Frankenstein and Philosophy
Popular Culture and Philosophy® Series Editor: George A. Reisch
VOLUME 1 Seinfeld and Philosophy: A Book about Everything and Nothing (2000)
VOLUME 2 The Simpsons and Philosophy: The D’oh! of Homer (2001)
VOLUME 3 The Matrix and Philosophy: Welcome to the Desert of the Real (2002)
VOLUME 4 Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Philosophy: Fear and Trembling in Sunnydale (2003)
VOLUME 5 The Lord of the Rings and Philosophy: One Book to Rule Them All (2003)
VOLUME 9 Harry Potter and Philosophy: If Aristotle Ran Hogwarts (2004)
VOLUME 12 Star Wars and Philosophy: More Powerful than You Can Possibly Imagine (2005)
VOLUME 13 Superheroes and Philosophy: Truth, Justice, and the Socratic Way (2005)
VOLUME 19 Monty Python and Philosophy: Nudge Nudge, Think Think! (2006)
VOLUME 25 The Beatles and Philosophy: Nothing You Can Think that Can’t Be Thunk (2006)
VOLUME 26 South Park and Philosophy: Bigger, Longer, and More Penetrating (2007)
VOLUME 30 Pink Floyd and Philosophy: Careful with that Axiom, Eugene! (2007)
VOLUME 33 Battlestar Galactica and Philosophy: Mission Accomplished or Mission Frakked Up? (2008)
VOLUME 35 Star Trek and Philosophy: The Wrath of Kant (2008)
VOLUME 36 The Legend of Zelda and Philosophy: I Link Therefore I Am (2008)
VOLUME 37 The Wizard of Oz and Philosophy: Wicked Wisdom of the West (2008)
VOLUME 38 Radiohead and Philosophy: Fitter Happier More Deductive (2009)
VOLUME 39 Jimmy Buffett and Philosophy: The Porpoise Driven Life (2009) Edited by Erin McKenna and Scott L. Pratt
VOLUME 41 Stephen Colbert and Philosophy: I Am Philosophy (And So Can You!) (2009) Edited by Aaron Allen Schiller
VOLUME 42 Supervillains and Philosophy: Sometimes, Evil Is Its Own Reward (2009) Edited by Ben Dyer
VOLUME 43 The Golden Compass and Philosophy: God Bites the Dust (2009) Edited by Richard Greene and Rachel Robison
VOLUME 44 Led Zeppelin and Philosophy: All Will Be Revealed (2009) Edited by Scott Calef
VOLUME 45 World of Warcraft and Philosophy: Wrath of the Philosopher King (2009) Edited by Luke Cuddy and John Nordlinger
Volume 46 Mr. Monk and Philosophy: The Curious Case of the Defective Detective (2010) Edited by D.E. Wittkower
Volume 47 Anime and Philosophy: Wide Eyed Wonder (2010) Edited by Josef Steiff and Tristan D. Tamplin
VOLUME 48 The Red Sox and Philosophy: Green Monster Meditations (2010) Edited by Michael Macomber
VOLUME 49 Zombies, Vampires, and Philosophy: New Life for the Undead (2010) Edited by Richard Greene and K. Silem Mohammad
VOLUME 50 Facebook and Philosophy: What’s on Your Mind? (2010) Edited by D.E. Wittkower
VOLUME 51 Soccer and Philosophy: Beautiful Thoughts on the Beautiful Game (2010) Edited by Ted Richards
VOLUME 52 Manga and Philosophy: Fullmetal Metaphysician (2010) Edited by Josef Steiff and Adam Barkman
VOLUME 53 Martial Arts and Philosophy: Beating and Nothingness (2010) Edited by Graham Priest and Damon Young
VOLUME 54 The Onion and Philosophy: Fake News Story True, Alleges Indignant Area Professor (2010) Edited by Sharon M. Kaye
VOLUME 55 Doctor Who and Philosophy: Bigger on the Inside (2010) Edited by Courtland Lewis and Paula Smithka
VOLUME 56 Dune and Philosophy: Weirding Way of the Mentat (2011) Edited by Jeffery Nicholas
VOLUME 57 Rush and Philosophy: Heart and Mind United (2011) Edited by Jim Berti and Durrell Bowman
VOLUME 58 Dexter and Philosophy: Mind over Spatter (2011) Edited by Richard Greene, George A. Reisch, and Rachel Robison-Greene
VOLUME 59 Halo and Philosophy: Intellect Evolved (2011) Edited by Luke Cuddy
VOLUME 60 SpongeBob SquarePants and Philosophy: Soaking Up Secrets Under the Sea! (2011) Edited by Joseph J. Foy
VOLUME 61 Sherlock Holmes and Philosophy: The Footprints of a Gigantic Mind (2011) Edited by Josef Steiff
VOLUME 62 Inception and Philosophy: Ideas to Die For (2011) Edited by Thorsten Botz-Bornstein
VOLUME 63 Philip K. Dick and Philosophy: Do Androids Have Kindred Spirits? (2011) Edited by D.E. Wittkower
VOLUME 64 The Rolling Stones and Philosophy: It’s Just a Thought Away (2012) Edited by Luke Dick and George A. Reisch
VOLUME 65 Chuck Klosterman and Philosophy: The Real and the Cereal (2012) Edited by Seth Vannatta
VOLUME 66 Neil Gaiman and Philosophy: Gods Gone Wild! (2012) Edited by Tracy L. Bealer, Rachel Luria, and Wayne Yuen
VOLUME 67 Breaking Bad and Philosophy: Badder Living through Chemistry (2012) Edited by David R. Koepsell and Robert Arp
VOLUME 68 The Walking Dead and Philosophy: Zombie Apocalypse Now (2012) Edited by Wayne Yuen
VOLUME 69 Curb Your Enthusiasm and Philosophy: Awaken the Social Assassin Within (2012) Edited by Mark Ralkowski
VOLUME 70 Dungeons and Dragons and Philosophy: Raiding the Temple of Wisdom (2012) Edited by Jon Cogburn and Mark Silcox
VOLUME 71 The Catcher in the Rye and Philosophy: A Book for Bastards, Morons, and Madmen (2012) Edited by Keith Dromm and Heather Salter
VOLUME 72 Jeopardy! and Philosophy: What Is Knowledge in the Form of a Question? (2012) Edited by Shaun P. Young
VOLUME 73 The Wire and Philosophy: This America, Man (2013) Edited by David Bzdak, Joanna Crosby, and Seth Vannatta
VOLUME 74 Planet of the Apes and Philosophy: Great Apes Think Alike (2013) Edited by John Huss
VOLUME 75 Psych and Philosophy: Some Dark Juju-Magumbo (2013) Edited by Robert Arp
VOLUME 76 The Good Wife and Philosophy: Temptations of Saint Alicia (2013) Edited by Kimberly Baltzer-Jaray and Robert Arp
VOLUME 77 Boardwalk Empire and Philosophy: Bootleg This Book (2013) Edited by Richard Greene and Rachel Robison-Greene
VOLUME 78 Futurama and Philosophy (2013) Edited by Courtland Lewis and Shaun P. Young
VOLUME 79 Frankenstein and Philosophy: The Shocking Truth (2013) Edited by Nicolas Michaud
VOLUME 80 Ender’s Game and Philosophy: Genocide Is Child’s Play (2013) Edited by D.E. Wittkower and Lucinda Rush
IN PREPARATION:
How I Met Your Mother and Philosophy (2014) Edited by Lorenzo von Matterhorn
Jurassic Park and Philosophy (2014) Edited by Nicolas Michaud
The Devil and Philosophy (2014) Edited by Robert Arp
Justified and Philosophy (2014) Edited by Rod Carveth
Leonard Cohen and Philosophy (2014) Edited by Jason Holt
Homeland and Philosophy (2014) Edited by Robert Arp
For full details of all Popular Culture and Philosophy® books, visit www.opencourtbooks.com.
Popular Culture and Philosophy®
Frankenstein and
Philosophy
The Shocking Truth
Edited by
NICOLAS MICHAUD
OPEN COURT
Chicago
Volume 79 in the series, Popular Culture and Philosophy ®, edited by George A. Reisch
To order books from Open Court, call toll-free 1-800-815-2280, or visit our website at www.opencourtbooks.com.
Open Court Publishing Company is a division of Carus Publishing Company, dba ePals Media.
Copyright © 2013 by Carus Publishing Company, dba ePals Media.
First printing 2013
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher, Open Court Publishing Company, 70 East Lake Street, Suite 800, Chicago,
Illinois 60601.
ISBN: 978-0-8126-9842-8
Library of Congress Control Number 201393090
Contents
That Vital Spark of Life
I. Dr. Frankenstein’s Easy Guide to Eternal Life
1.Wanna Live Forever? Don’t Pull a Frankenstein!
MICHAEL HAUSKELLER
2.Victor Frankenstein in the Twenty-First Century
DANILO CHAIB
3.Embracing the Corpse-People
GREG LITTMANN
4.So, You Want to Be a Mad Scientist . . .
DALE JACQUETTE
II. Dr. Frankenstein’s Treatment Notes
5.That Frightening Frankenmetaphor
ELENA CASETTA AND LUCA TAMBOLO
6.Frankenstein’s Failure
DANIEL KOKOTZ
7.Frankenstein and Zarathustra—Godless Men
CHRISTOPHER KETCHAM
8.Capitalism the Monster
JOHN R. FITZPATRICK
III. I Made a Monster! Now What?
9.Is the Monster Free?
PETER D. ZUK
10.How to Raise a Monster
JANELLE PÖTZSCH
11.When Creations Go Bad
SKYLER KING
12.Who’s to Blame?
JAI GALLIOTT
IV. Dr. Frankenstein’s Monster Identification Field Guide
13.Sure It’s Aliiiive, but Does It Have a Sooooul?
KEITH HESS
14.Who Is Frankenstein’s Monster?
JONATHAN LOPEZ
15.I’m the Person, You’re the Monster
NICOLAS MICHAUD
16.What Love Means to a Creature
MIRKO D. GARASIC
17.Getting Inside the Monster’s Head
SPYROS PETROUNAKOS
18.Come Back Dr. Frankenstein, All Is Forgiven
CAROLINE MOSSER
V. Dr. Frankenstein’s Monster Assembly Kit
19.And We Thought He Was the Monster
MICHAEL MENDELSON
20.Adopting Frankenstein’s Creature
MIKE KUGLER
21.Why Science Is Horrific
JEFF EWING
22.The Human and the Monstrous
CYNTHIA D. COE
23.The Monster that Therefore I Am
JESSIE DERN
VI. You Can Learn from My Mistakes
24.If We Could All Be Dr. Frankensteins . . .
JOHN V. KARAVITIS
25.Why It’s Wrong to Make Monsters—or Babies
JOE SLATER
26.Why Bad Things Happen to Good Monsters
TRIP MCCROSSIN
27.Good and Ugly
WILLIAM RODRIGUEZ
The Mad Creators
Bits and Pieces
Acknowledgments
I have many people I would like to thank for helping me stitch this project together. First and foremost, I owe a great deal of thanks to David Ramsay Steele for making this project happen—without his help and guidance there would be no book . . . Thank you, David.
I also owe George Reisch my deep thanks for helping me get this project off the ground and giving me the chance to take it on. Thank you, also, to my authors in this volume . . . you are awesome!
I owe unending thanks to the many people who put up with me while I tromp around grumpily trying to make my deadlines (in alpha order to avoid any angry mobs): Thomas Arden, Jake and Jessica May, Powell Kreis, and Joan and Ken Michaud. And a very special thank-you to my grandmother, Nelkis Cobas, whose own writing continues to inspire me. You are the best family a mad scientist could create. I love you all!
And thank you to our readers and fans of Frankenstein for keeping alive a story far bigger than any one short (or not so short) human lifespan.
That Vital Spark of Life
Igor, Show them in. . . .
“It’s Alive! . . . It’s Aliiiive!!!!”
With those immortal words, Mary Shelley, the author of Frankenstein, . . . well, did nothing. Shelley never wrote those words. Where did we hear them? We heard them at the movies. We heard them on TV. We heard our maniacal biology professor shout them from the top of the science building! (What some people will do for a research grant.)
Shelley’s creation keeps coming back. The creature has lived many lives and stalks the Earth in many creepy forms, in hundreds of movies, dozens of TV shows, in comic books, and even in many new novels which seek to re-engineer Shelley’s creature. So this book can dissect not just one body of work, but a vast proliferating corpus (or should I say corpse?) of popular entertainment, a monstrous mythology slouching through the mass mind.
This book stitches together assorted corporeal parts scavenged from many a fetid graveyard. We’re here to investigate and pay homage to a pop culture icon, and to have a bit of fun with it—and by fun, I do mean something a bit disgusting.
When you enter into the massive world that is Frankenstein, you find a whole bunch of philosophical—and, let’s be honest, shocking—toys to play with . . . Mel Brooks’s Young Frankenstein, the lovable Herman Munster, Dean Koontz’s Dr. Helios, the terrifying monster brought to life by Boris Karloff, and the newly re-animated Adam Frankenstein, to name but a few.
Not that we don’t pay plenty of attention to Shelley’s towering masterwork, but you just may find that some of our chapters mention Mary Shelly and Frankenweenie in the same sentence . . . and what’s Frankenstein about if it’s not about breaking rules? So, if there’s a good place to tread where only God should, while wearing a pair of heavy black boots with studs in them, it’s here.
And you’ll find that once we start trampling upon those boundaries, our investigative probe unveils some blood-chilling questions: We will ask you if a re-animated corpse-man has a soul. We will consider the chilling question, “If it is wrong to make monsters, is it wrong to make babies?” And perhaps most pressingly, we’ll reflect on whether Frankenstein’s maligned creation would be wrong in seeking to end all of us . . .
So, dim the lights, sit back by the flickering glow of a candle, and let’s look deeply into the dull, yellow eyes of the dark doctor’s foul creation.
On second thoughts, leave the lights on—and while you’re at it, bar the door.
I
Dr. Frankenstein’s Easy Guide to Eternal Life
1
Wanna Live Forever? Don’t Pull a Frankenstein!
MICHAEL HAUSKELLER
“It’s aliiiiiive, it’s aliiiiiiiiiiive!!!” Who could forget that moment in James Whale’s 1931 film Frankenstein? The scene is one of the reasons why the monster’s creator, played by Colin Clive, comes across as being more than just slightly disturbed. Although he keeps denying it (“Crazy, am I?”), the mad gleam in his eyes clearly marks him as an outright fruitcake. No wonder he has become the model for one of our most-cherished stereotypes, the “mad scientist.”
In Mary Shelley’s novel, however, there’s no hint of fruit-cakeyness. Shelley’s Victor Frankenstein might be slightly obsessed, but otherwise he seems to be quite sane. He is ambitious, as good scientists tend to be, and basically just wants to make the world a better place by ridding it of death, “that most irreparable evil,” and of disease. If that’s a sign of lunacy, then lately we seem to be surrounded by lunatics.
For thousands of years we’ve been dreaming about immortality, but only now, for the first time in history, radical life extension seems to be a real possibility. Scientists are close to figuring out what makes us age, and many are hopeful that very soon we’ll be able to halt and possibly even reverse the ageing process, which would make us virtually immortal. At least we would no longer have to die. And could anything be more desirable than that? Dedicated anti-ageists such as Aubrey de Grey, moral philosophers such as John Harris, and transhumanists such as Max More and Nick Bostrom assure us that death is the greatest of all evils and that nothing could be more important than getting rid of it. If that’s true, then it seems that Frankenstein’s ambition was actually quite sensible.
So why exact
ly did everything go so terribly wrong? Why did Victor Frankenstein, instead of becoming mankind’s greatest benefactor as he had planned to, end up creating something that he himself chooses to see, or perhaps cannot help but see, as a monster?
Playing God
In Shelley’s novel, Frankenstein himself blames the whole mess on his ill-considered attempt to “learn the hidden laws of nature,” to “penetrate” the “physical secrets of the world,” to “unveil the face of Nature” and to pursue her “to her hiding-places.” Frankenstein talks about nature as if she were a woman that he wants to bed and that he is determined to have whatever it takes. And if she doesn’t readily give herself to him, well, then she must be taken by force. The whole thing comes very close to a rape fantasy.
But after the rape comes remorse, and punishment. Or perhaps punishment first, and then remorse. After his creature has gone rampant, Frankenstein expresses disgust at his own actions. He speaks of his “unhallowed arts,” which led him, despite his good intentions, to commit “deeds of mischief beyond description horrible.” He doesn’t talk about God directly, but his choice of words (“unhallowed”) suggests that he feels he committed a sacrilege, an act that somehow defied God’s will and the natural and at the same time divine order of things, and that he has been justly punished for this.
The movie version is far more explicit. In Whale’s Frankenstein he shouts, after his creation has actually begun to move and shown that it is indeed alive: “In the name of God, now I know what it feels to be God!” And in the prologue that was added to the film to warn viewers of the shocking nature of the events that they were going to see, the presenter summarizes the whole story by saying that “Frankenstein sought to create a man after his own image, without reckoning upon God.”
In Bride of Frankenstein, James Whale’s 1935 sequel to Frankenstein, Mary Shelley herself, played by Elsa Lanchaster who later remorphs so splendidly as the Bride, conveniently explains what her story is all about. Her purpose was, she says, to “write a moral lesson about a mortal man who dared to emulate God.” All this strongly suggests that the violation, the crime that Frankenstein committed, was that he assumed a power that only God should have. The ancient Greeks called this hubris. Frankenstein made himself like God and was punished for it by God.
Frankenstein and Philosophy Page 1