Entry and Exit—Where do we come from? Where are we going?

Lecture Introduction

In February 1897, Gauguin completed his largest oil painting in his career: Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going? As he put it, "Its significance far surpasses all my previous works; I can no longer create a better or equally valuable painting.".
In Prometheus 2, the bio-engineer David once asked, "Father, you created me. Then who created you?" As the first native android, David was endowed with the "creative" ability to ignore the Three Laws of Robotics, raising a question that should never have been posed by a machine. This precisely captures the film's best philosophical inquiry into the four species—"engineers, xenomorphs, humans, and androids"—the eternal questions of "Who am I? Where do I come from? And where am I going?"
This lecture will be divided into four chapters: Creation and Crafting, Worship and Replication, Religion and Empire, and Industry and Science. It will take you on a journey through time, primarily centered on painting, by exploring the themes of Gauguin's works in conjunction with Yuval Noah Harari's Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind and his personal writings.