Frankenstein and Philosophy

by Michaud, Nicolas

  At base, Victor rejects the monster for being different, for being outside the clique of humanity. The great horror author H.P. Lovecraft praised Frankenstein by writing: “It has the true touch of cosmic fear.”3 But what is “cosmic fear”? Lovecraft explains: “Dread of outer, unknown forces must be present; and there must be a hint of . . . suspension or defeat of those fixed laws of Nature which are our only safeguard against the assaults of chaos and the daemons of unplumbed space.” In other words, we must be faced with something mysterious and unknown that defies the rules by which we think the universe operates. But being strange and unfamiliar to us and defying our expectations of what the universe is like are not to do anything wrong. We fear the unknown, but every friend is unknown until we get to know them.

  Building Friendships and Building Friends

  The opportunity science gives us to try to create intelligent creatures with a view to establishing friendships with them is too valuable for humanity to pass up. After all, it’s the only chance that humanity has to make any friends in the universe at all. One of the most persistent fears in science fiction is that the aliens are coming. But the science fiction nightmares paper over the far more terrible truth revealed by modern science. The aliens are not coming. We are going to be alone forever, or at least, as long as we last. If intelligent life were going to find us, the probability is overwhelming that they would have found us by now. As mathematical physicist Frank Tipler has pointed out, it should take less than half a million years to fill the galaxy with self-replicating robot spaceships on the lookout for life. That nobody from the great void has ever bothered to say hello is excellent grounds to believe that nobody is ever going to, while the lack of evidence of robot spaceships suggests that no other species has even grown clever enough to look for life beyond their world.4 As noted above, our species, Homo sapiens, once shared this planet with another intelligent species, our cousins the Neanderthals. But we drove them to extinction, a tragic and incalculable loss. As far as we know, in the entire universe there was only one other form of intelligent life and we wiped them out.

  As individuals we’re free to make friendships with other humans and that is extremely valuable. Yet just as it is good for individual humans to gain an outside perspective from their human friends, so the perspective of outsiders would be invaluable for humanity, as an aid to understanding both ourselves and the universe. In whatever way intellectual conversation between individuals benefits individuals, intellectual conversations with different forms of life might benefit us as a species. Truth is most effectively hunted in an environment with a diversity of perspectives, and other forms of life might offer us perspectives and ways of thinking that we would never have acquired on our own, just because of the limitations of our natures.

  Certainly, we can make friendships, of a sort, with some animals. We can even share some basic communication with them. Your dog can let you know it is happy to see you and vice versa, while some chimpanzees have even been taught rudimentary sign language. But we can’t connect with other animals on an intellectual level. A consistent theme in Frankenstein is our need for intelligent companionship. Walton finds that the hardest part about exploring the Arctic is the lack of an intellectual equal to share thoughts with. He writes: “I have no one near me, gentle yet courageous, possessed of a cultivated as well as a capacious mind” (p. 4). Victor, who cherishes the time he spends with his friend Clerval in intellectual conversation, sees intelligent friendship as essential to our development as humans. He explains to Walton: “We are unfashioned creatures, but half made up, if one wiser, better, dearer than ourselves—such a friends ought to be—do not lend his aid to perfectionate our weak and faulty natures” (p. 12).

  Even Safie flees to Europe not simply to be with her love Felix, but to get some decent chat. With an “intellect and an independence of spirit forbidden to the female followers of Mahomet,” she couldn’t bear to be “immured within the walls of a harem, allowed only to occupy herself with infantile amusements” (p. 88). Most strikingly, the monster cannot tolerate an existence without intelligent friendship. When he demands that Victor build him a mate, he’s not just looking for someone to talk to about his day, or to share monster cuddles with on freezing arctic nights. He must “live in communion with an equal.” Despite mastering a team of sled dogs, the friendship of the dogs is no balm for the monster’s soul. Dogs are notorious for putting up with ugly owners without complaint, and besides, the monster must smell wonderful. Yet whatever relationship he has with them, it brings no relief to his loneliness.

  A Modern Prometheus

  Shelley describes Victor as “the modern Prometheus” for usurping a power that belongs only to God. But if it wasn’t for Prometheus stealing fire from the gods (at least according to the myth), we humans would still be eating our food raw and technological development would have ended with the sharpened rock.

  No doubt our ancestors were afraid of fire at first, however they acquired it, and rightly so. Fire is dangerous, especially if treated irresponsibly. Yet judged by utilitarian standards, the benefits of this weird new technology have outweighed the costs, as fire lit the path to a new way of life for humans, one stranger and more wonderful than our ancestors’ wildest dreams. New things aren’t always bad, however bizarre they seem initially seem, and sometimes the risk of change comes with new opportunities worth welcoming with open arms.

  I started from my sleep and, by the dim and yellow light of the moon, as it forced its way through the window shutters, I beheld the creature whom I had created. He held up the curtain of the bed and his eyes, if eyes they may be called, were fixed on me while a grin wrinkled his cheeks. His jaws opened, and he muttered “I am sorry that I awakened you, Victor. That was not my intention. I merely enjoy the sight of you at slumber. Goodnight. I love you.”

  I answered as I reposed myself, “I love you too. Goodnight Nigel.”

  _________________

  1Mary Shelley, Frankenstein (Dover, 1983), pp. viii–ix.

  2Danse Macabre (Berkley, 1983), p. 39.

  3H.P. Lovecraft, Supernatural Horror in Literature (Dover, 1973).

  4Frank Tipler, “Extraterrestrial Beings Do Not Exist,” Quarterly Journal of the Royal Astronomical Society 21:267 (1981).

  4

  So, You Want to Be a Mad Scientist . . .

  DALE JACQUETTE

  After days and nights of incredible labour and fatigue, I succeeded in discovering the cause of generation and life; nay, more, I became myself capable of bestowing animation upon lifeless matter.

  —VICTOR FRANKENSTEIN

  Mythic elements of Mary Shelley’s gothic 1818 novel Frankenstein: Or, the Modern Prometheus express an interesting modern attitude about the conquest of applied experimental science and technology over human adversities.1

  If we think of nature as willful, then we can understand what Victor Frankenstein does in his rented Ingolstadt attic as flaunting the seemingly inevitable forces of nature, battling against mortality to bring life back from the dead. To know that such power exists would go far to alleviate our anxiety concerning the inescapability of death. Shelley’s novel has been so much more than a dire warning about the dangers of scientific hubris, or even the hope for eternal life. Somehow she breathes life into a story that has achieved an immortality about which her imaginary mad scientist could only dream.

  Hearts and Kidneys Are TinkerToys!

  In Mary Shelley’s time, people were just starting to realize the full impact of their dependence on natural science. They were already becoming indebted to science in efforts to prevent and cure disease, improve housing and food, sanitation, transportation, education and communication, together with all the professional health services that many people today can take for granted.

  Isn’t it better to live with science? And, when it all goes as advertised, who can knock it? How, then, can we look such a gift horse in the mouth, or strangle the goose that lays golden eggs, by questioning the value of
even the most morally unbridled scientific inquiry? Frankenstein in Shelley’s novel takes this potential to one of its fascinating extremes by considering the possibility of surgically attaching and then electrically re-animating an eight-foot tall (no exaggeration, see page 54) stitched-together assemblage of shopped out charnel-house dead body parts. It’s only the logical conclusion of the modern argument that if we can defeat smallpox and polio, then why should we not be able to cheat death altogether by somehow bringing life back to the clinically dead?

  How exactly it is all supposed to work from a technical standpoint is no more than hinted at in Shelley’s tale. The point is that Victor Frankenstein figures out how to do it, and then suffers intense creator’s regret:

  It was on a dreary night of November, that I beheld the accomplishment of my toils. With an anxiety that almost amounted to agony, I collected the instruments of life around me, that I might infuse a spark of being into the lifeless thing that lay at my feet. It was already one in the morning; the rain pattered dismally against the panes, and my candle was nearly burnt out when by the glimmer of the half-extinguished light, I saw the dull yellow eye of the creature open; it breathed hard, and a convulsive motion agitated its limbs.

  It is as though when telling Captain Walton his story, Victor, now in pursuit of the monster, cannot bear to dwell on any of the disgusting details. Even Walton fails adequately to describe the Creature, near the novel’s end, saying only: “I entered the cabin where lay the remains of my ill-fated and admirable friend. Over him hung a form which I cannot find words to describe (p. 209).

  The hard work of hooking up the organs and tissues in his rented attic laboratory invites filmmakers to elaborate on the apparatus and the electrical drama, and most importantly on the re-animated Creature. Although it’s not in Shelley’s book, an electrical storm is typically harvested and the power brought to bear somehow upon the dead being and against all odds, Frankenstein succeeds. If, as readers of Shelley’s spooky yarn, we ask again, how exactly this is all supposed to happen, then we can only observe that Shelley draws a misty veil and pulls some quick scene transitions over just these kinds of details.

  We almost participate in Frankenstein’s overworked trance state as he spends late nights collecting and whip-stitching dead body parts together and positioning electrodes on the lab table. It’s as though he’s already returning to the Creature with regret for his tampering when it next opens a yellowed eye. Shelley generously leaves us free to fill in the finer points ourselves, and film-makers have tried to do so in a variety of visually and conceptually interesting ways, inevitably changing or distorting Shelley’s story. If we want to take a darker view, then these parts of the story, these indescribable aspects of the Creature, are also by analogy something like a humiliating sexual encounter, an event too shameful for the discrete novelist explicitly to say any more about than is necessary, without wallowing in all the scandalous fun.

  A Riot Is an Ugly Thing . . . Und I Zink It Is Just About Time Ve Had One!

  Victor Frankenstein, in bestowing life on the Creature, mythically embodies an idea that continues to be a forceful undercurrent of our technological culture. It’s what might be called an optimism or faith in science—the belief that with enough time, determination, and application of resources, there can be an unlimitedly promising future of scientific control over virtually every human adversity.

  If there is no natural limit to the assumption, then in the new enlightened age of applied scientific knowledge, it ought to be possible in principle to thwart many if not all age-old challenges to health and happiness, including overcoming the supposed inevitability of death. Frankenstein is not evil, although he does play God by inadvertently creating a monster and then leaving it to fend for itself outside of all society. Frankenstein wants to be able to impart (and to gain fame for imparting) eternal life to individual human beings, to free them from physical ailment and the fear of mortality.

  It hardly comes as a surprise, therefore, in a frequent even overworked literary theme also brilliantly adapted by Shelley, that tempting the most profound forces of nature against human willpower and a do-it-yourself chemistry set is bound to turn out badly. We see it from a mile away after turning even the first few pages of the book: Creating new life out of spare parts of the dead is sure to result in an uncontrollable monster. We are in no suspense as to the fact that a great tragedy must boomerang on the modern Prometheus who dares like his namesake to bring a fire-like spark of life down from the gods to benefit his beloved creation. To attempt what Victor Frankenstein finally achieves in Shelley’s Frankenstein is to engage in the unnatural, for which in fiction at least there is always a price to be paid.

  Shelley’s fable, however, is not, supernatural. Stories of werewolves and vampires all typically depend on forces beyond nature. What Shelley describes is appropriate instead to eighteenth century science fiction. If we make the assumptions that were being made then about the unlimited prospects of experimental science—like all that is needed to defeat death is to combine parts of different dead bodies and then jolt the rag-doll into life with a little direct current, then much of the Frankenstein myth becomes not only possible, but inevitable. All it takes is undaunted human ambition, salvaged detached limbs and once living components, a needle and thread, maybe a couple of pneumatic pumps, and a lightning rod to harness a sufficient source of electricity infusing a renewed spark of life. It is a task at which no one can succeed who does not madly dream and madly dare, but the dreamer does not need to call on the occult or supernatural.

  The dark side of Shelley’s picture is that Victor’s effort to serve human demands over nature eventually leads to chaos and destruction. His arrogance leads him to try to exert dominance over the prescribed contingencies of life and death. There are grisly countryside homicides and the execution of an innocent falsely condemned and executed in the wake of the fiend’s misdeeds. All derive from the fact that Victor does not accept the monster he makes or take responsibility for its proper upbringing, protection, and education.

  As though in a supreme act of denial of his involvement, Victor does not even give his creation a name. He runs from it in terror, and thereby makes of it an outcast from all human society, without guidance or adult supervision to smooth its way. Once the Creature’s jaundiced eye cracks open on the world, Victor abandons his manufactured progeny to whatever fate holds, to finding its way in the world on its stumbling own. If the monster survives, and regardless of the havoc it wreaks in the process, it is with no help from its creator.

  Victor Frankenstein recklessly combines a baby’s untutored mind and high-strung emotions with the hideous form of a giant’s grotesque post-mortem body, and then tries to wash his hands of the whole miserable business. Later, when the Creature tracks him down, the justly guilt-ridden mad scientist dolefully reports:

  A flash of lightning illuminated the object, and discovered its shape plainly to me; its gigantic stature, and the deformity of its aspect, more hideous than belongs to humanity, instantly informed me that it was the wretch, the filthy daemon to whom I had given life. (pp. 77–78}

  Victor’s creation is subsequently left to experience rejection after rejection, eventually coming to hate all humankind.

  Oh, Sweet Mystery of Life, at Last I’ve Found You!

  What is to be learned from the Creature’s vicious exclusion from the kindness of his creator or from the country folk he helps? As the story unfolds, all hopes fail, one by one, and the Creature turns personal misery into anti-social violence. Victor Frankenstein, as the modern Prometheus, reaps his own destruction at the hands of the monster he creates.

  There is predictable poetic justice embodied in Shelley’s classic moral narrative arc. The interesting question is why the Frankenstein myth in so many different manifestations has captured the imagination of popular culture to such an astonishing degree. The tragedy of Frankenstein, imaginatively set by Shelley in the previous century at some distance from her
contemporary scene, obviously touches a raw modern nerve.

  Written after inspiration as part of a literary challenge on a cold Swiss winter night, having pored over a cache of French ghost stories in the extraordinary company of no less personages than Lord (George Gordon) Byron, Shelley’s husband Percy Bysshe Shelley, and Byron’s personal physician and traveling companion, Dr. John William Polidori, Mary Shelley’s drama has stood the test of time as a well-crafted work of literature, while proliferating outward in many directions, penetrating deeply into the popular culture. There are over a thousand Frankenstein-related films and TV episodes. It is a popular Halloween costume and mask, and untold numbers of related spin-off artifacts. There is even a Frankenberry kid’s cereal!

  Shelley in unleashing her novel creates as much a popular culture monster as Frankenstein in the story engineers. How, exactly, given that the consequences could not have been foreseen, does she manage to do this? What is the secret of Frankenstein’s unparalleled success in the time-honored world marketplace of mythical ideas, images, contagious and irresistibly insightful icons, parables, allegories and images? How does Frankenstein continue to strike such a responsive chord almost two hundred years after its original publication with readers and cinema-goers?

  The answer may be found in the story’s remarkable unique combination of the following powerful elements. Shelley’s novel invokes:

  •The progress of experimental science in nineteenth century Europe, beginning to reap the intellectual and practical implications of the age of Enlightenment that the previous century had inaugurated, and that is still with us most powerfully today.

  •The struggle against death and the characteristically human consciousness of the first and major premise in the Aristotelian syllogism that every logic student learns, “All men are mortal.” It is the awareness of life’s greatest mysteries and its cruelest limitations, the yearning in all times for immortality, as we find among the ancient Egyptians and in a majority of religious traditions. (We are reminded here of Woody Allen’s quip that he never wanted to achieve immortality through his work, but through not dying.)