Doctor Who and Philosophy

by Courtland Lewis

  The strong force comes to believe that it’s wrong to be strong, and surrenders its drive to action, what Nietzsche famously called its will to power. All forces have will to power, because the will to power is simply the drive to action, to create the act that has never existed before and to affirm that act by doing it. A strong force fully corrupted by resentment is an entirely reactive force. A reactive force has no confidence in its own capacities to act, because it sees every action as evil and sinful, so does nothing except punish itself. Its resentment reduces a reaction force to mere self-punishment, a kind of masochistic twitching. Simm’s Master is definitely no priest, no sinner, and no masochist, but instead considers himself the joyful destroyer of all. The kind of nihilism that fits the Master best is one of the most advanced kinds of nihilist.

  The man of resentment is created by reactive forces which break down the capacity to act. Nietzsche describes the most advanced form of nihilism where the nihilist becomes able to act again, where the nihilist’s will to power articulates itself as the will to nothingness, the affirmation of negativity. This will to nothingness is the will to universal destruction, which is precisely the Master’s mission for his war against the universe, to build a new Time Lord empire based on his own drive for violence and death. And he has a wonderful time doing it. “Last of the Time Lords” opens with a musical number where the Master dances around his flying fortress taunting his prisoners, the Doctor and the Jones family. He plays a Scissor Sisters song, of all things, taunting them with the lyric, “I can’t decide whether you should live or die,” laughing hysterically while he humiliates them. The Doctor is kept in a quasi-bird cage; the Joneses are spat-upon indentured servants. Many of his murders in “The Sound of Drums” are carried out with punch-lines: opening the door a crack to see if the reporter being sliced to death in the other room is still screaming, playing with his mask and kidding around with his cabinet ministers moments before he floods the room with deadly nerve gas, taunting and humiliating the American president before having him disintegrated. He’s hateful and vengeful, and takes a tremendous joy in it. In a sense, he has overcome ressentiment because he’s capable of action. But the Master’s motivations are still those of a resentful man: the world is valueless to him, but he is determined to have as much fun setting fire to it all as possible. To quote a figure from another story, “Some men just want to watch the world burn.” Alfred Pennyworth uses this phrase to describe The Joker in Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight, but it also applies to John Simm’s Master.

  The Doctor’s Overcoming

  One character who has watched worlds burn is the Doctor himself, who, during the Time War, was responsible for the destruction of both the Dalek and Time Lord Civilizations. We learn this in the first season of the revived series, when Christopher Eccleston’s Doctor was defined by the motivating forces of ressentiment: vengeance and hatred. This is openly directed against the Daleks for their role as antagonists of the Time War and so responsible for the destruction of Gallifrey and the Time Lord race. But a more general desire for vengeance and violence bubbled under the surface of Eccleston’s performance early in the season, dispensing little mercy to those whom he saw as causing needless deaths for petty reasons, such as Cassandra in “The End of the World” (2005), and the Slitheen family in “World War Three” (2005).

  The Doctor had seen worlds destroyed and the entire universe at stake; yet these puny people were casually planning mass murder for money. In Cassandra’s case especially, he casually let her die. In “Dalek” (2005), the Doctor was faced with the possibility of living a nobler kind of life, which Rose showed him in her acts of mercy towards a Dalek, and pointing out the Doctor’s own murderous rage that made him virtually unrecognizable: “What about you, Doctor?” she asks, “What are you changing into?”

  Overcome by resentment and revenge, he’s turning into the Master, the man who takes joy in annihilation, in destruction, in death. When he confronts Rose and the Dalek at the end of “Dalek,” he understands precisely what he’s letting himself turn into by giving in to his reactive forces, giving in to the desire for revenge. Seeing this, he turns against this transformation of vengefulness, and instead chooses to become something else. In terms of the morality he creates and articulates through his life, the regeneration of the Ninth into the Tenth Doctor begins at this point, when he perceives his desire for revenge for the baseness and venom that it really is, and he begins to live his life in a way that can be described in a phrase from Nietzsche: “Into all abysses I carry my beneficient Yes-saying!”105

  This saying yes, this affirmation, is the celebration of life itself. It’s not the simple pleasure the strong man takes in his own strength, but a far more difficult joy: being oneself overcome by hatred and revenge, but understanding it for the baseness that it is, and through this understanding overcoming hate itself. To overcome hate is Nietzsche’s spirit of celebration, and the defining characteristic of the Overman.

  In the Doctor’s case, this celebration of life results from the overcoming of the need for revenge. When the Dalek Emperor in “The Parting of the Ways” (2005) calls the Doctor “the Great Exterminator,” it recalls his actions during the Time War when he destroyed the Dalek fleets and Gallifrey. But when given the opportunity to destroy the Daleks again, he refuses. In this refusal is an affirmation of life, even if it’s the life of his enemies. The Tenth Doctor embodies this principle even more fully, only taking life when it’s necessary for greater survival, and approaching this choice with a great seriousness. Nietzsche quotes Buddha to explain the approach to one’s enemies befitting one who overcomes ressentiment: “Not by enmity is enmity ended; by friendliness enmity is ended.”106

  When the Judoon police invade a London hospital in “Smith and Jones” (2007), the Tenth Doctor doesn’t destroy the Judoon, as a resentful man would do, but delivers them the criminal they’re hunting and lets them go, and they return the hospital to Earth. He doesn’t confront the Family of Blood in “Human Nature” (2007) and “The Family of Blood” (2007) until it’s absolutely necessary, instead choosing to hide, waiting for them to die of natural causes. This, as Son-of-Mine explains, is an act of kindness. He who has overcome the desire for vengeance is strong enough to treat his enemies with kindness and respect. This is Nietzsche’s Overman.

  How Can a Degenerate Do All This?

  Nowhere is this aspect of the Doctor’s character illustrated more clearly than in his confrontation with John Simm’s Master. This is a confrontation of enmity, the desire for revenge; with that which defeats enmity, what Nietzsche translated in the quote from Buddha as ‘friendliness’. The Master acts in such a way that he draws anger from people, making them crave revenge, tricking them into allowing revenge to consume them. Disguised with their perception filters in “The Sound of Drums,” Martha watches the Master taunting her family, his prisoners, on an airport tarmac, and is determined to kill him, determined to revenge. After the Doctor and Captain Jack are captured, and the Jones family forced into servitude, they desire the same.

  FRANCINE JONES: One day, if I have to wait a hundred years, I’m going to kill the Master.

  TISH JONES: I’ll get him, even if it kills me ... I swear to you, he’s dead.

  Meanwhile, Martha has spent the year between the two episodes gathering the parts for a gun that supposedly can kill a Time Lord stone dead, revenge for the slaughter he led. Yet when she finally confronts the Master, the gun destroyed and herself about to be executed, Martha interrupts his grandstanding speech with laughter. The weapon was a joke played on the Master. “As if I would expect her to kill,” says the Doctor from his cage, since that would only replace enmity with enmity, a false victory that would be mere surrender to revenge. Of course, the reason the Master believed the ploy was because he does expect her to kill, to give in to vengeance and resentment, because he always does himself.

  The Doctor defeats the Master not with violence, for such violence would only make him anothe
r Master. Instead, he takes his enemy in his arms and says, “I forgive you,” sincere words that only the strongest of all people can say. This is the defeat of enmity with a gesture of friendship. When the Master is handcuffed and his empire erased from history, Francine still wants revenge, shaking with anger, pointing a gun at him. But the Doctor takes the gun away, saying, “You’re better than him.” The Doctor, just as his name says, literally makes his companions and friends better, better in Nietzsche’s sense. The strength of the Doctor is the strength to let revenge go, to affirm and embrace friendship. He’s beyond revenge, having overcome it.

  Instead of building a weapon with which to kill in revenge, Martha inspired people all over the world with stories about the Doctor, and instructions to think about those stories at a certain time one year after the conquest of Earth, to turn the Master’s telepathic satellite network against him. Martha’s storytelling was the creative affirmation of she and the Doctor and everyone else on Earth. The Doctor says at the moment of his triumph, “Tell me the human race is degenerate now, when they can do this,” using the satellite network to restore his bodily vitality which the Master had taken away. His words are a counterpoint to the nihilistic, jabbering Toclafane cyborgs, and the mission statement of his beneficient Yes! to life. Just because life is finite, with a slow, quiet endpoint, doesn’t mean that life is worthless. The worth of life is in what we can do in the finitude of its existence every single day.

  Life: A Celebration

  “Man, a little, eccentric species of animal, which—fortunately—has its day; all on earth a mere moment, an incident, an exception without consequences, something of no importance ... the earth itself, like every star, a hiatus between two nothingnesses ... Something in us rebels against this view.” 107 When this rebellion articulates itself as affirmation of the finite, the mere moment of life, it’s at its noblest, its strongest. Man “fortunately has its day,” Nietzsche says, glad that humanity is finite and will one day die entirely. An infinite being would require no effort to be strong, only patience, because an infinite number of events may pass over the course of infinite time. Part of the challenge of strength is that we each have only a small amount of time to achieve it. The Doctor himself may have had a few extra centuries more than his human friends, but his strength to forgive his enemy is no less impressive for his longer lifespan. Overcoming the desire for revenge, the nihilistic spiral of hate and enmity, is the mark of the strongest one, what Nietzsche calls the ‘Overman’.

  The Doctor is such a figure. He overcomes the forces that would end activity, who overcomes the forces of stability and sterility that embody death, who overcomes the specter of a world without change, a world of emptiness, a world without life. His beneficient affirmation overcomes the end of the universe itself when he shows that even though life is finite, that finitude doesn’t equal meaninglessness. He and Martha inspire the people of Earth to affirm their own strength, and overcome their vengeful oppressor. The Doctor has the strength to recognize the finitude of existence and celebrate existence in its infinite potential. Where does Nietzsche’s Overman carry his voice which all the time says yes? He carries it into the abyss.

  The abyss is emptiness, meaninglessness, oblivion of all existence, which is precisely how the Master understands the universe. The Doctor has chosen the mission which he gave himself, which is to protect the flourishing of life in all its forms. No death is a mercy for the Doctor, because a death is the end of a life.

  23

  Schopenhauer’s Master

  KEN CURRY

  We’re fascinated by the problem of evil in the world. We apprehend the world as a struggle of good against evil. We explore the depths of the struggle in literature such as Paradise Lost or The Divine Comedy. And we especially enjoy the struggle when rendered in a light mode such as Doctor Who.

  We know the Doctor is the good guy who will narrowly escape death and save the Earth from doom no matter how grim a situation he faces. We can’t always tell immediately if the life forms he meets in his adventures are good guys or bad guys, but they rarely come in intermediate forms and are quickly sorted out. The Master stands above all the Doctor’s other adversaries as the quintessential bad guy. The Doctor and the Master are evenly matched opponents. They’re both Time Lords, and I shall argue even more closely matched than that. They’re good and evil as two sides of the same coin, but since Doctor Who episodes are always comedies and not realities, evil will always lose by a thread to good and exit with the grim (actually delightful) promise of returning to entertain us in future episodes.

  Arthur Schopenhauer is the quintessential pessimist philosopher. Born in 1788, he published his seminal work, The World as Will and Representation, in 1818-1819, at the age of thirty. Before Schopenhauer, Kant had insisted that we perceive the world through our various sense organs and form conceptions of the world through the filter of our mind. We can only know the world through our perception and conception of it and not through any direct access. Perception begins with external stimuli that elicit nerve impulses which the brain filters and renders into impressions. Thus light impinging on our eyes elicits nerve impulses that the brain converts to images which appear before us, even though the actual image is created in the brain. Conception is the more complex task of interpreting our perceptions in context with previous experience.

  The realization that we experience the world through perception (physical sense) followed by conception (mental filter) is Kant’s world of phenomena—things as they appear to us. Behind that world of phenomena and manifesting itself in our perceptions, was the world of noumena, the world independent of our mind and the world we could never know directly. Kant referred to noumenal objects in this world as things-in-themselves.

  Schopenhauer refined Kant’s ideas about the phenomenal world, the world of our perceptions and concepts, but his most original philosophical contribution was his interpretation of Kant’s thing-in-itself, the noumenal world. Schopenhauer reasoned that the noumenal world was undifferentiated, and hence, he referred to it in the singular as the noumenon. He equated the noumenon with force or energy and called it Will. He equated energy with matter, thereby anticipating Einstein. The Will manifests itself in the phenomenal world of our mind as matter characterized in form and changing in time. The Will is part of each of us; a part we know only indirectly through our physical action and change. The Will is understood by us phenomenally as causality.

  For Schopenhauer, the pessimist, the Will was a blind, pointless force, and because of its pointlessness, it was more likely to be harmful than beneficial. This sense of evil is aptly captured in Tennyson’s line, “Nature red in tooth and claw.” Accepting Schopenhauer’s position, the Will is inherently evil. The Will is part of everything in the universe, part of each of us—a side of us we can glimpse through our inner self, but never know directly—a dark side of us. Consider this commentary from a world weary poet, Emily Brontë, a contemporary of Schopenhauer, from “I Am the Only Being” (17th May 1839):’Twas grief enough to think mankind

  All hollow, servile, insincere;

  But worse to turn to my own mind,

  And find the same corruption there.

  Enter the Doctor with his dark side, the Master. The Master is part of the noumenal world of which we can have only a glimpse, but in the Doctor Who stories, the Master is the personification of evil, the personification of the Will. We’re told repeatedly that the Master bears a special relationship with the Doctor.108 We shall see just what that relationship is as we explore Schopenhauer’s Will. The Master, as a personification of the Will, becomes fully part of our phenomenal world as we observe these light-hearted versions of the struggle between good and evil.

  His Mind Is My Mind

  Schopenhauer’s most original philosophical contribution, a master stroke of philosophical reasoning, is the world as Will. Schopenhauer refers to Will as force manifested as causality in our phenomenal world. He insists that matter and Will are equiva
lent! Causality is a mode of understanding. Whatever exists in the world beyond our senses, causality is how we understand change in that world as we perceive and conceive it.

  What we perceive as material change is no more than the exchange of energy and matter familiar to us from twentieth-century physics. But Schopenhauer expressed the idea clearly and forcefully early in the previous century! His unfortunate use of the word ‘Will’ instead of ‘energy’ or ‘force’ doomed him to be misunderstood. His insistence on the Will as an anthropomorphic will to live exacerbated the misunderstanding. If we understand ‘will to live’ metaphorically, we see that he meant no more than matter taking form through the exchange of energy and matter. In this way we understand what Schopenhauer meant in applying Will to both animate and inanimate objects. We understand change of any material form in terms of causality. Schopenhauer instructs us that the Will is the objectification of matter as material form to our subjective mind.

  Schopenhauer reasoned that our bodies are objects in the phenomenal world, and as such, we could know our physical manifestation just as we know any other phenomenal object. But significantly, we also have an inner knowledge of ourselves (of our bodies) that we can’t have of any other part of the phenomenal world. This inner knowledge, a nonverbal sense of ourselves, is manifested in bodily action, both voluntary and involuntary. Schopenhauer called this inner sense Will. He pointed out, long before Freud’s explanations, that we can’t find a causal connection between willing something to be so and the actual act of motion. Consider what appears to be your direct, willful act. Just because you say or think that you’ll do something doesn’t actually make it happen. We can find no direct causal relationship between a willful act and the act itself. Likewise with our emotions, we can’t pin down a causal relationship between the action accompanying the emotion and the sense of the emotion. For example, if we’re suddenly startled, our pulse quickens, but we’ve no direct sense of the pulse quickening.