Frankenstein and Philosophy

by Michaud, Nicolas

  The Shelley of Frankenstein builds her ethics on the idealization of the “intimate circle” of like-minded family and friends. Children, as the Swiss political theorist Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712–1778) and her mother Mary Wollstonecraft argued, should be raised by benevolent and permissive parents who would encourage the child’s caring and sympathetic nature.

  Victor’s mixed motives—to serve the needs of humanity as a renowned, god-like creator—animated Shelley’s criticism of the idealistic progressivism of her time. The Creature’s story expresses Shelley’s idealization of family and community. After the Creature’s creator-father sought solitude to complete his blasphemous work, he abandoned his creation to solitude and despair.

  No one with half a heart can fail to pity the Creature, so innocent and forlorn. Mary Shelley celebrates his natural brilliance and eloquence; he talks more like an artist and a philosopher than anyone else in the novel. The creature develops his benevolence and gregariousness without a single generous human gesture. Everyone rejects him. In a cottage he finds a family of political exiles, the De Laceys. They too are an “intimate circle” of family and close friends, a miniature community.

  Despite his earnest work to earn their love they revolt at his hideousness and violently cast him away. Their rejection drives the creature to despair and hatred. Shelley thus explains violence and vengeance through unjust exclusion; while Dr. Frankenstein’s sacrilegious evil was his own and nurtured in solitude, the Creature’s evil matures through repeated exclusion from his natural and just claim upon human community. In this way she challenges her father’s and husband’s assertion of the individual over the intimate community. Finding and reading Milton’s Paradise Lost the Creature decided he was a new Adam. Cast out from the “intimate circle” by the De Laceys, his last hope for a community crushed, he vows vengeance. Rejected and denied by Victor he becomes a Satanic rebel against his Creator and Father.

  In her story Shelley tests the ideas of her father, husband and other radical reformers in a thought-experiment. Victor earns our revulsion for escaping the moral accountability an “intimate circle” of family and friends would have imposed upon his divine aspirations and grotesque work. Through the Creature’s story Shelley asserts that affectionate company trains our innate sympathy into moral capacities. At the heart of her story Shelley challenged Victor’s attempt to eliminate women and mothers from reproduction and child-raising. Frankenstein built his Creature alone, abandoned him upon realizing fully that he had created a living human, all of which violates the basic intimacy of motherhood and the home.

  To a New World of Gods and Monsters!

  One of my earliest reading memories is from an encyclopedia’s condensed version of Frankenstein. All the classic shocking scenes are there: hubris, lightning, gruesome violation of bodies, the Creature’s horrific crimes. But the scene that sticks is the grieving, heart-crushed Creature scooping up his creator’s body and leaping from the window of Walton’s cabin onto the polar ice, disappearing into a white desert. The sublime thrill and sadness from that terrifying scene is as vivid now as it was forty years ago.

  With some notable exceptions like Whale’s The Bride of Frankenstein (1935) and Kenneth Branagh’s Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1994), popular revisions of the Frankenstein story have typically abandoned Shelley’s complex combination of idealistic and revolutionary convictions. Other works closer in spirit to Shelley’s novel are comic books like Bernie Wrightson’s Frankenstein (Dark Horse, 2011), Kevin Grevioux’s noir detective revision, I, Frankenstein (Darkstorm Studios, 2013), and Nick Dear’s play, Frankenstein (Faber and Faber, 2011). But in most modern versions of the tale the insanely obsessive scientist, working in fevered solitude, lives on, and the Creature rarely inspires pity; most often he’s just a nearly unstoppable monster. Shelley’s anxiety over solitude among the debris of the modern, extended family seems forgotten.

  Today’s Frankenstein myth probes our fear that the technical powers will overcome us, get inside, changing or corrupting our distinctive personhood into something unrecognizable or beyond our ability to manage. While such issues seem philosophically intriguing they say more of us than Shelley. Her terror was solitude, isolation; she made the lonely, even ugly, loving person the horrible counterpart of a loving circle of like-minded family and friends. Shelley used ugliness as a modernized “mark of Cain,” explaining the community’s rejection of the pitiable individual. The Creature’s hideousness and exclusion strongly contrasts an earlier incident where an outsider is warmly invited to join an extended family, when Victor’s father brings his beautiful and gentle cousin Elizabeth to live with them (pp. 19–21).

  For centuries the Christian church had taught that evil and suffering were consequences of human rebellion against God’s sovereignty. A range of writers in the Enlightenment and French Revolution promised the human power to minimize human suffering. Shelley took this “enlightened,” revolutionary impulse to press the boundary between human and divine. Her reckless scientist vows to eliminate human suffering and natural death. He can realize that arrogant ambition only in a grotesque parody of creation and the Christian resurrection.

  The Creature’s astonishing capacity to become in near complete isolation empathetic, gentle, and articulate points to Shelley’s highest hopes for a small, face-to-face community of equal citizens, suggesting a new kind of human being. But love denied becomes an agony, and the Creature turns to revenge. Shelley sympathized with but did not defend the revolutionary violence of Europe’s common people and the poor. The cycle of retribution and violence between the Creature and his father Victor is primal. Despite Dr. Frankenstein’s clumsy imitation of human beauty, his new-born Creature like the first Adam remains innocent. Unlike the first Adam the Creature falls into sin and violent rebellion against his creator as the victim of injustice, brutally driven from community after community. The novel then is in tension with itself, pulling between Shelley’s distrust of unrealistically optimistic human power expressed in technical intervention, and with her hopes for the modern liberation of human potential.

  Shelley was nineteen when she wrote Frankenstein. Her unsettled life echoed back the tremendous anxiety of revolutionary transformation across Europe. Fearing solitude in an age promising the transformation of human nature and society, she borrowed the most enduring and powerful myth in European culture, recasting its biblical symbols for a new age of audacious, charismatic revolutionaries. She answers her Promethean age with a story about love, its power, and the failure to reward it.

  What if Victor had adopted the Creature and raised him in his home? The novel’s repeated images of adoption and family life suggest a subtle manner of pushing the reader to this question. The redemptive hope of the novel whispers at every moment the Creature expresses his solitude and despair. Our ability to sympathize with the Creature implies his power as an icon of our own isolation, even desperation. Shelley’s moving account of innocence betrayed and abused asserts that despite the horrifying circumstances of his “conception” the Creature is like us. If his flesh is “wrong” he is nonetheless human.

  _________________

  1Frankenstein: 1818 Text (Oxford University Press, 1998), p. 196.

  21

  Why Science Is Horrific

  JEFF EWING

  Science can be very dangerous, especially when it plays God. Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein is just one of many horror stories that show us how dangerous it can be to play that game.

  Frankenstein, and many of the horror movies and novels that follow in its large, lumbering footsteps, depict the scary potential uses of science and technology. A similar concern about the out-of-control and terrible consequences of science has been voiced by various thinkers and writers.

  The philosophies of Marxism and Ecofeminism have been exceptionally critical of using science and technology to play God. They argue that it can cause the mistreatment of workers, women, indigenous and nonwhite peoples, and even of nature itsel
f. The “scientist as a god” perspective, they argue, treats those groups as if they are merely things to be used for power and profit.

  Penetrating Nature’s Recesses

  In Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, the product of unrestrained science and technology (and Victor Frankenstein’s hubris) literally runs amok. From an early age, Victor Frankenstein has, in his own words, always “been imbued with a fervent longing to penetrate the secrets of nature.” Frankenstein is specifically concerned with the “elixir of life,” allowing him to grant mankind power over disease and death, as he ponders “what glory would attend the discovery, if I could banish disease from the human frame and render man invulnerable to any but a violent death!”

  Frankenstein is instructed in modern natural philosophy, rejecting older alchemical practices, but ‘natural philosophy’ (the older term for ‘science’) disappoints him. He expresses “contempt for the uses of modern natural philosophy. . . It was very different, when the masters of the science sought immortality and power; such views, although futile, were grand.”

  Victor’s waning excitement with science is rekindled by his instructor, M. Waldman. Waldman describes the “modern masters” of science and natural philosophy, who

  penetrate into the recesses of nature, and show how she works in her hiding-places. They ascend into the heavens; they have discovered how the blood circulates, and the nature of the air we breathe. They have acquired new and almost unlimited powers; they can command the thunders of heaven, mimic the earthquake, and even mock the invisible world with its own shadows.

  Victor’s mind becomes again “filled with one thought, one conception, one purpose. . . I will pioneer a new way, explore unknown powers, and unfold to the world the deepest mysteries of creation.” Frankenstein’s pursuit of scientific progress and knowledge is explicitly derived from his desire to know the innermost secrets of the natural world, and his desire to bend nature to his will—absolutely and completely.

  Ecofeminism and the Critique of Science

  Ecofeminism begins with the insight that, particularly in Western civilization, the oppression of women, nonwhite, and indigenous peoples, and nonhuman nature have historically been interconnected in theory and practice. Maria Mies and Vandana Shiva explain that modern civilization is structured with the world organized into dichotomies, where one “half” is subordinated to the other—“nature is subordinated to man; woman to man; consumption to production; and the local to the global, and so on.”1

  All of these populations have long been subsumed as “nature” by colonizing white European and American men. Social practices in Western civilization have been oriented towards the instrumental use (the use only for personal gain) of these groups; they are treated as raw material for the pursuit of power and profit. This mistreatment is called “Othering” because those groups are treated as an “Other,” an outsider to be conquered, subdued, and enslaved to the will of the powerful.

  Ecofeminist theorists argue that this Othering impacts the development of science and technology. Val Plumwood shows how those groups have been treated as mere objects to be used by science after the Enlightenment. In this approach to science, science and technology have been developed to extract the secrets of the world, which is treated as a mechanical external world without mystery or value in and of itself. Carolyn Merchant highlights how this mechanistic treatment of the world reordered reality “around two fundamental constituents of human experience—order and power.”2 In other words, systems of domination and science have both been unified around the “Othering” of dominated groups. The dominated are now seen by science and the powerful as passive objects, treated as part of the “raw materials” of nature.

  Frankenstein’s Penetration of Nature’s Recesses

  Victor Frankenstein is inspired to practice science and perform his experiment from a desire to master and triumph over nature and natural processes. He desires power over the most natural and untouchable processes—life and death themselves—and his relation to nature in this scientific endeavor is marked by no reverence. To Victor,

  The world was to me a secret which I desired to divine . . . curiosity, earnest research to learn the hidden laws of nature, gladness akin to rapture, as they were unfolded to me, are among the earliest sensations I can remember.

  Victor is enraptured by the thought of learning nature’s hidden laws through the scientific method, and is so above all other considerations. Similarly, Merchant argues that the scientific method is now focused on attaining power over the natural world, and the rejection of “unpredictable animistic sources of change” in favor of mechanistic order—both of which are found in Victor Frankenstein! We see this in Victor’s rejection of earlier alchemists in favor of rationalistic, mechanistic natural philosophy, and his attribution of any frightening or supernatural elements regarding darkness or death to mere superstition. Victor has an order-structured orientation towards the natural world, which he uses to gain knowledge of the natural world, and through that knowledge, power over it.

  Victor’s method is a pure example of the science Plumwood criticizes, where the “knower” is superior to nature and free from its limits, and knowledge is “forced or tricked from a mindless and passive nature by a superior exclusively active and rational human mind.” We see this in the language Victor and his natural philosophy mentors use to describe their method and domination over nature. M. Waldman, the more kind of Frankenstein’s mentors, describes how natural philosophers “penetrate into the recesses of nature, and show how she works in her hiding-places,” describing the study of nature as the “penetration” into nature’s “recesses”—suggesting force (and perhaps even rape), by taking knowledge from it. This perfectly illustrates Plumwood’s critique of the scientific orientation, where “male knowers are seen as wringing from a nature pictured as a debased and passive female slave tortured to yield up her secrets.

  Nature is referred to as “she” and “her,” directly interpreted as female, passive, and overcome by an active and rational human mind. Victor elsewhere explains, in his description of the evolution of his desire to understand nature, that “I have described myself as always having been imbued with a fervent longing to penetrate the secrets of nature,” echoing the language of his mentor, with his desire for knowledge itself conceived as a “fervent longing” for this penetration.

  The scientific worldview portrayed in Frankenstein perfectly illustrates the orientation towards nature as a female and passive Other, to be “penetrated” by a superior rational man. Both Frankenstein’s violation of the laws of nature in the creation of his monster, and the consequences he unleashes yet cannot control, reflect Plumwood’s insight that this orientation to nature has been the cause of our ecological crises. Science under these conditions becomes a Frankensteinian monster, out of control, and threatening the very lives of those it touches.

  The Marxist Critique

  Marxian theory begins with acknowledgement of the ultimate dependence of humanity (alongside all other species on the planet) on successful relationships with nature for their survival and successful reproduction. For humanity, this is their relationship with nonhuman nature, with which they must interact to meet their needs, which is accomplished through labor (this process referred to as “production”) with the aid of various “tools.”

  The development of these tools and technologies creates to a large degree the potential for the successful meeting of needs—without the adequate tools, the rest of nature cannot be transformed for human purposes. Similarly, control over those tools and the “resources” of nature (the “means of production”) gives those in control of them (through ownership) an ability to coerce labor from those without access to resources and the means of production. Those with ownership over the “means of production” become the ruling class, while those forced to work on unequal terms and to unequal benefit become the “working classes,” and the specific forms these classes take vary by economic system, types of ownersh
ip, and the level of technology—and thus by the capacity for production to meet qualitatively and quantitatively different needs.

  As the owners of the “means of production” gradually monopolize wealth, technology in production, and resources, technological development becomes over time largely biased towards profitable technologies, ignoring many of the other potential results of those technologies, and neglecting many potential lines of technological development that would be useful or beneficial but not profitable.

  In the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, Marx argues that “natural science has invaded and transformed human life all the more practically through the medium of industry,” and predicts that “natural science will lose its abstractly material—or rather, its idealistic—tendency, and will become the basis of human science” when society stops focusing on profit and focuses instead on people.

  In The German Ideology, written jointly by Marx and his friend Friedrich Engels, Marx highlights how capitalism “made natural science subservient to capital and took from the division of labour the last semblance of its natural character.” Technological and scientific developments, to Marx and Engels, are necessary to enable a classless future, but capitalism in so many ways inhibits their capacity to do so through its power over 1. what gets researched; 2. the approach and analysis of that research (biases in its interpretation and what it omits and); 3. what gets translated from research on paper to actual produced goods in life; 4. how those goods are distributed; and 5. how those distributed goods are used.

  Das Monstrum: Marx Versus Victor

  Victor Frankenstein’s atomistic and mechanistic approach to nature is critiqued by Engels, just as we have seen it critiqued by ecofeminist thinkers. The relation of humanity to nonhuman nature is not treated holistically, and neither is it conceived in terms of a relationship—instead, nature is treated as an object that humanity is above and acts upon. Partway through the novel Victor escapes his troubles into nature without the intent to dissect it. In this brief moment, Victor notes, “my health and spirits had long been restored, and they gained additional strength from the salubrious air I breathed, the natural incidents of our progress.”