After creation: Frankenstein and the burden of what we make |
We live in a world littered with things we have made and no longer know how to live with. Our technologies scale beyond our capacity to govern them; our systems generate consequences no one claims; our knowledge outruns our moral imagination. Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818) has become the foundational myth of this condition. It is not primarily a warning about scientific hubris. It is the drama of responsibility after creation—the question of whether we can remain with what we have brought into being.
Guillermo del Toro’s Frankenstein (2025) returns to Shelley’s myth at a moment when its meaning has become difficult to ignore. The film does not treat the story as a moral fable about reckless invention but as a parable of responsibility after creation—and, more provocatively, of forgiveness after catastrophe. Unlike many retellings of the novel, del Toro’s version concludes with mutual forgiveness between Victor Frankenstein and the Creature. Some viewers have taken this as a softening of Shelley’s severity, as if redemption were being offered where the original narrative withholds it.
But this reading misunderstands the nature of the forgiveness on offer. Del Toro’s ending is not consolatory. It does not erase damage, restore innocence, or promise a future free of consequences. Read through the philosophy of the late Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling, the film’s forgiveness appears instead as something far rarer and more demanding: a metaphysical act that reorders freedom itself. This is not a story about making peace with the past. It is a story about learning how to live with what we have brought into the world—without denying the darkness that made it possible.
To see why del Toro’s Frankenstein speaks so directly to our moment, it helps to recall Schelling’s later reflections on freedom. Freedom, he suggests, does not begin in clarity but in a dark ground—a pre-rational striving toward selfhood without which no individuality could exist. This ground is not evil; it is the condition of being. But when the inward pull toward self overtakes relation and love, freedom distorts. Evil is not mere wrongdoing but inversion: selfhood taking precedence over relation.
In this framework, moral failure is not just about breaking rules. It is about misordering the forces that make freedom........