We do have evidence, in the inhuman way Pris convulses when shot through the solar plexus, that Blade Runner Replicants differ from humans in their internal wiring, their sub-functional architectures. Plausibly this makes a difference in the way it feels to be them. But how would we know that? And why should it be supposed to be the difference between having feelings and having none? Perhaps Rachel’s loving feeling is merely different from ours, not absent.
We have further evidence in the way Leon reaches into the beaker of liquid nitrogen and Pris into the beaker of boiling water, without sustaining bodily damage, that Replicants are made of different stuff. Perhaps rather than being made of carbon-based stuff, like humans, Blade Runner Replicants are made of silicon-based stuff, like computers. Plausibly this makes a difference in the way it feels to be them, also. But why, again, should it be supposed to be the difference between having feelings and having none? And how, again, would we know that? Again, perhaps Rachel’s loving feeling is merely different from ours, not absent.
And if she has no feelings whatever—if she really is a philosophy zombie—what then? “I love you,” she says. And if she not only talks the talk, but walks the walk ever after, if she wishes him well, and wants to be with him, is it all a lie for lack of some subjective amatory itch? 39 And if it was no subjective feeling that moved her to pull the trigger, killing Leon, to save Deckard’s life, doesn’t Deckard still owe her? Deckard says he has never retired a human by mistake, but it seems he has been “retiring” persons—intelligent and possibly sentient beings—all along.
But wait! Even if qualia are required for true love, and Rachel has none, her profession of love is no lie. She will have spoken untruly, but she will not have knowingly done so. What she thinks—including what she thinks about her feelings—is supposed to be unchanged. Good zombies, among other things, enforce this supposition. Lack them though she may, she still thinks she has feelings; as does Deckard. As do I. Conceivably, I too am deluded! Based on Descartes’s intuition of infallible self-awareness (the first person point of view) as the zombie thought-experiments are, yet seeming to undermine that very intuition, philosophy zombies may not be coherently conceivable after all. Plan B has led us back to plan A.40
PART II
Undead White Males
6
Heidegger the Vampire Slayer: The Undead and Fundamental Ontology
ADAM BARROWS
Sympathy for the Vampire
Count Dracula has proven the most persistently adaptable and resilient of popular icons, retaining his power to intrigue and frighten audiences across generational and cultural divides. While Bram Stoker didn’t invent the vampire, his treatment of the monster in his 1897 novel, Dracula, was immediately more compelling than earlier English fictional attempts, like Varney the Vampire (1847). Stoker’s many original additions to vampire lore have now become inextricably bound up with our popular imagination of the creatures. Among these additions were the use of garlic as a protective charm, the location of the neck as the privileged site of blood-sucking, and the Count’s ability to shapeshift, particularly into bats.
Stoker’s greatest innovation, though, was his use of the vampire story to explore deeper metaphysical questions about the true nature of humanity. Far from representing the vampire as a coldly grotesque monster, Stoker explored the pathos and psychological terror of a human being, with a core of goodness, becoming trapped inside a godless and eternally Undead body. As the original working titles for the novel suggest, the terror of becoming Undead captured Stoker’s imagination far more than the personal figure of the Count himself. Stoker’s working title for Dracula was The Dead Undead and, only weeks before publication, the novel was to be called simply The Undead. The Count, in fact, only physically appears as a character in roughly forty of the book’s three hundred pages. The rest of the book is occupied with the other characters’ fear of Dracula and what he represents. The fear of becoming Undead makes the Dracula story consistently compelling.
Compare Stoker’s killing of a vampire with the killing of a vampire in the sensational anonymous serial, Varney the Vampire, published fifty years before Dracula. Here is the killing of Clara Crofton in Varney the Vampire:The eyes of the corpse opened wide—the hands were clenched, and a shrill, piercing shriek came from the lips—a shriek that was answered by as many as there were persons present, and then with pallid fear upon their countenances they rushed headlong from the spot. (Dracula, p. 338)41
And the killing of Lucy Westenra in Stoker’s Dracula:The thing in the coffin writhed, and a hideous, blood-curdling screech came from the opened red lips. The body shook and quivered and twisted in wild contortions. . . . Finally it lay still. The terrible task was over. . . . There, in the coffin lay no longer the foul Thing that we had so dreaded and grown to hate that the work of her destruction was yielded as a privilege to the one best entitled to it, but Lucy as we had seen her in her life, with her face of unequaled sweetness and purity. True that there were, as we had seen them in life, the traces of care and pain and waste; but these were all dear to us, for they marked her truth to what we knew. (Dracula, p. 192)
Note how strikingly different is Stoker’s approach to the killing. In the earlier novel, we witness the slaughter of an animal. In Stoker’s novel, we witness the liberation of a human soul. The author of Varney the Vampire plays the stake through the heart for pure grotesque shock value, with a screech that draws the narrative away from the evil scene along with the crowd of onlookers, so that we are not allowed to look at the results of the killing. Stoker borrows the scream but does not pull away from the coffin. If we were to represent the two killings cinematically, we might use for the Varney scene a quick cut from a close-up on the face of the screaming Clara to a long shot of the crowds fleeing the tomb. For Stoker’s scene, in contrast, our camera would linger on the impaled vampire, zooming in on her transfigured features. Stoker describes the change in attitude of the killers from a hatred and bloodlust for the “foul Thing” to an appreciation of Lucy’s “truth.” To kill a vampire, for Stoker’s “vampire-hunters,” is not just to satisfy blood-lust or to combat evil, but to liberate a “true” humanity which is trapped inside a “false” inhumanity.
In her rally to the troops as they prepare to hunt the Count in Transylvania, Mina Harker reminds the hunters that they have to pity the poor soul stuck inside the Count’s Undead body:I want you to bear something in mind through all this dreadful time. I know you must fight—that you must destroy even as you destroyed the false Lucy so that the true Lucy might live hereafter; but it is not a work of hate. That poor soul who has wrought all this misery is the saddest case of all. Just think what will be his joy when he too is destroyed in his worser part that his better part may have spiritual immortality. You must be pitiful to him too, though it may not hold your hands from the destruction. (Dracula, pp. 268-69)
For Mina, humanity is “true” and vampirism is “false.” Her friend Lucy Westenra, killed earlier by the hunters, has been cured of vampirism by a stake through the heart, as if murder were an antidote for the “false” orientation of vampirism. The dead Lucy is the “true” Lucy, while her Undead manifestation is the “false” Lucy.
Stoker’s greatest contribution to the vampire legend is to focus our attention not only on the physical grotesqueries and violence of blood-sucking, but also on the far more troubling psychological fear of becoming “false,” of having one’s death, a fundamental part of one’s natural being, taken away, leaving the core of “true” humanity encased in a pallid deathless shell of skin and bone. What is endlessly compelling about Dracula is the monster’s subversion of our most deeply held metaphysical beliefs. “I know now the span of my life,” writes Jonathan Harker in Transylvania (p. 45). Although the knowledge is frightening for him, it distinguishes him from Dracula, whose life, being endless, has no span. It stretches from endlessness to endlessness, from abyss to abyss. The life of the vampire is an unpunctuated succession of feedings, deni
ed the common human bond of death. In an early conversation with Harker, Dracula explains his desire to come to London:I long to go through the crowded streets of your mighty London, to be in the midst of the whirl and rush of humanity, to share its life, its change, its death, all that makes it what it is. (Dracula, p. 26)
It’s possible to understand this speech as a glimpse of Dracula’s buried “true” self, struggling to become a part of humanity, a plea for the changeless to know change, for the deathless to feel death, for the Olympian outsider to share in a common humanity.
The Philosophy of Death
Death teaches us to be “true” humans. This lesson of Stoker’s Dracula will be repeated exactly thirty years later by a German philosopher named Martin Heidegger (1889-1976). Nowhere in the western philosophical tradition does Death play such a key role as it does in Heidegger’s book, Being and Time (1927). The key insights that ground Heidegger’s study of Being are that 1) death cannot be public but must be faced alone, and 2) life without death is existentially meaningless.
Heidegger didn’t just modify Western philosophy, but hoped to radically refocus it. For Heidegger, what was wrong with Western philosophy was that it was epistemological and not ontological. These are fairly daunting terms, but they can be defined quite simply. Epistemology is the study of how we know. Ontology is the study of (among other things) what we are. The entire philosophical tradition from Plato through Descartes to Kant, Heidegger wrote, focused on how we acquire knowledge about the world. Kant’s landmark Critique of Pure Reason, for instance, concluded that we always confront the material world with the help of certain categories like Time and Space, ideas that are not learned but rather are hard-wired. This is all very fine, Heidegger felt, but its failure was that it put the cart before the horse. How can we talk about how we know things until we have decided what the word “we” is referring to in the first place? What is the “being” that knows Time and Space? Does it have any fundamental characteristics that can be agreed upon?
Heidegger’s ontology was “fundamental ontology,” he argued, because it cut thorough all biological and social explanations of human nature to get to the more primordial, deeper, metaphysical core of what we are. In order to understand what is fundamental to being, Heidegger suggests that we must separate what is truly “authentic” about our being from the common, everyday, “inauthentic” knowledge of being. We already know deep down what we are, but that knowledge is clouded and distorted by all the distractions and deceptions of everyday life. Throughout Being and Time, then, Heidegger explains that there is always a true and a false way of “being.” In our everyday, run-of-the-mill, nine-to-five existence, we are “cut off from the primary and primordially genuine relations of our being” (p. 159).42
What do we learn about ourselves when we cut ourselves off from our immersion in the “inauthentic” daily round of routines? For Heidegger, the key revelation for humanity is that it ends—it will die. Without death, we could understand ourselves only as existing forever in a succession of empty moments. Instead, death provides us with a temporal arc—an experience of being thrown forward towards an indisputable end. The problem of existence, however, is that inauthentic, everyday experiences act relentlessly to conceal and obscure death. It’s not, of course, that there is some conspiracy to hide the biological fact of death. Tombstones abound and it is a truism that everyone dies. But these public acknowledgments of death only act to obscure the fact of one’s own personal death. Consider the following excerpt from Being and Time in which Heidegger explains how the “they” (his term for inauthentic, everyday beings) try to trick a dying person into not facing his death:. . . the “neighbors” often try to convince the “dying person” that he will escape death and soon return again to the tranquilized everydayness of his world. . . . This “concern” has the intention of thus “comforting” the “dying person. . . .” But basically, this tranquilization is not only for the “dying person” but just as much for “those who are comforting him. . . .” Even “thinking about death” is regarded publicly as cowardly fear, a sigh of insecurity . . . and a dark flight from the world. (Being and Time, pp. 234-35)
For Heidegger, a confrontation with death is not simply some kind of perverse morbidity. It is an act of “courage.” Inauthentic beings (“they”) cover up death and are thus always partial and incomplete, living blindly and deludedly into a future that will be an endless succession of present moments. Since the life of “they” has no end, it has no borders or limits and is unable to be grasped by the mind. “True” being, in contrast, is a bordered whole, with Death making it a complete entity. For Heidegger, this state of being is described almost ecstatically as a “passionate anxious freedom toward death which is free of the illusions of ‘the they’ . . . and certain of itself” (p. 245). Societal pressures try to “tranquilize” or “veil” this freedom, but authentic beings reject such pressures.
“Inauthentic” beings live forever in an endless succession of moments. What better example of this “inauthentic” being is there than the vampire? To kill the vampire is to teach him to understand his life as a bordered whole, to teach him to confront and accept his own death. Vampire-hunting, in the light of Being and Time, becomes a kind of philosophical task—making “true” dead humans out of “false” deathless vampires.
Dracula as Inauthentic Being
Dracula’s entire existence gives the lie to death, presenting a possibility of life without end. Stoker, in the early 1890s, wrote a checklist of Dracula’s most important characteristics in preparation for writing the novel. Number four on the list was: “absolutely despises death and the dead” (p. 343).43 Stoker conceived of Dracula as a sworn opponent not of humanity, but of the very idea of death itself. The vampire’s promise is to give life without end to chosen beings. His promise to the wretch Renfield is to give him the life force of thousands of rats. “All these lives will I give you, ay, and many more and greater, through countless ages” (p. 245). In this instance of vampiric seduction, Renfield is like the dying person in Heidegger’s scenario and Dracula acts as “they,” convincing the diseased mind that death is only what happens to other lowly forms of life, like rats.
Dracula’s attitude toward death is “inauthentic.” His notorious inability to be reflected by mirrors is a metaphor for his inability to “reflect” on his own true state of being. There’s a veil of inauthenticity drawn over Dracula that the mirror only makes painfully obvious. Dracula, as compelling a figure as he is, resembles Heidegger’s “they” in his lack of a stable self-image. In the same checklist of Dracula’s attributes, Stoker wrote, “painters can’t make a likeness of him—however hard the artist tries, the subject always ends up looking like someone else” (p. 344). Even though it was undeveloped in the final version of the novel, this aspect of Dracula nevertheless clarifies Stoker’s understanding of Dracula’s lack of “reflection.” A painting of Dracula would end up “looking like someone else.” Dracula has no distinct character himself. He is sometimes like you and sometimes like me. When Mina sees him in Piccadilly, he is a young thin man with a dark mustache (p. 155), while Harker knows him in Transylvania as aged and white-haired (p. 51) Francis Ford Coppola’s adaptation, with its use of elaborate makeup, makes much of this aspect of Dracula’s fluctuating appearance. Dracula is not distinct, but shifts from one form to another. He is mist as well as beast, old as well as young, masculine as well as feminine (his conquest of Mina, as many critics have noted, places him in the feminine role, with Mina at his breast). Despite what Van Helsing constantly asserts about Dracula’s “selfish child-brain,” Dracula is in actuality self-less. He is a kind of perverted communal force that transforms victims into his own likeness, a likeness that is, we are reminded, indistinct and unstable. Lucy, when she becomes a vampire, is not a self, but a pale imitation of Dracula. When Dracula smashes Jonathan’s shaving mirror, he calls it “a foul bauble of man’s vanity” (p. 31). The vanity of self does not translate into vampiric
terms, in which self is unfocused and indistinct.
Dracula is self-less, and the vampire-hunters despise selfless people. This attitude comes out early in the novel, when Dr. Seward makes the following observation in his diary about Renfield:. . . a possibly dangerous man, probably dangerous if unselfish. In selfish men caution is as secure an armour for their foes as for themselves. What I think of on this point is, when self is the fixed point the centripetal force is balanced with the centrifugal; when duty, a cause, etc., is the fixed point, the latter force is paramount, and only accident or a series of accidents can balance it. (Dracula, p. 62)
Seward’s point here, which is clouded with his odd Victorian language of weights and balances, is that the self is a “fixed point” that balances the various potentially dangerous forces we contain. “Unselfishness,” far from being a goal for noble altruistic behavior, is here seen as a pathological condition. To put all this bluntly, Stoker sees self as good and selflessness as evil. It is the loss of one’s self as a “fixed point” that constitutes the vampire’s main seduction. The hunters, keeping as dispassionate and “selfish” as possible, militate against this seduction. Note how Van Helsing, confronted with one of the female vampires in Transylvania, characterizes their power:. . . in old time, when such things were, many a man who set forth to do such a task as mine, found at the last his heart fail him, and then his nerve. So he delay, and delay, and delay, till the mere beauty and the fascination of the wanton un-dead have hypnotize him, and he remain on, and on, till sunset come. . . . I was moved to a yearning for delay which seemed to paralyse my faculties and to clog my very soul . . . certain it was that I was lapsing into sleep, the open-eyed sleep of one who yields to a sweet fascination. (p. 319)
Zombies, Vampires, and Philosophy Page 9
