Frankenstein and Philosophy

by Michaud, Nicolas

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  7Well, not really. The first to articulate Vitalism was actually a contemporary of Plato’s, Hippocrates of Cos (460 B.C.–c. 370 B.C.).

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  Embracing the Corpse-People

  GREG LITTMANN

  Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein is one of the greatest horror novels ever written, as well as one of the greatest works of science fiction. Like all great horror writers, Shelley drew on her own fears to inspire her work. Frankenstein is her nightmarish fantasy about scientific exploration taken too far. But how far is too far?

  For Shelley, the perfect example of going too far is creating artificial life. Yet creating artificial life is a goal of modern scientific research, both for geneticists editing DNA to produce new forms of biological life and for computer programmers working in artificial intelligence to produce thinking machines. So asking, “How wise is Shelley’s attitude in Frankenstein?” is not just an excuse to wallow in a wonderful book. If we’re going to be consistent, what we say about the Frankenstein case will have implications for what we should say about the development and use of technologies in the real world.

  What’s Wrong with Monsters?

  Why not create artificial life? Mary Shelley saw it as overstepping human prerogatives. Creating life is only for God. In her Author’s Introduction to the 1831 edition of Frankenstein, she writes: “Frightful must it be, for supremely frightful would be the effect of any human endeavor to mock the stupendous mechanism of the Creator of the world. His success would terrify the artist; he would rush away from his odious handy work, horror-stricken.”1 Dr. Victor Frankenstein likewise views his act as trespassing on God’s turf. He complains: “How much happier that man is who believes his native town to be the world, than he who aspires to become greater than his nature will allow?” (p. 31). The full title of the novel, Frankenstein or the Modern Prometheus, is a reference to Victor’s usurping of God’s prerogative, Prometheus being the Titan in Greek mythology who stole fire from the gods and gave it to humanity.

  As it turns out, though, we weren’t created by a god but arose through billions of years of evolution. In the absence of God, no divine law holds us back. Of course, just because we aren’t forbidden to do something doesn’t make it a good idea. The arctic explorer Robert Walton, whose letters frame the novel, asks, “What can stop the determined heart and resolved will of man?” (p. 7) as he proudly sails his ship north into the icy waters on a doomed voyage of discovery. His excessive human pride is not challenging God here, at least not directly, but it is leading him to go beyond the limits of what human beings should do.

  One good reason to be wary of creating new life is that it could be dangerous. Victor refuses to build a mate for his creation for fear that they will populate the world with their kind and perhaps wipe out humanity. He need not have worried. Modern genetics reveals that there is no way that two people made out of corpses sewn together could produce babies made out of baby corpses sewn together, or anything similar. Sewing human parts together doesn’t rewrite their DNA, so any monster children will be built on normal human DNA. Stephen King also notes that “Shelley apparently never considered the idea that for a man capable of creating life from moldering spare parts, it would be child’s play to create a woman without the capacity for conceiving a child”2 It might be added that if what the monster really needs is a friend, as he keeps insisting, Victor should be able to haggle him into accepting a male companion.

  Still, Victor certainly has a point that creating new life could potentially have disastrous consequences. If artificially created creatures happen to kill off or outcompete some established species, they could collapse an entire ecosystem. Likewise, the development of biological weapons intended to spread contagion among human populations is madness. Given the potential consequences for humanity, the human propensity for making mistakes, and the ability of humans to be shockingly evil, developing these technologies just isn’t worth the risk.

  However, this is not the sort of case we find in Frankenstein, even if we allow that in the universe of the novel, the children of corpse-monsters will be corpse-monsters too. Let’s imagine that Victor had built his creature a mate, and together the two monsters became the Adam and Eve of a new race that spread over the Earth. One day a family of cadaver folk might move in next door to you, the Smith-Jones-Black-Shelley-Wilkinson-And-A-Bit-Of-Phelps family; two gigantic but wizened adults and three gaunt, necrotic children. What, exactly, is so bad about that?

  Certainly, they are ugly. But so what? So am I and I bet you are too. Yet you would think it rude if your neighbor complained about your face. More to the point, some of the best people I know are ugly. They have the hearts of angels and faces like the devil’s backside.

  When Victor sees the monster for the first time since the night of his creation, he immediately concludes that it was the monster who murdered his brother William. He accuses: “Nothing in human shape could have destroyed that fair child. He was the murderer. I could not doubt it!” (p. 50). But Victor’s judgment is unfair. Very ordinary humans kill children, while nothing in the monster’s makeup requires him to be a killer. Victor calls him wretch, fiend, daemon, monster, and devil, but never so much as gives his creation a name, let alone offers him help and guidance. If anyone had ever befriended the poor “devil” and taught him that humanity is not his enemy, he would not have reached for William’s neck, but for his hand. Victor is right of course—the monster did murder his brother. But nothing Victor had learned up to that point justifies his conclusion. Little does he realize it, but his own prejudices against his creation are the greatest part of the problem.

  As the monster frequently points out, and as he demonstrates by trying to make friends with the cottager family, all he really wants is to be loved. If Victor had treated the monster as his family treated the needy child Elizabeth Lavenza, and taken him under his protection, the monster too would have grown up to be “the living spirit of love.” Even after the monster turns to murder, he’d be perfectly happy to reform if shown a little basic decency. He complains: “I was benevolent and good; misery made me a fiend. Make me happy, and I shall again be virtuous” (p. 69). In fact, he would reform if just one person would show him kindness: “If any being felt emotions of benevolence towards me, I should return them an hundred and an hundredfold; for that one creatures sake, I would make peace with the whole kind” (p. 105).

  It’s true that the corpse-people are, on average, a lot stronger, healthier, more agile, and more intelligent than humans. If a sufficiently large population of them decided to wipe us out, there’s not much that we could do to stop them. But that’s not grounds to prevent them from existing. If it were, I would be justified in preventing the birth of a human child in case it ever decided to buy a gun and shoot me.

  Direct killing isn’t the only way to bring disaster to a species. What if they used their superior intelligence to outcompete us, as we Homo sapiens used our superior intelligence to outcompete our cousins the Neanderthals? Again, though, such a standard is obviously unfair when we apply it to other humans. We wouldn’t want to prevent the births of particularly intelligent or healthy babies on the grounds that we don’t want our children having to compete for resources with their children. Besides, why would a race as intelligent as the monsters want to allow us to become extinct? Imagine what our own scholars would give to reverse the extinction of the Neanderthal. How much more would a race of geniuses give to preserve the only other species
whose intelligence resembles theirs, and the one that gave them existence in the first place?

  Learning to Love Monsters

  Stripped of the religious preconceptions that make the artificial creation of life seem like the violation of divine law, the value system underlying Frankenstein is more supportive of creating artificial life than the author seems to realize. The primary virtue celebrated in Frankenstein is not reverence for divine law but kindness. Victor is a man of “benevolence and sweetness” with “manners . . . conciliating and gentle.” His entire family is likewise characterized by gentleness and benevolence. His parents were “possessed of the very spirit of kindness and indulgence” and his upbringing was such that “during every hour of my infant life I received a lesson of patience, of charity, and of self-control” (p. 16).

  Nor do they limit their compassion to family and friends alone. Victor’s father and mother were frequently in the habit of visiting the poor to relieve their distress and go so far as to taking the penniless orphan Elizabeth into their family. Elizabeth herself, as noted above, is “the living spirit of love,” “unfolding . . . the real loveliness of beneficence” for others. Victor’s best friend Henry Clerval, everything that a man should be, is “perfectly humane . . . thoughtful in his generosity . . . full of kindness and tenderness.” Even the explorer Walton is a man capable of loving a friend of brief acquaintance “like a brother.”

  Shelley rightly rejects material gain as the basis for a fulfilling human life. Clerval refuses to follow his father’s wish that he devote himself solely to business, becoming “chained to the miserable details of commerce.” His life must have travel, poetry, and adventure, and he must be allowed to cultivate his mind with education. She also rightly rejects the quest for fame, and especially placing such a goal over loving relationships. She invites us to see foolishness in Walton, the mirror of Victor, when he writes to his beloved sister, “My life might have been passed in ease and luxury; but I preferred glory to every enticement that wealth placed in my path. . . . If I succeed, many, many months, perhaps years, will pass before you and I may meet. If I fail, you will see me again soon, or never” (p. 3).

  Even so, Shelley’s concern with the importance of family and friendship makes her too narrow-minded about how people should spend their time. To her mind, dedication to socializing with family and friends must be so complete that, as a repentant Victor puts it shortly before his death, “If the study to which you apply yourself has a tendency to weaken your affections, and to destroy your taste for those simple pleasures in which no alloy can possibly mix, then that study is certainly unlawful, that is to say, not befitting the human mind.” It would be better if “no man allowed any pursuit whatsoever to interfere with the tranquility of his domestic affections” (p. 34).

  It’s interesting that Shelley places such limitations on the study of the natural world when her love of nature so permeates her novel. Victor and the monster alike are both uplifted by scenes of natural beauty even in their deepest despair. Clerval and Elizabeth, representatives of the healthy-minded man and healthy-minded woman, are both regularly enchanted by nature, to the point that Clerval goes into aesthetic rapture at least twice a day, when the sun rises and sets. Forgetting to admire nature is a sign of Victor’s moral decline: “My eyes were insensible to the charms of nature. And the same feelings which made me neglect the scenes around me caused me also to forget those friends . . .” (p. 33). Yet Shelley’s love of nature does not extend to love of understanding nature. For her, nature is to be appreciated as it strikes the senses, but the causes of natural phenomena are no part of their beauty.

  When Victor condemns scientific obsession, it’s not scientific activity per se that Shelley is objecting to, but what she sees as the unnatural devotion of some scientists. The monster attacks not Victor, but his friends and family, like a personification of the scientific curiosity that alienates him from his loved ones. But simple pleasures, nice as they are, are not the only pleasures that entice us, and we should not feel bound to forgo sophisticated pleasures for simple ones.

  As to letting nothing interfere with the tranquility of our domestic affections, in practice that would mean getting next to no work done at all. We could always be spending quality time with friends or family instead of working, a very serious dilemma, but not one that should prevent us from pursuing projects that give our lives meaning. More importantly, we must not let the desire for the happiness of our loved ones prevent us from promoting the happiness of others in general. Kindness that applies only to those we know is not kindness enough. Researchers like Victor Frankenstein, who devote long hours to their work away from home, save other people’s family and friends through their discoveries.

  A Future of Cosmic Horror and Other Benefits of Being Kind

  A good guiding principle to direct our kindness is the one adopted by the monster himself when making sense of human history. “I read of men concerned in public affairs, governing or massacring their species. I felt the greatest ardour for virtue rise within me, and abhorrence for vice, as far as I understood the signification of those terms, relative as they were, as I applied them, to pleasure and pain alone” (p. 92). The monster has invented the moral theory known as “utilitarianism,” the view that the rightness or wrongness of acts depends solely on how much pleasure or suffering they cause. Mary Shelley’s father, the political philosopher William Godwin (1756–1836), was a passionate advocate for the view, so it is no surprise to find it striking the monster as so reasonable.

  The blind old cottager De Lacey is almost a utilitarian, as shown by his attitude to criminals. Before realizing that the monster is a monster, and knowing only that he is a stranger in need, he assures him that he would protect him from being driven out of society even if he “. . . were really criminal, for that can only drive you to desperation, and not instigate you to virtue” (p. 96). His attitude is characteristic of the desire of utilitarians to see reform in the justice system, to place the focus on rehabilitating criminals rather than on punishing wickedness. De Lacey goes on to promise: “I am poor and an exile, but it will afford me true pleasure to be in any way serviceable to a human creature.”

  He means well, but in specifying that he would help a human creature, he’s discriminating against the non-human. The monster may be less biologically related to the old man than other humans are, but he’s in no less need of help. If only the old man had acted as a true utilitarian, he would have disregarded the irrelevant fact of the monster’s unusual composition and concerned himself only with the monster’s happiness and suffering. Significantly, utilitarians were among the first to speak up for animal rights.

  Victor, when he finally thinks his duties through, embraces utilitarianism without discounting non-humans. When deciding whether to give in to the monster’s demand for a mate, he reasons: “This was my duty; but there was another still paramount to that. My duties towards the beings of my own species had greater claims to my attention, because they included a greater proportion of happiness or misery” (p. 161). Victor adds up the happiness and misery of all parties, the monster’s included, and decides that happiness overall is best served by not building a female.

  On the face of it, Victor is not being speciesist (biased against others simply because they are not members of his species) like De Lacey. He’s not claiming that the monster’s happiness is less valuable than that of a human, but just that the misery the monster suffers by being alone is outweighed by the good of all of humanity. But when we look deeper, he really is being speciesist. Firstly, he considers only the worst possible case for humanity, not what we might gain from associating with creatures so much more intelligent and, judging by the monster, so much kindlier in nature than ourselves. Secondly, he considers the suffering of generations of humans yet unborn, but not what joys may come to cadaver folk yet to be born. What achievements might these brilliant and naturally virtuous children of humanity make if only given a chance to exist, and what sort
of society might they build?

  As much as I enjoy the 1930s horror films of Universal Studios, movies like Frankenstein (1931) and Bride of Frankenstein (1935) cemented in the public mind an image of the monster as an unreasoning brute acting out of instinct, a forerunner to the hordes of zombies that have rampaged through pop culture. Despite all of the times that the monster has been paired up with his only competition as a horror icon, Count Dracula, not once has a popular film taken the fascinating opportunity to show the meeting of minds between the world-wise, cynical genius of Bram Stoker’s vampire and the naive, idealistic genius of Mary Shelley’s monster. The monster is much more likely to be found stumbling stupidly around a haunted house on Dracula’s orders, in pursuit of Abbot and Costello.

  Yet robbing the monster of his extreme intelligence is to rob him of the most interesting of his many inhuman abilities. He’s quite simply the cleverest person who has ever lived. This is a fellow who taught himself to speak and read by watching through a window as a Turkish speaker learns French, and then managed to make sense of the histories Ruins of Empires and Plutarch’s Lives, John Milton’s epic religious poem Paradise Lost, Johann Goethe’s tragic novel The Sorrows of Young Werther, and Victor’s medical notes. If the monster is that brilliant, he should be able to construct a woman himself and then sail off with her in his home-made submarine. In any case, it is clear the “race of devils” that Victor fears would, in fact, be a race of geniuses, functioning at an intellectual level Einstein could only drool at.