Doctor Who and Philosophy

by Courtland Lewis

  Given his propensity for talking about the integrity of the “web of time” (“Attack of the Cybermen,” 1985) as “wibbly-wobbly, timey-wimey stuff” (“Blink,” 2007), the Doctor’s perception of time must give him insight into the relationship between intention and consequence that we don’t share.

  Perhaps there’s another approach that better captures the ethos (of the same Greek root as ethical) of Doctor Who as a whole. Maybe the Doctor’s ethics can be found between the poles of the Romantic’s ideal of embracing self-realization and the beauty of uniqueness and the existentialist’s cosmic angst—focused on the deep aching realization of both our finitude and our freedom. In this respect, the Doctor’s morality, as I see it, is an “ethics of ambiguity.”

  Just This Once! Everybody Lives!

  Those eager to associate Doctor Who with the values of written science fiction in the mid-twentieth century might be tempted to take the Third Doctor’s impressive line, “I am every kind of scientist!” as definitive of the show’s ethos. Positivism was the name given by Auguste Comte (1798-1857) to the theory that any claim, to be meaningful, must be able to be verified by logical proof or scientific testing. Although the Doctor clearly prizes good reasoning and gets through many scrapes through technological McGuffins (like sonic screwdrivers and reversing the polarity of the neutron flow), it seems clear he’s not a positivist. From the First Doctor’s stirring assertion, “I don’t believe that man was made to be controlled by machines” (“The Keys of Marinus,” 1964) it makes more sense to infer that it’s the Doctor who has mastered scientific theory and technology, and not vice-versa. Inasmuch as a non-human can be a humanist, the Doctor is, and not a positivist.

  Beyond this, bold decisions were made in re-imagining Doctor Who both in 1996 (“Doctor Who: The TV Movie”) and in the new series begun in 2005 in order to give the Doctor a more emotional side and to explicitly stress the emotions and the relationship dynamics between characters, especially between the Doctor and companions.

  Sci-fi author Kim Newman sees a major shift starting with the character of the Eighth Doctor, who’s “impulsive, open (if the heart is the center of feeling, this would explain why McGann has emotion enough for two), eager to share knowledge even if he knows he should keep it to himself. . . .”47 In the new television series, Christopher Eccleston and David Tennant have also consistently injected more pathos into the role.

  These humanistic and passionate elements of Doctor Who converge in the ideals of Romanticism, an intellectual movement spanning a few decades before and after the turn of the nineteenth century. The Romantic temperament was born in Britain and Germany out of the collapse of the Enlightenment’s adulation of reason. This occurred in the wake of the French Revolution, especially the irrationality and excess of its Reign of Terror (which, as we know, the First Doctor was helpless to prevent). Doctor Who’s parallel construction, I would argue, has the Doctor’s Romantic character evolve from his initial alienation from Gallifreyan society. In post-2005 Doctor Who, blatantly Romanticist themes emerge from the utter destruction of that same society. So, for example, the very first time we see the Doctor openly weep is in “The End of the World” (2005) when Jabe confronts him about the destruction of the Time Lords.

  If a single ideal can represent Romanticist ethics, it must be an ideal that has indefinite potential for richness and depth. This ideal is found in the quest for what it means to become more fully human. In face of the collapse of the ideal of society organized by principles of reason, historian of ethics Warren Ashby tells us:there arose the ideal and reality of the individual in his or her uniqueness, with potential and realized richness and depth.... Each of these individuals broke previous rational limits and discovered new ways of feeling and thinking. In each there emerged new perceptions of what life essentially was and might be. (A Comprehensive History of Western Ethics, p. 441)

  The Romantics share with later existentialists the idea that human nature isn’t a given, but that its shaping is essentially in the hands of each free, expressive person. So begins a fascination with the quality of experience as well as with the social conditions that made this quality better or worse.

  They weren’t merely affirming the cliché, “Do what you love.” Indeed, the characteristic “longing” of the Romantic wasn’t for any particular experience, but for the “infinite” itself, “a feeling and a yearning that had to be realized through finite, small things” (p. 444). In his connection with vast and alien cosmic forces, the Doctor often pronounces how different he is from his (mostly) human companions: “I’m a Time Lord.... I walk in eternity” (“Pyramids of Mars,” 1975); “The ground beneath our feet is spinning at a thousand miles an hour, and the entire planet is hurtling around the Sun at sixty-seven thousand miles an hour, and I can feel it” (“Rose,” 2005). In the face of this, it’s remarkable how often the Doctor immerses himself in “finite small things,” like a cup of tea, flowers, home cooking (“Battlefield,” 1989) and of course, little shops. “For some people, small, beautiful events are what life is all about!” the Fifth Doctor reminds us in “Earthshock” (1982).

  It’s by exploring our feelings about the experience in question, as well as focusing on the indefinite and ambiguous qualities of the experience that we begin to catch a fleeting glimpse of the infinite. Romantics like poet Percy Bysshe Shelley would disagree with the positivists and traditional moral philosophers who think that our reason and sense experience are enough to tell us how to live a flourishing life. Instead, as Shelley declares in his poem “The Sensitive Plant”:For love, and beauty, and delight,

  There is no death or change: their might

  Exceeds our organs, which endure

  No light, being themselves obscure.

  The human faculty of imagination is underappreciated, Shelley thinks. “Reason is the enumeration of quantities already known,” he writes, while “imagination is the perception of the value of those qualities.... Reason is to Imagination as the instrument to the agent, as the body to the spirit, as the shadow to the substance.” It’s clear that this ideal is operative in Doctor Who’s more subtle characterizations: it’s more work for the audience of Doctor Who to have to look carefully at a character or a race, to be willing to revise our judgments about them (“Captain Jack is bisexual—am I okay with that? He is very witty and clever ...”). The attitude common to both existentialism and Romanticism—in the face of the limitations of our all-too-human perspective—is a stance of openness to surprise in face of the unique experiences of others. The Doctor, as Romantic, exemplifies this attitude perfectly, and it’s when he wears it on his sleeve that he provides the most galvanizing moral example for the rest of us.

  Yet sometimes even the Doctor’s behavior surprises us. Happily, the literature of the “Romantic Gothic” in which Doctor Who is steeped helps explain this as well: the Gothic motif is often focused on the notion of the “divided consciousness.” Heroes and villains in this world are often portrayed as mirror images of each other, with only shades of gray separating them. “Because the dividing line between heroic revolt and manic villainy could never be demarcated,” John Tulloch and Manuel Alvarado write, the “Romantic Gothic generated a degree of angst, guilt and alienation around its central narrative oppositions which attached doubted to its heroic performance and emotional sympathy to its villainous ones.” 48

  The mystery of the show’s central character thrives on this kind of uncertainty, from the First Doctor’s flirtation with the cold-blooded murder of a caveman (“An Unearthly Child,” 1963) to the Third Doctor’s close identification with Omega, the lost Gallifreyan solar engineer; from the scheming artfulness of the Seventh Doctor to the Tenth Doctor’s inability to know when to stop kicking a dead Racnoss (“The Runaway Bride,” 2006). Allies and enemies in the Doctor’s universe are equally ambiguous—races such as the Monoids, Sensorites, and Silurians and even the Daleks have members both benevolent and malicious.

  Have You Ever Thought What It’s L
ike ... to Be Exiles?

  Novelist James Baldwin wrote that “nothing is more unbearable, once one has it, than freedom.” To grasp the other side of the Doctor’s adventures in time and space, we should focus on the notion of freedom, an emphasis common to both Romanticism and existentialism. The TARDIS is emblematic of this freedom: from the very first episodes, we see that the Doctor’s time and space machine gives him limitless opportunities to travel everywhere and everywhen—a freedom most of us would love to possess. 49 This is freedom in the sense of absence of limitations (that is, the opposite of coercion), of not being tied down to a specific place or time but having the liberty to wander and explore. But existentialists like Jean-Paul Sartre (1905-1980) have pointed out that freedom also refers to a positive ability to act on my choices and—even more importantly—to have a range of options for acting that is not arbitrarily limited by forces outside our control. This is what the essayist and lecturer Ralph Waldo Emerson meant when he proclaimed that we must be free “... even to the definition of freedom.”

  Sartre’s and Emerson’s redescriptions of freedom call attention to the ways in which traditional moral theories can restrict our notion of what “ethics” is all about: are we simply to avoid forbidden actions, as rule systems such as the Ten Commandments require? But then, what should we do? The content of a meaningful life isn’t something that we gain from sets of rules. Must we focus on doing our absolute duties, as Immanuel Kant recommends? This ignores the possibility that we might have insoluble conflicts of duties, but also fails to deal with the possibility that within Kant’s own ethical system, we might be simultaneously commanded to both do and refrain from doing an action—surely a deep problem! Are we simply to act for the greatest happiness, as John Stuart Mill would have it? This exposes us to the possibility that the happiness of the many may consistently depend upon the oppression of the few, a situation that the Doctor encounters far too often as evidenced by “The Mutants” (1972), “The Sunmakers” (1977), “The Happiness Patrol” (1988), and many other episodes. Rejecting the very idea that moral theory might be helpful in grappling with our own “dreadful freedom,” Sartre instead offers a compelling story of a young, French student who came to him for advice during World War II:The boy was faced with the choice of leaving for England and joining the Free French Forces—that is, leaving his mother behind—or remaining with his mother and helping her to carry on. He was fully aware that the woman lived only for him and that his going-off—and perhaps his death—would plunge her into despair. He was also aware that every act that he did for his mother’s sake was a sure thing, in the sense that it was helping her to carry on, whereas every effort he made toward going off and fighting was an uncertain move which might run aground and prove completely useless. (Existentialism Is a Humanism, pp. 29-30)

  What choice did Sartre advise his troubled student to make? The answer may be surprising; to understand it, we must make a short hop in the TARDIS to the existentialist’s views on choice and value before returning. I want to explain these views by first looking at answers to the question, “Why did the Doctor leave Gallifrey?”

  In fact, more than forty years after the show’s premiere, we still know little about the Doctor’s reasons for his primarily lifestyle choice of “wandering through space and time in a rackety old TARDIS” (“The Five Doctors,” 1983). At first, both the Doctor and his grand-daughter Susan speak longingly of one day returning to their unnamed home world, from which they have been exiled. The Doctor’s confessed inability to control the TARDIS suggests that he left home in less than ideal circumstances, and is a stark contrast with his aspersions to a higher science (such as when he says to Ian in the original pilot episode, “I tell you, before your ancestors had turned the first wheel, the people of my world had reduced movement through the farthest reaches of space to a game for children.”). In “The Two Doctors” (1985), he identifies himself as a “pariah”—suggesting a deep cultural or philosophical divide between himself and his people. Here, the Doctor clearly represents a forlorn individual like Sartre’s student: both must face up to both the opportunities and the dreadful responsibilities of being free.

  But things aren’t so clear! In “The War Games” (1969), the Second Doctor is seized by the Time Lords and put on trial for interference in the course of established history. He claims to his companions that he left Gallifrey voluntarily—because he was bored! Adding to the retcon-fusion is that in the aforementioned “Two Doctors,” the Doctor claims not only to be a pariah but also to be on a mission for the Time Lords! Further, often radical developments for the Doctor’s relationship with his own people are implied by Doctor Who: The TV Movie (1996) and “Rose” (2005). What are we to make of the inconsistency of the Doctor’s motives and indeed, his entire history?

  Again, we could loosely paraphrase Emerson: “A foolish consistency is the Peking homunculus of little minds.”50 Existentialists agree with Emerson and the Doctor that inconsistency and ambiguity is to be treasured because it’s a close reminder of our own freedom to revise our identity and our future. And as James Chapman writes in his cultural history of the show, “The cultural politics and narrative ideologies of Doctor Who ... serve to encourage difference and non-conformity. This is evident ... in the characterization of the Doctor himself as an eccentric and a social outsider.”51

  Because existentialists put a premium on the unique character of subjective, concrete experience as well as on passion, they see that it’s our choices themselves that confer value on a situation. The opposite perspective, embraced by most traditional ethical theories, is that value is a pre-existing good that we reach for when we act correctly. What could be wrong with this common-sense approach? Against it, Sartre tells his student to avoid relying on religious doctrines or philosophical theories for advice: not only do they lead us to different outcomes based on arbitrary presuppositions, but they’re a way of transferring the ultimate responsibility for value and choice onto something other than us. To use them to avoid making a choice, or to avoid the full responsibility for that choice, is to engage in what Sartre calls “bad faith,” the act of denying the aching truth of our freedom. Sartre’s advice is simple but troubling: make some choice and assume responsibility for the choice. Hiding behind pretended absolutes or allowing others to make the decision for us is equally inauthentic—again, bad faith!

  In discussing how different kinds of people react to the fact of ultimate responsibility, existentialist Simone de Beauvoir (1908-1986) characterizes “the adventurer,” who gleefully “casts himself into the world.” She couldn’t have described the Doctor more precisely. He’s contrasted with what she calls the “sub-man,” an apathetic person who “manifests a fundamental fear in the face of existence, in the face of the risks and tensions which it implies.” The Doctor is also contrasted with what Beauvoir calls a man of “petit bourgeois seriousness,” who “gets rid of his freedom by claiming to subordinate it to values which would be unconditioned”; in other words, he doesn’t live by the book.52 No, the “adventurer” faces his fears and throws away the TARDIS manual:Hoping for no justification, he will nevertheless take delight in living. He will not turn aside from things which he does not believe in. He will seek a pretext in them for a gratuitous display of activity.... He finds joy in spreading through the world a freedom which remains indifferent to its content. (The Ethics of Ambiguity, p. 58)

  Unlike Beauvoir’s definition of the adventurer, the Doctor really does care (usually!) about the consequences of his choices upon other people. This is the difference that he makes in an “indifferent” universe, in which “planets come and go. Stars perish. Matter disperses, coalesces, forms into other patterns, other worlds. Nothing can be eternal” (“The Trial of a Time Lord,” 1986).

  “Howzat!” Prometheus Is a Fast Bowler

  One conclusion we should draw from all this is that the Doctor’s morality can’t be reduced to a formula or a theory. In his existentialist leanings, the Doctor acknowledges
both his ultimate freedom and responsibility for his choices by rejecting Time Lord values and defining himself through his relationships and his wandering. As a Romantic, the Doctor seeks the infinite in small events—whether in the joy of running through corridors or in the tragic loss of “Love’s Labour’s Found”—and recognizes that, since his own path to selfactualization must be idiosyncratic, everyone else’s must be as well. But in what sense does this lead us to an ethics that we can learn from?

  Well, the figure in Greek mythology that the Doctor resembles most, in his existentialist and Romantic trappings, is Prometheus.53 A Titan, Prometheus challenged the all-powerful, all-knowing Zeus, stealing fire from Olympus to give to humans to use as they pleased. In eternal punishment, Zeus chained Prometheus to a rock, where his liver was eaten by an eagle, a painful process carried out daily as Prometheus, immortal, regenerated after each attack. The punishment wasn’t quite “eternal,” since Hercules killed the eagle and freed Prometheus from his chains. The Prometheus myth is most resonant with us today as a humanistic reversal of the Biblical myth of the Fall: the theft of enlightenment, whether Zeus’s fire or the fruit of the tree of knowledge, may be seen as a crime by some, but in its consequences, it liberates humans, giving us a degree of control over our identities that is both delightful and dreadful. The gift of fire from a Gallifreyan Prometheus—in the Doctor’s words, “a whole galaxy to explore, millions of planets, eons of time, countless civilizations to meet!” (“The War Games,” 1969)—is an existentialist allegory for escaping from the imposed mediocrity of much of our mass culture. It’s also a Romantic’s metaphor for cultivating our imagination and creating provocations against biased and prejudiced imagination, whether our own or that of others.