As temporal creatures, nervously feeding a shortening future into a lengthening past, we attribute to the gods a timeless mode of being and an existence in total simultaneity. Therefore Faust’s craving for the “highest moment” really amounts to the ultimate hubris; he is reaching for more than mere superiority among men—more than Macbeth, who would be king, and more than Oedipus, the incomparable solver of riddles who was the king and came to know it too late. Faust reaches for divinity and is “hell-bent” to burst out of his imprisonment in temporality.
are we not striving for the same with the Singularity? the quest for immortality?
