Frankenstein and Philosophy

by Michaud, Nicolas

  And it’s worth noting what he does not do when he is inside this very alien environment. He is clearly looking for Henry Frankenstein, but he doesn’t find him. What he does find is Henry’s fiancé. But what he does not do is harm her. She screams in horror at his appearance, and he growls in return. But then she faints, and he retreats.

  Yes, he retreats. This “monster” with that “criminal brain” does not kill her, and upon reflection, this should not surprise us. Unlike the young girl, Henry Frankenstein’s fiancé does not welcome him, but she doesn’t really pose any threat to him either. This brief encounter sharply highlights his “Otherness,” and it also highlights the fact that we cannot regard him as simply engaged in some kind of relentless murderous rampage. That “rampage” is itself a plausible response to circumstances, circumstances which he did not choose, circumstances which he cannot control.

  So what’s really going on here? What’s the point that’s being made in these seventy minutes of images flickering upon the screen? The point: the monstrosity of it all, the horror of it all, is not to be found in this mute, odd looking creature that comes in from the outside. The monstrosity and horror is to be found on the “inside,” where it has been all along, even before the creature was brought to life in that abandoned watchtower.

  And to make matters worse, the monster is us. Worse even than that, we are also the creators of the monster.

  Final Credits Where Credits Are Due

  And so, we wonder, what does this mean and how can this be?

  Because: he is as “Other” as “Otherness” can be while still being recognized as anything at all. But otherness is not a “property” like being “red” or “soft” or “crooked.” Otherness is a “relation,” like being “taller than” or “far from” or “on the other side of.” A property can belong to one thing. To have a relation you need at least two. For something to be “other,” it has to be “other than” something else, something in addition to itself.

  And for us to be “who” or “what” we are, we need that relation of “otherness.” In order for us to have an “identity,” we need to have something—or someone or ones—with whom this identity can be contrasted. This is true at both the individual and the social level. My personality is unique to the extent that it is different from, or “other than,” the personalities of other individuals. And socially, much of my identity is made up of the various groups and social institutions to which I belong, and these groups and institutions derive their identity through what sets them apart from (makes them “other than”) different groups and institutions.

  And thus, we constantly derive comfort from that which is like us, and in order to get this comfort, we must distinguish ourselves from what is not like us, what is “other than” us. And the more different something is, the more extreme the otherness, the more conscious we become of the distinction between us and that otherness. Indeed, if that otherness is extreme enough, it even becomes a threat to our identity, something that sets the stage for conflict as we attempt to maintain and defend our identity.

  Yes, we derive comfort from our identity, but that comfort is more than a matter of simply belonging. It also requires exclusion in order that we can have the boundaries that our identity requires. In other words, if there is an “inside” where we belong, there has to be an “outside,” where the monsters reside.

  It can be something quite simple. To belong to a team or a club is to be different than those who are not members, and I often find comfort by belonging to that club or team because of the security it gives and the sense of unity with others who are also members. But sometimes it’s not so simple. If that which is on the “outside” seems so different that it threatens the security and unity that our identity gives us, our comfort is threatened to the point where we must do what we can to protect ourselves from what is “outside.” And so, that which is “different” becomes more than simply “different.” In our minds, it easily becomes a “monster,” something to be shunned and kept at a distance. And sometimes, we even want to destroy what we have come to call a “monster.”

  The creature seems to be a “monster” because he is so “other,” so much different than from what we recognize as belonging on our side of the border that makes up our identity. And because he is so much “other,” it is not surprising that he is met with such revulsion and resistance. And it is also not surprising that the cycle of violence and revenge emerges the way that it does.

  We think the creature is a monster because we have little choice. He is a visual, graphic representation of one of the darkest aspects of what seems to be one of the most cherished parts of our individual and social lives: our identity and the comfort that it brings. But that comfort comes at a price, and that price is the often unreflective, almost instinctual and violent exclusion of that which would threaten that comfort.

  Just as the creature has no name, we can’t help but wonder how often we must do all this in a manner that we don’t even recognize. Seventy minutes of diversion and distraction. And, for the reflective viewer, a somber question about just how much of the security of our well-ordered streets and well-ordered lives rest upon the nameless residents and remnants of burning windmills.

  20

  Adopting Frankenstein’s Creature

  MIKE KUGLER

  We in the West have a pretty insatiable appetite for stories of technical mastery gone very, very wrong. But it’s hard now to imagine anyone vetoing the early attempts at medical treatment such as smallpox vaccinations or investigations into the cause and cure of cholera. We’re far less comfortable, though, when discussing nuclear energy, genetically engineered food, or stem cell research.

  Writers as diverse as John Ruskin, H.G. Wells, and Aldous Huxley suffered little doubt that the relentless technical enhancement of human power would eventually overwhelm our capacity for sympathy, generosity, and imagination. Even Sauron’s ring “tech” in J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings suggests a twentieth-century anxiety over loss of personal integrity in the face of powerful technical mastery.

  One of the inspirations for such stories, one of our great modern myths, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818), is less about medical wonder and our horror at its unforeseen overthrow of our independence. It’s more about the human creator’s well-meaning but arrogant overreach, his sacrilegious procedures, and cruel abandonment of his new-born child to solitude, despair, and mass murder.

  Such confusion has hounded Mary Shelley’s tale since its publication in 1818. Decades later it was probably better known from its stage adaptations than the book itself. From Thomas Edison’s movie version in 1910, through John Whale’s classic of 1931 and Terence Fisher’s The Curse of Frankenstein (1958), we follow one terrible misjudgment by Victor Frankenstein after another. His maniacal lust for power over natural life yields a horrible, mute Creature.

  The fear of technology leaps out of the movie flea market of 1950s and 1960s sci-fi “B” movies, but also out of the far more imaginative and compelling The Fly (1986) or The Prestige (2006). They share an abiding distrust, if not terror, of some foreign irresistible power overthrowing our lives, getting “inside” us and “taking us over.”

  What technology, what medical intervention or technical transformation of my body threatens my independent, distinctively personal identity?

  Much of this line of sci-fi and horror film-making came together in Ridley Scott’s Prometheus (2012). Until the rest of this projected trilogy of films appears we can’t know his exact claims. But building on the earlier Alien films (1979–1997) Scott links the human desire to create our own forms of life, for immortality, and finally to genetic engineering, signaled of course by the use of Frankenstein’s subtitle, “The Modern Prometheus.”

  By the movie’s end, that unbelievable technical power is revealed graphically to be weaponized for genocide. The extraterrestrial “Engineers” who designed humans also engineer existing life to evolve rapidly into bio-weapons of mass ann
ihilation. Like Dr. Frankenstein the “Engineers” cobble new species from existing ones; and they cannot control them. At first glance, it seems Shelley’s Creature effortlessly becomes “the Monster,” the living reminder of Dr. Frankenstein’s violation of nature. But Shelley’s horror was not of technology hijacking us at our most intimate, vulnerable moments. Shelley’s terror was abandonment. This most powerful and enduring of modern myths, Frankenstein was Shelley’s ambiguous understanding of human ego, creativity, and the technical augmentation of our power.

  Shelley of course condemned Victor’s failure to “revere” nature and his abandonment of his new child, the Creature. But she was far more sympathetic to him than later film-makers. Her story forces us into amazement at Victor’s ability and audacity, but even further to sympathize with the Creature, and to hope we learn the proper lesson about risking frail collective human life for modern knowledge and glory. In Shelley’s age of modern political and technical mastery of the world, the “revolutionary” scientist threatened the moral and spiritual integrity not so much of the individual, but of human community.

  So what’s worth rescuing from Shelley’s story? Her book dramatizes how mutual love ignites our natural sympathies into moral character, and how a casual indifference towards love and family destroys that character, making community impossible. Shelley examined the political aftershocks of the French Revolution and Napoleon through the lenses of her father’s and her husband’s idealistic claims about human perfectibility. Challenging those top-down, authoritarian and quite male “Promethean” rebellions, Shelley narrated alternatively modern, face-to-face intimacies resembling a kind of communitarianism. She channeled her own frail home life into a stunning story of audacious idealistic rebellion and tragic solitude.

  The Pale Student of Unhallowed Arts

  The novel opens with a daredevil scientist and explorer, Walton, writing to his sister about his risky expedition to the North Pole. Finding a near-dead Dr. Frankenstein, Walton tends his injuries. The Swiss scientist recalls his happy privileged childhood, raised by loving parents in the intimacy of close friends. Frankenstein’s tranquil youth in the sublime beauty of Geneva shockingly ends with the death of his young mother.

  Grieving for her, Victor read furiously on the mystery of life. In college at Ingolstadt, at the time reputed among the most politically radical in Europe, he immediately sought the most advanced chemists and doctors. He soon began the solitary work of bursting through “the ideal bounds” of life and death. This obsessed and brilliant young medical student isolates the principle of life. Overcome with this revolutionary and divine knowledge, in a leap of imagination and arrogance Dr. Frankenstein prepares to build and resurrect the corpse he’s built from organs robbed from graves, morgues, and even slaughterhouses.

  Shelley’s circumstances partly explain her endowing this young scientist with the confidence he could overcome human death and suffering. Her parents were two of the most notoriously radical thinkers of the age, the rationalist-utopian philosopher William Godwin and the educational theorist and feminist Mary Wollstonecraft. Ten days after Mary’s birth in August 1797, Wollstonecraft died from infection. Haunted by her famous and absent mother, years later Mary often read at her mother’s grave. Her generally content life with a father she adored and her older half-sister Fanny changed when her father remarried. Mary despised her demanding step-mother. Into the tense life of this teenager stepped the handsome, radical poet Percy Shelley. An admirer of Mary’s father, Percy was soon pressing his love upon the lovely and brilliant Mary, even though he was already married.

  In May of 1816 Mary, Percy, and Mary’s step-sister Claire traveled to Lake Geneva to meet Lord Byron and Dr. Polidori. That June the famous ghost story contest inflamed Mary’s imagination and the terrible daydream of “the pale student of unhallowed arts kneeling beside the thing he had put together” would ignite the novel published two years later.1 Barely seventeen Mary had fallen in with the charismatic, talented and self-absorbed Percy Shelley. Her own father wouldn’t speak to her. Percy’s progressive ideas about marriage and family increased Mary’s sense of vulnerability—he proposed to his wife Harriet to join him and Mary as “sister.” The loss of her first child recalled her mother’s death; Mary dreamed that her dead daughter was still alive. In October and December of 1816 Shelley’s half-sister Fanny committed suicide and Percy Shelley’s wife drowned herself.

  The pall of loss hanging over her, by June Mary had begun the novel. Mary poured onto the page her reflections upon suffering, death and the promise of improved human life and society in a revolutionary age. What could the optimistic, and romanticized, moral and political preachments of her father and husband mean when faced with the kind of abandonment, loss, and sorrow Mary had endured? This broken-hearted teenaged prodigy challenged those “progressive” ideals by retelling an ancient myth on the origin and character of evil and death.

  Doctor, Cure Yourself

  Dr. Frankenstein did not seek to cure a particular illness or injury, but to re-invent humanity itself. Mary’s husband and father as well as many others had celebrated the potential of human improvement. Audacious, “Promethean” men imagined perfected humans in societies of complete liberty and equality. Science promised human power over nature unmatched in any previous age. In the place of traditional sources of authority like nobles, kings, and the Church a new source of truth, the Natural world, would be revealed by science in the facts of human and social life or by art. Revolutions in America and France appeared to bring their hopes to life.

  Mary Shelley was as aware of these ideas and their promise as any young person in Europe. The novel’s prospect of “a new species” (p. 36) reproduced the “new man,” “improved man,” a “perfectible man” from Europe’s most progressive and optimistic ideas in science and art. Her novel tested such hopes, a kind of “what if?” tale sparked by the promised advances of the human species in the modern age.

  Dr. Frankenstein was not interested in slow, methodical scientific research. Like Mary Shelley he was part of a well-read intellectual aristocracy; he too was young when his mother died. His scientific training to end human suffering and eliminate death followed the noblest goals of reformers like her parents and her husband. Once Victor isolated the chemical and biological basis first of death, then of life, what could prevent him bringing that god-like knowledge to the immediate salvation of humanity?

  Mary Shelley sympathized with Victor. Throughout the novel he inspires the love of fine people like the explorer Walton, his close friend Clerval, and his cousin and later wife Elizabeth, and others—people better than Victor himself. The young scientist clearly resembled Mary’s husband. While she loved and admired Percy Shelley, his ethic of free love undermined any possibility that she and he would enjoy a stable and trusting family life.

  Mary Shelley understood well the shroud under which childbearing women of that age lived. She had been raised without a mother by a distant father notorious for his written attacks on marriage and diminishment of the importance of family. Partly responsible for the breakup of Percy Shelley’s first marriage, and suffering from the loss of her first infant daughter, Mary Shelley made healthy children, the stable family, and close friends the fragile foundation critical to a community’s moral health. While Percy Shelley the charismatic reformer poet awed and inspired her, she had doubts about the idealism of a man who arrogantly imagined a perfectible humanity at the cost of family. Her Dr. Frankenstein sought reproduction of humans without women; he imagined and pursued this in total isolation from his family and friends. Victor was a graphic challenge to the ideas and character of a deeply loved but flawed husband.

  Victor’s arrogant, obsessive actions blossomed into aspirations to wield god-like powers, resurrecting the dead, and overcoming the ancient curse of sin and death. In Victor’s dream of enjoying the worship of his new “species,” Shelley recast her world’s most widely known mythic story, the Christian tradition. In the Genesis a
ccount human rebellion against a good and just creator brought disease, painful childbirth, cruel work, and death. Why shouldn’t Shelley’s revolutionary scientist improve on the Creator’s masterpiece, humanity?

  Shelley begins to move from sympathetic explanation to Dr. Frankenstein’s dangerous moral failings. To satisfy his revolutionary goals the young scientist abandoned his loving home for nearly three years. He violates corpses, not hesitating to use animal organs to build his “perfect” man. For nine months he conceived and constructed what he imagined to be the ideal human, designed as carefully as possible for beauty and physical perfection. While raised to have no terror of the supernatural Victor recognized that this work was destroying his mental health (pp. 33–39). Totally reclusive, unearthing bodies laid to rest under the sacrament of burial, conducting vivisections, and assembling rotting body parts by some hideous process, he was barely human by the time he completed the Creature. He conceived and carried out his disgusting and terrifying experiment forsaken in a moral desert of his own making.

  Man Is but a Reed, but a Thinking Reed

  How should we behave, caught between the power to realize our imagined greatness, and a future we put into motion we can neither predict nor control? Many romantic revolutionaries of Mary Shelley’s age celebrated the rebellious individual against ancient tyrannical authority. Shelley shared the radical hopes of her father, mother, and husband for a truly free and equal society. But the legacy of the French Revolution and Napoleon left her far more suspicious of modern charismatic reformers, their utopian ideals, and the massive scale of revolutionary reform.