‘In exchange for your immortal soul’ and all that, am I right?” The voice replies with a casual impatience: “Your soul? Oh, please… in this day and age?” From this very first exchange the game encourages a comparison with Goethe’s Faust - the most famous deal-with-the-devil story in Western civilization - while simultaneously suggesting that the times have changed, and that metaphysical morality isn’t what it used to be. Initially, you reject the offer: “I get it,” you call out. The voice belongs to a creature you will later learn is named Homunculus, who in appearance looks like an androgynous young person with red eyes and all-black clothing. A strange voice waxes vaguely on the challenges of averting fate, suggesting that it can help you reclaim your life. You wake up in purgatory, depicted as a room filled with oversized fallen statues, bookcases, and other historical detritus, all of it surrounded by an endless void. You are stabbed in the back on an empty street in a quaint European hamlet. Shadow of Destiny begins with your murder. The game is an astonishing work that, despite its substantial camp and silliness, manages all at once to be a compelling yarn about time travel and alchemy, an informed take on Western metaphysics, and a presage of the postmodern turn in videogames.
#Playstation 2 shadow of memories full
Developer Konami uses the term with full awareness of its long and varied history, and taken as a whole the game stands as a multi-tiered experience that touches upon all three of the major manifestations of the homunculus outlined above: the literal, the metaphorical, and the critical. It is the name given to the churlish overseer who helps guide you through the game world’s complex web of time and space.
#Playstation 2 shadow of memories ps2
The next important appearance of the homunculus in popular culture, at least in my view, arrived in the PS2 cult classic Shadow of Destiny (2001). The absurdity of a “little man inside your head” became a central argument for mid-century cognitivists to dismiss the study of metaphysics en masse : if there is a homunculus within you, processing stimuli and guiding your actions, then who processes its stimuli and guides its actions? Another homunculus, and so on through infinity? The impossibility of this model was used to advocate a separation between the studies of philosophy and brain science, an ironic new dualism that persists today.
In the 20th Century, the homunculus was adopted as a largely derisive term levied at Cartesian dualism, the notion of a separation between the material and immaterial, body and soul - the very distinction Goethe used the homunculus to illustrate. The homunculus is a kind of pure spirit working to become human In an eerie foreshadowing of contemporary concerns over the singularity, Mephistopheles suggests that a creature born of human science, being unbound from nature, may ultimately come to dominate us: “Upon the creatures we have made,/ We are, ourselves, at last dependent.” Goethe’s homunculus is a soul unshackled by the material plane, and is depicted as being on a journey that mirrors Faust’s: while the latter is a mortal soul trying to shed his body, the homunculus is a kind of pure spirit working to become human. In direct contrast to Paracelsus, Goethe employs alchemy as a metaphor, in part to represent the dangers of post-Enlightenment science which he saw as fundamentally amoral. In Part Two of the play, Faust and the devil Mephistopheles encounter an artificial human created by Faust’s former assistant Wagner. Hundreds of years later, the homunculus was resurrected in modern parlance through the 19th century epic Faust (1808) by German playwright Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. He presented the idea as a literal and serious possibility of alchemical science, a practice interested in all manners of manipulation beyond known natural laws, including the search for the fabled “Philosopher’s Stone,” which could purportedly turn lead into gold and grant eternal life. The unconscious desire implicit in this bizarre interspecies experiment - for a man to be able to create life without the aid of a woman - was apparently lost on Paracelsus. Paracelsus first coined the term “homunculus” - the Latin portmanteau meaning “little man.” The 16th Century occultist used the word to describe a miniature, fully-formed human that he believed could be produced through the “putrefaction” of isolated human sperm within a horse’s womb (yes, you read that correctly). This article is part of PS2 Week, a full week celebrating the 2000 PlayStation 2 console.
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