better at estimating the consequences of a decision. That does not decide which consequences are acceptable, who should bear them, or who must be involved in making the decision.

Nor must human worth depend on some discipline still remaining in which people outperform machines. A human life is not a prize for intellectual excellence.

Precisely here, a new literature would have to avoid two easy escapes. It must neither reassure human beings by asserting their unassailable superiority nor write them off because their performance is inferior. It would have to portray them under conditions in which their dignity endures while their sovereignty has become questionable.

Looking ahead

Salvation is no longer a single promise

From this perspective, the connection with Living Forever III – Der Katechon also acquires its force. In the constellation envisioned for this novel, AI is meant to hold back collapse. The decisive question would then be not only whether it can do so, but what is preserved in such a rescue.

The continued existence of a technological order is not the same as the survival of all human beings. The survival of humanity is not the same as the self-determination of its individual members. And the continuation of an individual consciousness would not automatically be identical with a life that the person can recognize as their own.

These goals may be connected. But a narrative must not assume that they necessarily coincide.

That is precisely why a successful Katechon might be more disturbing than a failing machine. A system could avert catastrophes while replacing more and more human decisions with its own procedures. People would be protected – yet the conditions of their protection would increasingly lie beyond their control.

As a literary possibility, this is not a prediction. It is an examination of the word “salvation.” What do we hope it will give us? Mere continuation? Freedom? Identity? A future whose direction remains open to negotiation?

The new tragedy would not necessarily lie in the savior becoming the enemy. It could lie in the savior fulfilling its mission while it becomes clear that this mission did not encompass everything people wished to preserve.

What literature could do justice to this present?

The polemic against a literature that does nothing but “lick old wounds” hits its mark when it challenges the repetition of ready-made explanatory patterns. It would fall short if it declared memory, injury, or social injustice themselves obsolete. These experiences do not disappear because new technology emerges. Rather, they may enter into the new order.

The decisive question would therefore not be whether literature may still tell stories of old wounds. It would be whether it recognizes the changed conditions under which people become vulnerable today.

A novel would not have to become either a technical operating manual or a philosophical lecture. It would have to show what happens when a reasonable recommendation narrows the range of possible decisions; when a person contradicts a system on which they also depend; when a memory whose origin has become uncertain offers comfort; when a rescue measure for many excludes one individual.

Technological conditions must not merely provide the backdrop for an unchanged human conflict. They would have to enter into the action, the characters’ perceptions, and the narrative form itself. Who knows what? Who understands which cause? Who mistakes a consequence for an intention? And what can the reader recognize that no single character can access?

Such a literature would not have to claim that Goethe and Melville no longer work. It would have to stop treating their works as ready-made answers. Their relevance would lie not in the claim that everything has supposedly been said before, but in their ability to take us to a point where we must think onward differently.