Frankenstein and Philosophy

by Michaud, Nicolas

  _________________

  1Zygmunt Bauman, Liquid Modernity (Polity, 2000).

  2According to a recent study that confronts two versions of the novel, it seems that the role of Mary Shelley’s husband was much more substantial than that of a muse: this added “humanity” given to Frankenstein appears to be ascribed directly to Percy Shelley. See: The Original Frankenstein, by Mary Shelley with Percy Shelley, edited by Charles E. Robinson (Vintage, 2009).

  3I am particularly grateful to Aakash Singh Rathore and Daniel Halliday for their help and advice during the revision of the chapter. Agnes Lyu and Minh Dinh also deserve my gratitude for their support.

  17

  Getting Inside the Monster’s Head

  SPYROS PETROUNAKOS

  As a work of literature or film, Frankenstein has been more about the famous monster than about its creator. Whenever the spotlight has fallen on the creator, Victor Frankenstein, it has often been as a cautionary tale of manic scientific ambition, curiosity, or the spooky attempt “to create a man after his own image,” as Dr. Frankenstein says in James Whale’s 1931 movie Frankenstein. Yet some of the story’s adaptations have focused on the fascinating duality between the monster’s external appearance and its personal, inner life.

  That much makes sense, as duality is one of the main themes of the tale in Shelley’s Frankenstein. One main duality is, on the one hand, between the inner lives of its two main characters, Victor Frankenstein and the monster, and, on the other, the outer events surrounding them. Itself a story within a story, Frankenstein switches between long stretches of introspection—the second “reality” within with minds of the characters—and the detailed descriptions of external places and people.

  At the core of this narration is one of the most striking reversals that became a standard in writing and cinema, in many instances giving rise to a filmic fascination with the living dead, most recently with I, Frankenstein, the film adaptation of the graphic novel. This is the reversal from death to life represented by Victor Frankenstein’s experiment, his single-minded pursuit of “bestowing animation upon lifeless matter,” a phrase that appears more than once in Shelley’s book. This experiment makes the work stand out within the theme of mad scientists creating life out of inanimate matter.

  It also establishes it as a work that contains a variety of philosophical themes. The phrase itself, “bestowing animation on matter,” comes very close to contemporary versions of the question, “How is the brain capable of consciousness?” In the words of one prominent philosopher, Colin McGinn, the problem of consciousness asks, “How can technicolor phenomenology arise from the soggy grey matter of brains?”1 In other words how can our vivid personal experiences come from the sloppy grey mass of our brains?

  The problem of consciousness, or of how we understand the mind, has also experienced various reversals, most notably in the work of philosopher Gilbert Ryle (1900–1976). The sort of reversal Ryle proposed brings to mind the visually stunning moment of the monster’s creation in the 1910 film production of Frankenstein by J. Searle Dawley. This is a striking scene because the moment of creation, itself, is an act of directorial genius that reflects the theme of reverse creation from death to life: The monster appears to come into being from nothingness because the scene of the burning effigy is played backwards. In this example of striking inventiveness, given the fact that there were no special effects at the time it was shot, flames and smoke return to their point of origin to become the monster’s flesh.

  Parallel Lives

  As a narrative, the book Frankenstein has at least one additional dimension compared to the movie. This is the dimension of the rich inner life of Victor. Frankenstein, which initially appears as passionate scientific ambition and then, almost halfway through the work, becomes a descent into a personal inferno of remorse. In both cases, the narrative that describes the external world in great natural detail runs parallel with the description of the turmoil within Dr. Frankenstein’s psyche. Often, events in the natural environment surrounding the main character become a mere backdrop, as Victor Frankenstein ponders the monstrosity of his experiment, its consequences and, during a particular scene in the middle of Lake Geneva, suicide.

  The parallel descriptions of external reality and internal reality often converge onto the single point of Frankenstein’s perspective. This is a work that celebrates the fullness of its characters’ internal lives, which are described like internal universes that converge almost by accident. This idea of the mental as a world in itself belongs to the tradition that goes back to the work of René Descartes (1596–1650). According to Descartes’s picture of the mind, our minds are distinct worlds that contain thoughts and feelings that can be fully observed only by us. Moreover, in the full version of Descartes’s picture of the mind, we live our lives primarily from the inside out.

  As a narrative, Frankenstein belongs to this Cartesian tradition of drawing attention to each person’s own perception of the world. Its main character, Victor Frankenstein, conceives his project in the solitude of his own mind, which then becomes the stage of a personal nightmare of regret. In this sense, what leads him to an inspired experiment then becomes a prison he cannot escape from. The book’s other characters, protagonists and narrators also strain under the weight of their own thoughts, scruples and disappointments. Telling stories and confessing their misdeeds appear to be their only pressure valves.

  The Inward Gaze

  The story’s ebb and flow is a combination of real events and the moral minefield that results from the monster’s creation. Once we go down the linear track of the story that leads to the monster’s moment of creation, the narrative breaks up and proceeds along different paths. Victor Frankenstein is tormented but also appears to have plunged into a personal purgatory. His abhorrence and revulsion at his creation is transformed into a physical illness, a transitory madness, which lasts for months and nearly claims his life.

  His well-being after his long recovery is shattered once again by the news of his brother’s death, an event that brings about his departure to Geneva. There he catches sight of the monster for the first time in two years. But the sighting itself is a relatively minor incident compared to the moral labyrinth ahead of him. As if to make things worse, the moral dilemmas spring from a cascade of events that allows him little room to collect his own thoughts. His sense of loss and disorientation in that part of the story is reflected and described in terms of his thoughts trying, but failing, to catch up with a reality that is always ahead of him. Victor is guilty of having created a dangerous monster. But he is also given an opportunity to atone for this sin by becoming the savior of Justine who is falsely accused of a crime that, unbeknownst to everyone else, has been committed by his monster. But, though he knows the truth, he cannot set the record straight.

  This is because the story of the creation of the monster is so outrageous that it is bound to lack credibility. He knows that no one will believe him and so what he says is bound to become the “ravings of a madman.” Here, his only chance of release and atonement through a confession is lost. Victor is completely trapped in his inner world, which at this point has ceased to be believable to anyone else but himself. This is a form of double imprisonment: not only is he the only person who knows the truth; he is also in possession of a truth that he cannot communicate even if he tried.

  But Victor Frankenstein’s internal world is only one part of the story. From the second half of the book onwards we witness the internal life of the monster itself as it becomes humanized by daily observation of the De Lacey family in the cottage. Not unlike the ambitious Victor Frankenstein who’s bent on revealing the secrets of nature, the monster is also driven to find “the cause of uneasiness” of the family it is observing and to “unravel” the “mystery” of how their language works. Reading these passages, we get a clear sense that the monster has been made in its creator’s image. As we follow the internal dialogue of the monster’s detailed observations of the
family, we temporarily forget that its outward appearance could not be more different to its creator’s. Yet these passages also inspire a sense of sympathy for the monster, its sincere attempts to come to grips with the world and to understand what makes humans tick.

  On the Outside Looking In

  Victor Frankenstein brings about moral change in the narrative in two ways: first, as the victim of circumstances and of his own single-minded pursuit of a project that goes terribly wrong. In a straightforward sense, as the creator of the monster himself, he’s the prime mover of the story. But there’s a second, equally interesting sense in which he brings about change. As a scientist with almost self-destructive ambition, he becomes a symbol of the search for a personal truth that puts moral considerations on the back burner.

  In fact, from this perspective, the entire story is also an object lesson in the perils of this attitude: the monster is set loose, beyond its creator’s control and initial calculation, to reap destruction. Its creator is unable to control it and, further, assumes little moral responsibility beyond acknowledging the ghastly nature of the beast he has set loose upon the world. After he recovers from his illness, Victor is relieved not to have to deal with the monster. It’s only afterwards, when tragedy hits his own family, that the destructive nature of the beast begins to dawn on him. But even then, his moral sense and his internal dialogue detach themselves from his intention to act. We get the sense that he is swamped by his own thinking. Even when he considers suicide, he eventually reasons that he must stay alive to help his family find the real perpetrator of the crime.

  The narrative’s focus on the internal worlds of the characters is set during our initial meeting with Victor. The entire theme of the sections on his scientific ambitions is based on the idea of the two sides of reality and of genuine truths hiding behind the appearances of things. There, we find him drawing a distinction between the “outward substance of things” and the “inner spirit of nature,” of entering “the citadel of knowledge,” of “penetrating the secrets of nature.” This sets out clearly the contrast between reality and its secrets, or between bodies and their inner mental lives, of two connected but also independent worlds that keep us guessing about what might lie on the other side.

  The Private Life We Know Best

  Descartes is known for his famous phrase “I think, therefore I am.” This represents his response to an extreme form of skepticism, in which he doubts the existence of everything, including his own mind. The statement comes in the context of a thought experiment in which a malicious demon makes him doubt that the reality surrounding him is real. The thought experiment represents Descartes’s way of reaching truth by a process of stepping back from the input of his senses, which he takes to be completely unreliable. His aim is to arrive at what he calls “clear and distinct” ideas. The process comes full circle in the realization that everything that the senses show us about the world can be doubted and that the only thing that cannot be doubted is that, right now, we’re thinking.

  But in contemporary philosophy of mind, Descartes’s idea that the senses are an unreliable basis for knowledge is only part of his philosophical story. Another equally important idea attributed to him is the idea of an absolute distinction between mind and body. This in turn has led to what is often described as the Cartesian conception of the inner—the ability of each person to look into, or introspect, their inner life as a series of mental episodes, an internal theater available only to each person’s internal gaze.

  The main idea is that there is an inner private life that can be observed only by the person whose private life it is and only indirectly by other people. One result of this is that our inner life, in contrast to our access to the external world, becomes the field of absolute certainty. This works both ways: the more our thoughts, feelings and everything else in our mind set the standard of certainty, the greater our temptation to regard the external world as being full of things that might mislead us. The certainty with which we know ourselves ups the ante in another direction too because it means that others can know what goes on in us only indirectly, by trying to figure out the truth within us from our outward behavior.

  A partition is set up between mind and world. The vividness of our personal world of thought and feeling often trumps the vividness of the external world around us. Descartes’s idea of withdrawing from external reality to a single point inside the mind is very much alive in Frankenstein. It’s at this single point, deep within the psyche, that Victor Frankenstein conceives his scientific experiment. It’s also where he withdraws to when things take a turn for the worse.

  One of the reasons for the persistence of Descartes’s ideas through the ages is that they seem to make absolute sense of our daily experience. For example, it is in fact true that we can withdraw within our self in a way that might make us inaccessible to others and that thoughts and feelings are things that we may choose to reveal or conceal from others. Both these aspects of our inner lives support the Cartesian idea of the mind. It is also true that a great part of our everyday life is dedicated to trying, in one way or another, to make sense of other people.

  It’s equally true that we misread, misinterpret, misunderstand the thoughts and feelings of others, regardless of degree of familiarity. Here, if we accept the idea that what we’re doing is trying to make sense, as if other people are enigmas, we are indirectly assuming that their thoughts and actions are hidden. And making sense from words and gestures is almost a daily task. To believe that in so doing we are trying to reach something within the person we are trying to interpret strengthens Descartes’s conception.

  It also seems true that whatever else we may doubt, the things we know most clearly are our own thoughts and feelings. We might even say that mind is indeed a world of its own by our mere everyday ability to sit still, immersed in thought or by the way our thoughts might hold us captive and make us temporarily unable to act. This is one of the reasons why Victor Frankenstein’s struggle with his scruples and his bouts of temporary paralysis speak to us directly. His extreme predicament is eerily familiar to us, at least in the sort of intensity with which he experiences a type of imprisonment within his own self and his desire to find atonement and release. It’s also why Descartes’s thought experiment in which evil demons make him doubt every certainty also feels like familiar fiction in that it reminds us of the mind’s ability to spin its own tales. But Descartes’s experiment is also a direct reminder of Dr. Frankenstein himself in the opposite direction. The aim of the evil demon to make Descartes doubt everything that is certain is equally as outrageous as Dr. Frankenstein’s project of putting life back into a corpse.

  A Ghost within a Monster

  The book’s storyline takes another major plunge into the internal worlds of its characters when the monster tells its own story to its creator, Frankenstein. In describing his observation of the De Lacey family over a period of months, the monster also tells the story of its own gradual immersion in the ways of humans, and, most importantly, of how it came to understand human emotions and language. The description contains a detailed profile of the people the monster is observing, of their actions and interaction with each other and of their emotional states, which the monster gradually manages to decode.

  This section establishes an ingenious symmetry between the Victor Frankenstein we have known “from within,” as a man gripped by a scientific obsession, and the monster’s own quest and insistence to understand its subjects. But here we see once again the emergence of the duality between the external and the internal realms, made particularly clear by the contrast between the monster’s observation of the inhabitants of the cottage from a distance and its own internal dialogue, a sort of running commentary of its daily observations. Even more astonishingly, in a passage that also brings to mind the philosopher John Locke’s dictum of ideas being either about objects in external reality or about what it calls “the internal operations of our minds,” the monster describes in detail how it
came to learn language.

  The monster talks about the names that were given to the “familiar objects of discourse” such as fire, milk, and bread, and of the ideas “appropriated to each of these sounds.” But then it also speaks of several other words, which, despite protracted observation, it could not yet understand how to apply: “good,” “dearest,” and “unhappy.” What the monster cannot understand are terms that go beyond what is immediately obvious. But whether this should mean that they refer to hidden, or private events, is another matter.

  The philosopher Gilbert Ryle was one of the most devastating critics of the Cartesian picture. He strongly opposed the idea that to understand these types of words we need to have direct access to the mental realm. The words that refer to our emotional life are not like objects in a room that we would need to see if we were learning the meanings of furniture-words. Ryle would be very happy with the passage that in Shelley’s Frankenstein appears directly after the description of the monster’s acquisition of language. In that passage, the monster says that it was able to respond directly to the joys and sorrows of the De Lacey family. It is this ability to respond directly to emotional states that is the basis for understanding words such as “unhappy.” We understand other people’s emotional states by observing their behavior and this is the basis for learning words that refer to emotions.

  Turning the Head on Its Head

  Ryle uses the metaphor of a walk for what allows us to understand language and the way words are connected to each other. According to Ryle, we learn language in the way that we reach a destination by walking—though we might not be able to describe the steps we took to get there. In contrast to Descartes, where everything seems to happen in the head, Ryle’s idea is that to learn a language and how words are connected to each other we need to observe the “live force of things we actually say.” Ryle turns the whole idea of how we learn a language on its head because he suggests that we learn a language not by learning what its words refer to but by exposing ourselves to it. It is a deep-end-of-the-pool method.