Note #1: this is altogether too long for me to effectively polish up at this exact moment, but "The artist belongs to his work, not the work to the artist."-Novalis
This tidbit of writing needs to get off my desk, or I'll never be finished. When you find some mistake, bad link, typo, or the like, please post a comment so that I can fix it.
Note #2: I'm breaking this article into several smaller posts so that it will be easier to read. It will take a little time for me to finish it, but if I'm going to eat this elephant, it'll be one byte at a time. Keep checking back.
(Last Updated 10:40 AM, May 6, 2012, Fixed hyperlink)
[Jump to part 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8]
Essentially, everyone that was born since the first publishing of Mary Shelley’s novel, The Modern Prometheus (better known as Frankenstein), has at least been exposed to the idea that sometime in the future science would allow us to cheat death, to live forever in some other body. It is a safe bet to say that in her work of classic horror fiction, Shelley was tapping into the hopes and fears of the readers at the time. So, you could say that there already was some strong desire to keep existing after we die.
Of course, Frankenstein was not the first Western writing to forward the idea of living forever, in a new body. Religions throughout the Western world have been making similar claim for thousands of years. The Egyptian god Osiris is the very embodiment of that thought.
Through his mastery over life and death, Osiris represented both the cycles of the Nile River (life when the river flowed and death when it nearly dried up, followed by life again), and the belief in literal life after death, although in the same body as he had before as long as it was properly mummified. Religion after religion repeated that theme with added details, amended storyline, and plagiarized material used by each new cult to arise. Arguably, the most influential on the West is the Christian mythos, which comforts believers with the thought that their souls sleep when their bodies die and will awaken again when Christ returns.
In the future after some inevitable dark age (if the old patterns of history hold true), future archeologists and anthropologists from some time after Christianity is as dead and forgotten as the thousands of Greek and Roman mystery cults, might have a hard time distinguishing the differences between the beliefs of the ancient Egyptians and the contemporary Christians. At least when it comes to the two religions’ views on life and death, they bear a striking resemblance. However, there is one unique aspects was that the authors of the Bible added in, the concept of taking the old parts and supernaturally transforming them into a new body, manufactured by a god to be perfect.
If those same anthropologists stumble upon a copy of Shelley’s novel, and have somehow lost the concept of fiction or they regard contemporary religious writings the same way we look at Homer’s The Odyssey and The Iliad, then they might have a serious problem separating Frankenstein from all the creation myths and resurrection stories in Western religions. It has similar plot elements, themes, and supernatural beliefs as religious texts, as is betrayed in her own use of ‘Prometheus’, which is the name of the Greek Titan best known for stealing fire from the gods for humans. In the Latin version of the story, he created man from clay; sound familiar? The main difference is that instead of a god creating a flawed body from a weak substance, perfecting a properly preserved body or building a new, perfect body, it has a man building a body through scientific and occult (hidden) knowledge. Some combination of forbidden and the scientific imbues the creature with the ability to become intelligent, “eloquent,educated, and well-mannered”, while still being a “hideously ugly creation”.
Seeing that the theme predates Shelley, perhaps it would be more accurate to say that everyone born in the collective known as Western Civilization from its earliest beginnings has been exposed to the concept that there is some aspect of existence that transcends the physical body. The Egyptians called that part the ba, and the “life-force” of a living human the ka. Christians called it the soul and the flesh. The 16th Century mathematician and natural philosopher, René Descartes, called it the mind and the body.
They were all making the same observations; a body alive has a personality, a body dead is just rotting flesh. (Ultimately, they were likely all describing the same emergent property, albeit in supernatural terms, which we still study in fields of Psychology, Neurobiology, and the Philosophy of Mind.) That led them to the question, what happens to the personality when the body is nothing more than rotting flesh? Interestingly, in almost 5,000 years, the popular answer was the same; the body dies when the personality separates from it and then goes on existing in some form. By Shelley’s time (18th-19th century), new thoughts about life and death had emerged from the rapidly expanding body of scientific knowledge.
By the Georgian era, an almost grotesque attitude about death emerged across the West as science began shaking the foundations of ancient beliefs. We can still feel the effects of the explosion of scientific knowledge today as the seemingly endless battle between rationality and faith continues to rock the popular consciousness. Frankenstein captured the horror that people felt (and continue to feel) at the concept that science was turning humans into gods, and the thought that logic killing god leaves no one to scoop up our immortal personalities from our rotting flesh. Are we no more than just a collection of organs being controlled like a puppet by three pounds of gray matter?
Most likely accidentally, Shelley also hinted at another form of new fiction along with the horror she brought down upon her readers, science fiction. Her tale, which she meant to be a cautionary story about playing with the fire of the gods, also brought the scientific experiments with chemistry and electrical currents on flesh (even dead rotting flesh) into the general conversation; her “monster” (once cleaned up) would someday become science’s answer to disillusioned believers’ questions about life after death.
If we are nothing more than organs controlled by bioelectrical impulses from the brain, then the essence of life ends only when the brain stops sending those signals. If we could artificially augment them, we could live much longer. If we could replace the weak, clay body, we could live forever. Even after we die, the right combination of body repair or replacement and electrical apparatus could resurrect and sustain us for the entire foreseeable future. However, biology advanced.
In the 194 years since she published, not one single person that was once (fully) dead, has been brought back to life, not in the terms imagined by Georgian science. The body is far more complex than we thought at the time. Every time it seems like we have a complete understanding of exactly how human life works, we find only more questions that need to be answered. Even with a complete map of the human genome, we have yet to actually understand human life as Dr. Victor Frankenstein seemed to in Shelley’s imagination.
The one thing we can certainly say is that our tools have become far more complex. In 1818, when The Modern Prometheus was first published, what we’d call Psychology was under the purview of Biology and the Philosophy of Mind. The body/brain part was handled solely by medical researchers that hadn’t figured out that drinking water filled with sewage was bad for you. The mind part had all but stalled out on the debate of Cartesian consciousness (the mind being separate from the body) and mind-body interactions argued in necessarily a priori terms (without or independent of experience) because it is impossible to physically see the mind. It’s not until Psychology separated as its own field that new theories were developed, concepts that would continue to shape our understanding of ourselves long after they were abandoned.
[Jump to part 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8]
[Jump to part 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8]
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