Frankenstein and Philosophy

by Michaud, Nicolas

  Zarathustra says that Man is both over-going; a tentative traveler of the rope across the abyss; and going under, towards rebirth. The crossing of this abyss is made even more tentative when we’re tempted to look back towards our animal origins. According to Zarathustra, humanity stumbles and lurches, like Frankenstein’s monster, as it stretched across the abyss.

  The abyss for Shelley is the idea that science could be poised to usurp God with the impunity to create even life itself. The abyss for Nietzsche is the realization that God is a dead idea, but God’s shadow continues to hold humankind back from becoming the Übermensch, the successor to humankind whose powerful will can not only produce strong individuality but does not fear or denigrate difference and peculiarity. Shelley’s Frankenstein portrays the abyss as the war between the good and evil of humanity subject to the laws of God and church. Nietzsche sees the abyss as the weakness of humans who believe that good and evil exist and as a result, fall back into a world where human will is subjugated.

  Going Under—a Monstrous Rebirth

  In the infancy of his first going under, Zarathustra speaks to villagers about the Übermensch and the will to power—the life worth living. He decries the “last man” who preaches a happiness where everyone is the same and longs for a pleasant and promised eternity. But Zarathustra says these things about the Übermensch during a carnival and is mistaken for a jester.

  After his speech, all eyes in the village turn towards a tightrope walker on a rope over the abyss between two buildings. A demonic jester accosts the man and the tightrope walker falls to his death at the feet of Zarathustra. Zarathustra picks up the dead man and begins to exit the town. As he leaves the demonic jester tells Zarathustra to leave town because even the good and just people hate him and that he is a danger to the true believers and the faithful. Zarathustra leaves the town, carrying the dead tightrope walker over his shoulder.

  Both Frankenstein’s monster and Zarathustra have been exiled but for different crimes of difference. The monster is exiled because of the prejudices against those who are physically different, for not being the accepted norm of society. There is no sympathy for the monster and no one, not even his father-mother Dr. Frankenstein wants to understand him. He is alone, spurned and denied affection—denied the happiness that comes from being just like others.

  Zarathustra, on the other hand, challenges the basic tenets of society—God, conformity, happiness as meekness, good, evil and a pleasant afterlife. He preaches the pragmatic: an Übermensch who understands that life is difficult but that life is the only thing. The will to have this life over and over again, rather than an afterlife, is what makes these “last men” shudder in the presence of the idea of the Übermensch.

  Dr. Frankenstein alludes to an equilibrium that is neither depressive nor manic when he says to Captain Walton that the perfect human is tranquil and possesses peace of mind not disturbed by emotion. Dr. Frankenstein is the analogy of the stretched rope, the last man whose will is subjugated to the greatest good for the greatest number—a pleasant happiness. But Zarathustra says that the Übermensch will shout, “What good is my happiness! It is poverty and pollution and wretched contentment” (p. 10).

  On the Three Metamorphoses

  “There is much that is difficult for the spirit, the strong reverent spirit that would bear much: but its strength demands the difficult and the most difficult.” Zarathustra speaks of three progressive metamorphoses of the sprit: camel, lion, and child, in that order. The first, a camel, willingly bears the burden of being. However, to achieve the second metamorphosis into lion the camel must first “hasten the spirit into its desert,” and in this loneliest wilderness, “here the spirit becomes a lion who would conquer his freedom and be master in his own desert” (p. 25). Zarathustra at his first going under has just become this camel while bearing the burden of the dead tightrope walker and entering the wilderness, hastening his spirit into the desert.

  The monster carries his own burden of existence as an outcast into the forest. But his metamorphosis begins in the reverse of Zarathustra. He is born a “superman” of sorts with the mind of a child. He begins as the child, Zarathustra’s third metamorphosis. The monster is pure potentiality—a pure will to power filled with the curiosities of a child but with a physical superstructure that ensures that he will be different from humanity. Yet he is thrown into the world and thrown away. He finds a dark womb-like hovel to become in. He begins to conquer his freedom and become master in his own affectionless existence by learning the ways of people through listening and observing the peasant family and its blind patriarch. But, the monster is learning the ways of humanity and not the Übermensch so his metamorphosis is being conducted in reverse, traversing back over the abyss.

  The monster experiences only one act of compassion in his existence when he waits until the family of the blind cottage dweller departs leaving only the sightless old man in the dwelling. The monster introduces himself to the old blind man. The old man tells the unseen monstrosity he too is an exile and that the monster has persuaded him that he is sincere so he would be happy to hear more of the tale. The monster embraces the old man.

  This monstrous creature, who desires only affection, is soon disabused of his minor brush with understanding and compassion. The family returns and when the monster is seen for the first time by those he has been secretly helping by chopping firewood, he is attacked and beaten by Felix, the old man’s son. Yet the abused monster could have easily overpowered his assailant as the lion overcomes the antelope, but he does not. He returns to his hovel-womb and burns it, howling like the lion he is reluctantly devolving into.

  Zarathustra says about this second metamorphosis, “Here he seeks his last master: he wants to fight him and his last god; for final victory he wants to fight with the great dragon. Who is the great dragon whom the spirit will no longer call lord or god? ‘Thou shalt,’ is the name of the great dragon. But the spirit of the lion says, ‘I will’” (p. 25). After burning his hovel, the monster sets out to find his last god: his father-mother Dr. Frankenstein.

  On the other hand, Zarathustra’s forward metamorphosis into lion is gradual. He has made speeches and traveled the world. On his return journey to his cave Zarathustra encounters men that are like Frankenstein’s monster—society’s outcasts. They include the ugliest man, an old pope, two kings, a voluntary beggar, Zarathustra’s own shadow, and a magician. He calls this foul-smelling group his “higher men” and determines to make them his apostles and teachers of the Übermensch. In the end, these higher men prove not to be worthy. At the moment of this understanding Zarathustra speaks:

  ‘Pity! Pity for the higher men!’ he cried out, and his face changed to brass. ‘Well! That—has had its time! My suffering and my pity—what do they matter! Should I strive for my happiness? I strive for my work! Well! The lion has come, my children are near, Zarathustra has grown ripe, my hour has come.—This is my morning, my day begins: arise now, arise, you great noon!’ (p. 281)

  Zarathustra abandons the higher men (his last gods—the last men) and his cave to go under again and metamorphose his spirit to fight for his final victory. At that moment of lion-like revelation, his final metamorphosis into child is nigh, “The child is innocence and forgetting, a new beginning, a game, a self-propelled wheel, a first movement, a sacred Yes-saying” (p. 26). This is the spirit that wills its own will, and with this power, even the outcast conquers his own world.

  The monster wrestles with his last God and his only God—Frankenstein, demanding that Frankenstein create a female companion for him in turn for which the monster agrees to exile himself and his companion from humanity. His vision of his life with his companion is like that of the Garden of Eden with beds of dry leaves and a warm sun that will ripen their food. His great noon is but more exile but perhaps a new beginning with a new companion who like himself is neither human nor animal. This is also the struggle for his will, as outcaste to conquer his own world and create his future, b
ut he cannot do it alone. Dr. Frankenstein agrees and begins to commit his sin again, but then renounces the monster and cuts his nearly finished second creation into pieces, disposing of her in the sea.

  Frankenstein defies his godless monster and asserts his will . . . but towards what end? The monster confronts Frankenstein after this betrayal and in a reversal of positions with his last God says in true lion-like form:

  Slave, I before reasoned with you, but you have proved yourself unworthy of my condescension. Remember that I have power; you believe yourself miserable, but I can make you so wretched that the light of day will be hateful to you. You are my creator, but I am your master;—obey!

  Frankenstein begins his own metamorphosis into a victim—a victim being chased by the monster. The monster’s quest for goodness, happiness, and companionship is drowned. His will towards becoming human is left unfulfilled and his backwards metamorphosis into lion is finished. His anger knows no bounds and, like Zeus, he attacks Frankenstein’s very being—not the liver as with Prometheus but his heart, killing those whom Frankenstein loves, one by one. That both he and Frankenstein shall be miserable in this life is now assured and they each chase each other into the darkness of the North Pole, seeking to extinguish each other.

  In the end Frankenstein expires on his own and the monster, who has in retrograde metamorphosed into Nietzsche’s camel, carries Frankenstein’s corpse off seeking to burn both himself and the body of his last God and immolating that which should not have been created.

  Just before his death, Frankenstein laments to Captain Walton that he once had the highest aspirations, the loftiest ambitions but has sunk so low that he will never rise again. Ashes to ashes—dust to dust. Good and evil have warred between Frankenstein and his monster but what has won? Humanity has won in the end over the possibility of a successor to humanity, the superhuman creation of Frankenstein who could have been more than any moral man—an Übermensch of humanity’s own creation and divination. Science has been dealt a blow and God remains the sole creator. The omniscient creator will continue to reign even as humanity finds the tools to imitate the creator’s most intricate handiwork.

  Noontide and Moonlight

  Zarathustra seeks the great noontide—an enlightening as if from the sun—for humanity’s awakening from the false-happiness of the church and its promise of pleasant eternal rest for the good and the righteous. He fights death, considering life the only thing that matters: any life lived, even if disease and suffering is all that life could be for someone (as was Nietzsche’s own). That one would wish for this life to recur in eternal sameness is what Zarathustra seeks for humanity.

  On the other hand, both Frankenstein and the monster find solace in the moon and rush to stage their final battle into ever deepening darkness at the cold and frozen North Pole. The good of happiness that both the monster and Frankenstein have sought have devolved into a hateful evil; a hatred of life itself. For Dr. Frankenstein this is first hate for his creation and then for himself for creating it: revenge and retribution in the usurpation of God.

  The monster begins his life-journey wanting to be part of something more than himself. He willingly bears the burdens of exile . . . but the need for human happiness and companionship drives him on. His journeys and trials do not lead to a love of life—they lead to death, an eternal smoldering death that he believes will wipe away his existence as if it had never occurred. Shelley’s story continues the battle between good and evil in the realm of God and the realm of humankind. The monster willingly sacrifices himself having accepted his existence as evil.

  Zarathustra’s message is that happiness is not the question nor is it the answer. Willingly bearing the burdens of life is the answer and these burdens are neither good nor bad but simple exigencies of nature, of living, of life. And life is what is to be; it is what humanity should be venerating. Zarathustra seeks an overcoming of man—a re-creation of man into a form that accepts the burden of the will but seeks to live life to the fullest.

  The monster seeks an overcoming of man because humanity is evil but he provides no foundation for a successor. The monster has abandoned humanity and with his self-immolation gazes into the animal that is humanity’s predecessor. Yet the monster’s will is strong, not the will to live, but the will as sheer power. The complicating aspect of the monster’s story is that this powerful will exists and it is up to humanity to choose to use it to propel itself forward and towards the Übermensch or backwards across the abyss towards the animal that precedes humanity.

  At the conclusion of the story the monster acknowledges his plight:

  But it is even so; the fallen angel becomes a malignant devil. Yet even that enemy of God and man had friends and associates in his desolation; I am quite alone.

  The monster has looked forward to taste the desire for beauty and truth and has looked back at the animal of man who sees only what he wants to see. In the end he is the monster—himself and nothing more. It is at this moment that he sees that he is a bridge between animal and monster (Übermensch) but destined for neither because he is the bastard child of a godless man and he will never be human. He sees no future in his evolutionary being, and says, “I shall collect my funeral pile, and consume to ashes this miserable frame, that its remains may afford no light to any curious and unhallowed wretch, who would create such another as I have been.”

  I ask you, “whither humanity?”

  _________________

  1Thus Spoke Zarathustra (Barnes and Noble Classics, 2005), p. 11, Zarathustra’s Prologue, Section IV.

  8

  Capitalism the Monster

  JOHN R. FITZPATRICK

  The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point, however, is to change it.

  —KARL MARX

  Karl Marx was only born in the year that Mary Shelley published Frankenstein, but my guess is that Shelley would have endorsed the view Marx stated above.

  Shelley saw the world changing and did not like what she saw. Marx’s vision was more optimistic, but rings with similar dire warnings. Shelley warns us of the danger of creating that which may destroy us. Specifically, she warns us about bringing to life a creature which, through isolation and abuse, masters us and separates us from our own lives and loved ones. When Marx wrote, he thought we had already brought that creature to life—a monster that separated us from ourselves and everything we love.

  In his Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, Karl Marx discusses how the workers suffer under capitalism through a social and psychological deformation that he called “alienation.” Workers are alienated from the product of their labor, and the act of labor itself. We can see this most visibly in the way Victor Frankenstein reacts to his creature. This two-part alienation from labor, from the product and the act, that Marx called “estranged labor” leads humans to be alienated from their own humanity as well as from other humans.

  This same story of turning people into isolated creatures is told over and over again by Shelley, as we see how Victor views the creature, and other humans view the creature, and inevitably how the creature views himself—alienated, isolated, and alone. From Marx’s perspective, capitalism turns alienated workers into monsters, much like Frankenstein and his creature.

  The Frankensteins and the De Laceys

  Marx and Engels begin their most famous work, The Communist Manifesto, “The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggle.” In slave owning societies this struggle is between slave owners and slaves. In the era of Frankenstein, the tail end of the eighteenth century, Europe finds itself still largely a feudal society, but the early stages of capitalism are in play.

  We can see the advent of capitalism clearly in the Kenneth Branagh movie Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. The Frankensteins live in a huge mansion, while others sleep in the street. But in a pivotal scene in the film, we see the clear struggle between the landed aristocracy and the serfs who work the land. After fleeing Ingols
tadt and entering into the woods, the creature finds shelter in the pig hovel of a family of serfs (unnamed in the movie but called the De Laceys in the book). But there has been an early frost, and it’s impossible for the family to harvest enough crops to stay alive, let alone pay the landlord the rent. This scene, which brilliantly demonstrates the precarious nature of the livelihood of poor serfs as tragically played out in the Irish potato famine, ends with the serfs leaving the farm to an untold fate. In the potato famine many farm workers simply starved. One supposes that this is the fate of the De Laceys as well. But there is no shortage of food for the rich and landed aristocracy.

  Production and Society

  Materialism in philosophy is roughly the view that the only stuff that exists in the universe is matter. Marx certainly believed this, though his view goes even deeper. He thought that the material conditions of a society, largely the means of production available to that society, would dominate many of the other features of society including its morality and politics. So, the technology and means of production that a given society is capable of employing influences other features of society.

  A typical example of this Marxist theory is that the dominant religious views of hunting and gathering societies are often similar to each other and not similar to those of agriculturalists. The materialist impact of technology on belief is another theme that is at the center of Mary Shelley’s universe.