Game of Thrones and Philosophy

by Jacoby, Henry, Irwin, William

  Westeros is a world where a person’s purpose or essence is determined by the categories of class, status, and tradition. Robb’s purpose in life is to succeed Ned as the head of House Stark. Robb can either live up to this purpose or fail; it is not something that he can choose for himself. Similarly, a woman cannot rule a kingdom in Westeros, which is why Lady Lysa may only rule in regency for her son, Lord Robert, just as Cersei may wield power only in regency for Joffrey. Cersei, of course, laments this fact, and Arya Stark consciously struggles to overcome it, but nearly every character takes gender to be an essential fact. (Brienne is the exception that proves the rule.) More generally, what one is determines who one is. Station is not something one can rise above, nor sink below. Jon is a bastard, and no matter what he achieves, he will never be heir to Winterfell.5

  Sartre tried hard to dispel this kind of essentialism. He believed that humans were very different from anything that has an essence. Sartre’s pithy slogan notwithstanding, it is not so much that human existence precedes essence as that human existence precludes essence. Sartre argued that if anything defines human beings, it is our unconditioned and absolute freedom to choose to be the kind of beings that we are.6 And since we are free to be anything, then we are in fact nothing, which is just another way of saying that human beings have no essence.7 No person is essentially a man or woman, lord or liege, just as no person is essentially a rational being or a pleasure-seeking being.

  How does Sartre know this? He believes that absolute freedom reveals itself through reflection and in certain moods. Before any action, one can always pause and reflect upon why one is about to act. What does one find in these moments of reflection? We discover motivations, desires, attitudes, and goals, none of which can force us to act. To act, you must choose, and this choice itself has no ground or cause other than the fact that you make it. The individual is always responsible for each and every choice. Cersei, for example, may try to excuse her actions on grounds of necessity: she must arrest and silence Ned because what he knows will bring ruin to the House of Lannister and Joffrey’s Kingship. She might think that her own desires or preferences have nothing to do with this. But of course this is wrong. She does have the choice; in fact, she has chosen.

  We are also aware of our freedom through certain moods, the most important of which is anguish (Angst, as it is sometimes referred to in the original German). Think of Eddard as he faces the choice to become Robert’s Hand. He surely knows the likely consequences. He knows well the fate the Hand has held for those before him, and is likely to hold, not only for himself, but also for the entire House Stark. We may never be asked to serve as the King’s Hand, but each of us has experienced moments of decision where we know that our choice, whatever it is, will lock in one future while foreclosing others. To feel that one’s entire life is at stake in the moment is anguish, which Sartre, following the German philosopher Martin Heidegger (more on him later!), interprets as a fear not in the face of some threat coming from the world, but the fear that accompanies the knowledge that one must decide one’s entire life.

  Ned must decide whether his primary loyalty is to the realm or to his family. Later, when Cersei demands his confession of treason, he faces an even starker choice: is it my family, or my honor, for which I live? Facing these choices in full awareness that in so choosing, you are choosing a life (will I be a traitor to my country, or to my family?) is what Sartre, again following Heidegger, calls “authenticity.”

  Anguish, Sartre says, rips us from our everyday existence—our being as father, friend, worker, and so on—and forces us to decide for that existence as a whole. We can do so authentically or inauthentically. If we are inauthentic, we push the enormity of such moments off onto forces we claim to be unable to control—such as fate! Sansa, as she stands before King Robert and is forced to choose between her fiancé and her family, chooses, as we know, the former. Surely Sansa is one of the most frustrating—and therefore most artfully drawn—characters in A Game of Thrones. Despite the manifest evidence, Sansa refuses to believe that Joffrey is anything other than a chivalrous prince, or that the Lannisters are anything but regal and upstanding wards. Sansa’s inauthenticity shows itself in “bad faith,” as Sartre calls it, by refusing to take ownership of herself and her situation.8 To Sansa’s mind, it is as if she has no choice but to lie about Joffrey’s attack against Mycah, as this is what loyalty as a fiancée requires.

  Authenticity thus defined is the very opposite of fatalism. To accept fate is to relinquish one’s freedom. Daenerys, if this theory is correct, may believe that fate is guiding her actions, but in reality it is only her choices and her freedom that drive her. If she does not recognize this, she is, in Sartre’s view, inauthentic.

  Que Sera, Sera (What Will Be, Will Be)

  Fate is often associated with justice. If not in this life, then in the next, the good shall be rewarded and the evil punished. Fate and justice do not seem to align in this familiar way in Martin’s books. Some argue that this is what makes Martin’s books unique, bestowing a sense of realism on a series otherwise firmly within the fantasy genre. If fate is operating in A Song of Ice and Fire, it does not seem to be a force for justice, but rather something cold and pitiless, sometimes allowing good characters to needlessly die while bad characters succeed.

  What sort of fate, then, might be operating in Westeros, if not the fate of cosmic justice? Metaphysical fatalism says nothing about the moral order of the universe. It says only that the future has already been determined. The Macedonian philosopher Aristotle (384–322 BCE) worried that the truth of metaphysical fatalism would nullify human freedom. In a treatise on the logical form of language, Aristotle considers the following argument in support of fatalism: Suppose that someone were to say, “There will be a sea battle tomorrow,” and someone else were to assert the opposite, “There will not be a sea battle tomorrow.”9 Since the second statement is only the negation of the first, one of these statements must be correct. Why is that? Aristotle was the first systematic logician and had elsewhere established that every proposition must be either true or false. For very many propositions, of course, we may never know which is the case. “There are exactly seventeen extraterrestrial civilizations,” “Caesar ate three eggs one morning in 45 BCE,” “Every even integer greater than two can be expressed as the sum of two primes”—we may never know, for any one of these propositions, whether it is true or false. All the same, Aristotle reasoned, surely each proposition has to be one or the other, true or false. He called this principle “the principle of bivalence.” A commitment to bivalence left him in a bind when it came to propositions about the future. If “There will be a sea battle tomorrow” is true, then it must be the fact that there is a sea battle tomorrow that makes it true. Hence we can infer that if the statement is true, the fact it describes must be the case, for otherwise the statement would not be true. But to say that something in the future must be the case is to endorse fatalism. If it’s true that there will be a sea battle tomorrow, then necessarily there will be a sea battle tomorrow, and nothing can be done to change that fact.

  Aristotle worried that if this argument were sound, human freedom would mean nothing; it would mean that we are powerless to affect the future. The truth of fatalism thus would mean that we neither have control over our lives nor possess individual responsibility. To avoid this conclusion, Aristotle decreed that for this one class of propositions (propositions about the future), the law of bivalence should be suspended. Thus, if you say to someone, “Tomorrow it will rain,” that statement, according to Aristotle, is neither true nor false. Some may take comfort in the fact that this means that one could never be wrong with a claim about the future, but of course it equally follows that one could never be right.

  The Roman orator and politician Cicero (106–43 BCE) spelled out more explicitly the threat that metaphysical fatalism seems to pose to human agency. It is called the “Idle Argument,” for it concludes that if fatalism is true, then there
is no reason to do anything. Take the following example:

  1. If Daenerys is fated to rule Westeros, then she will rule Westeros regardless of whether she leaves Mereen.

  2. Hence, whether she leaves Mereen is idle with respect to whether she will rule Westeros.

  3. Hence, Dany has no reason to leave Mereen.

  It should be apparent why this argument is problematic: clearly Daenerys will not be able to rule Westeros if she remains in Mereen. If we look again at the premises, we will see why this and any argument like it is unsound: it could be the case that Daenerys comes to rule Westeros only because she leaves Mereen.

  Philosophers use the term “practical” to refer to the sorts of deliberations we perform when acting. To say that a certain argument or fact matters practically is to say that it should figure in one’s deliberations about what to do. The Idle Argument, we can now say, makes exactly that claim about metaphysical fatalism—it claims that metaphysical fatalism matters for deciding what to do. But that, we now see, is false. It hardly follows from the arguments we have seen in favor of metaphysical fatalism that what you do does not affect the future; in fact, the future in large part is the result of what you do! So fatalism does not pose a threat to agency in the way that Sartre may have maintained. Remember that for Sartre, fatalism is anathema to human freedom if one uses it as an excuse for remaining in bad faith. In that much he is correct: because there are no practical consequences that follow from metaphysical fatalism, it would be in bad faith to use a commitment to fatalism as an excuse for not acting. Suppose, as a further example, that Jon believes the Others are fated never to enter Westeros. It would be wrong for him to do nothing. Fate might have it that the others fail to invade Westeros only because he stands firm in his duties at the Wall.

  Fulfilling Fate

  There is something of a paradox emerging here. It is wrong, we have just seen, to think of fate as an external force coercing agents this way or that. One’s fate is largely one’s own doing. Dany is fated to marry Khal Drogo, just as Jon is fated to don the Black, yet these are clearly things that each of them does. At the same time, metaphysical fatalism tells us that only one future is possible. It seems, then, that one’s fate is largely the result of one’s own doing, and yet, it is something that one can do nothing about. What notion of freedom could make sense of this?

  To answer, let’s return to Martin Heidegger (1889–1976), who first introduced the term “authenticity” to systematic philosophy. “Authenticity” normally connotes something real as opposed to something fake. No replica of Ice, Lord Eddard’s sword, no matter how exact, will ever be the “authentic” Ice. In this sense, being “real” is a way of being unique or singular. Heidegger appropriates this common understanding of authenticity to develop an alternative to the usual concept of human freedom as autonomy. While autonomy is defined in terms of control—I am autonomous if I can control what I do, free from any external or internal compulsion—authenticity is defined in terms of ownership and singularity: freedom as “owning” oneself and being one’s own.10 The challenge Heidegger wants to meet with the concept of authenticity is as follows: while acknowledging that we are wholly shaped by our past and that this will decide our future, how can one ever be free—how can one take possession of one’s own life? I think we can all appreciate this problem: while on the one hand we feel as if we are in control of ourselves and our lives, we understand that had we been born to a different time or in a different place, we would be very different from the person we are now and would make very different life decisions. How can we acknowledge this fact while still retaining any notion of freedom, any notion, that is, that we are responsible for who we are?

  Return to the moment when Eddard must decide, do I confess to treason and spare my family, or do I stand on principle and forfeit the lives of my daughters? The discerning reader, when aided by a writer as gifted as Martin, already knows the answer. Eddard has proven time and again that his honor matters more to him than his life or his status. But this honor is anchored in an even deeper sense of responsibility. He knows that it was his mistakes that put Arya and Sansa in danger, his decisions that endangered Winterfell, and his acquiescence that could thwart war. If Eddard can make matters right by laying down his honor before King’s Landing, then we already know what Eddard will do. When you know a person’s character, you know the sorts of choices that person will make. One’s choices at any moment do not, contrary to Sartre, float free of one’s past. We are determined by our history, and most importantly, by our character. The Greek philosopher Heraclitus (c. 535–c. 475 BCE), whom Heidegger greatly admired, expressed this point by saying that “character is destiny.”

  Freedom, as Heidegger interprets it, is, rather than a potentiality confined to the moment, something that characterizes one’s life as a whole. Contrary to Sartre, this freedom does not mean being cut off from one’s past, but rather fulfilling it. Heidegger says that normally we exist in a state of “average everydayness.” In this mode of existing, we go about our day doing what “one” does, being a father, brother, colleague, and friend. Our average or everyday existence is dispersed among many different projects and roles, only some of which cohere with one another. For example, Jon’s obligations as a brother to Robb conflict with his obligations as a brother of the Night’s Watch. He cannot live a life committed to both. He must choose. By his choice he does not escape those obligations. Rather, the obligations bind him even were he to choose to ignore them. What he must do instead is choose to fulfill one obligation or the other. Notice that in fulfilling an obligation, Jon is fulfilling a purpose he did not choose for himself, and in this sense, he is choosing his fate. Jon did not decide to be born a bastard in House Stark, nor did he decide that brothers of the Night’s Watch have no family but one another. But by choosing to fulfill one purpose rather than another, Jon is choosing himself, and in this sense, by becoming an individual, is free.

  Becoming Who You Are

  We began by asking, are fate and freedom compatible? Or does fatalism nullify freedom? Intuitively perhaps, we understand that they can be compatible—that finding one’s purpose or living up to one’s fate can be liberating. The challenge is to find a philosophical justification for that feeling. We have found it, I think, in Heidegger. Over the course of a life, one becomes who one is. Struggling to make something of one’s life is the struggle, in Heidegger’s terms, for authenticity. Life presents each of us with any number of incompatible possible lives that we might equally fulfill. Many options are open, but to live authentically, to be an individual, one must choose one and forfeit others. Good characters do this: Dany has chosen the rights to the House Targaryen, Jon has chosen the life of Watch, Robb has chosen to be the King of the North, and Tyrion has chosen to be a Lannister, no matter how much his father, his sister, and the world protest that that is a place to which he has no right. In choosing these lives, these characters are fulfilling purposes or fates that themselves were not chosen. Pindar (522–443 BCE), a Greek poet, expressed this point in the following words: “Become who you are.” How can a person become that which he or she already is? The answer is that who one is, is decided by how that person fulfills the purposes that fate—one’s past, one’s history, one’s character—has assigned.

  NOTES

  1. George R. R. Martin, A Game of Thrones (New York: Bantam Dell, 2005), p. 57.

  2. The philosophical term “metaphysics” is nearly the opposite of its other meaning when used to denote spiritual or otherworldly things. In philosophy, “metaphysics” refers to the study of reality. For example, the theories of space, time, and causality are “metaphysical.” In the present context, “metaphysical fatalism” says that the future, in some sense, really exists and cannot be changed. This is in contrast to what might be called “psychological fatalism,” that sense of powerlessness or passivity that follows from the belief that nothing can be done to change the future. A belief in metaphysical fatalism is often said to entail psy
chological fatalism, but I dispute this in the present chapter.

  3. Hence the name of the school in philosophy that Sartre more than any other perhaps represents: existentialism.

  4. It is worth pointing out that Epicurus did not believe that one should try to maximize pleasure at all times. In fact, Epicurus exhorted his followers to lead as abstemious and moderate a life as possible. A demand for great pleasures too easily leads to great disappointment, whereas a life of simple, rustic pleasure is easily achieved and its disappointments less severe.

  5. Several characters self-consciously struggle against this essentialism. One is Petyr Baelish, who, we are led to believe in A Feast of Crows, perhaps desires to run House Arryn, and maybe even Westeros itself, or maybe even something grander. Many readers admire Davos for similar reasons. It does not appear to take much for Lord Manderly to revivify the smuggler in him in A Dance with Dragons. And of course, in counterpoint to Jon, there is Ramsey Bolton, whose deformed character seems to betray his unfitness for his false station as Lord Bolton’s heir.

  6. A clever reader might be asking herself at this point, “Is Sartre not saying that freedom is the human essence, something each human has, by virtue of which each of us is a person? And is not this just admitting that humans do after all have an essence?” “Yes and no,” is the right answer. If we wish to insist that freedom is the human essence, then we may do so, so long as we recognize (a) that this essence is different from all other essences and (b) that since one could be anything one is nothing, and if our essence is nothing, then it really is not an essence at all.