Sam Ben-Meir – March 10, 2024

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 possible. Del Toro’s Frankenstein can be read as a dramatization of this inversion. Victor Frankenstein and the Creature are not merely creator and created; they are two distorted expressions of the same freedom. Victor represents reason severed from relation—the fantasy that creation can occur without responsibility. He wants creation without exposure, form without fellowship. He brings life into the world but recoils from the responsibility that follows. His crime is not that he creates, but that he abandons—that he refuses to remain with what now exists because of him. The Creature, by contrast, embodies the dark ground laid bare. He is pure individuation without mediation: hunger for recognition, rage born of exclusion, selfhood without a place to belong. He is terrifying not because he is monstrous, but because he reveals something we prefer to keep hidden—the raw, unintegrated forces beneath our moral self-image.

Both Victor and the Creature suffer from inversion. Victor denies the ground; the Creature is consumed by it. Neither allows relation to order freedom. This is what makes del Toro’s adaptation so relevant to contemporary crises. The film does not rely on villains in the traditional sense. Victor is not a sadist. The Creature is not a demon. Instead, we see a tragedy born of procedural neglect—a pattern that echoes throughout modern life.

We build systems whose consequences exceed our capacity to assume responsibility for them. We optimize, innovate, automate—and then step back, surprised by the outcomes. Climate change, algorithmic governance, supply chains, surveillance technologies: none of these emerged from a desire to destroy the world. They emerged from creation without sustained responsibility.

In Schelling’s terms, this is the ground asserting itself without being ordered by love. It is freedom turned inward, refusing relation, refusing exposure to consequence. Although Frankenstein is often framed as a theological warning—don’t play God”—del Toro’s film is better understood as a post-theological parable. God does not appear here as judge or lawgiver. What remains is the problem theology once addressed: who answers for what exists?

In biblical creation stories, creation is inseparable from covenant. God does not merely make the world; God remains in relation to it, addresses it, sustains it. Creation without covenant would not be divine creation at all—it would be abandonment. Victor’s sin, then, is not blasphemy but withdrawal. He refuses covenant. And the Creature’s tragedy is not that he exists, but that he exists without a world willing to receive him.

One of the most devastating aspects of the story—already present in Shelley, intensified by del Toro—is that knowledge does not save. The Creature learns language, history, moral reasoning. He understands goodness precisely because he is denied it. Enlightenment does not humanize him; it sharpens his pain.

This is another Schellingian insight. Knowledge alone cannot heal inversion. Moral awareness does not reorder freedom. Without relation—without love—knowledge becomes sterile, even cruel. This matters today, when we often assume that better information will solve our crises. We know more than ever about climate systems, social inequality, technological risk. Yet knowing has not translated into care. We have knowledge without reconciliation.

At this point, Günther Anders’ critique of Prometheanism becomes unavoidable. Anders argued in The Obsolescence of the Human that the defining tragedy of modernity is not hubris, but the widening gap between what we can make and what we can meaningfully assume responsibility for. We produce realities—technological, ecological, political—that exceed our capacity for imagination, remorse, or care. Victor Frankenstein is not guilty because he plays God, but because he cannot endure the presence of what he has brought into the world. His abandonment is not a failure of knowledge, but of moral scale. Read this way, the Creature is not only the dark ground of freedom made visible, but the embodiment of Anders’ Promethean surplus: the remainder of creation that cannot be integrated, managed, or disowned without catastrophe.

Here del Toro’s ending becomes decisive. Forgiveness does not undo the past; the dead remain dead. It is a decision in the depths—a free act that reorders freedom itself. Forgiveness here is not forgetting. It is not absolution. It is the refusal to let guilt or grievance become the final principle of identity. Victor’s forgiveness acknowledges entanglement: I cannot stand outside what I made.” The Creature’s forgiveness refuses reduction: I will not let abandonment define my essence.” This is not moral consolation. It is metaphysical courage, exposure without excuse.

Our age is marked by two opposing temptations. One is denial: to minimize damage, externalize responsibility, insist that no one could have known. The other is total condemnation: to freeze guilt into identity, to reduce actors to villains and victims with no remainder. Del Toro’s Frankenstein, read through late Schelling, rejects both. It insists that responsibility persists after innocence is gone, and that reconciliation does not erase darkness—it integrates it.

This is the only posture available in a world that cannot undo what it has made. We cannot return carbon to the ground by wishing harder. We cannot unbuild digital infrastructures that already mediate our lives. We cannot restore social trust by pretending betrayal never occurred. What we can do is reorder freedom: refuse abandonment, remain with consequences, integrate the ground rather than projecting it outward.

Importantly, del Toro’s forgiveness offers no promise of a better future. It does not guarantee redemption, progress, or harmony. It does not reassure us that things will turn out well. This is why the ending is so severe—and so honest. Forgiveness here is not hope. It is responsibility without guarantee.

Late Schelling would recognize this immediately. Freedom, for him, is not secured by outcomes. It is revealed in decisions that reorder existence even when no reward is assured. Read this way, Frankenstein becomes a parable not about monsters, but about modern adulthood. It asks whether we can live with the consequences of our creative powers without fleeing into denial or despair.

Del Toro offers no consolation. Forgiveness here does not promise restoration or harmony. It does not make catastrophe meaningful. It binds the creator to the created without dissolving guilt or injury. What has been made stands. What has been damaged stands. The only freedom that survives is whether we abandon what exists because of us—or remain exposed to it. Responsibility does not disappear when innocence does. It hardens. It does not reassure. The question is no longer whether we should create. It is whether we can endure the presence of what we have brought into the world.

Sam Ben-Meir is an assistant adjunct professor of philosophy at City University of New York, College of Technology.