The idea is not immediately obvious and seems to go against our gut feeling that we learn the meaning of words by having things pointed out to us. Everyday practices and especially the way children learn seem to make Descartes’s but not Ryle’s ideas obvious. But coming to understand an approach like Ryle’s is not a matter of delving in the depths of a particular theory. Rather, it’s a matter of pointing to the things we actually do in the course of our daily lives—to the practices that we already engage in. Ryle’s account draws our attention to these in an attempt to draw us away from the idea of private inner lives. He redirects our attention away from theoretical and technical complexities and towards what is already available in plain sight. The way he sees it, the Cartesian picture of an inner world of mental objects ignores the immediacy with which we respond to each other. When we react to people’s feelings, for example, we do so immediately, without needing first to know what actually lies hidden in their heads.
What he proposes is a reversal of the way we think about the mental. To understand how we learn a language we should not look inwardly, but outwardly and draw connections between the different terms, much as we would understand how to play a game by understanding what each piece does and how it combines with the other pieces. Ryle attacks what he calls the “ghost in the machine,” his way of describing the Cartesian mind as a place in which feelings occur secretly and privately.
The feeling that, despite its initial appeal, there is something wrong with Descartes’s idea of a sharp distinction between the inner and outer realms becomes apparent if we consider our bodies. In a telling passage in Ryle’s work The Concept of Mind, he describes how according to Descartes we should imagine our mind telling our legs, arms, and tongue what to do. But by drawing attention to the awkwardness of a distinct mind giving orders to a distinct body, Ryle shows that Descartes paints a picture of almost mechanical human movement that resembles Frankenstein’s monster.
The (Inner) Lives of Others
If we now return to the passage where the monster describes how it teaches itself the meaning of words, we can read it in a different way. Initially there seems a temptation to assume that it can understand the language by seeing the objects the words are associated with. From this perspective, it seems to make sense that in observing the De Lacey family, the monster would understand a small group of words associated with everyday objects but not the words that refer to their emotions. This is so, we assume, because these other words point to something that is not available to the observer, to feelings or psychological states hidden within the people it is observing.
But if it’s true that we learn only by associating words with things, the words others use to describe their feelings can never be understood because they point to things that we cannot see. Their faces and bodies, instead of directly expressing their thoughts and feelings, become shields that hide those very same thoughts and feelings. This is where we find a head-on collision between Descartes’s and Ryle’s views. On the one hand, we have the Cartesian view of an inner life that is fully visible only to us and only indirectly to others; and, on the other, the fact that in everyday life we do actually regard other people’s feelings as being fully, and not indirectly or partially, visible in their behavior.
Ryle’s contribution here is to remind us that visible behavior is our starting point when we make sense of other people and we begin to understand the words that refer to our emotions. We do not see others as mere bodies that express emotion only after we have managed to figure out what might be hiding within them. Unlike the monster who is merely a body before Frankenstein gives it life, we do not need direct access to what lies within to see other people’s bodies as endowed with life. This is also the moral of the passages where the monster is observing the De Lacey family: What it sees from the very first moment are humans with emotional lives interacting with each other, as opposed to mere bodies that come alive only after the code of their inner thoughts and feelings has been cracked.
Here we also need to acknowledge the crucial role of the monster’s appearance. Its role is not only to make the monster repulsive as an extra dose of drama. More than that, it uses the Cartesian idea of the body as something that shields the inner life of the mind and soul. In this sense, the monster’s deformity makes full use of Descartes’s idea of the body as an obstacle to the emotional life within. In this sense, the monster’s body is made all the more terrifying because it is a body that doesn’t wear its emotions on its face. In Victor Frankenstein’s own terms, the true sense in which the monster’s “dead matter” comes alive is not when the monster opens its yellow eyes, but when it begins behaving like a human being.
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1Colin McGinn, The Problem of Consciousness (Basil Blackwell, 1991), p. 1.
18
Come Back Dr. Frankenstein, All Is Forgiven
CAROLINE MOSSER
When we think of Frankenstein’s creature, we often have the image of a big, monstrous villain. But, what Victor Frankenstein had in mind was far from this. In fact, he wanted to create a new race, a better race than human beings.
What went wrong? Why was Dr. Frankenstein’s project bound to lead to disaster? A possible answer is that we’re scared of what’s different, especially when it challenges the superiority of the human species.
The assumption that Victor Frankenstein’s project, the scientific enhancement of human body parts to make something that is more than human, was foredoomed to produce nothing but horror, may be mere prejudice—‘humanistic’ prejudice. We may now be ready to move beyond humanism to post-humanism or trans-humanism. We may be ready for a new Frankenstein.
While humanists tend to see the human body as the sacred location of human identity, post-humanists rely on a modernized understanding of the duality between body and identity. Post-human perspectives propose new definitions of humanity by integrating new types of bodies as they reject the traditional opposition between natural and artificial. This rejection leads to the creation of a combination of both—the “cyborg.” The cyborg isn’t necessarily a combination of human and machine, but may be the combination of human and “Other”—the “unnatural.” What then is this Other “cyborg” thing, and should we let it become part of our “natural” human community?
We’re all familiar with Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein: Or, the Modern Prometheus and with its creature, who has haunted the popular imagination ever since the novel was published. This myth has created an association between attempts to enhance or create life through science and a certain lack of morality which leads to disastrous consequences. While sewing dead body parts together in order to create a new life seems unscientific now, the issues raised by this idea are relevant to new techniques like cloning and bodily augmentation.
Frankenstein is not merely a cautionary tale about science. It also provides critical insights into the values and rules that define our understanding of what it means to be human through the narration of the non-human, or “Other.” In philosophy, the term “Other” refers to anybody who is not included in the dominant culture. In most cases, that culture is patriarchal, (governed by men) and relies on the idea of founding “fathers.” The judgment of the fathers—whether represented by God or the biological father—is the absolute law. The creature’s struggle with his own “father,” Dr. Frankenstein, fits nicely into this representation of the Other and its attempt to break down the oppression of the father-culture.
The Creature’s Desire to Be Human
In Frankenstein, the creature discovers himself and the workings of his society and environment. We witness the evolution of Frankenstein’s creature, from his creation to his transformation into a socially aware being. The creature is like a child in its learning and its hurt feelings. Instead of a child growing into a man, we have an artificially created being trying to become a man—an evolution towards humanity in addition to adulthood.
The novel is not only educational but is also a warning about t
he need for education and about the responsibility of men towards their actions and creations of any kind. It echoes the usual concern for the role of childhood and education as primary elements in the construction of the adult character, an idea which led to a change in the perception of the child. According to the view which was still new when Mary Shelley wrote, society is not an escape from corrupted nature; it is what corrupts the child, who is innocent before he enters the social world. Frankenstein’s creature is at first a model of the noble savage or innocent child, but only as long as he remains hidden away from society.
The very nature of the creature’s thoughts are educational as he narrates his life experience from the day he was created to the moment when he is expressing his plea. Because he is attempting to convince Victor to see him as a good, human-like being, his narration focuses on his evolution from an innocent new-born to a reasonable adult. His story follows a path similar to human history. There is a parallel between the creature and humanity itself: in him we find the characteristic stages of human history or civilization.
Frankenstein’s creature at first lives in nature, eating fruits and hiding in bushes or caves, a state which is similar to that of the first men, who were nomads. One of the first meaningful events of the creature’s life is his discovery of fire, a discovery that is usually considered one of the first steps of humanity towards civilization.
Giving the Creature a Voice
Language learning is the next step towards a life that is more than mere survival; it parallels the political evolution from anarchy to a slave-master type of society and then to revolution. The creature’s life shows human progress from a natural state to a symbolic representation of revolution; it is characterized by an identity quest and the fight for freedom. This intellectual and psychological growth is based on language.
Frankenstein’s creature refers to language as a “godlike science.” The creature knows that his ability to master language enables him to pretend to be human while he remains hidden. This is strongly suggested by the De Lacey episode: the blind De Lacey accepts the creature and treats him as a human being because he bases his judgment on what he hears. The creature’s eloquence enables him to convince Victor Frankenstein to create a companion and to evoke empathy in Walton. Victor himself recognizes the discrepancy between his creature’s language and body:
His words had a strange effect upon me. I compassionated him, and sometimes felt a wish to console him, but when I looked upon him, when I saw the filthy mass that moved and talked, my heart sickened, and my feelings were altered to those of horror and hatred.
Language empowers the creature and his plea makes Frankenstein feel pity and almost consider him human until he looks at the creature’s inhuman body. Mary Shelley implies that if Frankenstein’s creature were not ugly, he would not be rejected. Language has often been seen as the primary characteristic that differentiates human beings from animals, a claim which is now impossible to make as our technology has proven that it is not the case.
But What Does It Mean to Be Human?
One of the first attempts to differentiate human beings from machines was made by Alan Turing, one of the pioneers in the field of artificial intelligence. He developed a test called the Turing Test. Turing argued that if a machine that we couldn’t see could fool us through language that it was human, then we would have to treat it like a thinking thing.
If we believed it was a thinking thing and then changed our minds just because we can now see it, then the only reason we have is bias against machines. This test is especially interesting in our case because we can apply Frankenstein’s creature’s experience: the episode with the blind De Lacey ends with the creature being accepted as human while unseen. It has therefore passed the Turing Test. However, passing this test soon proves not to be enough; when the other members of the De Lacey family arrive and see the creature, they are terrified.
This physical element has grown more ambiguous as cloning techniques, cosmetic surgery, and robotics are in constant evolution, becoming more and more effective. The body can no longer be used to define or to identify individuals. Humanness is related to your sense of the self and to your ability to express yourself as a unique being. The expression of your sense of self is often considered dependent on recognition of your mortality. Humanness is identifiable by conversation with yourself about your own death. But this sense of mortality seems too similar to the survival instinct, which characterizes non-human animals as well as human beings.
Through this association with animals, the post-human creature (like Frankenstein) is also seen as a pre-human creature whose artificial nature is connected to the way we view animals. The relationship between pre-human and post-human is ambiguous, and it makes us reflect on human and animal instead of the difference between “natural” and “artificial.” This distinction can be defined by the difference between mere “consciousness” and “being” as established by Robert Pepperell in The Posthuman Condition (Intellect, 1995). Consciousness is our thoughts at a single, specific moment. Being is built through the accumulation of thoughts leading to a certain consistency in the way we act in the world, and in turn, to an “ongoing sense of existence” (p. 100).
We think that most animals only live in the now while human beings act and think in terms of time—we think about the future and the past. Because of our peculiar relationship to time, human beings are able to develop identity and morality. These definitions also suggest that identity and humanness are not innate but constructed through time: they involve experience, repetition, and the influence of one’s environment. This state of “being” is acquired, not inherited.
If empathy makes humans morally superior to other animals, then individual human beings can be classified according to their level of empathy—and how human they are. If so, how can we interpret creatures who do not show much empathy? This question is implicitly asked in Frankenstein by means of the opposition between Dr. Frankenstein’s lack of empathy and the creature’s empathy. Frankenstein’s creature helps the De Laceys with their chores as much as he can, whereas Victor Frankenstein sacrifices anything or anybody standing in his way.
The challenge of accepting empathy as a defining characteristic of humanness is that it also undermines our own status as human because some of us do not show empathy. In Skin Shows: Gothic Horror and the Technology of Monsters (Duke University Press, 1995), Judith Halberstam reads the definition of the monster, here the creature, as a proof that the line between monster and human is not as clear as society claims it is. Our tendency to define the monster either in terms of human traits or as a representation of the non-human identifies the monster as an alien, as an Other. The monster becomes a mirror of ourselves as being in between humanness and monstrosity.
The presence of the monster reveals the monstrosity of our society as showed by the lack of efficiency during Justine’s trial in Frankenstein. Justine is wrongly accused of the murder of Dr. Frankenstein’s younger brother. Because society needs a culprit she will be held responsible. Dr. Frankenstein becomes monstrous because he refuses to tell the truth. Society becomes monstrous because it does not guarantee justice. The monster is therefore mirroring the society in which he lives, revealing what it wishes to keep hidden. The role of the monster, in Frankenstein and as a general cultural idea, is not then to define monstrosity or humanness, but to reveal how both are present in human beings.
Sociobiology and Frankenstein’s Cyborg
In Simians, Cyborgs, and Women (Free Association, 1991), Donna Haraway proposes the cyborg as a concept that allows us to go beyond Western philosophy. This figure of the cyborg emerges through the association of biology and social sciences in sociobiology. The role of sociobiology in the theoretical construction of the cyborg is found in the idea that society and the body are constructed in the same way and are interdependent. In what Harraway calls “human engineering,” social management is applied to the body: “Engineering meant rational placement and modifi
cation of human raw material—in the common interest of organism, family, culture, society, and industry” (p. 48).
Through the perspective of sociobiology, nature and the human body itself become “controlled machines” which are made of various cybernetic systems relying on communication to function properly. It is on the basis of this statement that she introduces the cyborg as a compound of both mechanical and organic parts. Because modern biology sees the human body as a machine, human beings are simultaneously represented as organisms and as machines, which, according to Harraway, makes us cyborgs.
Harraway’s analysis is especially interesting because she alludes to Frankenstein’s creature. Though she refuses to apply the creature’s hope of being saved by his creator to her cyborg, her description of the cyborg fits Frankenstein’s creature:
Cyborgs are not reverent; they do not re-member the cosmos. They are . . . needy for connection . . . The main trouble with cyborgs, of course, is that they are the illegitimate offspring of militarism and patriarchal capitalism, not to mention state socialism. But illegitimate offspring are often exceedingly unfaithful to their origins. Their fathers, after all, are inessential. (p. 151)
Frankenstein’s creature is aware that he does not fit into the Western representation of the cosmos. His only desire is to be connected with somebody and he is willing to leave human society if Frankenstein builds him a partner. In the end he rebels against his father, hence being unfaithful to his origins and rejecting patriarchy. Whether the creature is truly a cyborg or not, he shares with the cyborg the function of undermining a well-established Western ideology based on patriarchy and focused on European nations.
Frankenstein and Philosophy Page 20
