by Cuddy, Luke
The proper recourse for the Spartan is to learn what is “up to him” and to master his desires by understanding negative emotions and focusing on what is important for a good life for him. The Stoic program argues that if we learn to control ourselves and cultivate our virtue, there will be much less suffering and little evil in the world. Suffering and painful experiences are genuine, but the emotions we accept are self-imposed even when someone is being harmed. For example, when the marines are attacked by the Covenant troops from an elevated position, the stoic Spartan is as fearful as the rest of the marines; the difference, however, is the way the stoic Spartan then frames this fear. To go from “there are Covenant troops firing rockets from above” to “there are Covenant troops firing rockets from above and we are all going to die” gives assent (makes the choice) to negative emotions of distress. These movements to negative emotions are misjudgments and, according to the Stoics, emotions are not automatic since there is a choice to make in the movements.
If we understand the rational self, then we understands that movements of thought are part instinct and part choice. It may seem counter-intuitive in not moving to negative emotions when they are warranted; for example, if there are soldiers at your front door and you know they mean possible harm, you will naturally be terrified that they will harm you or your family. The Stoic advice is to know what is “up to you” and you will be fine.
It is not that Stoics are indifferent to loved ones, but it is “not up to you” if they are harmed or not, nor does it entail passivity to the situation; a Stoic may fight because living in accordance with nature may require one to sacrifice oneself. However, the Stoic must minimize the attachments to contingent things, like family, because we cannot control whether they live or die; failing to see this as true is to fail to understand the fundamental rule of becoming enslaved to negative emotions. Epictetus asks, “Do you wish to be invincible? Then don’t enter into combat with what you have no real control over” (Epictetus, p. 31). The Spartan can be invincible if he understands that the meaning to his life is independent of the conditions that surround him.
Master Chief has to face his past, the exploitive feature of his creation, and the questionable reasons for why he fights. He has to accept his present nature as a warrior sworn to defend humanity. He can be faithful to the cause as an antidote to the bitterness that his past may foster. What we learn in the mostly silent character of Master Chief is the complete Stoic warrior that is strong in his own understanding of his past, present, and future. His statement, “I need a weapon,” is a claim that understands who and what he is. Epictetus reminds us, “Nothing can be taken from us. There is nothing to lose. Inner peace begins when we stop saying ‘I have lost it’ and instead say, ‘It has been returned to where it came from’” (Epictetus, p. 23). If this follows, Master Chief and the Spartans can live with harmony and tranquility even in the war-torn Halo universe.
The criticism often leveled against Epictetus and the Stoics is that they minimize the emotional connections and attachments that are very important to most human beings. The Spartans must minimize their attachments to their fellow soldiers and the people they are sworn to defend. They can only fight on. Epictetus’s argument that it is out of their control and they must ignore it would minimize the terrible injustice suffered by the children of the Spartan program. The Stoic ideal seems rather troubling and hard to bear in this instance.
In the end, the contemplative Spartan will seek to make sense of his or her difficult life—be it the anti-hero or the Stoic warrior, only the Spartan will know. The two views offered, of Camus and Epictetus, are but two of the possibilities to be explored in the effort for greater understanding of life. Yet, both Camus and Epictetus capture something about what Master Chief has to concentrate on in finding meaning to a life less ordinary. Camus captures the strangeness and absurdity of living that can seem rather hopeless and meaningless. Master Chief and his kind could easily become disillusioned by the facts of their origin, the constant battles, and loss of life. These things are the rock being pushed up the hill and it falling down. If the Spartans embrace Camus, they can find meaning in the fleeting moments of defiance as they survive and fight on.
On the other hand, Epictetus captures an understanding that suggests that even if the world may appear absurd and rather mad, there’s still a choice. The Spartan can respond to the facts of her past and present by being clear with what is up to her and ignoring what she cannot control. In that understanding, tranquility is possible. Each of these philosophical perspectives addresses the possible meaning for the Spartan warrior. Those who play the games and read the stories of the Spartan warriors observe a solemn being facing a life of war and carnage—a being who faces that life with a quiet reserve that ordinary humans will sympathize with, but struggle to grasp. Even in the darkness and turmoil of the Halo future, Master Chief can find meaning to his actions and his life.
3
Why Plato Wants You to Play Halo
ROGER TRAVIS
What would Plato have thought of Halo? Plato knew a lot more about videogames than we usually give him credit for, and he was as familiar as anyone could be with Halo’s illustrious forebears, The Iliad and The Odyssey.
Despite his famous opposition to the ethics of what he called mimesis—that is, really, playing pretend the way we do when we play Halo—Plato would have welcomed Halo as a proper training for the citizens of a just nation.
Plato saw the theatrical epics he knew as a threat, but there’s also an under-appreciated irony in Plato’s position on mimesis—especially with regard to epic, a genre in which Halo is fully entitled to membership. That irony has everything to do with the status of works like Halo that help members of a society learn to behave as steadfast warriors in the face of threats to their communities. It’s no coincidence that even as Plato, through his character Socrates, is condemning stories that people perform by playing pretend, he’s performing such a story himself: The Republic.
Am I foolishly going to suggest that Halo is a deep philosophical treatise? Of course not—but according to the ancient understanding of philosophy, Halo is philosophy, because in its own way Halo trains us in the ethical life. Plato might well have welcomed it as a warlike supplement to The Republic.
Context of Platonic Ethics in Halo: Education
It certainly doesn’t seem on the face of it as if Halo has anything to do with the questions with which Plato was most concerned—the questions of ethical philosophy that we might boil down to “What does it mean to do, and to be, good?” Even if we somehow dignify Halo with the title “epic,” it’s still just a space-epic videogame about a super soldier fighting aliens, right?
It’s definitely that, but, strangely, Plato had a great deal to say about the ethical philosophy of (space-)epic, and about videogames; indeed, dealing with the philosophical influence of works very much like Halo was a key part of his reason for inventing what we know simply as “philosophy.”14 Those works were The Iliad and The Odyssey, and Plato felt he needed to deal with them for both a practical and a theoretical reason.
Practically, Plato saw that if his new way of doing life—that is, the practice of philosophy—was going to have the effect he wanted it to have on the world, he was going to have to reform education. In Plato’s Athens, the Homeric epics constituted the bedrock of education—and also a great deal of the edifice built upon that bedrock. Young Athenians learned their Homer before they learned anything else, and Plato himself ironically demonstrates that learning over and over in his dialogues, as interlocutor after interlocutor spouts endless bits of Homer the way moderns with a religious education can spout sacred texts.
We can see epic’s dominance reflected in the works for which classical Athens is justly famous. When Herodotus and Thucydides go to write history, they begin with the “author” they thought of as a man named “Homer.” (They were wrong to think that way. There was no single author Homer, but a bunch of different people whom we cal
l “the Homeric tradition.” But that doesn’t affect the use the Greeks made of what they thought of as Homer.) When Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides go to write tragedy, it’s Homer’s Iliad and Homer’s Odyssey that they count on their audience knowing, if their tragedies are going to make sense. The Iliad and The Odyssey, and, to a slightly lesser extent, a whole bunch of other, similar-but-inferior, epics that we’ve now lost, were the textbooks of the Athenian educational system.15
Plato on the Attack
When Plato wants to talk about reforming the way Athenians—and people in general—learn to be Athenians, and good people, it’s Homer he attacks: in the Ion and especially in The Republic. In the Ion, Plato has Socrates take on Ion the rhapsode—that is a reciter of the epics of Homer—as a proxy both for Homer “himself” and for the entire educational system that Plato saw as founded upon “his” works. In fact, Ion’s name is a tell here, because it indicates that he’s standing in for the educational tradition that came from Ionia, which is where the Homeric epics originate.
It might help to imagine for a moment what it would be like if Halo were the key textbook that kids were learning from today. You might find them quoting Sergeant Johnson, the Master Chief, Captain Keyes, and Cortana in appropriate situations, and bragging to one another about their accomplishments in the game...
Oh, wait. Kids already do that, don’t they?
In fact, we’re already in an educational system not that far from the one Plato experienced, in which being a person involved much more playing epic pretend than you notice when you first turn your attention to it; it’s just that the idea we have of “school” being the most important educational practice of childhood and early adolescence gets in the way of our seeing where and what our children are really learning.
The idea of “playing epic pretend” gets us into the theoretical part of the reason Plato’s ethical philosophy can’t be separated from Homeric epic—and thus can’t be separated from Halo either. The theoretical side of all this is where The Republic comes in, and now we have to dive into the thorny problem of mimesis. We could do a lot worse than to simply define it from the start as “playing epic pretend,” but let’s start with the more familiar translation: “imitation.”
Halo as Mimesis
Although mimesis is usually translated as “imitation,” imitation is not what’s going on when we play Halo or listen to a bard sing The Iliad, or watch a Greek tragedy, or watch a romantic comedy on TV. What’s really going on is that we’re pretending.
In fact, Plato’s word mimesis (which was already a reasonably old word meaning “pretend performance” in ancient Greek) had the sense of both “performance” and of “copying.” Plato makes it clear that he understood the word to mean “pretend performance.” Our word “imitation” has the sense of “copying” but not of “performance.”
The reason we see mimesis translated as “imitation” so often is that in the tenth book of The Republic Plato makes his famous argument about how a painting of a bed is (as we usually see it) a “copy of a copy,” because a “real” bed is actually a “copy” of the idea of Bed—usually called “the form of the bed.” But Plato is provocatively de-emphasizing the performance side of the word and heavily emphasizing the “copy” side not with the intention to redefine the term mimesis but with the intention of critiquing it.
More simply put, in Republic 10, Plato’s emphasizing the part of performance that may be viewed as sheer copying, or mimicry as we usually define that word. He’s saying “You think this mimesis thing is awesome, but, let me tell you, too much of it is mimicry, and you don’t realize how dangerous that makes it.”
In terms of Halo, when you pretend to be the Master Chief, you’re doing mimesis in the Book 3 sense: that is, you’re pretending to be somebody else. Plato’s Book 10 Socrates—if he’s even serious at that point—would like you to think about the harm you’re doing yourself ethically in that you’re also copying the actions the game gives you to copy: shooting aliens, just to choose Halo’s most prominent mechanic. If it seems insane to think that you could do yourself ethical harm that way, well, really it’s no more insane than saying that a painting of a bed is twice-removed from the metaphysical realm of the forms, which contains some sort of divine Bed: that is, it’s insanity with a philosophical reason, and an ironic philosophical reason at that (more about the irony in a moment).
There’s something to be said for Plato’s notion of ethical harm when we consider the kind of actions Grand Theft Auto gives you to copy: certainly the idea that people could become walking performances of criminal characters is one that’s pretty familiar to any gamer who’s tried to defend games like Halo as ethically okay, much less one who’s tried to persuade even gamers that the game might be ethically valuable. Plato knew it well, too: The Republic brings its critique of mimesis to a head with the following passage:Therefore, Glaucon, I said, whenever you meet with any of the eulogists of Homer declaring that he has been the educator of Hellas, and that he is profitable for education and for the ordering of human things, . . . we are ready to acknowledge that Homer is the greatest of poets and first of tragedy writers; but we must remain firm in our conviction that hymns to the gods and praises of famous men are the only poetry which ought to be admitted into our State. For if you go beyond this and allow the honeyed muse to enter, either in epic or lyric verse, not law and the reason of mankind, which by common consent have ever been deemed best, but pleasure and pain will be the rulers in our State.16
By playing epic pretend, people learn to let their appetites overcome their reason, Socrates says here. By playing Halo, you don’t just learn to be like Master Chief, but because Halo appeals to your appetites—for blood, for sex—you also learn to let those appetites control you.
Note carefully also the way Homer and tragedy have come together; it will be very important in a moment. It’s a shortcut, but not an inaccurate one, to say that the elements of tragedy we see in Halo, like the deaths of Commander Keyes and Sergeant Johnson, and the suffering of Cortana, demonstrate the same coming together: from a Platonic point of view Halo is both epic and tragedy, just as The Iliad is both epic and tragedy.
Plato’s student Aristotle also chooses to group Homeric epic and Greek tragedy together in his famous Poetics. Aristotle’s view, though, is directly opposed to Plato’s: for Aristotle, playing pretend is just what humans do, and when we do it in an epic or a tragic form we learn to be better at philosophy (that’s where his famous idea of catharsis comes in), not worse. At the end of this chapter, I’ll suggest that if we’re willing to let a little Aristotle in to leaven our Plato, the ethical picture for Halo gets even better. But even if we go with Aristotle on the basic ethical nature of mimesis, Plato’s analysis of its relation to education and culture keeps its power—the power I’m exploring here in connection to Halo.
All bad? No
Plato’s Socrates’s pronouncement, though, if we wanted to take it at face value, deciding that Socrates speaks Plato’s mind, would spell doom for our attempt to make Plato the rabid Bungie fanboy we want him to be. But it’s not the sum total of what Plato has to say about videogames, because in his final work, The Laws, he returns to the matter of mimesis in the course of designing another ideal city, this one substantially different from the one designed by Socrates and the people he talks to in The Republic. In The Laws Socrates is—almost uniquely in all of Plato’s dialogues—absent. His role is taken by a character called only “Athenian.” This Athenian takes a different view of what kind of playing pretend belongs in the city, but one that brightly illuminates what we just saw in The Republic Book 10.
First, mimesis is now explicitly the vehicle of education in the form of choral poetry (thus, a different kind of mimesis from the harmful kind outlined in The Republic Book 10). Second, in a memorable and unfortunately rarely-analyzed passage, the Athenian says that if tragic poets should come to the lawgivers and ask to put on tragedy in their new city, the lawgivers sh
ould respond that—wait for it—they are tragedians themselves, and there can only be one.
ATHENIAN: And, if any of the serious poets, as they are termed, who write tragedy, come to us . . . I think that our answer should be as follows: Best of strangers . . . we also according to our ability are tragic poets, and our tragedy is the best and noblest; for our whole constitution [politeia] is a performance [mimesis (or what did you think?)] of the best and noblest life, which we affirm to be indeed the truest tragedy. You are poets and we are poets, both makers of the same strains, rivals and antagonists in the noblest of dramas, which true law can alone perfect, as our hope is.... First of all show your songs to the magistrates, and let them compare them with our own, and if they are the same or better we will give you a chorus; but if not, then, my friends, we cannot.
Okay, here’s the most amazing thing, and this is the reason I gave you the Greek for “constitution.” Politeia is the word that, when given as the title of a dialogue of Plato, is translated “Republic.” Here at the end of his life, in his last and summative work, Plato admits that The Republic was mimesis. Yes, the same thing he had Socrates say would have to be chucked out. More, the Athenian is saying via this play on words that mimetic performances of The Republic would be admissible in the ideal city.