Frankenstein and Philosophy by Michaud Nicolas

Author:Michaud, Nicolas [Michaud, Nicolas]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 9780812698428
Publisher: Open Court

So What of the Monster?

After listening to the monster’s testimony, we have to conclude that the monster is in some sense a person. At this point it may be helpful to unpack and spell out what exactly is meant by the psychological criterion. Though there is no consensus on this issue a fruitful attempt of spelling out what goes into the psychological criterion is:

1.Consciousness (of objects and events external or internal to the being), and in particular the capacity to feel pain

2.Reasoning (the developed capacity to solve new and relatively complex problems)

3.Self-motivated activity (activity which is relatively independent of either genetic or direct external control)

4.The capacity to communicate, by whatever means, messages of an indefinite variety of types, that is, not just with an indefinite number of possible contents, but on indefinitely many possible topics

5.The presence of self-concepts, and self-awareness, either individual or racial, or both.

Under these conditions, it seems as if we should accept the monster as a person with his own (possibly new) identity. Arguably, the monster gains consciousness from the moment Victor Frankenstein “infused a spark of life into a lifeless thing.” The monster then proceeds to develop his reasoning faculties as well as his capacity to communicate during his time with the cottagers.

Although it’s very briefly outlined, the monster definitely has self-awareness as he makes constant comparisons between what he describes as the “perfect forms” of the cottagers and his disfigured self. Now self-motivated, as defined above, might be interpreted as some degree of freewill, which is a contentious subject in philosophical circles to say the least. Without committing myself to saying whether the monster has freewill, I’ll simply say that the monster has some appreciable amount of what we can call self-motivated activity. So it looks as if the monster can be considered to have his own identity, despite the amnesia problem. As to when exactly he attained-personhood, it can only have been at some point in his hovel.

Overall, the monster’s identity seems rooted in both his psychological contents (his memories and thoughts) and his physical makeup. By now it does look as if the monster is a new instance of a person, at least not identical to whomever owned the body parts at some previous time. The monster starts his identity in Victor’s lab and doesn’t share a history with any of his previous body parts. But at the same time I guess it’s important to recognize the role the physical body plays in the monster’s identity since it is at least necessary for him to build an identity in the first place. After all, what is Victor infusing life into if not a body, regardless of how gruesome it may be? But again, this casts the body as secondary to what is truly important to identity, as we saw how the monster came to build one for himself despite being given an improvised body, really a very crappy hardware system upon which to load a software.

While this may be all well and good

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