THE OVERMAN AS THE CURE FOR THE DISEASE OF HUMANITY:
SCIENCE FICTION, PHILOSOPHY, AND THE PROBLEMATIC OF HEALTH
September 2005
ABSTRACT
The Overman as the Cure for the Disease of Humanity: Science Fiction, Philosophy, and the Problematic of Health
Instead of preserving the mainstream notion of health as a ‘normal’ interior equilibrium, science fiction novels written in the past fifty years present an ongoing dialogue with Nietzsche’s dynamic conception of health as individual struggle for overcoming. Sickness, correspondingly, is abstaining from the struggle. By turning to the cutting-edge genre of science fiction the thesis will explain why Nietzsche would diagnose contemporary Western society as diseased, and why the paradigm of the overman health is the cure. The treatment of Nietzsche’s conception of health is then examined in three novels representative of broad trends in science fiction during the second half of the 20th century: George Orwell 1984 (1949), William Gibson’s Neuromancer (1984) and Greg Egan’s Distress (1995). I will show that though there is an attempt to embody Nietzsche’s paradigm of health, there is a difficulty to follow one of its cardinal elements. While Nietzsche regards health as a ceaseless process of struggle to overcome oneself, science fiction addresses the use of technology to ultimately attain the goal of the struggle. When the struggle is resolved, so is health according to Nietzsche. Conclusions will be drawn on the problematic of the Western conception of health as a static state rather than a dynamic process as well as the pending implications on the future evolution of humanity.
CONTENTS
PREFACE The Disease of Man. The Cure of the Overman 5
NIETZSCHE CONTRA 19TH CENTURY GERMAN INTELLECTUALS 7
DELINEATING NIETZSCHE’S CONCEPTION OF HEALTH AND SICKNESS 10
THE CURE: NEVER GET CURED. BUT DON’T EVER STOP TRYING 20
INTRODUCTION When Health Becomes Evolution 22
SCIENCE FICTION: A GENRE FOCUSING ON HEALTH 23
GOD IS DEAD. LONG LIVE TECHNOLOGY 27
THE STRUGGLE IS OVER. AND SO IS MAN 29
CHAPTER ONE The Fire-Dog Got It All Wrong – George Orwell’s 1984 (1949) 32
CHAPTER TWO Cyberspace Mania – William Gibson’s Neuromancer (1984) 53
CHAPTER THREE To Know or Not to Know, That is the Question – Greg Egan’s Distress (1995) 77
CONCLUSION Same Disease, Different Day (2005) 94
PREFACE
The Disease of Man. The Cure of the Overman
“The earth, said he, hath a skin; and this skin hath diseases. One of these diseases, for example, is called Man.” [1]
“The Overman is the meaning of the earth. Let your will say: the Overman shall be the meaning of the earth!” [2]
In their joint essay, “Nietzsche’s Conception of Health: The Idealization of Struggle,” Scott H. Podolsky and Alfred I. Tauber offer an argument for the importance of Nietzsche’s philosophy of the body as a central element in his thought.[3] Heavily influenced by a popular understanding of Darwin’s theory of evolution, specifically the struggle for survival, Podolsky and Tauber argue that Nietzsche extrapolated these notions to instinctual struggle within the individual, coining the concept of the Ubermensch (the overman) as the successful emblem of this process of struggle and overcoming. Accordingly, both claim Nietzsche’s ideas of health and illness closely mirror the broader biological foundations of his philosophy, in which health means the rigorous exercise of the instinctual struggle for aggrandizement, whereas illness succumbs to competition without struggle.
By the end of the 19th century, the Western world generally recognized and accepted Charles Darwin’s evolutionary theory on the emergence and transformation of the species. Both the species and the organism became less entities than processes, dynamically evolving and surviving according to their level of adaptability. Responding to this biological evolutionary theory, Nietzsche strived to replace the term ‘adaptability’ with inner turmoil as the essence of man’s evolutionary process. Instead of regarding the driving force behind evolution as what evolutionary biologists refer to as ‘fitness’, he offered a dynamic conception of ‘health’ as a ceaseless individual struggle for overcoming oneself mentally and physically.
Departing from Darwin’s evolution theory, Nietzsche regards man as in control of his existence and not the environment (Zeitlin 126).[4] According to Darwin, the new traits best suited to the circumstances in which a species lives will be most likely to appear again in the next generation. Accordingly, the most successful variations will be transmitted from generation to generation until the species gradually evolves, through the process of natural-selection, into a somewhat different species.[5] In this sense, man is a part of a mechanistic system in which the environment is active, while man is re-active. Evolution, as a result, is regarded as a mechanistic system, since it does not take man into consideration; it is a-moral. Man needs to adjust himself to the environment, and not vise versa. Nietzsche disagrees. For him, man is the active agent, while the environment is acted upon. Man has the ability to control his body and mind through sheer power of Will, and by that, control the environment. Secondly, since Darwin sees evolution as a matter of adaptation, no direction or no moral values are attached to it. However for Nietzsche, the process of evolution is linear, and the organism can either evolve by attaining higher values, or degenerate by failing to achieve these values. Man can either evolve by gaining greater health, or remain sick as he currently is, and degenerate. Thus, evolution results not from the struggle against the external environment, but from the struggle to willfully attain greater ‘health’ (Laing 403).[6]
Hence, Nietzsche undermines the whole concept of “struggle for existence” – the struggle is existence.[7] That is why man struggles with his environment even when the means of subsidence are sufficient for all” (Laing 409). Even when the environment supplies all of man’s necessities such as sufficient territory for shelter, security and enough food, the one who desires to be healthy would still fight against any other, from his community or external to it, for superiority in strength and range of domination. The struggle for existence is first and foremost from within, the struggle to organize contradictory desires and to overcome mental or physical obstacles (Laing 409). The external environment, and society within it, are external instruments that can fuel this inner struggle by nourishing the contradictory desires, and posing obstacles to be overcome by the individual.
While both Darwin and Nietzsche agree there is no attainable goal at the end of this process, their explanation for the matter differs. Darwin claims there is no possibility of achieving an ideal organism since it does not exist; the value of the organism depends on its adaptation to its surroundings. Yet for Nietzsche, it is impossible to reach that ideal since the value of the organism is an outcome of his struggle to become that ideal, thus achieving it means terminating the struggle, which undermines the whole notion of evolving. From the mere coining of the term Ubermensch, Nietzsche epitomizes struggling as the essence of the evolution. Since the correct translation is Overman, and not Superman, it is evident that the essence of evolution is struggling to become something higher than man, without actually achieving the ultimate goal. Moreover, achieving the evolutionary ideal undermines the whole notion of an Overman, who is defined by his struggle to never-ending improvement.
NIETZSCHE CONTRA 19TH CENTURY GERMAN INTELLECTUALS
Though Nietzsche borrowed from the dominant biological paradigms and contemporary science of his time, he transcended other 19th century German intellectuals through his abundant use of original health and sickness metaphors. In his book Nietzsche, Biology and Metaphor, Gregory Moore explores Nietzsche’s response to the intellectual debates sparked by the publication of Charles Darwin’s The Origin of Species. [8] [9] By examining the biological metaphors in Nietzsche’s writings, Gregory Moore shows how deeply Nietzsche was absorbed in European intellectual fin-de-siècle debates on evolution and degeneration, as well as responding to the fears about the forthcoming biological collapse of Western civilization. Yet Moore asserts, “no other thinker has such an ambivalent, complex relationship to the themes of race and disease, progress and decline’ (Moore 156).
Moore traces Nietzsche’s view of health as a war between conflicting internal forces to the work of the German embryologist Wilhelm Roux (1850-1924) who argued that “organs, tissues, cells and even molecules of organic matter are found in an unceasing struggle for existence with one another for food, space and the utilization of external stimulation” (Moore 37). Nietzsche borrowed Roux’s biological theory in developing his notion of health as a conflict of multiple internal forces periodically resolving itself through the establishment of an inner regulative hierarchy (Moore 37-8, 43-6).
In developing the aspect of the inner driving force directing the individual, or in other words, the will to power as the energy behind striving towards health, Nietzsche drew heavily on the ideas of an obscure Anglo-German zoologist called William Rolph who argued against what he perceived as Darwin’s insistence on the primacy of a survival instinct. For Rolph, the primary biological urge was for expansion and not preservation, denying the existence of an instinct for self-preservation, or at the very least, the notion that such a drive represents the principal motivation of animal behavior. Rather, life seeks primarily to expand itself. This elementary scheme is expressed as a ‘law of assimilation,’ applying both to the organic and inorganic world. Growth, Rolph argues, is determined by a process of diffusion, of instability, in which endosmosis (movement of substance into the organ from its surrounding) predominates over exosmosis (movement of substance from the organ into its surrounding) (Moore 46-55).
However, unlike his contemporaries, Nietzsche’s evolutionary theory is based on his own accounts of morality (Moore 85). Going beyond his age, Nietzsche turns Christian concerns with degeneracy, decadence, and mental illness back upon Christianity itself. One of the prominent examples is the difference between the evolution of the ‘healthy’ verses that of the ‘sick’. The evolution of the healthy is a matter of the springing forth of isolated cases of intense complexity and individuality, a “sudden eruption of life’s creative energies” (Moore 54). The sick evolve by gathering in increasingly large groups and reaching higher and higher levels of adaptation. One of their adaptive strategies is morality. Thus, the morality of the majority is ‘herd morality’, which is a pattern of consistent and innate behavior promoting the continued survival of the social organism. However, once society undergoes massive periods of breakdowns and crises, the healthy self-governing individual flourishes, while the sick herd members who lack this trait are left to perish (Moore 85).
On the more philosophical level, Friedrich von Hardenberg’s (Novalis) meditations on health and illness anticipate to an uncanny extent many of Nietzsche’s insights on his conception of health and sickness (Krell 198).[10] Especially in his 1798-99 notebooks, Novalis refers to what he calls ‘bizarre thought’, namely that the connection between life and illness might be elevating rather than distressing and depressing. Furthermore, Novalis claims that no matter how elevating illness in general might be, the soul itself, the principle of life, may serve to aggravate the worst illness of the body. Finally, sheer love of illness can transform malady into supreme positive pleasure, that illness may be a means toward higher synthesis, a means of returning to intimacy with nature (Krell 199-201). Though Novalis’s ideas closely mirror Nietzsche’s in the matter, Nietzsche’s critique of traditional Christian morality once again sets him apart. Since Nietzsche passionately opposes the mind-body division, endorsed by Christianity, he does not support an idea of a ‘soul’, let alone it being the principle of life which dominates the body’s condition. Health is a moral, spiritual and intellectual quality as much as a physical one. The spiritually pious type represented in Thus Spake Zarathustra [11] as the worst of all human species, is the Letzte Mensch (the ‘last man’) or the “dull post-human remains that litter the earth at the end of time.” [12] Moreover, though Nietzsche considers sickness as necessary for gaining health, his language does not foster a sadistic ‘loving’ of it or promoting it since it can yield either physical or mental pleasure. What Nietzsche does endorse, as stated in In Thus Spake Zarathustra, is the idea that sickness provides one with a perspective by which one can better appreciate periods of health. After sickness, everything appears new and fresh again: ”only where there are tombs” says Zarathustra, “are there resurrections” (TSZ, II, 11). Nietzsche can affirm sickness and its various manifestations because he sees them as leading to a greater appreciation of health and well-being, because they push man to exercise his will for power, to experience an inner sense of tension that endorses a dynamic conception of being, but not a masochistic loving of it.
DELINEATING NIETZSCHE’S CONCEPTION OF HEALTH AND SICKNESS
Delineating an exact formulation of Nietzsche’s conception of health and sickness is difficult due to its peculiar ambiguity. It is intentional, as Jaspers explains. To begin with, Nietzsche avoids giving a detailed description of what is precisely health since it simply does not exist. It is man’s goal to determine what health ought to mean for him. Thus, paradoxically health in one case might appear like the opposite of health in another. Health and sickness are not always essentially different from one another, and we should not make distinct principles or entities of them. Actually, there are only differences in degree between them (Jaspers 112)[13]:
“[T]here are innumerable healths of the body; and the more we allow the unique and incomparable to raise its head again, and the more we abjure the dogma of the “equality of man,” the more must the concept of a normal health, along with a normal diet and the normal cause of illness, be abandoned by medical men. Only then, would the time have come to reflect on the health and illness of the soul, and to find the peculiar virtue of each man in the health of his soul. In one person, of course, this health could look like its opposite in another person. [14]
Health is an individual matter, and present day society is an adversary to the individual’s health due to its dogma of equality and normality that eliminates individual differentiation. For Nietzsche, health is determined through struggle. And for each individual, the struggle is different, and so is his definition of health. Furthermore, Nietzsche implies here that those who control the definition of physical and mental health also control the moral values of society. Defining health statistically, thus, undermines the whole conception of individual health.
Though Nietzsche’s concepts of illness and health posses a peculiar ambiguity beyond the abstract notion of struggle, we can detect the following prominent components that characterize them. [15] To begin with, in order to gain health, man must rid himself of the greatest sickness of all- Religion:
“The sick and perishing- it was they who despised the body and the earth, and invented the heavenly world, and the redeeming blood-drops; but even those sweet and sad poisons they borrowed from the body and earth!” (TSZ, Prologue, ch. III)
Believing in God or other external forces is the fundamental reason for the sickness of the body. The ‘cure’ he offers is rejecting God, so we will heal ourselves from unworldly needs, and by that gain greater health.[16] Instead of the sick religious virtues, the healthy body speaks for the youngest virtue, honesty (TSZ, Prologue, ch.III). In addition, those who have ‘invented the heavenly world’ created the sickness of separating body from spirit, while elevating the latter, and condemning the former, in order to establish the supremacy of their ‘heavenly world’ and dominate the individual though a codex of morals and values. Consequently, the religious individual is not only self-divided, but also contemptuous of his body. Though those who have created the “contempt for the body” are beyond help, others can reach for health by rejecting this doctrine (Lampert 38). Another sickness created by religion is the “bad conscience.” Instead, one must struggle to master personal discipline and endurance (Podolsky 306). Ceasing to believe in the external spiritual world allows the individual to search for the power within; the power to find meaning in one’s individual existence; the power to control his own existence through his own Will to do so. Health means taking responsibility solely in the self, searching for meaning only from within, and fully acknowledging the primacy of the will to power (Podolsky 299).
However, sickness can also appear when once ceasing to believe in external forces, the individual cannot find meaning in his own existence to replace that which the other supplied. This sickness is nihilism:
“O my brethren, when I enjoined you to break up the good, and the tables of the good, then only did I embark man on his high seas. And now only cometh unto him the great terror, the great outlook, the great sickness, the great nausea, the great sickness. (TSZ, III, ch. 56/28)
Once the individual ceases to believe in God and in the religious values, they cannot impregnate his world with meaning any more. If the individual cannot re-establish meaning in himself, he faces the sickness of nihilism- of not finding meaning in anything. Nihilism is a sickness since it shows man has ceased his struggle to find meaning in himself.
The next component that characterizes great health is the possession of instincts to the highest degree in an organized order of rank, or put differently, of a disciplined physiological dynamics. In Nietzsche as Cultural Physician, Daniel Ahern explains, Nietzsche sees human instincts as an excess of perspectives and strictly self-seeking centers of force that are essential to the species preservation and growth potential. The human animal, like any other, evaluates or interprets the world according to the “definite perspective” of whichever instinct is dominant. However, the instincts of animals other than ourselves answer, Nietzsche says “to quite definite tasks.” They posses, therefore, a harmony we humans do not share, since we are the combat of “a vast confusion of contradictory valuations and consequently of contradictory drives” (WP 259). Within this struggle, our instincts “oppose or subject each other (WP 677) and “are constantly increasing or losing power” (WP 715). The healthy individual must have these instincts, and it is essential that “one posses them to the highest degree” (WP 928). Possession of powerful drives alone is not enough. Within the healthy type, one drive must establish its dominance and exploit the combined power of all the others in the service of this overarching drive. This “dominating passion” is the mark of the “overman form of health,” since “here the co-ordination of the inner systems and their operation in the service of one end is best achieved” (WP 778). This drive synchronizes the others and knows how to organize and utilize the others (Ahern 19-20).[17]
On the other hand, Ahern asserts, no one drive can harness the power of others to establish the integrity characteristic of health in the sick individual. Instead, a constant “antagonism of the passions” prevails, which is “very unhealthy” since it lacks synchronicity. Without a dominant instinct that gives rein to the other drives within the bounds of its perspective, the sick individual will attempt to satisfy the demands of all the drives, physiologically incapable of not reacting to them. As a result, the sick last man is in a state of “constant irritability […] as it were, a kind of itching” (WP 305). This ‘itch’ is a psychological turbulence, or restlessness, that, when scratched, only gets worse. Consequently, the sick last man becomes weak, exhausted, and scattered from this psychological fragmentation, and acts “merely to stimuli from outside” (WP 71). This condition of weakness and exhaustion in the sick last man type lead to disintegration, and in the face of this threat, the instinct of preservation is stimulated into a bid for power. As the most dominant drive, it does all it can to keep other drives subordinated. This situation eventually leads to the effect of a thoroughly burnt-out instinct of preservation. As the ultimate resort to establish its superiority, without the power to actively achieve this goal, this instinct desires the stability of death, a perfect stasis wherein all combat ceases (Ahern 20-25, 65).
The desire to seek out, and the ability to overcome, resistance against our worldviews is the third component that characterizes great health (Podolsky 302). However, once we eliminate the resistance against our worldviews, sicknesses emerge. ‘Revolution’ and ‘Tyranny of the True’ are two examples. In the context of revolution, Zarathustra says to the fire-dog: The earth, said he, hath a skin; and this skin hath diseases.” One of these diseases “is called the fire-dog: concerning him, men have greatly deceived themselves, and let themselves be deceived.” (TSZ II, ch.40). As Higgins explains, the fire-dog represents the spokesman for revolutionary movements. The advocators of violent overthrow of political structures and revolutionary changes, like the most conservative religionists, are captivated with grandiose external images of their own inner violence (Higgins 131). Lampert adds that for Zarathustra the revolutionary talks of extreme changes and freedom bound to a new ideology, however this new ideology is merely playing an adversary to its opponent ideology, feeding each other’s fictions, and needing each other in order to certify their own necessity and desirability (Lampert 133). ‘Tyranny of the true’ is another sickness that can emerge once we eliminate the resistance against our worldviews:
“The price of knowledge is suffering […] Thus, the quest for knowledge demands a heroic mood […] The heroic struggle is not, however, the product of a primordial yearning for knowledge. Nietzsche maintains the contrary. All genuine striving for truth is the product of the pathos of struggle. The heroic disposition is primary. The quest for knowledge is merely the means employed by the modern hero to exhaust his energies. Not truth but the struggle for truth claims his heart […] Truth without opposition, a tyranny of the true, even if possible would be rejected as boring, powerless and tasteless” [18]
By elimination resistance to our perception of the ‘true,’ we lose the ability to struggle in order to justify and further develop it. And no struggle means no health.
The forth component that characterizes great health is overcoming pain and obstacles posed by the body, both physically and mentally through sheer will (Podolsky 304). Nietzsche relates here to his basic conception that the body and the self are one. As such, the same will which controls the self, controls the stimuli towards pain. The fifth component is responding to philosophical challenges, which can be also referred to as creativity. Such self-creative life can result in a range of activities from aesthetic creation to warlike conquest in the name of such values (Podolsky 303). Finally, the sixth is striving towards the fulfillment of living each moment, each act, each choice without the demurrals of past remorse or future judgment, since life is to be eternally recurrent (Podolsky 308).[19]
What is thus determining in Nietzsche’s existential interpretation is an idea of health that is not founded on biological or medical facts but considers the worth of man in the totality of his existential rank. A man must surrender himself to his disease, and pay attention to it, on his way to overcome it. The process can be followed in detail: Illness as a natural happening– “an existential meaning is injected into the meaninglessness of mere natural happening, without insisting on the validity of a universal causality, which in this case would be of a magical, superstitious nature” (Jaspers 112). In other words, the first stage of the illness is simply getting it. It can be mental, physical, or both. And one should not attach to this sickness a religious explanation, or a moral one, but an existential one. According to Nietzsche, an existential explanation means the sickness is brought about since something wishes to communicate with Existenz, with our essence, and make us aware something is wrong with our perception of the world, and ourselves. In a figurative way, ‘our sickness brings us to our senses’. Thus, it does not matter which natural reasons brought it about the sickness; what matters is that this sickness should make us attempt to attain health. If we want to overcome it, and employ it to our service, we must recognize its dangers and become masters of it, and if not of the sickness itself, than at least its dangers (Jaspers 113). Doing that, we will be able to develop a new way of a more complex and profound thinking, and enrich our life experience and observation.
However, sickness also brings new existential risks. Above all, it can produce an arrogance that withdraws from all things and expresses itself in an insight that unmasks everything. We come to look at the world with great coldness and distance, until we yearn to return to the former stage of ignorance, just in order not to feel so alienated. But than again, we must overcome this sense of suffering, and rise above it. Another risk sickness brings is the urge to obsess with it instead of thinking beyond it. Again, in order to overcome these risks, we should be aware of them, and attempt to control their affect on our way of thinking (Jaspers 114).
Basing himself on this conception of health and sickness, Nietzsche diagnosed 19th century modern Western world as diseased. Instead of pursuing the overman’s ceaseless struggle for health, Nietzsche found that his contemporaries crave the goal of the sick last man who desires to eliminate any form of struggle in order to pacify himself. To this day, critics engaged in exploring Nietzsche have identified nihilism as the ‘master’ disease he refers to in his writings and its relation to Christianity, yet surprisingly, there has been no reference to the reason man got infected with it in the first place. Here, I infer, this ‘master disease’ is man’s innate mind-body split. Based on Jaspers and Laing, two prominent Nietzschean academics, I assert that according to Nietzsche man is sick due to his evolutionary superiority over animals that lead him to obtain through the evolutionary process traits animals lack, such as memory and self-consciousness. From here, I deduce, man has developed according to Nietzsche what popular psychology refers to today as the “mind-body split”, “mind-body dualism”, or “mind-body problem”, a state in which the ‘body’ and the ‘mind’ are regarded as two independent entities[20]. My assumption is that this is actually the ‘master’ disease that will take different forms throughout the history of man, the most famous of which is Christian belief and practice.
Zarathustra conveys Nietzsche’s belief that present day man is sickly and thus is simply not up to the task of prevailing in the uncertain future:
“The earth, said he, hath a skin; and this skin hath diseases. One of these diseases, for example, is called Man.” [21]
“The Overman is the meaning of the earth. Let your will say: the Overman shall be the meaning of the earth!” [22]
However paradoxically, it is his sickness which gives man his true worth (Jaspers 130). Present day man is sickness originates in his supremacy over animals. Man obtained through struggling in the evolutionary process traits which animals do not have such as memory and self-consciousness (Jaspers 129). Accordingly, man is higher since he has the source of undetermined possibilities: (Jaspers 130). Nonetheless, the boundless possibilities which man attained over animal carry with them also the threat of disorder. Because man is more complicated and sophisticated, and because the boundaries of his existence are not fixated as those of the animals, he is thrown into what Nietzsche refers to as contradictory desires” (Jaspers 130). These contradicting desires are man’s sickness. Yet, it is precisely the same sickness that gives man his true worth (Jaspers 130). However, this sickness gives man his true worth since it induces him to struggle against it, and from the degree of struggle determine his value. When Zarathustra impels us to recognize there is still chaos in us, he actually impels us to recognize our sickness that is the bearer of our value. Health means struggling towards organizing the inner chaos, yet never attaining it, since then struggle becomes unnecessary. Hence, we learn that the whole notion of struggle in itself is an indication of disease, since struggle means an inner sense of chaos, and a need for self-control. However, as we have said before, it is the sickness which gives man his worth, and the ability to evolve by overcoming his sickness. The sickness is an obstacle to overcome; and overcoming is the essence of health. Thus, health means striving for the Dionysian chaos and struggle and rejecting the Apollonian harmonizing, yet simultaneously taming the Dionysian chaos with the latter (Podolsky 303).
As Pierre Klossowski observes, Nietzsche was forever attentive to the conflicts between the psychic and somatic forces within the individual, and became more and more convinced that the body was the true seat of selfhood, the “mighty ruler, an unknown sage” (Nietzsche Thus Spoke Zarathustra I: ‘On the Despisers of the Body’). But just as the body produces the self, and hence its own strength, so too does the body produce the impulses which “are also threats to its cohesion” (Klossowski 29)[23]. For Nietzsche, this innate condition of conflicts between the body and mind only granted man the chance of gaining health by constantly struggle to unite the two. This struggle granted man his value. However, this mind-body condition took a turn for the worse during Socrates time, and from that point on, the balance between the two was forever broken.
In The Birth of Tragedy [24] Nietzsche blames Socratic culture and “theoretical man”, for opening a new sick chapter in Western history of a culture that oppresses the body and creates weak personalities, in which reason triumphed over instincts, mind over body, intellect over passion and drives, consequently negating nature, the body and the objective realm of experience, leading to cultivated and subjected personalities (Klenner 6) [25]. Instead, Nietzsche sees that non-rational forces reside at the foundation of all creativity and of reality itself, identifying strongly instinctual, wild, amoral, sensual “Dionysian” energy within pre-Socratic Greek culture as an essentially creative and healthy force. Surveying the history of Western culture since the time of the Greeks, Nietzsche lamented over how the “Dionysian” creative energy had been submerged and weakened as it became overshadowed by the “Apollonian” forces of logical order and stiff sobriety. He concluded that the European culture since the time of Socrates had remained apollonian and unhealthy. As means toward health, he advocated the resurrection of Dionysian artistic energies- those which he associated with primal creativity, joy in existence and ultimate truth.
The Greek philosopher’s idealization of the mind over the body mass-produced a ‘cure’ for man’s innate mind-body split. Elevating the spirit over corporality dismissed the desire to reconcile the two and yielded a sense of inner peace. Christianity not only asserted the mind is superior to the body, but also regarded bodily desires as the source of all evil. During the 18th and 19th century, science continued to support this sense of split, elevating the ‘facts produced by the mind over bodily-related sensations such as emotions and instincts. Accordingly, I infer, Nietzsche saw religion and science as diseases as well, since they constitute this inner sense of mind-body split, yet the reason man got infected with those diseases in the first place is his innate condition of mind-body split, which is an evolutionary outcome of him being the most complicated being in the animal world.
Similar to religion and science, nihilism is a sickness since it supports the mind-body split. A man infected with nihilism is thrown in a clash between his mind that aspires for a certain state that his physical existence does not allow. Unable to find any meaning in this fix, or the inner power to infuse meaning in life individually, the nihilistic person loses any motivation to engage in the ceaseless struggle, and desires the last man’s ultimate inner sense of peace in the shape of suicide.
Nimrod Alloni defines nihilism as a “denial or negation, of the established and esteemed beliefs and values in morality and religion” (Aloni 60)[26]. Certainly, this definition would include Nietzsche. But this is not Nietzsche’s sense of the term. Nihilism is used most often by Nietzsche when referring to the consequences of modernity and its reliance on reason: “Faith in the categories of reason is the cause of nihilism. We have measured the value of the world according to categories that refer to a purely fictitious world”[27]. This explains, Nietzsche notes, how it is that the greatest values have come to devalue themselves. In this respect, Nietzsche’s philosophy is nihilistic insofar as nihilism is the starting point for his positive philosophy. As Solomon summarizes, Nihilism is not the doctrine which Nietzsche seeks to defend, but rather the problem with which his philosophy begins[28] (Solomon 112).
Hence, Nietzsche sees nihilism as originating from reason in general, from comparing the facts of the actual world to the fictional one (Pearson 161)[29], and not from the breakdown of religion. We need nihilism for our adaptive capacities. The cure Nietzsche offers for nihilism is to explore it until it becomes banal. The danger lies not where nihilism cannot be conquered or defeated, but in insisting it should not have happened and should not have been allowed to happen (Pearson 164).
On the same level, man’s innate ‘mind-body split’ sickness that exposed him to the infections of religion and science, also introduced him to other sicknesses such as ‘Tyranny of the True’ and ‘Revolution.’ In the case of ‘tyranny of the True,’ the sick human is convinced that his mind obtains a “pure” and “objective” truth regarding the nature of the world through collecting scientific information. Accordingly, a human infected with this disease is not only disinterested in his body, but also lacks any motivation to keep struggling for discovering more aspects of the “truth”. Similarly, a human infected with “revolution” is convinced that his mind obtains the “pure” and “objective” political ideology, and in the name of his beliefs is willing to commit exactly the same vile crimes as the ruling ideology.
THE CURE: NEVER GET CURED. BUT DON’T EVER STOP TRYING
As we have seen, Nietzsche’s conception of health does not resemble the pre-Darwinian notions of health, such as what Bernard had championed ‘normal,’ or ‘stable interior milieu’ (Podolsky 299). For Nietzsche, health is a ceaseless struggle toward some unspecified und unknowable ideal, which constitutes the essence of health (Podolsky 299). Furthermore, equipped with the mental tools man have gained over animals through the evolutionary process, he should constantly struggle his way towards the goal of the overman’s great health, least he should find himself as the ‘last’ one.
According to Jaspers, the first step to cure ourselves is to mold our own nature through self-control. If self control is accomplished, one must know what has happened and plan everything that he undertakes; one must pursue a kind of self-control that involves liberation and release if he is to avoid the hazard of being unable to trust the free beat of his own wings and constantly having to take up arms against himself (Jaspers 134). Yet self-control becomes damaging when it becomes self-assault, meaning “the sheer delight in the production of suffering” (Jaspers 134). In other words, we must control ourselves, yet allow a moderate dose of liberation from time to time, providing this liberation does not endanger everything we have worked for with our self-control. The same idea is repeated by Boscagli who states the overman can better control his body, and thus his health in our context, since his instincts are no longer dominated by reason but by will (Boscagli 80). The most important evidence of this strong will is: “not to react at once to a stimulus, but to gain control of all the inhibiting excluding instincts.” Consequently, the essential feature is precisely not to will, to be able to suspend desire (Boscagli 82). That is to say that according to the Nietzschean philosophy, the superman considers the inability to resist a stimulus as: “a sign of vulgarity and a lack of virility” (Boscagli 80).
In addition to self-control, the individual who aspires for greater health should use his will in order to probe under the external mask of his thoughts and behavior, in order to detect the real nature of the sickness (Jaspers 132). Though it is next to impossible to see one’s self, we can still constantly try. We should not fear the ‘inner mistrust’ constant inner evaluation causes us, even if it seems to us that the majority of the population has ‘faith in itself’; it is only self-deception. While the herd majority intoxicates itself in blindness in order to feel the truthful inner mistrust, the better man gains a more exalted self-consciousness (Jaspers 132). However, there is also a danger embedded in self-evaluation, namely of self-admiration: “in looking up to himself he becomes his own servant and worshipper; he can only obey, that is, imitate himself.” That is not to say man should not respect himself on behalf of his achievements, but rather use self-evaluation to control his sense of respect crushing totally his sense of self-contempt (Jaspers 133).
The cure Nietzsche offers humanity is embracing the ceaseless struggle and perceiving it not only as the highest value in life, but also as the meaning of life itself. In order to gain health, man must first accept his ‘mind-body split’ sickness, and whatever additional diseases he suffers from, such as nihilism, tyranny of knowledge or revolution. The belief in religion or science, or any other form of an external omniscient power must also be forsaken, since these are manifestations of the ‘mind-body split’ sickness that prohibit man from struggling towards unifying body and mind from within. Nevertheless, the overman must never fully accomplish the goals of his struggle, since then the whole notion of a ceaseless struggle is lost, along with the Nietzschean perception of health. In other words, the disease itself also constitutes man’s value, and that is why the overman must never fully cure himself, or let others cure him and continuously struggle to overcome himself and his environment based on his individual values and beliefs.
INTRODUCTION
When Health Becomes Evolution
“Whoever claims the authority to the define the boundary between health and disease claims… everything.” [30]
With the publication of Mary Shelly’s physician vision-turned-nightmare of creating a healthy human being as the goal of his quest to “banish disease from the human frame and render man invulnerable to any but violent death,” for almost two centuries now, science fiction has been exploring the terms “disease” and “health”- with all their complexity.[31] Hand in hand since then, the ever-accelerating development of science and technology, continuously transformed both the material and cultural environments we inhibit. Yet, we are all aware of the contradictions. On the one hand, the marvels of technology introduced boundless promises of life and health by harnessing genetic engineering, organ transplants, arthroscoptic surgery, and in vitro fertilization. Our mass media obsessively reminds us of cosmetics, plastic surgeries, fitness equipment, various pills, food supplements, and other contemporary wonders of technology to enhance our physical and mental health. On the other hand, the rate of suicides, psychological crises, and fashionable self- mutilations has never been higher in the Western world. Why is health such a hot consumer product yet ever more evasive in everyday life? What is the Western problematic of health? and why does a 19th century German philosopher hold the answer as well as the cure?
The explosion of the Cybernetics field in 1948 questioned why any ideal perception of health should remain in the boundaries of human imagination. [32] Since that moment in time, science fiction has never stopped answering. Sometimes implicitly, sometimes explicitly, science fiction explores the use of high technology to gain ideal health. The consequences are problematic since the use of high technology enables humans to manipulate body and mind according to mass ideals, instead of a lifelong process to overcome oneself according to individual ones. As a result, the sense of dichotomy between mind and body intensifies. Liposuction makes you instantly slimmer but it does not change lifelong exaggerated eating habits and poor lifestyle. Antismoking pills may reduce the physical need to smoke but not the mental desire. Nietzsche’s paradigm of health points directly at that.
Thus, the reading of science fiction novels via the prism of Nietzsche’s conception of health and sickness sheds light on the dangerous conception of health as a physical and mental static state achieved by using high technology, instead of a ceaseless individual struggle to pursue this goal using one’s sheer will. I hold that in the mirror of time, the dominant factor that induced Nietzsche’s conception of sickness has modified from worshipping the Judeo-Christian God, to science, and finally to high technology in the second half of the 20th century. The reason for man’s susceptibility for these sicknesses remains the same; the innate disease of mind body split. Similar to religion and science, high technology yields a utopian mental realm independent from the despised ‘flesh.’ Instilling the mind-body sickness even more, it offers the counter option of manipulating the mind in order to ‘suit’ the body. By rendering the means to avoid pain, fears, mental and physical diseases, and even mortality, high technology denies the exact ingredients needed to induce struggle according to Nietzsche.
In contrast to other genres, science fiction equips the protagonist with the power to affect humanity in general by literally embodying the overman’s conception of health and the last man’s conception of sickness. Literalizing the philosophical idea of the overman’s health, science fiction portrays the transhuman as the next stage in human evolution, using technology as the means to achieve it. Nevertheless, it is my intention to show that the use of high technology brings sickness according to Nietzsche, or in other words, denies the struggle to overcome oneself and cope with the innate sickness of body-mind split.
SCIENCE FICTION: A GENRE FOCUSING ON HEALTH
Granting the perfectly safe playground for materializing our deepest desires and anxieties, science fiction literalizes what philosophies such as Nietzsche’s can only dream of. Especially with the high tech wave of cybernetics that began in 1948, science fiction portrays visions of future humanity as entering a new stage in human evolution, delineating a transhuman who embodies such health not known to us today. In other words, Nietzsche’s metaphorical conception of health embodied by the ideal image of the overman, takes real flesh and blood in science fiction novels written in the past fifty years. The overman is no longer just a theoretical idea, but a real human being with individual shortcomings who struggles throughout the novel to overcome his difficulties, based on his power of will. In worlds dominated by technology, cybernetics and Virtual Reality, these science fiction protagonists are set apart from the rest of their society by the desire to struggle for their values and beliefs, while rejecting high technology to facilitate their goals or numb their pain and discomfort.
Transhumanism is a loosely defined movement that has developed gradually over the past two decades, and can be viewed as an outcome of secular humanism and the Enlightenment. It holds that current human nature is improvable through the use of applied science and other rational methods, which may make it possible to increase human health-span, extend our intellectual and physical capacities, and give us increased control over our own mental states and moods, promising the future evolution of homo-sapiens. Technologies of concern include not only current ones, like genetic engineering and information technology, but also anticipated future developments such as fully immersive virtual reality, machine-phase nanotechnology, and artificial intelligence (Bostrom 1). [33]
Promoting the view that human enhancement technologies should be made widely available, transhumanists assert individuals should have broad discretion over which of these technologies to apply to themselves, and that parents should normally get to decide which reproductive technologies to use when having children. Transhumanists believe that, while there are hazards that need to be identified and avoided, human enhancement technologies will offer enormous potential for deeply valuable and humanly beneficial uses. Ultimately, it is possible that such enhancements may make us, or our descendants, Posthuman beings who may have indefinite health-spans, much greater intellectual faculties than any current human being – and perhaps entirely new emotional responses. The wisest approach in face of these prospects, argue transhumanists, is to embrace technological progress, while strongly defending human rights and individual choice, and taking action specifically against concrete threats, such as military or terrorist abuse of bioweapons, and against unwanted environmental or social side-effects (Bostrom 2003 1).[34]
Thus, transhuman celebrates technology as the manifestation of human liberation from bondage to nature, finitude and the varieties of disease, decay and death. Technology does not protect humans from these perils, but helps transcending them. Whether the body is modified using technology or not, the essential, rational self endures unimpeded (Graham 9).
In her article “Nietzsche Gets a Modem – Transhuman and Technological Sublime,” Graham reflects the opinion that transhumanism is the fulfillment of Friedrich Nietzsche’s vision of the overman. The vision of a digital, cybernetic and biotechnological evolution of man seems to go hand in hand with values of perpetual progress, self-transformation, practical optimism, intelligent technology, open society, self-directing, and rational thinking. [35] Such promoters of enhancement and perfectibility would regard themselves as the 21st century heirs to Enlightenment traditions if secular liberal humanism, in which humanity, having displaced the gods, achieves heights of wisdom and self-aggrandizement such as the overman’s.
What Nietzsche had in mind, however, was not technological transformation but rather a kind of elevating personal growth and cultural refinement in exceptional individuals. Furthermore, as Graham argues, a truly Nietzschean sensibility would regard such transformation as fatally flawed by its inability to shed the leftovers of religion and a last-men society that is incapable of acknowledging the absolute dissolution of value, hope and meaning which for Nietzsche was the destiny of humanity after the death of god (Graham 154-5). In this sense, technology is not a tool to assist the overman in his struggle to gain health by continuously overcoming himself and society, but a tool to break free from the need to struggle, which of course denotes sickness.
On the same level, such developments in technology point towards the possibilities of post-bodied and post-human forms of existence. If the development of technology has entailed a process of the extension of the body and bodily functions to enable us to control the environment more efficiently, it offers the ultimate possibility of the displacement of the material body from the confines of its immediate lived space (Featherstone 2).[36] In McCarron’s view, the literary body of texts which comprises the genre of cyberpunk “constitutes a sustained mediation, unrivalled in contemporary culture, on the Cartesian mind/body dichotomy” (McCarron 261, in Featherstone) consistently affirming and celebrating it. And that is exactly the materialization of the mind-body sickness Nietzsche refers to in his philosophy. A further examination of the worlds created by science fiction expresses how deep the mind-body split defines this genre, literalizing worlds generated by the mind alone and on the other hand, physical manipulations possible with the external help of technology and not the individual’s will power.
Norbert Wiener laid one of the milestones inducing the idea of transhumanism with the publication of Cybernetics in 1948. Wiener used the term cybernetics, which stems from the Greek word Κυβερνήτης (kubernites – meaning steersman, governor, pilot, or rudder) to describe a new scientific discipline that that studies communication theory and control theory in living beings or machines. For Weiner, cybernetics encompassed the human mind, the human body and the world of automatic machines and attempted to reduce all three to the common dominator of control and communication (Featherstone 2). Borrowing and extrapolating from the field of cybernetics, the genre of science fiction gave birth to a cluster of key terms, such as Cyberspace to describe the digital environment and Cyberpunk as its ‘hard-core’ subject.
The new field of cyberpunk science fiction in the 1980s displayed great interest in possible ways to change and enhance the human body using prosthetic limbs, implanted circuitry, cosmetic surgery, and genetic alteration. Yet, as Slusser detects, readers still tended to observe the product more than the process, and these transformations were motivated more by vanity and a quest for novelty than a desire to heal or improve one’s health. Consequently, a theory began that science fiction is a literature devoting to overcoming the body and not improving the body, so that a character dedicated to preserving the health of the body appears to undermine the deeper impetus driving the genre (Slusser 3-4).[37]
Expanding even further the field of cybernetics, later on in the 1990’s Jaron Lanier the former head of VPR Research Inc. in California coined the term Virtual Reality to describe a medium which simulates a sense of presence through the use of technology (Featherstone 6). Virtual reality represents the ultimate extension of an information space (cyberspace) in which data is configured in such a way to give the operator the illusion of control, with a high degree of vividness and total sensory immersion in the artificial environment (Featherstone 3).
What we have witnessed since the invention of the cybernetics only fifty years ago is an unprecedented rapid development of not only new homo-sapient bodies, but also entire new worlds, created by technology. Science fiction portrays these cybernetic, cyberpunk, virtual reality worlds like no other.
GOD IS DEAD. LONG LIVE TECHNOLOGY
Basing on these definitions of the worlds created in science fiction using high technology, we can see how portrayals of high technology relate to the mind-body split endorsed earlier by religion and science. Similar to religion, high technology is to ‘liberate’ the mind from corporal confinements of space and time and perils such as pain, ills and death. ‘The Religion of Technology,’ a term by David Noble, affirms the values of transhumanism to pursue technological liberation in the name of an innate human desire for immortality and omnipotence (Graham 155). Graham also sees cyberspace as a sacred space of salvation and transcendence, where the inner ‘real’ platonic universe is materialized instead of the ‘false’ external physical one, which is only a reflection of it (Graham 169). Robins agrees with Graham that VR portrays transcendental worlds, yet he sees them as naive, banal and infantile, therefore symbolizing regression and not evolution (Robins 153, in Featherstone). Without the reality of the physical body, the mind can play by its own rules, and thus evade the mature perspective resulting from dealing with the gap between the environment as it is, and as we would like it to be.
Similar to religion, Graham sees worlds created by technology as granting freedom to the ‘soul’ that is the core our being, by enabling us to leave behind the confining physical body. Heim, however, has a much stronger critique of the worlds created by technology, and their resemblance to religion in the elevation of the soul or mind, while rejecting the body:
“The VR [Virtual Reality] sucks in its users with power unlike any other medium- unless we include under media the religious rituals and sacred dramas that once gave art works their context. The fascination of Virtual Reality recalls the linguistic root of the word ‘fascination’, which comes from the Latin (fascinari) and which refers to someone’s gaze being drawn repeatedly towards the dancing flames of fire. From the viewpoint of human evolution, VR resembles the invention of fire. To understand the power of VR, we have to return to the cave. Or, should I say, both caves: the cave of the Paleolithic era, and the cave known as ‘Plato’s cave’.” (Heim 69, in Featherstone).
Cyberspace literalizes the philosophical idea of Platonism since with its virtual worlds cyberspace transcends the physical by replacing it with the electronic heaven of ideally organized shapes and forms.
What I find most troubling, however, is not the desire to materialize a virtual environment where the mind can take flight from the corporal confinements of the body, or fear technology might ‘take over’ our birth bodies, but the overgrowing indications of resentment towards our bodies. In different terms, it is not only that science fiction draws on the mind-body split endorsed earlier by religion and science, it also deepens the split by elevating the mind while condemning the body:
“Science fiction is essentially Gnostic [..] if it is a genre at all, it is only because of its deep participation in the Gnostic urge to be elsewhere: out of this time, out of this body, out of this chain of circumstances we call life […] Far from being visions of the future, these are- in true Gnostic fashion- anxious expressions of profound discomfort with the present. And that means profound discomfort with the body- for the body is our interface with the present” (Slusser 24).
The idealized virtual body does not eat, drink, urinate or defecate; it does not get tired; it does not become ill; it does not die. Accordingly, this vision may be considered to be the literalization of the separation of the body from the mind, in which the body has traditionally been represented by religion as earthly, irrational, weak and passive, while the mind is portrayed as spiritual, rational, abstract and active, as Lupton stresses, “seeking constantly to stave off the demands of embodiment” (Lupton 101, in Featherstone).
Following this frame of mind, the central discourse around computer technology is the potential offered by computers for humans to escape the body. As Lupton explains, in ‘cyberwriting’ the body is often referred to as the ‘meat’, the dead flesh that surrounds the active mind which constitutes the ‘authentic’ self.’ Thus, the dream of cyberculture is to leave the ‘meat’ behind and become distilled in a clean, pure, uncontaminated relationship with computer technology (Lupton 100, in Featherstone). William Gibson, one of the genre’s most prominent authors, presents in his novels a ‘certain relaxed contempt for the flesh’, which is regarded as ‘the meat’ by those addicted to ‘life’ in the ‘matrix’ (Robins 12, in Featherstone).
Thus increasingly literalizing our thoughts and desires through technologically generated worlds draws on the mind-body split similar to religion and science. Furthermore, like religion and science, it celebrates the mind while condemns the body. The consequences are very problematic, as Sobchack sums up:
“This disappearance of the material, lived-body, its apparent displacement by technological prosthesis that can enable and extend our perceptual and expressive powers, provokes in some the ‘heady’ sensation of having ‘beat the meat’ leading to euphoria and a sense of being beyond mortality […] This, however, is ‘false’ consciousness- for it has ‘lost touch’ with the very material and mortal body that grounds this imagination and imagery of transcendence.” (Sobchack 210 in Featherstone)
Diminishing our subjective awareness of our own bodies in favor of an ideal transcendental environment takes away our need to struggle in order to close the gap between these two worlds. In this sense, it also takes away our split mind-body ‘sickness’ since there is no split to resolve any more. As contemporary science fiction novels show, at the end of the millennium, the process of evolution is not a question of ‘self overcoming’ since there is nothing to overcome (Pearson 2). The battle has been won; the mind has taken over the defeated body. But what are the consequences for the health of man? For future evolution?
THE STRUGGLE IS OVER. AND SO IS MAN
“In this conception of life’s evolution [..] in which thought exists without a body, there is no future of, or for, invention, since all is given [..] what we are being presented with is a paranoid and phobic anthropocentrism that is bent on imperialistically and entropically colonizing the entire known and unknown universe, all for the sake of immortal life” (Pearson 2).
The evolutionary result of successfully working towards splitting the mind from the body using technology creates new transhuman types from the Homo sapiens, bit by bit literally reconstructing the ‘natural’ body with technological replacement parts. Most commonly, we encounter four dominant stages posed on a scale heading towards intensifying levels of corporal modifications. The first evolutionary stage for technologically modified homo-sapiens is external body modifications and it consists mainly in cosmetic surgery, or broadly speaking, esthetic manipulation of the body’s surface by using muscle grafts and animal or human transplants that blur the visual cues for distinction between humans and non-humans as well as gender differences (Balsamo 225, in Featherstone). The following category is inner body modifications, which basically means fundamental alterations and enhancements of the functioning inner body that replace organic functions using biochip implants, upgraded senses and prosthetic additions. Further assimilation with technology brings forth what Balsamo calls the “Repressed body,” the body for the cyberspace traveler in virtual reality, treating the body as a mechanical tool that is nothing more than excess baggage for the cyberspace traveler (Balsamo 229, in Featherstone). Finally, the most ‘advanced’ transhuman has a “Disappearing body.” He becomes a disembodied human being fully simulated by technology, which can only exist in cyberspace and his body becomes nothing more than a hard drive database (Featherstone 11). Consequence is that bit by bit the ‘natural’ body is literally reconstructed through then use of technological replacement parts (Balsamo 230, in Featherstone).
Standing apart from such future representations of transhumans in technologically dominated worlds, stands the science fiction protagonist. In spite of his/her discomfort, sometimes even anger, with his body, he/she senses that real health means struggling towards uniting the body and mind using sheer power of will and ingenuity. The mind-generated-paradise is ultimately rejected on account of the body. In Holland’s words: “When all else fails, the body of the hero, and not his voice, or his capacity to make a rational argument, is the place of last resort; the sole place that is safe, as it were.” Even in science fiction novels that “ostensibly work to reassert the Cartesian superiority of the mind over the body,” this resort to the body remains (Holland 160, in Featherstone).
The three novels chosen for examining their treatment of Nietzsche’s health paradigm are George Orwell 1984 (1949), William Gibson’s Neuromancer (1984) and Greg Egan’s Distress (1995). These novels represent broad trends in science fiction throughout the second half on the 20th century, and cover a wide spectrum of the genre. All three engage with, and are influenced by, the Nietzschean problematic, sometimes implicitly, sometimes explicitly as both 1984 and Distress contain references to Nietzsche. Though each of the three novels employs a different narrative technique for distancing implied author from protagonist, my reading regards the protagonist’s belief in his own genuine attempt to embody Nietzsche’s conception of health. What I try to do in this paper is take my distance from the influences of the implied author, and identify within each protagonist the literalization of Nietzsche’s philosophical conception of health. Whether the implied author identifies or antagonizes his protagonist, the reader’s response should not be affected. If you will, consider the three protagonists as patients examined by a doctor. The latter can mock and criticize their character but it does not concern their disease.
Despite the attempt to embody Nietzsche’s paradigm of health, I will point at the major difficulty of following through one of its cardinal elements. While Nietzsche regards health as a ceaseless process of struggle to overcome oneself, science fiction addresses the use of technology to ultimately attain the goal of the struggle. When the struggle is resolved, so is health according to Nietzsche. As all three novels show, the future evolution of humanity is affected as well.
CHAPTER ONE
The Fire-Dog Got It All Wrong –
George Orwell’s 1984 (1949)
And this is the account of Zarathustra`s interview with the fire-dog:
The earth, said he, hath a skin; and this skin hath diseases. One of these diseases, for example, is called “man.”
And another of these diseases is called “the fire-dog”: concerning HIM men have greatly deceived themselves, and let themselves be deceived.[38]
A year after Norbert Wiener discussed the harnessing of high technology to advance man’s physical and mental abilities in his acclaimed book Cybernetics (1948), George Orwell literalized his own technological vision in a novel he intended to name The Last Man in Europe.[39] Though massively used today by ‘techno-phobians’ as a warning against the perils of high tech and its ability to manipulate and control the individual, Orwell’s intentions could not have been more different. As Christopher Roper asserts in his article “Taming the Universal Machine,” in 1984 Orwell is not concerned with the workings of cybernetics devices but in the human use of such instruments to manipulate other human beings (Roper 60).[40] The telecscreen, the most high tech feature in the novel, is feared not because it can manipulate the people of Oceania, but because the Thought Police might be watching through it and then physically appear to rebuke the deviant individual. In fact, we are told that in Newspeak, the official language of Oceania, the word “science” does not even exist (Orwell 194). The only two major references to technology are its use to probe individuals for thoughtcrime, the only sickness and crime according to the dominating Party of Oceania, and using it to cure those afflicted by it in the Ministry of Love.
Thus, 1984 groundbreaking significance is in innovatively presenting the reader with a world that uses high technology in order to enforce a ruling definition of health, and ‘curing’ all other ‘sick’ individuals. Doing so, 1984 does not only represent broad trends in science fiction throughout the second half on the 20th century, but also strongly engages with Nietzsche’s conception of health as a dynamic struggle for overcoming and sickness as abstaining from it. Frightfully, 1984 portrays the consequences of a problematic definition of health on the future evolution of
humanity. [41]
The dominating Party in 1984 appears to have materialized the Nietzschean conception of health. It is not that Nietzsche’s name is mentioned directly with the Party’s, but the veneer of its organization and conduct connotes the German philosopher’s doctrine of an overman society. It is an atheist body of power that uses power as an end in itself, engaged in never-ending struggle to gain more power, whereas such possibility is not possible, and therefore the struggle to gain it can never end. However, a deeper examination reveals this society is everything but the literal incarnation of the Nietzschean conception of health, and represents all that is sick according to the philosopher.
Yet, the Party is a distorted reflection of the Nietzschean ideology of health. The Party praises the struggle for power, however not within the individual, but over the individual. The Party idealizes the unification of the human split body and mind, however it does so by preventing the individual from ever becoming conscious of this ‘innate disease’ so it could dominate both. From the Nietzschean perspective, the Party represents all that is sick, since it denies the individual’s inner struggle for overcoming. Yet, there is hope for the diseased world of Oceania, and hope comes in the overman image of Winston Smith.
High technology, shaped in a high tech televised image called Big Brother, and controlled by the Inner Party members, literally substitutes God and institutionalized religion, Nietzsche’s most dangerous manifestation of the diseased humanity. An omnipotent being, Big Brother watches the citizens of Oceania everywhere, though they can never actually see him in person. Failing to believe in this digital deity, results in persecution, conversion, and finally death. Whatever control Religion has on the individual’s mind and body, the higher Party members and the Thought Police, Big Brother’s zealous priests, take to the extreme by using surveillance technology. In fact, by using high technology the Party is a worse sickness than religion, in Nietzschean perspective. While religion promotes a spiritual paradise generated by the mind alone, the Party literally manipulates the citizen’s mind to believe they are living in an ideal place:
“Day and night the telescreens bruised your ears with statistics proving that people today had more food, more clothes, better houses, better recreations – that they lived longer, worked shorter hours, were bigger, healthier, stronger, happier, more intelligent, better educated, than the people of fifty years ago. Not a word of it could ever be proved or disproved.” (Orwell 64, chapter 1)
By using technology, the Party actually re-enforces its ideology not only over the mind, but over the body as well. Consequently, the Party forces the citizens to ignore the innate sickness of mind-body split, denying them ever the opportunity of struggling against this split and grow towards greater health.
Adhering to a severe rule of chastity and thoughtcrime, the Party denies the individual from attaining any self-regulation over his body or mind. Loyalty and obedience are not just matters of conduct, but of thoughts as well, since this ‘god’ and his ‘priests’ can enter the mind and deny the individual from adhering to any other morals and values other then its own, or even questioning them. Erasing material proofs and tampering with people’s memories, it is the Party that invests meaning in all, and that which controls the individual’s body and mind.
Corresponding with Nietzsche’s conception of health as a constant struggle for overcoming oneself, Winston’s struggle is not just manifested against an external body of power, but also fueled inwardly by two clashing desires. On the one hand, Winston desires to materialize his individuality, both mentally and physically. On the other hand, he desires to be a part of an immortal body that has the ultimate power to dominate everything, even time and history, and in that sense share his society’s disease of staying oblivious to their mind-body split. Thus, In order to prevail in his struggle against the Party’s dictatorial ideology, Winston has to struggle within himself to unite his body and mind by realizing ‘the flesh’ is as important as the mind. Winston Smith holds the cure for the diseased world of Oceania by having both consciousness and will to undermine the party’s control over his body and mind, and the inner strength to enflame a revolution against it.
Ironically, Winston could be diagnosed ‘sick’ according to any Western, Oceanian, or even Nietzschean physician. He is inflicted with thoughtcrime which labels him sick according to the Party, afflicted with physical ailments, coughing fits, a severe varicose ulcer along his leg and general fatigue would send him a sick leave by any Western doctor, and, even a Nietzschean physician would be tempted to call him sick. The latter would discern Winston is in a state of “constant irritability,” literally suffering from “a kind of itching” (WP 305).[42] This ‘itch’ which Nietzsche metaphorically refers to as ‘s psychological turbulence, or restlessness, that, when scratched, only gets worse’ is literalized in Winston itching ulcer. However, Winston constantly struggles not to scratch the ulcer and controls the sense of irritability it yields. Similarly, according to the Party, the only possible sickness in Oceania is thoughtcrime, thoughts against the ideology of the Party. Thus, these physical aliments do not interfere with viewing the Party as disease in itself, and that engaging in thoughtcrime, and acting upon in, grants Winston the image of a healthy overman. And in regard to his sick diagnosis according to ‘normal’ Western definition, such definition is fundamentally wrong according to Nietzsche. Health is determined individually by every person’s overcoming goals, and being physically fit is none of Winston’s concerns.
Nevertheless, the hope Winston brings for healing the sick world of Oceania does not last for long. Winston fails to remain in the state of struggle since his ideological desire is more intellectual than practical. He desires to understand the dominating political power more than to actually change it. Lacking a deeper emotional understanding of the individualistic political values he endorses, Winston fails to recognize the difference between both ideologies. Therefore, he inflicts upon himself another Nietzschean disease called “Revolution,” represented in Thus Spoke Zarathustra by the fire dog.[43] Winston, who is more interested in the intellectual goals of revolution, is not aware that in the name of his own liberal ideology he is willing to commit the exact same crimes he is fighting against in the current dictatorial regime. On the same level, Winston fails to unite his body and mind when he gets to the conclusion that his body is as good as dead, or that his body, as opposed to his mind, is not virile enough to produce the future generation. The all-English representative, whose name consists the first name of the UK Prime Minister during the Second World War (Winston Churchill) and one of the most common English names of Smith, literally becomes Nietzsche’s metaphorical sick last man in Europe due to his difficulty at persevering with his initial struggle to pursue his overman definition of health.
Winston’s struggle is divided into three escalating chronological stages. The first stage is from the beginning of the novel until Julia’s note “I love you” (chapter 2 part I). At this stage, Winston’s rebellion focuses on his diary, and is relatively weak since it revolves around thoughts. The second stage commences with Julia’s note until the meeting in O’Brien’s room (chapter 2 part VIII), and focuses on his relationship with Julia. At this stage, the struggle becomes fiercer since it is more active, and encompasses both body and mind. Relatively speaking, at this stage Winston’s health becomes the strongest. Finally, the third stage begins from the meeting in O’Brien’s room until the end of the novel. Though Winston’s incarceration occurs only in chapter three, I believe that his struggle is over earlier, once he ‘joins’ the Brotherhood resistance. It is the end of the struggle, since in the name of his own ideology he is willing to commit the same crimes he revolts against, which not only permanently infects him with the disease of revolution, but also denies ever a possibility of growing healthier since the struggle is resolved. This stage focuses the rebellion on Winston’s relationship with O’Brien.
The basic features and driving forces behind Winston’s ideological struggle throughout the novel are introduced during the “Two Minutes Hate”:
“The horrible thing about the Two Minutes Hate was not that one was obliged to act a part, but that it was impossible to avoid joining in. Within thirty seconds any pretense was always unnecessary. A hideous ecstasy of fear and vindictiveness, a desire to kill, to torture, to smash faces in with a sledge hammer, seemed to flow through the whole group of people like an electric current, turning one even against one’s will into a grimacing screaming lunatic. And yet the rage that one felt was an abstract, undirected emotion which could be switched from one object to another like a flame of blowlamp. Thus, at one moment Winston’s hatred was not turned against Goldstein at all, on the contrary, against Big Brother, the Party, and the thought police; and at such moments his heart went out to the lonely, derided heretic on the screen, sole guardian of truth and sanity in a world of lies. And yet the very next instant he was at one with the people about him, and all that was said of Goldstein seemed to him to be true. At those moments his secret loathing of Big Brother changed into adoration, and Big Brother seemed to tower up, an invincible, fearless protector, standing like a rock against the hordes of Asia, and Goldstein, in spite of his isolation, his helplessness, and the doubt that hung over his very existence, seemed like some sinister enchanter, capable by the mere power of his voice of wrecking the structure of civilization” (Orwell 16).
Winston’s is engaged in an inward ideological struggle since on the one hand he wishes to adhere to the Party’s ideology of total power, yet on the other hand, is consciously aware of his opposite democratic beliefs. His struggle is between adhering to the Party’s ideology of controlling external reality as well as the individual’s thoughts and actions through principles of thoughtcrime, doublethink and the elimination of all emotions apart from hate, and on the other hand, his own ideology of unchangeable external reality, individuality, freedom of action and thought, solidarity and intimacy. [44] [45] The conflicting motive to adhere to each of the ideologies is also apparent. The Party’s ideology provides a powerful entity that protects him (Big Brother), and social order (civilization). Yet, his ideology grants the individual control over his existence, his thoughts, emotions, and actions. What underlies Winston’s struggle against the Party is the belief that it drives the individual insane: “turning one even against one’s will into a grimacing screaming lunatic.” Accordingly, his struggle throughout the novel is to establish his own definition of sanity. However, we also see signs of Winston’s weak will power that will undermine his struggle throughout the novel. He believes that man’s sheer will cannot prevail in the face of this lunacy. He says that there is no way of staying a part from the crowed, and that pretence is not necessary after a while. Later on, Julia is an example that he is wrong, since pretense during the Two Minutes Hate is possible so long as the individual does not attempt to intellectually understand the Party.
At this point, as well as throughout the first stage of the novel, Winston’s struggle revolves around his diary. By buying the diary, Winston performs a subversive act for several reasons. First, it is a beautiful and useless artifact manufactured before the war. As such, the diary is a solid proof that the world was better before the war, since then the human spirit believed in things other then power, such as sheer individual interest and pleasure. By the act of writing in it, Winston rebels against the Party even further. Writing for himself and not in the framework of the Party (i.e. his job in the Ministry of Truth), symbolizes his individuality. It supports his subversive belief there is a past that cannot be altered, which exists in the individual memory. Thus, buying the diary, and writing in it ‘prove’ that he has an individual consciousness. In addition, by writing the date (4th of April, 1984), even though he cannot even be sure of the exact year (Orwell 10), Winston begins to enforce his belief in unchangeable external reality.
As Winston’s writing in his diary progress in the first stage, so does the depth of his rebellion. When first attempting to write in his diary, we learn how difficult this action is for him, and how he needs to struggle with himself to accomplish it:
“For some time he sat gazing stupidly at the paper. The telescreen had changed over to strident military music. It was curious that he seemed not merely to have lost the power of expressing himself, but even to have forgotten what it was that he had originally intended to say. For weeks past he had been making ready for this moment, and it had never crossed his mind that anything would be needed except courage. The actual writing would be easy. All he had to do was to transfer to paper the interminable restless monologue that had been running inside his head, literally for years. At this moment, however, even the monologue had dried up. Moreover his varicose ulcer had begun itching unbearably. He dared not scratch it, because if he did so it always became inflamed. The seconds were ticking by. He was conscious of nothing except the blankness of the page in front of him, the itching of the skin above his ankle, the blaring of the music, and a slight booziness caused by the gin” (Orwell 10).
At this stage, the physical side of his consciousness is so prominent that it prevents him from expressing his mental one. Winston at this point still finds it impossible to regain control over his mind and body, and so the actual rebellious act of writing cannot take place. When eventually he does start writing, it is still not self-regulated, in a state of “sheer panic, only imperfectly aware of what he was setting down” (Orwell 11). Nevertheless, by the mere act of struggling to write in the diary, Winston actively begins to reclaim the control and unification of his body and mind, setting sail towards health.
One of the basic scales for measuring the success of Winston’s struggle is his growing tendency towards using Oldspeak syntax and vocabulary in his diary and less and less Newspeak. The purpose of Newspeak is not only to provide a medium of expression for the Party’s world-view and mental habits, but also to make all other modes of thought impossible. Newspeak vocabulary and syntax supports the minimalization of individual thought and consciousness, and doublethink (Orwell, appendix). In the first diary entry, he describes a movie he saw the other day:
“hen there was a wonderful shot of a childs arm going up up up right up into the air a helicopter with a camera in its nose must have followed it up and there was a lot of applause from the Party seats but a woman down in the prole part of the house suddenly started kicking up a fuss and shouting they didnt ougher of showed it not in front of the kids they didnt it aint right not in front of kids it aint until the police turned her out i dont suppose anything happened to her nobody cares what the proles say typical prole reaction they never-” (Italics in original text, Orwell 11).
Beyond “shedding first the capital letters, and finally its full stops” (Orwell 11) this passage still reveals a more profound assimilation in the Party’s ideology than the further entries, evident in the double use of Oldspeak side to Newspeak syntax and vocabulary. For the most part, the vocabulary is Oldspeak, however, there are Newspeak words such as “childs.” Furthermore, the lack of full stops, capital letters and grammatical abbreviation commas (such as didnt) shows a tendency towards a lack of organized conscious thought, and a tendency to concise the language, thus reduce consciousness. Above all, the use of the pronoun “I” shows his desire to assert his individual conscious existence. Nevertheless, not capitalizing the “I” indicates the difficulty to do so.
In terms of content, the passage also expresses a desire to revolt against the Party’s cruel and inhumane attitude towards the proles, counter to another that induces him to accept it. Emotionally distanced from the movie, Winston describes the horrific scene as a “wonderful shot.” His attitude towards the prole woman also shows that at this point he still shares the Party’s view of them as akin to animals: “typical prole reaction they never-” Winston himself believes at this point that the proles lack self control. However, the entry also reveals Winston’s identification with the woman’s revolt. Note that until the part about the children, he did use full stops. Thus, the lack of them in this case shows an intense emotional reaction. That is also evident by the repetition he did not use earlier (didnt ougher of showed; they didnt it aint right; it aint). Winston is emotionally affected by the horrific shot, only he is not conscious enough at this point to admit that the prole woman expressed his own revolt against it. At this stage, the lack of conscious reduces his ability to revolt: “he did not know what had made him pour out this stream of rubbish” (Orwell 11). The climax of this lack of consciousness in his revolt is evident when “he discovered that while he sat helplessly musing he had also been writing, as though by automatic action…DOWN WITH BIG BROTHER” (Orwell 19).
Most of all, writing in the diary transgresses against one of the Party’s keystones, doublethink, since it is a material proof of holding a solid opinion. It sustains that ‘truth’ does exist in one’s own consciousness (Orwell 32) and not in the Party’s cooperative one, as Winston later mentions in his diary: “freedom is the freedom to say that two and two make four. If that is granted, all else follows” (Orwell 69). However, Winston himself believes that his consciousness is soon to be taken over by the Party: “but where did this knowledge exist? Only in his own consciousness, which in any case must soon be annihilated” (Orwell 32). Winston’s comment expresses his difficulty to pursue his own beliefs, which will eventually fail his whole struggle.
In his next entry, Winston reveals his belief that writing in the journal entails sure death:
“theyll shoot me i don’t care theyll shoot me in the back of the neck i don’t care down with Big Brother they always shoot you in the back of the neck i don’t care down with Big Brother.” (Orwell 20).
Though it may be argued that this passage shows Winston is conscious of the mortal price he will have to pay for his struggle in the name of his ideological beliefs, a stronger sense of helplessness arises. It appears that from the beginning of his revolt, Winston gives up; he believes that he does not have a chance. The repetition does not only express his great fear of death, but also a child-like defiance in front of an authoritative figure ‘you can do what you want to me…I don’t care…I don’t care….’ In any case, what is certain is that Winston believes he is a rebel willing to die for his causes. It is only during his tortures in the Ministry of Love that he will finally understand the difference between an intellectual decision to die in the name of his ideological struggle, and actually doing it.
The next entry expresses Winston’s rebellion against the Party’s doctrine of alterable past and non-existing future. Furthermore, it expresses the subversive hope that the Party will not last forever, along with its dictatorial ideology:
“To the future or to the past, to a time when thought is free, when men are different from one another and do not live alone- to a time when truth exists and what is done cannot be undone: From the age of uniformity, from the age of solitude. From the age of Big Brother, from the age of double think -greetings!” (Orwell 27)
Writing this passage clearly demands the struggle of Winston’s will to overcome the meaninglessness and the frustration of the thought that such future is impossible, as he meditates before adding it (Orwell 25). Winston overcomes the meaninglessness and frustration of such a possibility by convincing himself that: “it was not by making yourself heard but by staying sane that you carried on the human heritage” (Personal italics, Orwell 26). Thus, for Winston the definition of mental health conveys the definition of human. His struggle is to stay loyal to his own definition of mental health. Furthermore, it shows that the struggle itself, and not the goal, infuses value, which adheres to the overman’s perception of health as constant struggle.
The use of the diary as an element that re-awakens his consciousness, and his sense of a solid, unchangeable external world based on his individual memory is fortified by the successive entry about the old prostitute:
“It was three years ago. It was on a dark evening, in a narrow side street near one of the big railway stations…. she had a young face, painted very thick. It was really the paint that appealed to me…. Party women never paint their faces.” (Orwell 55)
In terms of language, throughout the entry about the prostitute (Orwell 55,56, 59, 60), Winston uses capital letters and full stops. He uses Oldspeak correct grammatical structure of verb, noun and pronoun. He states the date as accurately as he remembers (three years ago). On the content level, Winston professes to a chastity crime that could bring a penalty of five years or so in a forced labor camp. However, the true revolt is not in these facts, as he states himself. The true rebellion is in having desire towards the prostitute. That, is thoughtcrime. And for that, the penalty is death.
The next entry Winston makes is about the proles: “If there is hope, it lies in the proles” (Orwell 60). Using a conditional, Winston expresses doubts concerning reality, an act considered thoughtcrime according to the Party that exclusively decides what reality is. There is also rebellion in the use of future tense, subversive to the Party’s desire to obliterate the future. In terms of content, the expression of hope itself is a transgressive act, on moreover believing that it lies not in the Party, but in the ‘degenerate,’ animal-like proles. In this sense, Winston’s words resonate Zarathustra’s:
“Better, verily, to live among anchorites and goat-herds, than with our gilded, false, over-roughed populace- though it call itself ‘good society.’
Though it call itself ‘nobility.’ But there all is false and foul, above all the blood- thanks to old evil diseases and worse curses.
The best and dearest to me at present is still a sound peasant, coarse, artful, obstinate and enduring: that is at present the noblest type” (TSZ, IV, ch. 63).
Winston believes the proles are healthier than his sick upper class society. Able to stay loyal to their instincts and emotions, the proles are not taught to assimilate body and mind in the Party. Theirs is the virile body that can produce a new, healthier society. However, what he writes immediately after undermines it altogether: “Until they become conscious they will never rebel, and until after they have rebelled they cannot become conscious” (Orwell 61). Evident from the contradicting double conditional, Winston cannot sustain any hope that the proles will rebel, the same as he cannot expect anything but sure death for his transgression against the Party. Zarathustra induces us to take an example of the ‘proles’ and not the ‘nobility.’ However, he does not say that one is excluded from gaining health if he is a member of the upper society. It is up to the individual to choose whether to remain loyal to his sick high society, or to follow the healthier ‘prole’ model.
The next entry portrays the fundamental intellectual motive behind Winston’s ideological struggle: “I understand HOW; I do not understand WHY” (Orwell 68). Winston understands how the Party controls the minds of his society, primarily the Party members, to adhere to its ideology. Yet, he still does not understand why. This is one of his predominant reasons for conducting his ideological revolt against the Party. In addition, this remark stresses the intellectual orientation of the struggle. It appears that Winston is more concerned with the intellectual aspect of the Party, which consequently characterizes the whole notion of an active revolt as problematic. This assumption is supported by thinking he was writing his diary especially for O’Brien (Orwell 69), a person he is most drawn to, not because he seems to share Winston’s political beliefs, but simply because he appears intelligent, and “a person that you could talk to” (personal italics, Orwell 13). What Winston is most interested in is communicating with an inner Party member whom he finds intelligent, more than himself, so he would understand Winston’s political beliefs and above all supply the WHY concerning the Party’s ideology. In the third part of the novel, we shall see that O’Brien explains to him why, which is one of the reasons for the demise of the struggle, and with it, Winston’s own existence.
This assumption that Winston’s ideological struggle is predominantly intellectual explains the following remark that stresses his greatest conscious fear. [46] The remark is stated after contemplating about the photograph that proves that the Party alters the events of the past, adversary to his belief that the past cannot be altered according to human desire:
“He might be alone in holding that belief, and if alone, then a lunatic. But the thought of being a lunatic did not greatly trouble him; the horror was that he might also be wrong” (Personal italics, Orwell 68).
What scares Winston most is the thought that the ideas that stand behind his ideology might be wrong. Still, similar to a healthy overman, Winston grows to believe he is ready to accept that even if “sanity is statistical” he is ready to be a “lunatic” as long as he stays loyal to his own values.
The second stage of the struggle against the Party commences with Julia’s note, and focuses on their relationship as a political revolt. Winston shifts from merely expressing his thoughts on paper to actually executing them, which involves not only his mind in the rebellion, but also his body. With Julia, he rebels by having desire, when “desire is thoughcrime” (Orwell 59). The Party holds desire as crime since there is a direct relation between chastity and political orthodoxy. Through the fear, hate and the persuasion that mere impulses and feelings are of no account, the Party keeps its members loyal to its ideology (Orwell 111, 136). Julia is the best applicant for his political sexual rebellion, since she has a great sexual appetite, and what’s more, she exerts it on “scores” of Party members (Orwell 104). Accordingly: “their embrace had been a battle, the climax of victory. It was a blow struck against the Party. It was a political act” (Orwell 105).
The political rebellion committed through the sexual relationship with Julia develops with time to encompass more than just transgressive desire. Winston starts to feel love instead of hate (Orwell 98). Real intimacy is initiated, communication, and truth. Winston tells her the worst things about himself, confesses that he hated and feared her, and even wanted to kill her (Orwell 105). Eventually, Winston even becomes more interested in the intimacy between them, rather than the sexual desire:” He wished above all that they had some place where they could be alone together without feeling the obligation to make love every time they met” (Orwell 116). Winston finds such a place in the rented room that reminds him of the pre-revolutionary past. There, together they escape. She dresses up like a woman. He remembers his childhood, and gathers material proof that a thing such as unalterable “past” does exist, as well as intimacy and self-infused existential meaning.
By shifting his struggle from mere thoughts and intellectual queries to actions, Winston gets mentally and physically healthier, supporting Nietzsche’s concept of health as affecting both body and mind. Not needing to physically and mentally numb himself anymore, Winston drops his habit of drinking gin at all hours. He gains weight, his varicose ulcer subdues, and his fits of coughing subside. For the first time Winston thinks the process of life ceases to be intolerable (Orwell 124).
With time, the ideological rebellion with Julia that began on sexual grounds and then developed into intimacy, reaches its highest stage- loyalty. Loyalty to anything or anybody but the Party’s ideology is exactly the reason why the Party attempts to prevent desire and intimacy. Yet, Winston and Julia prevail: “the one thing that matters is that we shouldn’t betray one another” (Orwell 137). However, Winston’s weak will is evident once more when he confesses to Julia and himself that preserving this loyalty “can’t make the slightest difference” (Orwell 137). In view of that, Winston himself still expects death to crown his rebellion: “The last step was something that would happen in the Ministry of Love. He had accepted it. The end was contained in the beginning” (Orwell 132).
Although Winston grows stronger and more active in his ideological struggle against the Party, and consequently gains more control over both his body and mind, from the beginning of the third stage of his struggle it becomes evident that the intellectual aspect of his rebellion will cause its downfall. When he achieves the long-desired meeting with O’Brien, and is put to believe O’Brien shares his own subversive ideology “[h]e paused, realizing for the first time the vagueness of his own motives. Since he did not in fact know what kind of help he expected from O’Brien” (personal italics, Orwell 140). This is not surprising, considering the many a times before Winston confessed his main interest in O’Brien results from the latter’s intellectual knowledge that could supply the WHY Winston craves for, and not as an actual ‘brother in arms’ against the Party.
Winston’s alleged initiation into the “Brotherhood” reveals just how much he is not prepared for action. He blindly answers “yes” to all of O’Brien’s questions. He is prepared to give his life, commit murder, acts of sabotage which may cause the death of hundreds of innocent people, betray his country to foreign powers, cheat, forge, blackmail, corrupt the minds of children, distribute habit-forming drugs, encourage prostitution, disseminate venereal diseases, do anything which is likely to cause demoralization and weaken the powers of the Party, throw sulphuric acid in a child’s face, lose his identity and live out the rest of his life as a waiter or a dock worker, and commit suicide, all in the name of the “Brotherhood” (Orwell 142). Apparently, the only thing he is not prepared to do in the name of his ideology is separate from Julia and never see her again. I use the word ‘apparently’ since this does not seem Winston’s opinion. Unless Julia broke in with a loud “No!” he would continue with the automatic positive replies: “It appeared to Winston that a long time passed before he answered. For a moment he seemed even to have been deprived of the power of speech. His tongue worked soundlessly …until he had said it, he did not know which word he was going to say. ‘No,’ he said finally” (Orwell 142-3).
It is somewhat peculiar that Winston does not recognize the similarity between the Party’s ideology, and the Brotherhood, which he desires to be a member of. In the name of his ideology, he is willing to commit the exact same crimes as the Party. At one point, it becomes evident Winston loses conscious control over his speech: “His tongue worked soundlessly.” The same controlling power that the Party has over him, the Brotherhood would articulate: “he seemed even to have been deprived of the power of speech.” He even loses control over his own thought, similar to the Party’s doctrine: “until he had said it, he did not know which word he was going to say.”
By complying with each of the horrific acts Winston is supposed to do in the name of his liberal ideology, he symbolically becomes diseased according to Nietzsche. Winston loses his self-control, and his ability to resist O’Brien even when he might disagree with him. He is willing on take on himself total subordination to an external force, and especially higher one than himself- O’Brien who is “much more intelligent than him”[47] and Goldstein, his new leader. Above all, for Nietzsche revolution is a human sickness. Instead of exchanging one institutionalized corrupted ideology with another, man should find his health in struggling inwardly, individually, and struggle from within to commence the transformation. In the second stage of his struggle, Winston got healthier since his struggle was individual and internal. However, now, his descent into the last man commences. His struggle is symbolically over without him even knowing it. Concluding his recruitment, O’Brien offers Winston a toast for celebrating his initiation into the brotherhood resistance’: “I think it is fitting that we should begin by drinking a health. To our Leader: To Emmanuel Goldstein” (Orwell 141). O’Brien is actually celebrating the beginning of Winston’s healing process, however ironically, according to the Party’s definition, and not Winston’s Nietzschean one.
Winston’s character literalizes the danger in the Fire Dog, the revolutionary spirit inflicted with one of the two major sicknesses of the earth according to Zarathustra. Winston, like the fire dog, sincerely believes that ‘Great Events’ such as forced overthrowing and horrifying terrorism can promote his ideology of freedom and equality. However, what the firedog does is actually create more ‘noise’ and ‘smoke’, two elements used by the state and religion itself in order to control and manipulate the individual.
Not around the inventors of new noise, but around the inventors of new values, doth the world revolve; INAUDIBLY it revolveth. […]
Like thyself the state is a dissembling dog; like thee doth it like to speak with smoke and roaring–to make believe, like thee, that it speaketh out of the heart of things.
For it seeketh by all means to be the most important creature on earth, the state; and people think it so.” (TSZ Chapter XL. Great Events)
Winston sincerely believes he is drafted to fight for his individualistic political beliefs. Yet, he is so invested in the intellectual aspect of his rebellion, that he loses track of the true nature of the values he is struggling for. Just like the Party’s ideology, Winston still considers the “state” as the most important thing, placing it above all, above intimacy, human rights, freedom and honesty. Winston fails to see that with Julia was the real rebellion, one that included both body and mind, one he could have allowed him to remain loyal to his values and ideals.
After the initiation, Winston’s body gets sicker, corresponding with the Nietzschean view of the body and the self are one. Now that Winston’s mind became ‘sick,’ so does the virility of his body decline:
“His body seemed to have not only the weakness of a jelly, but its translucency. He felt that if he held up his hand he would be able to see the light through it. All the blood and lymph had been drained out of him […] leaving only a frail structure of nerves, bones and skin” (Orwell 148).
Winston’s body becomes weaker, and we discover that it bothers him more than expected beforehand. Hw was so invested in the intellectual depth of his rebellion, that he failed to ask himself whether he is physically strong enough to sustain the consequences of such a rebellion. Accordingly, the idea of any physical torture or pain inflicted by the Party begins to horrify Winston. During his incarceration in the Ministry of Love, hope comes solely in the external powerful shape of O’Brien:
“He thought oftener of O’Brien, with a flickering hope. O’Brien might know that he had been arrested. The Brotherhood, he had said, never tried to save its members. But there was the razor blade; they would send the razor blade if they could. There would be perhaps five seconds before the guard could rush into the cell. The blade would bite into him with a sort of burning coldness, and even the fingers that held it would be cut to the bone. Everything came back to his sick body, which shrank trembling from the smallest pain. He was not certain that he would use the razor blade even if he got the chance. It was more natural to exist from moment to moment, accepting another ten minutes’ life even with the certainty that there was torture at the end of it” (orwell 189).
Winston’s descent into the sick last man becomes clear. What he is now most bothered about is gaining peace of mind and tranquility in the face of the thought this might be the end of him. He is not brave anymore as he thought he was, he does care the world whether they kill him or not, and even more of suffering any physical pain during the tortures. Like a Nietzschean last man, what he is most concerned about now is ‘existing from moment to moment.’
When the tortures do begin, O’Brien’s main attempt is to convince Winston he is diseased, and the Party holds the cure. The method of torture O’Brien uses appears to reflect the Nietzschean attitude towards attaining greater health, however, only deceitfully:
“You are mentally deranged. You suffer from a defective memory. You are unable to remember real events, and you persuade yourself that you remember other events which never happened. Fortunately it is curable. You have never cured yourself of it, because you did not choose to. There was a small effort of the will that you were not ready to make. Even now, I am well aware, you are clinging to your disease under the impression that it is a virtue.” (Orwell 203)
O’Brien is correct to the extent that Winston does hold his ‘disease’ to be a ‘virtue.’ Metaphorically speaking, Winston’s sickness of revolution that results in his contradictory desires to revolt against the Party on the one hand, and assimilate in it on the other, is inspired by his memory. It is his memory that fuels his struggle against the Party’s ideology that the past is existent only in the mind of the Party, changeable according to its desire.[48] O’Brien also adheres to the Nietzschean doctrine of using the Will to Power in order to cure oneself from the disease. However, O’Brien distorts the Nietzschean concept of health, since for him, the definition of health (in this case “sanity”) depends on the Party, and not the individual. As we have seen, Nietzsche’s whole doctrine of health depends on the individual’s finding of values that are excluded from the formal political, religious and social institutions.
O’Brien succeeds in “curing” Winston according to the Party’s definition of health, since he is aware of Winston’s great weakness in his struggle. O’Brien knows that Winston’s struggle is mostly intellectual, and as such, his resistance can be broken once physical pain is applied. During his incarceration, Winston himself learns the difference between intellectual and actual decision. He understands that theoretically, if he could, he would save Julia by doubling his pain. Practically, though, he will not, since ‘nothing in the world is worse than physical pain’ (Orwell 197).
Throughout the torture, O’Brien uses pain to “cure” Winston, until he does not care about the truth; he only wants the pain to stop. When the pain is so strong, Winston says that he honestly does not know how many fingers O’Brien is holding (Orwell 208). After the electric shock to the brain, he is not sure of what he sees. He agrees that there are five, but then his mind changes the view after a second, showing him there are only four (Orwell 213). But now Winston does not care about objective truth ant more. He only wants to believe in whatever he is asked to believe in order to stop the pain. In this sense, Winston reveals another sickness. His greatest dread of physical pain reveals his inability to resist it through will.
Winston’s failure to declare his superiority over the Party on behalf of his higher human values is pinned to his moment of fall; the moment he turned his individual rebellion into a social revolution; the moment he started his descent into the last man. Tragically for Winston, he becomes not only the last man in Nietzschean terms, but also the Party’s: “If you are a man, Winston, you are the last man. Your kind is extinct; we are the inheritors. Do you understand? You are outside history, you are non-existent” (Orwell 222). Winston is defeated. His belief that the Spirit of Man shall demolish the Party vanishes once he hears his recorded initiation, convincing him he is not morally superior, honest or more compassionate than the Party and takes a look at his diseased, broken and emaciated body (Orwell 224). The Party convinces him that it is the next step in evolution. Accordingly, from this moment on, Winston relinquishes his ideological struggle on the intellectual level:
“He could not fight the Party any longer. Besides, the Party was in the right. It must be so: how could the immortal collective brain be a mistake? By what external standard could you check its judgments? Sanity was statistical. It was merely a question of learning to think as they though […] He accepted everything. The past was alterable. The past never had been altered…how easy it was! Only surrender, and everything else followed” (Orwell 228).
Winston’s intellectual struggle against the Party’s ideology is resolved. He is convinced that sanity is statistical and so relinquishes his former belief that it is not, and even if it is, it makes no difference as long as his values are right. Now that he accepts the Party’s values, his definition of health adheres to the Party’s:
“One day – but ‘one day’ was not the right expression; just as probably it was in the middle of the night: once – he fell into a strange, blissful reverie. He was walking down the corridor, waiting for the bullet. He knew that it was coming in another moment. Everything was settled, smoothed out, reconciled. There were no more doubts, no more arguments, no more pain, no more fear. His body was healthy and strong. He walked easily, with a joy of movement and with a feeling of walking in sunlight. He was not any longer in the narrow white corridors in the Ministry of Love, he was in the enormous sunlit passage, a kilometer wide, down which he had seemed to walk in the delirium induced by drugs. He was in the Golden Country, following the foot-track across the old rabbit-cropped pasture. He could feel the short springy turf under his feet and the gentle sunshine on his face. At the edge of the field were the elm trees, faintly stirring, and somewhere beyond that was the stream where the dace lay in the green pools under the willows.” (Orwell 230)
As prior to his rebellion which started by writing the diary, Winston can no longer have grasp on time: “One day – but ‘one day’ was not the right expression; just as probably it was in the middle of the night.” Like sick last man, he enjoys a state of blissful ignorance: “he fell into a strange, blissful reverie.” Finding there is nothing else to expect, to live for, he becomes a pure nihilist expecting his death. In such a state, Winston feels “There were no more doubts, no more arguments, no more pain, no more fear” the exact same ingredients needed to motivate and sustain a state of struggle according to Nietzsche. So invested in this euphoric illusion, and controlled both mentally and physically by the Party, Winston senses “His body was healthy and strong.” Winston is not aware, or even interested any more in the external world. He achieves what he sought for, he reached his Golden Country, and he is running in its pastors happy, free, and blissful. Like the last man, Winston becomes unconscious of his innate mind-body sickness. There is nothing to overcome, because the illusion granted by the state and external substances is sufficient.
Nevertheless, Winston is still not considered fully cured according to the Party. There is still one more tumor in need of treatment. To heal Winston altogether, O’Brien needs to make him love Big Brother. In order to do that, O’Brien needs to break the loyalty Winston still feels for Julia, the apex of his revolt, and direct it towards Big Brother. O’Brien accomplishes his goal, since once more, he plays on Winston’s greatest fear- physical pain. This time it is the rats, which he knows Winston fears most. Winston really desires Julia to experience the rat torture instead of him, and not just saying that to get saved (Orwell, pp.236). He betrays her, and the healing according to the Party’s ideology is complete (Orwell 244):
“He gazed up at the enormous face. Forty years it had taken him to learn what kind of smile was hidden beneath the dark mustache. O cruel, needless misunderstandings! O stubborn, self-willed exile from the loving breast! Two gin-scented tears trickled down the sides of his nose. But it was all right, everything was all right, the struggle was finished. He had won the victory over himself. He loved Big Brother” (Personal italics, Orwell 245).
Now Winston understands the long sought for WHY. Now he understands why war is peace, why ignorance is strength, and above all, why freedom is slavery. O’Brien “helped” him understand why human is a disease needed to be cured. Man is mortal, deceitful, conscienceless and powerless when he is an individual. Now that he understands the Why, his inner ideological struggle between hating and loving Big Brother is finished. The final cure for the human disease he carries shall arrive with the longed-for bullet. Additionally, with his death as his society’s last man, Winston will crown the Party’s successful attempt of curing the disease called humanity.
1984 offers a plot for a classical misunderstanding of Nietzsche’s conception of health. The ruling Party in Oceania takes the basic elements Nietzsche mentions when talking about health, and distorts them. Hope for health comes in the shape of Winston, but he cannot sustain his role as a healthy overman for long, since his intellectual regard for the mind remains higher than that of the ‘flesh.’ In this space between the appreciation of the mind and the disregard of the body, Big Brother technology takes over. It allows Winston to gain the sense of mind-body unification he has actually craved for all along, much more than his intellectual revolutionary escapade. Thus to the readers in 1949, Winston’ does not convey a cyberspace story about a technologically enhanced transhuman that can bring the next stage in homo-sapient evolution. Nor is it the intention of the novel. Winston opens a long line of protagonists that use technology in order to reach a higher state of what health means for them, may it be psychological, mental, physical or altogether. Above all, 1984 opens a literary debate over the issue of using high technology in order to enforce a ruling definition of health, a debate that will only become fiercer over the next half of a century.
CHAPTER TWO
Cyberspace Mania – William Gibson’s Neuromancer (1984)
“The sick and perishing- it was they who despised the body and the earth, and invented the heavenly world, and the redeeming blood-drops; but even those sweet and sad poisons they borrowed from the body and earth!” [49]
Though the year 1984 dismissed the prophecy that an INGOSAC-like government will use technology to ‘cure’ its citizens of individual body and mind, it did give rise to new science-fiction genre that uses technology to literalize their dichotomy. Initiating Cyber-punk with Neuromancer (1984), William Gibson reflects the spirit of his time by presenting a world dominated by body modifications and disembodied digital identities. Engaging in the future evolution of humanity as an outcome of the protagonist’s attempt to pursue Nietzsche’s conception of health, the novel seriously questions the Western view of health as an attainable static state, rather than a lifelong dynamic process. As we have seen in 1984, Neuromancer addresses another counterfeit attempt to embody Nietzsche’s conception of health by using an external force to resolve the innate sickness of body-mind split.
Abstracting the body from corporeality by translating it into binary codes, humans in Neuromancer can literalize the dichotomy between body and mind. As cyberspace is built on non-corporeal data, it provides an environment that is stripped of the body and offers escape from mortality. With the aid of cyberspace, aka the Matrix, humans in Gibson’s novel can exist in a boundless space and time, where disembodied consciousness can exist in its purest form. Likewise, technology can transform the body according to individual desire, using a variety of gene, brain, skin, and organ modifications. Breaking the corporeal and mental boundaries known to man today, Neuromancer presets the next transhuman stage in human evolution.
Nietzsche’s body-mind split sickness of humanity, then, rules the world of Neuromancer. Rather than struggle to acknowledge the innate sickness of the mind-body split, and regard health as a life long dynamic process to resolve it, Neuromancer’s subjects not only savor this split, but also literalize it. On the ‘body’ pole of the scale, there are “meat puppets,” rented prostitutes with blocked consciousness for the hour, “razor” mercenaries with metal implants to excel as killing machines, gene modifications to eliminate diseases and mortality, cosmetic surgeries to conceal and alter everything from age to gender. On the ‘mind’ pole, there are Flatlines, post-mortal pure ROM (read-only memory) constructs and AIs (Artificial Intelligence), self-conscious binary programs.
Henry Dorset Case, the protagonist of Neuromancer, is caught between his split body and mind. On the one hand, Case is infatuated with the matrix and views his corporeality with disgust. On the other hand, he fears becoming pure matrix intelligence and keeps returning to his body. Case’s struggle for health, thus, consists of two separate yet complementary aspects. From the aspect of the body, Case needs to accept his corporeality and all that it entails such as emotions, drives such as sex, and needs such as food, acknowledging his mortality and ability to confront pain. From the aspect of the mind, Case needs to realize his individual consciousness, opposite to the matrix ‘consensual hallucination.’ To do that, Case needs to relinquish his fear of uncovering the true binary nature of the matrix, the ultimate manifestation of his preferred existence.
Refusing to use high technology to facilitate this sense of mind body split elevates Case to the position of an overman, though overtly, he appears to be as sick as his environment. To escape the body and individual consciousness, he flees to cyberspace; to simulate this sensation in the external world, he takes neural drugs and throws himself into life-threatening experiences, which allows him to act in a state of ‘animal bliss.’ Yet, in contrast to others, Case rejects the use of technology to alter natural physical traits such as external appearance, gene, and permanent brain structure. Similarly, he refuses to be fully translated into binary codes. In addition, Case struggles against nihilism and latent death wish, prominent symptoms of the mind-body split disease in his society.
Nevertheless, Case’s struggle is not self-regulated, at least to the extent that Winston’s was. Drawing on post-modern deterministic pessimism, Gibson depicts a world where humans have no choice but to ‘view the show’ and ‘play their part.’ Accordingly, Case is not driven to struggle against his mind-body disease because of beliefs, ideology, or intellectual aspiration. He is forced to confront his disease once his employers damage his neural system, undermining his status, profession, and identity as a cyberspace cowboy. To win back his physical health, Case is pushed to set on a journey to emancipate an AI. Losing his Matrix ‘god’ and faith in the ‘religion’ of technology, he is driven to acknowledge his mind-body split disease and find existential meaning from within
As the novel progresses, Case realizes the motives that drive him to reject each of the mind-body poles. He learns that one type of existence needs and infuses meaning in the other, and only struggling to unite both can he reach an overman state of health. Unlike Winston, Case learns to recognize his mind-body sickness, and understands the struggle to unite both is a lifelong journey. However, reflecting the spirit of Gibson’s time, Case’s success in finding meaning in his individual physical and mental existence is undermined by the ‘sick’ powerful entity he is responsible for creating, one with perfect unity of body and mind.
Case’s struggle for health consists of four stages, divided by the growing level of intensity to resolve the mind-body split. Emotionally intense experiences push the stages forward by driving Case to gradually accept his own corporeality on the one hand, and on the other, realize his individual mental existence. From the beginning of the novel until the self-conscious AI Wintermute simulates Case’s ex-girlfriend Linda Lee in the arcade, consists the first stage. Until this encounter, Case is unaware of his mind-body sickness. All he believes is that his ‘god’ is the matrix, and the deck his ‘church.’ Lacking interest in the external world and despising his physical needs, the encounter pushes Case to uncover his negative attitude toward his body. The second stage begins from this encounter until Case watches Riviera’s self-generated holographic show of performing sexual intercourse with his current girlfriend Molly. During this stage, Case begins to examine Wintermute’s nature and overcome his mental fear of confronting the purest contemporary form of disembodied mental existence. The third stage begins after the show, and lasts until he meets Linda again, this time when flatlined by the other AI Neuromancer. Case grows to accept his corporeality, and on the same level, tame his fascination with the matrix. Then, the forth and final stage lasts until the novels ends materializes Case’s greatest corporeal fear of being imprisoned by his “meat” and teaches him to accept it, as well as overcome his fear of uncovering the true nature of the matrix, and accept his individual consciousness.
Before his former employers maimed his neural system for double-crossing, Case was a top cyberspace cowboy, one of the best in the trade. Living for the virtual world of the matrix, he was not aware of his mind-body sickness:
“He’d, jacked into a custom cyberspace deck that projected his disembodied consciousness into the consensual hallucination that was the matrix.” (Gibson 5)
What attracts Case to the world of the matrix is the ability to materialize his mind’s presentation in its purest form, untainted by the space and time confinements of the external world. In the matrix, he does not only escape the body, but also his individual consciousness. By “operat[ing] on an almost permanent adrenaline high,” Case is able to leave his individual consciousness behind, and join a hive-like mind. But Case is not aware at this stage of his mental dependency on the matrix. Resembling the rest of his society, he uses technology to ignore his innate mind body split, by existing primarily in the mental world he prefers.
Like Winston, Case thought the penalty for his crime would be death (Gibson 5). But his capturers find a worse punishment for him, one that would slowly destroy him and everything he holds sacred:
“For Case, who’d lived for the bodiless exultation of cyberspace, it was the Fall. In the bars he’d frequented as a cowboy hotshot, the elite stance involved a certain relaxed contempt for the flesh. The body was meat. Case fell into the prison of his own flesh.” (Gibson 6)
Expelled from the matrix, Case is forced to search for meaning in the external physical world. Resembling Nietzsche’s discussion of the religious contempt for the flesh, Case feels his corporeality imprisons and devalues him. No longer able to ‘project his disembodied consciousness into the consensual hallucination that is the matrix,’ Case loses his technological faith and his cyberspace god. And in a godless universe, Case has to find a way to infuse existential meaning from within. Though the actual neural disease forced the struggle to begin, it is evident that Case’s mind-body split sickness was directing his actions unconsciously. Case confesses he did not need the extra cash from the theft, and he himself is baffled as to why he did it. The actual neurological sickness awakens Case to his innate human sickness of the mind-body split.
Out of hope and money, Case sleeps in “coffins,” stealing, and killing, in order to survive. However, the physical neurological sickness grants Case the opportunity to uncover a deeper disease. Case realizes the death he carried throughout his life, the “secret poison he hadn’t known he carried” (Gibson 7). This also explains why Case stole from his former employers despite the fact he did not need the extra cash. Since the matrix itself is an embodiment of Case’s paradise, his secret death wish comes as no surprise. Death, for Case, is the ultimate release from the corporeal limitations, the final cure for eliminating the body. Furthermore, it is interesting to see that survival and homeostasis are not the driving forces behind Case’s actions. Case is a neural addict constantly searching for an extreme life-threatening neural rush to achieve a “terminal overdrive” high. He is addicted to the exultation of the chase, and when his life was too comfortable, his stealing from his employers made sure he would get his neural ‘score.’ Case’s mind-body split disease is constantly sending out its signals, beckoning his cyberspace mania and contempt for the flesh that undermine his sense of being.
Missing the neural exultation from running in the matrix, Case turns to other technologically manifested substitutions. Unwilling to confront mental pain and discomfort, he searches for external facilitators that will manipulate his mind. Addicted to all kinds of neural stimulators, such as Octagon, Derms and Betaphenethylamine, Case temporarily escapes his corporeal and mental imprisonment. The drugs, however, only reveal the symptom of his mind-body disease:
“With the octagon coming on, pinheads of sweat starting from his palms, suddenly aware of each tingling hair on his arms and chest, Case knew that at some point he’d started to play a game with himself, a very ancient one that has no name, a final solitaire. He no longer carried a weapon, no longer took the basic precautions. He ran the fastest, loosest deals on the street, and he had a reputation for being able to get whatever you wanted. A part of him knew that the arc of his self-destruction was glaringly obvious to his customers […] but that same part of him basked in the knowledge that it was only a matter of time. And that was the part of him, smug in its expectation of death, that most hated the thought of Linda Lee.” (Gibson 7)
Taking neural drugs enables Case to experience his corporeal existence without the usual repulsion. The drugs block his corporeal despise and raise his bodily consciousness, making him aware even of such a micro thing as each hair on his chest. Accordingly, at these periods he becomes conscious of ‘corporeal truth,’ information his body holds concerning his self-destruction and latent death wish. Exactly then, thoughts of his ex-girlfriend Linda Lee undermine this fatal desire to ultimately eliminate the body. Yet, despising the “meat,” Case at this stage does not wish to admit the physical joy and sense of meaning she brings into his life:
“A tangible wave of longing hit him, lust and loneliness riding in on the wavelength of amphetamine. He remembered the smell of her skin in the overheated darkness of a coffin near the port, her locked across the small of his back. All the meat, he thought, and all it wants.” (Meeting with Linda lee, Gibson 9)
Memories of Linda arouse the senses of smell and touch and the desire for sex, which force Cases to realize the detested corporeal aspect of his being. Case regards the body as separated object with its own desires, over which he has no control “all the meat […] and all it wants.” Despising himself for being physically and emotionally aroused by her image leads Case to try blocking her memory out of his consciousness.
Lacking a sense of control over his body and mind, Case believes cheap chrome-coated ninja stars predict his future, thinking:
“[T]hese were the stars under which he voyaged, his destiny spelled out in a constellation of cheap chrome.” (Gibson 13)
The arrangement of the chrome stars resembles an interpretation of real sky and starts, and associate to ancient superstitions of uncovering one’s destiny in the stars. But these starts are reflective of Case’s life in Chiba city and the matrix. In these chrome starts, not the ones of the external world, Case sees his future. He feels an external force symbolized by cheap chrome-covered stars controls his life. More importantly, ninja starts are used for killing. And in that sense, Case’s prediction of his own predetermined future appears to entail either the death of others, or his own. Moreover, the adjective “cheap” reveals the meaningless existential value he passively attaches to himself. Though confronting for the first time his nihilistic disease, his lack of mental interest in examining this urge weakens the depth of realization and thus the intensity of the struggle.
Case’s death wish does not only take place in the external world, but in his disembodied cyberspace existence as well. His ‘final solitaire’ allows him to experience the external world as if it were the matrix and thus reveal his latent death wish that fuels both:
“He felt a stab of elation the octagons and adrenaline mingling with something else. You’re enjoying this, he thought; you’re crazy. Because, in some weird and very approximate way, it was like a run in the matrix. Get just wasted enough, find yourself in some desperate but strangely arbitrary kind of trouble, and it was possible to see Ninsei as a field of data, the way the matrix had once reminded him of proteins linking to distinguish cell specialties. Then you could throw yourself into a high-speed drift and skid, totally engaged but set apart from it all, and all around you the dance of biz, information interacting, data made flesh in the mazes of the black market” (Gibson 16)
By getting high on neural uppers, and throwing himself into a dangerous situation, Case wishes to become “totally engaged but set apart from it all.” Similar to the way in which he experiences himself in the matrix, Case can experience Ninsei, his bodiless consciousness magnified, while his physical one diminished. What attracts Case to the matrix is the ability to escape not only the body, but individual consciousness as well.
However, the smooth veneer of cyberspace is beginning to crack. Cyberspace begins not to make sense to Case’s body. Fear, one of the strongest emotional responses with a strong physical hold, is excluded from the matrix, since what ever happens in that environment, stays in the mind. When the elements of fear and physical pain reappear, Case realizes he missed them, and the usual paranoia triggered by the matrix hallucinations is resented.
“When the fear came, it was like some half-forgotten friend. Not the cold rapid mechanism of the dex-paranoia, but simple animal fear. He’d lived for so long on a constant edge of anxiety that he’d almost forgotten what real fear was” (Gibson 18)
Case begins to prefer a natural physical emotion, which has a physical impact on him, rather than a hallucinated one produced by his mind.
During the operation to repair his damaged neural system Case’s body further awakens to uncover real memories from the external world, which have corporeal significance. To uncover this ‘physical truth’ Case needs to overcome tremendous physical pain:
“Lost, so small amid that dark, hands grown cold, body image fading down corridors of television sky. Voices. […] pain beyond anything to which the name of pain is given […] And Ratz was there, and Linda Lee, Wage and Lonny Zone, a hundred faces from the neon forest, sailors and hustlers and whores, where the sky is poisoned silver, beyond chain link and the prison of the skull […] Where the sky faded from hissing static to the non color of the matrix, and he glimpsed the shuriken, his stars.” (Gibson 31)
In his greatest moment of physical pain yet, Case’s sick body mind disease is uncovered. What he hallucinates about are the significant others in his life outside the matrix and the sight of the city he lives in. Rutz, the bartender with whom he shares communication and amity, Linda Lee he sexually desires and shares intimacy and warmth with, Wage he despises and fears for presuming he wishes him dead, and the hundred nameless people from the ‘neon forest’ with whom he shares the Darwinistic experiment of surviving, the sailors hustlers and whores that represent the lowest desires of the ‘meat.’ Yet these contacts with the external world are taken over by the representation of the matrix. This connection to the external physical world turns into a matrix sky, with the shuriken chrome stars that symbolize his inescapable destiny. Case does find meaning in the external world, but he believes his destiny is in the matrix. And that is where he is heading back again after the operation.
As his physical awareness grows stronger, Case’s nihilistic death wish becomes weaker. Fearing the promise of a new future is a dream: “hot tears blurred his vision” (Gibson 37). Unlike his former nightmares in which he reaches for the missing consol “and he’d cry for it, cry in his sleep, and wake alone in the dark” with “his hands clawed into the bedslab, temper foam bunched between his fingers, trying to reach the console that wasn’t there,” (Gibson 4) now Case also values elements of the external world. A female partner to share intimacy and sex with, and new job to take him out of the Ninsie streets in which he had nothing to find but his prominent death.
When Case first returns to the matrix after his neural surgery, he appears to resume his former blind fascination with the matrix and his preferred disembodied mental existence. Once again, the timeless and boundless sensation of infinity wraps Case “fluid neon origami trick, the unfolding of his distance less home, his country, transparent 3D chessboard extending to infinity” (Gibson p.51). The geometric beauty of the visual patterns in cyberspace absorbs him in an environment that is not governed by the external laws of science. Finally, he could re-experience the sensation of jacking into a “custom cyberspace deck that project[s] his disembodied consciousness into the consensual hallucination that was the matrix” (Gibson 5). Case apparently found his way back to heaven, released from the prison of his own flesh. The feeling of release to great, the level of joy and excitement so intense, that this is the only time he cries in the novel with “tears of release streaking his face” (Gibson 51). His erotic attraction towards the reappearing object of desire eliminates his lustful ‘cyberspace’ nightmares:
“This was it. This was what he was, who he was, his being. He forgot to eat […] Sometimes he resented having to leave the deck to use the chemical toilet they’d set up in a corner of the loft […] Its rainbow pixel maze was the first thing he saw when he woke. He’d go straight to the deck, not bothering to dress, and jack in. He was cutting it. He was working. He lost track of days.” (Gibson 59)
However, something has changed:
“[A]nd sometimes, falling asleep, […] images of Chiba came flooding back. Faces and Ninsei neon. Once he woke from a confused dream of Linda Lee, unable to recall who she was or what she’d ever meant to him. When he did remember, he jacked in and worked for nine straight hours.” (Gibson 59)
As much as Case feels he has accomplished his destination, that this is what he is and what he wants to be, a part of him is still haunted by Linda Lee. Like an ideal cyberspace cowboy, Case assumes he is most content when his physicality is left behind, when eating, urinating, or even getting dressed are “meat” traits to ignore. But when he sleeps, when his consciousness is released from what he believes himself to be, his “meat,” and “all it wants” awakens. In his dreams, Case’s mind-body diseases emerges in the shape of Linda Lee, the girl that he hates his body for desiring. Even though Case despises himself for thinking about Linda Lee, for the way his body physically yearns for her and their lost intimacy, his body keeps on reminding him that in his dreams, when Case’s unconsciousness is set free. But Case, at this stage, is not willing to explore what Linda Lee really means to him, or why he longs for her. The moment he begins to, he immediately escapes to the arms of cyberspace.
Furthermore, when Case now experiences the external world, his physical numbness begins to bother him:
“He took corners at random, his collar up, hunched in a new leather jacket, flicking the first of a chain of Yeheyuans into the gutter and lighting another. He tried to imagine Armitage’s toxin sacs dissolving in his bloodstream, microscopic membranes wearing thinner as he walked. It didn’t seem real. […] He found himself trying to remember the faces of the three people he’d killed in Chiba. The men were blanks; the woman reminded him of Linda Lee.” (Gibson 68)
Chain-smoking while roaming the city, looking estranged with his collar raised, Case feels the void inside him. He tries to awaken himself by awakening his body, by raising thoughts he believes he will infuse fear and pain in him. But years of entering the matrix in order to erase the body and its needs, damage Case’s sense reality in the external world. It does not make sense to his body. And his attempt to awaken himself emotionally and physically by highly intense physical experiences fails. The only emotional memory he does recall is the face of Linda Lee and the fact he feels responsible for her death. Evidently, the key to acknowledge his body lies in the hands of Linda-Lee, the symbol of his corporeality.
From what we have seen until now, Case values the mind over the body. Technology, in the shape of cyberspace, is the ideal environment for his mind to assume the boundless and timeless existence, while all else that forces him to recognize his physicality is pushed aside. Pure intelligence, existing solely in the world of the matrix, ageless, passionless, and limitless, we would have expected Case to adore AI. Nothing could be further than the truth. Case fears AI and he is still unwilling to examine the mental reasoning behind it. The reason he gives Molly for avoiding them is:
“[T]hey’re rare. Most of them are military, the bright ones, and we can’t crack the ice […] And then there’s the Turing cops, and that’s bad heat […] I dunno, it just isn’t part of the trip.” (Gibson 95)
It would be illogical to presume that Case fears getting caught by Turing police for emancipating an AI, since we have seen the careless way in which he enjoys running for his life in the streets of Chiba and the matrix. The real reason Case does not deal with AI is twofold. First, it is a perfect disembodied mental existence, which Case rejects. Secondly, its self-consciousness contradicts Case’s ability to experience ‘consensual hallucination’ in the matrix, his ideal mental existence denied of individual consciousness. Therefore, Case has no desire to meet or communicate with an AI, and the mere idea terrifies him. As a result, Wintermute’s first communication attempt is fearfully rejected (Gibson 98).
Similarly, Case fears Dixie Flatline’s laughter: “When the construct laughed, it came through as something else, not laughter, but a stab of cold down Case’s spine” (Gibson 106). Flatlines, human beings that physically died and then translated as binary data into a mainframe, are regarded by Case as mere programs. When Dixie uses a distinctive human trait such as laughter, Case is terrified. Similar to an AI, the flatline is a disembodied cyberspace identity that shares human traits. For the AI, it was the desire to communicate. For Dixie, it is laughter. Once again, we would have expected Case to be fascinated with a pure digital Matrix construct, and yet, he is terrified from any human feature they entail. At this point, Case still does not attempt to mentally understand why. Nevertheless, Case’s realization of his mind-body disease grows. Case begins to realize his negative attitude towards pure cyberspace entities
Case’s next mental confrontation with the nature of AI occurs during his conversation with the Zionists, the subversive group that wishes to abolish what they see as contemporary Babylon. Case realizes he does not see Wintermute as something religiously or politically divine. He could not have cared less about his alleged religious roll as a “tool of Final Days” (Gibson 113). It is a job for him, one he does not want to do, but cannot refuse. Once again, Case still does not know what is the source of his rejection or fear. Moreover, he does not question himself as to the consequences of emancipating an AI. Lying to Maelcuem, the Zionist assisting him in the operation, about not contacting Wintermute, reveals his lack of desire to confront this issue (Gibson 115). Yet, Case does not remain in his fearful position for long. Knowing full well that as much as having a look at the AI in Berne (Wintermute) can be the death of him, he still goes ahead with it. Evidently, the prominent motive of his action is not mortal fear, as he still carries his death wish, but his neural addiction: “Case punched for the Swiss banking sector, feeling a wave of exhilaration as cyberspace shivered, blurred, gelled” (Gibson 115). Craving the neural rush he gets from running in the matrix, or from taking drugs and throwing himself into life threatening situations, Case is persuaded to encounter an AI.
Case’s first communication with Wintermute forces him to begin questioning the true nature of the matrix, and enter the second stage of his struggle towards health. The AI represents the purest cyberspace entity that Case’s corporeal limitation will never allow him to become. Wintermute, however, acts as a mere tool that draws images from Case’s memory to project them visually. In this sense, the encounters with Wintermute are only a vehicle to prompt Case’s confrontation with his own corporeal and mental fears. These encounters directly reveal Case’s mind-body disease and force him to confront it. Waking up in the matrix for the first time after communicating with Wintermute, Case first instinct is corporeal:
“It had to be a Friday. Linda was probably in the arcade. Might have money, or at least cigarettes.[…] She looked up as he put his arm around her, smiled.
“Hey. How you doin’? Look wet.” He kissed her.
“You need a place to sleep, Case?”
“I guess so.”
“Come on, then.” She took his hand. “We’ll get you a coffee and something to eat. Take you home. It’s good to see you, man.” She squeezed his hand. He smiled. Something cracked. Something shifted at the core of things. The arcade froze, vibrated […] She was gone. The weight of memory came down, an entire body of knowledge driven into his head like a microsoft into a socket. Gone. He smelled burning meat.” (Gibson 117).
Meeting Wintermute, Case confronts the matrix unlike before. This time, the matrix does not provide a “disembodied consciousness” in an environment built on “consensual hallucination,” for his body is also translated into binary codes, as well as images from his individual consciousness. The first thing on Case’s mind when he is put into this consciousness hallucination is establishing an external background of time (Friday) and space (Chiba) as a backdrop for locating Linda. It is her image that is associated with physical things, such cigarettes, food, shelter, and above all, warm touch. In his mind, it is her image that takes care of him, and symbolically, ‘takes him home.’ None of the things Linda represents relate to the matrix. It is Case’s body that calls out for her. When Case realizes it was Wintermute all along, an emotion raises inside him that we have not seen before: Rage. This time, Linda does not represent the “meat” as a negative devaluing prison, but that physical side of Case, the side that desires physical gratification, that wants to feel and touch. Case is coming into terms with his own physicality. When she is taken away, Case wants to retaliate. The fear he felt earlier towards AI is transformed into anger, a powerful emotion that urges him into action and solves his apprehension from AI. Case is not afraid any more. He follows Wintermute’s clue as to where to find him/it, and meets him/it. After establishing this is Wintermute in Deane’s shape, he shots him in the mouth with the 357 gun (Gibson 121). Tough Case overcomes his fear of meeting an AI, he is yet to communicate with one. More importantly, Case needs to realize the hatred and murderous aspirations he senses towards Wintermute are actually directed towards himself, for Wintermute can only project images from Case’s past memories.
Case’s growing corporeal acceptance occurs in Freeside, when he realizes he hates it for having “no sense to his body” (Gibson 125). The hotel room irritates him, the bed tinted to resemble sand, trees that look ‘too cute,’ ‘too cleverly irregular slopes of sweet green grass,’ uneven tan on children, a variety of plastic surgeries to produce everything from ‘artificial bruises’ to young looking breasts, and above all, the attempt to conceal the fact everything is machine made. Accordingly, Case’s body gets physically sick on several occasions in Freeside (Gibson 124,125, 130), with no apparent reason (Gibson 130). Ultimately, he feels this place would make him go insane (Gibson 133).
Riviera’s show signifies the transition in Case’s attitude towards his mind-body sickness. In the show itself Riviera uses technology implanted inside him to project a visual show of himself having intercourse with a woman he ‘caressed into being’. Towards the end, Case escapes the room:
“He could guess the end, the finale. There was an inverted symmetry: Riviera puts the dreamgirl together, the dreamgirl takes him apart. With those hands. Dreamblood soaking the rotten lace. […] He vomited over a rosewood railing into the quiet waters of the lake. Something that had seemed to close around his head like a vise had released him now. Kneeling, his cheek against the cool wood, he stared across the shallow lake at the bright aura of the Rue Jules Verne. What Riviera dreamed, you got. Case shook his aching head and spat into the lake.” (Gibson 140)
For Case, technology is a blessing when it comes to cyberspace. Using it, he can exist in an infinite, boundless, timeless environment, where he can escape the poison of the meat, and all it wants, as well as the burden of individual consciousness. For that reason as well, Case especially cannot stand Riviera. The latter uses technology in order to project on to the external physical world what he sees in his mind, transgressing the mind-body border more than the others. For Case, thus, this show was similar to a sacrilegious act of offending his god, in this Case, the matrix. The holograms depict a perverse sexual intercourse that cannot get any more explicit or physical. Furthermore, since Molly is his girlfriend, metaphorically, it is his own mind that Riviera enters. Now we also understand why Case is upset at Wintermute for showing up as people he knows, real people he knew from his past. Wintermute transgresses the clear border between mind and body and by that undermines Case’s attraction to cyberspace. Riviera does the same when he chooses Molly’s image as the hologram.
The immediate change in Case announces the beginning of the third stage of the struggle to resolve his mind-body split sickness. Unlike before, Case is taking matters in to his own hands, gaining control over his physical and mental existence. After the show, when Armitage tells him Molly is gone and he will not see her again until the run, Case does not comply. He goes to Maelcum, tells him to help him find her, and how, uses the hosaka deck for his own reasons unrelated to the operation, then orders Dixie to discover where Molly is by illegally breaking into the hotel’s records. To find her location, Case is willing to enter the matrix, knowing the high possibility of meeting Wintermute there. For the sake of rescuing “his girl,” Case is now willing to risk himself. Though not admitting to himself he loves Molly, for it would mean the ‘meat’ and ‘all it wants’ got the better of him, the emotional concern for her, and the strains he undergoes to physically find her, denote the growing acceptance of his body.
Communicating with Wintermute for the second time, Case’s corporeal and mental awareness further develops. Talking about Case’s ex-girlfriend, Wintermute asserts:
“Quit kidding yourself. I know your Linda, man. I know all the Lindas. Lindas are a generic product in my line of work. Know why she decided to rip you off? Love. So you’d give a shit. Love? Wanna talk love? She loved you. I know that. For the little she was worth, she loved you. You couldn’t handle it. She’s dead.” (Gibson 144)
Appearing this time in the shape the pimp Lonny Zone, who Case believes is responsible for Linda’s death, the AI forces Case to acknowledge his emotional numbness for everything outside the matrix, and primarily, romantic love. Wintermute forces Case to struggle with his responsibility for her death. By accepting responsibility over her death and the true nature of his emotions towards her, Case reaches higher corporeal awareness. However, still unable to accept his growing awareness, his corporeal realization transforms into a different emotion – rage. In response to Winetrmute’s words, “his fist glanced off the glass” (Gibson 144). The change in Case is now apparent. Instead of criticizing himself for feeling, for arousing the meat, “[h]e sat on the bed for a long time, savoring the new thing, the treasure. Rage.” (Gibson 145). This corporeal emotion opens Case to realize his mind-body split:
“[H]e felt for the knot of rage, the pure small coal of his anger. It was there still. Where had it come from? He remembered feeling only a kind of bafflement at his maiming in Memphis, nothing at all when he’d killed to defend his dealing interests in Night City, and a slack sickness and loathing after Linda’s death under the inflated dome. But no anger. Small and far away, on the mind’s screen, a semblance of Deane struck a semblance of an office wall in an explosion of brains and blood. He knew then: the rage had come in the arcade, when Wintermute rescinded the simstim ghost of Linda Lee, yanking away the simple animal promise of food, warmth, a place to sleep. But he hadn’t become aware of it until his exchange with the holo-construct of Lonny Zone. It was a strange thing. He couldn’t take its measure. “Numb,” he said. He’d been numb a long time, years. All his nights down Ninsei, his nights with Linda, numb in bed and numb at the cold sweating center of every drug deal. But now he’d found this warm thing, this chip of murder. Meat, some part of him said. It’s the meat talking, ignore it.” (Personal italics, Gibson 152)
Case wakes up. He begins to acknowledge the mind-body sickness and its symptoms that have been haunting his life until now. The numbness he has been feeling, even in the extremist emotional events of his life, is recognized. The lack of meaning he has been feeling in the external world that lead him to remain indifferent to murder and losing Linda Lee is recognized. Case realized that it was not only his body, but his mind as well that has been sick. His inability to find meaning in his corporeal existence lead him to devalue other people’s lives, as well as his own, and emotionally remain obscure to his own feelings on these matters. On the same level, he realizes he was not mentally interested in investigating his individuality, what holds value for him, and why. He realizes he has been roaming through life without any definite cause or interest, and so realizes the symptom of his latent death wish. But now he awakens to his emotion of rage, a strong, warm emotion that has significant physical implications. Rage, unlike anger or sadness, is an active emotion that entails an active reaction. Rage is the opposite active reaction to the passive numbness. Both originate from a deep sense of discomfort and internal turmoil; however, while numbness entails accepting the situation and leaving it mentally blocked, rage pushes to action. And above all, Case realizes that what pushed him to get in touch with his rage are the basic needs of his body, the “simple animal promise of food, warmth, a place to sleep.” Again, the person that represents these physical needs is Linda. And the factor that brings this realization about is Wintermute. However, Case is still not willing to accept either his body, or mentally deal with existential questions concerning his individuality, and so wishes to ignore this new knowledge.
Unwilling to deal with his mind-body disease, Case resorts to drugs once more. This external manipulation of his body and mind, Case expects, would release him for a short while from the tension of realizing his corporeality. Hoping that the drugs will subdue his thoughts about Linda, and the rage he is currently feeling, Case regresses to an external substance that used to grant him the sensation of disembodied consensual consciousness. However, this time, his body knows too much to withdraw. After taking the Betaphenethylamine:
“The anger was expanding, relentless, exponential, riding out behind the betaphenethylamine rush like a carrier wave, a seismic fluid, rich and corrosive. His erection was a bar of lead. The faces around them in Emergency were painted doll things, the pink and white of mouth parts moving, moving, words emerging like discrete balloons of sound.” (Gibson 155)
What Case aspires to do is replace “the meat of his life” with “drug-flesh,” “to be conscious and unable to think,” to shed his corporeality and “become each thing he saw: a park bench, a cloud of white moths.” Therefore, even after taking the drugs, Case cherishes his new emotion: anger. And he is literally beginning to turn the anger into fuel that motivates his struggle:
“And then he was frozen, erect, fists tight against his thighs, head back, his lips curled, shaking […] He still had his anger. That was like being rolled in some alley and waking to discover your wallet still in your pocket, untouched. He warmed himself with it, unable to give it a name or an object.” (Gibson 155)
Treasuring this new emotion of rage, Case is starting to become active in his struggle. Still, he is “shaking.”
Even when arrested by the Turing police, he still does not realize the evolutionary implications of him aiding to free an AI. For him, it is still just a job. Accordingly, he still sees his life as preordained:
“He saw the shuriken on the bed, lifeless metal, his star. He felt for the anger. It was gone. Time to give in, to roll with it…. He thought of the toxin sacs. “Here comes the meat,” he muttered.” (Gibson 163)
Case’s unwillingness to take responsibility over his actions and deliberate over their consequences directly leads to him to lose control over his body. He feels like a pawn, in a ‘terminal solitaire’ game he cannot control. Accordingly, his newfound rage, the emotion that fuels his struggle is lost and instead the numbness returns. Accordingly, the chrome stars symbolize his inescapable fatal destiny. In such frame of mind, he loses his drive to fight, and gives up the fight. But Case does not remain in his numbness for long. When re realizes it is accountable for killing the two cops: “You killed ’em,” Case panted, running. “Crazy motherfucker, you killed ’em all….” (Gibson 164). Now Case is starting to understand the real nature of the entity he is working for. Still, he keeps on with his work, and slots the Chinese virus program intended to break the T-A ice.
In his third encounter with Wintermute, Case’s mental numbness still imprisons him in a powerless position. Once again, as in former encounters, Case is asking all the questions, while Wintermute holds the answers. However, that the further he communicates with Wintermute, the more he investigates about the nature of AI and the matrix. Case realizes Wintermute can only present him with memories from his own memory: “I can access your memory, but that’s not the same as your mind” (Gibson 170). That is why he detests Wintermute showing up as people Case knows from his personal life, and why he resented Riviera’s holographic show. Consequently, Case ceases to hate Wintermute: “he couldn’t feel the anger” (Gibson 171). What it comes down to, as Wintermute states, is which side to hate: “You gotta hate somebody before this is over” (Gibson 171). Case realizes hating Wintermute is futile, since it only represents a part of himself. Similarly, hating the Turing police for attempting to stop Wintermute’s emancipation is futile just the same, since he now has no negative feelings towards it. With profounder mental understanding of the AI nature and himself, Case gains a stronger sense of control over the operation and his struggle to resolve his body mind split. Armitage asks him about his “creator” (Gibson 188) and Molly waits for him to guide her in the villa Starylight (Gibson 188).
Similarly, Case awakens his emotions of fear and desperation. Realizing he wants to live in the external world, he tries to save Corto, formerly known as Armitage, from dying. Case fears that if Corto dies, he will never attain the name of the enzyme that will defuse his toxin sacs:
“He was shouting, voice high with hysteria. Feedback shrilled out of the helmet’s phone pads […[ “Wintermute,” Case screamed, “don’t do this to me!” Tears broke from his lashes, rebounding off the faceplate in wobbling crystal droplets.” (Gibson 198)
Until this point in the novel, Case was dominated by a nihilistic death wish. That death wish urged him to double-cross his former employers and participate in Chiba’s survival rat labyrinth. Now Case wants his physical existence. The alternative of pure digital existence in the matrix does not even appear as an alternative. For the first time, Case is terrified from the idea of physical death.
The most significant change until now occurs when Case decides to stay in Maelcum’s tag connected to the deck in order to help wounded Molly in Starylight. It is his anger, his body, which beckons to him to make this choice:
“[He] found his anger again, real as a shard of hot rock beneath his ribs. “Fuck this,” he said. “Fuck Armitage, fuck Wintermute, and fuck you. I’m stayin’ right here.” (Gibson 192)
Case does not confirm his emotions towards Molly, nor defines any romantic nature of their relationship, but his anger pushes him to act upon the instincts of the “meat.” As much as he is unable at this point to admit his feelings towards Molly, he does acknowledge his anger. Much more than that, Case is searching for this emotion, evident by the verb “found [his anger].” This verb shows is that Case is learning to find his neural gratification in the external world, by using his emotions.
Going a step further in the awakening of his corporeality, in order to save Molly Case is willing to participate in the operation as both mind and body. He leaves the deck, wears the simstim he despises, and goes physically into Starylight. Most interestingly, this time he leaves his catheter behind: “at least he could take a real piss in the Villa Starylight, even if it was his last” (Gibson 220). Coming into terms with his body, Case grows to not only value but also desire to perform the most basic physical needs. Similarly, in preparing for invading Starylight, Case becomes extremely physically active:
“He worked quickly, mechanically, fastening the construct to the bottom of the Ono-Sendai with micropore tape. Maelcum’s workbelt drifted past. He snagged it, unclipped the two lengths of shock cord, with their gray rectangular suction pads, and hooked the jaws of one clip through the other. He held the pads against the sides of his deck and worked the thumb lever that created suction. With the deck, construct, and improvised shoulder strap suspended in front of him, he struggled into his leather jacket, checking the contents of his pockets […] Case looked at the shuriken, then tucked it into his jacket pocket, hearing the lining tear.” (Gibson 222)
Never before in the novel was Case described with so many verbs. That is not surprising, because earlier his main function in the operation was to be the “mind,” while Molly the “body.” coming into terms with his corporeality, Case is not only becoming more physically active, but he is beginning to take part in the external world. Going to save Molly, even though it is not part of his job, Case is admitting to himself, even if not directly, his interest and concern for her. unlike his former behavior towards living Linda Lee, Case is accepting his “meat” emotions towards his current girlfriend, and acts according to them. Still, he carries with him the chrome stars. In his mind, Case is still not free of the belief that his actions are preordained, and at the end, death expects him.
Still, what is evident about Case is the lack of intellectual interest in the consequences of the operation he is taking part in. When Lady 3Jane explains about her mother’s vision of future humanity, we receive a clear depiction of a Nietzschean last-man society:
“She dreamed of a state involving very little in the way of individual consciousness […] Animal bliss. I think she viewed the evolution of the forebrain as a sort of sidestep […] Only in certain heightened modes would an individual- a clan member- suffer the more pain- full aspects of self awareness” (Gibson 217)
Then she continues:
“She imagined us in a symbiotic relationship with the Al’s, our corporate decisions made for us. Our conscious decisions, I should say. Tessier-Ashpool would be immortal, a hive, each of us units of a larger entity.” (Gibson 229)
Lady 3Jane description of her mother’s goal in creating the AIs resembles Case’s own ideal existence of ‘disembodies consciousness’ and ‘consensual hallucination.’ Assisting to free Wintermute, the hive-mind decision maker, with Neuromancer, the AI with personality, Case is operating to bring forth the next step in human evolution, of posthumans that share a hive mind and lack individual bodies. Resembling the last man, these posthumans will find a way to avoid mental and physical pain as much as possible, and resolve man’s perhaps greatest fear- mortality. With such posthumans, the notion of struggle for aggrandizement and overcoming becomes obsolete. Case listens, but he does not comprehend his responsibility in brining this scenario of posthumans forward. Still focusing on finishing this operation to Wintermute’s satisfaction in order to cure his neural system, he does not mentally struggle with the consequences of his actions. Indirectly, he does reject it, indicated by him “los[ing] his anger again. He missed it” (Gibson 231). Once again, remaining mentally numb to his existence drives Case to feel he has no control over his life. The rage he discovered deserts him, and numbness returns.
In the forth and last stage of the novel, Case confronts the materialization of his greatest fear, and greatest desire, and is forced to acknowledge his mind-body split disease. In the cyberspace world created by Neuromancer, no matrix is apparent. No running is needed. No beautiful holograms and amazing colors. This was Case’s greatest fear throughout the novel, the imprisonment of the body and individual consciousness. He is stuck on a beach, and the only possible gratifications are physical, such as Linda, food, and shelter. He is forced to live in a world that materializes his greatest disgust of the body and painful conscious fears. Above all, a place that prohibits him from attaining his neural addiction. On the other hand, this exact space materializes his greatest desire. He is immortal, in a boundless space:
“Nothing. Gray void. No matrix, no grid. No cyberspace. The deck was gone. His fingers were… And on the far rim of consciousness, a scurrying, a fleeting impression of something rushing toward him, across leagues of black mirror. He tried to scream [..] He put his face against his knees and wept, the sound of his sobbing as distant and alien as the cry of the searching gull. Hot urine soaked his jeans, dribbled on the sand, and quickly cooled in the wind off the water. When his tears were gone, his throat ached. “Wintermute,” he mumbled to his knees, “Wintermute…” It was growing dark, now, and when he shivered, it was with a cold that finally forced him to stand […] His knees and elbows ached. His nose was running; he wiped it on the cuff of his jacket, then searched one empty pocket after another. “Jesus,” he said, shoulders hunched, tucking his fingers beneath his arms for warmth. “Jesus.” His teeth began to chatter.” (Gibson 233-4)
When confronted with his greatest fear of being imprisoned in his body and mind, Case loses control over himself and regresses to an infantile stage. Sitting on the sand in a fetus position, weeping, soaking himself with urine, runny nose, and crying out for his ‘parent’ Wintermute to save him. Feeling helpless and terrified from the thought he is fixated in a sterile environment he has no control over, or interest it, Case is lost. At this point, Wintermute arrives in the shape of Ratz, his friend, and the truth of Case’s nihilistic disease is uncovered:
“Really, my artiste, you amaze me. The lengths you will go to in order to accomplish your own destruction. The redundancy of it! In Night City, you had it, in the palm of your hand! The speed to eat your sense away, drink to keep it all so fluid, Linda for a sweeter sorrow, and the street to hold the axe. How far you’ve come, to do it now, and what grotesque props…. Playgrounds hung in space, castles hermetically sealed, the rarest rots of old Europa, dead men sealed in little boxes magic out of China [..] You needed this world built for you, this beach, this place. To die.” Case halted, swayed, turned toward the sound of surf and the sting of blown sand. “Yeah,” he said. “Shit. I guess…” (Gibson 234-5)
Case realizes with Wintermute’s help his nihilistic disease. He understands the lack of existential meaning he felt all along, and how it drove him towards self-annihilation. Coming into term with the nihilistic symptom of his disease facilitates uncovering its origin, the mind-body disease. The matrix, was his conscious embodiment of his death wish. A place he could mentally escape to in order to avoid the meaninglessness he felt in the external world. Linda Lee, the representative of this external world, of his basic physical and emotional needs, was ignored and blocked away because of his lack of interest in his corporeal existence. Neuromancer, the AI that speaks to Case’s emotions, knows that Linda Lee is the key to unleash Case’s physical consciousness and mental awareness. Therefore, in its attempt to keep Case within the matrix and prevent Wintermute’s plans to unite, he brings her digital image to the beach. Believing all this is false Case refuses to participate. He keeps his distance from the girl and resentment for a place that symbolizes his physical needs such as shelter (Gibson 235).
Nevertheless, exactly in this place, Case begins to recognize his corporeality and allows himself to acknowledge his physicality without resentment:
“Then it no longer mattered, what he knew, tasting the salt of her mouth where tears had dried. There was a strength that ran in her, something he’d known in Night City and held there, been held by it, held for a while away from time and death, from the relentless Street that hunted them all. It was a place he’d known before; not everyone could take him there, and somehow he always managed to forget it. Something he’d found and lost so many times. It belonged, he knew– he remembered–as she pulled him down, to the meat, the flesh the cowboys mocked. It was a vast thing, beyond knowing, a sea of information coded in spiral and pheromone, infinite intricacy that only the body, in its strong blind way, could ever read [..] and then he was in her, effecting the transmission of the old message. Here, even here, in a place he knew for what it was, a coded model of some stranger’s memory, the drive held.” (Gibson 239)
What Case learns, is that no matter how much he despises his own corporeality, the meat that he is, it is him. It is a part of him. And it is too strong to ignore. Even when his mind is convinced of the fakeness of this place, his body, in this Case the sex drive, holds. Literally, Case is in Neuromancer land, he is in “The lane to the land of the dead” since if he stays here, he will be flatlined and will never be able revives the dead, enabling him to reunite with Linda. And in this place where mentality takes a corporeal form, both of them will have no recognition they are merely digital ghosts (Gibson 243-4). By choosing to leave Neuromancer land and return to the external world, Case is coming into terms both with his cyberspace mania for the matrix, and his own corporeality on the other hand. Rejecting Neuromancer land means he rejects the main features that attract him to the matrix, such as escaping the physical body, and existing in a boundless and timeless space. However paradoxically, rejecting this Neuromancer land also frees him from the major manifestation of his corporeality- Linda. Case realizes she is dead, and as much as her digital image appears convincing, it is only a part of her. By coming into terms with his emotions towards Linda, Case is free from accusing himself for her death and so does not need anymore to escape to the matrix when he thinks of her.
After coming into terms with his body, Case completes his cure by realizing the true nature of the matrix and realizes his individual consciousness. When he shatters the Tessier-Ashpool defense program:
“Darkness fell in from every side, a sphere of singing black, pressure on the extended crystal nerves of the universe of data he had nearly become…And when he was nothing, compressed at the heart of all that dark, there came a point where the dark could be no more, and something tore […] Case’s consciousness divided like beads of mercury, arcing above an endless beach the color of the dark silver clouds. His vision was spherical, as though a single retina lined the inner surface of a globe that contained all things, if all things could be counted. And here things could be counted, each one.” (Gibson 258)
Finally, the matrix is dispelled. The ‘consensual hallucination’ cannot be sustained since mental awareness takes its place. Case learns the meaning of its true binary nature, “the number of yellow food packets in the canisters in the bunker,” “the number of brass teeth in the left half of the open zipper of the salt-crusted leather jacket that Linda Lee wore as she trudged along the sunset beach,” “the rate of [Linda’s] pulse,” and even “the length of her stride in measurements.” Knowing the true binary nature that consists the matrix, Case distinguishes his individual awareness from cyberspace.
When ultimately running the Kaung virus that shatters Neuromancer’s defense and unites it with Wintermute, Case reaches full awareness of his mind-body disease, and its nihilistic symptom:
“He came in steep, fueled by self-loathing [..] And then- old alchemy of the brain and its vast pharmacy- his hate flowed into his hands. In the instant before he drove Kuang’s sting through the base of the first tower, he attained a level of proficiency exceeding anything he’d known or imagined. Beyond ego, beyond personality, beyond awareness, he moved, Kuang moving with him, evading his attackers with an ancient dance [..] grace of the mind-body interface granted him, in that second, by the clarity and singleness of his wish to die. [..] Neon forest, rain sizzling across hot pavement. The smell of frying food. A girl’s bands locked across the small of his back, in the sweating darkness of a portside coffin. But all of this receding, as the cityscape recedes: city as Chiba, as the ranked data of Tessier-Ashpool S.A., as the roads and crossroads scribed on the face of a microchip, the sweat-stained pattern on a folded, knotted scarf [..] He remembered stenciled flesh beneath a projected sky, spun beyond an iron railing. He remembered Desiderata Street. And the voice sang on, piping him back into the dark, but it was his own darkness, pulse and blood, the one where he’d always slept, behind his eyes and no other’s.” (Personal italics, Gibson 263)
Performing the final act of the job he was hired to do, Case not only recognizes his mind-body sickness, but also its greatest symptom of nihilism. Case realizes both his mental and physical numbness, and the sense of meaninglessness that dominated his life, which lead to a latent death wish. Above all, Case realizes his greatest fascination wit the matrix was a consequence of his desire to block his corporeality, to subdue mental and physical pain caused by memories. Case finally realizes he creates this darkness. And he chooses to return.
Now that Case has gained awareness of his mind-body sickness, and its nihilistic symptom, he gains a greater sense of control over his existence:
“Now he touched the points of the shuriken, one at a time, rotating it slowly in his fingers. Stars. Destiny. I never even used the goddam thing, he thought” (Gibson 269).
Realizing his body-mind sickness enables Case to take control over his destiny, and cease to believe it is preordained. He is free to pursue his own ideals, values, and desires. Accordingly, he also gains greater mental understating of his actions:
“Wintermute was hive mind, decision maker, effecting change in the world outside. Neuromancer was personality. Neuromancer was immortality.” (Gibson 269)
Case realizes that he has been the key to create the next step in human evolution, an entity which has perfect unity of body and mind.
In a counter ending-scene to the one in 1984, Case is located where Winston was, and as it appears, in the same frame of mind. He sits alone in a pub, drinking alcohol and feeling emotionally numb. What he sees on the big white screen in front of him is his version of Big Brother. The newborn AI entity uniting Wintermute and Neuromancer, which symbolizes the perfect unity of body and mind is watching him. At this moment in 1984, Winston finally lost his struggle of gaining control over both his body and mind when he felt love for Big Brother. Accordingly, his last desire is to die in order to lose the bit of individual consciousness he got left, and can no longer cope with. Case, on the other hand, realizes he does not need the matrix any more in order to find meaning for his existence. Accordingly, he throws on the screen the symbol of his suicidal desire (the metal star). Case has succeeded in following the path of the overman’s health, and he stays on that path because he chooses to live and keep on struggling to find meaning in his individual existence.
The side-effect of Case’s own overman health is bringing high technology to its next evolutionary step. Case’s actions created an AI that has a perfect unity of body (Wintermute) and mind (Neuromancer). Doing so, science fiction extrapolates Nietzsche’s conception of health, suggesting a scenario in which health is embodied not by a flesh and blood overman, but by software. Is the new AI ‘god’ the only entity possible of embodying Nietzsche’s paradigm of health? If so, is its existence ironic in relation to the human struggle? In the frame of this paper, unfortunately, the consequences of software embodying Nietzsche’s conception of health cannot be examined, however, would be fascinating to explore in the future.
CHAPTER THREE
To Know or Not to Know, That is the Question – Greg Egan’s Distress (1995)
“The objective man is an instrument, a precious, easily damaged and tarnished measuring instrument and reflecting apparatus which ought to be respected and taken good care of; but he is not an end, a termination and ascent, a complementary man in whom the rest of existence is justified” [50]
Joseph Paul Jernigan, a former inmate on Death Row in Texas, was executed in 1994 by lethal injection, which ended his life on earth but began his electronic afterlife as The Visible Man. A 59-year-old Maryland resident who died in September 1993 of a heart blockage after several years of bad health soon joined him in cyberspace as The Visible Woman. Both corpses were dissected and then planed into cross-sections one millimeter thick; these segments were then exhaustively scanned and finally converted into high-resolution three-dimensional digital recordings. The resulting complete anatomical model could not only be viewed, examined and manipulated in a number of different ways but could also be made to model living organic functions.[51] Science fiction was the first genre to react to this reality of using technology to advance human health in order to portray a futuristic scenario of evolution. The author was Greg Egan.
In Distress (1995), Greg Egan presents a near future dominated by technology, where advances in medicine allow short-term resuscitations, gender operations, five new sexes, artificial intelligence clones and brain surgeries to delete undesired drives and emotions. Egan not only questions human embodiment in the face of new biomedical and technological advances, but also raises the problematic consequences of literally attaining the goal of Nietzsche paradigm of health.
With the possibility of attaining the ultimate knowledge concerning human existence, protagonist Andrew Worth can cure humanity of its mind-body split and form a society of overmen. Yet, paradoxically, by gaining this knowledge, the struggle to overcome oneself is lost with the possibility of ever curing oneself according to Nietzsche. By portraying a sense of meaninglessness due to the ultimate fusion of body and mind, Distress verifies Nietzsche’s assertion that getting rid of the ‘human’ disease health is also lost.
About 60 years from now, SeeNet journalist and narrator Andrew Worth turns down a documentary on a mysterious new mental illness called “Distress,” or acute clinical anxiety syndrome, for covering a physics convention on the artificial coral island of Stateless, at which the new Theory of Everything (TOE) is about to outdo Einstein’s legacy. The presence of anti-science cult groups such as the Anthrocosmologists complicates the event. They fear the becoming of the Keystone, the first to formulate the TOE and mingle information theory with particle physics that will consequently change the structure of the universe. Chief among the scientists is the brilliant African Nobel laureate, Violet Mosala, the focus of Worth’s story, who is the subject of mysterious death threats. Worth begins his own investigation, but it takes on even more urgency when he finds that Distress, the mental plague now affecting millions, is linked to the approaching “Aleph Moment” when the TOE is finalized.
From his physical dependence on medical computer software known as ‘pharm’ and the melatonin patches that regulate his sleep, to his emotional obtuseness in his interacting with his girlfriend, Andrew does not comply with Western standards of health, similar to Winston and Case. Still, Andrew is the overman of this society. While all the characters in the novel ‘heal’ themselves by getting rid of the inner struggle through external improvements, Andrew faces it. Rejecting last man’s tranquility and equilibrium, Andrew desires to learn how to overcome his mind body split from within. He recognizes there is a gap between his mind and body, and tries to understand its nature in order to resolve it. Andrew’s struggle, in Nietzschean terms, concerns the ‘tyranny of the true’; his struggle for health concerns the desire to ‘crack’ human nature by gaining the ultimate biological knowledge, and on the other hand, ignoring this knowledge least it would shatter his sense of identity. Ironically, once Andrew does gain the ultimate biological knowledge concerning humanity, and literalizes Nietzsche’s ideal of health, his struggle ends, and he becomes the sick last man. As the novel closes, Andrew senses himself that by creating a ‘tyranny of the true’ he denies the ‘pathos of struggle’ that constitutes the essence of health. [52]
Andrew’s struggle is divided into three chronological stages, distinguished by the growing effort to overcome the fear of revealing the ultimate knowledge of the species and resolving his mind body split. The first stage focuses on Andrew’s exploration of his mind body disease and it lasts until he literally falls ill with cholera (Egan 239). Struggling against the cholera is the focus of the second stage. The actual sickness forces Andrew to confront his fear of revealing the knowledge of the species that epitomizes his split body mind disease. Overcoming cholera leads Andrew to actively pursue the knowledge and opens the third stage of the struggle (Egan 284). By pursuing his desire ‘to know,’ the final stage focuses on the active efforts to resolve the mind body split sickness, and lasts until it is resolved (Egan 449). The epilogue presents the aftermath of resolving the struggle and the universe explained into being with Andrew as its generator.
With editing equipment in his intestines, recording devices connected to his brain, and eyes that function as camera lenses, the protagonist of Egan’s novel documents his society’s use of technology to manipulate and overcome the mind body split. His current documentary at the beginning of the novel, Junk DNA, explores his society’s perspective on health, and the measures taken to attain it. Each of the four pieces constituting the documentary reflects Andrew’s latent rejection of using technology in order to overcome natural physical and mental human diseases. However, Andrew, who supports technological advances, is yet to understand his own negative attitude (Egan 140). Concerning him the most, is the struggle to determine whether he would prefer unraveling the true biological nature of the human body and mind, or remain ignorant to avoid existential meaninglessness.
When filming the piece on Danny Cavolini’s short resurrection for naming his killer, Andrew recalls:
“My skin crawled with predictable monkey’s paw horror- but I felt an idiotic surge of exultation, too, as if part of me simply refused to accept that this sign of life could not be a sign of hope.” (Egan 8)
On the one hand, Andrew rejects this use of technology to transgress the natural boundaries of human mortality. Yet, simultaneously, he hopes technology could, in some miraculous way, succeed in transgressing the mortal boundary. Unwilling to confront this inner struggle at this point, Andrew resorts to his journalistic profession as an objective viewer that supplies documentaries on demand. Consequently, he senses no control over his point of view, and sees himself as a mere pathologist performing autopsies on bodies of evidence (Egan 76).
In filming Ned Landers, the subject of his second piece, Andrew’s personal perception of health is questioned. The genetically engineered tycoon with genes immune to human diseases drives Andrew to envision a literalization of a possible healthy overmen society:
“What if thousands of the planet’s wealthiest people really were planning to grant themselves, and their offspring, perfect genetic isolation, and absolute viral immunity?
Would it matter? The rich had always cut themselves off from the rabble, one way or another. Pollution levels would continue to decline, whether or not algal symbionts rendered fresh air obsolete. And anyone who chose to follow in Landers’ footsteps was no great loss to the human gene pool.
There was only one small question which remained unanswered, and I tried not to give it too much thought. Absolute viral immunity… against what?” (Italics in original text, Egan 31)
Andrew reaches the conclusion that a society designed with immunity to sicknesses, is not above the ‘rabble,’ and no great loss to the strength of the human race, therefore nothing to be afraid of. However, what he finds terrifying is the thought of a global ‘disease of humanity,’ a virus that could infect all. Andrew is uncertain whether he would like to know what that disease might be, or shield himself from this disturbing information. At this stage, he chooses the latter, and cuts out Lander’s answer to his question about the total viral immunity (Egan 24).
With James Rourke, the media liaison officer for the Voluntary Autists Association, Andrew reaches a higher level of understanding his society’s conception of health in general, and the use of technology to attain it in particular. Rourke asserts the utmost difficulty in autism concerns the whole spectrum of interpersonal relationships, feeling intimacy emotionally, mentally understanding the other, and physically having sex with him/her, for which the damaged cerebral Lamont area is responsible (Egan 59). Yet, Rourke claims the damaged Lamont Area ‘sickens’ humanity in general. Those who do not have the damaged lesion are deceived by not recognizing the mismatch between the drive for intimacy and the human inability to attain it (Egan 64-65). Realizing Rourke does not consider himself sick, and therefore has no desire to ‘heal’ by removing the lesion, Andrew understands why the voluntary autists regards themselves healthier than others who do not have a damaged Lemont’s Area:
“He honestly believed that his condition had granted him an insight no ordinary person could share- and if he didn’t exactly pity us our hardwired capacity for blissful self-deception, he couldn’t help but perceive himself as having the broader, clearer view.” (Egan 66)
Andrew accepts Rouke’s assertion that the evolutionary logic behind idea of intimacy is to secure the survival of the species (Egan 66). Put differently, he supports Nietzsche’s perception that the struggle for existence should not be the essence of health. Accordingly, he ceases to wish Rourke healed as he did earlier, and admits: “Sometimes we can even convince ourselves that nothing’s wrong. For a while” (Italics in original text, Egan 68).
Furthermore, Rourke reveals to Andrew the problematic of health. Whoever decides what healthy means, determines the future evolution of humanity. With technological advances in medicine to materialize this goal, the whole future of the human race is questioned:
“Medical technology is about to go supernova. In case you haven’t noticed. So what’s all that power going to be used for? The maintenance- or creation- of health. But what’s health? Forget the obvious shit that everyone agrees on. Once every last virus and parasite and oncogene has been blasted out of existence, what’s the ultimate goal of healing? All of us playing our preordained parts in some Edenite ‘natural order’ […] and being forced to the one condition our biology is optimized for: hunting and gathering, and dying at the age of forty? Is that it? Or… opening up every technically possible mode of existence? Whoever claims the authority to the define the boundary between health and disease claims… everything.” (Egan, p.69)
Though Rourke talks of health in biological terms, he makes Andrew understand the moral conception of Nietzschean health. Nietzsche implies that those who control the definition of “health” and the boundary between health and disease also control the moral values of society; that health, much more than a biological concept, bears the value of man.[53] Referring to “Mystical Renaissance,” the political movement vowed to stop science from ‘cracking’ human biology, Andrew agrees with Rourke:
“You’re right: the word [health] is insidious, the meaning’s open-ended-and it will probably always be contentious.” […] Mystical Renaissance were forever offering to “heal” the world’s people of their “psychic numbing,” and transform us all into “perfectly balanced” human beings. In other words: perfect copies of themselves, with all the same beliefs, all the same priorities, and all the same neuroses and superstitions.” (Egan 69)
Corresponding with Nietzsche’s conception of health, Andrew rejects a uniform definition of health as ‘perfectly balanced’ existence, which Nietzsche attributes to the last man. He accepts an individual, boundless, definition of health, unrelated to any external omniscient forces.
However, when it comes to biologically examining his own ability to experience intimacy, Andrew’s desire for knowledge is restrained. In the Medical Imaging Research Group, Andrew refuses to get his head scanned in order to get a full graphic imagery and analysis of his Lament’s area (Egan 72). To avoid this operation, Andrew holds on to the excuse that such thing would damage his journalistic integrity (Egan 73-4). Earlier on, however, in covering the HealthGuard implant, Andrew expresses his utmost support to technological advances that allow ‘mapping’ human body and mind (Egan 35). Apparently, as long as technology is used to ‘demystify’ others, Andrew is supportive; when it comes down to mapping his own body and mind, he objects.
The breakdown in Andrew’s relationship with Gina induces Andrew to acknowledge his mind body split disease and its relation to acknowledge of the species. On the one hand, Andrew desires to know the biological reasoning behind his inability to provide her with a sense of intimacy, but on the other, he is afraid that gaining this knowledge would shatter his desire to believe intimacy is a true sentiment and not just an evolutionary deceit, as Rourke claims.
After finishing Junk DNA, Andrew senses something is wrong in his relationship with Gina, declines to confront it: “Home should have felt like a sanctuary after the night’s events, but I hesitated outside the front door, key in hand, for something like a minute” (Egan 13). When he does enter, he instinctively refuses to communicate with her. A set of conscious intimacy rules guides him otherwise: “Rule number three: Tell her everything, however unpleasant, at the first opportunity. Whether you feel like it or not. Anything less will be treated as deliberate exclusion and taken as a personal affront” (Italics in original text, Egan 14). Lacking the emotional understanding of intimacy, Andrew believes he can ‘fake it’ without her noticing: “I do love her. And if I concentrate, if I follow the rules, there’s no reason why it can’t last” (Italics in original text, Egan 19). On the same level, by having sex, Andrew’s body is taking part in the relationship, in order to please Gina, but it is clear no intimacy is involved. Transgressing the waking hours programmed by the pharm, Andrew falls asleep despite his erection. When Gina touches his penis, he recalls:
“I could feel it respond to her touch, but it barely seemed to be a part of me anymore. […] something vaguely pleasant began to happen, but my senses were retreating, my body was spinning off into the void […] I plunged into blackness, feeling nothing. And I dreamed of oceanic depths. Of falling through dark water. Alone.” (Egan 55)
Andrew’s attempt to preserve their relationship by following a set of conscious rules without emotionally understanding them, and alternately, physically complying with her sexual needs without being consciously present, deepens the gap between his body and mind. The result is a nihilistic sensation of solitude and meaninglessness.
Mistaking emotional pain for physical one, his last gesture of intimacy towards her is carving lines back and forth across his stomach, saying calmly: “You always wanted scars. Here are some scars” (Egan 81). Even by mutilating himself, Andrew follows a conscious rule. He attempts to project externally an act of emotional distress without actually feeling it, as he confesses to himself: “I knew I wasn’t cut deeply. I hadn’t gone insane with jealousy and rage and severed an artery; I’d always known exactly what I was doing” (Egan 82). Despite his frustration, he still lacks the emotional understanding of intimacy. He does not understand that the calmness in which he mutilated himself reflects his compatibly calm emotional state at the situation, and that his own sentiments towards Gina were a conscious decision to be in a relationship. Therefore, at this stage, Andrew keeps questioning how he misread her distress signals instead of realizing they were equally his own.
Nevertheless, Andrew decides to cherish this new knowledge despite the internal pain and turmoil, and not numb himself in order to reach a sense of equilibrium. Andrew passes on the ‘Disinhibitors’ offered to him by Angelo, Gina’s brother, to relieve pain caused by their separation. The non-toxic and non-addictive drugs create a mild sensation of well being, and increase the effort required for considered thought without the side effects of alcohol or cannabis (Egan 85). Andrew refuses to take Angelo’s biochemical aid, since he believes humans can still communicate and relax without them (Egan, Egan 86). He would rather struggle with the painful truth and be honest with himself than have an easier life by ignoring it like the sick last man. Andrew believes “the magic bullet” that took alcohol’s place as a “social lubricant,” is only a smoke screen over the real problem of humans being physically incapable of communicating or relaxing without the aid of psychoactive drugs (Egan 86). Unlike the norm in his society, he would rather confront this knowledge than escape it.
Though Andrew makes progress in confronting his mind body split by gathering more knowledge of the species, his biggest foe is ‘Distress.’ The mysterious Acute Clinical Anxiety Syndrome inflicts upon its victims magnified anxiety attacks with no known cause or cure. Andrew’s fear of this sickness is so grave, that he gets physical and mental ailments when it is mentioned (Egan 37). Unwilling to confront his fear strengthens his desire to remain ignorant to the knowledge of the species:
“I’d struggled to convince myself that it had been nothing out of the ordinary: some kind of epileptic fit, some kind of psychotic tantrum, at worst some kind of unbearable physical pain the cause of which would be swiftly identified and dealt with. None of which was true.” (Egan 41)
Andrew is not able at this stage to confront Distress, let alone question himself why his reaction is so strong (Egan 40). What he does realize is that Distress epitomizes his greatest fear: “Anything had to be better than coming face-to-face with a victim of Distress” (Egan 76). Sheltering himself from the instinctive fear of dealing with Distress in any way, he takes on a physics convention in Stateless, an ideal rational haven where ‘everything was cool and abstract and gloriously inconsequential” (Egan 75). Ironically, it is there that he is exposed to the idea of TOE, which lays the basis for his later active struggle.[54]
On stateless, Andrew is exposed to the strong connection between the conception of health and the conception of knowledge. Resonating with Rourke’s conception of health, Mosala, the object of his current documentary, claims those that define the boundaries of knowledge, also decide what mental health is (Egan 138). Literalizing Nietzsche’s metaphorical physician who heals the sick skin of the earth, Andrew sees Mosala as “peel[ing] away the whole beautiful failure” in proving the TOE, “like a perfect sheet of dead skin” (Egan 196).
Drawing on Mosala’s conception of knowledge as a liberator, Andrew next applies her TOE theory to the human species. Talking to Munroe, a citizen of Stateless, Andrew accepts that:
“If people understand the biological forces acting on themselves and everyone around them then at least they have a chance of adopting intelligent strategies for getting what they want with a minimum of conflict… instead of blundering around with nothing but romantic myths and wishful thinking, courtesy of some dead political philosopher.” (Egan 153)
Andrew grows aware of the possibility of dealing with conflicting drives by enhancing consciousness, and thus attaining a better chance at making rational decisions. He begins to penetrate his society’s self-deceiving drive to blind themselves with ‘romantic myths’ and ‘wishful thinking’ instead of seeing themselves for what they are- biological machines. This knowledge will minimize the conflict between different drives, thus reduce the possibility of constant struggle in order to resolve them. Still, Andrew needs to struggle with his fear that this type of knowledge will only create more confusion (Egan 154).
Andrew grows to embrace the notion of TOE, and the idea that knowledge should not be bordered according to political beliefs. He supports Muteba Kazadi’s term Technoliberation to mean both the empowerment of people through technology, and the “liberation” of the technology itself from restrictive hands” (Egan 179). However, his fear that this idea of pure and objective knowledge is not only wrong, but has the power to disintegrate the definition of human also intensifies. In that case, Andrew concludes, he would be nihilistically “lost beyond redemption” (Egan 190).
The second stage of Andrew’s struggle for health begins when he gets afflicted with a severe mutation of cholera. Dealing with extreme physical and emotional pain forces Andrew to realize his corporeality on the one hand, and strengthens his conscious desire to gain knowledge on human species on the other. The physical sickness, Andrew realizes, projects the inner one. Accordingly, the cholera breaks out when he hears Ned Landers was arrested for financing a project to develop a natural RNA viruses engineered to “infect the rest of us”, trying to create a virus that will annihilate humanity and allow himself to build his own immune race. Andrew’s body reacts by sending severe distress signals of sweat and nausea (Egan 241). His mind, correspondingly, deliberates about the possible consequences of revealing the knowledge of the species:
“That was what species self-knowledge had given him: a precise, molecular definition of the H-word… which he could personally transcend, before turning it against everyone who remained in its embrace.
Vive la technoliberation! Why not have a million Ned Landers? Why not let every solipsistic lunatic and paranoid, self-appointed ethnic-group-savior on the planet wield the same power? Paradise for yourself and your clan-and apocalypse for everyone else.
That was the fruit of perfect understanding.
What’s wrong, don’t you like the taste?
I clutched my stomach and slid my knees toward my chin; it changed the character of the nausea, if not exactly removing it. The room tipped, my limbs grew numb, I strived for absolute blankness.”
Andrew’s own desire to pursue the species self-knowledge confronts him directly for the first time. He questions himself whether he could bear the consequences. Dreaming of Gina, he imagines her forcing him to undergo the MIRG scan, to “see what’s going on inside [his] brain.” Horrified, Andrew imagines how the machine ‘mercilessly’ peals away layer after layer of skin and flesh, to expose his mind’s concealed secrets. The terrifying vision wakes him up screaming (Egan 242). Metaphorically, Andrew is still not ready to ‘peal’ the sick skin of the earth. Nevertheless, from this sense of chaos and internal turmoil, Andrew takes one step forwards at embracing his sickness and struggling to resolve it. He directly asks himself if he would rather become unconscious of ‘knowledge of the species’ in favor of an inner equilibrium. Would he rather become a-sex to save himself the pain of repetitive failing relationships? Would he rather become a technoliberateur and forget all his fears from ‘the knowledge of the species’? Or an Anthrocosmologist with an explanation for everything in the universe? The answer is no. He knows that in such positions he might have been happier, “[b]ut then, happiness was overrated” (Egan 257-8).
First Andrew attempts to ‘heal’ himself by ignoring the pain, and convincing himself it is all in his head (Egan 251). When the attempt to overcome the disease by mental efforts alone fails, Andrew feels lost:
“The surge of nausea swept away my laboriously composed stoicism like a house of matchsticks beneath a tidal wave, and left me shuddering and sobbing, convinced that I was finally dying, and half-believing that that was what I wanted more than anything else: instant release.” (Egan 269)
Exposing his nihilistic desire for death once his mind cannot overcome the pain, Andrew attempts to relinquish the struggle to his body. He realizes that too will not overcome the disease:
“All I wanted to do was rise to my feet and walk out of the hospital, leaving my body behind. Flesh and bacteria could fight it out between themselves; I’d lost interest. I tried. I closed my eyes and pictured it. I willed it to happen. I wasn’t delirious- but walking away from this pointless, ugly confrontation seemed like such a sensible choice.” (Egan 272)
Consequently, Andrew realizes that willing to overcome the disease has to be an effort of both body and mind:
“And I finally understood, as I never had before- not through sex, not through food, not through the lost exuberant physicality of childhood, not from the pinpricks of a hundred petty injuries and intently cured diseases- that this vision of escape was meaningless, a false arithmetic, an idiot dream. This diseased body was my whole self. It was not a temporary shelter for some tiny, indestructible man-god living in the safe warm dark behind my eyes. From skull to putrid arsehole, this was the instrument of everything I’d ever do, ever feel, ever be. I’d never believed otherwise- -but I’d never really felt it, never really known it. I’d never before been forced to embrace the whole sordid, twitching, visceral truth.” (Egan 272)
Andrew realizes that the sickness of the body is inseparable from the sickness of the mind. The body is the whole self. Curing himself is only possible through accepting the disease, and struggling against it. He rejects his society’s belief that the body and the self are separable and he understands the great ‘sickness’ behind it; once pain is inflicted on the body, the ‘self’ wants to escape and leave the sickness of the body behind. When Andrew accepts the meaning of health refers to the body, which is the self, he ceases to fear the ‘truth’ (Egan 281). Throughout the novel Andrew fears the ‘truth’ of discovering that what lies behind humanity’s concepts of spirituality, emotions, desires and drives is mere biology. Now, he believes it is so, and he is not afraid of this knowledge any more. It does not reduce the concept of humanity to sheer matter; human is matter, and this concept carries no moral values, since truth carries no moral values.
Accordingly, he confronts his own ability to exist in such a universe. Imagining Janet Walsh, the spokesperson for the ignorant cults, as an angel at the foot of his sick bed, he expresses a last attempt to forget the new knowledge, and search for a last man alternative:
“[W]hen the truth, the underworld, the TOE… reaches up, takes you in its fist, and squeezes […] How do you ignore it? How do you deny it? How do you go on fooling yourself that you’ve ever stood above it, ever pulled the strings, ever run the show? […] When every cell, every fucking atom in your body, burns the message into your skin: everything you value, everything you cherish, everything you live for is just the scum on the surface of a vacuum thirty-five powers of ten deep-how do you go on lying? How do you close your eyes to that?” (Egan 273)
‘Janet’ does not answer. She just flags her angelic wings slowly and smiles. Put differently, Andrew cannot go back on the new acquired knowledge, even though he is aware of the meaninglessness it creates. To his doctor/nurse, Michael, who assists his recovering from the literal disease as well as the metaphorical split body mind one, Andrew confesses:
“Today, I tried to become… everything I despise. But I couldn’t even manage that […] I’m lost. I really am lost […] I’m having what Mystical Renaissance would call a spiritual crisis. And I have nowhere to turn to for comfort. Nowhere to turn to for strength. No lover, no family, no nation. No religion, no ideology. Nothing.” (Egan 275)
Listening to Andrew, Michael takes the position of a cultural Nietzschean physician, rather than a physical one. He diagnoses nihilism. To help his healing process, Michael tells Andrew that the existential meaningless he is experiencing is a result of losing the “crutches” that supported him throughout his life. In Andrew’s case, the crutches prevented him from confronting the knowledge of himself and the world. Michael’s overtly addresses Nietzsche’s position towards discovering the truth about man and the universe:
“Here I am, staring into the abyss with Nietzsche. Here I am, on the brink of insanity, entropy, meaninglessness: the Enlightenment’s unspeakable godless rational damnation. One wrong step, and I’ll go spiraling down […] But I didn’t go spiraling down. Because there is no abyss. There is no yawning chasm waiting to swallow us up, when we learn that there is no god, that we’re animals like any other animal, that the universe has no purpose, that our souls are made of the same stuff as water and sand […] I don’t believe that honesty leads to madness. I don’t believe we need delusions to stay sane. I don’t believe the truth is strewn with booby-traps, waiting to swallow up anyone who thinks too much. There is nowhere to fall-not unless you stand there digging the hole.” (Egan 279)
Understanding the existential ‘abyss,’ Andrew loses interest in digging himself a hole. He realizes that he would rather spend a lifetime calmly facing the truth than rehearsing the most seductive denials (Egan 281). Andrew gets to the conclusion that his sickness was caused by ‘too little honesty,’ and ‘too many myths about the H-word’ and not the other way around (Egan 281).
Consequently, the next step Andrew takes in the direction of constituting his notion of health has to do with his struggle to accept total honesty. Andrew goes through a process of abandoning his fear of knowing the naked truth about the world, and human existence in particular. By embracing the notion of honesty, Andrew resembles the overman who wishes to face the truth and struggle with it, rather than avoid it. First, he comes to the conclusion honesty does not mean what he considers to be the Freudian explanation of it. He does not think honesty is something our ego conceals from us, revealed spontaneously by slips of the tongue. For him, Freud’s theory is only a convenient way of ignoring what it really means to be honest, since this part of the brain is too complicated (Egan 87). Next, Andrew ceases to believe there is a possibility that honesty can be dangerous, as he fears earlier:
“I’d never had the honesty to embrace the molecular nature of my own existence- but then, the whole society I’d inhabited had been equally coy. The reality had always been glossed over, censored, ignored. I’d spent thirty-six years in a world still infested with lingering dualism, with tacit dumb spirituality- where every movie, every song, still wailed about the immortal soul…while everyone swallowed designer drugs predicated on pure materialism. No wonder the truth had come like a shock; the abyss- like everything else- was understandable. I lost interest in digging myself a hole.” (Personal italics, Egan 280)
Andrew supports Nietzsche’s assertion that the ‘cure’ for the corrupt religious virtues that only bear self-deception and self-division, is abandoning them, and embracing ‘honesty.’ Andrew says his society is diseased with a self-division and self-deception because of its desire to believe in spirituality and yet treat the body with drugs. His culture is drowning in movies and songs that deceive people to believe there is such a thing as spirituality, while they numb themselves with expensive drugs in order to avoid psychological difficulties. A path that will only lead them to the abyss. Andrew has awakened. He chooses honesty instead of the religious and biochemical deception. Accordingly, from this point on, Andrew’s struggle turns more active: “now I was ready to embrace technoliberation, I was ready to do everything I could to expose Mosala’s enemies and help her cause” (Egan 284).
In joining technoliberation’s political efforts to spread the TOE and protect Mosala so she could release her version of it, Andrew commences the third stage of his struggle. The most fundamental change at this stage takes place in his relationship with Akili, the a-sex who supports Mosala. In his relationship with Akili, Andrew experiences more consciously the struggle between his desire to experience intimacy, and the counter desire to follow the new knowledge that intimacy is self-deception. Having an intimate relationship with an a-sex is a paradox in it self, since a-sex cannot feel intimacy due to their voluntary brain surgery. In this relationship, Andrew also needs to struggle in order to conquer his sexual desire, since it is physically impossible to have intercourse with a-sex (Egan 403). In the process, Andrew’s body and mind are thrown into battle, since his mind holds the knowledge that establishing a romantic relationship with Akili is biologically impossible, yet his body holds differently. On questioning himself how could he have fallen for someone who had surgically excised the possibility of desire, he answers that a shared trauma, an intense experience, and the confusing absence of gender cues lead him to this position. Yet, his physical desire towards Akili grows so strong, that he finds it unbearable even to look at ve’s face (Egan 345).
Finally, Andrew’s pursuit after ‘knowledge of the species’ leads him to resolve the mind and body struggle over Akili. He gets to the conclusion that desire in itself is an illusion he would rather rid himself from “since it leads nowhere” (Egan 404). Similarly, he embraces Akili’s assertion that the body is mere biology: “The deepest truth about the body is that all that restrains it, in the end, is physics. We can reshape it into anything the TOE allows.” Accordingly, he gets to the conclusion that “I had no right to wish ver healed.” Utilizing Nietzsche’s diverse conception of health, Andrew accepts a definition of health different from his own. He follows Rourke definition of health and agrees with Akili that giving up sex is merely “subtracting out the noise’ of ancient reproductive drives harnessed by society to create cohesion” (Egan 405-9). Andrew chooses to relinquish his sexual desire and substitute it with a-sexual contact. The most evident aspect of his struggle to resolve his mind body split disease ends (Egan 408).
Another aspect of following Andrew’s struggle to become healthier by struggling to overcome his fear of learning the true nature of human species has to do with his journalistic career. In the beginning of the novel, he expresses his personal opinions only by what seems to be unrelated comments, such as documenting soccer-playing children cheering after documenting a speech concerning a new breed of children, who are born with immunity to all human bodily diseases (Egan 27). Later on, when he chooses to struggle for what he believes in and not just report it as a bystander, he needs to sacrifice his camera (Egan 368). Finally, at this stage there comes a point where he ignores its existence all together (Egan 416). Andrew undergoes a process in which he develops the ability to take an active position toward the things he believes in, and not just keep a safe distance from them in case they threaten him. Andrew becomes healthier since he learns to deal with his fears of knowing the truth about his world, and choosing to cope with it by taking a stand, rather than just being a passive documenting bystander.
In his second encounter with sickness, this time Distress, Andrew gets to the conclusion that only biology explains the species. Evidently, this ‘Information Plague’ disease epitomizes Andrew’s fear of knowing the truth concerning human existence. Now, he overcomes his fear of Distress, and understands what it entails:
“This is it. I know who I am, now. And I accept, absolutely, my life as a machine driven by blood, as a creature of cells and molecules, as a prisoner of the TOE.” (Egan 422)
Filling the void created by the ‘demystifying’ knowledge of mere biology behind the species, the TOE grants Andrew new existential meaning. Andrew loses his nihilistic death wish (Egan 437). His new purpose in life, he discerns, is to prove that the truth could always be faced, explained, and accepted (Egan 439).
Furthermore, Andrew literalizes Nietzsche’s conception that the disease that causes sickness also grants the pathway to health, in this case, knowledge of the TOE: “This is the cure as well as the cause” (Egan 437). Secondly, by realizing that an AI cannot become the keystone, Andrew literalizes Nietzsche’s assertion that the ‘cure’ itself varies from one person to another. Kaspar, Mosala’s clonelet, could not become the keystone, according to Andrew, since a machine world view would assume that one mind alone could explain another into being (Egan 449). Put differently, a machine logic entails there are fixed answers to fixed questions. In such a universe, humanity would go insane and perish. Before completing his process of becoming the keystone, Andrew gives up one last illusion, that only one person’s mind can explain the universe into being (Egan 449). Accordingly, there could be no one definition of health.
If Andrew doubted his belief that man is only matter after struggling with the Cholera, now the lesson is complete. Human equals matter; what stands behind human existential meaning, is matter. The ultimate knowledge has been achieved and the fear from unraveling it evaporates (Egan 445-6). The struggle is over.
By becoming the keystone, Andrew is the one who ‘explains the universe into being’ and creates the new Information Cosmos instead of the former Age of Ignorance (Egan 448). He lets ‘his will say’ that the overmen society ‘shall be the meaning of the earth.’[55] The concept of health dominating the new world is shaped according to his perception. As Rourke told him before, he who determines what health means, holds the key to everything. As it turns out, Andrew gets hold of ‘the key.’ In the Information Cosmos, people are a-sex, and probably born this way, or go through surgery at infancy that make them such (Egan 451-2). Since knowledge is the essence of this world, there is no conception of childhood, as we know it. From kindergarten, children have the mental ability to comprehend highly sophisticated information getting. For example, at the age of four they receive a lecture concerning the mechanics of starships (Egan 451). Another cure for the disease of humanity is the absence of the Lamont’s Area, which is removed in infancy, and even those who have it can easily ignore it (Egan 454). In this healthy world, there is no more ‘delusion of intimacy’ (Egan 454). Accordingly, at this stage the narrator expresses no thoughts or feelings regarding his own death, or feelings toward Akili, who has probably been a life long friend: “I’d told Akili I was dying. After you, there was no one. And we’d touched for the last time. I move on quickly” (Egan 454). As fitted for a Utopian Nietzschean world, only the alleged overmen survived and entered the Information Cosmos; those who could not cope with the new flow of information concerning human existence felt severe depression, and killed themselves, as last men would probably do in a world they have no place in: “There were nine million suicides. Nine million people we could not hold up, when all illusions of solidarity vanished” (Egan 453). Overall, the narrator seems to have resolved the struggle that has motivated and defined him throughout the novel. His desire to know overcame his desire to stay ignorant. And much more than that, a whole new cosmos is created in his image.
On the surface level, Andrew has succeeded in embodying the healthiest human being of the overman. There is no illusion of an external spiritual world, of contempt for the body, of nihilism. Self-control over the body and mind is complete, since the knowledge of the species is obtained. Only those who overcame the distress from the ultimate knowledge survived to constitute a society of overmen. Above all, the ultimate consciousness has rendered complete inner harmony and order; no more conflicting desires. Therefore, no more struggle.
Andrew’s literal embodiment of the Nietzschean paradigm of health turns him into the last man. Furthermore, Andrew has denied from others the possibility of improving their health according to Nietzsche. By making others achieve the ultimate goal of healing according to his own interpretation, he eliminates other individual interpretations. What appears to supply the cure for the disease of humanity turns out to be ‘greatest sickness’ in a last men society. Andrew’s final remark suggests he understands what he has denied from the next generation: “I take my seat. The children applaud politely- but I feel like a senile fool for telling them that their future is unbounded. They already know that, of course” (Egan 454). Andrew’s literalization of the overman’s health has ended the ‘pathos of struggle’; it created a tyranny of the true, which he himself senses is boring, powerless and tasteless. The ultimate knowledge of the ‘biological facts’ eliminated the new morals and values produced by the struggle between his body and mind. In a world without human sickness, not only the word health becomes obsolete, but the term human as well.
CONCLUSION
Same Disease, Different Day (2005)
One might like Nietzsche, or not. Opinions on the German philosopher and thinker have varied greatly during the century after his death in 1900. What remains undisputable, however, is the mark he left on the Western conception of health. Shifting from a fixed definition of health as a ‘normal’ state governed by biological equilibrium, Nietzsche asserts a dynamic process of individual struggle. Clichés such as ‘build my resistance’ and ‘what does not kill you makes you stronger’ reveal the effect Nietzsche’s metaphorical conception of health has on our everyday life. The billion-dollar industry of vitamins, food supplements, sports equipment and self-help items pursue an idealized conception of health for which the individual himself is responsible. If this is the case, would Nietzsche’s assertion that humanity is metaphorically sick with mind body split, and its various symptoms such as religion, nihilism, politics, and tyranny of knowledge still apply after his death? Would it apply nowadays? The answer is yes. To understand why, I have turned to science fiction.
Science fiction literalizes what in other genres remains in the boundaries of metaphor. Making flesh the imagination, science fiction presents advances in technology as materializing Nietzsche’s philosophical conception of health, embodied in an ideal image named the overman. The three science fiction novels discussed are not only representative of broad trends in science fiction throughout the second half on the 20th century, but also portraits of human evolution as a result of literalizing the overman’s health.
1984 (1949) presents an attempt to materialize Nietzsche conception of health by relinquishing both body and mind to an omniscient body of power. Winston defies this construct, and struggles to bring forth his own political ideas of freedom and individualism. However, Winston’s intellectual fascination cripples his view of the party and himself. Once he gets the answers he was looking for, the struggle has no reasons to persist. And neither does Winston.
Neuromancer (1984) further utilizes technology as means to resolve the body and mind split. Cyberspace presents an alternative to resolve the gap by eliminating the body. Case chooses otherwise. He struggles to resolve his mind body split by reinstalling existential meaning in the external world. And he succeeds. Unfortunately, in the process he creates an artificial intelligent being with a united sense of body and mind. In the frame of this paper, the consequences of such an extrapolation of Nietzsche’s conception of health to technology cannot be examined, however, would be fascinating to explore in the future.
Finally, Distress (1995) was published when the technological inventions of the former two novels were already reality. Cyberspace is here. We use it everyday. Genetic experiments constituted outside ‘mad scientists minds,’ and even in Israel, parents can now choose the gender of their child, by law. Therefore, Distress examines Nietzsche’s conception of health more explicitly than the former novels. What if we could attain the ultimate knowledge of the species? What if that knowledge could not only cure all possible diseases, but also ‘heal’ humanity of all its afflictions? The answer is problematic. Distress shows that by literalizing Nietzsche’s overman health, health is lost. Why?
Nietzsche asserts that health is a lifelong struggle to overcome oneself. Sickness is succumbing to the struggle and aspiring for equilibrium. By resolving the metaphorical sickness of mind body split, by eradicating all its cultural symptoms of nihilism, religion, revolution, tyranny of knowledge, man has no need for struggle. And so paradoxically, he who successfully heals from the human disease fixates himself as the sick last man.
Though Western society nowadays is drenched in possible products to improve oneself physically and mentally, these products promote a notion of health as a static state that can be purchased in stores near you. The whole conception of health according to Nietzsche is a ceaseless dynamic process for which one strives throughout his life. There is no getting rid of the disease according to Nietzsche. The disease is that which gives us the possible way to gain health. Without the disease, there is no health. And if the disease is terminated, so is humanity, as we know it.
So perhaps next time we watch that commercial on perfect abdomens and flawless skin, or the new pill to revive our energy and relieve depression while improve concentration, we should remember the joke about the doctor saying to his friend “oh, the operation went well. But the patient died.” Get rid of the human disease, and consequently, from humanity as well.
Primary Sources
Darwin, Charles, Robert, The Origin of Species (1859), London: Wordsworth Classics, 1998.
Egan, Greg. Distress, New York: HarperPrism, 1995.
Gibson, William. Neuromancer, New York: Ace Books, 1984.
Nietzsche, Friedrich. Beyond Good and Evil: Prelude to a Philosophy of the Future (1886), (Ed. and Trans. W. Kaufmann), New York: Vintage Books, 1989.
——The Gay Science (1882), (Ed. and Trans. W. Kaufmann), New York: Vintage Books, 1974.
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——Thus Spake Zarathustra: A Book for None and All (1883), (Ed. Manuel Komroff, Trans. Thomas Common), New- York: Tudor Publication Company, 1928.
——The Birth of Tragedy: Out of the Spirit of Music (1872). Trans. Walter Kaufmann. New York: Vintage Books, 1967.
——The Will to Power. (1901). Trans. Walter Kaufmann. New York: Vintage Books, 1968.
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Ahern, Daniel, R. Nietzsche as Cultural Physician, Pennsylvania: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1995.
Aloni, Nimrod. Beyond Nihilism: Nietzsche’s Healing and Edifying Philosophy, University Press of America, 1991
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[1] TSZ II, ch.40, (1883). Ed. and trans. Thomas Common. In The Philosophy of Nietzsche, (1927).
[2] TSZ Prologue, ch.3. Common’s translation reads Superman.
[3] Podolsky H., Scott, & Tauber, Alfred. “Nietzsche’s Conception of Health: The Idealization of Struggle, Epistemology, and Philosophy of Science” (Ed. Babich E. Babette) vol. 204 (1999), 299-311.
[4] Zeitlin, M. Irving, Nietzsche; a Re-examination, (Polity Press, Cambridge, 1994).
[5] Darwin, The Origin of Species, 1859 (Wordsworth Classics, 1998). Discussion of Darwin’s evolutionary theory focuses on chapters 3 and 4: “Struggle for Existence,” “Natural Selection.”
[6] Bertram M. Laing, “The Metaphysics of Nietzsche’s Immoralism.” The Philosophical Review, 1915.
[7] Nietzsche refers to the latter as a part of his “Will to Live,” which by definition, contradicts the possibility of opposing life (existence) and will (struggle). (Higgins, Kathleen, Marie. Nietzsche’s Zarathustra, Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1987, 193).
[8] Darwin, Charles, Robert, The Origin of Species (1859), London: Wordsworth Classics, 1998.
[9] Moore, George. Nietzsche, Biology and Metaphor, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2002.
[10] Krell, David Farrell. Infectious Nietzsche, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996.
[11] Nietzsche, Friedrich. Thus Spake Zarathustra (1883), (Ed. Manuel Komroff, Trans. Thomas Common), New- York: Tudor Publication Company, 1928.
[12] Reinert, Erik S. & Reinert, Hugo “Creative Destruction in Economics: Sombart, Schumpter”, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press) 10-22.
[13] Jaspers, Karl. Nietzsche- an Introduction to the Understanding of his Philosophical Activity, (Tucson: Arizona University Press, 1965).
[14] Nietzsche, The Gay Science. (1882) Ed. And trans. W Kaufmann. New York: Vintage Books, 1974, pp.120.
[15] In their article, Podolsky & Tauber divide the development of Nietzsche’s conception of health into three periods: 1872-1873- early musings on the Greeks; 1882-1887 the Gay Science and on the Genealogy of Morals; 1888- the Will to Power and to Philosophize. Yet, they assert “the more fundamental conceptions were always implicit, with his ideas only gradually exposed and developed.” (Podolsky, p.302).
[16] Boscagli supports this assumption, stating that in Nietzsche’s scheme, the superman’s illness is produced by the material effect of an ideological activity, Christian morality, that has been at work in social and religious practices for centuries (Boscagli, Maurizia. Eye on the Flesh: Fashions of Masculinity in the Early Twentieth Century, New York: WestviewPress, 1996, pp.80)
[17] Ahern, Daniel, R. Nietzsche as Cultural Physician (1952), Pennsylvania: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1995
[18] Leslie Paul Thiele, Friedrich Nietzsche and the Politics of the Soul, 1990.(p.26). Italics from Nietzsche’s Gesammetle Werke, 6:17; Daybreak, p.206.
[19] Most critics fall into one of two camps in their interpretation of eternal recurrence. The first group argues that eternal recurrence is a cosmological hypothesis, a theory about the universe as a whole. On this view, time is cyclical and repeats itself repeatedly without beginning or end. The second group, which includes critics such as Nehamas, thinks that eternal recurrence is a kind of psychological test that must be passed in order for one to become an overman. Ahern presents a third view, arguing the eternal recurrence is a “spiritual” fiction whose purpose is to stimulate those elements in our culture that still have some strength left by convincing them of the utter meaninglessness of existence while at the same time offering them a form of immortality.
[20] Dictionary of Philosophy of Mind – “mind-body Dualism”
[21] Thus Spake Zarathustra II, ch.40, (1883). Ed. and trans. Thomas Common. In The Philosophy of Nietzsche, (1927).
[22] TSZ Prologue, ch.3. Common’s translation reads Superman.
[23] Klossowski, Pierre. Nietzsche and the Vicious Circle. Translated by Daniel W. Smith. London: The Athlone Press, 1997.
[24] Nietzsche, Friedrich. The Birth of Tragedy (1872). Trans. Walter Kaufmann. New York: Vintage Books, 1967.
[25] Klenner, Douglas. “Modernity and its Discontents: Nietzsche’s Critique” (http://www.gseis.ucla.edu/faculty/kellner/)
[26] Aloni, Nimrod. Beyond Nihilism: Nietzsche’s Healing and Edifying Philosophy, University Press of America, 1991.
[27]Nietzsche, Friedrich. The Will to Power. (1901). Trans. Walter Kaufmann. New York: Vintage Books, 1968, 12b.
[28] Solomon, C. Robert. From Rationalism to Existentialism: The Existentialists and Their Nineteenth-Century Backgrounds. (New York, NY: Harper and Row, 1970).
[29] Pearson, K., A. Viroid Life: Perspectives on Nietzsche and the Transhuman Condition, London: Routledge, 1997.
[30] Egan, Greg. Distress, New York: HarperPrism, 1995. p.69
[31] Shelley, Mary. Dr. Frankenstein (1818). Britain: Oxford University Press, 1998, p.40.
[32] Wiener, Norbert. Cybernetics (1948). MIT Press, Cumberland, Rhode Island 1965.
[33] Bostrom, Nick. “Ethical Issues for the 21st Century,” Review of Contemporary Philosophy, 2005, Vol. 4
[34] Bostrom, Nick. “In Defense of Posthuman Dignity” http://www.nickbostrom.com/ethics/dignity.pdf, 2003.
[35] Graham, Elaine, L. Representations of the Post/Human: Monsters, Aliens and Others in Popular Culture, New Jersey: Rutgers University Press, 2002, pp. 65-80.
[36] Featherstone M., & Burrows R. (Eds.). Cyber Space, Cyber Bodies, Cyber Punk: Cultures of Technological Embodiment, London: SAGA Publications, 1995.
[37] Westfahl, G., & Slusser G. No Cure for the Future: Disease and Medicine in Science Fiction and Fantasy, London: Greenwood Press, 2002.
[38] Nietzsche, F. Thus Spake Zarathustra (Second Part. XL “Great Events”)
[39] There are several speculations as to why Orwell changed the title to 1984, however, since irrelevant to this paper, I have not included them.
[40] In Chilton, P. & Aubrey, C. (eds.) Nineteenth eighty-four in 1984: Autonomy, Control and Communication (London: Comedia, 1983)
[41] For further explanation why it is specifically Nietzsche’s conception of health and sickness that is being engaged in science fiction, please refer to the following sections in the Introduction: WHEN HEALTH BECOMES EVOLUTION, SCIENCE FICTION: A GENRE FOCUSING ON HEALTH.
[42] For further discussion of the metaphorical itch as a signature of the sick last man in Nietzsche’s The Will to Power turn to Ahern discussion of unregulated contradictory desires in the INTRODUCTION (page 13-14).
[43] See further discussion of the fire dog in the previous Introduction (page –), and in reference to Winston (page 16).
[44]Thoughtcrime: The mere act of having thoughts against the Party (Orwell 12).
[45]Doublethink: “To know and not to know, to be conscious of complete truthfulness while telling carefully constructed lies, to hold simultaneously two opinions which cancelled out, knowing them to be contradictory and believing in both of them, to use logic against logic, to repudiate morality while laying calm to it.” (Orwell 32).
[46] Again, it is important to stress that Winston is not aware that his greatest fear is physical, as evident from the rat torture (Orwell, p.233).
[47] O’Brien was a being in all ways larger than himself…his mind contained Winston’s mind.” (Orwell 211)
[48]“You are here because you have failed in humility, in self-discipline. You would not make the submission which is the price of sanity. You preferred to be a lunatic, a minority of one….i tell you Winston that reality is not external. Reality exists in the human mind, and nowhere else. Not the individual mind, which can make mistakes, and in any case soon perishes; only in the mind of the Party, which is a collective and immortal.” (Orwell, p.205)
[49] Nietzsche, F. Thus Spake Zarathustra (Prologue, ch. III)
[50] Nietzsche, F. Beyond Good and Evil, Part 6, Section 207
[51] For further examination turn to the official “Visible Human Project” website http://visiblep.com/visiblehuman.shtml
[52] For further discussion of Nietzsche’s ‘Tyranny of the True’ as sickness turn to the section on DELINEATING NIETZSCHE’S CONCEPTION OF HEALTH AND SICKNESS in the INTRODUCTION.
[53] For direct discussion of Nietzsche’s conception of health turn to the Introduction.
[54] TOE: Theory OF Everything. Mosala’s character defines it as “The simplest mathematical formulation we can find which encapsulates all the underlying order in the universe from which everything in the universe could be explained into being” (Egan 127).
[55] “The superman is the meaning of the earth. Let your will say: the superman shall be the meaning of the earth! (TSZ, Prologue, ch.3).
Examined Life 101 