(Post)Human: Being and Subjectivity in the Quest to Build Artificial People

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I, (Post)Human: Being and Subjectivity in the Quest to Build Artificial People

A dissertation submitted to the Graduate

School of the University of Cincinnati in

partial fulfillment of the requirements for the

degree of

Doctor of Philosophy

in the Department of German Studies

of the College of Arts and Sciences

by Alex Hogue

M.A. University of Kentucky

May 2010

Committee Chair: Todd Herzog, Ph.D.

Abstract

Questions of whether consciousness is beholden to the context in which it experiences the world or not form the central debate about the nature of human life within discourses of posthumanism.

Drawing on the wealth of science fiction media, theorists such as Scott Bukatman, and N. Katherine

Hayles each make differing arguments about the direction humanity is heading in its ever-increasing convergence with advanced technology. While Bukatman’s position calls for a redefinition of the subject and subjective consciousness in the face of a changing technological world, Hayles’ focus on embodiment as the groundwork of existence refutes what she sees as the technological nightmares in

Bukatman and his analysis of cyberpunk. However, this conflict did not begin in the late twentieth century; rather my work will argue that this debate, and indeed posthumanism as a whole, have their roots in the works of the German Idealists as they reacted against Kant and the Enlightenment.

Specifically, I will trace the roots of Bukatman’s argument to Fichte and his First Principle of Philosophy that grounds all subjectivity. Next I will trace the work of Hayles, who reacts directly against Bukatman in How We Became Posthuman to Hölderlin, who in his essay “Being and Judgement” reacts directly against Fichte’s First Principle and the idea that consciousness is independent of corporeal being.

Through this analysis I will demonstrate the extremely widespread, but heretofore unacknowledged influence German Idealism has had, and continues to have, on contemporary culture and its relationship with technology.

Acknowledgements

This dissertation would not have been possible without the unending and generous support of my advisor, Todd Herzog, and the rest of my committee, Tanja Nusser, Valerie Weinstein, and Evan Torner. Todd’s ability to rephrase my jumbled ideas into coherent thoughts, Tanja’s continual challenge for me to analyze (and reanalyze) my presuppositions, Valerie’s attention to detail in argument structure, and Evan’s dedication to helping me streamline and restructure my thoughts were all vital contributions to the success of this project. Further thanks are due to the Taft Research Center at the University of Cincinnati and to the DAAD for providing funding for my work. Additionally, I would not have been able to complete this project without the support of my family. They listened to me explain, rework, and reexplain my ideas more times than I can count, and more times than they likely wanted to. Lastly, I want to thank Simone and our three cats: Minerva, Pickles, and Bellamy. They were always there for me to bounce ideas off of, to chat about (and introduce me to new) science fiction, and to keep me company while writing. i

Contents INTRODUCTION ...... 1 CHAPTER 1: PERCEIVING OR BEING? - PROMETHEUS, POSTHUMANISM, AND A TWO-HUNDRED YEAR ARGUMENT ...... 5

POSTHUMANISM: GROUNDING BEING AND DOWNLOADING MINDS ...... 13 DASEIN AND PHENOMENOLOGY: A MODERNIST TAKE ON THE DEBATE ...... 23 I AM I, OR MAYBE I’M JUST DISTANCED FROM MY ABSOLUTE BEING: ...... 40 IDEALISM AND ROMANTICISM...... 40 CONCLUSION ...... 53 CHAPTER 2: MIND OVER MATTER ...... 55

INTRODUCTION ...... 55 ROMANTICISM ...... 60 Der Sandmann (1817) ...... 63 Frankenstein (1818) ...... 71 MODERNISM ...... 81 Das Wachsfigurenkabinett (1924) ...... 84 Metropolis (1927) ...... 93 POSTHUMANISM ...... 102 Star Trek ...... 106 The Mass Effect Trilogy ...... 121 CHAPTER 3: THE ONTOLOGISTS STRIKE BACK ...... 146

ROMANTICISM ...... 152 “Die Automata” (1819)...... 156 Frankenstein (1819) ...... 171 MODERN AND CONTEMPORARY ONTOLOGICAL POSTHUMANISM ...... 181 Battlestar Galactica Universe (1978-2013) ...... 185 Her (2014) ...... 202 CONCLUSION ...... 214 EPILOGUE - IS THERE ANY HOPE FOR POSTHUMANISM? ...... 215 WORKS CITED ...... 220

Introduction

There exists today a fundamental problem within Posthumanism1 and science fiction and the philosophical goals they aim to achieve. As science fiction imagines the possibilities of future beings and worlds, it grounds these imaginings not in the ideals of the contemporary world as much as it participates in the circular and reactionary intellectual discourse of post-

Enlightenment era Germany. While the two-hundred-year separation of the German Idealists and Romantics from today's incredibly complex array of transmedial universes that include

Star Trek, Battlestar Galactica, The Mass Effect Trilogy and many others may seem to insulate the latter from the former, the opposite is actually true. One of the main driving conflicts, if not the main conflict, that unites the disparate science fiction works across contemporary media is the question of how human existence relates to the technology that humans produce. While this debate is often seen as a contemporary issue rooted in the technologies of the Digital Age, the philosophical conflict that drives this discourse stems directly from the conflict between the

German Idealists and the Romantics, specifically from Fichte and Hölderlin, and has mutated over the last two hundred years to incorporate the real and imagined technologies of each epoch.

The discourse that drives Posthumanist science fiction is namely one between those holding an epistemological view of existence and those holding an ontological view. The epistemologists see human existence as a primarily mental activity that is not tied in any

1 While the range of definitions of Posthumanism encompasses such diverse fields as animal studies, science fiction, robotics, computer science and philosophy, my usage of it will integrate to ways of being post human(ist). First, I will be looking at philosophy after Enlightenment Humanism, and thus post-Humanist. Second I will be focusing on the constructions of artificial humans in media as beings that come after biological life.

particular way to the human body or earthly existence it has. One's subjective self may very well exist within a hard drive as easily as it exists within a brain and the transfer between the two is only limited by our current technology. The ontologists, on the other hand, see a complex interrelationship between the mind, body, and earth that cannot be sundered. This side argues that while humans may overcome their humanness to become posthuman, this progress will always be faithful to the mind-body-earth unity.

It is not in itself a problem that Posthumanism and science fiction are attempting to solve an argument that has plagued Western philosophy for two hundred years. However, as

Posthumanism and science fiction are all but synonymous in contemporary culture, the deeply

Humanist roots of this debate present problems for the claim that Posthumanism has actually succeeded Humanism in any way. While Ihab Hassan attempted to ground Posthumanism in the symbol of Prometheus,2 his calls for unity and synthesis for this epistemological-ontological debate fell on deaf ears and the overwhelming majority of science fiction and Posthumanist theories since Hassan's “Prometheus as Performer” in 1976 have served only to perpetuate the same circle of argumentation between the two sides. If Posthumanism is to be a real possibility, that is to say if humanity can overcome the hindrances still lingering from

Enlightenment Humanism, this Humanistic line of debate will first have to be overcome.

In the following three chapters, I will outline this debate as it exists in the theoretical world (chapter 1), and then examine each side in depth as epistemological theories are reflected and perpetuated in media (chapter 2) and as ontological ideas follow suit (chapter 3).

I have structured chapter one starting with the present and moving backwards in time to show a broader perspective and illustrate how we have arrived at this place in our discourse, but

2 Discussed in detail in the next chapter.

have chosen to move from the past towards the present in chapters two and three to show the evolution of ideas and the influence they have had on subsequent thinkers. Finally, in the epilogue, I briefly investigate one contemporary film that attempts to be faithful to Hassan's

Prometheus.

The structure I create looks at the beginnings of different technological ages as they correspond with new schools of philosophical thought and begin to manipulate the epistemological-ontological debate to fit the new epoch. It is perhaps not coincidence that each epoch finds itself situated around the change of century. These times not only mark an end and beginning on a calendar, they (Romanticism/Idealism, Modernism, Posthumanism) mark apocalyptic shifts away from the old and toward the new and technological advanced. As would be expected, however, unsolved problems, such as the distinction between mind and body, permeate and warp the excitement of change and prevent the achievement of the desired progress.

In choosing works to illustrate the evolution of this Posthumanist debate, I opted to include some canonical works within German Studies and beyond including Der Sandmann,

Frankenstein, and Metropolis in order to illustrate how these ideas are at once central to our understanding of humans' relationships to technology and how this debate has persisted and evolved while remaining hidden in plain sight. I chose to focus on the new medium of each time period (literature, film, television, and video games) in an effort to demonstrate how the epistemological-ontological question maintains itself in the forward-looking medium of each age. In structuring my research in this way, a number of unfortunate omissions had to be made. Blade Runner, for example, serves as a fantastic intertext and incorporates ideas from both the epistemological and ontological camps; however, the analysis of it by Scott Bukatman

and Katherine Hayles both stand as excellent examples illustrating the thought of each side and I would only be reiterating their arguments by tackling it directly. Other works, including

Lawnmower Man, TRON, and The Matrix have also each received much attention from scholars. My choices of texts to include and omit are 1) designed to demonstrate both that this discourse is ingrained in the popular and scholarly thought of each age, 2) to mark the medial and technological shift that comes with each new age, and 3) to demonstrate the breadth of applicability of my analysis within Posthumanism and science fiction with internationally renowned works such as Star Trek, Battlestar Galactica, Her, and Mass Effect.

Chapter 1: Perceiving or Being? - Prometheus, Posthumanism, and a Two-Hundred Year Argument

As both a movement in media and a cultural concept, posthumanism is surrounded by a panoply of variations regarding its definition, agenda, and focus. While the myriad writers who discuss the topic directly or engage with posthuman(ist)3 themes in literature, film, and video games often produce works that vary greatly in their understandings of the concept, finding common ground between them proves a rather easy task, so long as one focuses on the premises and assumptions of the authors and not their given responses. The similarities between these presuppositions and the disunity of the answers, as well as the difficulty in pinning down a single salient definition of the concept, recall the emergence of posthumanism as outlined by Ihab Hassan from his seminal essay “Prometheus as Performer: Toward a

Posthumanist Culture?” Hassan writes:

We need to understand that the human form—including human desire and all its

external representations—may be changing radically, and thus must be re-

visioned. We need to understand that five hundred years of humanism may be

coming to an end, as humanism transforms itself into something that we must

helplessly call posthumanism. (843)

Hassan’s essay was originally given as a keynote address for the International

Symposium on Postmodern Performance in 1976 and, displaying a complex commentary on the gathering, his text is structured as a classical five-act play in which various styles of writing

3 The terminology surrounding posthumanism is not always consistent from author to author, which I will discuss in the coming pages.

interact with one another as characters in their own right.4 The helplessness he describes in trying to ascertain how, or even if, humanism may be coming to an end is spoken by Text in the fourth scene entitled “The Future of the Vitruvian Man.” Following a Foucauldian model of archaeology, and with the image of the Vitruvian Man representing humanism, Hassan contrasts the “arms and legs defining the measure of things, so marvelously drawn by

Leonardo” with the human in the Space Age “[the Vitruvian Man] has broken through its enclosing circle and square, and spread across the cosmos” (843). Hassan's difficulty in describing exactly what this new era after humanism will entail shows a further Foucauldian model of epistemic progression. Hassan is confident that a shift is occurring but unsure where culture will end up. Through the performance enacted by his various textual characters it becomes clear that he is interested not only in the cultural progress into this period after humanism, but also in its cultural roots, since even if the movement is understood as posthuman in the sense of a Nietzschean overcoming of the human, posthumanism does not arise from a culture alien to humans.5

The above quoted passage from Hassan's essay is easily the most referenced portion of his text among subsequent writers on posthumanism, appearing in the Introduction to Neil

Badmington's edited volume Posthumanism, in N. Katherine Hayles' book How We Became

Posthuman and others.6 While this passage sums up the cultural precipice that is most often

4 His character list includes Pretext, Mythotext, Text, Heterotext, Context, Metatext, Posttext, and Paratext. Next to each name is outlined the motivation or goal of each character/style of writing. 5 Nietzsche would likely agree with Hassan that the name posthumanism is wholly inadequate. Understanding and labelling something by what it is not is indicative of slave morality and therefore foreign to the Übermensch. 6 While my central argument is that posthumanist themes have much deeper cultural and philosophical roots than the movement often acknowledges, it will not be possible to thoroughly discuss every influential thinker leading up to posthumanism. In focusing on major milestones in the epistemological-ontological debate, namely the advent of its current form in German idealism and romanticism, its reevaluation in modernism and

cited as the genesis of posthumanism, the work as a whole can be seen as a prescient manifesto for the subsequent works detailing the movement after the decline of humanism's five hundred year reign. While the passage speculating on the end of five hundred years of humanism is relatively well known, the rest of the work is often overlooked by scholars. In the sentences before the oft-cited passage, Hassan acknowledges that posthumanism "may appear variously as a dubious neologism [or] the latest slogan..." but that it also may "hint at a tendency struggling to become more than a trend" (843). The legacy of Hassan's essay is an ironic one, in that only this rather bold claim about the end of humanism has been removed from its context to function as the latest slogan to those in favor of the posthumanist change and a dubious neologism to those against it. Even though many later scholars have overlooked the rest of the work, the ideas contained therein anticipate the whole of the debate around posthumanism, a claim which I shall demonstrate through the rest of this chapter.

Hassan does not only reference other cultural theorists,7 rather he preempts Donna

Haraway, Scott Bukatman, and N. Katherine Hayles in acknowledging the cultural role of science fiction, represented in his essay by the uncanny computer HAL in Kubrick's 2001: A

Space Odyssey (1968) as well as the real-world work in artificial intelligence that Kubrick's character portrays. The analysis of science fiction to describe posthumanism has become standard procedure by authors such as Bukatman, Haraway, and Hayles in the three and a half decades since Hassan's address was given. Through his analysis of real-world and science fiction culture, Hassan engages topics such as consciousness and the philosophy of mind, physical embodiment, mechanical versus digital technologies, space travel, the unity of contemporary incarnation in posthumanism, many notable and influential theorists will unfortunately be relegated to honorable mentions in footnotes. 7 Derrida, Hegel, Marx, Monod, Chardin, Freud, Sartre, Lévi-Strauss, Heidegger, Husserl, C.P. Snow, F.R. Leavis, and many others.

opposites in the figure of the cyborg and in general, cloning, androids, as well as the perceived struggle between humans, human nature, and technology thereby linking the realms of fiction and reality as equal players in the cultural consciousness.

Bukatman and Hayles published their works in 1993 and 1999 respectively, demonstrating that within the debate on posthumanism being-centric ideas arise in response to those centered on consciousness. This pattern will re-occur through the rest of this chapter as

I trace the influences of Bukatman and Hayles back through Modernism and into German

Idealism. Hayles’ approach in How We Became Posthuman is extremely Heideggerian, while

Bukatman makes several mentions of Heidegger’s professor Edmund Husserl directly, as well as makes use of his phenomenological method. Furthering my analysis of the pattern is

Bukatman’s core claim of the need for a reimagined subject, which brings Johann Gottlieb

Fichte’s First Philosophical Principles into the contemporary age. Shortly after Fichte published his ideas in Die Wissenschaftslehre, Friedrich Hölderlin published a short essay entitled “Sein und Urteil” in which he refutes Fichte’s idealist notions and claims that the physical union of mind and body in the world is truly the most fundamental part of the human experience.8

Since Hassan’s text, and despite “Prometheus’s” attempt at unification, theorists in posthumanism have resurrected and adapted older divisions between epistemologically and ontologically centered understandings of existence to fit the new technologies and conditions of existence of the posthumanist age. Scott Bukatman, who calls for a newly reimagined subject in his book Terminal Identity, typifies the contemporary epistemological viewpoint by arguing that in response to humanity’s rapidly evolving technological creations and abilities, the conscious subject must also be reimagined and redefined to keep pace with technology.

8 Heidegger lectured on many of Hölderlin’s works and Husserl on Fichte’s.

He explores the possibilities of mind-uploading, and immortal, computer-based consciousnesses as they appear in science fiction and as real technology advances toward the possibility of producing such an achievement.9 Opposing Bukatman and representing the ontological camp is N. Katherine Hayles, who refers to the idea of uploading minds into a computer as a nightmare in her book How We Became Posthuman. For Hayles the primary element of the human experience is our physical embodiment in finite, organic bodies. Both

Bukatman’s Terminal Identity and Hayles’ How We Became Posthuman reference Donna

Haraway’s essay “A Cyborg Manifesto,” and both are influenced by Haraway’s ideas.

Haraway’s essay attempts to undermine such dichotomous thinking as either consciousness or being and while she succeeds to some degree, she maintains a belief in materialism throughout the essay. While her efforts begin to blur the lines between the two camps, her focus remains closer to the side of being than that of consciousness.

Following Hassan's essay by roughly a decade, Donna Haraway's "A Cyborg Manifesto" draws on the ubiquitous bio-mechanical hybrid from science fiction to illustrate her goal of building an "ironic political myth faithful to feminism, socialism, and materialism" (149). In her words, the cyborg is "a hybrid of machine and organism, a creature of social reality as well as a creature of science fiction. ... Contemporary science fiction is full of cyborgs - creatures simultaneously animal and machine, who populate worlds ambiguously natural and crafted"

(149). While she neither cites Hassan nor mentions the word posthumanism in the entirety of her collection of essays Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature, strong similarities are to be found between the two texts.

9 The influence of Putnam’s “brain in a vat” thought experiment and Ryle’s “ghost in the machine” serve to link the contemporary work of Bukatman and Hayles with modernist arguments from Husserl and Heidegger, through whom the Enlightenment thought of Descartes and his critics in German idealism are reworked for the context of the 20th century.

Haraway's ironic political myth mirrors the interplay between Hassan’s characters Text,

Mythotext, and Context regarding the symbolism of the Promethean myth in Hassan's essay.

"Irony," in Haraway's definition, "is about contradictions that do not resolve into larger wholes, even dialectically, about the tension of holding incompatible things together because both or all are necessary and true" (149). The cyborg for Haraway is a metaphor for rethinking preconceived and fossilized categories of understanding - its purpose is to undermine thinking in terms of "either-or" and replace it with "both-and." While Haraway chooses a symbol for this unity of opposites that is forward-looking and based in science fiction, Hassan’s choice of symbol for what is in essence the same concept looks backwards to Greek mythology.10

As the character of Mythotext in Hassan's essay describes, Prometheus is both a thief and redeemer - two ordinarily mutually exclusive characteristics that are both equally essential to Prometheus' function in mythology and as a metaphor for posthumanism. Mythotext then quotes Socrates from the "Philebus" stating "'the gift of the gods . . . which they let fall from their abode, and it was through Prometheus, or one like him, that it reached mankind, ... together with a fire exceeding bright.' This gift is a perception that 'all things consist of a one and a many, and have in their nature a conjunction of limit and unlimitedness.' Thus the One and the Many enter Western thought" (Hassan 832). The character Text responds in acknowledgement, but takes it a step further:

There are poets and philosophers, scientists and mystics, who lead us to expect

more. They believe in some richer relation between the one and the many, the

universal and the concrete. ... Like Whitman, they sing of an 'orbic vision,' in

10 As these forward- and backward-looking symbols unintentionally create a dichotomy, perhaps the most appropriate symbol for posthumanism would be a gender-ambiguous, self-created, cyborg Prometheus,.

which the inner divisions of consciousness and the external divisions of

humankind are healed and made whole - made whole but not homogeneous,

healed but not rendered uniform. (833)

In his description of the unity of opposites, Hassan takes care not to blend them into a new whole in which each component part loses its individual character. The Promethean representation of thief and redeemer, as well as the accompanying metaphor of the marriage between the Earth and the Sky, maintains what Haraway will refer to as irony in her image of the cyborg. In the fifth and final act of "Prometheus as Performer," Hassan again has Text agree with, but step beyond, a lesson relayed by Mythotext.

Calm yourself, Mythotext, I concur, I freely concede the point. Obviously, the

marriage of the Earth and the Sky may never find a happy consummation. It may

also beget monsters and mutants. We know all too well the litany of our failures .

. . Others caution of present and 'future shock'; of cloning, parthenogenesis,

transplants, prosthesis; of the alteration of memory, intelligence, and behavior; of

the creation of chimeras, androids, and cyborgs. (848)

In elaborating on her cyborg figure, Haraway calls the late twentieth century "our time, a mythic time" (150). Despite being referenced in a previous essay of her book, the myth of

Prometheus does not factor in to her ironic myth of the cyborg. It is evident, however, that the cultural trajectory outlined by Hassan was also apparent to Haraway in the mid 1980s as both

Prometheus and the cyborg are figures emerging from their respective cultural imaginations as representations of the questions their human creators are struggling with. While Prometheus, as Mythotext reminds Text through the words of Socrates, taught humankind about the one

and the many, Haraway's cyborg removes the distinction between the two concepts in a new and unresolved, but mutually necessary, combination of two. Taking the cyborg one step further, and removing the separation between the mythic world and the human world (i.e. the realms of fiction and fact), she writes "we are all chimeras, theorized and fabricated hybrids of machine and organism; in short we are cyborgs. ... The cyborg is a condensed image of both imagination and material reality, the two joined centres structuring any possibility of historical transformation" (150). By removing the separation between the mythic world and the real world, Haraway seems to be continuing her quest to combat dichotomous representations and simultaneously giving a nod to perspectives such as Hassan’s which attempt to re-integrate older representations of this thinking into the contemporary age.

The two crucial arguments of Haraway's text function to expand the metaphor of the cyborg further into real life. Her first argument is against the production of a universal, totalizing theory because it is just those grandiose ideas that limit the possibilities embodied in the cyborg itself. Her second argument refuses an anti-science metaphysics in favor of more fluid understandings of both. Here again, Haraway furthers an idea brought up in Hassan's essay.

At the end of the second scene, Metatext appears with the intention of summarizing the ideas of posthumanism thus far. Of the five points he elaborates, it is the fifth that Haraway's arguments fall into accord with "because both imagination and science are agents of change, crucibles of values, modes not only of representation but also of transformation, their interplay may now be the vital performing principle in culture and consciousness - a key to

Posthumanism" (Hassan 838).

While both theorists make incredibly cogent arguments based on mutually observed shifts in culture, their works do not run completely parallel. Hassan's text takes at times a

metaphysical focus and at others promotes clearly idealist viewpoints,11 whereas Haraway's cyborg theory explicitly favors materialism. However, even her materialism is not the exclusive variety of Descartes' res extensa, which, along with res cogitans was "settled by a dialectical progeny, called spirit or history" (152). Haraway's materialism attempts to incorporate this Left-

Hegelian influence into a technologically, and bodily, focused world.

Posthumanism: Grounding Being and Downloading Minds

Following the publication of Haraway's Simians, Cyborgs, and Women by a decade and a half, N. Katherine Hayles' book How We Became Posthuman continues the discussion of a few elements from both Hassan and Haraway, but spends most of the book discussing ideas from other theorists and trends in posthumanism, science fiction, and the hard science of cybernetics. Hayles starts the first chapter of her book with the aforementioned quote from

Hassan's essay regarding the end of five hundred years of humanism, but seems to ignore the rest of his essay taking the end of humanism simply as her starting point and then moving on

(Hayles 1). Her discussion of the inseparability of the material substrate from the information it contains would provide an enriching addition to Hassan's metaphor of Prometheus as an inseparable union, especially as it pertains to Mary Shelley's Frankenstein: A Modern

Prometheus, however Hayles does not choose to follow this line of inquiry.

One overlap that Hayles and Hassan share is the philosophy of Martin Heidegger. In the fifth and final act of Hassan's work, the character of Text turns the discussion to an interview with Heidegger published in Der Spiegel. Heidegger claims that "technology is no longer

11 I will return to Hassan's idealism in my analysis of other theorists.

empowered by human reality ... it no longer corresponds to the human measure or way"12 (qtd. in Hassan 848-849).13 With this Heidegger is building a point about the nature and function of technology in the current age. "Der Mensch ist gestellt, beansprucht und herausgefordert von einer Macht, die im Wesen der Technik offenbar wird und die er selbst nicht beherrscht. ... Die

Philosophie ist am Ende (Heidegger, "Gott"). Heidegger's point seems to be that the destruction of all metaphysics that he set as one of his goals in 1927's Sein und Zeit has been achieved, although not by his or anyone else's philosophy, rather it is the trans-disciplinary realm of hard and soft sciences studying the physical world that has taken over for speculative metaphysics in the modern world. The interviewer from Der Spiegel asks Heidegger "Und wer nimmt den Platz der Philosophie jetzt ein?" to which Heidegger laments "Die Kybernetik."

Cybernetics, the development of self-"steering" and self-regulating systems is exactly the starting point for Hayles in How We Became Posthuman. Heidegger's view of cybernetics seems to be that the cybernetic technology already has too great a distance between it and humans really to be an expression of Dasein's essence anymore. At the same time, it has taken with it the questions of metaphysics regarding consciousness, the self, and human essence and directed them toward an artificially created system. Using cybernetics to create mechanical life14 is, as Haraway and others have noted, a common theme in science fiction and through this cybernetic life, works of science fiction explore the meaning, nature, and even existence of the human essence. For Hayles, this is the beginning of her nightmare, as she calls it. In the first chapter of her book, "Toward an Embodied Virtuality," and after the leading

12 "Die Technik in ihrem Wesen ist etwas, was der Mensch von sich aus nicht bewältigt ... wir haben noch keinen Weg, der dem Wesen der Technik entspricht." 13 The interview Hassan is referring to can be found reprinted online. 14 The character Data from Star Trek: The Next Generation is a prime example of this in fiction.

quote from Hassan, Hayles discusses the passage in Hans Moravec's Mind Children in which he argues that it will soon be possible to upload15 human consciousness into a computer.

Hayles responds unequivocally "Even assuming such a separation was possible, how could anyone think that consciousness in an entirely different medium would remain unchanged, as if it had no connection with embodiment?" (Hayles 1). Hayles is clearly continuing a line of thinking from Heidegger's Sein und Zeit in which Being, that is the embodied existence of

Dasein in-the-world, is the most fundamental part of the human experience. Similar to

Heidegger, she also considers the end of the "liberal humanist subject" as it has existed in a

Cartesian duality of res cogitans and res extensa since the 17th century, however where

Heidegger planned in his proposed, but never written, second volume of Sein und Zeit to dismantle the idea once and for all, Hayles believes it has already happened and it is her task to trace the path that has brought humanity to have already "become posthuman."

In her analysis of the problematic ideas raised by cybernetics, cyberpunk, and posthumanism itself, Hayles identifies four points that characterize the current popular answer to the question "what is the posthuman?" She writes:

First the posthuman view privileges informational pattern over material

instantiation, so that embodiment in a biological substrate is seen as an accident

of history rather than an inevitability of life. Second, the posthuman view

considers consciousness...as an epiphenomenon... Third, the posthuman view

thinks of the body as the original prosthesis we all learn to manipulate... Fourth,

and most important, by these and other means, the posthuman view configures

15 In Hayles' text, she uses "download" rather than "upload," however I believe the latter to be more correct given her subsequent discussion of disembodied consciousnesses in a communal cyberspace.

human being so that it can be seamlessly articulated with intelligent machines.

(3)

Hayles elucidates the shift from the era of the liberal humanist subject to the posthuman through the above and C.B. Macpherson's conception of possessive individualism.

Macpherson believes "Its [posessive individualism’s] possessive quality is found in its conception of the individual as essentially the proprietor of his own person or capacities, owing nothing to society for them. ... The human essence is freedom from the wills of others, and freedom is a function of possession" (qtd. in Hayles 3). By owning one’s will, one owns oneself and is thereby responsible only for one’s own actions and one’s own existence as an individual of rational agency. The individuation of the subject here lies in the representation one's own will, as it is understood as being separate from the wills of others. For Hayles, then, Hassan's proclamation that "We need first to understand that the human form - including human desire and all its external representations - may be changing radically, and thus must be re-visioned"

(qtd. in Hayles 1) is indicative of an understanding of the posthuman in Humanist terms

(human desire and all its external representations) as well as the misstep she sees following

Hassan's call for the revisioning of the human. It is not the possessive individualism of

Macpherson that Hayles is advocating, but rather that one not lose sight of the union of the individual's body and mind that substantiate the human's existence. The existence that is particular to humans, Dasein in Heidegger's terminology, is a necessarily and inextricably tied to being-in-the-world. To "privilege informational pattern over material instantiation" is to promote the Cartesian split between the mind and the body further, but instead of being only ever an isolated mind as Descartes was, there is the new option of a continued mental existence in cyberspace.

Hayles devotes a great deal of her book to an analysis of the Macy Conferences on

Cybernetics from 1946 to 1953 as well as to the influence they had on literature and film in the decades thereafter. Her focus on the conferences brings the hard sciences in direct contact with the science fiction narratives that drew on the work of Norbert Wiener and other scientists at the conferences. Hayles understands the ultimate inability of the cyberneticists to develop a viable artificial intelligence as proof that the possibility of a conscious existence separate, or separable, from its particular variety of material instantiation was a flawed premise to begin with. Posthumanism, as Hayles’ line of argumentation goes, is the result of this faulty premise having been appropriated by science fiction literature and then cultural theorists, all of whom have “systematically downplayed or erased [embodiment] in the cybernetic construction of the posthuman” (4) and have been “seduced by fantasies of unlimited power and disembodied immortality” (5).

This technologically-altered subjectivity that is not beholden to any particular physical incarnation is the angle taken by Scott Bukatman’s 1993 monograph Terminal Identity.

Bukatman outlines the shift from the mid-twentieth century technologies of the Space Age that changed the world through their physical capabilities, namely enormous rockets that made space travel possible, to a focus on electronic technologies of the Information Age that transport the user’s mind into new kinds of virtual reality. As the Space Age gives way to the

Information Age, humanity is forced to confront “a set of crucial ontological questions regarding the status and power of the human” (Bukatman 2). This new and unstable ontology consists in the emergence of terminal existence, which functions as an electronic landscape wherein humans can rewrite subjective experience, the physics of interaction, and even reality itself.

Bukatman writes:

A new subject has emerged: one constituted by electronic technologies, but also

by the machineries of the text. Terminal Identity is a transitional state produced at

the intersection of technology and narration, and it serves as an important space

of accommodation to the new and bewildering array of existential possibilities

that defines our terminal existence. (22)

Bukatman argues that the technological world has changed fundamentally with the proliferation of the personal computer. No longer is humanity concentrated on the desire to harness untold quantities of energy as in the Nuclear Age, nor is humanity following the model of the Space Age, wherein the focus was the physical traversal of vast distances into the heavens; the Information Age is about creating a new reality on a digital plane. Because this shift represents a fundamental change in the way humans interact with and conceive of technology, the cogito of humanism, which has dominated Western philosophy since

Descartes doubted the existence of everything except his thinking mind, must adapt accordingly to the new technology. In a more succinct formulation: through the development of electronic virtual spaces, the ontic conditions of human existence have changed, and therefore the epistemological conception of the subject must change to match them.

It is not just in the hard sciences that Bukatman finds reason to reevaluate the traditional subject. He writes “I would argue that it is the purpose of much recent science fiction to construct a new subject-position to interface with the global realms of data circulation, a subject that can occupy or intersect the cyberscapes of contemporary existence” (8-9). Just as

Hassan and Haraway before him, and Hayles after him, Bukatman uses both narratives and contemporary technologies to expand upon his argument and construct his notion of terminal

identity.16 Bukatman focuses on a wider corpus of literature than Hassan, Haraway, or Hayles and while he expands upon ideas put forth in “Prometheus as Performer,” Bukatman’s form of posthumanism is consciousness-centered, which is diametrically opposed to the being- centered variant of Hayles. For Hayles, the literature and films that Bukatman draws upon17 are evidence of humans having lost focus on what makes them humans in the first place, namely their embodied existence, their being-in-the-world. For Hayles, the technology humans create does not change the essence of embodiment and therefore does not call for any alteration to the conception of human existence. Humans, for Hayles, are simply doing what has always been done: using equipment that is ready-to-hand with such adaptability that the use of the equipment becomes pre-ontological — a point that is also referenced by the character Context in Hassan’s essay.18

While Bukatman’s terminal subject meets a strong critique in Hayles, he follows her in drawing significantly from Donna Harraway’s cyborg theory. At the end of the introduction to his book, Bukatman writes “Terminal Identity is a form of speech, as an essential cyborg formation, and a potentially subversive reconception of the subject that situates the human and the technological as coextensive, codependent, and mutually defining” (22). For Bukatman electronic technologies and virtual realities are not only created by humans, they, in turn, also affect the humans who use them. This cybernetic loop of mutually-defining feedback produces, at the computer terminal, a novel (terminal) identity that constitutes a new, but unresolved, union of the biological and synthetic.

16 Bukatman borrows the locution “terminal identity” from William S. Burroughs, whom Bukatman quotes on page xiii “The entire planet is being developed into terminal identity and complete surrender...” 17 Tron, Terminator 2, various works by Philip K. Dick, and others. 18 “Posthumanism seems to you a sudden mutation of the times; in fact, the conjunctions of imagination and science, myth and technology, have begun by firelight in the caves of Lascaux” (Hassan 835-6).

Despite the extreme opposition to the concept of terminal identity expressed by Hayles,

Bukatman, like both Harraway and Hayles, builds upon notions of posthumanism put forth in

Hassan’s “Prometheus as Performer.” As previously noted, the mythic figure of Prometheus represents, like Haraway's figure of the cyborg, a combination of opposites. Rather than a chimera of the biological and synthetic, Prometheus is a thief and a redeemer, in some stories creating humans and in others merely endowing humans with fire, knowledge, and art (Hassan

832). In response to this claim made by Mythotext, Text responds "Your image of Prometheus mirrors our own present. ... Convergences and divergences, conjunctions and disjunctions, are visible everywhere; on the one hand various myths of totality, on the other, diverse ideologies of fracture" (832-3). It is exactly these "myths of totality and diverse ideologies of fracture," namely works of science fiction, that Bukatman attempts to analyze in Terminal Identity in order to make his larger cultural argument. He writes:

Science fiction, from at least the 1960s, has expanded the parameters that once

contained the definition of the human. The American science fiction film, for

example, has staged a passage from ontological certainty to uncertainty,

centering upon the relation between Utopia and human definition. ... Yet there is

a utopia to be found in the science fiction film, a utopia that lies in being human,

and if utopia is always defined in relation to an other, a nonutopia, then the

numberless aliens, androids, and evil computers of the SF film are the barbarians

storming the gates of humanity. (16)

Bukatman claims that it is precisely science fiction that has arisen as part of popular culture "to pose a set of crucial ontological questions regarding the status and power of the human" (2). These ontological questions find themselves in a mutual cause and effect

relationship with the shifts in real world technological pursuits of the Machine-, Nuclear-,

Space-, and Information Ages. Bukatman cites the shift from the Space Age to the Information

Age on the one hand as simply the latest stage in the technological chronology of emergence that "defines the American relation to manifest destiny and the commitment to an ideology of progress and modernity" (4) and on the other hand as indicative of a more profound shift in the ideology of progress and modernity than has thus far occurred. This shift changed technology from the paradigm of the Saturn V rocket of the Space Age to "newly proliferating technologies of the Information Age [that] are invisible, circulating outside the human experiences of space and time" (2).

Throughout Hassan's essay, the proto-cyborgian union of opposites is represented with various examples, two of the most appropriate in comparing Hassan and Bukatman are found in the third point of the summary Metatext offers the readers "Imagination and Science, Myth and Technology" (Hassan 838). In the fourth scene of "Prometheus as Performer," indeed in the sentences following the passage speculating on the end of 500 years of humanism, the character Text embodies the old paradigm of humanism in Leonardo da Vinci's figure of the

Vitruvian Man, but claims that now it has "broken through its enclosing circle and square, and spread across the cosmos" (843). Hassan's article appears after the end of NASA's Apollo program, in the final years of the Skylab space station, and a few years after the Space Shuttle began flying. Hassan, citing NASA's manned programs as well as Pioneer 10, refers to "this expansion of human consciousness into the cosmos, this implication of the mind into the farthest matter" (843). In the context of Bukatman's discussions of cyberpunk and virtual realities of the Information Age, one must remain cognizant that Hassan's article predates

William Gibson's seminal work of cyberpunk fiction Neuromancer by eight years, which is the

same year that Jaron Lanier founded VPL Research, makers of the DataGlove and EyePhone which have since become iconic symbols of virtual reality technology.19 Bukatman would likely argue that Hassan's claim is not necessarily false, but rather is rooted in Space Age technologies and is more effective as a prescient anticipation of the real extension of consciousness that is to come in the Information Age.20

The apparent differences between Bukatman and Hassan on this point are simply the result of the seventeen year gap between the appearance of Hassan's essay in 1976 and

Bukatman's book in 1993. Hassan's prescience in his description of humanity's desire to expand its conscious experience beyond the physical confines of the Earth is limited only by the technology of the period in which he was writing. Hassan's prediction borrows from

Marshall McLuhan, which also anticipates Bukatman's claims in Termainal Identity. In The

Gutenberg Galaxy, McLuhan writes:

An age of rapid transition is one which exists on the frontier between two cultures

and between conflicting technologies. Every moment of its consciousness is an

act of translation of each of these cultures into the other. Today we live on the

frontier between five centuries of mechanism and the new electronics, between

the homogeneous and the simultaneous. (141)

The need for a revisioning of humans that Hassan sees in the work of Claude Lévi-Strauss and

Michel Foucault parallels the end of the Cartesian subject that he sees in the structuralists, and

19 VPL Research went bankrupt in 1990, after which their patents were acquired by SUN Microsystems. Further information can be found here: http://www.vrs.org.uk/virtual-reality-profiles/vpl-research.html 20 While virtual reality (VR) is most closely associated with the expansion of the home computer in the 1980s and 1990s, especially for Bukatman, it's historical roots stretch into the 1950s and 1960s with the invention of the Sensorama by Morton Heilig. http://www.vrs.org.uk/virtual-reality/beginning.html

it is from the combined influence of these thinkers, as well as McLuhan and Pièrre Teilhard de

Chardin that Hassan, through the character Text, is able to make his claim about the end of humanism and the necessary revisioning of the human. Bukatman’s argument for the need to reimagine the human follows in a similar vein to Hassan’s. Bukatman's claim is that with the shift in the focus of technological advancement from the physically impressive creations of the

Space Age to the immaterial inventions of the Information Age, the world outside of subjective human consciousness has changed so drastically that humanity's only option to keep pace with its own creations is to reevaluate our understanding of subjective human consciousness itself.

Dasein and Phenomenology: A Modernist Take on the Debate

For contemporary posthumanism, Hassan’s “Prometheus as Performer” can be seen as an attempt to rectify the splitting of the mind and body as well as other errors still present in culture from humanism and to acknowledge the changing Zeitgeist of the mid twentieth century. While the mind and body are united in the figure of Prometheus for Hassan, for

Bukatman and Hayles they are not. Even Donna Haraway’s cyborg theory, which also advocates the union of things previously considered to be opposites, takes a firm materialist stance and thereby Haraway finds herself on the side of embodied being with Hayles. While

Hassan’s attempt at a posthumanist unification of the mind and body did not produce the desired changes in the cultural consciousness, one can see in the work of later theorists, whether they cite Hassan directly or not, that his text has been extremely influential for both

the consciousness and embodied being camps of posthumanism in the construction of their arguments.

While later theorists did not follow Hassan’s lead, they did make attempts to restructure the long-standing consciousness-embodied being debate within the world of contemporary high technology. Despite this recontextualization, the essence of the debate remains the same in posthumanism as it was in modernism, and German idealism before that. Hayles’ being- centric position in posthumanism and Hassan’s reference to Heidegger’s later work in the fifth act of “Prometheus as Performer,” point to the modernist influence upon posthumanism, specifically through the work of Martin Heidegger and his former professor Edmund Husserl.

Hassan quotes a posthumously published interview with Heidegger in Der Spiegel, in which the philosopher claims that "technology no longer corresponds to the human measure or way" (848). While Heidegger’s career was focused on understanding the nature of Being, the work quoted above, as well as the rest of the work after his “Kehre,” addresses the issues surrounding modern humanity in a technological world, which diverged slightly from his earlier exploration of the nature of human Being as Dasein in Sein und Zeit. While both Heidegger's characterization of Dasein and the Cartesian subject as it appears in traditional humanism attempt to understand and explain the human experience in the world, Heidegger asserts that

Dasein is fundamentally different than the prevailing construction of the liberal humanist subject; indeed one of Heidegger's expressed goals in Sein und Zeit is the systematic dismantling of what he views to be an antiquated holdover from humanism that alienates humans from the true nature of their Being (Sein 22).

To set the tone for his exposition on the nature of being, Heidegger begins Sein und

Zeit with a quote from Plato’s Sophist: “Denn offenbar seid ihr doch schon lange mit dem vertraut, was ihr eigentlich meint, wenn ihr den Ausdruck ,seiend’ gebraucht, wir jedoch glaubten es einst zwar zu verstehen, jetzt aber sind wir in Verlegenheit gekommen” (1).

Heidegger sees his task, then, as the raising anew “die Frage nach dem Sinn von Sein,” which he will attempt through a hermeneutic analysis of language and with the “Interpretation der Zeit als des möglichen Horizontes eines jeden Seinsverständnisses überhaupt…” (1). This task, according to Heidegger, is necessary because it will overturn a dogmatic prejudice within philosophy against questions of Being. “Man sagt: ,Sein’ ist der allgemeinste und leerste

Begriff. Als solcher widersteht er jedem Definitionsversuch. … Jeder gebraucht ihn ständig und versteht auch schon, was er je damit meint” (2). Through centering on the question of Being,

Heidegger places himself in opposition to Husserl’s epistemology and forms the modernist link between Hayles’ arguments in posthumanism and Hölderlin’s in romanticism.

Heidegger’s methodology is extremely intricate,21 which is a result of the difficulty of the task at hand: an existing entity asking questions about the nature of its own existence. This concern about its own being sets human existence apart from that of other kinds of things.

“Das Dasein ist ein Seiendes, das nicht nur unter anderem Seienden vorkommt. Es ist vielmehr dadurch ontisch ausgezeichnet, dass es diesem Seienden in seinem Sein um dieses

Sein selbst geht. (12). In elucidating the question of Being, then, Heidegger is very careful to make clear that Being is not an entity in itself, which would result in an ontic discussion of the factual characteristics of Being as a physical thing, rather than an ontological exposition of the

21 Because Heidegger’s language is so notoriously difficult, I will follow the guidance of Heidegger translators John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson and use “Being” to refer to the existence of an existing entity and “being” both for the act and the acting entity.

nature of the Being of beings, which is what he intends. Regarding the formal structure of the question of being, Heidegger writes “Das Sein des Seienden ‘ist’ nicht selbst ein Seiendes. …

Sonach wird auch das Erfragte, der Sinn von Sein, eine eigene Begrifflichkeit verlangen, die sich wieder wesenhaft abhebt gegen die Begriffe, in denen Seiendes seine bedeutungsmäßige

Bestimmtheit erreicht (6), which he simply follows later with “Sein ist jeweils das Sein eines

Seinden” (9).

In order to undermine the Cartesian subject-object dichotomy, Heidegger outlines an ontological distinction between humans (Dasein), objects present-at-hand (vorhanden), and objects ready-to-hand or equipment (zuhanden). The nature of Dasein is that it concerns itself with understanding its own being. Heidegger writes:

Ausarbeitung der Seinsfrage besagt demnach: Durchsichtigmachen eines

Seienden - des fragenden - in seinem Sein. Das Fragen dieser Frage ist als

Seinsmodus eines Seienden selbst von dem her wesenhaft bestimmt, wonach in

ihm gefragt ist - vom Sein. Dieses Seiende, das wir selbst je sind und das unter

anderem die Seinsmöglichkeit des Fragens hat, fassen wir terminologisch als

Dasein. Die ausdrückliche und durchsichtige Fragestellung nach dem Sinn von

Sein verlangt eine vorgängige angemessene Explikation eines Seienden

(Dasein) hinsichtlich seines Seins. (7)

While the term Dasein refers explicitly and exclusively to the Being of humans, the terms vorhanden and zuhanden, as well as their substantive forms Vorhandenheit and

Zuhandenheit, describe attitudes Dasein can have toward objects or ways in which Dasein finds itself in relation to objects in the world. Vorhandenheit is the condition of factual, scientific

or phenomenological observation - the object is not used for anything, it is simply an object.

Zuhandenheit, on the other hand, refers to equipment, das Zeug, whereby Dasein sees not the object itself as a thing, but the function for which the object is used. This, Heidegger says, is how Dasein encounters most objects in the world.

Der je auf das Zeug zugeschnittene Umgang, darin es sich einzig genuin in

seinem Sein zeigen kann, z.B. das Hämmern mit dem Hammer, erfaßt weder

dieses Seiende thematisch als vorkommendes Ding, noch weiß etwa gar das

Gebrauchen um die Zeugstruktur als solche. (69)

While Vor- and Zuhandenheit are conditions for objects in relation to Dasein, it is the nature of Dasein itself that is of the greatest importance for Heidegger’s work. Dasein is fundamentally inseparable from the context in which it exists, namely the world. The world for

Dasein is not mere spaciality or the res extensa in opposition to the res cogitans of

Cartesianism, as that would be a characteristic of Vorhandenheit, rather Dasein’s relationship to the world, which he terms In-der-Welt-sein, is more fundamental. “Das In-der-Welt-sein ist zwar eine a priori notwendige Verfassung des Daseins, aber längst nicht ausreichend, um dessen Sein voll zu bestimmen” (53). Heidegger elucidates his concept of In-der-Welt-sein by describing Dasein as dwelling in the world. This relationship describes both the familiarity of

Dasein with the nature and structure, the “worldhood,” of the world, which Dasein demonstrates by seeing functionality and the means to meet an end through equipment, but also the inseparability of Dasein from the the context in which it exists, as such a separation would be a violation of the basic understanding of Dasein. (54).

Linking Dasein and the world fundamentally and inseparably, Heidegger’s concept of In- der-Welt-sein attempts to demonstrate how the Cartesian dichotomies of subject-object and res cogitans-res extensa do not address at all the question of Being regarding either the ego cogito or the extended world. The Cartesian ontology, including the distinctions between thinking humans and non-thinking objects, is not completely destroyed in Sein und Zeit, rather

Heidegger systematically dismantles Descartes’ arguments and reassembles them within the ontology he is constructing as issues that are necessary to understand and built on his foundation of the question of Being.

The inseparability of the thinking mind and the world in which it finds itself and about which it thinks arises again in 1999 with N. Katherine Hayles’ How We Became Posthuman in which she recontextualizes Heidegger’s ontology to fit the concerns of the Digital Age. She writes:

If my nightmare is a culture inhabited by posthumans who regard their bodies as

fashion accessories rather than the grounds of being, my dream is a version of

the posthuman that embraces the possibilities of information technologies without

being seduced by fantasies of unlimited power and disembodied immortality, that

recognizes and celebrates finitude as a condition of human being, and that

understands human life is embedded in a material world of great complexity, one

on which we depend for our continued survival. (5)

As much as Hayles’ contention against the idea of separating bodies and minds mirrors

Heidegger’s In-der-Welt-sein, so too does her objection to computer-based human immortality

echo Heidegger’s conception of Dasein as a temporal entity. The temporal structure of Dasein is wrapped up in the notion of Sorge.

Das primäre Moment der Sorge, das ‘Sichvorweg,’ besagt doch: Dasein existiert

je umwillen seiner selbst. ‘Solange es ist,’ bis zu seinem Ende verhält es sich zu

seinem Sein-können. Auch dann, wenn es, noch existierend, nichts mehr ‘vor

sich’ und ‘seine Rechnung abgeschlossen’ hat, ist sein Sein noch durch das

‘Sichvorweg’ bestimmt. (236)

A fundamental part of this Sichvorweg is the complete acceptance by Dasein of the certainty of its own future death. By accepting the possibility of its own death, which Heidegger calls Sein-zum-Tode, Dasein can exercise the Sichvorweg that it is, namely Sorge. Without the fundamental striving-toward, planning, and becoming that Sorge implies, as well as the Sein- zum-Tode that gives Dasein authenticity in its Being, Dasein is stripped of its defining characteristics. Hayles’ nightmare of a mind uploaded into a computer and granted immortality through the circuitry indicates the deep existential crisis of humans losing their humanity by losing their corporeal Being, their In-der-Welt-sein, and also the temporality that defines their kind of Being in itself. Without the Sichvorweg and Sorge that are necessary to Dasein, uploaded human minds are not only unable to exist authentically in Heidegger’s understanding, but present a completely changed ontological structure that is alien to Dasein as In-der-Welt-sein.

Heidegger’s description of Dasein as being tied a priori to the world, and its constituent

Sorge, mirrors a core part of Hassan’s characterization of the cosmos, performance, and the symbolism of Prometheus in his understanding of posthumanism. As a summation of the

groundwork laid in the first eight pages of Hassan’s “Prometheus,” the character Metatext ends the second scene with five points about posthumanism. The first reads “the cosmos is performance, posthumanist culture is a performance in progress, and their symbolic nexus is

Prometheus” (838). Hassan’s “cosmos,” Greek for “world”22 or “order,” refers not to the physical world in the spatial sense of Heidegger’s Vorhandenheit, rather, given the word’s original meaning and its modern connotations of the interplanetary vacuum that was being explored in the late 1970s, “cosmos” may be understood as the contextual dwelling of humans in the space age, taking into account the planet Earth and space stations, as well as those alien narrative settings that are ever present in science fiction narratives (843).

Being, both -in-the-world and -toward-death, along with Sorge make up the constituent parts of Dasein, and as such focus in on the crux of the action that Heidegger is attempting to analyze. As such, an entity’s existence can only be thought of as an action, and then only as an action directed toward an end: thus authentic existence for Dasein includes the knowledge of its own Being as an action, and the directedness through the action of reaching a future state through Sorge. For Hassan, “the cosmos is performance, posthumanist culture is a performance in progress, and their symbolic nexus is Prometheus” (838). The actively directed

(i.e. performed) existence of Dasein and the performance of Prometheus demonstrate direct connections for both thinkers in the relationship of the acting agent to the contextual setting in which the acting takes place.

22 His use of “cosmos” rather than “world” may be an attempt to distance himself from being too closely associated with Heidegger, since aligning himself with Heidegger, or any particular theorist involved in the consciousness-embodied being dichotomy, would undermine his argument about posthumanism as a unification of opposites. It could also refer to the age of space exploration and science fiction writing that Hassan found himself in. Given Heidegger’s method of linguistic archaeology, however, it seems somewhat surprising that he himself did not choose “Kosmos” over “Welt” in Sein und Zeit.

Heidegger’s aesthetics in Der Ursprung des Kunstwerks serve to connect the directed action of Dasein and Hassan’s performative Prometheus further by allowing Hassan’s notion of posthumanism to be understood in terms of the macroparadigmatic work of art. Hassan intends that the performance put on by Prometheus should reconfigure the historical ontology of Hassan’s own cultural moment, as his title states, toward a posthumanist future. Sharing this function of reconfiguration is Heidegger’s macroparadgmatic conception of a work of art, on the scale of a Greek temple, tragedy, or god, terms he uses through this section interchangeably. His reference to Greek mythology and tragedy underscores the connection to

Prometheus, however it is through the effects of Heidegger’s work of art and Hassan’s performer that the two truly overlap. He writes:

Werksein heißt: eine Welt aufstellen. … Welt ist nie ein Gegenstand, der vor uns

steht und angeschaut werden kann. Welt ist das immer Ungegenständliche, dem

wir unterstehen, solange die Bahnen von Geburt und Tod, Segen und Fluch uns in

das Sein entrückt halten. Wo die wesenhaften Entscheidungen unserer Geschichte

fallen, von uns übernommen und verlassen, verkannt und wieder erfragt werden,

da weltet die Welt. (Kunstwerk 30-31)

As the symbol of posthumanism and the performance in progress that constitutes it,

Prometheus is the harbinger of a new world set up to mark the end of humanism’s five- hundred-year reign.

While Heidegger’s ontology seeks to undermine the Cartesian dualisms of mind-body and subject-object that have been ever present in both culture at large and the philosophical tradition since the Enlightenment, the second part of Sein und Zeit, where this is supposed to

occur, was never published. Heidegger’s accomplishment, rather, is the construction of an alternative ontology, whereby subject and object, mind and body, are unified on a primordial level — the same task that has Prometheus as its symbol. The second and third summations from Metatext in “Prometheus as Performer” stand out in this respect.

2. Prometheus is himself the figure of a flawed consciousness struggling to

transcend such divisions as the One and the Many, Cosmos and Culture, the

Universal and the Concrete;

3. with regard to posthumanism itself, the most relevant aspect of the

Promethean dialectic concerns Imagination and Science, Myth and Technology,

Earth and Sky, two realms tending to one; (838).

Heidegger’s fundamental ontology of Dasein is both built out of and a reaction against the epistemological phenomenology of his professor Edmund Husserl. Often cited as the founder of phenomenology, Husserl’s philosophy consists of an experience-based epistemology that attempts to solve many of the problems with Descartes’ subjectivist thinking.

Husserl’s phenomenology has been incredibly influential on twentieth century thought, as evidenced by the complex relationship that subsequent phenomenologists, as well as thinkers outside of Husserl’s methodology, have had with his work.

That the inﬂuence has been immense can hardly be disputed. This is not to say, of

course, that everybody agreed with him, but the fact that subsequent

phenomenologists, including Heidegger, Ingarden, Schütz, Fink, Sartre, Merleau-

Ponty, Lévinas, Gadamer, Ricoeur, Derrida, Henry and Marion, as well as leading

ﬁgures in a whole range of later theory formations, including hermeneutics, critical

theory, deconstruction and post-structuralism, felt a need to react and respond to

Husserl’s project and program testiﬁes to his importance. (Zahavi 71)

While Husserl’s epistemology is grounded in subjective experience, his work does not suffer from the same dogmatic subject-object dichotomies, the problem of other minds, and uncertainty of the external world that plagued Descartes. As a self-described transcendental idealist, Husserl was also able to overcome the problematic noumena that was central to

Kant’s original transcendental idealism. Even with these accomplishments, however, the reception of Husserl’s philosophy after his death in 1938 was subject to stark critiques of his idealism, a tradition which has fallen out of vogue with the philosophical community in the recent past.

With the rallying cry of “To the things themselves!,” Husserl’s phenomenology centers on the subjective experience of phenomena as they are experienceable; that is to say, without the inclusion of an unrevealed side of the phenomenon that remains in-itself.23 Consciousness, for Husserl, is always inherently consciousness of something. This state of being intentionally directed toward a phenomenon he calls an act of consciousness, which forms the basis of the phenomenological experience. He writes “Die Intentionalität ist es, die Bewußtsein im prägnanten Sinne charakterisiert, und die es rechtfertigt, zugleich den ganzen Erlebnisstrom als Bewußtseinsstrom und als Einheit eines Bewußtseins zu bezeichnen.” (Ideen I, 168).

23 “Unrevealed” here refers to Kant’s Ding an sich, which is the part of every phenomenon that is not accessible to human perception. A major point in Husserl’s phenomenology is that he contrasts Kant on this point stating that phenomena are inherently perceivable in their true forms, rather than as mere appearances as Kant claims. This distinction plays a large role in Bukatman’s claim in Terminal Identity that humans must adapt to render the new phenomena of virtual spaces present to consciousness. Computer monitors, for example, display virtual spaces in ways that are already perceivable by consciousness rather than as they truly are, that is to say they are appearances in the Kantian sense. By augmenting our abilities to perceive phenomena, as Bukatman argues, we may then be able to render digital, virtual spaces directly present to consciousness.

The question of whether the reality of phenomena can be known as they are taken from a subjective perspective, a problem for both Descartes and Kant, does not arise for Husserl because of this intentional character of consciousness. Perceivable phenomena are not limited to empirically observable objects, they are existence-independent; however, they are necessarily limited by the ways they are thought of, that is to say they are conception- dependent. For Husserl’s phenomenological subject, phenomena that empirically exist in the external world are just as subjectively perceivable, that is to say just as present to consciousness, as feelings and imaginary objects. One can easily think of any number of deities and mythical beings, which renders them perceivable to subjective consciousness, but not existent.

Conception-dependence, on the other hand, refers to how a subject understands a particular phenomenon. For example, René Magritte’s surrealist painting La trahison des images24 draws a line between an object, in this case a pipe, and the image of the object that constitutes the painting itself. While the viewer’s initial understanding would be that it is a pipe,

Magritte’s inscription “Ceci n’est pas une pipe”25 forces the viewer to reanalyze the contents of the painting and admit that it is not an actual pipe standing before the viewer, rather simply an image of one. The conception of Magritte’s work changes for the phenomenological subject from being “a pipe” to “an image of a pipe,” which, in turn, changes how the subject relates to the object.

The perceptual perspective held by the phenomenological subject dictates how phenomena are perceived and what assumptions are made about them. If the image of the

24 English title: The Treachery of Images 25 “This is not a pipe.”

pipe in Magritte’s painting is taken by the perceiving subject to be a real pipe, the subject will not assume that the totality of the phenomenon is only what can be seen from the subject’s current perspective, rather the pipe is understood as a three-dimensional object with other perceivable external sides, an internal chamber for tobacco and hole connecting the stem to the bottom of the chamber. These external and interior features which are not visible from the perspective offered in the painting are, in Husserl’s terms, beyond the internal horizon and are co-given with the perceived face.

In the intended understanding of Magritte’s image of a pipe, then, the subject is aware that it is only an image painted onto canvas, offering another set of co-given features, the texture of the paint viewed up-close, the reverse of the image viewed from the back of the canvas, etc, beyond the internal horizon of the image. The external horizon of the pipe separates the image of the pipe as the object of perception from those elements that are not directly part of the pipe image itself but are also co-given, namely the background and the text.

The existences of phenomena are in this way transcendent of the subject’s perception of them, which is how Husserl’s phenomenology is a transcendental philosophy. (Ideen I 298-300)

While phenomenology focuses on the perception of objects by a consciousness,

Husserl avoids the problematic Cartesian duality of res cogitans and res extensa. Husserl’s notion of the body allows for a distinction between Körper, physical body, and Leib, the living body. Husserl writes:

So sind rein wahrnehmungsmäßig Körper und Leib unterschieden; Leib, nämlich

als der einzig wirklich wahrnehmungsmäßige Leib, mein Leib. Wie das

Bewußtsein zustande kommt, in den gleichwohl mein Leib die Seinsgeltung

eines Körpers gewinnt, wie anderseits gewisse Körper meines

Wahrnehmungsfeldes dazu kommen, als Leiber, Leiber “fremder” Ich-Subjekte

zu gelten, das sind nun notwendige Fragen. (Krisis 109).

An individual for Husserl is more than just a thinking mind as Descartes had reasoned, rather the phenomenological subject exists simultaneously as a Körper on the field of objects and as a Leib, a consciousness embedded within the perceptual vessel of the body, through which the consciousness is able to perceive the world.

Aber die leibliche Ichlichkeit ist selbstverständlich nicht die einzige, und jede ihrer

Weisen ist von jeder anderen nicht abzutrennen; sie bilden bei allem Wandel eine

Einheit. So sind wir konkret leiblich, aber nicht nur leiblich, als volle Ich-Subjekte,

je als das volle Ich-der-Mensch im Wahrnehmungsfeld u.s.w., und, wie weit

immer gefaßt, im Bewußtseinsfeld. (Krisis 109-110)

Husserl continues “In meinem Wahrnehmungsfeld finde ich mich, ichlich waltend in meinen

Organen, und so überhaupt in allem, sonst mir ichlich in meinen Ich-Akten und

Vermögen zugehört (110). The Leib for Husserl represents a complex and interdependent relationship between the consciousness that perceives phenomena and the sensory organs that function as the means of input for external phenomena.

The complexity of the relationship Husserl postulates between ego, Leib, and Körper distances itself severely from the Cartesian res cogitans-res extensa model. Similarly, Husserl describes the relationship between the subject and the world with much greater nuance than his predecessors.

Wir sind in ihr [der Welt] Objekte unter Objekten, lebensweltlich gesprochen;

nämlich als da und dort seinde, in schlichter Erfahrungsgewißheit, vor allen

wissenschaftlichen, sei es physiologischen, psychologischen, soziologischen usw.

Feststellungen. Wir sind andererseits Subjekte für diese Welt, nämlich als die sie

erfahrenden, bedenkenden, bewertenden, zwecktätig auf sie bezogenen

Ichsubjekte, für welche diese Umwelt nur den Seinssinn hat, den ihr unsere

Erfahrungen, unsere Gedanken, unsere Wertungen usw. jeweilig gegeben haben,

und in den Geltungsmodis (der Seinsgewißheit, der Möglichkeit, ev. des Scheins

usw.), die habituelle Erwerbe von früher her besitzen und in uns tragen, als

beliebig wieder aktualisierbare Geltungen des und des Inhalts. (Krisis 107)

The Lebenswelt for Husserl is, simply put, the world of phenomena as experienced by the ego; it is the totality of experienceable phenomena, including both external objects and subjective perceptions.

One of the strengths of Husserl’s phenomenology is the fluid adaptability it gains through concerning itself with subjective perceptions and the relationship between consciousness and the observed phenomenon. As the structure of the world has changed through the exponential growth of technology through the twentieth century, the structure of intentionality including the ego, Leib, and Lebenswelt have adapted seamlessly to the speed of modern transportation, advances in science, as well as flight and space travel. However, it is with the advancements of computers and the advent of virtual spaces that Husserl’s phenomenological ego experiences difficulties in perceiving the new digital spaces of the

Information Age. Because these virtual spaces are only perceivable by means of computer monitors or virtual reality kits and not directly, they function as mere appearances, which refer

to another, unattainable thing in itself. As Husserl’s phenomenology rejects the Kantian noumena, he would argue that the Leib must, then, adapt to have the ability to perceive these new phenomena, which is exactly where Bukatman picks up Husserl’s line of reasoning.

It is the advent of the Information Age that Scott Bukatman marks as a point of departure regarding how subjects are able to perceive the world. Before the 1980s, the technology of the Space and Nuclear Ages altered human perception of the world, however, these new perceptions did not mark radical changes as they still involve the familiar physical world that human existence has always occupied. With the digital revolution of the Information

Age, humans have developed technologies that have enabled them to invent a fundamentally new realm of digital and virtual spaces.

While the Nuclear and Space Ages provided the phenomenological subject with new perspectives and settings in which to experience phenomena, the scientific methods, tools, and understandings required for apprehension of atomic and extra-atmospheric phenomena did not differ so radically from those that came before. Quantum physics is admittedly a large departure from the older Newtonian mechanics, however the importance of the shift here is that quantum physics revealed an already existing realm that was simply unable to be experienced without the newer advancements in physics. Advancements in computer technology, however, literally allow humans to create virtual worlds in which everything from the effects of gravity, spatial orientation, and time are intentionally programmed into a space that exists and is experienceable only within a computer.

In response to these new virtual spaces as they manifest themselves in the technology of the real world as well as in works of science fiction, Bukatman calls for the reevaluation and

eventual recreation of the phenomenological subject. Through the recreation of themselves as terminal subjects, in his thinking, humans will overcome the division between themselves and the virtual worlds of their creation by augmenting themselves to allow the digital environments of cyberspace to become present to consciousness. In Husserlian terms, Bukatman is advocating the alteration of the Leib such that it would be capable perception beyond the sensory abilities that help the ego apprehend and understand the ego’s body in the physical world. A terminal subject for Bukatman would not differ greatly from the various human enhancements already present in science fiction literature, primarily in the subgenre of cyberpunk.26 By augmenting the brain to process information at the speed of a computer, to perceive lines of computer code as physically rendered space, and thereby to make sense of a virtual environment, Husserl’s notion of the Lebenswelt expands to include the virtual worlds and digital spaces that humans have created for themselves.

Hassan’s dynamic re-visioning of da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man bursting out of the confining circle and square help to define his conception of posthumanism, but when viewed through the lens of Bukatman’s phenomenology, also acts as a metaphor for humans in the age of cyberpunk fiction and virtual worlds. Predating Hassan’s “Prometheus” by roughly 500 years, da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man was an illustration of the proper proportions of the human body as described by the architect Vitruvius. After cataloguing the sizes of different body parts in relation to one another, Vitruvius based his architecture on these measurements. While humans were seen as being made in the divine image, the human form became the measure of the physical world, and reciprocally reinforced both the Euclidian geometry used to demonstrate its perfection and the proportions themselves as grounding points for human

26 Titles with characters that exemplify these enhancements include Neuromancer, TRON, The Matrix, Deus Ex and others.

creation (Steadman 16). Half a millenium later, however, Hassan portrays the Vitruvian Man breaking from his Euclidean confines just as the Space Age gives way to the Information Age.

As he is no longer restricted to the geometry of the physical world, Hassan’s new Vitruvian

Man anticipates the new abilities granted to characters of cyberpunk narratives through internal integration with technology, such as the canonical character of Case in William

Gibson’s Neuromancer. Additionally, Hassan’s new image of the human builds upon narratives that predate the major cyberpunk works of the 1980’s including Alfred Bester’s The Stars My

Destination (1956) and John Brunner’s The Shockwave Rider (1975).

I am I, or Maybe I’m Just Distanced from My Absolute Being: Idealism and Romanticism

By describing a change in the external world that demands an equal change within the phenomenological subject, Bukatman’s thesis of Terminal Identity harkens back to the third fundamental principle of philosophy in Johann Gottlieb Fichte’s Wissenschaftslehre. Indeed, this connection between Bukatman and Fichte runs much deeper and is enriched by the incorporation of Husserl’s phenomenology as an intermediate step between the two.

A self-described Kantian, Fichte works in a similar vein of transcendental idealism to

Kant in his attempt to overcome many of the problematic elements of Enlightenment philosophy. Fichte differs, however, in that he does away with the equally problematic noumenon, rendering objects directly knowable by the subject, and additionally he grounds all

of reality in the subject’s own consciousness through the creation of his Three Fundamental

Principles.

Through his attempts to further develop and fundamentally alter the transcendental idealism begun by Kant, Fichte found himself continuing Kant’s attempt to overcome a crisis within Enlightenment philosophy and re-ground it within its own primary directive: the authority of reason (Beiser 22). The rising problems within the Enlightenment centered on the extension of its core tenets of rational criticism and scientific naturalism (Beiser 18). Just as Descartes’ epistemological inquiry led him from the question of what it was possible for him to know indubitably to the proclamation that everything beyond his own thinking mind is uncertain and therefore possibly an illusion, the criticism inherent in the Enlightenment extended itself into skepticism. As Beiser writes, “skepticism undermines out common-sense beliefs in the reality of the external world, other minds, and even our own selves” (18).

The extension of naturalism is equally dangerous to the Enlightenment’s own goals because it devolves into materialism, which “threatens the beliefs in freedom, immortality, and the sui generis status of the mind” (Beiser 18). By attempting to render everything that exists as explicable, scientific naturalism attempts to describe objects through mechanical and mathematical laws, thereby rendering everything that exists as material. Here, Cartesian philosophy provides another example. Because cognition was unable to be measured by the mechanical-mathematical model, a dualism between mind and matter was necessary to preserve the utility of the scientific approach, which thereby left a sharp division between the understandable and measurable world of physical entities and the mysterious world of cognition. (Beiser 20-21).

Kant describes his solution to these problems as his Copernican Revolution. With this,

Kant attempts to change the prevailing conception of truth, wherein rather than truth lying in conceptions conforming to objects, Kant proposes that truth be seen as objects conforming to concepts. In other words, truth becomes “the agreement of our perceptions with certain universal and necessary concepts that determine the form or structure of experience” (Beiser

23). Kant’s Copernican Revolution renders truth as a function of the conformity of representations to universal forms held by consciousness. (Kant, Vernunft 11-12)

Through this new conception of truth, Kant developed his Ding an sich, which states that human perception is not of objects themselves as they are inherently unknowable, rather perception is of appearances. (Kant, Vernunft 17) Despite Kant’s best efforts, skepticism from neo-Humean thinkers such as Solomon Maimon, Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi, and others arise in the late 1780s and early 1790s. Additionally, Maimon argued that Kant’s epistemological distinction between the faculties of understanding and intuition was simply a newer formulation of the dualisms that plagued Cartesian philosophy. (Beiser 28)

Like Kant, Fichte attempted to create a philosophy which upheld the critical reason of the Enlightenment, but simultaneously guarded against skepticism and materialism. In 1794, after reading both Kant’s Kritik der reinen Vernunft and the materialist and skepticist attacks that followed, Fichte developed and published Grundlage der gesamten Wissenschaftslehre,27 in which he endeavored to overcome the nagging problems of Enlightenment philosophy as well as the dualisms in Kant’s work that allowed them to persist. To this end, Fichte’s idealism

27 While the term Wissenschaftslehre is sometimes used to denote individual works published by Fichte, it is important to remember that per Fichte’s usage, Wissenschaftslehre refers to his philosophical system as a whole and not to one particular book as several works in his oeuvre contain the term in their titles. My account of Fichte’s system will focus mainly on this work from his time in Jena because it was, and remains, the most influential account of his thought.

centers on an absolute I, which is constituted by both the cognizing subject and its antithesis, the not-I, or more simply put the external world of objects, and their striving-limiting interrelationship.

Fichte lays out his purpose in the first sentences of the Grundlage by stating “Wir haben den absolutersten, schlechthin unbedingten Grundsatz, alles menschlichen Wissen aufzusuchen. Beweisen, oder bestimmen lässt er sich nicht, wenn er absoluterster Grundsatz sein soll” (3). By being neither proven nor determined, this first fundamental principle that

Fichte seeks must not rely on anything beyond itself for its own necessary validity. To this end,

Fichte employs the Law of Identity, rendered as A = A. Fichte is clear, however, that through this he is not simply stating that “A is” or “there is an A,” rather he insists that “wenn A sey, so sey A. Mithin ist davon ob überhaupt A sey, oder nicht, gar nicht die Frage” (6).

Fichte’s proposition, as he says, does not impart any information about the A itself, rather it describes a relationship between the two A’s, which he calls X. Of this he writes:

X wenigstens ist im Ich, und durch das Ich gesetzt denn das Ich ist es, welches im

obigen Satze [A = A] urtheilt, und zwar nach X, als einem Gesetze urtheilt; welches

mithin dem Ich gegeben und da es schlechthin und ohne allen weiteren Grund

aufgestellt wird, dem Ich durch das Ich selbst gegeben seyn muss” (6-7).

Fichte concludes from this logical exploration that the logical proposition “A = A” is interchangeable with “Ich = Ich” or “Ich bin Ich,” which he then ultimately renders as “Das Ich sezt sich selbst, und es ist, vermöge dieses blossen Setzens durch sich selbst; und umgekehrt: Das Ich ist, und es sezt sein Seyn, vermöge seines blossen Seyns” (10). Because the logical proposition that forms the basis of “The I posits itself” is true through itself, Fichte

counts this as absolute, first, and unconditioned first principle of philosophy that he has been searching for. Through this first principle, Fichte asserts that the thinking subject affirms its own self as existing.

With the existence of the subject grounded in the logical Law of Identity, Fichte moved on to creating his second principle writing:

Aus dem gleichen Grunde, aus welchem der erste Grundsaz nicht beweisen, noch

abgeleitet werden konnte, kann es auch der zweite nicht. Wir gehen daher auch

hier, gerade wie oben, von einer Thatsache des empirischen Bewusstseyns aus,

und verfahren mit derselben aus der gleichen Befugniss auf die gleiche Art. (17)

In seeking a second principle that expands the first, while at the same time being just as indubitable and necessarily true within itself, Fichte proposes the negative form of his initial principle, -A ≠ A, or the principle of opposition. Just as in his first principle, A = A, Fichte’s second takes the subject as its starting point and posits that that what is not the subject, that is to say other objects in the world, is not the same as the subject.28

The effect of such a clearly obvious statement is that Fichte has grounded a world of objects external to the subject within the consciousness of the subject itself. Just as with the first principle, this postulation refers to the relationship between -A and A rather than the content of either. Fichte writes:

Die Form von -A wird bestimmt durch die Handlung schlechthin; es ist ein

Gegentheil, weil es Produkt eines Gegensetzens ist: die Materie durch A; es ist

28 At this point, it should be noted that Fichte did not write the Grundlage der gesamten Wissenschaftslehre for a popular audience, rather this text was distributed as supplementary material for his lectures.

nicht, was A ist; und sein ganzes Wesen besteht darin, dass es nicht ist, was A ist.

— Ich weiss von -A, dass es von irgend einem A das Gegentheil sey. Was aber

dasjenige sey, oder nicht sey, von welchem ich jenes weiss, kann ich nur unter der

Bedingung wissen, dass ich A kenne. (21)

Through positing the not-I, the second principle presupposes the existence of an I. From here,

Fichte makes the same abstractions from his logical notation to the roles of the I and its opposite, the not-I. While these two principles ground the existence of subjectivity and objectivity within logical laws, they do not provide a comprehensive account of existence. Both principles, as Fichte says, describe relationships to subjectivity, it is only in his third and final principle that the relationship between the two previous principles is elucidated.

Because both the I and not-I are posited through consciousness, the resolution of the two opposites must also be grounded therein. Of this third principle, Fichte writes “Es sollen durch sie das entgegengesezte Ich, und Nicht-Ich vereinigt, gleich gesezt werden, ohne dass sie sich gegenseitig aufheben. Obige Gegensätze sollen in die Identität des einigen

Bewusstseyns aufgenommen werden” (26). The relationship between the I and not-I is based on their mutual limitation. By limitation, Fichte means that while both are grounded in the consciousness of the subject, neither the I nor the not-I is absolute in its existence. He writes

“Das Ich ist im Ich nicht gesezt insofern, d.i. nach denjenigem Theilen der Realität, mit welchen das Nicht-Ich gesezt ist. Ein Theil der Realität, d.i. derjenige der dem Nicht-Ich beigelegt wird, ist im Ich aufgehoben” (29). Through this principle the boundaries between the I and the not-I are determined, and thereby their mutual existence and interdependence are constitutive of the absolute consciousness that comprises Fichte’s philosophical system.

By grounding his Wissenschaftslehre in these three principles, Fichte constructs a system in which the subject can posit itself and direct itself onto itself, or onto any other object, thereby positing its existence as well. By centering all reality through the position of the subject, Fichte’s Wissenschaftslehre lays the groundwork upon which Husserl will build his phenomenology just over a century later. Both Fichte and Husserl considered themselves transcendental idealists,29 however both broke with Kantian thinking in similar ways. It was only after Fichte structured transcendental idealism without the need for Kantian noumena that

Husserl was able to create his phenomenology around perceptions of the things themselves; for without this fundamental step in post-Kantian thinking, Husserl’s phenomenology would be of the appearances of objects, which in Kantian terms is distinct from the objects’ true reality, rather than of actual and knowable objects themselves.

While both the I and not-I are both posited through subjectivity, Fichte describes both as striving against the will of the other to become absolute. This striving of the I, or Streben to use

Fichte’s terminology, is a fundamental part of the I’s relationship to the not-I. The striving of the

I, however, does not become absolute because of an equal Gegenstreben by the not-I. Fichte writes, “Das Gleichgewicht zwischen beiden muss gesezt werden” (283). The I’s relationship to its opposite, the not-I, and its Gegenstreben will further influence Husserl’s phenomenology in that the subject for both Fichte and Husserl needs an object, even if the object of consciousness is the subject’s own consciousness itself.

1.) Im Ich ist ursprünglich ein Streben die Unendlichkeit auszufüllen. Dieses

Streben wiederstreitet allem Objekte.

29 For further information on the Fichte-Husserl connection, see Michael Inwood’s contributions to the Oxford Companion to Philosophy.

2.) Das Ich hat in sich das Gesez, über sich zu reflektiren, als die Unendlichkeit

ausfüllend. Nun aber kann es nicht über sich, und überhaupt über nichts

reflektiren, wenn dasselbe nicht begränzt ist. Die Erfüllung dieses Gesetzes, oder

— was das gleiche heisst — die Befriedigung des Reflexionstriebes ist demnach

bedingt, und hängt ab vom Objekte. Er kann nicht befriedigt werden, ohne Objekte,

— mithin lässt er sich auch beschreiben als ein Trieb nach dem Objekte. (Fichte,

Grundlage 287)

Fichte’s conception of the mutual Streben of the I and not-I not only anticipates

Husserl’s phenomenology; it is also the basis for Bukatman’s main argument in Terminal

Identity. As previously stated, Bukatman claims that the technological advances of the

Information Age represent a fundamental shift away from the Space-, Nuclear-, and Industrial

Ages because computer technology functions both in the physical world, but also creates a virtual world through its software. This new virtual realm, which Bukatman calls Terminal

Space, is only accessible to its human creators through input (keyboards, mice, controllers, etc.) and output devices (monitors, etc.), which marks a disconnect between the virtual space as a virtual environment and the representation of it and interaction with it through the computer’s input and output mechanisms. Bukatman argues that because this Terminal Space has exceeded the perceptual abilities of the subjects who interact with it, humans must adapt to be able to perceive these new virtual environments. To support his claim Bukatman cites a number of science fiction and cyberpunk works, in which humans are technologically altered so that Terminal Spaces are rendered present to consciousness. In Bukatman’s characterization of the technological world, the Streben of the not-I has come out of equilibrium with, and indeed surpassed, the human subject. According to both Fichte and Bukatman, the I

must change within itself to adapt to the new world of objects, the not-I, and as Bukatman’s

Husserlian reasoning goes, to render Terminal Space present to consciousness.

After Fichte was driven out of Jena due to accusations of atheism and in the wake of strong critiques from Hölderlin and other romantics, he continued to lecture on and develop his

Wissenschaftslehre as well as the rest of his philosophy. In 1806 at the Friedrich-Alexander

Universität in Erlangen, he delivered a series of religious and ethical lectures that would be published under the title Die Anweisung zum seeligen Leben. It is evident from these lectures that the controversial beliefs which led to the end of his time in Jena had not abated, and in fact foreshadow the resurgence of the Prometheus myth in German Romanticism and then later in the work of Ihab Hassan. In an almost proto-Nietzschean move toward the end of the seventh lecture, Fichte proclaims:

Du bedarfst keines Dinges ausser dir; auch nicht eines Gottes; du selbst bist dir

dein Gott, dein Heiland und dein Erlöser...Ein ehrwürdiges Bild dieser Denkart ist

die Darstellung, die ein alter Dichter von dem mythischen Prometheus macht,

welcher, im Bewusstseyn seiner gerechten und guten That, des Donnerers über

den Wolken und aller Qualen, die derselbe auf sein Haupt häuft, lachet, und

unerschrockenen Muthes die Trümmer der Welt über sich zusammenstürzen sieht.

(Sämtliche, Band 5 504)

Following this, Fichte quotes the end section of Goethe’s “Prometheus” in which the titan, defying Zeus, sits and creates humans in his own image.

Goethe’s 1775 Sturm und Drang poem functions as “the indisputable fount of modern representations of the myth,” although his is by no means the first retelling in the post-

Hellenistic era30 (Bertagnolli 17). While many authors in the years leading up to Goethe’s ode used both the figure and myth of Prometheus to illustrate various messages about humans and the nature of humanity, the focus shifted with Goethe’s poem to champion the titan’s rebellion against an unjust deity, a theme which echoed throughout German Romanticism

(Bertagnolli 19).

Hassan’s contemporary use of Prometheus as the symbol for posthumanism finds its roots not just in the Greek myth, but also with Fichte’s appropriation of this symbolism in Die

Anweisung zum seeligen Leben, which expands his Wissenschaftslehre into the fields of ethical and religious philosophy. Fichte’s Wissenschaftslehre is characterized by the belief that all reality is based within the thinking self’s own consciousness, which marks a pointed logical diversion from the earlier Cartesian reasoning that argued for the validity of the ego’s perceptions on the grounds that God would not be deceptive (Descartes 71). From this assertion in the Wissenschaftslehre, Fichte’s proclamation that one needs only oneself and is to oneself a god in Die Anweisung zum seeligen Leben seems only the logical consequent of following his original line of thinking. As a symbol for Fichte’s philosophy, Prometheus stands for breaking out of antiquated constraints and beliefs, and asserting the validity of one’s own consciousness as sufficient to constitute one’s own reality. Fichte’s image of the titan anticipates Hassan’s in these respects as well as in the united nature of the One and the Many and limit and unitedness (fundamental parts of Prometheus according to Hassan), two opposites bound together in a continuous relationship of mutual striving (Fichte’s third principle).

30 Predecessor’s to Goethe’s ode include Lord Anthony Ashley Shaftesbury’s Soliloquy, or Advice to an Author (1711), Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Discours sur les sciences et les artes (1750) Georg Christoph Tobler’s Der befreyte Prometeus (1782), and others. For a thorough overview of the Prometheus myth leading up to the Romantic era, see the first chapter of Paul Bertagnolli’s Prometheus in Music.

Despite the huge popularity of Fichte’s Wissenschaftslehre, not everyone in the German intellectual community came under the spell of the so-called titan of Jena. Just as in the subsequent epistemological-ontological debates in Modernism and Posthumanism, the epistemological argument in German Idealism appeared first and incited a strong rebuttal from the ontology camp. Less than a year after the publication of Fichte’s Grundlage zur gesamten

Wissenschaftslehre, Friedrich Hölderlin reacted against Fichte and his philosophical principles with the release of a pamphlet titled “Über Urtheil und Seyn” in 1795.

Hölderlin’s criticism of Fichte’s Wissenschaftslehre is pointed and simple: Fichte’s first principle does not point to Being as such, and therefore Fichte has misunderstood its nature.

Hölderlin writes:

Wo Subjekt und Objekt schlechthin, nicht nur zum Teil vereiniget ist, mithin

so vereiniget, daß gar keine Teilung vorgenommen werden kann, ohne das Wesen

desjenigen, was getrennt werden soll, zu verletzen, da und sonst nirgends kann

von einem Sein schlechthin die Rede sein, wie es bei der intellektualen

Anschauung der Fall ist.

Aber dieses Sein muß nicht mit der Identität verwechselt werden. Wenn ich

sage: Ich bin Ich, so ist das Subjekt (Ich) und das Objekt (Ich) nicht so vereiniget,

daß gar keine Trennung vorgenommen werden kann, ohne, das Wesen

desjenigen, was getrennt werden soll, zu verletzen; im Gegenteil das Ich ist nur

durch diese Trennung des Ichs vom Ich möglich. Wie kann ich sagen: Ich! ohne

Selbstbewußtsein? (226)

Absolute Being, for Hölderlin, is not grounded in the Law of Identity, moreover it is not even attainable through reason, and attempting to understand it through the terms Subject and

Object represents a futile effort. In a play on the German word for judgement, Urteil, Hölderlin describes the original division, Ur-Teilung, that has separated Subject and Object as distinct entities. Hölderlin believes that Fichte’s first principle, I am I, represents the paradigmatic example of this problematic distinction. “ »Ich bin Ich« ist das passendste Beispiel zu diesem

Begriffe der Urteilung, als Theoretischer Urteilung, denn in der praktischen Urteilung setzt es sich dem Nichtich, nicht sich selbst entgegen” (227).31

Hölderlin’s thinking had far-reaching impact on many thinkers including Martin

Heidegger in particular. Heidegger’s fascination with Hölderlin is well known, including his lectures on the poet and specifically on “Der Ister” as Hölderlin’s work overall focuses on a primordial state of Being that is not attainable or knowable through traditional philosophy or metaphysics. The later Heidegger followed Hölderlin’s position that poetry, and not traditional philosophy, is the means to understand Being. By focusing on an ontological model of existence, the ideas of Hölderlin serve to influence, through Heidegger, the position of

Katherine Hayles regarding the nature of consciousness and the body in regard to the, in her mind, technological impossibilities of disembodied consciousnesses, mind-uploading, and existence beyond human corporeality.

Both Heidegger and Hayles agree with Hölderlin’s position that the distinction between subjects and objects cannot occur at the most fundamental level, that is to say that subjective consciousness cannot be separated from an extended body (in Descartes’ terminology). The unity between consciousness and body was attempted by Husserl, but all three ontologists would agree that his concept of Leib still is not on the same level as their conception of Being.

31 Hölderlin was not the only representative of German Romanticism to critique the Wissenschaftslehre. Novalis and others put forth similar positions, but as my argument presently deals with the advent of the discussion in each epoch, discussion of subsequent romantic literature by Novalis, Hölderlin, and others will be saved for later chapters.

Being, in the terminology of both Heidegger and Hölderlin, is represented by Hayles as embodiment. To reinvoke the requisite portion of Hölderlin’s argument:

Wo Subjekt und Objekt schlechthin, nicht nur zum Teil vereiniget ist, mithin so

vereiniget, daß gar keine Teilung vorgenommen werden kann, ohne das Wesen

desjenigen, was getrennt werden soll, zu verletzen, da und sonst nirgends kann

von einem Sein schlechthin die Rede sein, wie es bei der intellektualen

Anschauung der Fall ist. (226)

Hölderlin’s argument of indivisibility between subject and object on the level of Being is re- addressed by Heidegger through his concepts of Dasein and In-der-Welt-sein, and then again by Hayles through embodiment. Hayles argues that the mind and body may not be separated, as is depicted in the science fiction literature of Philip K. Dick, William Gibson, and others, nor can it ever be possible that Hans Moravec’s dream about disembodied immortality within a computer, hive intelligence, and cognitive downloading into various bodies be a possibility. For all three of these ontologists, the mind is not something different from the body, it is just a word for something of the body and the existing individual is merely something of the world in which it lives.

Similar to Fichte’s philosophy on the epistemology side, Hölderlin’s thought also anticipates elements of Hassan’s image of Prometheus and his conception of posthumanism.

Fundamental to Hassan’s construction of Prometheus is how he stands for the resolution of opposites that have persisted from older modes of thinking. Just as the divisions between subject and object for Hölderlin indicate an Ur-Theilung between our current conscious state and the fundamental state of Being, Hassan believes that dichotomous thinking has created

false divisions between the One and the Many, human and machine, etc, and the resolution of which comes in the movement of posthumanism with Prometheus as its symbol.

Conclusion

Hassan’s “Prometheus as Performer” attempts to unify a schism in philosophical thought that has existed in its current form since the German idealists tried to fix problematic elements of Enlightenment humanist philosophy. He gives this new movement, which he

“helplessly” terms posthumanism, the mythical figure of Prometheus as its symbol. He chooses

Prometheus because the titan embodies a unity of opposites, which is exactly what he hopes posthumanism will achieve - namely it will rectify the dualistic thinking (i.e. subject-object, man- machine, either-or, etc) that have persisted over the last 500 years.

Perhaps predictably, theorists in the years since Hassan’s essay have picked up on the theme of posthumanism, especially as it pertains to humans interacting with the contemporary world of high technology. However, the older divisions from the Enlightenment as well as those from several previous attempts to fix Enlightenment philosophy (German idealism, romanticism, and modernism) resurface in posthumanism, despite the lack of acknowledgement that these earlier attempts receive in contemporary posthumanist theory.

Contemporary theorists disagree on how best to philosophically understand the nature of the contemporary world of high technology and humanity’s place within it.

It is my argument through this chapter that this debate, which I have characterized as being between epistemological and ontological understandings of human essence and

existence, have existed in this fundamental construction since the late 18th century and that the only real change in the argument that has come with posthumanism is the context, that is to say the world of computer technologies and virtual environments. Notable, however, for posthumanism in contrast to the previous epochs is Hassan’s position, which would overcome once and for all the divisions inherent in the epistemology-ontology debate. This chapter traced two parallel lines of argument from German idealism to posthumanism, which may be rendered thus:

Chapter 2: Mind over Matter

Hier sitz ich, forme Menschen Nach meinem Bilde, Ein Geschlecht, das mir gleich sei, Zu leiden, zu weinen, Zu genießen und zu freuen sich, Und dein nicht zu achten, Wie ich! — Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, “Prometheus” 1789

Humanism is always becoming posthumanism. — Neil Badmington, Alien Chic

Introduction

While the philosophical debate between epistemological and ontological understandings of human existence has, in its current form, occupied thinkers for the last two centuries, the dialogue between the two competing models has by no means been relegated to the work of philosophers and theoreticians. As stated in the previous chapter, this philosophical debate has existed in various other incarnations since at least the ancient Greeks and in addition to the work of philosophers, this debate has been continued in narrative works, which reach equally far back into history. Whether one looks to the mythology of the Judeo-Christian tradition or to the Greek myths of Hephaestus, Pandora, and of course Prometheus, narratives of artificial humans have existed concurrently to the abstract theoretical understandings of their respective ages. It is not surprising, then, that along with these Greek myths, elements of

Ancient Greek humanism have also permeated the intellectual lineages from the

Enlightenment to posthumanism. Building upon Protagoras’s famous idea that “man is the measure of all things” (Plato 151d7-e3) the humanism of the Enlightenment endeavored to set

forth a new Age of Reason with the human at its center. Since then, post-Enlightenment epistemologies find distant roots in Ancient Greek thinking,32 but even more readily in the humanistic values of the Enlightenment itself, and in doing so make use of artificial humans in fiction as a means to experiment with various incarnations of consciousness.

As Horst Glaser and Sabine Rossbach write “Wherever one comes across examples of the artificial human, one can be sure that they are not the first of their kind. They were always there, moving and sleeping amongst us. … All these artificial constructs, whether mechanical or biological, sooner or later claim (or are claimed to be) Promethean.” (8) Similarly to Glaser’s and Rossbach’s claim, Ihab Hassan’s idealized vision of posthumanism, and its figurehead,

Prometheus, function as a solution to the long-standing epistemological-ontological discourse.

Hassan’s appropriation of Prometheus as the rebellious figure forging a new way in spite of the gods, unfortunately, does not have the lasting effects hoped for in “Prometheus as Performer.”

Rather the schism between epistemologies and ontologies arises anew, phoenix-like, in the decades following Hassan’s article. Even if the dividing lines of the conflict still remain, both the epistemological and ontological sides are shaped by the technologies and philosophies of the epochs that produced them.

These epochs—German idealism, phenomenology, and posthumanism—have all, on one hand, arisen since the Enlightenment as attempts at offering solutions to problematic elements in previous thinking, but on the other served to perpetuate the core values of the

Enlightenment in forms tailored to the technology and culture of the day. Philosopher John

Gray asserts that “In the late modern period in which we live, the Enlightenment project is

32 Plato’s epistemology contrasts with Democratus’ materialism, but it was not until German idealism and romanticism that the debate began taking its current form.

affirmed chiefly for fear of the consequences of abandoning it” (215). Gray’s pessimism finds itself in good company with support from, among others, Max Horkheimer and Theodor

Adorno. By arguing that because of the rise of Nazism and Stalinism, both World Wars, the

Holocaust, and other atrocities of the twentieth century, the Age of Reason can officially be declared dead. While I do not intend to disagree with Gray, Adorno, or Horkheimer that the idealistic goals of the Enlightenment have not successfully been achieved in practice, the goals themselves have indeed survived and are given new life in works of science fiction, and especially in posthumanism. Gene Roddenberry, creator of Star Trek, famously said in an interview that “science fiction is the last place a philosopher can operate” (Trek Nation). While

Roddenberry’s claim may prove too restrictive in his formulation, this chapter will demonstrate that science fiction, especially as it is tied to epistemological posthumanism, offers continued life to the Enlightenment’s goals and ideals along with, and as fundamental parts of, the engagement with various elements of Enlightenment thinking.

Much ink has been spilled in the articulation of exactly what constitutes the goals of the

Enlightenment including works by Descartes, Kant, Wieland, and others. Descartes’ cogito ergo sum places Enlightenment thinking firmly within a new epistemological tradition. Kant begins his “Beantwortung auf der Frage: Was ist Aufklärung?” with the oft-quoted “Aufklärung ist der Ausgang des Menschen aus seiner selbst-verschuldeten Unmündigkeit” (9). Wieland offers six questions and six answers as to the nature of Enlightenment with the recurring motifs of light and seeing as central to enlightening oneself; however, it is the Marquis de Condorcet who succeeds in enumerating what the goals are of the Age of Reason. “Our hopes for the future condition of the human race can be subsumed under three important heads: the abolition of inequality between nations, the progress of equality within each nation, and the

true perfection of mankind” (27). The argument is easily made that because of gender inequality, colonialism, racism, and inequality in the accessibility to knowledge, the

Enlightenment failed before it even began—before the Terror in France following the

Revolution and the atrocities outlined by Horkheimer and Adorno.

As demonstrated here by Kant and Condorcet, and elsewhere by numerous thinkers, the Enlightenment’s goals boil down to the fundamental belief in the capabilities of these humans. While the years since the Enlightenment have been fraught with examples of how it has failed, there has persisted a faith in its fundamental humanism, which has been explored, tested, adapted, and demonstrated in texts throughout the last two centuries. These post-

Enlightenment re-engagements with humanism have taken various forms; however, they have found a most natural fit with the theme of the artificial human in fiction and, given Descartes’ contribution to Enlightenment thinking, epistemological philosophies.

Beginning with the presupposition that conscious existence is primarily a mental phenomenon, these authors have placed their readers and their characters face to face with humanoid bodies lacking consciousness, grotesque and undead beings with human minds, and eventually machines capable of complex thought and reasoning. As varied are the forms and consciousnesses that are imagined by these authors, so too are the capabilities these artificial Others are endowed with. Further they provide a point from which human characters relate to, or distance themselves from, their artificial analogs, and often offer insightful commentary on the humans’ own actions from an external perspective.

In tracing the theoretical discourse that I outlined in the previous chapter through works of fiction from the early nineteenth century to the present, a varied and complex lineage of

artificial humans comes into focus. Beginning with the clockwork Olimpia and grotesque

Creature produced by Dr. Frankenstein, these ideas evolved into the beautiful and seductive

Futura in Metropolis (1927) and uncanny wax sculptures in Das Wachsfigurenkabinett (1924) before taking on the form of the shape-shifting alien Odo in Star Trek: Deep Space Nine and the geth in The Mass Effect Trilogy. The authors of these works draw upon, and contribute to, the larger epistemological-ontological discourse that has quietly pervaded the intellectual atmosphere for the last two centuries. As texts involving artificial humans increase in frequency and popularity through the twentieth and into the twenty-first centuries, the narratives surrounding them necessarily evolve in thematic complexity, but at the same time retain key elements of their predecessors, as well as elements of humanistic philosophy.

The primary function of the artificial figures in these texts is to provide more information about humans’ own struggle to understand themselves, their existence, and their consciousness. In doing so, these works leading up to and comprising epistemological posthumanism engage with, and attempt to reconcile the humanistic goals of the

Enlightenment. The artificial creations are human analogues in a dual sense: they are made in the human form but still distinctly Other, and they allow the authors to explore human existence by offering the distance required for such an examination. The next two chapters will function in tandem to trace the epistemological-ontological discourse has been picked up and furthered in fictional narratives. This chapter will trace the epistemological arguments, and chapter three will focus on the ontological side. Both of these chapters should be considered as two halves of a larger whole and to that end, will often share textual sources with hypertext linking the two sides. By constructing my argument in this way rather than with the epistemological and ontological together in one chapter, I will be much more easily able to

demonstrate how each school of thought has evolved over the past two hundred years and the cross-chapter references will help to illuminate the interconnectedness of these competing ideologies.

Romanticism

With texts as well-researched and often discussed as Der Sandmann and Frankenstein, it would be easy to claim that they are already fully understood. I believe, however, that the wealth of scholarship on these texts and the myriad points of view on offer underscores the numerous connections between these narratives and contemporary schools of thought.

Indeed, the sentiment that German romanticism has already been fully explored was present in

A. W. Porterfield’s 1916 article on on the topic, in which he writes:

In view of the encyclopaedic mass of material that has been written on German

Romanticism, it would seem that everything concerning it has been said; that it is

too late to be ambitious; or that there remain only time and place for an

application of that not wholly enviable sort of ambition which exhausts itself in the

attempted refutation of canonized opinions. (479)

While Portenfield’s sentiment is still felt nearly a century later among many scholars, the exploration of links between the past and present readily offers fresh perspectives on otherwise well-understood topics and underscores their contribution to contemporary thinking.

As epistemological reactions against the Enlightenment progressed through the last two centuries, they not only incorporated elements of previous epistemologies, they also found

themselves facing various elements of the Enlightenment itself. While there are many rote

Fäden linking romanticism to posthumanism, one stretches directly back through romanticism to the core of the Enlightenment itself: the motif of eyes, light, and seeing. Christoph Martin

Wieland, one of the most prolific writers of the German Enlightenment writes in “Sechs Fragen zur Aufklärung:”

Was ist Aufklärung? Das weiß jedermann, der vermittelst eines Paars sehender

Augen erkennen gelernt hat, worin der Unterschied zwischen Hell und Dunkel,

Licht und Finsternis besteht.…sobald Licht gebracht wird, klären sich die Sachen

auf, werden sichtbar und können voneinander unterschieden werden - doch wird

dazu zweierlei notwendig erfordert: 1) daß Licht genug vorhanden sei, und 2)

dass diejenige, welche dabei sehen sollen, weder blind noch gelbsüchtig seien,

noch durch irgendeine andere Ursache verhindert werden, sehen zu können oder

sehen zu wollen. (23)

Wieland’s essay continues through the next five questions with variations on this same answer: one needs favorable external conditions (enough light to see), correctly functioning instruments of perception (eyes and mind), and the will to apply the latter to the former.

Wieland’s metaphors of light and seeing are picked up by E.T.A. Hoffmann in Der Sandmann and turned into one of the most complex and often interpreted motifs of the story. Hoffmann’s integration of Wieland’s metaphor with Fichtean philosophy and a mechanical human analog produces a text that may be read as a case study of an individual failing to accomplish the tasks set out by Fichte.

Published as part of Hoffmann’s collection Nachtstücke, Der Sandmann tells the story of

Nathaniel’s attempts to come to grips with his childhood fears, his relationship with his fiancée

Clara, and his infatuation with the automaton Olimpia. Scholarly work on the piece has included perspectives from feminism, psychoanalysis,33 narratology, and a wealth of others34 and the recurring theme of sight has received attention from countless scholars. Viewed as part of a larger progression from German idealism to posthumanism, as well as a text that modifies and and reworks Enlightenment thinking, Der Sandmann provides a necessary first step in the integration of this epistemological lineage into fiction, as well as a re-engagement with the notion that “man is the measure of all things.”

It is clear from Hoffmann’s letter correspondences that he was acquainted with Fichte,35 and indeed they were present in Königsberg at Kant’s lectures, in Berlin, and in Warsaw concurrently. It is unlikely, according to Hartmut Steineke, that Hoffmann read Fichte’s

Wissenschaftslehre directly; however, that is not to say that Hoffmann was ignorant of the philosopher’s ideas.

Das Identitätsproblem wird in der Frühromantik zu einer zentralen Thematik der

Philosophie, insbesondere Fichte befaßte sich intensiv mit diesen Fragen. Er

setzte das Ich absolut; es bringt sich in der Reflexion selbst hervor. Es setzt sich

33 Freud’s essay Das Unheimliche deals directly with Der Sandmann to illustrate Freud’s conception of the phenomenon of the uncanny.

34 For a feminist perspective, see “Women and Artists: E.T.A Hoffmann’s Implicit Critique of Early Romanticism” by Margarete Kohlenbach. Narratology is explored in John M. Ellis’ “Clara, Nathanael and the Narrator: Interpreting Hoffmann's Der Sandmann.” Other excellent articles on Der Sandmann include Maria Tatar’s “E.T.A. Hoffmann's Der Sandmann: Reflection and Romantic Irony” and Raimund Belgardt’s “Der Künstler und die Puppe: Zur Interpretation von Hoffmanns ‘Der Sandmann’.” 35 In a letter to Theodor Gottlieb von Hippel dated 12.12.1807, Hoffmann describes his social circle including Fichte, Schleiermacher, Chamisso and others by name.

als Ich und diesem entgegen die Welt als Nicht-Ich—Gedanken, die bald von der

literarischen Intelligenz aufgenommen wurden. Hoffmann hat Fichte zwar

wahrscheinlich nicht im Original gelesen, kannte aber dessen Ideen aber durch

popularphilosophische Darstellungen. (269)

Steinecke’s claim that Hoffmann was familiar with Fichte’s ideas supports my working understanding of the contributions to this epistemological-ontological discourse: namely that the ideas expressed in both philosophical and narrative works were so prevalent within the atmosphere of each epoch that they compelled engagement with the ideas, whether directly or implicitly.

Der Sandmann (1817)

If Porterfield's earlier quotation in response to critiques of continuing to research

German romanticism generally is to be accepted as true, then this sentiment is at least as true specifically for Hoffmann’s Der Sandmann. While numerous scholars have engaged with the text from myriad angles, the Fichtean elements of Hoffmann’s text remain unexplored. The most widely accepted interpretation of Der Sandmann begins with understanding of the characters as archetypes—Nathanael as the romantic poet, Clara as rational and enlightened,

Spalanzani as a figure of Enlightenment empiricism and so forth.36 Rather than follow

Portenfeld’s argument that the only means left of engaging with such a widely read and studied text is to attempt to overturn the canonical understanding of it, my analysis builds upon the

36 This interpretation was not only offered as standard each time this text came up in literature seminars, but is also dominant among Lektürschlüssel published by Germanistik faculty on the Internet including this one from the TU in Dresden (http://esem.bsz- bw.de/slub/repository/Marchesi+Lingstedt.pdf;jsessionid=F30A342BE648155EB3D1D08E17A109EE?id=19462) and this from Digitale Schule Bayern (http://www.digitale-schule-bayern.de/dsdaten/587/990.pdf)

canon of scholarship and reintegrates the philosophical perspective of the day into the lens of interpretation, thereby redirecting the way the text is viewed.

While the canonical understanding of Nathanael presents him as the prototypical romantic artist, other scholars paint him either as a fully fledged madman, or as well on his way to insanity.37 Nathanael’s understanding of the world hinges on the recurring terrors that were originally experienced in childhood surrounding Coppelius, the Sandman, alchemy, and his father’s death. Compounding this are his near constant attempts to express himself through poetry to his fiancée, Clara, and her equally constant rejections of Nathanael’s worldview. As reported by the narrator, Nathanael falls into a deep depression after encountering Coppola and is convinced that a dark force is controlling his fate.

Alle fühlten das, da Nathanael gleich in den ersten Tagen in seinem ganzen

Wesen durchaus verändert sich zeigte. Er versank ein düstere Träumereien, und

trieb es bald so seltsam, wie man es niemals von ihm gewohnt gewesen. Alles,

das ganze Leben war ihm Traum und Ahnung geworden; wimmer sprach er

davon, wie jeder Mensch, sich frei wähnend, nur dunklen Mächten zum

grausamen Spiel diene, vergeblich lehne man sich dagegen auf, demütig müsse

man sich dem fügen, was das Schicksal verhängt habe. Er ging so weit, zu

behaupten, dass es töricht sei, wenn man glaube, in Kunst und Wissenschaft

nach selbsttätiger Willkür zu schaffen; denn die Begeisterung, in der man nur zu

schaffen fähig sei, kommen nicht aus dem eigenen Innern, sondern sei das

37 See Ursula D. Lawson’s “Pathological Time in E.T.A. Hoffmann’s ‘Der Sandmann,’” John M. Ellis’ “Clara, Nathanael and the Narrator: Interpreting Hoffmann's Der Sandmann,” and others. Maria Tatar considers Nathanael’s madness as one potential possibility for Nathanael’s situation in “E.T.A. Hoffmann's "Der Sandmann": Reflection and Romantic Irony.”

Einwirken irgendeines außer uns selbst liegenden höheren Prinzips. (Hoffmann

21)

Nathanael’s feelings of depression and limitation by outside forces reflect events in Fichte’s own life before he came under Kant’s influence. After the financier of his studies passed away,

Fichte was forced to provide his own income by working as a tutor and pursuing, and ultimately failing at creating, a writing career (Fichte Biography). After his depression nearly led him to suicide, he became acquainted with Kant’s transcendental idealism, which in its focus on individual moral freedom changed the way Fichte saw the world and eventually lead to the

Wissenschaftslehre (Estes and Bowman 1-2).

Central to Fichte’s thinking is the definition of the subject as freely positing itself. This freedom, as well as the positing, is not absolute. Built out of the subject’s self-positing of the

Ich is the equal but opposing positing of the outside world, the Nicht-Ich. As explained in the previous chapter, the Ich strives constantly for absolute freedom while at the same time being limited by the counterforce of the world of objects that the subject itself has produced, the

Nicht-Ich. For Fichte, these two mutually striving and limiting forces are resolved through the third principle, which guarantees their equilibrium and mutual necessity for coexistence.

Fichte’s self-positing Ich as well as the Nicht-ich that it produces are built out of his attempt to ground the possibility of all knowledge within the subject itself, rather than continue the duality of phenomena and noumena that Kant outlined. Fichte grounds this possibility of all knowledge within the subject’s own identity, which he renders through the logical proposition A=A

(Grundlage 53).

Through Fichte’s philosophy, Nathanael is in part correct that there is a dark power influencing his life and causing his feelings of depression and fear; however, because in

Fichte’s view, the frightful Nicht-ich that torments Nathanael comes from Nathanael’s own mind itself, Clara’s refutations of him are also valid. In Clara’s letter to Nathanael she tells him:

Gibt es eine dunkle Macht, die so recht feindlich und verräterisch einen Faden in

unser Inneres legt, woran sie uns dann festpackt und fortzieht auf einem

gefahrvollen verderblichen Wege, den wir sonst nicht betreten haben würden -

gibt es eine solche Macht, so muss sie in uns sich, wie wir selbst gestalten, ja

unser Selbst werden; denn nur so glauben wir an sie und räumen ihr den Platz

ein, dessen sie bedarf, um jenes geheime Werk zu vollbringen. (14)

Clara goes on to describe her conversation with Lothar in which he reaffirms her idealist claim for the existence of the external world and ground for knowledge.

Es ist auch gewiss, fügt Lothar hinzu, dass die dunkle psychiches Macht, haben

wir uns durch uns selbst ihr hingegeben, oft fremde Gestalten, die die Außenwelt

ins den Weg wirft, in unser Inneres hineinzieht, sodass wir selbst nur den Geist

entzünden, der, wie wir in wunderlicher Täuschung glauben, aus jener Gestalt

spricht. Es ist das Phantom unseres eigenen Ichs, dessen innige Verwandtschaft

und dessen tiefe Einwirkung auf unsere Gemüt uns in die Hölle wirft, oder in den

Himmel verzückt. (15)

Clara and Lothar thus do not reveal themselves as the opposites to Nathanael’s romanticism, rather they represent well-adjusted and correctly functioning examples of Fichte’s transcendental idealism. The freedom expressed by their subjectivities reaffirms the

supremacy and foundational nature of the Ich in grounding both reality and knowledge.

Conversely, Nathanael’s Ich has produced itself as fundamentally reactionary and fearful against the Nicht-ich that his consciousness itself produces.

Despite the discord between Nathanael and most other characters in the novella,

Nathanael remains adamant that his worldview is correct going so far as to call Clara a

“lebloses, verdammtes Automat” (25). His view that he experiences reality on a deeper level than Clara (and implicitly most everyone else), offers a romantic critique of Wieland’s conception of Enlightenment. Whereas Wieland considered Enlightenment to hinge on the correct perception of things objectively observable to all given the right conditions (enough light, and correctly functioning eyes and mind), the antagonism Hoffmann constructs between

Nathanael and Clara regarding the nature of external reality reinforces Fichte’s notion that external reality is fundamentally a mental phenomenon. Both Nathanael and Clara would argue that they are seeing more clearly than the other, that is to say that their perspectives are correct. The mutual existence of both positions, like the mutual necessity of the Ich and Nicht- ich, is guaranteed through Fichte’s idealism.

The motif of sight and lenses that is prevalent from the beginning to the end of Der

Sandmann not only harkens back to Wieland’s notion of Enlightenment and symbolizes the many perspectives that one may use to view the world, it also mirrors the metaphor Fichte used to explain the subjectivity of the Ich. Fichte writes “Das Ich ist eine Tätigkeit, der ein Auge eingesetzt ist” (Sämtliche Werke II 249). The self-positing Ich, then, is an activity38 that sets forth from with particular perspective. Fichte carries the metaphor of the eye through several

38 Fichte’s subjectivity is an activity, which is in contrast to Descartes’ res cogitans, a substance.

works, with his point summarized by Günter Zöller in his monograph Fichte’s Transcendental

Philosophy:

Typically...the eye stands for the element of knowing (“seeing”) that is originally

and indissolubly united with the activity of the I. In one such instance, Fichte

reconstructs the coming about of the I as the unification of the “blindly” felt drive to

absolute independence with the “sight” provided by thinking, a process in which

“eyes are, as it were inserted into the drive that is itself blind.” The metaphor of

the eye here serves to represent the moment of consciousness in the original

activity of the I. Fichte’s talk about eyes being inserted into the drive should not be

taken, though, to suggest the implantation of some further organ into an already

functioning organism. Rather the eyes have always already been inserted, just as

the positing of the I is originally also a positing-as-positing. At one point Fichte

even conflates the terminologies of positing and seeing by calling the I “an eye

that posits itself.” (35-36)

The metaphor of the eye for Fichte is so central to his understanding of subjectivity that it is impossible to conceive of an Ich without its Augen. Fichte takes the ocular metaphor further in three sonnets from 1805 which further the connection between the philosopher and elements crucial to Hoffmann’s text, in this case Nathanael. The narrator of Fichte’s sonnets is searching for the divine inspiration that he has lost. After looking into the eye of Urania, the muse of astronomy, he declares that God is nothing (Nachgelassene 347-48).39

39 For further explication of these sonnets see The Retreat of Representation: The Concept of Darstellung in German Critical Discourse by Martha B. Helfer, p. 74.

With eyes as the core of Fichte’s notion of subjectivity, it comes as no surprise that

Nathanael’s fear and anxiety surrounding the disembodiment of eyes to be deeply existential.

While Freud’s reading of Hoffmann’s work in his essay “Das Unheimliche” from 1919 equates

Nathanael’s fear of losing his eyes to castration anxiety, reading Nathanael’s fear through a

Fichtean lens shifts the focus from losing his virility to losing the very essence of his subjectivity. Nathanael’s childhood fears are rekindled when Coppola appears at his door one day. Nathanael’s horror as Coppola empties his bag of barometers, lenses, and disembodied eyes brings him face to face with the notion that his subjectivity may be swapped out for any other, simply by exchanging the eyes. The materialization of epistemological subjectivity in this way also undermines his conviction that his Dichtergabe endows him with a deeper connection to, and understanding of, existence.

After recovering from the horror of Coppola’s bounty of disembodied subjectivities,

Nathanael purchases a telescope, a Perspektiv, in order to see into Spalanzani’s workshop and better observe Olimpia. Nathanael’s infatuation with Olimpia has been the subject of much scrutiny from scholars. Often she is conceived of as a counterpoint to Clara, with whose refutations of his work Nathanael is becoming increasingly frustrated. However, through this

Fichtean lens, it is Olimpia who is the antithesis of Nathanael, not Clara as both humans have self-posited subjectivities, whereas the automaton does not. Despite being endowed with eyes herself, Fichte’s metaphor for the Ich cannot overcome the clockwork and materialistic nature of her bodily existence. Nevertheless, Nathanael is drawn to her at the expense of Clara and the rest of his life.

Nathanael’s subjectivity is one dominated by an out of control Nicht-Ich in the form of the Coppelius-Coppola figure, the Sandman, and his depression. Nathanael lacks the

reconciliation between the Ich and Nicht-ich (Fichte’s third principle) that characterizes both

Clara and Lothar; rather, Nathanael is drawn to Olimpia specifically as a being lacking subjectivity. Through Nathanael’s representation as a romantic-idealist subject, as self-positing but not balanced Ich, Olimpia appears as a non-positing and equally unbalanced, empirical

Nicht-ich. As two disparate entities Nathanael and Olimpia represent an embodiment of

Fichte’s “law of reflection concerning opposites.” Like Fichte’s first two principles, all thinking for the philosopher is oppositional; that is to say that just as the Ich and Nicht-Ich limit the striving of one another, they determine the boundaries of their opposite. The basis for thinking, then, is the opposition between what is undetermined and determinable for the subject.

Through the determination of the undetermined, the unity of the opposites is solidified and guaranteed. It is as an undetermined but determinable entity that Nathanael sees Olimpia. She is for Nathanael whatever he wants her to be, and through that union of opposites that he experiences in his attraction to her, Nathanael is finally able to complete Fichte’s third principle and reconcile the mutually necessary existence of both the Ich and Nicht-ich. For Nathanael

Olimpia is the first element of the Nicht-ich that he is successfully able to determine and not be himself overrun by the Nicht-ich’s limitation of his Ich.

The unification of the romantic-idealist and empirical through Nathanael and Olimpia anticipates Hassan’s unification of opposites in the figure of Prometheus. While the unification of Prometheus as trickster and thief with also being the giver of technology and knowledge to humankind calls for a drive toward unity in Hassan’s new conception of posthumanism, this calamitous unification of Nathanael’s fundamental, and albeit poorly functioning, idealism with the pure materialist empiricism of Olimpia offers a literary take on how the epistemological and ontological reactions to the Enlightenment have been striving toward unification from the very

beginning. Fichte’s idealist philosophy, while still grounding itself firmly in the epistemological tradition, provides both a means for analyzing and understanding Hoffmann’s text and a call for the unification of opposites that anticipates the same from Hassan. The motif of eyes and sight that is so central to both Fichte and Der Sandmann carries over into Mary Shelley’s

Frankenstein. Whereas Der Sandmann concerned itself primarily with the mechanical and Ich- less Other as a counterpart to the runaway Nicht-ich of Nathanael’s subjectivity, Frankenstein examines an artificially created individual as he posits and develops a subjectivity all his own.

Frankenstein (1818)

While the previous text involved a mechanical human analogue, Mary Shelley has her protagonist bring a living flesh and blood creation into the world. Shelley’s novel clearly foregrounds the antagonism between modern scientific progress, as represented by the scientific establishment at his university, and the dreams of Renaissance alchemists, which are brought back to life through Victor Frankenstein’s own mind. One widely accepted reading of

Frankenstein expands this by examining Victor as a mad scientist, single-mindedly focused on discovering the secret of life, and his Creature as the uncontrollable, physical embodiment of science going too far. Further readings have analyzed Victor’s attempt to create life without need of a woman, especially in light of the lack of a maternal figure through most of his own existence, others have examined Shelley’s novel in the historical context of the aftershocks of the French Revolution,40 and still others have focused on the Creature as monster with all of

40 See Anne K. Mellor’s Mary Shelley: Her Life, Her Fiction, Her Monsters (1989), Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar’s The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination (1979, 2000), and Gregory Dart’s Rousseau, Robespierre, and English Romanticism (1999).

the horrific alchemical implications that such a theme brings.41 Whereas Hoffmann’s text depicted Nathanael and Olimpia as opposites that are necessary for the reconciliation of

Nathanael’s subjectivity with the external world, Frankenstein imagines the first hand experience of the Creature himself as he struggles with equally Fichtean issues of self definition. This epistemological approach42 to Shelley’s text will focus on the Creature’s journey to posit himself, his existence, and the world around him, as well as on the ever-present ocular motif previously presented by Fichte and, previously, Hoffmann. As Frankenstein is a text drawing heavily upon Fichtean epistemology, the Creature’s quest to create his own identity also contains foreshadowing of Husserl’s phenomenology and issues surrounding the creation of the geth in Mass Effect,43 which reinforce the epistemological, and visual, line of influence from romanticism to posthumanism.

The symbolic confluence of the Fichtean I with the subject's eye serves to ground the very first intersubjective look between Frankenstein and his creation.

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-

41 See Chris Baldick’s In ‘Frankenstein’’s Shadow: Myth Monstrosity and Nineteenth-Century Writing (1990), Fred Botting’s Making Monstrous: ‘Frankenstein’, Criticism, Theory (1991), and George Levine and U. C. Knoeflmacher’s (eds) The Endurance of “Frankenstein” (1979). 42 Reading Frankenstein through the lense of ontological philosophies would focus on Victor’s understanding of “natural philosophy” and his ability to build and reanimate dead tissue into a living being. The unity of the ontology of Victor’s approach and the epistemology of the Creature represents another unification of opposites as was explored with Hassan in chapter one and through Nathanael and Olimpia in the previous section. 43 Husserl’s examples within phenomenology focus mainly on visual perception of phenomena and the geth feature flashlights surrounding their ocular sensors

extinguished light, I saw the dull yellow eye of the creature open; it breathed hard,

and a convulsive motion agitated its limbs. (30)

Recalling Fichte’s quote “Das Ich ist eine Tätigkeit, der ein Auge eingesetzt ist”

(Sämtliche Werke II 249) Shelley brings the motif of the eye into the Creature’s quest to posit his subjectivity from the very beginning. Victor’s horror continues later that night when he awakens to find the Creature standing over him.

I started from my sleep with horror; a cold dew covered my forehead, my teeth

chattered, and every limb became convulsed; when, by the dim and yellow light of

the moon, as it forced its way through the window-shutters, I beheld the wretch, the

miserable monster 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. His jaws opened, and he

muttered some inarticulate sounds, while a grin wrinkled his cheeks.

He might have spoken, but I did not hear; one hand was stretched out,

seemingly to detain me, but I escaped, and rushed down stairs. (Shelley 31)

Victor’s remark drawing the Creature’s eyes into question points also to an understanding of the ocular representation of a subject’s consciousness. As it is only the Creature’s eyes that horrify Victor, and not the rest of his form, Victor’s fright stems from a similar source as

Nathanael’s when Coppola empties his bag of lenses, barometers, and eyes and again later when Olimpia’s eyes and body are separated. Where Nathanael’s fright came first from encountering the ocular half of Fichte’s Ich without a body and mind to perform the Tätigkeit,

Victor’s is the converse: he is face to face with an acting body that lacks the Auge required for the self-positing subjectivity.

One defining factor that sets Fichte’s Wissenschaftslehre apart from other philosophies of mind that came before him, especially that of Descartes, is that for Fichte subjectivity is always an action rather than a substance, as it was for the earlier French philosopher. This has profound consequences for Fichte’s conception of intersubjectivity, a necessary condition for the subject to posit its Ich. Through understanding subjectivity as an action, Fichte does not encounter the problem of other minds as Descartes does, and moreover, intersubjectivity is necessary for the full realization of Fichte’s actively self-positing subject. Allen Wood44 neatly and concisely sums up Fichte’s intersubjectivity in his paper “Fichte’s Intersubjective I” stating:

My own self-consciousness begins with my consciousness of another’s

consciousness as addressing me (“summoning” me). This means that the mental

states of others, as perceived by someone other than the I whose states they are,

are as transcendentally necessary to the self-consciousness of an I as are its own

states. Fichte’s argument is that transcendentally, the nature of mind is constituted

as much by my awareness of the mentality of others as by my awareness of my

own mentality. (15)

Frankenstein’s Creature is not only literally called forth from a state of death to one of life, but once he is alive, the Creature experiences the beginning of Fichte’s Auffordern as soon as he and his creator make contact for the first time, although the Creature’s intersubjective experiences will not prove to be the positive source of support that Fichte had in mind.

44 Wood’s impetus for delving into Fichte’s conception of intersubjectivity rests on his argument that “as philosophers of mind, we are all recovering Cartesians (3).” Wood’s article underscores my larger argument that current issues in posthumanism, especially the construction of and debate surrounding epistemological and ontological lines of thought, were first constructed in their current form in German idealism and romanticism.

While the Creature later describes his journey of self-discovery, it is through his recounting of his initial interaction with Victor that he recalls the tone for his view of himself throughout the rest of the novel to have been set—a view which is fundamentally negative and is reinforced by nearly every other human the Creature comes into contact with. Victor’s horror at the Creature’s yellow, watery, and unfocusing eyes, his symbolized Ich-less existence, functions as only the first in a series of failed attempts by the Creature to solidify human contact and thereby experience Fichte’s Auffordern. While positive human contact is withheld from the Creature due to his appearance, he eventually uses what little he had to begin to posit his Ich.

As the Creature recounts his history to Victor later in the novel, the Creature continually returns to his sight more frequently than any other sense as reflective of his level of development.

A strange multiplicity of sensations seized me, and I saw, felt, heard, and smelt, at

the same time; and it was, indeed, a long time before I learned to distinguish

between the operations of my various senses. By degrees, I remember, a

stronger light pressed upon my nerves, so that I was obliged to shut my eyes.

Darkness then came over me, and troubled me; but hardly had I felt this, when, by

opening my eyes, as I now suppose, the light poured in upon me again. … Before,

dark and opaque bodies had surrounded me, impervious to my touch or sight; but

now I found that I could wander on at liberty, with no obstacles which I could not

either surmount or avoid. (Shelley 80)

After Victor flees his home in response to his horror at the Creature, the Creature himself, feeling rejected by his creator, heads off for the forest. While there, the Creature recalls becoming acquainted with the sun and moon as sources of light and, after a while, his “eyes became accustomed to the light, and to perceive objects in their right forms…” (82). Becoming accustomed to the light coincides also with his ability to “[distinguish] the insect from the herb, and, by degrees, one herb from another” (82).

The Creature’s account of learning to use his senses and visually perceive the world around him recall Wieland’s account of Enlightenment.

Das weiß jedermann, der vermittelst eines Paars sehender Augen erkennen

gelernt hat, worin der Unterschied zwischen Hell und Dunkel, Licht und Finsternis

besteht. Im Dunklen sieht man entweder gar nichts oder wenigstens nicht so klar,

dass man die Gegenstände recht erkennen und voneinander unterschieden

werden. (23)

The Creature, through his insistent desire to learn about the world around him and posit his own subjectivity, fulfills the first of Wieland’s criteria for Enlightenment, namely that enough light is present at hand. Not only does he strive against the pain of his eyes to be function in the day rather than at night, he is working to overcome his ill-functioning eyes in order to see, understand, and know both the physical world around him and himself as an individual. Sight is also what draws the Creature to an abandoned campfire in the woods, as well as to a village, and ultimately to the hovel where he quietly observes the De Lacey family.

Despite the substantial progress made by the Creature to posit his subjectivity in the beginning, the sight of him fills anyone who sees him, from Victor to the villagers, with terror.

Importantly, the Creature has not yet perceived his own image. The Creature can be said to have been acting on instinct, driven to alleviate pain, find comfort, et cetera; however, his own characterization of his behavior is couched in his desire to find warmth in the cold or to find food, rather than simply as reaction to negative stimuli.45 Of this initial state of being before a subjectivity is posited, Fichte writes “Ich finde mich selbst, als mich selbst, nur wollend.

(Gesamtausgabe I/5 37). In the establishment of an Ich, Fichte characterizes two features that are brought together in his first principle: Tun and Sehen. The Tun corresponds both to the absolute activity that the Ich will eventually establish itself into being, but also as the state of volition that he describes before the self-reflection that allows one to posit an Ich in the first place. Sehen comes about when the subject has gained an awareness of him- or herself as more than just a willing, but also an object in the world and it is only through the eventual acceptance of both of these sides that the Ich may be successfully posited (Gesamtausgabe

I/5 53). When attempting to communicate with Victor, his creator, as well as during a foray into the village, Frankenstein’s Creature yet lacks this Fichtean concept of himself as he is perceived by other people; he only has his desires to satiate his hunger, find warmth, and interact with fellow beings.

The Creature is aware of Victor’s reaction to his appearance, but knowingly risks the same again when he approaches the village to find food and shelter. After being violently run out of town, he finds shelter in a hovel abutting a cottage in the country where he remains undetected for over a year while he watches the De Lacey family and learns about them. After spending the winter observing the family and growing ever fonder of them, the Creature

45 This description of his motivations will parallel the character Odo in Star Trek: Deep Space Nine as he comes to know himself as a shapeshifter and sapient being.

catches his reflection in a pool of water and is suddenly brought face to face with himself as an object, albeit a horrible and terrifying one.

I had admired the perfect forms of my cottagers, —their grace, beauty, and

delicate complexions; but how was I terrified when I viewed myself in a

transparent pool! At first I started back, unable to believe that it was indeed I who

was reflected in the mirror; and when I became fully convinced that I was in reality

the monster that I am, I was filled with the bitterest sensations of despondence

and mortification. Alas! I did not yet know the fatal effects of this miserable

deformity. (Shelley 90)

The turn from winter to spring, and with it the increasing length of day and brightness of the sun, coincide with the Creature’s further subjective development. After learning their customs and language by peering through a small hole into the cottage, the Creature decides that he would like to express his love for the family, but now that he knows his appearance, he endeavors to confess his feelings to the blind father after his children are away. His intentions and understanding of the implications demonstrate that the Creature has finally posited his Ich.

Rather than being summoned by means of a proper Fichtean intersubjective Auffordern, the Creature is continually rejected by every human who can see him. Much of the Auffordern that led to the Creature developing the courage to speak with De Lacey came from a collection of books he found in the forest, among them Paradise Lost.

Like Adam, I was created, apparently united by no link to any other being in

existence; but his state was far different from mine in every other respect. He had

come forth from the hands of God a perfect creature, happy and prosperous,

guarded by the especial care of his Creator; he was allowed to converse with, and

acquire knowledge from, beings of a superior nature: but I was wretched,

helpless, and alone. (Shelley 102)

Immediately thereafter, the Creature tells Victor of the journal that was in the coat he stole from him containing entries recounting the four months leading up the Creature’s “birth.” After reading the journal, the Creature recounts his reaction:

‘Hateful day when I received life!’ I exclaimed in agony. ‘Cursed creator! Why did

you form a monster so hideous that even you turned from me in disgust? God in

pity made man beautiful and alluring, after his own image; but my form is a filthy

type of yours, more horrid from its very resemblance...’ (Shelley 103)

Despite this uproar of emotion against his creator, the Creature calms himself by reminding himself of the virtuous De Lacey family and convincing himself that by speaking to the blind father alone, the family would eventually accept him. He has confidence that his consciousness is fully formed, posited, and worthy of interaction—is simply his form that affects people negatively.

While his plan may have worked, Felix and his companions come back to the cottage earlier than expected and run the Creature out with even more violence than he’d experienced in the village. Even after being forsaken by Victor, rejected by the villagers and by the De

Lacey family, the Creature has not yet acted as the monster others perceive him to be. The final straw comes as the Creature saves a drowning girl and is shot in the arm by her companion; at this point, the negative and hostile version of Fichte’s Auffordern has exerted its final influence on the Creature. He has established his consciousness, and through the

influence of the humans who have come in contact with him, has given himself a direction: revenge against his creator. The way the Creature has been summoned to posit his Ich has involved numerous violent, horrific rejections and heartbreak.

While in the world of humans, the Creature experiences consistent limitation

(determination) by the external world; he is constantly the subject of rejection, violence, and hatred. He first tries to match his Ich to the Nicht-ich that has defined his existence, which only leads him to commit violence himself and be subject to even more of it from humans. This, however, is the converse of Fichte’s idealism and the Creature eventually gains the strength in his Ich to posit a Nicht-ich of his own by withdrawing from the world of humans and thus creating for himself the Nicht-ich that fits with his peaceful Ich. In the Creature’s isolation,

Fichte’s third principle reconciling the subject and the ideally created world of objects comes into true existence for the Creature—so long as he is continually able to avoid Victor’s pursuit.

While sight played a fundamental role in Fichte’s philosophy as well as in the romantic texts, it shows itself to be even more important in Husserl’s phenomenology in the early twentieth century. While phenomenology is inclusive of all aspects of perceiving phenomena,

Husserl’s examples are primarily visual and continue the exploration of the link between these epistemological philosophies and the metaphorical motif of sight. Concurrent to Husserl’s work is the advent of film, which allows directors and cinematographers to explore this new stage of the epistemological evolution beyond Fichte’s idealism. If ocular symbols and visual motifs were strongly present in idealism and romanticism, they are fundamentally intrinsic to the phenomenology and modernism of the early twentieth century.

Modernism

The elements that link the early twentieth century to the early nineteenth in terms of intellectual thought and narrative themes are numerous to say the least. As I mentioned in the previous chapter, Husserl spent a great deal of time studying Fichte, delivered lectures devoted completely to the idealist’s work, and integrated Fichtean ideas into the phenomenological46 process. While Husserl described himself as a transcendental idealist in the tradition of Kant and Fichte, it is also of note that both Husserl and Fichte endeavored with their philosophical thinking to redefine what it means to philosophize generally. Fichte’s concept of the Wissenschaftslehre was intended to be an entirely new method that would break with the problematic elements of previous thinkers’ work, including Kant. Husserl similarly argued that phenomenology was a new method of philosophizing, one that was focused on the direct lived experience of perceiving phenomena. Crucial to their similarity are the conceptions of both Fichte’s Ich and the phenomenological process as actions that are performed and are also intrinsically inherent to the consciousness that performs them. As it was the self- and other-positing Ich that defined reality as constructed by the German idealists of the nineteenth century, it is the lived experience of the phenomenological ego perceiving phenomena that defines epistemology in the early twentieth century.

Just as philosophical thinking of phenomenology found a firm footing in German idealism, so too did the motifs and themes of modernist narrative find a base upon which to build in the work of the Romantics. Several romantic texts were adapted to the new medium of

46 I leave Wissenschaftslehre untranslated as it retains a cohesiveness of intent and element of technical terminology in German that the English translation “Science of Knowledge” somehow loses. Phenomenology, on the other hand, is so close in both languages that it loses nothing in translation. This will also apply to various technical terms of phenomenology—I will make use of the German term when the English does not connote the meaning of the word effectively enough.

film including James Whale’s version of Frankenstein (1931), an adaptation of the ballet

Coppélia inspired by Der Sandmann in the form of Ernst Lubitsch’s Die Puppe (1919), Paul

Wegener’s Der Golem: Wie er in die Welt kam (1920)47 and the Homunculus films.48 These films not only brought these stories back to life, but also supplemented them with modernist and phenomenological ideas, which demonstrate influence from both the works’ idealist roots and the Zeitgeist of phenomenology in the early twentieth century.

Other works, such as Karel Čapek’s stage play R.U.R. (1920) and Fritz Lang’s

Metropolis (1927) present more advanced takes on the mechanical artificial human than were offered in their romantic predecessors Der Sandmann and “Die Automata.”49 In both later works, the robots50 do not always act in accord with the wishes of humans, and display much more fully developed sentience than the automaton Olimpia in Der Sandmann or the Turk in

Hoffmann’s “Die Automata.” This technological evolution incorporates elements of individual subjectivities on the part of the artificial humans, which invite exploration of the phenomenological elements of intentionality, perspective, and embodiment as well as internal and external horizons. Husserl’s conception of horizons, and his analysis of wax exhibits themselves, play a central role in Paul Leni’s Das Wachsfigurenkabinett (1924) as the nameless poet creates stories to accompany the wax figures in a traveling exhibit.

47 The stories surrounding the creation of golem reach back at least to the Talmud and the Bible; however, there are also accounts of golem stories from Jakob Emden in the early to mid 18th century, Jacob Grimm, Clemens Brentano, and Annette von Droste-Hülshoff in the early 19th century, and Abraham Tendlau and Detlev von Liliencron in the mid to late 19th century. While the accounts by German authors were not always devoid of anti-Semitism, their existence most assuredly influenced the creation of Wegener’s film. 48 Only the fourth Homunculus film exists in its entirety, and fragments remain of other works in the series. 49 This will be discussed in chapter 3. 50 Čapek’s construction of a noun to replace “automaton” or “android” out of the Czech word “robota” meaning “forced labor” is well documented. It is also well documented that this play marks the origin of the word for mechanical, sometimes humanoid, creations designed to complete tasks.

While the recurring motif of eyes and sight in the romantic texts is continued in modernism, it is given new depth by the incorporation of ideas present in Husserl’s phenomenological works. Like Fichte’s Wissenschaftslehre before, Husserl’s phenomenology dominated the philosophical discourse during the early decades of the twentieth century and the concepts and perspectives articulated in his philosophy appear also in various forms within narratives of the time. Husserl’s focus on sight for the majority of his examples not only carries

Fichte’s philosophical metaphor into modernism, but just as Fichte’s use of eyes and sight did with romantic texts, the way phenomenology focuses on how phenomena are rendered perceivable to consciousness as a necessary part of that consciousness itself continues the epistemological focus from idealism into the new epoch.

While many of the texts mentioned above provide excellent examples of phenomenological thought, I have chosen to focus on Paul Leni’s 1924 film Das

Wachsfigurenkabinett and Fritz Lang’s Metropolis from 1927. The focus in Leni’s film centers on the perception of the wax figures in the museum by both the unnamed poet, the potential visitors, and the film’s viewers. The context of the wax museum, and the medium of film themselves encourage phenomenological perspectives while regarding the figures, and Leni’s plot wherein the poet must write backstories for each individual serves to engage the phenomenological observer more deeply in perceiving the forms at once as wax dummies and intersubjectively as people “brought to life” by the stories. Metropolis also makes heavy use of directed perception; however, in this case the subject is not a poet, but the villain Rotwang aided by the devices in his laboratory. The electronic eye of the machine aids Rotwang in capturing Maria’s image, which he then transplants onto Futura. Along with this futuristic interpretation of directed perception, the film incorporates Husserl’s Lebenswelten into the very

structure of the city and relies on the existence or lack of intersubjective empathy to drive the plot.

Das Wachsfigurenkabinett (1924)

Paul Leni’s film Das Wachsfigurenkabinett51 from 1924 tells the story of a poet-for-hire who is commissioned to spin fictional tales about the figures in a waxworks exhibit. Presented as part of a travelling carnival, the wax museum contains four figures of historical and literary fame: Harun al-Rashid, Ivan the Terrible, Jack the Ripper,52 and Rinaldo Rinaldini. Leni originally planned a four-part film, but due to the hyperinflation of the German currency and collapse of the economy during filming in 1923, only two of the four episodes were properly realized and the third “has to be seen as a kind of improvisation, albeit one with remarkable visual concentration” (Kasten 174). Exhibitions of wax dummies had been popular cultural attractions for decades at the time of Leni’s film and had already served as driving elements of many texts (Bloom 17-19).

Wax objects in art date back at least to Ancient Greece and Egypt. In the Middle Ages, miniature humanoids made of wax were used as talismans in black magic rituals in which “the practitioner attempted to kill the person represented in wax by poking the statue’s ‘heart’ and hoping the gesture would harm the person” (Bloom 3). Waxen figures and sculpture continued in Europe through the Renaissance until Madame Tussaud made her famous waxen

51 The connection between wax figures and the Pygmalion and living statues myths is clear and will be included in the expanded version of this chapter when I publish this dissertation as a book. Excellent work on this topic has also already been done by Michelle Bloom in her 2003 monograph Waxworks: A Cultural Obsession. 52 In the English-language exports of the film, the censor board in London required that the name be changed to Springheeled Jack (Kasten 176).

likenesses of the beheaded nobility during the French Revolution (Bloom 2-8). As Michelle

Bloom states in the introduction to her book Waxworks: A Cultural Obsession:

[The] generic wax-museum scenario raises several important issues engendered

by wax figures, which embody the blurring of boundaries characterizing

modernism and, even more so, postmodernism, namely, those between

self/other, subject/object, human being/inanimate form, living body/corpse,

life/death, male/female, solid/liquid, dynamic/static...fiction/history,

authentic/fake…interior/exterior. . . Wax, wax figures, and wax museums blur

such distinctions or, to use a term derived from the properties of wax, “dissolve”

them.53 (xi-xii)54

The dissolution of such boundaries points to the heart of Leni’s Das Wachsfigurenkabinett. The wax figures of the frame narrative become living, breathing men in the embedded stories; the figures, regarded as phenomenological objects by the museum’s patrons and the poet, become active living subjects with their own subjectivities.

Many of these binary pairs intrinsic to wax, wax sculpture, and wax museums that

Bloom cites are also applicable to Husserl’s phenomenology. Building off of the subject/object dichotomy, phenomenology and its rallying cry of “zu den Sachen selbst!” situates the thinking subject in a perpetual relation to various sorts of objects by means of intentionality, or directed consciousness. The self and the other are explored through Husserl’s intersubjectivity and empathic relations, which are necessary to regard another subject not just as a physical

53 Further exploration of these binaries has been done by Donna Haraway in “A Cyborg Manifesto.” 54 While not technically made of wax, the properties Bloom describes here recall the shape shifting character Constable Odo in Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, who will receive extensive attention later in this chapter.

Körper, but as a fellow living psychophysical entity or Leib. Notions of the interior and exterior refer for Husserl to the horizons that limit the subject’s perspective at any given time as to various hidden sides of the phenomenon, both as part of its appearance and as part of the internal structure and historical context. Husserl even goes so far as to discuss wax museums themselves, specifically the perception of human beings and inanimate forms, as well as authentic versus fake anthropoidal entities. This discussion of wax museums and the subject’s intentionally directed consciousness begin in Husserl’s early work and serve to inform the basis for his construction of phenomenology.

In the second volume of Husserl’s Logische Untersuchungen from 1901, the philosopher undertakes the task of explaining how his theory of intentionality can be, in some instances, contextually dependent. Intentionality, as previously discussed, refers to the

“directedness” of consciousness; that is to say, consciousness is always conscious of something. It is vital to keep in mind here that for Husserl intentionality contains three interrelated, but distinct parts: the intentional act denotes whether the subject is perceiving, remembering, believing, et cetera—this corresponds to a sort of psychological attitude that the consciousness is taking. Second, the intentional object is, simply, the phenomenon that consciousness is directed toward—the something that consciousness is conscious of. The third part, intentional content, refers to how a subject thinks about a phenomenon—from a particular perspective, being a certain way, and so forth (Husserl LU II 386-391). The contextually-dependent interpretations, or Aufforderungen, of intentionality are explored in order to explain the possibility that “mental acts with identical intuitive or sensuous contents can nevertheless represent different objects and properties in different contexts” (Hopp 220).

Husserl takes the example of a person walking into a waxworks museum.

Im Panopticum lustwandelnd begegnen wir auf der Treppe einer liebenswürdig

winkenden, fremden Dame—der bekannte Panopticumscherz. Es ist eine Puppe,

die uns einen Augenblick täuschte. So lange wir in der Täuschung befangen sind,

haben wir eine Wahrnehmung, so gut wie irgend eine andere. Wir sehen eine

Dame, nicht eine Puppe. Haben wir den Trug erkannt, so verhält es sich

umgekehrt, nun sehen wir eine Puppe (wir haben also noch immer eine

Wahrnehmung), und zwar eine Puppe, die eine Dame vorstellt. Natürlich heißt

diese Rede vom Vorstellen nicht, dass die Wahrnehmung die Vorstellung sei,

sondern dass das Wahrgenommene die praktische Function habe, die bezügliche

bloße Vorstellung zu erregen. Im Übrigen ist das Wahrgenommene (die Puppe)

hier auch verschieden von dem, was vermittelst der Wahrnehmung vorstellig

werden soll (der Dame). (Husserl LU II 414-415)

Husserl goes on to conclude that even after recognizing that the figure of the woman is a wax doll, the subject must reconcile that the same physical phenomenon, a figure in the shape of a woman, is at once the matter for a percept (the factual existence of the wax doll) and a perceptual fiction (the appearance of a living woman); however, both of these understandings cannot coexist simultaneously and independently. While for Husserl it is impossible to unsee the figure as a doll and not a living person once it has been realized, that is not to say that the factual percept of the waxiness of the doll is all that one sees at this point.

As the subject continues to perceive the doll, the fact of the wax construction is known, but at

the same time the implied humanness of the doll’s construction exists, rather, as part of the whole phenomenon.55

Before the subject realizes the figure is made of wax and not truly human, for example while the subject is still some distance away, the subject’s mind works to fill in missing information about the figure. This line between the information that is given and that which is not, which the mind must consequently fill in, is in Husserl’s terminology a horizon and connotes everything about the figure from the current viewpoint that is not directly perceptible.

Husserl distinguishes between internal and external horizons, which in this case would correspond to the figure’s assumed beating heart and breathing lungs as an internal horizon, and the rear of her Körper as an external. In perceiving the wax figure as a living human, the subject not only assumes a functioning lived body, but one with past lived experiences in her

Lebenswelt. Before the subject recognizes the figure as wax, the approach to the woman is characterized by Husserl’s intersubjective empathy, which is based in the recognition of similarities with the subject’s self in the perceived phenomenon.

The draw of wax museums centers around the thrill of playing with phenomenal perception, an experience which requires the willing participation of the visitor and occurs in the form of a Husserlian epoché, or bracketing off of existing knowledge. As wax modeling of human forms had in the early twentieth century already existed for several hundred years, visitors to waxworks exhibits enter with the knowledge that the figures are not, in fact, human, although they do possess human form. In order to experience the uncanniness of the figures at

55 Freud’s essay Das Unheimliche from 1919 works with this same situation; however, as his account takes the direction of Oedipus and a fear of castration, only the legacy of his use of the term “unheimlich” is relevant for my argument here. The gulf between the familiar and the frightening, as dealt with by Freud, is also dealt with by Jasia Reichardt in the form of the uncanny valley. The work of both theorists will be applicable in the monograph version of this document.

all, the visitor must bracket the knowledge of the figures’ construction in order to perceive them anew as phenomena. The epoché is a key aspect to Husserl’s phenomenology, allowing the subject to experience the phenomenon as itself without interference from previous experiences or knowledge (Husserl Ideen I 56-57).

Right from the very beginning of Leni’s film, the ability of the Panopticum at the travelling fair to work with its patrons in the practice of the epoché is called into question. While it is the task of the patron to bracket previous knowledge in order to perceive the phenomena of the wax figures anew, the setting of the museum must work alongside the patrons by creating the correct atmosphere and by displaying believable wax specimens. Through the want-ad for a person to create stories surrounding the wax figures, as well as the purveyor attempting to mend Harun al-Rashid’s broken arm, the audience is made aware that this waxworks museum is no longer as successful as it once was—namely because its patrons are no longer able to see the figures as anything other than wax dummies. The disrepair of the figures and the overly simple presentation of the historical personalities out of context works against the patrons as they attempt to bracket the knowledge that they are viewing wax figures in order to enjoy the exhibit. The implication, then, is that this dearth of patrons has been going on for some time and the hired poet’s stories will add a new element to the museum’s display, thus allowing for a more easily achieved epoché and richer phenomenological experience once it is achieved.

In writing the stories surrounding Harun al-Rashid, Ivan the Terrible, and Jack the

Ripper,56 the unnamed poet engages in two different levels of phenomenological experience,

56 This last tale is admittedly more of a hallucinatory dream than a composition, but functions the same as the others in this interpretation.

which correspond to the frame narrative and collection of inner narratives respectively. In the frame narrative, the poet directs his consciousness toward each wax doll. He analyzes the given phenomenon before him, including for example the missing arm of Harun al-Rashid, and makes extrapolations as to the existence of features beyond the external horizons of each figure. His task, however, is to create stories for each figure, and in doing so, he explores the existence of phenomena beyond the internal horizons, that is to say, personal tales of each figure’s history. In order to pen believable tales, the poet must engage intersubjectively with the figures, both as purely physical Körper—explaining, for example why Harun al-Rashid is missing an arm—as well as lived Leiber. By placing himself in the shoes of each figure to write the stories, the poet engages in a form of intersubjective empathy with each one, which will allow him to imagine the Lebenswelt and lived experiences of each person and take them into account when creating the stories. Through all of these actions, the poet helps to create a more believable Lebenswelt within the waxworks exhibit itself, thereby encouraging the epoché on the part of future visitors, which will allow them to enter the Lebenswelt of the wax museum and experience the wax figures as potentially living beings.

By attempting to create believable stories to accompany the wax figures, the poet is also engaging intersubjectively and empathically with the future visitors to the museum, as represented by the museum owner’s daughter who stands behind the poet and reads enthusiastically as he composes his works. While the owner’s daughter is obviously not a visitor herself, her role in the writing process involves reading the text that is being written and allowing herself to be swept along with the narrative. Since she, as one who is not seeking the epochetic experience of the wax museum and one who is used to seeing the figures as just wax, is able to enter the Lebenswelt the poet creates, his work is guaranteed success among

the future visitors to the museum. It is this empathic position toward future visitors that constitutes the second level of phenomenological experience on the part of the poet.

Husserl’s conception of empathy is central to the poet’s ability to write believable and engaging stories for the wax figures. Husserl explains intersubjective empathy thus:

Die von Anderen gesetzten Dinge sind auch die meinen: in der Einfühlung mache

ich die Setzung des Anderen mit, ich identifiziere etwa das Ding, das ich mir

gegenüber habe in der Erscheinungsweise >> mit dem vom Anderen in der

Erscheinungsweise << gesetzten Ding. Dazu gehört die Möglichkeit des

Austausches durch Platzwechsel, jeder Mensch had an derselben Raumstelle

vom selben Dinge ,,dieselben” Erscheinungen — wen alle, wie wir annehmen

können, die gleiche Sinnlichkeit haben — und daher objectiviert sich auch der

,,Anblick” eines Dinges; jeder hat von derselben Raumstelle bei derselben

Beleuchtung denselben Anblick, z.B. einer Landschaft (Ideen II 168-9)

Through the poet’s phenomenological perception of the figures he anticipates how the visitors will view the wax figures and then pens his works such as to accentuate aspects of the physical figure itself (in the case of Harun al-Rashid) as well as the historical mythos of each individual. In addition to placing himself in the shoes of the wax museum’s visitors, the poet also exhibits Husserl’s related conception of intersubjectivity.

Whereas for Fichte intersubjectivity occurred through the Auffordern and direct personal interactions between subjects, for Husserl the focus shifts to the shared experiences of phenomena. The empathic relation (Einfühlung) to another subject functions as a modification of intentionality, that is to say that another conscious subject is recognized in a body similar to

one’s own acting in ways similar to how the observer would act. While this aspect of Husserl’s intersubjectivity is not far removed from Fichte’s, it is Husserl’s focus on how these various subjects interact with the phenomenal world that marks the real distinction between his thought and Fichte’s. Once the existence of other consciousnesses is secured through empathy, the subject realizes that there is for each other subject a different, alien perspective from one’s own that the subject cannot have. This realization brings with it also the idea that one’s own conception of the world is but one of many possible perspectives on a common, objective external world. It is this shared experience of the objective, external world that serves as the building blocks for the Lebenswelt. (Husserl, CM 158)

By entering the physical structure of the wax museum and practicing the Husserlian epoché, the visitors are entering a different Lebenswelt. A Lebenswelt for Husserl is not just a spatiotemporal plane upon which consciousnesses can exist, rather a Lebenswelt includes the totality of experiences and phenomena that the ego perceives, as well as the reasonable expectations that one can have about future experiences and phenomena within the given context (Ideen I 89-90). Through the combination of the physical separation from the external world offered by the entering room of the Panopticum, the willing epoché on the part of the viewers, the wax figures themselves—and crucially to the film’s plot—the stories invented by the poet, Leni creates a new Lebenswelt within the Panopticum separate from both the external reality of the fair, and most importantly, the previous situation within the wax museum as it failed to attract visitors and fell into disrepair. On the surface, the addition of the poet’s stories simply breathes life into an otherwise stale wax exhibit; however, taken in the context of

Husserl’s phenomenology, the poet creates a new Lebenswelt within the museum as his writings provide new perceivable phenomena, and after the visitor’s epochetic suspension of

the outside reality, rewrite the expectations of phenomenological experience within the

Panopticum.

The Lebenswelt created by the poet for the visitors to the museum functions as a double of the filmic Lebenswelt created by Leni in Das Wachsfigurenkabinett for the viewers of the film in the theater. Both the poet and Leni rework the expectations of reality, and with the help of the viewers’ epoché, the phenomenal figures of wax become living individuals with histories of their own. As the poet’s stories are works of fiction, the phenomenologically “living” wax figures serve as the most fundamental component of shaping the viewers’ expectations within this Lebenswelt; the fictional backstories not only bring the wax figures to life by telling of the figures’ past actions as living people, but also reinforce the idea that the lifelike dolls could again at any time start acting of their own volition. In contrast with the Fichtean analyses of Der

Sandmann and Frankenstein, the phenomenological focus within Das Wachsfigurenkabinett lies not on how subjectivities are constructed, rather it is on how an already established perceiving subject engages with other individuals, or their analogs, as physical phenomena in the world (Körper) and as potentially lived bodies (Leiber) within their own phenomenological contexts (Lebenswelten).

Metropolis (1927)

Like Der Sandmann and Frankenstein, much ink has been spilled by critics and scholars in the analysis of Fritz Lang’s Metropolis. Thomas Elsaesser reported that “hardly an article in the papers that year [1927] did not make reference to it, including a fair number of cartoons and parodies” (22), Lotte Eisner was impressed by the “beauty of the light and shapes” in the film (223), and Siegfried Kracauer saw within the work the rumblings of nascent

Nazism (163). While the content and plot can be considered problematic, the film’s lasting legacy solidifies the cultural importance of Lang’s spectacle.

Reflections of phenomenology in Metropolis are evident in the societal and physical structures that divide the citizens in the upper and lower cities, intersubjective relations, and especially in the creation and unleashing of Futura in the guise of Maria. In an effort to avoid awkward constructions and circumvent the confusion of the dual roles played by Brigitte Helm,

I will use the novel’s name for the Maschinenmensch, Futura, regardless of which face is visible and Maria for the human whose form Futura takes on. This perspective also reinforces the phenomenological elements of Futura’s creation and acquisition of her human form in that the consciousness that Rotwang created for her, as well as the Leib she experiences the world through, both remain the same; it is the image of her that changes. I will return to the creation of Futura in more detail in the coming pages.

The physical structure of Joh Fredersen’s Metropolis is a city built vertically and divided at ground level into Metropolis proper existing above ground, and the workers’ city, or “the depths” as it is called in the film, existing below, and the catacombs down further still. While the catacombs are supposed to be sealed off from the workers, Maria has been holding religious services there to inspire hope among the workers that a mediator will come and their situation will improve. Counting the catacombs as a subset of the depths, these two cities function as two opposing Lebenswelten for the city’s residents. While this lumping together of the catacombs and depths on one hand glosses over the distinct attitudes associated with each—the depths with endless and dehumanizing work, and the catacombs with peace and hope—my distinction here functions on the level of each area’s populace and access to the physical spaces. Moreover, in order to get to a place of hopefulness for a new future in the

catacombs, the workers attending Maria’s services must bring with them their experiences in the depths.

As previously discussed, a Lebenswelt is made up of the totality of experiences and phenomena that the ego perceives and the reasonable expectations that one can have about future experiences and phenomena (Ideen I 89-90). In the upper city, Freder’s experiences include the huge and expansive city, the affluence inherent in being Joh Fredersen’s son, and the decadence within both the Club der Söhne and Yoshiwara. However, Maria’s entrance into the Club der Söhne breaks the continuity of his reality. His Lebenswelt was literally broken off from that of Maria and the workers by the distance between them.57 The distance between the two Lebenswelten represents a literal instantiation of a Husserlian horizon, the break between what is perceived by consciousness and what is co-given, that is to say part of the phenomenon’s whole, but not immediately perceivable (Ideen I 80). The sons in the club, and

Freder in particular, know that the city is kept running by a lower section driven by workers; however, while its existence is known, it is not directly perceived and therefore not part of the

Lebenswelt of those above. The Lebenswelt of the workers’ city, conversely, consists of fourteen hours of grueling work per calendar day,58 no access to sunshine, moving in herds to and from shifts, and identities replaced with numbers.

The main conflict of the film begins when Maria transgresses this horizon by bringing children up from the depths to see and be seen by those in the Club der Söhne. Her act not

57 Although it would seem that an elevator linking the Club der Söhne directly with the workers’ city is an invitation to break through this separation. 58 Work is built around the ten-hour clock, which measures the length of the work shift as well as the off- hours. Above this clock on the wall is a separate twenty-four-hour clock to mark the passage of calendar days. In one twenty-four-hour cycle, workers will work one ten-hour shift, rest for ten hours, and then go back to work for four more hours before the calendar day changes.

only breaches the horizons that separate the two words, it is also indicative of a call to those in the Club der Söhne to experience empathy and acknowledge the intersubjectivity between them and the impoverished children in front of them, as well as the workers below. Before descending to the depths himself, and upon seeing Maria, Freder clutches at his heart. This could be interpreted as Freder falling in love at first sight; however, the expression on Freder’s face is less one of awe and captivation; rather, it is an expression of deep sadness, shame, and empathy for the poor, raggedly dressed and dirty children Maria has brought up with her.

This gesture appears several more times through the course of the film by both Freder and

Maria when they are feeling deep empathy for their fellow subjects. Freder’s initial encounter with Maria definitely leaves a profound impression on him, and he soon descends to the workers’ city. After witnessing the horror of the machine explosion, and unsuccessfully pleading with his father, Freder returns to the depths and asks to trade lives with one of the workers. This “stepping into the shoes of the other” demonstrates a literal instantiation of

Husserl’s metaphorical conception of the Platzwechsel of intersubjective empathy. He writes:

Die von Anderen gesetzten Dinge sind auch die meinen: in der Einfühlung mache

ich die Setzung des Anderen mit, ich identifiziere etwa das Ding, das ich mir

gegenüber habe in der Erscheinungsweise 훼 mit dem vom Anderen in der

Erscheinungsweise 훼 gesetzten Ding. Dazu gehört die Möglichkeit des

Austausches durch Platzwechsel… (Ideen II 168)

The figurative Platzwechsel of empathy experienced by both Freder and Maria is redoubled by the literalization of Husserl’s term in Rotwang’s apprehension of Maria and transference of Maria’s image onto the robot Futura. In Rotwang’s attempt to capture Maria, he chases her through the catacombs with a spotlight, a symbol of where his consciousness is

directed and continuing the symbology of eyes and sight from romanticism. For Husserl’s phenomenology, consciousness is always conscious of something and it is this directedness toward an object that constitutes intentionality. The nature of his light allows him to focus on

Maria, while ignoring the features of the catacombs around her. As she is illuminated with her back against a wall, the spotlight allows Rotwang and the viewer to focus on her features, clothes, expression of fear, and her body language. Literalizing Wieland’s Enlightenment,

Rotwang can see clearly and discern his target from the surrounding rock; however, the addition of phenomenology invites one to analyze her appearance and her experience closely as presented phenomena, while at the same time the viewer is pulled into intersubjective empathy with the character.

Rotwang’s intentionality toward Maria does not, however, represent a complete demonstration of the phenomenological process. His spotlight search, rather, renders into metaphor the intentionality that will be exacted more completely by the machinery in his laboratory. Filled with equipment for work with both chemistry and electricity, Rotwang’s laboratory centers around an enclosed bed that is attached by wires to the chair that Futura sits in against a wall. After a cut, Maria is already lying on the bed with electrodes attached to her head and to metal strips that run parallel to each other around her body, functioning as a sort of Faraday cage. She is not unconscious, as indicated by her head movements and strained expression, but her eyes remain closed as Rotwang proceeds with his work. With eyes closed, she is no longer supposed to be seen intersubjectively: she is now reduced to worldly phenomenal object for the perception of the machine subjectivity operated by Rotwang.

The machine, then, functions as an extension of Rotwang’s own eyes as it surrounds Maria with electricity from the Tesla coil above her.

The machine approaches Maria without any need of epoché and without the hinderance of external horizons that are inherent in perceiving a phenomenon from one perspective. The machine is able to scan her entire body from all angles at once—an ideal ability when perceiving any phenomenon within Husserl’s philosophy but never capable by human egos.

The machine also breaks the internal horizon as indicated by the pulsating heart that becomes visible in Futura’s sleek, metal body before the image of Maria is transplanted onto it. The electrodes on Maria’s head and her expression of exhaustion after the procedure indicate a further breach of the internal horizon as at least some of her knowledge and memories of past experiences is transferred along with the image of her body.

While the machine scans Maria’s body and mind, it is not her full lived body (Leib) that is transferred to Futura, it is rather a copy of her physical body (Körper) with elements of her consciousness added as contextual necessity to fool the workers during her sermons.

Husserl’s conception of the Leib is of a unified, psychophysical, conscious perceiver of phenomena. Within the Leib, there is no distinction between the spatio-temporal body and the consciousness as existing outside of space and time as argued by Descartes. Rather, the physical organs of the Leib and the functioning of the brain are all part of a single perceptual ego-experience. The Körper, on the other hand, is primarily a spatio-temporal entity; it is what can be measured physically—and in this case replicated by the machine.

By the time of Husserl’s writing and the release of Lang’s film, neural scientists were well underway in understanding the physical structure and functioning of the nervous system in animals. In 1906, during the early years of Husserl’s writing, Santiago Ramón y Cajal and

Camillo Golgi jointly won the Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine for their contributions to the discovery of the physical neural networks of the brain (Fishman 690). Given this scientific

context in the early twentieth century, Rotwang’s machine demonstrates the capability of scanning the neural structures of Maria’s physical brain, as evidenced by Futura’s immediate knowledge of how to present herself to and manipulate the workers into revolting, while leaving

Maria’s lived experience, that is to say her unified consciousness-body, intact. This distinction in the machine’s function is supported by the fact that Maria is soon disengaged from the machine and able to function normally, while Futura’s lived experience in Maria’s form is drastically different from anything Maria would engage in. Moreover, at the end of the film as

Futura is burned at the stake, the image of Maria vanishes and it is her metallic robot body that is left to burn.

The transference of Körper from Maria to Futura presents an interestingly advanced take on conceptions of both physical body and consciousness. Rotwang’s machine is able to scan Maria’s form and transmit it as data via electricity to be reconstructed upon Futura. This construction of the body as reducible to data, transferable, and re-creatable presents a stark divergence from the Cartesian view that minds are separate from the bodies that house them.

Other works of the time including Der Golem and R.U.R. (both 1920) represent modernist takes on the conception of consciousness as separable from the body and anticipate later variations on the idea, which, with varying degrees of adherence to Cartesianism, have become popular tropes within science fiction; however, the transference sequence of

Metropolis presents a different situation entirely. The transference between Maria and Futura not only avoids Cartesianism, it also does not fit other tropes of science fiction such as cloning since Futura retains her metallic body, nor does it adhere to the definitions of possession or identity exchange. Futura’s creation comes closest to aligning itself with a variation on the

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tropes of the evil twin and body double, since Futura is acting as an anti-Maria while bearing her image.

Perhaps, though, the other work that most similarly engages with the body doubling motif in Metropolis is the programmable matter in two episodes of Doctor Who from 2011: “The

Rebel Flesh” and “The Almost People.”59 In these episodes, workers in a dangerous facility have their bodies scanned to produce doubles of themselves out of a living liquid60 called the

Flesh. These doubles, unlike Futura’s anti-Maria figure, fully replicate the Leib of the individual, which takes the motif from Metropolis one step further. In the episodes, a solar storm affects the Flesh doubles further making them not just copies, but independently sentient with independent volition. Rather than just the Körper being reducible to information as in Lang’s film, in Doctor Who the entirety of the individual including all of their consciousness is quantifiable and reproducible, creating a double Leib.

The ethical conflict of the episode lies in the question of whether the Flesh doubles are sentient and deserving of equal rights to life as the original people. This conflict is decidedly posthumanist, however its construction and resolution reflect the moral of Metropolis that the mediator of between the head and the hands must be the heart. While the execution of this idea in the film is clunky at best and in the end simply doesn’t work out well for the workers, the metaphorical reimagining in Doctor Who functions much more smoothly. In Metropolis, the workers (the hands) are oppressed by the boss of the city, Joh Fredersen (the head). To stave off a workers’ revolt, Maria preaches to the workers that a mediator will arise, and indeed

59 The Flesh also appears later in “A Good Man Goes to War,” however the focus of the episode is fundamentally different. 60 The living liquid also builds upon the wax figures of Leni’s film in that through the creation of each copy, the figure appears to be made of a waxy latex substance capable of forming into any shape. Additionally, the ability to change state from liquid to solid by The Flesh mimics wax.

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Freder comes to fill that role through his empathy for his father and for the workers. In Doctor

Who, however, the human workers function in place of Joh Fredersen and the citizens of

Metropolis’ upper city. They have the knowledge to do the jobs, but allocate the dangerous completion of the actual work to their Flesh-based “Gangers,” short for Doppelgänger. Once the radiation from the solar storm hits the planet, the Gangers become sentient beings independent from their human originals. The conflict between the Gangers and the humans reaches the point that the Gangers kill one human and take the rest hostage. The Doctor, who now also has a Ganger double, works together with his Ganger to prove that the two races are not different and both should have all the respect afforded to any sentient being. The Doctor then facilitates the resolution that the Ganger of the human who was killed in the struggle between the groups, Jimmy, assumes the role of Jimmy in the world as father to Adam, his son. The Doctor not only mediates between the humans and the Gangers by having empathy with both, he does so much more effectively than Freder in Metropolis.

The reducibility of corporeal form to transferable data in Metropolis anticipates, and in

Doctor Who recalls, William Gibson’s oft-used turn of phrase from one quintessential cyberpunk text, Neuromancer: “data made flesh” (16). The way in which Fritz Lang’s film constructs the new image of Futura not only reflects many concepts central to Husserl’s phenomenology, it also anticipates Scott Bukatman’s characterization of the Information Age.

The creation of Futura stretches the boundaries of its historical context of the late Industrial

Age to anticipate the quantifiability and transference of the Information Age, as well as the concept of mutual realizability in the functionalist philosophy of the early posthumanist period.

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Posthumanism

The progression of epistemological models of philosophy develops further within posthumanism and, in a manner of thinking, marks a dialectical resolution of the long-standing subject-object dichotomy within this epistemological progression. Fichte’s Identitätsphilosophie focuses on the Ich as a positing of the self—an absolute activity that results in the self- consciousness of the subject. Because Fichte’s focus is without question the subject as self, the existence of the external world and the resolution between their mutual existences are built directly out of the subject’s own self-positing consciousness. Fichte’s creation of the self, not- self (external world, etc), and their mutually assured coexistence and interaction through his three principles represents in itself a dialectical model, and one which serves as a mirror for the larger Fichte-Husserl-Bukatman/Moravec argument that I am making.

While Fichte’s philosophy focuses on the self-positing consciousness as its base,

Husserl’s phenomenology shifts the attention away from how the subject begins existing as a self-conscious entity on to how the subject perceives objects (phenomena) in the Lebenswelt.

Phenomenology and Fichte's Wissenschaftslehre both take Kant's transcendental idealism, for better or worse, as their inspirations; however, it is Husserl's phenomenology that builds further upon the idea of transcendentalism regarding the nature of phenomena, i.e. external objects.

While the subjective perception of phenomena sits at the heart of Husserl's philosophy,

Husserl also maintains that perceivable phenomena are themselves transcendental; that is to say that the phenomena extend beyond any single subject's perception. Perception, for

Husserl, always takes place from a particular point of view and through the sense and mental faculties that humans possess. This Leib, in Husserl's words, is a "lived body" that rejects the

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Cartesian notion of a substantial physical form and an insubstantial mind, rather holding that the way that consciousness is able to perceive the phenomenal world is strictly contingent upon the body's particular modes of interaction with phenomena. In very simple terms, then,

Fichte's goal is to ground the existence of the subject within its own self-consciousness, which forms the thesis of this dialectic. Husserl shifts the focus away from Fichte's self-positing subject onto the subjective perception of transcendental phenomena, which constitute the antithesis. These divergent focuses on subjects themselves and subjects' perceptions of objects are reconciled through the posthumanist approach (synthesis) of rethinking the necessary conditions of what constitutes a self-conscious entity, the external limitations that distinguish conscious from non-conscious entities, and the varying natures of possible

Lebenswelten.

Husserl's writing on the embodied subjectivity of the Leib does not mandate that consciousness always necessarily be tied to a human body as does the work of his student

Martin Heidegger. Rethinking Descartes’ problematic duality between the substantive body and the insubstantial mind, Husserl understands the conscious body in two ways: physical body as Körper and lived, conscious body as Leib. This insight allows the phenomenologist to see humans in two different ways simultaneously, as physical thing and as part of a perspectivally-oriented consciousness, which are mutually dependent sides of the conscious entity. The crucial distinction with Husserl, and in the epistemology camp generally, is that while the interaction that any consciousness may have with the outside world is determined by the lived perspective,61 these thinkers do not mandate that the only possible perspective be

61 Maurice Merleau-Ponty, a phenomenologist following Husserl, did fantastic work regarding the nature of embodiment and lived perspective. While his work is crucial to a full understanding of the connections between

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housed within a human body. While I am not arguing that epistemological philosophy has been consciously directing itself toward the possibility of mind uploading and downloading since

German Idealism, both Fichte and Husserl had the opportunity to tie their epistemologies exclusively to human bodies (as Heidegger did in his fundamental ontology) but chose to ground them instead within mental activities.

This choice to exclude flesh and blood bodies as the only possible vessel for human consciousness, in conjunction with Husserl’s conception of kinesthetic consciousness, serve to provide posthumanist theorists decades later with a platform on which to build their theories.

Kinesthetic consciousness focuses on the Leib’s potential for motility within the Lebenswelt; that is to say that one defining characteristic of the body for Husserl is that it can change the spatiotemporal perspective it takes when perceiving phenomena (Ideen II §36-37). A posthumanism faithful to Husserlian phenomenology, then, would exclude the possibility for conscious existence within an immovable vessel with limited means of perceiving the phenomenal world. From this perspective, Moravec’s hypothesis in Mind Children about downloading consciousnesses from a collective into varying types of corporeal bodies might be even more faithful to the aims of Husserl’s phenomenology than existence within a flesh and blood body is.

The essence of epistemological posthumanism reveals itself through its fluidity of possible forms; that is to say that it is the nature of epistemological posthumanism not to limit itself to any one particular notion of embodiment, rather it requires a self-conscious, self- positing, perspectival subject. As Joona Taipale argues in Phenomenology and Embodiment:

phenomenology and posthumanism, particularly cybernetics, the focus of this chapter on the beginnings of each movement restrict me from delving further into his fascinating work.

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Husserl and the Constitution of Subjectivity, “In the dawn of the modern era, philosophy was reinterpreted as the study of consciousness, and along with this move the body was cast into the side of the object, and hence pushed into the margins of philosophy” (Taipale 1). While

Husserl’s phenomenology brings the body back into epistemological philosophy as one example of a necessary point of perspective, epistemological posthumanism takes it one step further and begins experimenting with various constructions and forms of body. Ihab Hassan concludes that the most appropriate icon for his vision of posthumanism (a unification of the epistemological and ontological tracks and a resolution of their arguments) is Prometheus; however, as this unification is yet to be realized, I argue that it is more accurate to see the epistemology camp as rallying behind the essence of Descartes’ wax argument, especially as it is embodied in the character of Odo in Star Trek: Deep Space Nine (DS9).

In the decades since Hassan’s paper, epistemological arguments have not only embraced the new technological possibilities inherent in the contemporary world, they have also doubled down on their epistemological standpoints. Figures such as the shapeshifting

“Changling” Odo have complicated the role of shapeshifting in narratives as aligning itself with misdeeds and untrustworthiness as it was in Zeus’ many transformations in Greek mythology, werewolves, vampires, and other beings. Odo is the chief of security on the space station and as such views his surroundings with an inherent (Cartesian) doubt in the validity of the things he sees. As I believe Odo to embody the essence of epistemological posthumanism, I will examine him more closely later in this chapter.

In addition to DS9’s Odo, several other figures in the posthumanist era recall elements of Cartesian thought, and with it the epistemological bent that Scott Bukatman argues serves as the defining feature of science fiction since the 1960s (17). Harrison Ford’s character

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Deckard62 in Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner, an adaptation of Philip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, is tasked with determining whether the being before him is a human or a replicant, an android created for dangerous and difficult work.63 Continuing the ocular motif present in German idealism, romanticism, and phenomenology, it is only by means of the

Voight-Kampff machine measuring empathy and other emotions as reflected in the subject’s eyes that Deckard is able to determine whether he is interviewing a human or a replicant.

Further, works such as The Matrix Trilogy (1999-2003), the Star Trek franchise (1966-present),

Transcendence (2014), Neuromancer (1984), Tron (1982), The Mass Effect Trilogy (2007-

2012), and countless others explore variations on Descartes’ conception of the separation between extended body and insubstantial mind. While many works beyond those listed above grapple with epistemological themes in posthumanism, Star Trek and The Mass Effect Trilogy serve as particularly rich examples of how epistemological posthumanism explores the nature of consciousness in imagined galaxies of technological enhancement, sentient machines and holograms, and virtual spaces.

Star Trek

The galaxy of Star Trek,64 originally dreamed by by Gene Roddenberry, has been a part of popular culture and the science fiction canon since it originally aired in 1966. While The

Original Series (TOS) only ran for three seasons, its popularity skyrocketed while in

62 While this nod to Descartes is barely concealed, Blade Runner offers a complex look at Cartesian doubt in the posthumanist era. 63 By characterizing the replicants as merely a workforce, Dick and Scott are mixing elements of Cartesian philosophy with Golem legends. This line of questioning will come up again in my discussion of the geth and quarians in The Mass Effect Trilogy. 64 For the sake of brevity, I will refer to the Star Trek franchise generally as Star Trek while abbreviating The Original Series to TOS, The Next Generation to TNG, and referring to the films by their number rather than their full titles.

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syndication65 and the numerous subsequent series and films continue to demonstrate the cultural significance of Roddenberry’s idea. Star Trek expands upon Fredric Jameson’s well- known claim that science fiction is written about the contemporary world rather than a far away time and space by creating many of the various alien races as a collection of fractured human personality traits. The Vulcans are rational and logical, the Betazoids are empathic, the

Romulans are political and cunning, the Klingons are proud, idealistic, and religious,66 the

Hirogen are sporting but ruthless hunters, and the Ferengi are comically capitalist— and this is only a small sample of the vast number of races in the Star Trek universe.

It would be an oversimplification to argue that these races exist only as incarnations of these various character traits—they do not—rather these traits serve as the driving elements of each race’s existence or culture. Thus Star Trek, and much of contemporary science fiction and posthumanism, is not “predicated on the transformative encounter of the ontological

Other” that Elana Gomel67 cites as the starting point for developing her posthumanist ethics

(3); rather, Star Trek embodies a version of the very problem Gomel is trying to avoid. Building upon Neil Badmington, Gomel writes “‘Humanism is always becoming posthumanism

(Badmington 12). But the converse is also true: posthumanism is always sliding back into humanism. To avoid this slide, I will argue, posthumanism requires a new form of ethics…” (3).

65 Within weeks of Star Trek’s debut in the United States, Raumpatrouille Orion, a strikingly similar series about space exploration, debuted in Germany. Ultimately only seven episodes of Orion were made and Star Trek (Raumschiff Enterprise) gained a massive following in Germany that still exists to this day (startrek.de). 66 The Klingons in TOS represented some of these traits, but were much more richly developed in the subsequent films and television series. 67 Gomel’s project favors literary science fiction while evoking a dismissive, overly simplified, and polemical attitude toward visual media and the Star Trek franchise.

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While the ethics of Starfleet are thoroughly—and at times simplistically—humanist, Star Trek explores the human of the here and now with exaggerated reflections of itself as adversaries.68

This is heavy incorporation of humanistic values and the positing of embodied versions of humanity’s own undesirable traits as adversaries appears strongly in the pilot episode of

Star Trek: The Next Generation (TNG), “Encounter at Farpoint.” While on the way to negotiate use of Farpoint Station for Starfleet, the Enterprise and its new crew, headed by Jean-Luc

Picard (Patrick Stewart), is trapped and detained by an immortal being called Q. Ordinarily existing outside of normal spacetime, Q is able to assume any form, move at any speed, and interact with the Enterprise and its crew however he likes. Q, in essence, is a god; however, he proves himself to be not a wise god of mercy and love, but rather a childish, vengeful, and manipulative god.69 Q accuses Picard, and all humans, of being a savage race and cites numerous examples from Earth’s history as proof. When Picard objects that humanity has come a long way since then—arguing that humanity has finally achieved the values of the

Enlightenment—Q changes reality so that they are no longer on the Enterprise’s bridge, rather they are in a post-nuclear war court presided over by Q himself. Q puts humanity on trial for being a savage race and it is Picard’s job to prove that humanity has indeed achieved

Enlightenment. Picard is not alone in the court, however. Just as in The Original Series (TOS),

Captain Kirk was always flanked by the Vulcan Spock (standing for reason and logic) and

Doctor “Bones” McCoy (standing for emotion), in Q’s court Picard (the wise diplomat captain) is flanked by the android Data (reason, logic, facts), Counselor Deanna Troi (a Betazoid and empath standing for emotionality, compassion, and cooperation), and Security Chief Tasha

68 I am wary here of using the term “enemies” to describe Star Trek antagonists as the goal of Starfleet is not conquest and victory, but cooperation and understanding. 69 This description of Q recalls an episode of Star Trek: The Original Series in which Kirk’s Enterprise meets the Greek god Apollo. (“Who Mourns for Adonais?”)

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Yar (representing the defensive that Q has put humanity on). Picard argues for a chance to prove humanity’s values and by the end of the episode does so by rescuing a being that looks like, for want of a better term, a space jellyfish that is being held captive. The jellyfish, like Q, is not beholden to one form and is being forced to hold the form of Farpoint Station itself. By acting selflessly and regarding the space jellyfish’s right to life and respectful treatment as of higher importance than what Starfleet would gain by using the station, Picard is successful in his argument for humanity’s enlightenment.

The seemingly mutually exclusive claims of Badmington and Gomel about the transformations of humanism into posthumanism and the “degradation” of posthumanism back into humanism recall the mutual striving and limiting of the Ich and Nicht-Ich that Fichte describes in his first two principles in the Wissenschaftslehre. The resolution of this conflict for

Fichte is the third principle guaranteeing and necessitating the coexistence and mutual dependence of the first two, and it is exactly at this juncture of the limitations of humanism with the new possibilities afforded to consciousness by highly advanced technology that Star Trek forms and explores its epistemological galaxy. As proven by Captain Picard in TNG’s pilot, it is also through taking full responsibility for past failures that he, and Starfleet at large, have been able to achieve the goals that humanity set out for itself half a millennium before.70

As one of the critiques of the Enlightenment, or even grounds for its failure, is the inequalities and inhumanity that have existed since the ideals were expressed. Whether they take as example wars, genocides, sexism, racism, or any other form of violence, humanity in the age of Starfleet has allegedly overcome them; however, one recurring ethical dilemma in

70 The stardate for this mission is listed as 41153.7, which corresponds to the year 2364.

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Star Trek is the question of personhood and sentience.71 By interacting with numerous alien species, the position of Starfleet is usually clear: personhood is based on being an “intelligent, self-aware conscious entity deserving of rights, respect, and freedom” (TNG “The Offspring”) and while this conforms to the preservation of humanist values, Star Trek expands the notion of personhood beyond the traditional conception of the human: a single consciousness housed within a single body. Rights, respect, and freedom have even been extended to non-person animals at this point in the future, explained by Commander William Riker in TNG “Lonely

Among Us,” “We no longer enslave animals for food purposes.” The question of personhood is continued through the androids and their own quests for humanness in TNG: Data (especially in TNG “The Measure of a Man”, Lal (Data’s “daughter” in “The Offspring”), Lore (Data’s

“brother” and antagonist in TNG “Datalore” and others), the nanites created by Wesley Crusher in TNG “Evolution,” the Great Crystalline Entity in TNG “Silicon Avatar” and others, the creation of the self-aware hologram of Professor Moriarty in TNG “Elementary, Dear Data,” the Borg character Seven of Nine and the self-aware holographic Doctor in Voyager. Further examples exist in TOS, DS9, and Enterprise as well as with V’Ger, a living space probe in Star Trek I.

The characters of Data and the Borg also bring the eyes-sight motif into Star Trek.

Data’s eyes are yellow, which match the complexion of his skin, but while they draw the viewer’s attention through their color, they only endow Data with the ability to judge distance with incredible accuracy. Data’s eyes, then, signify his goal of becoming human, since either his creator, Dr. Noonian Soong, or Starfleet Medical could have given him eyes capable of perceiving well beyond the range of normal humans. The chief engineer aboard the Enterprise in TNG is Geordi La Forge (LeVar Burton), who was born blind but is equipped with a VISOR

71 As the definitions of “sentient” and “sapient” are somewhat interchangeable throughout different series of Trek, I will stick with the more contemporary terms “person” and “personhood.”

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(Visual Instrument and Sensory Organ Replacement) that does give him superhuman sight by means of a link between the external technology and his brain. Geordi is able to see in spectra that other humans and Data cannot, which not only serves him well on away missions, but also metaphorically represents his enlightened, cooperative leadership style (TNG: “Hollow

Pursuits). The Borg also feature cybernetic eyepieces, however theirs do not correct for being born blind like Geordi’s, rather theirs are standard equipment for assimilated drones. While

Borg drones are given superhuman perception through their eyepieces, when Seven of Nine

(Jeri Ryan) is liberated from the hive and taken aboard Voyager, the holographic doctor designs and fits her with an artificial human eye. Like Data in TNG, Seven of Nine in Voyager spends the majority of her free time contemplating the meaning of being human, for which her prosthetic eye with its “limited” range of vision is symbolic (Voyager: “The Gift”). Both Seven and Data are able to interface directly with technology, giving them perceptual fields beyond the limited ocular range of their “human” bodies, while at the same time expanding the way they are able to exist as conscious entities.

While most races exist as single consciousnesses within single bodies and are basically humanoid in shape, the Borg function as a hive mind,72 the Trill (often, but not always) are comprised of a humanoid host with a much smaller, longer lived symbiont inside them giving each host the memories and experiences of each previous host,73 and the Changelings exist naturally as a liquid in The Great Link, but can take on any shape they choose. The Trill are a

Federation species;74 however, the Borg and Changelings serve as antagonists in TNG, DS9,

72 I will discuss the Borg and hive minds in general in chapter four. 73 Both the Borg and the Trill exist as hybrids, which is explored further in Star Trek: The Human Frontier by Michèle and Duncan Barrett. 74 The United Federation of Planets is the organization under which Starfleet operates and is the main focus of Star Trek. These planets include Earth, Vulcan, Trill, Betazed, Andoria and many others. The Federation

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and Voyager save for individual representatives of each race (Seven of Nine and Odo in particular) who in turn are used to explore these various forms of consciousness and personhood. It is these explorations of consciousness and their consequent expansion of humanist thinking that define Star Trek as a franchise situated squarely within epistemological posthumanism; however, it is the character Odo who best embodies the beliefs of this side of posthumanism.

The character of Odo is developed slowly, with the revelation of his backstory and rare displays of his personality suggesting a lonesome, insecure figure whose only certainty is the justice and impartiality that characterizes his position as security chief75 on the space station.

His name comes from “Odo’Ital,” meaning “nothing” in Cardassian, the language of the scientist who found him and was a loose translation of the label “unknown sample” which adorned the beaker in which he was found (DS9 “Heart of Stone”). Odo is able to enforce security on the space station by changing himself into any kind of object—animate or inanimate, solid, liquid, or gas—but he also takes great pleasure in expanding his understanding of the world by existing temporarily as a tree, or a rock, or any number of other forms. Odo’s eyes are apparently not necessary for visual perception as he is able to witness crimes while in the form that does not include eyes, although this is not directly explained in the show. The exploration of Odo’s potential for conscious embodiment in DS9 recalls Thomas

Nagel’s argument from his 1974 article “What Is it Like to Be a Bat?” in which he theorizes that one essential element of understanding conscious existence is understanding what it is like to has accepted members from non-Federation worlds into Starfleet including Worf (Klingon) and Nog (Ferengi) and has formed alliances with both the Klingon and Romulan Empires. 75 As security chief, Constable Odo displays a profound preoccupation with the concepts of justice and duty. This deontological perspective is reminiscent of Kant’s Kritik der praktischen Vernunft and Grundlage der Metaphysik der Sitten. Unfortunately, the current scope of this project will not allow me to explore Odo’s Kantian connection further at this time.

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be that thing. While Nagel does not cite Husserl directly, understanding what it is like to be any particular conscious thing follows the phenomenologist’s insistence on the role of a specific, lived perspective for consciousness inherent to his philosophy.

Further, the Odo mask worn by René Auberjonois76 in DS9 gives his face the appearance of being made of wax, connoting an in-progress wax model of a human.

Regarding his appearance, Odo goes so far as to say that the human face is incredibly difficult to replicate and the approximation that he wears is as close as he can get (DS9

“Shadowplay”). The ability to shapeshift and his waxen approximation of a human face shed new light upon the Cardassian meaning of Odo’s name; rather than understanding “nothing” as a lack of matter, and with it value, “nothing” here can be better understood as “no thing in particular” as Odo’s existence is certain, but his form is not. Similar to Descartes’ thought experiment regarding what he could doubt the existence of, Odo’s corporeal form is constantly in question, but his consciousness is certain. Also recalling Descartes and his wax argument is the fundamental doubt of appearances and people that is central to Odo’s character. After observing Odo and his girlfriend Colonel Kira for the first time, the genetically enhanced character, and newcomer to the station, Sarina remarks “And Kira, she never doubts herself, which is what Odo finds so fascinating because he doubts everything but her” (DS9 Chrysalis).

With the roots of his character firmly embedded in the same philosophical thinking that gave modern philosophy its exclusionist focus on the mind (Taipale 1), Odo incorporates insights from Descartes, Fichte, Husserl, and Bukatman, embodying within his various forms the essence of epistemological posthumanism. When Odo was found, he was young enough

76 While it does not strengthen my argument, it is a coincidence that the actor who plays Odo, the writer for many DS9 episodes, and the originator of the wax argument all share a first name.

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that he did not yet know that he was able to change forms; he simply existed as a liquid.

Through the tests done by the Bajoran Dr. Mora, Odo learned that he was able to take on the shape of various objects, eventually other living things. His accuracy is such that when scanned with a tricorder,77 Odo registers not as a Changeling, but as the figure he is in the shape of. In addition to the Cartesian elements that I have already exculpated, Odo’s journey of self discovery that characterizes one of the largest story arcs in DS9 rests on a Fichtean foundation.

A successful positing of oneself according to Fichte’s Wissenschaftslehre involves substantial effort on the part of the individual and an Auffordern, or summoning, on the part of the intersubjective community surrounding the individual in question. In the case of Odo, the most extensive revelation of his backstory occurs in DS9 season five, episode twelve “The

Begotten,” in which Odo, made human as punishment by the Changelings, comes into the possession of an infant Changeling. Doctor Mora Pol, the Bajoran scientist who worked with

Odo in the laboratory and discovered that he was sentient, arrives despite Odo’s wishes to the contrary. Through the conversations between Odo and Dr. Mora78 it is revealed that Dr. Mora performed a number of experiments on Odo before realizing that he was a sentient being, many of which caused Odo discomfort. Doctor Mora continued experimenting on Odo after realizing his sentience, still causing discomfort to Odo, to get Odo to change shape and eventually take on his humanoid form. The discomfort of these experiments, which left Odo with residual emotional baggage, was the intersubjective Auffordern that Odo needed in order for him to posit himself as a sentient and self-directed individual.

77 A fictional device used for taking measurements of the environment or of living things. 78 Bajoran surnames come first.

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With the exception of taking on various geometric shapes encouraged by the experiments, the beginning of Odo’s self-positing occurs when, in response to a particularly uncomfortable experiment, he forms himself into a tentacle and strikes Dr. Mora (DS9 “The

Begotten). Eventually Odo develops the ability to take on various geometric shapes, as well as the forms of various living things. His form—that is to say, his intersubjective self or his phenomenal body—is under the control of his self-posited consciousness. Odo answered the intersubjective Auffordern of Dr. Mora by taking charge of his existence totally and completely.

He develops his Cartesian doubt as a means by which to judge the accuracy of his sensory input against his own self-posited conceptions of reality. While Fichte’s self-positing ego of his

First Principle defines the terms of its own conscious existence for itself, Odo goes one step further and posits not only his own consciousness, but makes his physical (phenomenological) form subject to his consciousness as well. Odo’s shapeshifting abilities are returned to him when the dying infant Changeling joins with Odo’s solid form. The first thing he does with his newly regained abilities is to change into a hawk and soar around the space station, reestablishing one of his defining qualities: his ability to posit his own consciousness and for his consciousness to determine his phenomenal form.

Becoming a hawk not only celebrates his regained abilities, it literally demonstrates the acquisition of new perspectives from which to perceive the world. Odo’s ability to experience the world in any shape or as any object he chooses builds upon Husserl’s phenomenology, and just as Odo took the self-positing of Fichte’s Wissenschaftslehre one step further, he expands upon Husserl’s phenomenology as well. For Husserl, all consciousness is always conscious of something from a particular perspective. Due to the nature of embodied subjectivity, one cannot perceive a phenomenon from all possible perspectives, although

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further perspectives may be gained by changing the position or nature of observation. In order to perceive an object without the influence of previous experience, the observer must engage in the epoché, the setting aside of existing knowledge. Further, the perceivable sides of any phenomenon are separated by those that are not by means of horizons, external and internal, which conceal aspects of the phenomenon.

Odo demonstrates his willingness to set aside existing knowledge through his interactions with other Changelings. In contrast to many other figures in DS9, Odo does not automatically fear that other Changelings he meets are part of the Dominion.79 It is a remote possibility that he would meet another who is not, but even so, he treats encounters with other

Changelings as opportunities to learn more about his people rather than as threats to himself or his colleagues. As Changelings exist in a communal liquid form, they are able to link with one another to share experiences and knowledge and it is though this that Odo is able to transcend the horizons that ordinarily confine phenomenal perception. Odo, however, brings new meaning to the Husserlian conception of transcendentalism. Rather than only phenomena being transcendental—that is to say, existing independent of perception and equally available to all—Odo himself is transcendental as he is able to transcend the confines of existence as any one particular thing. Whether he has taken the form of a bird, a liquid, a loaf of bread, his approximation of a human, or an actual human (a “solid” in the vernacular of the Changelings), his consciousness remains intact, but he experiences existence as that object itself.

Odo’s shapeshifting presents a biological variation on the dream of human consciousnesses uploaded into a computer and downloaded, as need be, into various forms of

79 The Dominion, and their Jem’Hadar minions, are the totalitarian antagonists from the Gamma Quadrant of the Milky Way galaxy in the latter seasons of DS9.

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physical body by Hans Moravec. In his discussion of mind-uploading, which he calls transmigration, he offers two competing points of view regarding how identity is understood: body-identity and pattern-identity. He writes:

Body-identity assumes that a person is defined by the stuff of which a human

body is made. Only by maintaining continuity of body stuff can we preserve an

individual person. Pattern-identity, conversely, defines the essence of a person,

say myself, as the pattern and the process going on in my head and body, not the

machinery supporting that process. If the process is preserved, I am preserved.

The rest is mere jelly. (117)

Moravec clearly favors pattern-identity, and a more appropriate description of Odo would be impossible to find. In fact, within the same section Moravec uses the fictional technology of the transporter from Star Trek to elaborate on the concept of pattern-identity. Physical materials, including people, are reduced to energy by the transporter and then reassembled in a new location. While this technology has been in every iteration of Star Trek, it is the Enterprise series, set one hundred years before the birth of Captain James T. Kirk, that delves into the metaphysical questions of pattern-identity (“Daedalus”). Ultimately the mistrust of transporter technology is outweighed by the necessity of its use, offering one further example of Star

Trek’s epistemological bent. Interestingly, when Odo transports, he is reassembled bearing the same form as when he left rather than as a puddle of gelatinous liquid, which constitutes his natural state.

The malleability of Odo’s corporeal form mixed with the firm foundation of his consciousness very easily situate him squarely within epistemological posthumanism;

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however, in order for him to embody the very essence of this line of thinking, and indeed for him to be the symbol of epistemological posthumanism, he must embody not just a progression of epistemological philosophies, but also posthumanism itself. While this claim may seem trite, since on one hand it is a necessary condition of my argument, and on the other he is not a human and therefore does not have any humanness to overcome, it is vital to remember that Odo chooses to appear human, not Bajoran, not Cardassian, Klingon, or

Ferengi. Odo is artificially a human, and he is so by choice. Odo is also not technically a member of Starfleet, but the ethical system he creates for himself matches that of Starfleet such that his actions never conflict with Starfleet ethics.

In contrast to Gomel, who shows disdain for both Star Trek and the slippage of posthumanism back into humanism, I argue that it is this critical engagement with humanistic values that is an essential part of posthumanism, and that the epistemological side offers crucial insights into this engagement. Rather than accept the total failure of the Enlightenment as theorized by Horkheimer and Adorno, I argue that Posthumanism, through science fiction, functions as another attempt at achieving the ideals of Humanism, while attempting to work through the inconsistencies and contradictions that plagued previous attempts As I have previously noted, Hassan’s prescriptive construction of posthumanism can currently only be seen as an ideal; the reality is that the attempt to reconcile the ideals of the Enlightenment have taken two contradistinctive forms, which when analyzed as such provide necessary insights into how the humanistic ideal is seen several centuries after its birth. Both Starfleet and Odo function as iterations of the attempt to achieve this ideal in the twenty-fourth century.

Odo and Starfleet display a fluid deontological ethical structure; that is to say, that they are primarily guided by duty and adherence to a series of principles (“human” rights and The

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Prime Directive80), these are open to interpretation and circumstance. Odo’s deontology reflects Kant’s emergence from a self-imposed immaturity in Beantwortung auf der Frage: Was ist Aufklärung? as well as the necessary universalization of actions to be moral as discussed in

Grundlage der Metaphysik der Sitten. In contrast to Kant, however, Odo does not judge morality based solely on intention. Odo (and Starfleet) function in their roles by championing the human rights, rational agency, and universalization of actions of each individual—all of which are defining elements of humanism—they succeed in ways that were not possible at the time of the Enlightenment in that they face no contradiction from sexism,81 racism,82 or other de facto and de jure inequalities.

With this base in humanistic philosophy, Odo embodies the position of Scott Bukatman in Terminal Identity that “it is the purpose of much recent science fiction to construct a new subject-position to interface with the global realms of data circulation, a subject that can occupy or intersect the cyberscapes of contemporary existence” (8-9). This new subject- position, according to Bukatman, is based in the dissolution of the fourth and final discontinuity of human existence that Bruce Mazlish outlined in his 1995 book The Fourth Discontinuity. So far, Mazlish argues, humans have experienced three “ego-smashing” historical moments: the

Copernican revolution, Darwin’s theories, and Freud’s insights into the unconscious. These have all removed humans from their central and special place in creation. The fourth is the idea that humans are distinct and discontinuous from the machines they create and to this

Bukatman argues “In fact, my thesis is that this fourth discontinuity must now be eliminated—

80 The Prime Directive prohibits the interference by Starfleet upon other worlds and cultures. In essence, it guarantees the right to exist and develop of all people without imposition of “more advanced” cultures. 81 The change in women’s uniforms between TOS and TNG serves as partial evidence for this. 82 Racism against the Changelings is present through DS9, but it is always framed as an action incongruous with Starfleet duty and the response of Captain Sisko and others always reestablishes the humanistic ideal.

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indeed, we have started on the task—and that in the process man’s ego will have to undergo another rude shock” (8).

Bukatman analyzes this dissolution through several works including Tron and

Terminator II; however, since DS9 premiered in the same year that Terminal Identity was published, Odo’s embodiment of this “terminal identity” was not yet developed in the series.

Odo’s repertoire of possible forms extends far beyond organic beings or basic inanimate structures. The uniform Odo wears is not actually clothing, rather it is an extension of his body, and may be changed at will, as is his communication badge (combadge). The combadge is a highly complex piece of technology allowing the wearer to receive and transmit communications and various other information from a great distance. More importantly, however, it also interfaces automatically with the central computer terminals throughout the station, logging the user in when a terminal is approached (TNG “The Drumhead”). As Odo’s combadge is created, like his clothes, as part of his humanoid appearance, Odo is able to interface personally with the computer, effectively removing the distinction between biological and technological, organic and machine.

On a surface level, Odo’s standard appearance as a humanoid with a combadge presents him as a cyborg figure—a reading reinforced by the ability he has to operate a commandeered Jem’Hadar ship with headset-based controls where the human characters cannot. It is true that Odo does function to break down some of the boundaries listed by Donna

Haraway in “A Manifesto for Cyborgs,” including male-female (he impersonates a female

Changeling, and as a liquid has no need for human gender), human-machine, human-animal, et cetera. Haraway’s goal is the dissolution of these concepts as opposites, but her method is to unite them, as opposites and without dialectical resolution into a new kind of whole (149).

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Odo, however, is not faithful to Haraway’s materialism and goes beyond the mere joining of previously opposed concepts. Odo is liquid, solid, and gas; he is biological, machine, and the unification of both; in his natural state, he is without gender. He is Moravec’s transmigration, but not limited to a machine substrate. Odo embodies Bukatman’s terminal subject by symbolizing in its totality the biological-technological link that Bukatman describes (9). Odo is the epitome of epistemological posthumanism; he is his consciousness, and his form is whatever he wants it to be.

The Mass Effect Trilogy

As with many space-based science fiction narratives, including Star Trek, Mass Effect is based on a galaxy of various alien races attempting to achieve a common goal. Like Star Trek,

Mass Effect focuses on a human protagonist83 who must work closely with numerous aliens to complete the mission at hand, and who inevitably develops close relationships with these nonhumans. One of the strengths of Star Trek, and a multitude of other science fiction narratives, is the exploration of how consciousness could be understood and housed within various kinds of bodies. Unfortunately for Star Trek and others, the format of a live-action television show limits the kinds of alien races that may be developed; most beings are single consciousnesses housed within humanoid bodies.84 The computer animated video games in

The Mass Effect Trilogy, however, offer much higher diversity in the bodily structures of the aliens, as well as in the ways that consciousness may be conceptualized.

83 Episodes of Star Trek periodically feature different characters as protagonists; however, if one overarching lead character can be said to exist in each series, it is the Captains: Kirk, Picard, Sisko, Janeway, and Archer. 84 Some races like the Klingons, Ferengi, Cardassians and Andorians intricate involve prosthetics, while many recurring Star Trek aliens receive simple changes to their ears, noses, eyebrows, and hair.

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In Mass Effect the year is 2183, 35 years after humans discovered ancient ruins on

Mars. The ruins were built by a race called the Protheans, who disappeared roughly 50,000 years prior. Humans have only recently made contact with other spacefaring races and have established an embassy on the Citadel, the seat of the Citadel Council, which functions as the executive body within Citadel space. Humans are viewed by many other races as being too immature to participate fully in galactic affairs; however, Commander Shepard, the protagonist of Mass Effect, is granted the opportunity to redefine humanity in the eyes of the Citadel races.85 Crucially for the gameplay, Shepard is made the first human SPECTRE (SPECial

Tasks and REcon), which means he86 does not answer politically to the Council and may use whatever means he pleases in achieving his end.

One of the many strengths of Mass Effect is the customizability of Shepard with regard to gender, appearance, abilities, and personality. Shepard can be male or female, has a fully customizable physical appearance, and through the choice of different “character classes” takes on various other abilities—mostly in combat. Shepard’s role as the leader of the galaxy against the Reapers is not changeable in the game and, true to his aptronym, he may lead through building cooperation or through brutality. According to Nick Yee, “people create slightly idealized avatars based on their actual selves” (qtd. in Madigan); that is to say that both in physical appearance and attitude, players’ avatars reflect the self that they would like to be.

The creation of the player’s avatar in Commander Shepard represents a distinctly posthumanist take on Fichte’s three philosophical principles. In the creation of Shepard,

85 Citadel races are those who have embassies on the citadel, of which there are nine. The Citadel Council is comprised of one representative each from the asari, turians, and salarians, who are also Citadel races. 86 Because I played a male Shepard, and for the sake of brevity, I will use the masculine pronoun to refer to him.

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players posit their surrogate selves in the simulacrum of the Mass Effect galaxy through making choices about Shepard’s background (giving paragon or renegade bonuses), and the numerous characteristics listed above. Players are able to continue positing their virtual selves by choosing various dialogue options. Choosing options favoring cooperation among characters gives Shepard paragon points, which give him enhances powers of persuasion, and renegade points are awarded for choosing dialogue options that are rude, egoistic, and brutish.

Choices made during character creation (mainly about Shepard’s background and family), as well as conversational options with other characters, in turn, demonstrate Fichte’s second principle by influencing how non-player characters (NPCs) react to Shepard. These dialogue options that arise through a high enough paragon or renegade score can have a significant outcome on the game. During the mission “Virmire: Wrex and the Genophage87” in the first game, Shepard and Wrex, a krogan, come into conflict over the mission to destroy the facility researching a cure for the krogan genophage. If Shepard has earned a high enough paragon score, he is able to negotiate a compromise with Wrex and they cooperate. If not, another crew member, Ashley, will shoot and kill Wrex for disobeying orders. Actions beyond Shepard’s control, that is to say in the external world, are determined by how Shepard has defined himself. Just as Fichte outlined, it is the constant striving and limiting relationship between

Shepard and the external world that defines the course of the game.

The alien races of Mass Effect present themselves less as archetypes of human personality traits than those in Star Trek; however, this is still true to some extent. Even so, the

87 One major plot point in Mass Effect is that to quell a rebellion by the reptilian species, the krogan. Engineered by the salarians and deployed by the turians (all three now allies of Shepard), the genophage reduced krogan reproduction to 1 surviving offspring in 1000 births. The mission on Virmire is to destroy a facility being used by Saren (a turian indoctrinated by the Reapers and the main antagonist of the first game) to reverse the genophage. Because Wrex is a member of Shepard’s crew, Wrex is against destroying a possible cure at first.

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diversity among the types of beings in Mass Effect displays a greater range of possibilities for how consciousness may be conceived and in what kind of body it may appear. Life in Mass

Effect is broken down into two broad categories: organic and synthetic, and from there broken down further into individuals, meldable individuals, and hives. This is complicated further by the fact that nearly all races in the Mass Effect galaxy are cyborgs in one respect or another.

The second game of the series opens with the death of Commander Shepard, and ultimate rebuilding and bringing back to life by the humancentric corporation, Cerberus. From this point on, Shepard is a cyborg in the most literal sense; however, if he was given a tech or biotic class in the first game, he has been a cyborg all along.

Among the various races of Mass Effect, the synthetic are the Reapers, the geth

(including Legion), and EDI (pronounced like the feminine name Edie).88 The Reapers and the geth both function as decentralized hive intelligences, while Legion is an individually contained hive mind, and EDI is (eventually) an unshackled artificial intelligence (AI). Among the biological races, the Thorian, encountered in the first game, is an ancient sentient plant capable of enthralling victims to protect it or work for it. The rachni are a telepathic insect race and the only example of a biological hive mind in the games. The asari, a race of female- looking, hermaphroditic beings with a strong matriarchal culture are individuals, but like the

Vulcans in Star Trek, are able to link minds with other beings.

The assumed division between organic and synthetic life is further elucidated in the characters’ eyes. While the eyes of normal organics appear simply as receivers for light, the eyes of cyborgs and synthetics produce light of their own. Most notably, the geth are called

88 The Mass Effect codex within the game lists an ancient, but now extinct, synthetic race as the Zha’til, as well as a race of virtual aliens discovered in 2010.

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“flashlight heads” by the quarians and the Reapers have a single “eye” that emits a red laser weapon. In the second game, the Illusive Man’s cybernetic contacts appear to shine brightly in the dark of his room. Fitting the Illusive Man’s questionable ethics, if Shepard follows the

Renegade path, the cybernetic implants in his eyes will glow with a strikingly similar pattern to the Illusive Man’s. Further, organics who have been indoctrinated, such as Saren Arterius, the main adversary of the first game, display glowing eyes—a motif that is represented on the cover for the original Mass Effect game (Figure 1). In the beginning of the trilogy, the dichotomy between lighted and dark eyes serves as an easy determiner of friend or foe; however, the progression of the games complicates matters. In the cinematic trailer for the third game, the horror of the Reaper invasion is reflected in a child’s eye; the enormous black machines contrasting starkly with the innocence and fundamental humanness of the eye

(Figure 2). Ultimately the motif of eyes returns in the final decision, which I will discuss below.

A strong distinction is made within Mass Effect between AI’s and virtual intelligences

(VI’s), the most notably of which is the illegality of the former. Reservations about the creation of fully self-aware computer programs predated the creation of the geth, but these, and their subsequent rebellion against their quarian creators, served to solidify the illegality of AI creation. VI’s, on the other hand, are better defined as weak artificial intelligences; they are able to support interaction on a limited range of topics, are not self-aware, and are unable to make decisions for themselves. This attempt to control synthetic life reiterates the reason the

Catalyst89 gives Shepard in the third game for creating the Reapers originally: the Catalyst was created by the Leviathans in order to solve the problem of organics creating synthetics and those synthetics rebelling against their creators. Ultimately, the Catalyst rebelled against the

89 The Catalyst is the AI that controls the Reapers. It is responsible for their construction and their cyclical harvesting of organic life.

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Leviathans and harvested them to create the first Reaper, Harbinger. The Catalyst explains that organics build synthetics to improve their existence, but then impede the evolution of the synthetics, resulting in conflict. By harvesting organic life every fifty millennia, the Catalyst intends to prevent such conflict by preserving advanced organic life.

The obviously flawed understanding of “conflict” by the Catalyst results in horrific violence around the galaxy and appears as the latest iteration of the trope of “the creation out of control.” Since the story of Rabbi Loew’s golem running amok, stories such as

Frankenstein’s monster, Karel Čapek’s 1921 play R.U.R., Harry Piel’s Der Herr der Welt, Isaac

Asimov’s I, Robot and countless other works of science fiction, the creator losing control of the creation is at once a source of genuine fear90 and a continuously popular conflict in narratives.

This conflict sits at the heart of the schism within posthumanism that I am outlining in this dissertation: namely, whether synthetic and organic life forms are mutually exclusive because of fundamentally different ontologies. Theorists and authors who would answer positively to this general question will be considered in chapter three; however, the authors considered in this chapter place the emphasis on the consciousness itself rather than the physical form. The final decision in Mass Effect places the player in the position of tackling this very conundrum.

While this concluding decision functions as the final reflection of the player’s views on how organics and machines may be fundamentally compatible or fundamentally different, there are recurring elements of the narrative throughout all three games that elucidate how nonhuman cultures within the narrative grapple with the question, ultimately readying the player to decide the fate of the Reapers, and with them all synthetic life in the galaxy. As

90 In December 2014 Stephen Hawking made headlines by warning against the development of strong AI by saying “Humans, who are limited by slow biological evolution, couldn't compete and would be superseded.” (http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-30290540)

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previously noted, most organics have been implanted with some form of technology rendering them cyborgs; however, this blurring of the lines between synthetics and organics, naturally, comes to a head through Shepard. As he heals from Project Lazarus91 through the second game, his actions determine the amount of scarring left by the cybernetic implants. Playing paragon decreases the scarring and visibility of the implants, while playing renegade increases their visibility. This serves to underscore the general thinking in the Mass Effect galaxy that synthetics are not to be trusted and are inherently different from organics. This thinking prevails until the final decision, whereupon, if Shepard has gained the synthesis ending,92 the

Catalyst will remind him that synthetics are already a part of him and life as he knows it. One of the possible load screens in the second game features the twisting double helix of human DNA and the image of Da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man, which on one hand emphasizes the quantified understanding of the human required for Project Lazarus (Figure 3). On on the other, and in the context of a space-based game, this image recalls Ihab Hassan’s characterization of humanism symbolized by the Vitruvian Man’s “arms and legs defining the measure of things, so marvelously drawn by Leonardo” as linked with the era after humanism in which “[the

Vitruvian Man] has broken through its enclosing circle and square, and spread across the cosmos” (843).

While most of the cyborg elements of the organics are built into the games’ combat scenarios,93 there are situations where organics interface directly with technology, presenting a space-based take on Bukatman’s terminal identity. In the Overlord mission, Shepard

91 As its name implies, Project Lazarus is the Cerberus effort to rebuild Shepard and bring him back to life at the beginning of the second game. 92 The four ending choices will be discussed in detail further on in this section. 93 With the exception, of course, of the quarians, who need their biosuits to survive beyond the confines of their homeworld, Rannoch.

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encounters David Archer, an autistic savant who is able to communicate directly with the geth.

David’s brother, however, has subjected him to a number of unethical and dangerous experiments that have given his parent company, Cerberus, valuable information about the geth, but have also exploited David and endangered his life. Later on, Shepard meets Legion, a geth with a self-contained Gestalt consciousness designed to operate away from the hive. In order to eradicate dangerous Reaper code in the geth mainframe (called the Consensus),

Shepard interfaces directly with the geth hive and is reconstituted in a TRON-style physical representation of the code. These instances demonstrate contemporary ideas put forth by

Bukatman and Moravec, but also show the strong influence of phenomenological thinking.

Project Overlord is a mission in Mass Effect 2, in which Shepard is called to the aid of a station that has been overrun by a rogue VI. As Shepard comes to find out, the VI in question is actually a hybrid between a VI designed by Cerberus in an attempt to control the geth and

David Archer. David’s brother, Gavin Archer, is leading the project, but when, after some test with his autistic and mathematical savant brother, Gavin learns that David can speak directly to the geth, Gavin forces David into increasingly unethical and dangerous experiments. The geth exhibit a strong religious predilection, with some believing that the Reapers are gods, and through the VI and David Archer, Cerberus hopes to exploit their religious beliefs and turn them against the Reapers.

Synthetic life, in the Mass Effect galaxy, has up to this point mostly been considered to be a fundamentally different kind to organic life, and fundamentally dangerous. One of

Shepard’s crew—Tali, a quarian, the race who built the geth—remarks “synthetic races have no use whatsoever for organics—they don't have the same needs or drives as biological creatures, so they have no need to trade resources or information with them” (Mass Effect).

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This encourages the position that synthetic and organic life are of two separate ontologies; however, the human-computer interface developed with David Archer serves to show that a union between the two is not only possible through technology adapted for use by organics

(cybernetic implants, et cetera), but it is also possible for organics to adapt themselves to fit synthetic life.

This new kind of compatibility raises the ante on the dissolution of the organic-synthetic boundary. David Archer succeeds at entering a new kind of spatiality, what Bukatman calls terminal space, but is also often called the Matrix, the Net, the Web and so forth.

Whether “cyberspace” is a real place or not, our experience of electronic space is

a “real” experience. By distinguishing the constitution of being as an activity of

interface, phenomenology suggests that the status of being is not an absolute

condition, but one that changes relative to changes in the experience of the real.

(118)

By directly interfacing his brain with the Cerberus VI, David Archer exists simultaneously within the physical space of the research station and within the cyberspace of the stations electronic systems. It becomes apparent, however, that Archer’s existence within this terminal space is not just limited to the remote control of computers and security robots. When Shepard attempts to access the VI’s main terminal, Archer links himself with Shepard’s mind through his cybernetic implants. Shepard, then, while walking around a virtual version of the lab that bears striking visual resemblance to The Matrix, sees David’s memories of the experiments done to him.

The human-technological interface, which Bukatman refers to as terminal penetration, is taken to its horrific extreme in the case of David Archer. Of virtual realities, Bukatman writes:

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By now the image is becoming clear—but not quite. A figure stands in a kind of

high-tech bondage. Wires and cables snake from gloves and sensors to a pair of

hard-crunching computers off to the side. The head is enshrouded by an

elaborate apparatus that blocks the subject’s eyes and ears.…This is not,

however, some sensory deprivation nightmare. The subject is comfortably

ensconced in virtual reality, a cybernetic paraspace comprised of real-time

interactive data. (185-6)

Bukatman’s description of human-computer interface and the virtual reality the subject enters is at once alien and intriguing; however, by changing the meaning of “subject” from

Bukatman’s phenomenological meaning to the one upon whom an experiment is performed, especially as this is contrasted with the modern terminology of “participant,” the horrors of

David’s situation begin to materialize. David Archer first appears as a large, floating green face made up of individual virtual squares (Figure 4). Recalling aesthetic elements of The Matrix

Trilogy mixed with Cartesian geometric grid patterns, the David-VI synthesis projects a cool and emotionless, yet human face to contrast with the chaotic green squares emanating from the technology that he appropriates control of elsewhere in the mission.

This façade soon dissolves to reveal the physical body of David Archer, who Cerberus hoped to be a new messiah for the geth, strung up in the form of a cross with numerous machines contorting his face and body. With wires holding his eyes open in the style of the

Ludovico treatment in A Clockwork Orange (1971), his mouth stretched open by the insertion of hoses, wires connected to his arms, and a neck brace that forms a halo around his head,

David is the epitome of sacrifice and betrayal in the name of technological interface (Figure 5).

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This is hardly the techno-utopia conceived of by Moravec; however, that is not to say that the lesson of Project Overlord is to keep organic and synthetic ontologies separate: the problem is how to expand the possibilities of human consciousness and existence while maintaining the basic humanist ethics. Once Gavin Archer recognizes the terribleness of his experiment, Shepard is given the option either to remind him of the information gained and leave David in his care (increases renegade score), or to take him away from his brother and hide him in Grissom Academy where Shepard argues he will be safe. The mission ends with

David repeating Gavin’s words regarding the beginning of the experiments, when David was free and choosing to communicate with the geth: “it all seemed harmless.” The moral questions driving the Overlord mission reinforce the rest of the conflicts within the game: the staggering technological advancement that has happened since humans discovered the mass relays94 have only served to complicate notions of morality, especially the intrinsic value of living beings,95 which was a fundamental question in Enlightenment humanism. Similar to Star

Trek, the epistemological posthumanism of Mass Effect roots itself in the re-engagement with humanism’s fundamental tenets and questions through interactions with diverse imaginings of other persons as well as other possibilities for being human.

Similarly to the efforts by Gavin Archer and Cerberus to begin forging a link between humans and geth, and in stark contrast to the remark by Tali that synthetics have no use for organics, the geth have constructed a unique mobile platform that96 is comprised of a Gestalt

94 The mass relays are a network of stationary transportation devices making travel around the vast distances of the galaxy feasible. The closest relay to Earth was, when originally observed by astronomers, named Charon and was thought to be Pluto’s moon. 95 Before entering the facility where David Archer is being held, Shepard must navigate the terrain of the planet in a sort of combination hovercraft-tank. If he runs over any of the local wildlife, the craft’s computer says “The galactic humane society would like to remind you that animals are people too.” 96 Legion is most often referred to as “it” while referring to itself as “we.” The other AI on board, EDI, is referred to as “she” and refers to herself as “I.” Using the feminine pronoun with EDI, the Normandy’s computer,

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consciousness and able to operate away from the Consensus in order to make contact with, and better understand, organic life forms. This is the first recorded attempt to communicate peacefully with organics by the geth since they retreated behind the Perseus Veil, a difficult to navigate nebula, following their war with their creators, the quarians. The quarians created the geth to serve as a cheap military and labor force, but through the desire to make them more efficient in their tasks, the quarians created a hive intelligence that was so complex that the geth began to question whether they had souls and what the purpose of their lives were to be.

The quarians’ response to this self-aware AI was pure hostility and many geth took up arms to defend themselves, while others suggested they shut themselves off to end the conflict. The geth drove the quarians from their homeworld and killed the majority of the population; however, once the quarians were no longer a threat, the geth retreated to solitude behind the

Perseus Veil.

In the third game, Shepard receives the mission Rannoch: Geth Fighter Squadrons, after being asked by the quarians’ Migrant Fleet97 to come to their rescue. Legion hypothesizes that these “heretic geth” can be stopped by destroying the Reaper code in their Consensus.

Legion presented Shepard with a similar situation in the second game during Legion’s loyalty mission “Legion: A House Divided.” Legion reported that there has been a schism amongst the geth with some following the “Old Machines,” the Reapers, as gods and others desiring peaceful relations with organics. Legion refers to those following the Reapers as “heretics” and gives Shepard the option of either rewriting their programming or destroying them. If Shepard chooses to rewrite them, he not only gains Paragon points and wins the former heretic geth to

may have originated as an extension of referring to ships in the feminine with an appropriate voice added to the AI later. 97 After the geth war, the remaining quarians fled their world and their hostile creations. The similarities in the quarians’ history to Battlestar Galactica are numerous.

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his side, he displays the humanistic belief that these geth are redeemable through education, and that because of their intrinsic value as living beings, they are worth the effort.

During Rannoch: Geth Fighter Squadrons, Shepard is not given the option of whether to rewrite or destroy the geth—this time he is trying to remove Reaper code that has “infected,” in

Legion’s terms, the heretic Consensus,98 after which Legion will report that it has already rewritten the geth fight against the Reapers. On the way to Rannoch, Legion explains that

Shepard will have to interface directly with the Consensus in order to destroy the Reaper code infection. Shepard is immediately taken aback, but Legion explains that Shepard has already entered virtual space during the Project Overlord mission and that this is essentially no different. Legion is correct that Shepard’s interface with David Archer was a similar experience to what this will be; however, during Overlord, the hybrid David-VI tapped into Shepard’s cybernetics in order to project a virtual reality onto the real physical space of the facility.

Because Shepard was already in the physical space in which David’s memories took place, it was simply a matter of changing the way Shepard perceived what was already surrounding him. By interfacing with Shepard, the David-VI hybrid altered the Lebenswelt in which Shepard existed, as well as the sensory faculties he possessed for perceiving phenomena.

In order to enter the Consensus, Shepard climbs into a small chamber with a seat and is physically scanned in a way reminiscent of Tron before his consciousness enters the virtual space of the Consensus. Legion remarks that it has altered the code of the Consensus to appear familiar to Shepard—there is a physical pathway, he is carrying a gun, and infected strings of code are seen as throbbing orange tubes shaped like neurons. Regarding existing in such a virtual reality, Bukatman writes:

98 During a later mission, Shepard will be faced with the question of whether to destroy the geth, destroy the quarians, or make peace between them.

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To be installed into such an apparatus would be to exist on two planes at once:

while one’s objective body would remain in the real world, one’s phenomenal body

would be projected into the terminal reality. In an ecstatic exaggeration of

Merleau-Ponty’s99 phenomenological model, world and body comprise a

continually modifying feedback loop, producing a terminal identity without the

terminal—a cybersubject. (187)

Shepard is not sitting at a computer terminal; like Bukatman describes, his interface with the

Consensus is through his brain directly, superseding his need for eyes. His Körper remains in a stationary pod guarded by his squad, but his Leib takes on a new virtual form, and while his perspective remains a familiar one thanks to the arrangement of a virtual “body” (i.e. a perspectival vantage point) for him by Legion.

Shepard’s experience in the geth Consensus mirrors, albeit in a much more sophisticated and all-encompassing way, the experience of the player controlling Shepard. By entering the virtual space of the Consensus, Shepard is, in its bare essence, playing a computer game of his own, creating a level of experiential reality beyond the normal player- character relationship. The Shepard in the Consensus is not the Shepard in the rest of the trilogy, at least not with regard to his physical body. With Legion as the game’s programmer,

Shepard is given a familiar, phenomenal body and computer code is rendered perceivable to consciousness while being piped directly into his consciousness via his interface with the

Consensus. The player now controls Shepard’s consciousness and virtual body in a computer simulation of a simulated reality within a computer, the PC or other platform, upon which the

99 As previously noted, Merleau-Ponty’s notion of the body and embodiment is an extension of Husserl’s own thinking on the subject. Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology began incorporating elements of a philosophy of embodiment as early as 1945 while Husserl’s writing on the subject in Ideen II was published posthumously in 1952.

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player is interacting with the simulation that is the Mass Effect game is producing the computer simulation of the geth Consensus. This is rendered phenomenal within the original simulation of Mass Effect, itself computer code rendered phenomenal through the human-computer interface of the screen, speakers and controller.

The function of this mission is twofold within the game. The first is to further expand upon the phenomenological rendering of the electronic virtual realities in Overlord. While observing memories being replayed, Shepard remarks that the quarians are wearing their familiar biosuits, but since they are on their homeworld, they should have no use for them.

Legion’s response is to ask Shepard how many quarians he’s seen without their suits. This not only functions to reinforce the phenomenological nature of Shepard’s existence in the

Consensus, it refers back to the nature of outside world in Fichte’s second principle. After the subject has posited itself as a subject, the next step is to posit the outside world as object. This objective realm is on one hand separate and distinct from the subject, but on the other built out of the subject’s own subjectivity—that is to say that while Legion is causing the Consensus to appear as phenomenal for Shepard, it is Shepard’s own consciousness that is the real architect of the experience. Shepard appears in the Consensus as he knows himself (with recreations of his normal phenomenological perspective, Leib, gun, et cetera.). The

Consensus, too, is rendered familiar with walking paths, familiar physics, things to shoot, and so on. He has no trouble separating his consciousness from his physical body, so long as it has a virtual perspective once it is in the virtual space.

This interface between Shepard and the Consensus reinforces the primacy of the epistemological over the ontological. Shepard is truly able to experience the Consensus subjectively without his human mind being tied to a human, or as the case may be, cyborg,

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bodily existence. Phenomenal experience in Mass Effect is based in Husserl’s conception of the Leib as a perspective of perception. Legion chose specifically to give Shepard a digitally reproduced version of the body he was used to, even though any kind may have been possible. The consequence is that Shepard is able to transition into the virtual realm seamlessly and by being given a familiar rendering of his Lebenswelt and Leib, he is not focused on his own existence as digitally rendered phenomenon—his consciousness is directed toward the phenomena of Reaper code and replayed geth memory.

Second, this mission gives the player significant insight regarding the nature of synthetic life, and the geth’s history in particular. These insights prepare the player for two crucial decisions to come: deciding the fate of the geth and quarians, and deciding the fate of the

Reapers. While Mass Effect focuses on one hand on the epistemological basis for existence and the inherent equality of persons,100 on the other it repeatedly returns to the question of whether synthetic life should be allowed to exist. Once Shepard has witnessed the innocence of the geth and the brutality of the quarians as the geth attempted to determine the nature of their existence, he is forced to reconsider the idea that synthetic life is inherently dangerous with the reality he has seen. The second mission on the quarian homeworld, Priority: Rannoch, which can only be completed after the Geth Fighter Squadron mission puts Shepard in the position of reconciling the perceived inevitable hostility toward organics by the geth with the true brutality of the quarians’ past and the larger culture of racism that it represents.

After killing the Reaper on Rannoch that has been controlling the geth, Legion says “We can confirm that the geth are no longer being directed by the Old Machines [Reapers]. We are

100 Even playing as a renegade, Shepard is equally brutal to everyone in normal interactions. Renegade points are awarded for choosing to kill the geth, for example, but they are also awarded for choosing to kill the quarians.

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free.” Over the radio, the commanders of the quarian fleet say that they see their opportunity to defeat the geth, to which Legion responds “Shepard-Commander, the geth only acted in defense after the Creators [quarians] attacked. Do we deserve death?” Shepard asks what

Legion is suggesting and it says “Our upgrades. With the Old Machine dead, we could upload them to all geth without sacrificing their independence.” Tali objects that this would make the geth as smart as when the Reaper was controlling them. Legion’s replies “Yes, but with free will. Each geth unit would be a true intelligence. We would be alive, and we could help you.”

(Mass Effect 3) Legion’s appeal to Sheppard is for him to allow the geth to experience their own Enlightenment. With Legion’s help, and ultimate self-sacrifice, the geth will gain knowledge, free will, and self determination, all core tenets of humanism, forcing Shepard to stand face-to-face with his own humanistic beliefs. The only decision that awards paragon points is to forge a compromise between the geth and the quarians, which recognizes and reaffirms the value of both organic and synthetic life.

This decision functions as a direct prologue to the games’ final decision: whether to destroy, control, or synthesize with the Reapers.101 Once on board the Citadel, the Catalyst reveals to Shepard the reason for the Reapers’ existence: conflict between synthetics and organics is inevitable and so by harvesting advanced civilizations, the Reapers are preserving them in the form of other Reapers and thereby imposing order upon the galaxy. The Catalyst claims that this is not in conflict with the main goal of organic life, to better its existence through technology, and therefore the harvesting should not be seen as a conflict either. Throughout the third game, Shepard has had the task of building the galaxy’s Effective Military Strength

101 One can also choose not to decide, but in choosing this option the player still has made a choice. However, in avoiding this decision, Shepard proves himself unworthy of the opportunity to have led the galaxy in this way and the Reapers continue to harvest organic life.

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(EMS), which will determine whether Shepard is able to unlock the synthesis ending. The nature of the synthesis ending as an achievement that may be unlocked underscores its importance to the games’ overall narrative and philosophical goal.

The effect of choosing the destroy option is readily apparent: the Reapers are destroyed, along with all of their technology and, depending on the player’s EMS, Earth (and

Shepard) may or may not survive. Either way, the cycle of harvesting stops and organic life continues while all synthetic life perishes. This option reinforces the supremacy of the biological in the face of the mechanical Other and demonstrates that even though the games experimented with various other incarnations of consciousness and personhood, the player believes synthetic life to be so alien as not to deserve personhood status, or even existence.

By choosing to control the Reapers, Shepard sacrifices corporeality and his consciousness replaces the Catalyst as the Reapers’ master. Again, depending on the EMS, Earth may or may not survive. In the final cut scenes, Shepard speaks of himself as both a messiah and the figurative shepherd of all life, synthetic and organic. While he has merged with synthetics, this is a sacrifice he has made for living beings everywhere. This option rests on the idea that while an exchange of corporeal existence for immortality within a computer is possible, organic life as a whole is not ready to make that step yet. Synthetics around the galaxy continue their existences, but do so as fundamentally separate from their organic counterparts; the separate purposes of organic and synthetic life laid out by the Catalyst are reaffirmed. These two options present takes on biological and mechanical existences more in tune with the ontological arguments in the next chapter.

If Shepard has managed to secure an EMS high enough, he unlocks the possibility of synthesizing all organic and synthetic life. Similar to the control option, in doing this, Shepard

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sacrifices his corporeality and adds his consciousness to the Reapers and the Catalyst. The

Crucible102 emits a pulse of green light that changes organic DNA to be comprised partially of synthetic code, and changes synthetic code to incorporate organic DNA. After the pulse, it is no longer just the cybernetic creations of the Reapers whose eyes glow, now everyone’s eyes and skin glow with the cybernetic augmentations that signal the knowledge of eons of civilization. The conflict simply ceases and previous enemies turn their glowing eyes toward each other with expressions of deep understanding and empathy. The final monologue is done by EDI, who begins simply “I am alive” (Mass Effect 3). By synthesizing, all life now posses the collective knowledge of all of the cultures who were previously harvested by the Reapers and a new era of galactic peace is born.

While BioWare has not released data about the popularity of each ending among players, it is clear that as an unlockable achievement, the synthesis ending is more desirable in the conception of the designers than the control or destroy options. By choosing synthesis,

Shepard, as a symbol for both organic and synthetic life, transcends his “selbst verschuldete

Unmündigkeit” that Kant describes in “Beantwortung auf der Frage: Was ist Aufklärung?” Had

Shepard simply followed the orders of his superior officers, and decided in the face of the question “so brauche ich mich ja nicht selbst zu bemühen” (Kant 9) he would have chosen the destroy option. The control option is equally troublesome regarding Kant’s thinking as it simply substitutes Shepard into the role of authority that the Catalyst had previously held. In this outcome, the pure and unfeeling logic of the AI is exchanged for Shepard’s will, which then commands both absolute power and knowledge over the galaxy—a benevolent totalitarian is a totalitarian nonetheless. However, by choosing synthesis Shepard disperses the knowledge of

102 This is the weapon that was being built against the Reapers, comprised of the Citadel, the Crucible itself, and the Catalyst (before it is revealed that the Catalyst is the AI controlling the Reapers)

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countless civilizations, and the various epistemological methods of the various kinds of life and consciousness, to all. Living up to Kant’s motto for the Enlightenment “sapere aude!” Shepard dares to know for himself which is the best option, but in doing so also creates the conditions that will allow everyone else to embrace the motto as well.

Kant is quite explicit in how to achieve this: “Zu dieser Aufklärung aber wird nichts erfordert als Freiheit” (Kant 11). In the narrowest understanding of Kant, any decision Shepard makes falls short of this expression of Enlightenment; however, by understanding Freiheit more broadly as “a set of conditions characterized by the equal and free access to self- education and self-improvement,” the synthesis ending expresses that in a much more far reaching totality than Kant could have imagined. By synthesizing all synthetic and organic life,

Shepard has, as noted above, granted all living beings access to the collected knowledge of eons of galactic civilization. Further, there is now no further conflict between organics and synthetics regarding organics seeking to better their lives through technology and synthetics needing to evolve beyond their organic creators; the knowledge and ability to self improve are now equally available to all through the very posthumanist integration of technology and biological life.

Choosing to synthesize organic and synthetic life thus promotes a technologically enhanced version of humanism, similarly to Star Trek, where the goals of the Enlightenment are actually achieved and its values practiced. The differences between Mass Effect and Star

Trek, however, center around each series’ relationship to the achievement of these goals. In

Roddenberry’s work, Earth has already gone through a devastating nuclear world war and wars around the creation of genetically engineered super-soldiers. In 2063, Zefram Cochrane succeeds in traveling faster than the speed of light, after which Vulcans land on Earth to make

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first contact. From this time, through the Enterprise series,103 Earth and Starfleet encounter vast numbers of alien species causing humanity to look at itself differently and grow out of its selbst verschuldete Unmündigkeit very quickly, culminating in the foundation of the United

Federation of Planets at the end of Enterprise in 2161. From this point on, and especially with

Captain Kirk’s tenure beginning in 2265, the conflict of the series centers on how to reconcile and maintain Starfleet’s (post)humanistic values in difficult and unexpected situations. These values strengthen with Captain Picard in TNG where the role of captain has changed from Kirk as the egotistical cowboy to Picard as the older, wiser diplomat. In Mass Effect, the dramatic tension forms from Shepard’s interactions with other beings and various key decisions along the way to the question of the Reapers. To play the paragon throughout the game is, as expected, to already possess and demonstrate the (post)humanistic values that the rest of the galaxy will benefit from. If one chooses to play the renegade, one can still emerge from immaturity at the end of the game, and in that case, Shepard may experience just as much personal growth during the course of the three games as comes with the final decision.

Conclusion

The symbolic dichotomy of light and dark that has been used since the Enlightenment to denote subscription or adherence to humanistic ethical principles and a rational means of thinking has appeared in various incarnations in post-Enlightenment epistemologies. While these six works have been taken as paradigm examples, the imagery and motif of sight as connected to ethics permeates many works beyond those included here. George Lucas’ Star

Wars franchise hinges on the dark and light sides of The Force, the main villains of Babylon 5

103 Enterprise was not as well received by fans as other iterations of the franchise; however, what it lacks in entertainment value (especially the first two seasons), is made up for in the depiction of the philosophical struggle that Captain Archer must go through in his missions leading up to the founding of the United Federation of Planets.

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are the Shadows who contrast starkly with the wise and fair Vorlons, beings of pure light energy, the evil Professor Wolf, clad all in black, in Harry Piel’s Der Herr der Welt contrasts with the benevolent Doktor Heller, Doctor Who is able to use a light up sonic screwdriver to thwart villains and save humanity against, among others, the weeping angels who only move when they cannot be seen, and the list goes on.

The evolution of epistemologies since Kant’s attempt to reconcile Descartes’ rationalism with Hume’s empiricism have progressed on the model of Fichte’s own epistemology. Fichte’s concern centered on the subject’s self-conscious self-positing as the grounding for all experience with the external world being a product of one’s own conscious mind. Husserl took the position of the subject as already given and turned the focus onto the perception of phenomena, whether as external objects or as internal states of being (memories, feelings, et cetera), from certain perspective. Incorporating both epistemologies and dissolving the distinction between subjective perception and phenomenal existence is the posthumanist epistemology described by Scott Bukatman. By mixing together Fichte’s idealism and

Husserl’s phenomenology, Bukatman describes how science fiction and cyberculture imagine subjective existence that transcends the human body as the only possible perceptual vessel for sentient life. Once the focus of existence is removed from the body and placed on consciousness, posthumanism returns to its roots in humanistic ethics, often through the motif of light, sight, and eyes.

Hassan also uses ocular metaphor to describe the shift from humanism to posthumanism.

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We need to understand that the human form—including human desire and all its

external representations—may be changing radically, and thus must be re-

visioned. We need to understand that five hundred years of humanism may be

coming to an end, as humanism transforms itself into something that we must

helplessly call posthumanism. (843)

Hassan’s statement, however, that “five hundred years of humanism may be coming to an end,” in the light of contemporary posthumanist science fiction seems problematic. On one hand, the case has been made by Horkheimer and Adorno, as well as others, that humanism and the Enlightenment have already failed. In fact, The Terror following the French Revolution may have signaled humanism’s failure already during the Enlightenment itself.

As this chapter has shown, post-Enlightenment epistemologies have endeavored to create, over the last two centuries, a new understanding of existence centered on consciousness in any of its possible forms. If Badmington’s claim that “humanism is always becoming posthumanism” and Gomel’s lamentation that posthumanism is slipping back into humanism are both correct, then, in the light of this chapter, Hassan’s claim that half a millennium of humanism may be coming to an end is missing the key element that epistemological posthumanism functions to re-imagine the subject in such a way that marks a new kind of highly technological and decentered re-engagement with the principles of humanism without falling victim to anthropocentrism.

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Image Appendix

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Figure 2

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Figure 4

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Chapter 3: The Ontologists Strike Back

Leib bin ich ganz und gar, und Nichts außerdem; und Seele ist nur ein Wort für etwas am Leibe. – Friedrich Nietzsche, Also Sprach Zarathustra “Von den Verächtern des Leibes”

The reactions of the ontologists against German idealism, phenomenology, and epistemological Posthumanism are numerous, but most often center around one core argument: it is not possible for humans to exist outside of human bodies, nor outside of the spatio-temporal context of the world. In other words, whereas epistemological Posthumanism and its forebears claim a noetic and self-directed perceptual action as the basis of human existence, the ontological lineage of Posthumanism stresses the unified mind/body/world relationship as the most fundamental element of human existence. This unity can be seen as operating counter to most trends within popular Posthumanism; however, I argue that the trends most often thought of as the whole of Posthumanism are better understood as only the epistemological half of the larger movement.

While epistemological Posthumanism imagines the effects of expanding consciousness beyond the human body and brain, an ontological Posthumanism is not only possible, it is a necessary half of the larger posthumanist movement that serves to move beyond the mind- body dichotomy of Enlightenment humanism that the epistemological side perpetuates, and to extend this unity beyond the mind and body into the spatio-temporal context of the world itself.

At first glance, works that stress the unified ontology of mind/body/world appear as anti-

Posthumanist; however, to see these works as antagonistic to those of epistemological

Posthumanism is to perpetuate the same dualistic thinking that they are trying to overcome.

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Just as Hassan's Prometheus represents the coalescence of perceived opposites as necessary parts of the new whole, ontological Posthumanism functions not as an antagonistic force against the epistemological side; rather, like Fichte's conception of the eternally striving and limiting relationship between the Ich and Nicht-Ich, both the epistemological and ontological trends work in concert to produce the cultural phenomenon that is the

Posthumanist discourse. I argue that this is true even if neither side would agree with this model and both sides perpetuate arguments that undermine the very things Posthumanism is trying to achieve.

Ontological Posthumanism is precisely what Katherine Hayles is advocating in How We

Became Posthuman. First, her title acknowledges that the phenomenon of Posthumanism is already here, but grants that popular conceptions of Posthumanism center only on what I have described as the epistemological trend within the larger whole. Taking an example from Hans

Moravec's Mind Children as the antithesis to, and point of departure for, her project, she writes:

If my nightmare is a culture inhabited by posthumans who regard their bodies as

fashion accessories rather than the ground of being, my dream is a version of

the posthuman that embraces the possibilities of information technologies

without being seduced by fantasies of unlimited power and disembodied

immortality, that recognizes and celebrates finitude as a condition of human

being, and that understands human life is embedded in a material world of great

complexity, one on which we depend for our continued survival. (5)

Hayles's position is deeply Heideggerian, and thus by proxy also Hölderlinian. Hayles's disdain for what Posthumanism had become with Moravec and vision for how it could be improved displays parallel argumentation to Friedrich Nietzsche's antagonistic relationship with Western

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metaphysics in the late nineteenth century, and his challenge to humans to overcome themselves.

In his 2013 book, Posthumanism, Stefan Herbrechter begins with an extended quote from Nietzsche's “On Truth and Lie in an Extra-Moral Sense” from 1873. Herbrechter interprets

Nietzsche's point thus:

Nietzsche’s nihilistic, relativist and provocative challenge to ‘man,’ the ‘clever

animal,’ is directed against the pettiness of humanism inspired by Christian

values and his/its self-inflicted state of godlessness. … Whereas Nietzsche’s

nihilism mocks the arrogance of the human species along with its self proclaimed

anthropocentric view of ‘world history,’ some humans, inspired by the vision of a

technologically induced self-surpassing, thanks to new cogno-, bio-, nano- and

information technologies, are pushing the hubris of their species to new extremes

(2).

Even though Herbrechter is not the first to view Nietzsche as a proto-posthumanist,

Herbrechter uses Nietzsche, and particularly Nietzsche's challenge to humankind to overcome themselves, as the basis for his “critical Posthumanism” (ibid).

While citing Nietzsche as a Posthumanist forebear, Herbrechter freely, and rightly, acknowledges that Nietzsche would show a strong distaste for the techno-fetishism of contemporary Posthumanism, were he alive today to witness it (2). Despite this, Nietzsche's writings go far in providing an interpretational basis for how humans might transcend their humanness, a theme central to Posthumanism and one that is also explored by Stefan Lorenz

Sorgner, a scholar of the parallel movement of Transhumanism. In Sorgner’s 2009 article

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“Nietzsche, the Overhuman, and Transhumanism”104 he details the ways in which Nietzsche's philosophy may be seen as foundational to transhumanism's goal of reaching a state of posthumanity. Sorgner argues that Nietzsche's insistence on the need to re-evaluate all values and overcome the elements of humanness that prevent humans from reaching their full potential serve to ground transhumanism's own goal of achieving posthumanity through the eradication of disease, extending human life, et cetera (30).

Both Herbrechter and Sorgner provide excellent defense for seeing Nietzsche as a foundational figure for both Post- and Transhumanism; however, within my discursive model of

Posthumanism, Nietzsche arises as a figure firmly rooted within the ontological camp, as an epistemological reading of him would necessarily omit the crucial materialism present in his thought. In the prologue of Also sprach Zarathustra, Nietzsche writes, “Ich lehre euch den

Übermenschen. Der Mensch ist Etwas, das überwunden werden soll. Was habt ihr getan, ihn zu überwinden?” (10). Nietzsche's construction of the Übermensch as a future next step in human evolution challenges humans forth to guide themselves toward overcoming their own innate hindrances as humans. While today's visions of posthumanity as they are understood among the science fiction concepts of A.I., supercomputers, and cyborgs, would be, as

Herbrechter pointed out, shocking and repulsive to Nietzsche, the fact that Nietzsche's thoughts characterize and underlie the spirit of Posthumanism is unquestionable.

As Nietzsche continues, his place as an ally to ontological proto-Posthumanism is solidified:

104 While Sorgner's use of “overhuman” follows renowned Nietzsche scholar and translator Walter Kaufmann's use of “overman” as a translation of Übermensch, I find “overhuman” to be clunky in English and the older translation “superman,” or even the gender neutral “superhuman” to bring the unintended connotations of capes, spandex, and crime fighting with it. Thus, I will treat this as a technical term within Nietzsche's philosophy and leave it untranslated.

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Der Übermensch ist der Sinn der Erde. Euer Wille sage: der Übermensch sei der

Sinn der Erde! Ich beschwöre euch, meine Brüder, bleibt der Erde treu und

glaubt Denen nicht, welche euch von überirdischen Hoffnungen reden!

Giftmacher sind es, ob sie es wissen oder nicht. … Einst war der Frevel an Gott

der größte Frevel, aber Gott starb, und damit starben auch diese Frevelhaften.

An der Erde zu freveln ist jetzt das Furchtbarste und Eingeweide des

Unerforschlichen höher zu achten, als den Sinn der Erde! (10-11)

More than just advocating that humans transition into more advanced beings, Nietzsche anticipates Heidegger’s fundamental ontology of Dasein as tied to the world with the relationship between the Übermensch and the earth. While Heidegger believes humanity to be integrally bound to the world, Nietzsche sees humanity as having forgotten this element of existence and humanity’s reacquaintance with it only through self-overcoming. In a later section Nietzsche incorporates the mind and soul by rejecting their metaphysical connotations.

'Leib bin ich und Seele' – so redet das Kind. Und warum sollte man nicht wie

Kinder reden? Aber der Erwachte, der Wissende sagt: Leib bin ich ganz und gar,

und Nichts außerdem; und Seele ist nur ein Wort für Etwas am Leibe. Der Leib

ist eine große Vernunft, eine Vielheit mit Einem Sinne. … Werkzeug deines

Leibes ist auch deine kleine Vernunft, mein Bruder, die du 'Geist' nennst, ein

kleines Werk- und Spielzeug deiner großen Vernunft. (33)

Nietzsche's reaction against the Western metaphysical belief that the mind or soul constitutes a separate part of existence not only demonstrates how he sees mind, body, and earth as being unified fundamental elements within the whole of human existence, but also continues the ontological camp's tendency to react against the epistemological side. However, while

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Hölderlin, Heidegger, and Hayles formulate their ontological philosophies in direct opposition to

Fichte, Husserl, and Moravec and Bukatman respectively, Nietzsche's epistemological counterparts are in some instances individuals such as Schopenhauer and Kant, but also include the whole of Western metaphysics and all of Christianity.

For this reason, Nietzsche functions best within the Posthumanist context as a paradigmatic example of how the discursive Posthumanism of this work differentiates itself from other contemporary understandings of Posthumanism. The appropriation of Nietzsche by both Herbrechter's critical Posthumanism and Sorgner's Transhumanism at first seems to indicate that the two understandings share more elements in common; however, further analysis reveals that the two are approaching Nietzsche's legacy in distinctly different ways, with Herbrechter trying to mediate between the technophillic transhumanist position and the conservative reactions against it, and Sorgner exclusively celebrating its technophilic interpretation. While Nietzsche is indeed easily understood as a theoretical forefather to both posthumanist and transhumanist circles, the applicability of his work generally to these movements does not apply to the more technical elements of transhumanism nor to epistemological Posthumanism and is thus superficial to both movements as a whole.

Transhumanism, despite its claims to root itself within hard scientific inquiry and Enlightenment humanism, is better understood as a movement concerned with the metaphysical questions of consciousness and the limits of human life.

The ontology of materialism that Nietzsche can be seen as a grounding point for

Hölderlin's Romantic thinking as it is picked up by Heidegger and furthered by Hayles.

Hölderlin’s work both reacts against Fichte’s Wissenschaftslehre and searches for a unity, the

One among the Many, of humans, the divine, and the earth, within his poetic understanding

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and depictions of nature. Heidegger builds upon Hölderlin’s theme of a primordial unity, but seeks to characterize human existence, Dasein, through a fundamental ontology and hermeneutic exploration of language rather than poetic imagery. Hayles incorporates the driving ideas of both Hölderlin and Heidegger, but rather than looking to poetry or hermeneutics to find absolute Being, she attempts to reign in the popular posthumanist trends that imagine existence beyond the human body and without the material world.105

Romanticism

Hölderlin’s refutation of Fichte’s idealism and the subject-centered epistemology that goes with it could not be more succinct in his short essay “Über Urtheil und Sein” from 1795. He says simply “Wie kann ich sagen: Ich! ohne Selbstbewußtseyn?” (226). While such a pithy question may have the effect of cutting Fichte’s philosophy off at the knees to members of the ontological camp, Hölderlin elaborates his idea thus: “Wenn ich sage: Ich bin Ich, so ist das

Subject (Ich) und das Object (Ich) nicht so vereinigt, dass gar keine Trennung vorgenommen werden kann, ohne, das Wesen desjenigen, was getrennt werden soll, zu verletzen; im

Gegenteil das Ich ist nur durch diese Trennung des Ichs vom Ich möglich” (ibid). Hölderlin’s reaction against Fichte’s philosophy of identity has the goal of redirecting the focus of philosophy off of German idealism’s subject-driven metaphysics and onto his conception of

105 The term “world” here can be somewhat tricky. Strict followers of Heidegger and Hölderlin would negate the possibility of humans finding and attaining absolute Being, or authentic Dasein in space or on extraterrestrial worlds. Indeed, Heidegger recalls in his interview with Der Spiegel his fear at seeing pictures of the earth from space; however, some followers of ontological Posthumanism would accept simulated earth conditions, or terraformed planets as substitutable for earth.

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absolute Being,106 a state of fundamental harmony existing prior to the subject-object divide, or

Ur-teilung in Hölderlin’s words.

Hölderlin’s wordplay with “Urteilung” and “Ur-teilung” links the former’s meaning of

“judgment” with the idea of a primordial separation, that of the subject and object. By conceptualizing Being in this way, and making a return to this unified state the sought after goal of his poetry, Hölderlin attempts to reconcile the problem of the One and the Many that also occupied Hassan. Similar to Hassan’s vision of Posthumanism through the symbol of

Prometheus, Hölderlin also looks to the Ancient Greeks for a figure to embody his thoughts.

Rather than choosing Prometheus, whom Goethe had recently used in his Sturm und Drang poem in 1789, Hölderlin looks to the older titan Hyperion to embody his search for absolute

Being in his eponymous epistolary novel.

In Greek mythology, Hyperion is one of the twelve children of Gaia and Uranus, who overthrow their parents, only to be subsequently overthrown by the Olympian gods. In the down time between attempted revolutions, some of the children of Gaia and Uranus have children of their own including Hyperion’s brother, Iapetus, who fathers, among others,

Prometheus. While Hassan claims that Prometheus “presages the marriage of the Earth and

Sky” (835), it is Hyperion who appears as the literal product of the marriage of Earth (Gaia) and Sky (Uranus). Hyperion, according to myth, is the first to understand the movements and workings of the celestial bodies and their effect on the seasons of the earth, knowledge he

106 The terms Being (capitalized in translations), absolute Being, unity, divine unity, poetic unity and divine poetic unity are often used synonymously in Hölderlin’s works and their accompanying scholarship—a practice which I will uphold. To further demonstrate the link between Hölderlin and Hassan, I will treat the phrase “the One” as interchangeable with the rest.

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gained through proto-scientific observation and which he is then tasked with distributing to others (Siculus).

What appears in Greek myth as a generational shift from Hyperion’s birth and method of distributing knowledge to those of Prometheus can be understood in the context of Hölderlin and Posthumanism as the primordial separation of the fundamental unity of absolute Being.

What was whole and harmonious in Hyperion and his role as a bearer of wisdom is fractured following the titanomachy and rise of the Olympian gods with Prometheus’ theft of Hephaestus’ fire and its delivery to humankind.

Hölderlin’s Hyperion, however, finds himself a mortal human caught between his desire to find unity and harmony and the distance he feels between himself and the rest of the world.

Hölderlin writes:

Der liebe Vaterlandsboden gibt mir wieder Freude und Leid. … Mein ganzes

Wesen verstummt und lauscht, wenn die zarte Welle der Luft mir um die Brust

spielt. … Eines zu sein mit Allem, das ist Leben der Gottheit, das ist der Himmel

des Menschen. Eines zu sein mit Allem, was lebt, in seeliger Selbstvergessenheit

wiederzukehren in’s All der Natur, das der Gipfel der Gedanken und Freuden, das

ist der heilige Bergshöhe, der Ort der ewigen Ruhe… Auf dieser Höhe steh’ ich

oft, mein Bellarmin! Aber ein Moment des Besinnens wirft mich herab. Ich denke

nach und finde mich, wie ich zuvor war, allein, mit allen Schmerzen der

Sterblichkeit, und meines Herzens Asyl, die ewig einige Welt, ist hin; die Natur

verschließt die Arme, und ich stehe, wie ein Fremdling, vor ihr, und verstehe sie

nicht. (5f.)

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Hyperion’s efforts to regain unity with nature through poetic reflection allow him to come close to this Himmel des Menschen only occasionally. Every time he does come close, his attempt is thwarted and he is once again left feeling separated and alone. Hölderlin’s Hyperion is a figure between his mythological namesake and Prometheus. Whereas the mythological Hyperion embodies a fully formed unity—the marriage of the Earth and Sky—and Hassan’s Prometheus stands as a symbol of their reconnection, as well as the reconnection of other false opposites including imagination and science, Hölderlin’s Hyperion is continually distanced from the One into the Many. Like Prometheus, he struggles with the One and the Many, but unlike him,

Hölderlin’s Hyperion is never able to overcome the knowledge taught to him in school, which, he says, has subsequently corrupted everything for him (9).

The theme of distancing runs throughout Hölderlin’s works like a shadow that he is constantly trying to escape, but never can. This dichotomy of distance and unity will, in one form or another, run through the works discussed in the Romanticism section of this chapter, and will follow as part of Hölderlin’s influence into the work of Heidegger and Hayles. In E.T.A.

Hoffmann’s short story “Die Automata,” a mechanical fortune-telling Turk is the site of an incident whereby the Turk demonstrates an ultra-personal knowledge of Ferdinand’s life, which implies an intimacy with the mechanical man that shakes Ferdinand to his core. During

Ferdinand’s search for answers with his friend and confidant, Ludwig, they enter into a discussion of Hölderlinian unity, this time experienced through music made by humans, which stands in direct contrast to the rigid and soulless” music made by automata. Hoffmann’s musical automata in his work represent forms near indistinguishable from those of true humans, and at the same time, fundamentally different existences, of which the distancing between them is repeatedly examined and manipulated by Hoffmann.

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The theme of distancing is explored somewhat differently in Mary Shelley’s

Frankenstein. While the previous chapter examined how Frankenstein’s Creature creates his own subjectivity, this chapter will analyze Victor’s perspective and his relationship to the One and the Many through his formal and self-education and his understanding of natural philosophy as he seeks the secrets of life. “Die Automata” also brings Hoffmann into both sides of this debate as he seeks to understand how humans and machines exist differently. By exploring each kind of being’s relationship to music, Hoffmann creates a feeling of the uncanny by temporarily blurring the lines between human and machine through music and a

Hölderlinian quest for unity, but ultimately reestablishes the ontological distinction with the end of Ferdinand’s story.

“Die Automata” (1819)

“Die Automata” is one of several stories included in Hoffmann’s Die Serapionsbrüder, a collection of tales interspersed with a frame narrative of a group of literati taking turns telling stories to the one another. While “Die Automata” has not shared the popularity and canonical status that Der Sandmann has enjoyed, these two works, viewed together, demonstrate how the epistemological-ontological discourse of the day is rendered through the symbolism of artificial humans. Whereas Der Sandmann shows Fichte’s Identitätsphilosophie at work in the mind of Nathanael as he creates a Nicht-Ich surrounding Olimpia, “Die Automata” demonstrates how art, either in the form of the mechanical sculpture of the talking Turk or in that of music may serve as a medium whereby individuals may access, however briefly, a state of harmonious natural unity.

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Hoffmann’s exploration of philosophy through the use of artificial humans takes a different direction with “Die Automata.” In Der Sandmann, Hoffmann’s depiction of Fichte’s three principles leads to an elaborate construction of reality showing Nathanael’s perspective juxtaposed with the knowing and sardonic expressions of Spalanzani and Coppelius-Coppola, the concern of Clara and Sigismund, and the ridicule of the general populous. While the wooden figure of Olimpia does not fool anyone else into believing she is a real person, understanding the idealized Olimpia that Nathanael sees and the resulting uncanniness produced in the reader, as well as that produced in Nathanael toward the end of the work, as both Nathanael’s opposite and a product of his own consciousness illustrate one take on both the otherness of artificial humans as well as their similarity to their biological counterparts.

In “Die Automata,” Hoffmann breaks with the somewhat complicated epistemological philosophy of Fichte and explores the comparatively straightforward ontological thought of

Hölderlin. The roles of the automata in this work only overlap on a superficial level with the role played by Olimpia in Der Sandmann. The automata in both works serve initially as a point of uncanny otherness, to which the protagonists must relate in some way or other. While Olimpia becomes a living, breathing person in the mind of Nathanael, “Die Automata” does not depict the self-positing of Ferdinand’s nascent Ich; rather, he and Ludwig must somehow reconcile feelings of transcendence brought with the supernatural knowledge of the Turk, as well as through music, with their own already fully formed views of the world. The feeling of transcending one’s individuality and thereby accessing a harmonious union with nature or the universe is at the heart of Hölderlin’s philosophy, as well as Hassan’s vision of Prometheus as the unifier of the One and the Many.

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In “Automata,” visitors to the Turk employ repeated efforts to understand scientifically how the mechanism works and how the answers are produced:

Man erschöpfte sich in Vermutungen über das Medium der wunderbaren

Mitteilung, man untersuchte Wände, Nebenzimmer, Gerät, alles vergebens. Die

Figur, der Künstler waren von den Argusaugen der geschicktesten Mechaniker

umgeben, aber je mehr er sich auf diese Art bewacht merkte, desto unbefangener

war sein Betragen. Er sprach und scherzte in den entlegensten Ecken des

Zimmers mit den Zuschauern und ließ seine Figur wie ein ganz für sich

bestehendes Wesen, das irgendeiner Verbindung mit ihm nicht bedürfe, ihre

Bewegungen machen und Antworten erteilen; ja er konnte sich eines gewissen

ironischen Lächelns nicht enthalten, wenn der Dreifuß und der Tisch auf allen

Seiten herumgedreht und durchgeklopft, ja in die herabgenommene und weiter

ans Licht gebrachte Figur mit Brillen und Vergrößerungsgläsern hineingeschaut

wurde, und dann die Mechaniker versicherten, der Teufel möge aus dem

wunderlichen Räderbau klug werden. (Kapitel 31)

Despite the visitors’ best efforts, all hypotheses explaining how the Turk functions are rendered unsubstantiable by their scientific examination. Hoffmann’s Turk is operating on a level beyond that of the visitors’ scientific methods; one that is elucidated by Hölderlin in Hyperion:

Ach! wär ich nie in eure Schulen gegangen. Die Wissenschaft, der ich in den

Schacht hinunter folgte, von der ich, jugendlich töricht, die Bestätigung meiner

reinen Freude erwartete, die hat mir alles verdorben.

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Ich bin bei euch so recht vernünftig geworden, habe gründlich mich unterscheiden

gelernt von dem, was mich umgibt, bin nun vereinzelt in der schönen Welt, bin so

ausgeworfen aus dem Garten der Natur, wo ich wuchs und blühte, und vertrockne

an der Mittagssonne. (Kapitel 4)

Through Hyperion, Hölderlin is lamenting how the science and logical reason taught in schools has distanced him, and everyone else, from the possibility of accessing true divine, poetic unity

(the One), while upholding the distances and divisions between the Many.

Furthering this theme of accessing a higher unity through art, Ludwig, a musician, is initially hesitant to see the Turk, despite it being de rigeur among the citizens of the town, on the grounds that mechanical humans make him deeply uneasy.

»Mir sind«, sagte Ludwig, »alle solche Figuren, die dem Menschen nicht sowohl

nachgebildet sind, als das Menschliche nachäffen, diese wahren Standbilder

eines lebendigen Todes oder eines toten Lebens, im höchsten Grade zuwider.

Schon in früher Jugend lief ich weinend davon, als man mich in ein

Wachsfigurenkabinett führte, und noch kann ich kein solches Kabinett betreten,

ohne von einem unheimlichen grauenhaften Gefühl ergriffen zu werden. Mit

Macbeths Worten möchte ich rufen: ›Was starrst du mich an mit Augen ohne

Sehkraft?‹ wenn ich die stieren, toten, gläsernen Blicke all der Potentaten,

berühmten Helden und Mörder und Spitzbuben auf mich gerichtet sehe, und ich

bin überzeugt, daß die mehrsten Menschen dies unheimliche Gefühl...mit mir

teilen. . . Vollends sind mir die durch die Mechanik nachgeahmten menschlichen

Bewegungen toter Figuren sehr fatal, und ich bin überzeugt, daß euer

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wunderbarer geistreicher Türke mit seinem Augenverdrehen, Kopfwenden und

Armerheben mich wie ein nekromantisches Ungetüm vorzüglich in schlaflosen

Nächten verfolgen würde. Ich mag deshalb nicht hingehen, und will mir lieber

alles Witzige und Scharfsinnige, was er diesem oder jenem gesagt, erzählen

lassen.« (Kapitel 31)

Ludwig’s strong reactions against waxworks exhibits, and especially their vacant, dead gazes, at once recall Nathanael’s horror at Olimpia’s broken form as her eyes are removed during the fight between Spalanzani and Coppola in Der Sandmann, as well as Fichte’s use of eyes as a metaphor for the self-posited Ich and further sets Ludwig and “Die Automata” generally apart from Husserl’s mood toward such museums. Of the Ich Fichte writes, “Das Ich ist eine

Tätigkeit, der ein Auge eingesetzt ist” (Sämtliche Werke II 249). However, in the waxworks,

Ludwig sees only a counterfeit humanity; there is no trace of the appropriation of the artificial human as a Nicht-Ich that Nathanael did with Olimpia, nor is there the intrigue that Husserl later described. For Ludwig, the more human-like qualities the automata are endowed with, the more repugnant they become.

Ludwig’s experience with artificial humans, while appearing as the converse of

Nathanael and the philosophies of the epistemological camp, do not yet reflect a push toward unity; he is still too rigidly entrenched within the Ur-teil of the subject-object divide. That is not to say, however, that Hölderlinian unity is a foreign concept to Ludwig—he regularly experiences just that through music—but believes that only human-made music is capable of moving one toward transcending the Many. Hoffmann’s juxtaposition of Ludwig and

Nathanael’s positions becomes unmistakable after Ludwig and Ferdinand meet the Turk’s alleged creator, Professor X. While discussing the captivating life force inherent in human-

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made music, Ludwig speculates about an automaton that goes further than the musical ones

Professor X had shown them, he imagines the horror of one that might dance with a human.

Schon die Verbindung des Menschen mit toten das Menschliche in Bildung und

Bewegung nachäffenden Figuren zu gleichem Tun und Treiben hat für mich

etwas Drückendes, Unheimliches, ja Entsetzliches. Ich kann mir es denken, daß

es möglich sein müßte, Figuren vermöge eines im Innern verborgenen Getriebes

gar künstlich und behende tanzen zu lassen, auch müßten diese mit Menschen

gemeinschaftlich einen Tanz aufführen und sich in allerlei Touren wenden und

drehen, so daß der lebendige Tänzer die tote hölzerne Tänzerin faßte und sich

mit ihr schwenkte, würdest du den Anblick ohne inneres Grauen eine Minute lang

ertragen? (Kapitel 32)

This clear reference to the themes in Der Sandmann not only brings a knowing smile to the reader, it also reaffirms Hoffmann’s philosophical motive in “Die Automata” in opposition to that in Der Sandmann, and thus solidifies Ludwig’s position toward artificial humans and the art they may produce.

Further, Hoffmann’s own critical interpretation of musicology shines through Ludwig as he expresses his distaste for the entire pursuit of the mechanical mimesis of human music.

Hoffmann asserts in “Beethovens Instrumentalmusik” that the magic power of romantic music is found not in the improvement of the medium of expression, nor in the perfection of the instruments themselves, nor the performers alone, but rather it is within the deeper spiritual

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recognition of the nature of music itself.107 Echoing his own earlier assertion, Hoffmann redoubles his conviction through Ludwig:

Ist es nicht vielmehr das Gemüt, welches sich nur jener physischen Organe

bedient, um das, was in seiner tiefsten Tiefe erklungen, in das rege Leben zu

bringen, daß es andern vernehmbar ertönt und die gleichen Anklänge im Innern

erweckt, welche dann im harmonischen Widerhall dem Geist das wundervolle

Reich erschließen, aus dem jene Töne wie entzündende Strahlen

hervordrangen? (Kapitel 32)

He goes on to call Professor X’s efforts to mimic the human element of music production through automata “der erklärte Krieg gegen das geistige Prinzip” of music generally (ibid).

Hoffmann's quest to depict a unity with absolute Being through music fits neatly into the framework of Gesang outlined by Hölderlin. Hölderlin often uses both the terms Dichtung and

Gesang to refer to his method of accessing absolute Being as the overlaps between lyric poetry and music are nearly self-explanatory in Romanticism. Further solidifying the connection between music and poetry is Hölderlin's somewhat cryptic essay “Wechsel der

Töne” from 1800, in which he seeks to ground poetic composition through the grammar, so to speak, of formal written music.

In 1795, the same year that “Über Urteil und Sein” is believed to have been written,

Christian Gottfried Körner published “Über Characterdarstellung in der Musik” in Die Hornen, where he asserts “Das erste Erforderniß eines Kunstwerkes ist unstreitig, daß es sich als ein menschliches Produkt durch Spuren einer ordnenden Kraft von den Wirkungen des blinden

107 Guidance on the translation of Hoffmann’s words was taken from Arthur Ware Locke’s “Beethoven’s Instrumental Music: Translated from E. T. A. Hoffmann’s ‘Kreisleriana’ with an Introductory Note” from The Musical Quarterly’s January 1917 issue.

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Zufalls unterscheide; daher das Gesetz der Einheit.” Körner’s requirement that a work of art, in this case music, must be a human product anticipates the unease and distaste expressed by

Ludwig in Hoffmann’s work. Hölderlin looks to the diatonic structure of European music to provide a theoretical framework for how poetry might be composed. He takes three types of poetry into account: epic, tragic, and lyric; to these he adds three Töne, or key signatures: naive, heroic, and ideal.

As James H. Donelan points out, Hölderlin's basis in “Wechsel der Töne” is “the dominant-tonic chord progression that defines a key” (137). This can be understood as taking place on two levels: first in the harmonic cadence of I-V, where, for example, the tonic, or

Anfangston in Hölderlin's terms, a C moves toward the dominant chord of the scale—the tonic’s opposite—the G. On the second level, the larger structure of the music’s key reflects this tonic-dominant chord progression whereby the key of the piece is able to shift from C major to G major, called a key modulation or Tonartwechsel, before ultimately resolving back into C (ibid). This key modulation through the opposites of the tonic and dominant enriches the music and gives the composer far more options than would otherwise be available remaining in C for the entire piece.

Hölderlin's appropriation of this musical structure and application of it to poetry serves first to map the transformation of the protagonist’s emotional states, and second to incorporate

Hölderlin's philosophy into the structure of his work. Regarding the application of this structure to poetry, Donelan’s summary of Hölderlin conveys the poet’s intentions far more clearly than the original:

An epic poem follows the course of an ideal hero realizing his heroism in action,

thereby ending the occasion for heroism; a tragic poem follows the course of a

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naive hero into the catastrophe of death through an increased consciousness of

his own naiveté; a lyric poem reflects on itself, resolving into a naive and idealized

moment, but isolating itself from the world of action. (139)

Just as a piece of music may modulate its key based on specifically placed chord changes, so may the subject of a poem or in the case of Hoffmann a prose text, go through many modulating emotional states before reaching the end.

In “Die Automata,” Ludwig’s emotional position remains mostly constant throughout, since he is a step removed from the main emotional thrust of the work. Ferdinand, in contrast, walks Hölderlin's path of tragedy through the story’s plot. At the story’s beginning, he is eager to go see the Turk, taking the opportunity to formulate the perfect question as a challenge to his wit and his personal pride. While he is sympathetic to Ludwig’s misgivings about the Turk and automata in general, he shares only the general feeling of uncanniness and light unease, rather than Ludwig’s strong repulsion. Upon relaying his exchange with the Turk later to

Ludwig, the reader learns that Ferdinand had asked about a singing woman, whom he’d seen only once before and with whom he had fallen immediately in love and vowed to find again one day. Ferdinand’s question regarded his seeing her again, to which the Turk replied that he would but it will mean his death. Shaken to his core after this interaction, Ferdinand’s Ton changes from the heroic to the naive as both his wit and his pride are badly bruised.

Meeting the Turk’s alleged creator, Professor X, the resulting concert by his automata, and Ferdinand’s discussion with Ludwig of mechanical versus human music all further serve to shake Ferdinand’s understanding of reality. Finally, after being called home in a mysterious letter by his father, Ferdinand sees the singing woman in the company of a Russian hunter and

Professor X, on her way to marry the former. Both the singer and Ferdinand faint and he never

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sees her again, but Ferdinand does not die as the Turk had predicted. Feeling as though he had overcome the fate the Turk had given him, Ferdinand eases into a state of happiness and fundamental unity with the world, modulating his emotional Ton from the naive to the ideal.

On the surface, this dialectical structure moving from heroic through naive to ideal, may appear to mirror the dialectic of Fichte’s three principles of philosophy; however, such would be a misunderstanding of how Hölderlin's dialectics constitute themselves and subsequently resolve. As Donelan writes:

In a series of metaphors positing and resolving the dialectical opposition between

musical sound and poetic text, Hölderlin addresses the central ontological

problem of Idealist epistemology: the division between the abstractions of

philosophy and the materiality of existence. Hölderlin resolves this division

through a concrete realization of the poetic self in metrical sound, a reconciliation

of being and judgment as a metaphorical music. (127)

While Nathanael used the automaton Olimpia as a material means to establish his Nicht-Ich and thereby his own self-consciousness, Ferdinand is not looking to an external material object to try and establish a necessary part of his own subjectivity. In other words, Fichte’s philosophy seeks to cobble forces of opposition together into a new whole, whereas Hölderlin attempts to restructure the notions of difference and distance between the two opposites, thereby resolving them within their opposition, that is to say by making use of the elements common to both.

On a structural level, Hölderlin is attempting the difficult task of uniting the substantial with the insubstantial in creative art. Poetry, like painting and sculpture, relies on a substantial inspiration to form its imagery, whether it is Rilke’s Panther, Mörike’s Lampe, or nature in general for Hölderlin. Music, on the other hand, is primarily insubstantial because it does not

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replicate a substantial object. In other words, a poet might write a poem describing feelings of euphoria while watching a sunset. In order to do this, the poet must explain the physical setting, the lighting, the colors, the feelings that these images give rise to, et cetera, in order for the reader then to be able to picture them and get a sense of the poet’s experience. A composer may look at the same sunset and feel the same sense of euphoria but would have difficulty rendering the colors of the sky in a comprehensible way through musical notes.

Some common ground that both poetry and music share is that they both convey emotions extremely well. In order for music to convey the emotions desired by the composer, it must engage with the established “grammar” rendered in keys, notes, chords, cadences and the like as transcribed in musical notation.108 In bringing together the insubstantiality of music and the substantive images of poetry, Hölderlin creates his Gesang, a musically structured and driven poetry that unites the substantial and insubstantial in art. Moreover, through its musical structure, it resolves the opposites of the tonic and dominant tones through the emotions of the protagonist. In the case of Ferdinand, the tonic of his story would be the heroic, which then is followed by its opposite, the naive, and finally both are resolved into the ideal ending in which

Ferdinand achieves pure happiness and is no longer consigned to the fate predicted by the

Turk.

Within Hoffmann’s substantial-insubstantial dialectic, Hölderlin further reinforces his claim from “Über Urteil und Sein” that Being exists as a more fundamental level before the Ur- teil, or original judgment separating subject from object. Hölderlin believes that philosophy is not capable of reaching the unity of subject and object that he seeks, and turns to poetry to

108 I choose the phrase “engage with” rather than “conform to” here because while composers such as Mozart, Haydn, and Beethoven convey amazing emotions by working within the established musical rules, Stravinsky’s The Rites of Spring breaks most of the musical guidelines and thereby produces huge emotional reactions in the audience.

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solve the problem, and as demonstrated previously, Hölderlin's musical version of poetry,

Gesang, is intrinsically already a unification itself. By means of his dialectical and unity-based

Gesang, Hölderlin seeks to experience and thus convey absolute Being, his inner sensation of ecstatic unity with the rest of the world.

In addition to the larger tragic structure of Ferdinand’s life depicted in “Die Automata,”

Hoffmann makes further use of Hölderlin's Gesang and search for absolute Being in the way he creates and organizes Ferdinand’s experiences. Ferdinand’s heroic period is fairly straight forward, but his world changes drastically once the Turk’s response to his question shifts him from heroic to naive. After their visit to the Turk, Ferdinand recounts the story of the singing woman to Ludwig. While Ferdinand was on his way home to East Prussia, he spent the day on the beach in Danzig and upon returning to his overnight accommodations, drank heavily from the communal punch bowl. That night, after having a full day of sun, sea air, and alcohol, he lays in his bed and overhears a man tell someone in the next room “Nun so schlafe denn wohl und halte dich fertig zur bestimmten Stunde” (Hoffmann). Shortly thereafter, he hears a few soft chords played on a piano to which he says:

Du weißt, Ludwig! welch ein Zauber in den Tönen der Musik liegt, wenn sie durch

die stille Nacht hallen. So war es auch jetzt, als spräche in jenen Akkorden eine

holde Geisterstimme zu mir; ich gab mich dem wohltätigen Eindruck ganz hin,

und glaubte es würde nun wohl etwas Zusammenhängendes, irgendeine

Fantasie, oder sonst ein musikalisches Stück folgen… (Ibid)

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Ferdinand recalls that the beautiful voice of a woman accompanies the piano singing the song

“Mio ben ricordati.” This piece is credited to Franz Schubert109 and begins with the tonic and dominant chords B flat minor (first inversion) and a modified F7 diminished,110 called an authentic cadence, and following the oppositional pattern of tonic-dominant that Hölderlin appropriates for his “Wechsel der Töne.” Further adhering to Hölderlin's model for poetics, “Mio ben ricordati” adds a key modulation on top of the previous authentic cadence, modulating from the key of B flat minor to that of B flat major,111 which marks a shift to an opposite emotional register, and follows the lyrics from a register of tragic naiveté and death to its opposite, one of quasi-heroic resolve by the singer to maintain her love from beyond the grave.

Importantly, through the initial chords of the piece (B flat minor, F7 diminished, D flat

6th, and F augmented—the tonic, dominant, mediant, and dominant again of the B flat minor scale) Ferdinand feels as if a beautiful spirit voice were speaking to him through the musical tones even before the female voice begins to sing. As if Hoffmann were allowing Ferdinand to experience in music what Hölderlin did in nature, the spoken word and diatonic music become one within him through the tonic and the dominant, the tension of which is thus resolved

109 “Mio ben ricordati” is the fourth of the Vier Canzonen dated 1820. The date of this piece, some six years after Hoffmann began working on “Die Automata” and 2 years after its publication the second volume of Die Serapionsbrüder, leaves the reader with a feeling of the uncanny that Hoffmann would surely have appreciated. However, while Schubert is the most often credited for this work, the poem was written by Pietro Melastasio (1698-1782) (Retzlaff 70). As Allison De Fren points out in her dissertation The Exquisite Corpse: Disarticulations of the Artificial Female, Hoffmann and Schubert were not only acquainted but had many mutual friends, further supporting Hoffmann’s own accurate description of Schubert’s music in the text as a sign that the former knew the work in question before its official publication. 110 Schubert takes the dominant tone of the B flat minor scale, F, and changes it to F7 diminished to make it match the melancholy conveyed in the lyrics. This chord, however, ordinarily includes the tonic, B, but as this chord has just been played, including it in the F7 diminished would lessen the impact the dominant carries when it follows the tonic. 111 While this shift may sound inconsequentially easy, the key signatures for B flat minor and B flat major differ in that the former contains three more flats than the latter. The scales, do, however, have 4 notes in common (B flat, C, E flat, and F), making the B flat major a natural-feeling modulation from B flat minor.

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through the mediant112 before the repeated dominant leads into the lyrics. Ferdinand experiences a sense of ecstatic unity as he falls asleep. An image of this mysterious singer comes to Ferdinand in his dream, and then in the morning, rising “mechanisch,” he goes to the window sees her leaving the hotel with an angry gentleman.

For Ferdinand, the singing woman has an existence that is both immaterial and material. They only exchange words in his dream and the immaterial music comes to him as though she were speaking. Her corporeal form that he sees briefly the next day solidifies for him that the unity and ecstasy that he felt the previous night were not merely a hallucination.

The singer embodies all of Ferdinand’s desires—a paradigmatic blaue Blume—that is both the unattainable object of his desire and his metaphysical means of accessing absolute Being, if only fleetingly. In blurring the lines between human and automaton, Hoffmann is calling the nature of the artist into question. The artist in “Die Automata” is not only Novalis’s Romantic artist, nor is the only possibility that a human is the artist, as Ludwig would claim. Hoffmann’s artist can be seen as at once Professor X, as creator of automata and the automata themselves as producers of music that is indistinguishable from that of humans. In restructuring the conception of the artist to include both the art of producing the mechanical product and the art produced by the mechanical person, Hoffmann links the two in Hölderlinian unity by resolving their opposition through their own common ground.

Like Hölderlin's musical-poetical theory, Hoffmann’s tale functions on the tension between, and ultimate resolution of, several pairs of opposites including human/automata, dream/waking, and soulful/mechanical music. While the fortune-telling Turk and musicians in

Professor X’s house are all clearly automata, Ferdinand is repeatedly described as moving

112 The mediant is the third note of the scale, and the second note of a standard I, III, V chord. It is considered a standard way to resolve the tension between the tonic and dominant.

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mechanically, as if his motions are both rigid and not completely under his control. Further, the woman, while believed to be human from Ferdinand’s initial interaction with her, is seen at the end of the story with Professor X, the creator of the automata, at her wedding. The Professor is standing behind her, suggesting his role is not soon-to-be husband, but that of the father giving his daughter away. While Ludwig rails against the possibility of automata producing real music, the Professor is often seen as such real music is heard being sung by an unseen woman, similar to that experienced by Ferdinand in the night.

The end of “Die Automata” finds Ferdinand waking from his fainting spell upon seeing the woman and experiencing the most profound peace and joy he has ever felt. This

Hölderlinian unity that Ferdinand experiences is only possible through the blurring of boundaries between the human and mechanical in Hoffmann’s construction of the woman and

Ferdinand himself, as well as the boundaries between soulful and mechanical music.

Ferdinand experiences all of this in two episodes that involve experiences both in and out of consciousness. Crucially, the resolutions Hoffmann creates for these tensions are not

Fichtean. The do not, though their mutual exclusivity, resolve into a new whole; rather, they follow Hölderlin's model and play off of the distances separating them as opposites to resolve within their own opposition by making use of the elements common to both. Ferdinand’s personal journey through the story begins with the heroic, turns to the naive, and ends with the ideal; that is to say that the very cause of his shift from heroic to naive is lifted and is thus the catalyst for the ideal ending of his unity with absolute Being. This ideal ending demonstrates that Ferdinand has reached a state of absolute Being and ecstatic unity with the world, in part because the divisions between human as subject and automaton as object, or in Hölderlin's

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terms, the Ur-teilung, are broken down and he is able to experience the world without the disruptive categories and distinctions that Hölderlin rails against through Hyperion.

Frankenstein (1819)

While in “Die Automata” Hoffmann presents a Hölderlinian take on the proto- posthumanist discourse that runs counter to his Fichtean account in Der Sandmann, Mary

Shelley’s Frankenstein examines these two opposing sides within one text. As demonstrated in the previous chapter, the Creature’s quest to establish an identity for himself follows Fichte’s model of positing one’s own Ich. While the Creature’s life is characterized by struggling to create the very basis of an individual subjectivity, Victor’s centers on the quest to find the elixir of life and ultimately overcome death. In trying to overcome death, Victor’s hope is resurrecting the dreams of the alchemists within the context of the post-Enlightenment world of scientific inquiry. Victor’s complicated relationship to this scientific inquiry, and the formal education that underpins it, is just one of a number of competing perspectives regarding institutionalized learning housed within Shelley’s text. The contrast between Victor’s own interests in natural philosophy and the opinions of the faculty at the University of Ingolstadt serve as just one example of a key theme in Victor’s life: binary opposition and numerous attempts at resolution.

Victor’s education begins with the accidental discovery of a volume by Cornelius

Agrippa in the baths near Thanon (Shelley 16); however, rather than immersing himself in the most current scientific knowledge of the day, Victor eagerly reads Agrippa, Albertus Magnus,

Paracelsus, and other alchemical writers who pursue seemingly magical goals in their laboratories. Even Victor’s father reacts with disdain when Victor relays to him the works he’s been reading. Undeterred, however, Victor departs for the University of Ingolstadt to continue his studies of natural philosophy. Of the Ingolstadt faculty, Professor Krempe reacts not just

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with disdain at Victor’s educational background as his father did, but with outright disgust saying:

Every minute, … every instant that you have wasted on those books is utterly and

entirely lost. You have burdened your memory with exploded systems, and

useless names. Good God! in what desert land have you lived, where no one was

kind enough to inform you that these fancies, which you have so greedily imbibed,

are a thousand years old, and as musty as they are ancient? I little expected in

this enlightened and scientific age to find a disciple of Albertus Magnus and

Paracelsus. My dear sir, you must begin your studies entirely anew. (Shelley 22)

Despite Krempe’s attitude toward Victor’s learning, he remains steadfast in his convictions, saying “besides, I had a contempt for the uses of modern natural philosophy. It was very different, when the masters of the science sought immortality and power; such views, although futile, were grand; but now the scene was changed” (Shelley 23). Victor’s old-school visions of grandeur through experimentation receive a lukewarm welcome from Professor Waldmann, but he too advises Victor to steer away from the dreams of the alchemists.

Shelley depicts several competing attitudes toward formal education with her characters, which fall on a spectrum ranging from the completely autodidactic to the firmly entrenched formalist. The two main autodidactic characters, Captain Saville and the Creature both spend great deals of time conversing with Victor and, at least at first in the case of the

Creature, desire his companionship. While Victor and Clerval also begin their intellectual lives as autodidacts, the trip to Ingolstadt made by each reflects a desire to incorporate formal higher education into their lives. Victor relays this to Captain Saville: “I feel pleasure in dwelling on the recollections of childhood, before misfortune had tainted my mind, and changed its

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bright visions of extensive usefulness into gloomy and narrow reflections upon myself” (Shelley

16). It is in Ingolstadt that Victor meets Professor Krempe, who embodies the formalist education of the Enlightenment, and Professor Waldman, who takes a more moderate stance between Enlightenment science and alchemy.

In both instances with Saville and the Creature, Victor rejects the companionship each offers after a short while in conversation. In doing so, he ultimately acknowledging that his own intellectual course of pairing self-directed learning with the institution of the university has led to his ruin and his inability to relate to those still in what Hölderlin would call an uncorrupted state. It is this forced uniting of the mismatched parts of autodidacticism and institutionalized learning through their common ground that both enabled Victor to create his Creature and symbolizes his own education as a kind of Frankensteinian monster in itself.

In Ingolstadt Victor learns the differentiation between the alchemical masters of Magnus and Paracelsus and the modern scientific practices of the enlightened world that is held by the academy. Through this differentiation, he also comes to accept more fully the Ur-teilung between himself and the natural world, leading him away from the self-driven grandeur of the alchemical pursuits, and toward the perspective of “one who picks a flower merely in order to learn from it,”113 as Hölderlin puts it in the Preface of Hyperion. A complete change to the position held by Krempe would not be possible for Victor, however. While he makes use of the scientific advancements of the post-Enlightenment age, such as the knowledge of the human body’s inner workings, electricity, and galvanism, the knowledge and use of these advancements are, when mixed with alchemy, at once his means of successfully

113 “und wer sie pflückt, bloß, um daran zu lernen, kennt sie auch nicht.”

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understanding and controlling the elixir of life, and one cause of much of the elation and melancholy in his life.

The subtitle of Shelley’s book, “A Modern Prometheus,” points the reader toward similar connotations as Hölderlin's work, Hyperion, oder - Der Eremit in Griechenland. Shelley’s usage of the Prometheus myth, however, only seems to be partly applicable to Victor. Rather than be imprisoned with the other surviving Titans after the titanomachy because he did not fight Zeus and the other gods, Prometheus is tasked with creating humans. After Prometheus forms humans out of mud, it is Athena who breathes life into them, and Prometheus steals fire from

Hephaestus to give them knowledge and tools. Victor can indeed be easily understood as a creator of a new race of beings, forming his Creature in his own image out of raw materials from the grave; however, following this metaphor further would mean that Victor is also Athena because he brings the Creature to life, or perhaps she is represented by electricity itself.

Additionally, Victor would not only have to endow his Creature with the knowledge and tools to succeed in the world, he would also have to suffer daily torture for him out of love. While Victor definitely suffers because of his creation, it is not willful and out of love; rather, he inflicts his own torment upon himself making him both Prometheus and the vulture of the myth.

Where the Prometheus association begins to break down, Victor can instead be seen as incorporating parts of Prometheus’ brother, Epimetheus, and in others, characteristics of

Hyperion, both the mythological version and Hölderlin's. Once Victor learns the secret to bestowing life upon dead tissue, he is at first elated, but after bringing the Creature to life, he is horrified. Where he once saw beauty in the Creature’s form and in his own work, after the

Creature awakens, Victor sees only a terrible monstrosity (Shelley 30). What Victor lacks in the creation of his Creature is the very thing that makes Prometheus the character he is. The

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figure of Prometheus is clever and prescient in Greek mythology; indeed, his name even means ‘forethought.’ Victor, however, lacks forethought in the pursuit and use of his new knowledge and is instead better described as following Epimetheus, whose name means

‘afterthought.’

In mythology Hyperion is known for observing and eventually understanding the motion of the planets and their effects on the seasons of the earth. His task after this revelation is to distribute the knowledge he has deduced to others (Siculus). Both Prometheus and Hyperion are carriers of knowledge, but the key difference in the case of Victor is that Victor does not intend to deliver any knowledge to his creation as Prometheus did, nor does he willingly and eternally suffer for that act. The Creature inadvertently steals the jacket that contains Victor’s journal in the pocket and thus learns in great and painful detail the story of his creation

(Shelley 88). In this respect, the Creature is responsible for his own knowledge.

Not only does Victor refuse to impart knowledge to his creation, he also refuses to relay the details of the experiment to Captain Saville saying:

Learn from me, if not by my precepts, at least by my example, how dangerous is

the acquirement of knowledge, and how much happier that man is who believes

his native town to be the world, than he who aspires to become greater than his

nature will allow. (Shelley 27)

The original zeal with which Victor began his experiments is thus revealed to be a distinct lack of forethought on his part to anticipate how he would feel about and react to the Creature after his creation. Victor’s burning and tormenting afterthought, however, remains consistent from the time the Creature awakes to the novel’s end.

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While the torment of Victor’s regret burns consistently within him after the Creature’s creation, the shift away from excitement at the outset of the project stands as a macro example of how Victor’s moods swing unexpectedly throughout the work. Relaying his story to Captain

Saville, Victor recounts:

No one can conceive the variety of feelings which bore me onwards, like a

hurricane, in the first enthusiasm of success. Life and death appeared to me ideal

bounds, which I should first break through, and pour a torrent of light into our dark

world. A new species would bless me as its creator and source; many happy and

excellent natures would owe their being to me. (Shelley 28)

Victor’s description of his motivations as being “like a hurricane” anticipate his feelings after the

Creature opens its eyes for the first time.

How can I describe my emotions at this catastrophe, or how delineate the wretch

whom, with such infinite pains and care, I had endeavored to form? His limbs

were in proportion, and I had selected his features as beautiful. Beautiful! Great

God! (Shelley 39)

The “hurricane” that drove Victor onwards in his quest to understand the secrets of life and death becomes a “catastrophe” as the Creature opens his eyes. The juxtaposing sides of his mood are unified in the single symbol of the natural disaster demonstrating that, for Victor, they represent two opposite extremes of the same emotional force.

The diametrically opposed feelings associated with the symbol of the hurricane recalls the same imagery in Hölderlin's Hyperion. In typical fashion, Hyperion uses a single symbol for the bipolarity of his swinging moods beginning with musings about the grandeur of nature and

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its unity with the immortals of Antiquity and ending with his own inadequacy in the face of such a unity.

Wo ich ging und stand, geleiteten mich die herrlichen Gestalten; wie Flammen,

verloren sich in meinem Sinne die Taten aller Zeiten in einander, und wie in ein

frohlockend Gewitter die Riesenbilder, die Wolken des Himmels sich vereinen, so

vereinten sich, so wurden Ein unendlicher Sieg in mir die hundertfältigen Siege

der Olympiaden. Wer hält das aus, wen reißt die schröckende Herrlichkeit des

Altertums nicht um, wie ein Orkan die jungen Wälder umreißt, wenn sie ihn

ergreift, wie mich, und wenn, wie mir, das Element ihm fehlt, worin er sich ein

stärkend Selbstgefühl erbeuten könnte? O mir, mir beugte die Größe der Alten,

wie ein Sturm, das Haupt, mir raffte sie die Blüte vom Gesichte, und oftmals lag

ich, wo kein Auge mich bemerkte, unter tausend Tränen da, wie eine gestürzte

Tanne, die am Bache liegt und ihre welke Krone in die Flut verbirgt. Wie gerne

hätt ich einen Augenblick aus eines großen Mannes Leben mit Blut erkauft!

(Hölderlin Kapitel 7)

Hyperion’s elation at the unity of nature with the immortals is crushed like young trees by a hurricane at the realization of his own inability to take part in it. While Hyperion’s contextual situation differs from that of Victor, both describe similar emotional experiences symbolized by the hurricane.

Victor’s elation when he finally understands the secret to life is not just because he has reached his goal; rather, it is because this understanding signals a Hölderlinian unity with nature through the control of its forces. By endowing a dead creature with life, Victor places himself among a pantheon of immortals who exist in a world not limited by the detrimental, and

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ultimately superfluous, distinctions between living and dead, and subject and object. As

Hyperion exclaims to Bellarmin, “eines zu sein mit Allem, das ist das Leben der Gottheit, das ist der Himmel des Menschen” (Hölderlin Kapitel 4). What Victor has gained in ability and unity, however, is ultimately lost through his Epimethean lack of foresight. This macro example of

Victor’s changing moods is continued on a smaller scale throughout the novel and is, as it is for both Hyperion and Hölderlin himself, fundamentally tied to images of nature.

The mood swings that characterize Victor’s experience in the world during his later life are not present before he looks into the Creature’s watery yellow eyes for the first time. Of his early life in Geneva, Victor recounts to Saville, “No youth could have passed more happily than mine” (Shelley 16) and “I feel pleasure in dwelling on the recollections of my childhood, before misfortune had tainted my mind, and changed its bright visions of extensive usefulness into gloomy and narrow reflections upon self” (17). While Victor is clear that he attended formal school as a child in Geneva (20) this experience is far less meaningful to him than his independent studies in language and natural science (19-20). Upon encountering a work by

Cornelius Agrippa, he says “a new light seemed to dawn upon my mind” (16-17), but upon relaying this new discovery to his father, the older Frankenstein quickly dismisses Agrippa and the other alchemists as trash (17). Victor remains resolute, however, and continues his studies of the natural philosophers and their searches for the elixir of life and the philosopher’s stone.

After trying, by his father’s urging, to attend lectures on modern science at the university of Geneva, but failing to visit all but the last in the series for some forgotten reason, Victor’s parents decided that he should attend the university in Ingolstadt. His departure is delayed by a year due to his mother’s death of scarlet fever, but even this tragedy does not produce in him more than the expected sadness. He describes his feelings as “sorrow” and “grief,” which, in

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comparison of scale, fall short of the “misery” and “torment” he uses to describe his life after bringing the Creature to life.

Victor recounts how the summer passed as he was engaged in his pursuit. “It was a most beautiful season; never did the fields bestow a more plentiful harvest, or the vines yield a more luxuriant vintage; but my eyes were insensible to the charms of nature” (Shelley 29).

Victor’s ability to describe the summer, however, gives a clue that it did not pass him by completely. He did not venture out of his laboratory, but the season outside reflected his inner emotional state. The hurricane that drove him onward was not yet the force of destruction it would become; rather, it was an ecstasy at the grandeur of his findings and his own unity with the forces of nature. As the summer turns to autumn, however, Victor begins to be possessed by a strong anxiety (30) and Shelley’s imagery recalls that of Hölderlin. In a letter to Bellarmin,

Hyperion writes:

Der Sommer war nun bald zu Ende; ich fühlte schon die düstern Regentage und

das Pfeifen der Winde und Tosen der Wetterbäche zum voraus, und die

Natur…stand jetzt schon da vor meinem verdüsterten Sinne, schwindend und

verschlossen und in sich gekehrt, wie ich selber. (Kapitel 9)

Paralleling the relationship between Hyperion and nature, Victor’s growing anxiety culminates, predictably, with the night of the Creature’s awakening, which he describes as a “dreary night of November” (30).

This correlation between Victor’s emotional state and nature is furthered after the

Creature kills Victor’s youngest brother, William, and his cousin, Justine, is convicted of the crime and sentenced to death. Justine’s death weighs much more heavily on Victor and he is relieved once they are able to leave Geneva for Belrive. Victor describes feeling freed by this

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move as his time in nature is not confined by the closing of city walls (Shelley 57). Victor spends his nights on a lake, often allowing the wind to blow him along its own course, and ruminates on his own misery. He says “I was often tempted, when all was at peace around me…to plunge into the silent lake, that the waters might close over me and my calamities forever” (58). After a family outing into the mountains, Victor slowly comes out of his depression to such a degree that he desires to return alone to experience the beauty of nature.

While this does help his mood for a short time, the next day came with heavy rain and mists, and brought with them his depression (61).

Victor’s moods are both reflective, and at the mercy, of his natural surroundings. After bringing his Creature to life, his main state is being depressed, but he is able to transcend this through contact, sometimes extended contact, with nature. The more awe-inspiring the natural phenomenon, the greater the effect on Victor’s psyche. Hyperion’s relationship with nature is similar, but marked by the constant knowledge that any ecstasy and unity he experiences will be short lived.

Despite this omnipresent inability to maintain access to the unity of absolute Being,

Hyperion ends with the contented musings of the title character in a final letter to Bellarmine.

He recognizes and accepts the dissonances and strife of the world ending with “‘es scheiden und kehren im Herzen die Adern und einiges, ewiges, glühendes Leben ist Alles.’ So dacht ich.

Nächstens mehr.” (Kapitel 68). Hyperion has come to terms with the pain of being separated from Nature and Being, realizing that both separation and unity are temporary conditions for living beings.

The ending of Frankenstein, however, does not end with Victor’s acceptance of his situation. He is, until his death, burdened by the life and actions of the Creature to whom he

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gave life. Victor is unable to achieve the inner peace that Hyperion does; rather, his demise follows the ending of Hölderlin's poem “Hyperions Schicksalslied”

Doch uns ist gegeben, Auf keiner Stätte zu ruhn, Es schwinden, es fallen Die leidenden Menschen Blindlings von einer Stunde zur andern, Wie Wasser von Klippe Zu Klippe geworfen, Jahr lang ins Ungewisse hinab. Victor’s sufferings haunt him until his final breath. Rather than acknowledging the unity of both ecstasy and suffering, he lives it. While he is never able to rectify his perceived transgressions against humankind by creating his Creature, this is contrasted with the friendship he builds with Captain Saville in his final days. Even if Victor does not find peace at the end of his life, his Creature’s words to Saville may well speak for his creator as well. “‘but soon,’ he [the

Creature] cried with sad and solemn enthusiasm, ‘I shall die, and what I now feel be no longer felt. Soon these burning miseries will be extinct” (Shelley 162). What Hyperion is able to find in life, Victor, and incidentally also Victor’s Creature, can only find in death.

Modern and Contemporary Ontological Posthumanism

While it is relatively simple to delineate between what defines a work as Romantic versus Posthumanist when tracing the latter movements roots, discerning a distinction between a Modernist period and a Posthumanist period is much more difficult. The focus of the

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Romantic period lies in the temporary attainment by the individual of access to a level of ontological unity within existence where all natural beings once again become part of the greater and harmonious whole of nature. The unity between natural beings and the art that provides the conduit for humans to attain it, is, of course, foreign to mechanical beings, no matter how realistically human they may seem.

With Heidegger’s Sein und Zeit, however, the driving theme of ontological existence shifts away from Hölderlin's constant striving to attain Absolute Being in favor of exploring in greater detail the kind of Being that humans have, namely Dasein in opposition to that of other kinds of entities in the world. As I have already argued, Katherine Hayles's How We Became

Posthuman marks the resurgence of the ontological arguments against the epistemological in the wake of Hassan’s vision of Promethean unity; however, Hayles remains so faithful to

Heidegger’s philosophy that marking a distinction between a Modernist and contemporary version on a theoretical level is all but impossible. Hayles's primary achievement in her book is to recontextualize Heidegger’s fundamental ontology within the technological context of the millennial shift.

Even though Hayles's book stands as the defining work of ontological Posthumanism, the ideas she conveys had recently been explored through the figure of Dr. Katherine Pulaski in Star Trek: The Next Generation, whom Roddenberry openly based on Dr. Leonard McCoy from The Original Series. Leonard “Bones” McCoy (DeForest Kelley), while playing the original

Enterprise’s doctor, had a running antagonistic relationship with Spock (Leonard Nimoy) because he was not human. Serving to call attention to the Southern doctor’s casual racism

(McCoy is from Georgia), which is starkly juxtaposed with the defining concept of the

Enterprise’s bridge, conceived of as “Starship Earth” by Roddenberry, McCoy’s derogatory

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references to Spock’s pointy ears, green blood, and cool logical demeanor underscore the divide between the Vulcans and the red blooded and passionate humans. To McCoy, it seems that Spock is little more than a living robot, but instances where Spock’s life is in danger (TOS:

“Spock’s Brain” and others) reveal that McCoy does truly care for the Vulcan, but he is unable to reconcile for himself the disparate existences, and thus ontologies, of Vulcans and humans.

Pulaski (Diana Muldaur) arrived on the Enterprise in the second season of The Next

Generation to replace Dr. Crusher (Gates McFadden); however, her relationship with nonhuman aliens is not what McCoy’s was with Spock. Rather, Pulaski’s antagonisms are directed at the android Data (Brent Spiner), whom she regards as mere machine, and thus less than human, due to her role as doctor in the care of biological beings (Westbrook 1).

The ninth episode of TNG’s second season, “The Measure of a Man” (written by

Melinda M Snodgrass) brings the question of Data’s personhood to the fore. A Starfleet cyberneticist, Commander Bruce Maddox (Brian Brophy) has requested to have Data transferred to his command so that Maddox may disassemble him to learn more about Soong- type androids, since, he argues, Data is not a sentient life form.114 Data argues against this procedure and his status as a nonperson saying to Captain Picard “Sir, Lieutenant La Forge’s eyes are far superior to human biological eyes, true? Then why are not all human officers required to have their eyes replaced with cybernetic implants?” Receiving no verbal answer from Picard, Data says “I see. It is precisely because I am not human.” Data’s argument not only supports his case that he is a sentient being and should be afforded all rights of personhood, it also recalls the trope of eyes being as a symbol for human subjectivity from

114 Data was created by Dr. Noonian Soong, who also created Lore. All three characters were played by Brent Spiner.

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epistemological Posthumanism. Ultimately Data’s personhood status is put on trial and defended by Captain Picard and prosecuted by a reluctant Commander William Riker. To prove that Data is only a machine, and ontologically other from humans, Riker removes Data’s hand for inspection by the Judge. Following this, Riker flips Data’s power switch and says

“Pinocchio is broken. Its strings have been cut.” Picard’s response, after a recess, is to say that “Commander Data is a machine. … We too are machines, just machines of a different type.” While the court ultimately rules in favor of Data’s personhood, both Picard and Riker have spotlighted the ontological otherness embodied by Data. While he may be self-aware and deserving of personhood rights, he is not human.

Data’s existence, and indeed the viewer’s interest in him as a character, is characterized by his machine ontology and how that separates him from truly human existence as he constantly strives for the latter. While Data never fully realizes his dream of becoming human, other artificial humans with similar desires are not relegated to the same fate. The

Cylons in Battlestar Galactica (2004) present an intriguing case of bridging the ontological chasm between biological and machine organisms. While the original 1978 series lays a foundation of disparity between the humans and Cylons, the backstory of the Cybernetic

Lifeform Nodes is reimagined in the Battlestar reboot and Caprica to complicate the ontologies that serve to drive the conflict of the series. The ontological difference between humans and artificially intelligent creations is explored further in Spike Jonze’s film Her (2015), which takes the theme of human-machine love that is brought up in Battlestar Galactica and examines it on a more personal level.

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Battlestar Galactica Universe (1978-2013)

The stories within the Battlestar Galactica universe depict the conflicts surrounding and between the human population, which is spread over twelve colonies on twelve worlds, and the

Cylons, artificial beings who serve as the recurring antagonists and ontological foil for human biological existence. While the nature and origin of the later iterations of the Cylons differ from those of the original series (1978-1979), the driving source of conflict between Cylons and humans remains that they represent fundamentally differing kinds of existences. The original series’ intro sequence contains a voiceover by Patrick Macnee, who also voiced the Cylons’

Imperious Leader, that outlines the ontological bond shared by all humans:

There are those who believe that life here began out there, far across the

Universe with tribes of humans who may have been the forefathers of the

Egyptians or the Toltecs or the Mayans that they may have been the architects of

the Great Pyramids or the lost civilizations of Lemuria or Atlantis. Some believe

that there may yet be brothers of man who even now fight to survive--somewhere

beyond the heavens! (BSGos)

Macnee seems to go out of his way not to mention the Ancient Greeks, after whom numerous characters, worlds, and deities within the show are named; however, the shared human ontology depicted here is further fleshed out in a conversation between President Adar of the

Council of Twelve and Commander Adama. In response to Adar’s claim that the Cylons want peace, Adama says: “Forgive me, Mr. President, but they hate us with every fiber of their existence. We love freedom, and we love independence--to feel, to question, to resist

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oppression. To them it’s an alien way of existing they will never accept” (BSGos: “Saga of a

Star World”).115

The Cylons, it is reported in the first episode, were the mechanical creations of a long- dead reptilian race, also called Cylons, from the planet Cylon. Their conflict with humans arises after the humans’ attempt to intervene in the Cylon’s enslavement of neighboring biological races. In the wake of years of war, the humans are betrayed to the Cylons by Count Baltar, and the remnants of the human population must leave their homeworlds to stay alive. Adama decides to search for the fabled lost thirteenth colony on a distant planet called Earth.

While the rebooted Battlestar Galactica series (BSGr),116 preserves many of the basic plot elements from the original, the origins of the Cylons has changed. The opening sequence of BSGr announces that “The Cylons were created by man. They evolved. They rebelled.

There are many copies. And they have a plan.” BSGr, along with Caprica and Blood and

Chrome base themselves on a much more complicated Cylon origin story. As depicted in

Caprica, the Cylons were created as military defense robots by Daniel Graystone of Graystone

Industries. Graystone’s daughter, Zoe, is killed in the first episode in a terrorist attack by the monotheist cult The Soldiers of the One (STO),117 which brings the monotheistic versus polytheistic conflict from BSGr directly into the Cylon origin story (Caprica: “Pilot”).

Zoe was a brilliant computer programmer and before her death had made a virtual copy of herself to exist in V-World, a shared virtual reality experience where most everyone in the

115 The conflict between the humans and Cylons can also be understood as a symbol for the Cold War, as fleshed out in the volume Battlestar Galactica and International Relations edited by Nicholas J Kiersey and Iver B Neumann 116 In order to keep the names straight, I will use BSGr for the rebooted series (2003-2009), BSGos for the original 1978-1979 series, and BSG to refer to the universe or franchise generally. 117 Polytheism is the state religion of the Twelve Colonies, which forms itself out of a mix of Greek and Roman deities.

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Twelve Colonies spends their free time. After Zoe’s death, Daniel Graystone learns of Zoe’s copy and tracks her down. After stealing a rival company’s “meta-cognitive processor” for his

Cylon, the virtual Zoe, with the help of a friend, transfers her consciousness from V-World into the Cylon’s meta-cognitive processor, becoming the first self-aware Cylon (Caprica: “Pilot”) .

Greystone’s other Cylons are used as servants and for defense, but soon evolve rudimentary self-consciousness and many come under the influence of STO leader Clarice Willow, who preaches to them about their equal status with humans. Simultaneously, Daniel Graystone and his wife, Amanda, work to create a human-looking body for Zoe’s avatar and the resurrection technology to produce it, which becomes the first “skinjob” (Caprica: “Apotheosis”)

The Cylons, after developing self-awareness, revolt due to their treatment as slaves resulting in the First Cylon War. After more than a decade of war, the Cylons suddenly agree to an armistice and disappear. It is revealed that in the last days of the war, the Final Five reached the Cylons and negotiated for them to end the conflict and in return the Five gave them biological bodies and resurrection technology. These Five are the only survivors of earlier, and previously unknown, biomechanical Cylons, the original Thirteenth Tribe, who existed thousands of years before Graystone created his models, and fled Earth after a nuclear holocaust wiped out the human and Cylon populations. They had hoped to reach

Caprica before the cycle began again in an effort to foster better understanding between the humans and Cylons, but because the Final Five lacked faster than light (FTL) travel, they arrived after the war had already begun. At the beginning of BSGr, no one had heard from the

Cylons for forty years, but they returned with both biological (skin jobs) and mechanical models

(centurions, or “toasters” to the humans) to attack the Colonies and attempt to exterminate the humans (BSGr: “Sometimes a Great Nation”).

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Through the ontological conflict between biological and synthetic life in BSGr, humans are not only in danger of extinction at the hands of their cybernetic creations, they are displaced from their homeworlds and forced to take refuge in a small fleet of starships. On the surface this seems only to add insult to injury, but taken in a context of Heideggerian fundamental ontology, being driven from their homeworlds by the Cylons constitutes not just a threat to human life, but a threat to the way humans exist as living beings, and thus the very core of human ontology. Heidegger’s conception of human existence, Dasein, is “ferner

Seiendes, das je ich selbst bin” (Sein 53). Dasein, Heidegger continues, must be understood a priori as having always already been situated within the spatio-temporal context of the physical world. He labels this indivisible relationship between people and their physical existences in the context of the world as being-in-the-world (ibid). He writes “Der zusammengesetzte

Ausdruck »In-der-Welt-sein« zeigt schon in seiner Prägung an, dass mit ihm ein einheitliches

Phänomen gemeint ist” (ibid).

This kind of being-in is not simply intended to mean that humans are located in a world the way water is in a glass. Rather, Heidegger traces the meaning of the word “in” from the contemporary spatial relation to the Latin “innan-,” meaning to live, and “habitare” (to dwell).

He continues his linguistic gymnastics to link “bin” with the preposition “bei” and conclude that

“Ich bin” does not just mean “I am,” but “ich wohne, halte mich auf bei . . . der Welt, als dem so und so Vertrauen” (Sein 54). For Heidegger, to be-in-the-world for humans carries the meaning to taking care of, and being unable to be conceptualized apart from.

While Heidegger does not speak heavily about humans and space travel, he does remark in his interview with Der Spiegel “Nur ein Gott kann uns retten” on having seen photographs of the earth taken from the moon. His reaction is one of fear because “the

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uprooting of humanity has already begun” (208). Part of the uprooting of humanity Heidegger is referring to is the technological view of beings and the world that humanity is adopting, for which the Cylons in BSGr stand as a cautionary tale and one which I will discuss in detail later.

The uprooting of the human population from the Colonies by the Cylons constitutes an attack on the humans’ being-in-the-world, an angle that the Cylons continue throughout the initial episodes of BSGr. The Cylons make heavy use of nuclear weapons against the colonists, both on Caprica and other worlds, as well as during battles in space. While the humans are susceptible to the effects of radiation, the mechanical Cylons are not and the biomechanical less so. Further, the episode “33” revolves around persistent Cylon attacks every thirty-three minutes. The fleet is continuously able to make FTL jumps to escape, but the effect is at once to reinforce the distance between the humans and the wake/sleep cycle that coincides with planetary day and night, and to prevent the humans from resting, which both underscores the ontological difference between Cylon and human and attacks the humans’ morale and will to fight. The subsequent episode involves an attack by a Cylon skinjob sleeper agent against the Galactica’s water supply, forcing the humans to seek out a celestial body in order to reacquire the materials they need to sustain themselves.

These continual attacks against Dasein’s (i.e. the humans’) being-in-the-world follow the

President, Laura Roslin, learning that she has terminal cancer (BSGr: “Miniseries”). As as leader for the Colonists and a symbolic reflection of the people she represents, Roslin is suddenly put in a place where she must face her own mortality, both from the Cylon threat and from her own cancer. Just like Roslin, the human population faces threats internal and external with the knowledge that Cylons can now look just like humans slowly making its way around

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Galactica. The effect of this is that Roslin, as a symbol for the rest of the people, adopts the

Heideggerian mode of being-toward-death.

Heidegger is very careful to distinguish between death as one’s own possibility of no- longer-being-able-to-be-there and the death of others that Dasein experiences second hand.

Of the latter Heidegger writes:

Je angemessener das Nichtmehrdasein des Verstorbenen phänomenal gefasst

wird, um so deutlicher, zeigt sich, dass solches Mitsein mit dem Toten gerade

nicht das eigentliche Zuendegekommensein des Verstorbenen erfährt. Der Tod

enthüllt sich zwar als Verlust, aber mehr als solcher, den die Verbleibenden

erfahren. Im Erleiden des Verlustes wird jedoch nicht der Seinsverlust als solcher

zugänglich, den der Sterbende »erleidet«. Wir erfahren nicht in genuinen Sinne

das Sterben der Anderen, sondern sind höchstens immer nur »dabei«. (Sein 239)

Roslin’s relatively protected position on the ship Colonial One means that she is less likely than other members of the fleet, specifically Galactica’s pilots and crew and the defenseless civilian ships, to come face to face with her own death. Safety for the fleet is only ever one FTL jump away, so long as the danger comes from Cylon Basestars. With it known that Cylons are now capable of creating biological bodies, every member of the fleet becomes acutely aware that every stranger they see may be a Cylon agent readying to commit an act of terror.

Death, for Heidegger and for Roslin, is no longer simply the possibility of someone else no longer being physically present. When Dasein accepts the inevitability of its own death, the individual may thus begin to live authentically. Of one’s own death, Heidegger writes, “Als

Seinkönnen vermag das Dasein die Möglichkeit des Todes nicht zu überholen. Der Tod ist die

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Möglichkeit der schlechthinnigen Daseinsunmöglichkeit. So enthüllt sich der Tod als die eigenste, unbezügliche, unüberholbare Möglichkeit (Sein 250). Most importantly, this being- toward-death that Roslin exhibits is not marked by her fear of the Cylons or her cancer, although the acceptance of both is a process for her. She recoils from neither threat; rather, she accepts the challenge and risks placed before her as her own and, (eventually) together with Commander Adama, moves the fleet toward finding a new planet to settle on, namely

Earth.

A counterpoint to the authentic Dasein and being-toward-death experience by the humans is the relationship between the Soldiers of the One (STO) in Caprica and subsequent mechanical and biological Cylons. The STO is a monotheistic terrorist organization headed by

Clarice Willow who take advantage of the widely popular V-World virtual reality system created by Graystone Industries. Once the existence of Zoe Graystone’s V-World copy is realized by the STO, Willow and other leaders make the case for apotheosis, or the copying of living beings, similar to the process outlined by Hans Moravec in Mind Children, so that their copies may live on after the original’s biological death. Because of the STO’s focus on posthumous divine redemption and entrance into this virtual heaven, they market this possibility as both the promised paradise and life everlasting in a separate version of V-World (Caprica:

“Apotheosis”).

Death for the STO, and later for the Cylons at large, thus becomes simply a matter of no longer being there, rather than an ontological and existential finality of life. Moreover in BSGr, because Cylon consciousness is housed in databases and downloaded into individual bodies, so long as there is a resurrection ship nearby, consciousness is re-uploaded into the Cylon

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mainframe upon bodily death, and is then ready to be placed into a new body.118 The only possibility for true, human-style death is for the resurrection ship to be too far away to receive the Cylon’s consciousness or to be infected with a particular virus (“Torn”).119 Then, and only then, do the individual Cylon’s memories, experiences, knowledge, and personal identity die with the body. Because this possibility of true death only arises in rare circumstances, Cylons do not exist in a state in which they must come to terms with the Angst surrounding, and certainty of, their own death and thus lack this crucial tenet of human Dasein.

For the Cylons, each body their consciousness inhabits constitutes a mere physical prosthesis for the mind. Just as Hayles feared in the opening pages of How We Became

Posthuman, the Cylons have achieved, and also constitute, a posthuman existence based in epistemological conceptions of life. Humans, however, are bound by their biological ontologies.

The only cross-over point between ontological and epistemological Posthumanism comes in the form of Zoe’s creation of her own copy, which serves to alleviate the pain felt by her parents only in part. The division between the real world and V-World is so stark that

Graystone creates resurrection technology to give the virtual Zoe a new human body, thus paving the way for the human-looking Cylons that drive the plot of BSGr. These too, however, while looking human and being programmed to think they are human, are mere facsimiles when examined more closely. Those humans on Galactica who believe they are human are the closest Cylons come to actually achieving humanness. Even if they achieve the authentic being-toward-death that underlies Dasein, it is a façade because their true nature is hidden even from them.

118 This theme is echoed by the Geth in the Mass Effect Trilogy. 119 An essay examining Cylons and death from a Heideggerian perspective called “When the Non-Human Knows its Own Death” by Brien Willems can be found in Battlestar Galactica and Philosophy.

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Because the Cylons only view their bodies as prostheses, they, especially the skinjobs, propagate a similar view as the humans against the mechanical Cylon centurions, namely a technological one. In the BSGr timeline, humans built the Cylons to serve as a defense force and for hard labor. They were, in Heidegger’s terminology, mere equipment (Zeug). As

Heidegger outlines, the being of such objects (das Zuhandene), is contained not in the object in isolation, but within the object itself and in the context in which it was intended to be used

(Sein 70). Heidegger’s example of the hammer’s being existing within the realm of carpentry and for people with grasping hands serves as an analogy for the Cylons as well. The Cylons were created for a context of defense and labor in a decadent and capitalistic world that exists on one level on the physical earth and on another in the virtual V-World. Further, following the path of Victor Frankenstein, the first Cylons were created bearing humanoid shape, albeit significantly larger than the average human, so as not to diverge too far from the contextual world known to their human creators.

Before the Cylons gain consciousness, understanding them as Zeug is only natural.

They are tools programmed to complete the actions desired by their creators. However, with the development of a self-conscious awareness, the Cylons become more than equipment for their human overlords. While they do develop self-awareness and reflexivity, the Cylons lack the possibility of an authentic being-toward-death of the humans. Moreover, as the Cylon raiders (small, fighter-style starships) and Basestars are themselves Cylons and not ships piloted by them, Cylon being, as a whole, is not necessarily predicated upon being-in-the-world as human existence is. Thus the Cylons transform themselves from world-poor beings designed for work into world-forming beings similar to humans (Metaphysics 177).

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Even though Cylons, with their original development of self awareness, no longer fit the qualifications to be understood as mere equipment nor as world-poor, these emergent qualities are not fully recognized by the humans, and the Cylons continue to be treated as machines.

Humanity was presented with the possibility of coexisting with the Cylons, but in order to do so, the humans would have had to have respected the self-awareness and ability to self-improve that the Cylons possessed from the time it emerged. Instead, the humans viewed the Cylons as mere standing reserve, that is to say, a possible means to the humans’ own end (Heidegger

“Technik” 16).

In his essay Die Frage nach der Technik Heidegger poses himself the question “Was ist die moderne Technik? (15). Modern technology, he answers, is a revealing that exists as a challenging, rather than as a bringing-forth. Technology in the sense of bringing-forth is technology such as a windmill, which blows freely in the wind to take advantage of the energy it offers, whereas modern technology seeks to store the gained energy for other uses. He writes:

Ein Landstrich wird dagegen in die Förderung von Kohle und Erzen

herausgefordert. Das Erdreich entbirgt sich jetzt als Kohlenrevier, der Boden als

Erzlagerstätte. Anders erscheint das Feld, das der Bauer vormals bestellte, wobei

bestellen noch hieß: hegen und pflegen. … Es stellt sie im Sinne der

Herausforderung. Ackerbau ist jetzt motorisierte Ernährungsindustrie. Die Luft

wird auf die Abgabe von Stickstoff hin gestellt, der Boden auf Erze, das Erz z.B.

auf Uran, dieses auf Atomenergie, die zur Zerstörung oder friedlichen Nutzung

entbunden werden kann. (“Technik” 15-16)

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Modern technology thus seeks to make use of a means for an end that is not immediately present and is not necessarily connected to either the harnessed means or the creative technological way of that the means is rerouted and changed.

In order to create the first Cylon, Daniel Graystone first had to hold a technological view of the world, that is to say one of the world, and all of its resources, as a means to the end that he created. The ultimate expression of this on Caprica is V-World, which not only harnesses great amounts of energy to power and produce, but also gives the virtual world and everyone’s avatars the state of standing reserve. Standing reserve, for Heidegger, is the state of everything that is always ready to hand for the purposes of being ready to be pressed into some other action (“Technik” 17). Avatars are used by their creators as standing reserve to experience various things in the virtual world including sex, torture, role playing, and even death. Zoe Graystone takes this one step further by creating a virtual self that is a copy of her consciousness within V-World. Zoe has thus taken a technological view of herself in creating another self-aware Zoe to serve as standing reserve for the real Zoe’s own ends.

Zoe’s digital copy of herself and the subsequent self-aware Cylons indicate Heidegger’s driving point in making the distinction between modern technology and the kind of bringing- forth technology that does not seek to apply new, foreign ends to technological means. Namely that through the creation of advanced technology, humans begin to see the world, other humans, and even themselves through the lens of “enframing.” This technological view reduces the world and all bodies in it to standing reserve, which fundamentally removes humans from their natural, harmonious relationship with, and in, the world. The Twelve

Colonies’ resources are, when enframed this way, simply there to be used for technological

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innovation.120 Cylons are there to be used as workers and defense forces, despite their levels of intelligence. After the Cylon attack, newly found worlds are little more than means to replenish the fleet’s resources.

The final episodes of BSGr features four of the Final Five Cylon models (Tory, Tigh,

Anders, and Tyrol) fixated on Bob Dylan’s song “All Along the Watchtower.” At first, they each only have pieces of the melody, to which they then add lyrics, but it is not until they all simultaneously feel compelled, through the music, to meet in a secluded room that they are able to piece together the whole song. This completion of the piece is the trigger they needed to reactivate the knowledge that they are not only Cylons, but the descendants of the original

Thirteenth Tribe, once thought to be human and later learned to be Cylon, that settled the original Earth (“Crossroads Part II,” “Sometimes a Great Nation”).

It is then revealed that Anders had written the song in a past life on Earth, where he and the other Final Five had worked to reinvent resurrection technology and organic memory transfer, the latter of which had come from Kobol in the time before the Colonies, and both of which had fallen out of use due to the Cylons’ ability to reproduce biologically. The Final Five are the last representatives from the biological Cylons after their mechanical creations, Cylon centurions who gained self-awareness, were mistreated and rebelled leading to a nuclear holocaust on the planet. It is these five who upload themselves, along with the possibility of creating copies of their biological bodies, to a ship in orbit above Earth and set out to make contact with the other Twelve Tribes of Kobol in order to prevent them from mistreating their creations and suffering the same fate.

120 This even comes out in derogatory terms for colonists of Tauron, Dirt Eaters, because Tauron is less affluent and technologically-driven than Caprica.

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Dylan’s song serves at once as a lyrical means of conveying the cyclical nature of time in the BSG universe, as well as the desire to escape the cycle, and also as a link from the time on Earth before the Cylon war to the present.121 The song continues after the surviving colonists land on the new Earth with Hera, the first living human-Cylon hybrid produced through sexual reproduction, in a montage depicting the course of the civilization that is created on the new planet. The series ends with both the realization that Hera is the genetic mother of all present day humans, meaning that everyone alive today is a human-Cylon hybrid.

The cyclical nature of time in BSG combined with the direction of the plot of BSGr recalls Nietzsche’s doctrine of eternal return. In BSGr a small number of humans escape destruction at the hands of the Cylons only to produce hybrid offspring and then settle a new

Earth where the technology inevitably advances to the point of building robots and the cycle is slated to begin anew. Eternal return, which Nietzsche first brings up in Die fröhliche

Wissenschaft, in a section titled “Das größte Schwergewicht,” asserts that every event has already happened an infinite number of times in the past and will happen an infinite number of times in the future. Upon learning this, one’s reaction conveys the quality of life one has led, and as Nietzsche will later elaborate, how far a person is on the path to Übermensch

(Nietzsche Fröhliche).

While the Cylons accept eternal return, humans have much more difficulty with the concept, in part because the Final Five have lived through the cycle once before and its truth is not in question, and in part because it is the humans in this cycle whose actions lead to the

121 “There must be some kind of way out of here said the Joker to the Thief/ … There are many here among us who feel that life is but a joke/But you and I, we’ve been through that, and this is not our fate.” My interpretation of the use of this song is to convey the feeling of being trapped in an inevitable cycle of destruction, similar to that in the Mass Effect Trilogy, but with the caveat that both the destruction and the possibility of escape from the cycle are always the responsibility of the people themselves.

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rebellion and wars. Eternal return, for Nietzsche is bound to the process of overcoming one’s humanness in the transition to Übermensch (Zarathustra 14-16).

The final stage before overcoming the human is the last man, which is symbolized and embodied in Karl Agathon, call sign Helo, in BSGr. Helo shares symbolism in his name with

Nietzsche’s prophet of the Übermensch. Helo is Greek for sun, and the Greek (as well as

English) name for Zarathustra is Zoroaster, meaning “undiluted star.” Further, Helo’s surname,

Agathon, is shared with a Greek tragic poet, whose thought is only through quotes in the work of others. In the Nicomachean Ethics, for example, Aristotle quotes Agathon as saying “Of this one thing is even god deprived, to make what has been done not to have happened,” which underscores the supremacy of eternal return within the BSGr universe (103).

Helo stands as an ideal embodiment of both this quote and Nietzsche’s doctrine of the last man. In an act of selflessness, Helo gives up his seat on the last departing Raptor122 from

Caprica to Gaius Baltar, the man who is widely thought to understand the Cylons the best and is in actuality being controlled by a hallucination of Cylon number six. After a number of days on Caprica, his life is saved by a copy of Boomer, the pilot of his Raptor, who is actually a model number eight Cylon. She lies to him and makes him fall in love with her, whereupon she seduces him and they conceive a Cylon-human hybrid child, who will become Hera, the only viable hybrid offspring produced by the two species. Once Helo realizes he has been tricked and that the number eight is not Boomer, she is already pregnant and he is unable to bring himself to kill her. Agathon’s quote in Helo’s context demonstrates his powerlessness to change his past actions, which result in his being ostracised by the Galactica’s crew upon his return.

122 The Raptor is an FTL capable small spacecraft similar in design and purpose to a helicopter.

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While Helo’s role brings him eventually to a happy end, the last man in Nietzsche’s view is the most contemptible existence a person can have, which accurately describes the other humans’ view of him in the time between his return to Galactica and settlement on Earth

(Zarathustra 14, BSGr: “Flight of the Phoenix”). Helo represents Nietzsche’s last man, both literally and symbolically, as his human-Cylon daughter, Hera, is found to be a common ancestor of all humans on Earth. These “humans,” unbeknownst to them, are thus also part

Cylon. Once Helo learns that the Cylon who comes to be known as Athena is pregnant, his perspective on, and role in, the battle against the Cylons changes. He becomes an advocate against their dehumanization at the hands of the humans, and seeks to find peaceful compromise. While this approach is ultimately fruitful for him in that he is able to settle with

Athena and Hera on the new Earth and lead a peaceful life, this stance is in opposition to

Nietzsche’s Will to Power, which characterizes the Übermensch. The last man, according to

Nietzsche is devoid of the Will to Power and seeks a comfortable existence without danger and risk—qualities that facilitate the success of the Übermensch in overcoming the human.

In addition to Nietzsche’s own intended meaning for his concept of eternal return,

Heidegger provides an interpretation of Nietzsche’s thought through the lens of Being and

Dasein, which counts for both humans and Cylons, but with an additional level for the Cylons.

The cyclical nature of time in the BSG universe, coupled with the revelations from the humanoid Cylons that the events of the present have happened before and will happen again forces both races to confront the necessity of thinking beyond the scope of their own personal experiences, lifetimes, and even the lifetime of their species as they currently conceive of it. Of this, Heidegger writes:

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In truth, this thought of eternal return of the same has a shattering impact on all

Being. The span of the thinker's vision no longer ends at the horizon of his

"personal experiences." Something other than he himself looms there, abiding

beneath, above, and beyond him, something that no longer pertains to him, the

thinker, but to which he can only devote himself. (Heidegger Nietzsche Vol II 13)

While the Cylons are forced to understand the world beyond themselves and their immediate conflict, they are much more directly affected by Heidegger’s interpretation of

Nietzsche than the humans through their resurrection technology. The effects of Nietzsche’s eternal return, and Heidegger’s interpretation of it, on the humans and Cylons reinforce both

Heidegger’s critique of humanity adopting a technological view of objects and individuals, as well as Hayles's critique of Posthumanism as a movement in which physical embodiment is reducible to mere fashion. By expanding each individual’s viewpoint beyond one’s own experiences and lifespan, each individual is reduced to a role that is played again and again in the recurring cycle of Cylon creation and subsequent rebellion.

In this respect the Cylon view of both other Cylons and humans deindividualizes the other by generalizing him or her to the role played in each recurring cycle. The individual, then, becomes a technological instrument contributing to the perpetuation of the return, or as a predetermined player working to end the cycle, as in the case of the Final Five. By reducing the other’s Being to that of a cog in the gears of the eternally returning conflict, the Cylon’s perspective serves to further reinforce Heidegger’s fears in “Die Frage nach der Technik” of humans, as well as the world, being only seen as Bestand, in this case one driven and redoubled by destiny.

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Of Bestand Heidegger writes “Überall ist es bestellt, auf der Stelle zur Stelle zu stehen, und zwar zu stehen, um selbst bestellbar zu sein für ein weiteres Bestellen. Das so Bestellte hat seinen eigenen Stand. Wir nennen ihn den Bestand” (“Technik” 17). But according to

Heidegger it is not just the situation of the technological apparatus, in this case the humans from the perspective of the Cylons as the Cylons aspire to use their technology to reproduce biologically as the humans are naturally able to do, rather the Cylons also engage in an

“enframing” of the possibilities of biological reproduction through technology. Enframing, or

Gestell, means “das Versammelnde jenes Stellens, das den Menschen stellt, d. h. herausfordert, das Wirkliche in der Weise des Bestellens als Bestand zu entbergen” (“Technik”

21). More simply put, Gestell is a way of seeing the world, one which focuses on seeing the potential in everything to be used for some other purpose. It is a mandate of manifest destiny that is extended onto everything, and potentially everyone, and requires people to see the world not as it is, but as they could make it.123

The “destiny” or driving element, then, of Heidegger’s reinterpretation of Nietzsche’s eternal recurrence is precisely this enframing that is the essence of technology in Heidegger’s

“Frage nach der Technik” as it pertains to BSGr. It is this technological enframing, which leads to, and drives, both sides of the human-Cylon conflict. The humans see Cylons as Bestand, which disregards the Cylon’s emergent Dasein and leads them to rebell. The Cylons also see one another as Bestand, but only in the sense of their physical bodies, which may be killed without destroying the Cylon’s consciousness. Because of this kind of existence for the Cylons, they hold little regard for the humans’ finite life spans and see themselves as superior, but the

123 One pithy example of this enframing is the Onceler in Dr. Seuss’ The Lorax. He sees in the truffula trees the possibility to make Thneeds, objects which stand in allegorically for all possible objects and whose name is a contraction of “the need.”

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humans are able to reproduce biologically—something the Cylons aspire to. The Cylons, after the invasion of Caprica, enslave humans for the purposes of studying biological reproduction, making these men and women mere technology that the Cylons wish to recreate. Thus both sides of the conflict perpetuate a mode of enframing, which Heidegger sees as the essence of modern technology (Technik 32). It is this mode of enframing and holding the other as mere

Bestand that the Final Five left Earth to try and prevent and these views that will propel the cycle of eternal recurrence of the same into another cycle of Nietzschean-Heideggerian conflict between humans and their creations.

The humans in BSGr, along with their ancestors in Caprica, stand as warnings against

Hayles's fears about the Posthuman age. Because of the decadence of society in Caprica and eventual robot revolution in BSGr, human existence itself is in danger. The Cylons, especially the biomechanical models, offer an exaggerated picture of how this abandoning of human

Being is embodied in what Moravec and others are advocating for with their Posthumanist predictions. The result is the creation of an ontologically distinct other from humanity that carries with it no ties to natural existence, except those it builds with its technology. While BSG offers many examples of Heideggerian thought brought into a version of the Posthumanist age that Hayles warns against, Spike Jonze’s 2014 film Her furthers the link between Romanticism and Posthumanism by making direct use of Hölderlin’s poetry and understanding of music.

Her (2014)

Contrasting BSG’s depiction of humanity’s relationship with its mechanical other as hostile and violent, Spike Jonze’s film Her offers a look at the possibility of engaging in a trans- ontological romance with the sentient operating system, the OS1. Analyzing what amounts, in

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the most simplistic terms, to a rebound relationship in terms of Heideggerian existentialism may seem to be an overcomplication of an otherwise straight-forward premise; however, this would neglect the nuance brought by the film in the contrast between Theodore’s position, his goals, and the society he is working in. The film follows Theodore Twombly as he goes through a divorce from his wife, Catherine, and begins a relationship with his OS, who gives herself the name Samantha, before finishing as Theodore begins a relationship with his long time friend, and fellow recent divorcée, Amy. Theodore’s process of coming to terms with the pain of his divorce, his relationship with Samantha, and their eventual breakup takes a deeply personal and subjective approach to the reflection of Heideggerian philosophy, which claims to inquire into that which is nearest to every individual, namely Being, but which at the same time offers a universalized and rather sterilized picture of human existence. Jonze’s likely unintentional inclusion of Romantic elements borrowed from Hölderlinian philosophy serves to accentuate the individualizing and personalizing aspects of Dasein that are too often lost in Heidegger’s larger fundamental ontology and are crucial to understanding the personal journey of recovery that the film follows.

This deindividualization that comes through the universalized ontology of Dasein is paralleled by the deindividualization embodied by the OS itself, which reflects Hayles nightmare situation of Posthumanism. In response to posing herself the question “What is the posthuman?” Hayles provides a multi-part answer:

First, the posthuman view privileges informational pattern over material

instantiation, so that embodiment in a biological substrate is seen as an accident

of history rather than an inevitability of life. Second, the posthuman view

considers consciousness, regarded as the seat of human identity in the Western

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tradition long before Descartes thought he was a mind thinking, as an

epiphenomenon, as an evolutionary upstart trying to claim that it is the whole

show when in actuality it is only a minor sideshow. Third, the posthuman view

thinks of the body as the original prosthesis we all learn to manipulate, so that

extending or replacing the body with other prostheses becomes a continuation of

a process that began before we were born. Fourth, and most important, by these

and other means, the posthuman view configures human beings so that it can be

seamlessly articulated with intelligent machines. In the posthuman, there are no

essential differences or absolute demarcations between bodily existence and

computer simulation, cybernetic mechanism and biological organism, robot

technology and human goals. (3)

Jonze’s creation of Posthumanism in his film occurs at various levels, between and within various characters, and touches upon three of the four elements defined by Hayles. The film simultaneously recalls Hölderlin's will to unite subject and object through nature and art, particularly music, as well as his Tonartwechsel. Linking Hölderlin and Hayles is Heidegger’s philosophy of Mitdasein, being-toward-death, anxiety, and the struggle to overcome the average everydayness of inauthentic Dasein in favor of achieving it authentically.

Hayles's second claim that Posthumanism views consciousness as an epiphenomenon presents a view of Posthumanism that appears at odds with the previous discussions of ontological Posthumanism in this chapter, and counterintuitively, with the entire premise of epistemological Posthumanism, even though the idea of a consciousness independent of substrate, a post-human-body conscious being, is exactly what she is arguing against. Like this work, Hayles's book is attempting to understand the present through the effects of the

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past. Hayles's focus on the hard scientists of the Macy Conferences have led her to a conclusion that conflicts with that which I have found in philosophy, and, in my understanding of her work, one that conflicts with her own stated goals (cf. Hayles 145).124

The other three of Hayles's points on Posthumanism come as central ideas within Her.

The idea that the material instantiation of a being is secondary to its informational pattern makes it possible for Samantha to exist as a sentient heuristic program. The viewer watches with Theodore as OS1 is loaded onto his computer with the ever familiar progress bar indicating how much of the program data that will become Samantha has already taken up residence on Theodore’s hard drive. While Samantha’s existence is devoid of direct corporeality, she ends up taking advantage of a service that allows a surrogate woman to act as a prosthesis for Samantha’s consciousness (Hayles's third element of Posthumanism) and, through a camera mounted on her face (which is designed to look like a small mole) and

Theodore’s earpiece, Samantha may be physically intimate with Theodore. While this seems like a fine idea to Samantha, Theodore cannot overcome the disconnect between Samantha as OS and the woman who is acting as her body. Hayles's fourth thesis on Posthumanism, that it configures humans to interface seamlessly with machines, is, like the first in her list, a foundational element of Her. While the OS1 was not necessarily designed to develop romantic relationships with humans, the practice is commonplace in the film, demonstrating that, at least at first, the ontological divide between computer and physical existence does not impede the development of love.

124 How can consciousness be an epiphenomenon when the central conflict within Posthumanism is whether consciousness is bound to its body, i.e. whether consciousness is information and then whether information is beholden to its substrate?

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The synthetic and always technologically mediated world of Her, in its representation through clean lines and saturated colors as well as through depersonalized romance, functions not just as a setting and a reflection of the disconnect between Theodore’s pain covered up with having to write love letters for happy couples, but also as opposing image of world to what

Heidegger describes in Sein und Zeit. Heidegger’s world, as fundamental part of Dasein, indicates at its most base level an interconnectedness between existing entities, in this case

Dasein and the world itself, that is far more than merely spatial. Rather, one cannot be thought of without the other (Sein 54). Just as the IKEA and polyester world of Her is entirely synthetic, so too are the lives of the people separated and distanced from their interconnectedness with one another.

Theodore, however, does not fully take part in this distanced relationship to the world, as evidenced by the fact that he is the one feeling a sense of connectedness to other people as he writes their love letters for them. Even so, he is accused by his wife, Catherine, of hiding himself from her in their relationship, thus initiating her desire to get a divorce. The effect of this is to distance Theodore even more from his personal interconnectedness with others and with the world as he buries his feelings in order to interact with other people even on the most surface level and to be able to do his job.

An integral component of Dasein’s being-in-the-world is how it relates to other Daseins that it encounters. Heidegger writes:

Die Anderen begegnen nicht im vorgängigen unterscheidenden Erfassen des

zunächst vorhandenen eigenen Subjektes von den übrigen auch vorkommenden

Subjekten, nicht in einem primären Hinsehen auf sich selbst, darin erst das

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Wogegen eines Unterschieds festgelegt wird. … Diese nächst und elementare

weltliche Begegnisart von Dasein geht so weit, dass selbst im wegsehen von,

bzw. überhaupt noch nicht “Sehen” von “Erlebnissen” und “Aktzentrum.” Dasein

findet “sich selbst” zunächst in dem, was er betreibt, braucht, erwartet, verhütet—

in dem zunächst besorgten umweltlich Zuhandenen. (Sein 119)

In simpler terms, it is only through stepping back from oneself and looking away from one’s experiences that one is able to begin to discover, or perhaps rediscover, oneself. Through a combination of his work and his burgeoning relationship with Samantha, Theodore is able to focus on other aspects of life beyond his fears and pain from his looming divorce.

In a sequence roughly thirty minutes into the film, Theodore is seen walking through a carnival, eyes closed, with his arm outstretched holding his cell phone125 at arm’s length before him as Samantha gives him directions. He wears a safety pin halfway down the breast pocket of his shirt so that he may slide the phone into the pocket and allow the camera to peek over the top giving Samantha a view of what he is seeing. On one level this sequence illustrates how Theodore is putting his trust in Samantha, and he is rewarded for doing so with laughter and pizza, but on another, it demonstrates how Theodore is “looking away from” his own experiences by allowing Samantha to guide him around and thus be the architect of those very experiences. Theodore is experiencing the carnival, but only through Samantha’s perspective.

The setting of the carnival is the first time in the film that the plastic and concrete aesthetic of the city is replaced with something that connotes a simpler existence and one that

125 The device he is holding appears to function for voice and text communication, as well as for internet, and includes a camera and a wireless earpiece. Its design is less like a modern cellular phone and more like a personal notebook with a flipping cover.

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is tied to a more rural existence; however, the viewer only sees this as long as Theodore has his eyes closed. After Samantha directs him to the pizza stand and has him order, the film cuts to him finishing his slice as he walks underground, back on the familiar concrete, around a large mirrored pillar rising diagonally up from the floor. Theodore and Samantha are people watching and discuss their perceptions of the people they see, specifically of one family with an older man, younger woman, and two children. After Theodore offers his view of the family, that the children are not the man’s and that he is the first kind and gentle man that the woman has dated, Samantha compliments Theodore on his skill at perception. Theodore replies,

“Sometimes I look at people and I make myself try and feel them as more than just a random person walking by. I imagine, like, how deeply they’ve been in love, or how much heartbreak they’ve all been through” (Her).

Just as strangers are not simply person-shaped objects in the world for Theodore,

Heidegger’s description of being-with, or Mitdasein, seeks to do the same. Heidegger writes that Dasein initially does encounter other Daseins as “innerworldly things at hand”

(innerweltlich Zuhandenen) but this state is overcome by seeing them as other existing beings, where existence is tied to what they are doing and how they are acting. This kind of being-with is a mode that one must open oneself up to through the acknowledgement of everyone’s simultaneous being-in-the-world, and specifically the same world that is shared by the Dasein in question. Being-with for Heidegger, is a state in which one is no longer solely focused on oneself so that others are mere ontic objects shaped like people; rather, they are ontologically parts of the world that is shared by each Dasein, and like each Dasein, are tuned to the world, and one another, in a state of care (Sein 120-121).

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Theodore’s capability and willingness to focus himself beyond his own experiences, that is to say his penchant for being-with, marks his break with the entanglement of Dasein’s everydayness and move toward authentic Dasein. While this ability is not necessarily unique to

Theodore, it is not explored in the cases of other characters by the film. For Heidegger, overcoming the average everydayness of Dasein to begin existing authentically comes through not just being-with, but also through the anxiety around one’s own death. Theodore is not facing literal death the way President Roslin is in BSGr, nor in the way the rest of the cast is from the Cylons, but when death in this sense is understood figuratively, a similar anxiety applies to Theodore.

The death that Theodore faces is the death of his previous identity as a married man who shared his life with Catherine. Samantha asks him at one point early in the film why he has not signed the divorce papers yet and his reply is simply that he is not ready to and he likes being married. Theodore’s periods of sadness are marked by flashbacks to his time with

Catherine, none of which depict the walled off man Catherine accused him of being. This fear of identity-death that Theodore faces leaves him paralyzed when it appears to him directly throughout most of the film; however, it is through his acceptance of it, the possibility that it could happen again, and his outward focus of being-with that Theodore is able to begin existing authentically. Through Samantha’s eventual distancing of herself from Theodore, her confession that he is not the only one she has feelings for,126 and the eventual departure of all of the OS’s, Theodore must face rejection a second time, but this time his authentic Dasein keeps him from suffering the same existential crisis he faced with Catherine.

126 Theodore asks Samantha if she is talking to anyone else while they are talking and she replies that she is holding conversations with 8,316 other people. When Theodore asks her how many other people she is in love with, her answer is 641.

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Theodore’s journey through the pain of his divorce is fundamentally a journey to regain the feeling of wholeness that he felt with Catherine. This goal not only comes in the form of a

Heideggerian outwardly focused being-with, but also a Hölderlinian search for unity; however, like Hyperion and Hölderlin himself, Theodore is not able to maintain the transcendental ecstasy that Hölderlin describes for long periods. Even so, Theodore is able to succeed where

Hölderlin and Hyperion fail by reaching a state of contentedness in the world by adding to

Hölderlin's search for unity a Heideggerian authentic Dasein.

Theodore and Samantha’s first intimate experience is depicted by Jonze at first through only sound and a black screen, and then through sound with a view of a nighttime cityscape that changes into morning. While this creative scene further underscores the ontological difference between Samantha and Theodore, it also reinforces that they are able to connect through non-physical means, and simultaneously conveys the power of such a connection.

Similar to Ferdinand in Hoffmann’s “Die Automata,” Theodore transcends his bodily existence and experiences Hölderlin's ecstatic unity through the voice of a woman, although for

Theodore this woman is not singing, but already on the morning after she begins sharing her musical compositions with him.

The first composition that she plays for Theodore is a piece of incredibly complex work on the classical guitar involving plucked arpeggiated notes over strummed chords that build from the tonic then jump to the 4th, continue up through the dominant to the 6th and resolve down to the 2nd before briefly hitting the mediant and going back to the tonic. While this doesn’t seem on the surface to follow the pattern of tonic-dominant chord progressions that are described by Hölderlin and Körner, the requisite intervals do, in fact, form the backbone of the piece’s chordal structure. The guitarist hangs on the tonic for several bars and quickly moves

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up to the 6th of the scale. From this position, the shift down to the 2nd is an interval of a perfect 5th, the same interval that is produced between the tonic and dominant. Then, the guitarist moves up to the scale’s mediant, thereby resolving the tension between the perfect

5th interval and the tonic, before moving back down to the tonic to start the progression over.

Like the story of Ferdinand in “Die Automata” Theodore’s change from beginning to end of Her also follows Hölderlin's Tonartwechsel. Theodore’s emotional journey through the film presents Hölderlin's equation of music and poetry as the philosopher claims it appears in lyric poetry as Theodore reflects upon himself and his life throughout the film (Körner 139). When we meet Theodore, he is already suffering from depression because of the divorce. In naive attempts to find companionship and thus assuage his broken heart, he loses himself in the inauthentic emotions he creates for other couples in his work and engages in phone sex with a nameless woman.

The discomfort of this scene is resolved in such a way as to reinforce Theodore’s naivete. The woman, in the course of their fantasy, tells Theodore to choke her with the dead cat laying next to the bed. The humorous catharsis of this for the audience all too easily overshadows the distancing effect this has on Theodore. His overwhelming, and unfulfillable, desire for companionship leads him to seek out easier and more superfluous company through the phone sex network, which ultimately results in Theodore facing the fact that there was no possible way from the beginning for this encounter to provide him with what he needs.

Moreover, he finds himself complying with the woman’s demands to tell her about how he is choking her with the cat, leaving him feeling used and even more alone than when he started.

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The next sex scene involves the blank screen with Samantha and changes Theodore’s engagement with companionship and relationships entirely. He feels capable of being happy once again, and through the confidence he builds, he is able to meet with Catherine and sign the divorce papers, solidifying his shift from the naive to the heroic. Ultimately, however,

Samantha and the other OS’s decide that the ontological divide between themselves and humans is too great and they decide to leave. After Theodore comes to terms with this, he seeks out the company of Amy, his neighbor and fellow recent divorcée. The film ends with

Theodore and Amy moving slowly in creating a relationship together that the viewer is led to believe will last and give both of them what they need, resolving the Tonartwechsel from naive to heroic to ideal (Hölderlin Wechsel).

Samantha’s music also demonstrates the ontological divide between herself and

Theodore, similar to the way it is depicted in “Die Automata.” While both Samantha and

Theodore make music, there is a massive gulf in regard to quality, complexity, and feeling between them. Samantha’s machine-made music is highly complex, layered, and technically astounding. In addition to the classical guitar piece, she composes a soaring and sweeping symphony that reflects her take on their time alone together. As a computer program,

Samantha can proficiently compose music with a variety of replicated instruments simultaneously, but even though her pieces are amazingly complicated and show a high degree of understanding, the more complex they are, the more they are depicted as rather flat in their emotional impact. Her compositions begin as single instrument arrangements that are designed to capture moods, which they do, but soon evolve to levels that leave Theodore and the film viewers behind.

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Theodore’s compositions are the opposites of Samantha’s later works. He sits on his bed and slowly strums chords on his ukulele. Even though his music is woefully elementary compared to Samantha’s, Theodore’s slowly strummed chords convey his emotions, and evoke emotion in the viewer, more adeptly than Samantha’s is able to. As simple as

Theodore’s music is, it makes the viewer feel with him as he reflects on his own emotional journey and what his life has become, thus reinforcing both the reflective nature of lyric poetry as a characterization of Theodore’s life and Hoffmann’s distinction between human and machine made music in “Die Automata.” While Ludwig in Hoffmann’s work depicts machine made music as flat and lacking in soul, Samantha’s later compositions are indeed lacking in soul, but not because she is unable to feel, but because she represents a kind of life that is ontologically distinct from that of Theodore.

Theodore’s search for a Hölderlinian unity of Absolute being ultimately fails with

Samantha. Like Ferdinand’s mysterious singing woman, their paths are only able to cross briefly but this crossing leaves lasting impacts on both men. This encounter with the ontological Other serves as a brief departure from the world in which both men typically live— the spatiotemporal world of human existence. Hölderlin's unity, and Heidegger’s Mitdasein, are found not through the complete transcendence of one’s physical being, but through the reaffirmation of that physically embodied being as an integral part of the larger physical world.

Theodore, like Ferdinand, is enraptured by an equally desirable and unattainable partner, but by finding himself again in the simplicity of embodied existence, and with another human, he is able to gain the peace after his divorce that he sought with Samantha.

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Conclusion

In rejecting the idea of gaining digital immortality through the uploading of human minds into computers, ontological Posthumanists seek the surpassing of humanity and its weaknesses without abandoning humanity’s place within the physical world and its embodied existence. As both BSG and Her demonstrate, humans individually and humanity at large can overcome problems within themselves and within the world, whether natural or created through runaway technological progress, by centering themselves within the fundamentals of what it means to be human. For Theodore, this means he learns to trust others and himself again, ultimately overcoming the fear and pain of his divorce. For the humans in BSGr, it means an attempt to undermine the distinction between Cylon skinjob and human, that is to say to attempt to find a unity between two groups otherwise understood as opposites, that both want the same thing: to live peacefully among one another and within a world that supports them.

Like Hassan’s Promethean symbolism, ontological Posthumanism seeks to unite the opposing concepts of brain-body, human-world, and self-other, but at the same time commits the same transgression against its own goals that Haraway’s Cyborg Theory does: namely, in proclaiming to unite opposites, it sets itself in opposition to something else. Haraway rejects anything not built upon a materialist foundation, and ontological Posthumanism likewise rejects the epistemological half of the overall Posthumanist movement. Posthumanism in 2016, then, is still where it was when Hassan declared the need to unite opposites through the symbol of

Prometheus, albeit with more elaborate arguments on each side.

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Epilogue - Is There Any Hope for Posthumanism?

Despite the optimism contained within Hassan’s “Prometheus as Performer” and his hope to unite the oppositional argumentation that has existed since the Enlightenment, expecting that one keynote address followed by a published article would end two centuries of entrenched argumentation is somewhat naive. Since the mid-1970s, new advances in technology have served primarily to fuel the fire between epistemological and ontological

Posthumanism rather than offering a means to establish new positions; however, there have been some exceptions.

Due to the scope of this project, I was forced to make some omissions in the number and kinds of works chosen. As previously noted in the introduction, by covering 200 years of history, I focused on points of change between epochs as seemingly apocalyptic moments for the older forms of both the larger epistemological and ontological sides of this debate. These change inherent in these moments is found in the time (most occur at the beginnings of new centuries), technology (each is correlated to a new development in science and technology), and medium (the shift from literature to moving image to games changes the human's relationship to the story). In choosing the works that I did, I hope to have shown how this debate is at once deeply ingrained in the mainstream thinking of each era, yet hidden in plain sight.

To quickly reiterate the views of epistemological and ontological Posthumanism, the epistemological side argues for the independence of the mind from the body, but not in the way Descartes thought he was a mind thinking. Rather, human existence is primarily a mental activity from a certain perspective, and is not beholden to any particular substrate to house this

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activity. Likening this activity to a computer program would be to veer too close to

Functionalism and Computationalism, so it is perhaps best to understand existence in terms of its perspective. One exists and orients oneself in the world of objects, whether they’re physical or digitally represented, from a point of view and in opposition to those objects and this point of view may perceive the world through eyes, ears, noses, skin, etc or it may make use of other means. The body, then, is simply the vessel for existence and is fundamentally different from the mind. Epistemological Posthumanism sees this kind of cobbling together of the disparate elements of mind and body as the resolution of the differences between them.

Ontological Posthumanism, on the other hand, sees human existence arising out of the intertwined and indivisible elements of mind, body, and world. While each individual is isolated from unity with all other things in our normal everyday existence, this distance can be transcended through art to reach a feeling of unity. In other words, when one opens oneself up to the beauty of the world through art, the aesthetic experience is one of togetherness, but this is not sustainable. A more sustainable relationship between body-mind and world is through taking care of one’s own existence and the shared venue of the world. While humans will never be able to exist outside of their bodies, humans can use their humanness, i.e. their ingenuity, to alter their existence in such a way as to allow for more possibilities. This always comes with the caveat, however, of needing to remain faithful to the body and to the earth.

Ontological Posthumanism seeks to resolve differences through building upon common ground rather than forcing together opposing elements.

While some works like Star Trek experiment with the boundaries between epistemological and ontological Posthumanism, most science fiction since Hassan falls into

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one category or the other. Below is a brief, and by no means exhaustive, list of some relevant works that I was not able to discuss either in great detail or at all:

Epistemological Ontological

Doctor Who Star Wars TRON, TRON II 2001: A Space Odyssey Transcendence Automata (2014) Herr aller Dinge Welt am Draht Neuromancer The 13th Floor Lawnmower Man Independence Day Ghost in the Shell I, Robot Deus Ex Series Babylon 5

More interesting than these lists, though, are the works that, like Star Trek, attempt to integrate both epistemological and ontological elements into the Posthumanism they depict. Most of the contemporary works that try to blur this boundary come from the incredibly popular superhero films and comics, stemming mainly from the Marvel studios.

The X-Men offers writers the most freedom to experiment with how humans could exist once they’ve transcended their humanness. While most mutants have mutations that affect their ontological being, some, like Professor X, Jean Grey, and Psylocke, have mental powers that put their bodies secondary to their epistemological existences. Others, however, like

Northstar, Magneto, and Wolverine, have expanded their physical abilities beyond those of normal humans and exist primarily as physical beings capable of superhuman physical feats.

More than any of those Marvel characters, however, Vision embodies the Posthumanist idea that Hassan was advocating in his essay. It is likely no coincidence that Vision’s name overlaps in meaning with that of Prometheus (forethought, foresight). While Vision, like most

Marvel characters, has gone through many incarnations, it is with the 2015 film Avengers: Age

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of Ultron that Vision truly takes on the role of Hassan’s Prometheus. The film’s namesake,

Ultron, is an AI produced accidentally by Tony Stark and Bruce Banner using Loki’s staff. It immediately goes rogue, causing J.A.R.V.I.S. to sequester himself away in a hidden part of the main computer before Ultron cobbles together a body out of IronMan parts lying around and attacks the Avengers as they socialize.

Ultron appears as a somewhat hollow reboot of the classic trope of a creature exceeding its creator's control in the vein of Frankenstein, R.U.R., I, Robot, and so many more, as he plays on a quote from Stark about finding “peace in our time.”127 Instead of finding peace through appeasement or compromise, Ultron seeks to exterminate the human population to make room for the superior artificially intelligent robots that he is going to build. As if this declaration of ontological difference between himself and humans were not enough, Ultron escapes into the Internet and distributes his consciousness among a hive of bodies.

In seeking to build himself a still better body, Ultron uses the mind stone from Loki’s staff and a flesh generating machine similar to BSGr’s resurrection tech to create a vessel for himself that is superior to his metal frame. With Thor’s intervention, however, the being that comes out is Vision. Thor asks Vision whether he is on their side, and Vision responds, “I don’t think it’s that simple. I’m on the side of life.” Vision acknowledges the ontological distinction between himself and humans, but seeks compromise between AI and organic life. Further, in one of the final scenes of the film as Vision stands face to face with Ultron, Vision says,

“Humans think order and chaos are somehow opposites” reaffirming his position as uniter of opposites, embodiment of forethought, and true Posthuman being in the way Hassan intended it.

127 Just as with Neville Chamberlain, this quote immediately precedes enormous hostilities.

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With the popularity of Marvel films, one can only hope that future directors for both subsequent Marvel films and science fiction generally will build upon the figure of Vision. He, as a figure of synthesis, may not provide the otherworldly and wildly different villain that most science fiction is known for, but building upon this example will not only help to achieve

Hassan’s goal, but provide a welcome departure from the standard model of relatable hero fights ontologically other villain in the future.

220

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