Plato, Aristotle and Supernatural, Essay Example

The saturation of “undead” imagery throughout American popular culture of the early twenty-first century is undeniable. for most observers, the attraction of werewolves, zombies, and zombies is based on escapist fantasy. These fictional creatures are fixtures of fantasy an entertainment that are meant to distract average people from the tensions and unpleasant aspects of their lives by providing alternate realities of the imagination. Such an impulse while a boon to entertainment and media companies actually stands as an example of immoral or unethical behavior when examined in light of two of the most deeply reflected philosophers in history: Plato and Aristotle. According to Plato, the immersion in fictional realities is a dangerous preoccupation which threatens the pursuit of knowledge and truth. For Aristotle, the modern preoccupation with zombies and the undead is a vice based in excess which, while initially gratifying, actually works against the attainment of true happiness.

Before following through on a more specific examination of how the zombie-fascination is related to the two philosophers, it is necessary to give additional details on the modern context of the issue. For example, the book The Undead and Philosophy: Chicken Soup for the Soulless (2006) mentions that the preoccupation with undead motifs in popular culture is an extension of a common desire to imagine the realities of death. There is opportunity for fiction to speak out since in reality nothing is known about death: “Since there is little consensus about whether there is an afterlife, and if there is, about what it’s like, it is appropriate to address the question of death’s badness by assuming that death is an experiential blank.” (Greene 7). This viewpoint acknowledges that the undead motif in popular culture is serving a useful purpose.

The idea that art can be used to probe the unknown is further supported, in the book, by the concept of truths that exist beyond verifiable things. For example, the idea that “There can be conceptual truths about things that do not exist. There can be conceptual truths about unicorns, even though unicorns surely do not exist” (Vargas 40) is one that is very much relevant to the discussion of the undead meme in popular culture. Those who see value in the meme would,d argue that those things that are opf the imagination are in many ways no less real than things that can be touched and scientifically verified. The bottom line is that images of the undead help people grapple with essential questions of existence, most obviously; the nature of death.

Furthermore, movies, books, and other media that feature the undead challenge us to consider states that are neither purely living or dead. this means that the undead exist as symbols for our very ignorance about the true nature of life and death. The undead images also force us to confront or fears about the potentialities of dying. The images “threaten us with the possibility of becoming Undead ourselves.” (Greene 3). In this sense, the undead images also mock us for not living our lives to the fullest capacity. This is a nuanced perception that can be tricky to understand. however, the fact remains that the undead in popular culture are symbols for those who live their lives as thought they are already dead by not thinking deeply or appreciating their lives deeply.

Each of the points touched on above indicate that the popular culture’s fascination with images of the undead is a healthy, cathartic phenomenon that ultimately reflects a cultural desire to derive a greater meaning out of existence. This viewpoint justifies the fascination with the undead as a way of bringing about a cultural evolution that will bring about necessary change and transformation. If this is the case, then why would great philosophers such as Plato and Aristotle stand against the proliferation of the undead meme in popular culture? The answer to that question is at once simple and extremely complex. On a simple level, the answer is that both Plato and Aristotle would view the undead meme a s a sign of cultural vice rather than virtue. the complex answer involves taking a closer look at the two philosopher’s respective theories.

In regard to Aristotle, the first consideration to rule out is the idea that imaginary creature such as the undead could have any genuine existence. If a being fails to be verified as authentic through concrete physical evidence, then it is an aspect of fantasy and imagination and nothing more. Aristotle therefore would view any form of escapist entertainment as appealing not to the rational mind but to what he termed the “appetites.” The use of modern media for escapist fantasy, for Aristotle, would show a kind of decadent behavior that was, in the long run, self-serving and self-defeating.

According to Thomas C. Brickhouse in his article “Does Aristotle Have a Consistent Account of Vice?” the pursuit of appetites, for Aristotle, led to unending unfulfillment. Brickhouse writes that “Anyone who makes a practice of choosing activities that make his appetites great and strong is bound to experience discord as his appetites rise up and, ignoring reason’s wish that all pleasures be good pleasures” (Brickhouse). This is a tricky point of view because it shows that Aristotle did in fact value pleasure and happiness, but he failed to acknowledge escapist fantasy as a suitable method for attaining them. Instead, Aristotle argued that the pursuit of virtues was the correct way to attain happiness. The pursuit of virtue led to happiness because virtue was, itself, a good. The pursuit of escapism and fantasy, by contrast, constitutes a vice that is dangerous to the moral character because it encourages appetites to increase and increase until they can no longer be reasonable fulfilled, and the end-result is unhappiness. This kind of dynamic would seem to be at least partially supported in recent examples of video game addiction and in widely reported cases of escapist fantasy that have reportedly led to all manner of social violence and criminal behavior.

This kind of vision is very much in sympathy with what Plato might have thought and felt about the undead meme in popular culture. Although Plato’s philosophy allowed for the existence of the supernatural, his ethical framework is no more supportive of escapist fantasy than Aristotle’s. For example, in Plato’s estimation the supernatural world was made up of four different categories: prophetic, religious, poetic and erotic. Plato also proposed a separate “physics” for the natural world and the supernatural. While the perception of the world is determined as understanding the rules of nature and physics by both Plato and Aristotle, the focus on supernatural, divine and “Heavens” appears in Plato’s philosophy first. Creatures like God were attributed supernatural powers, just like werewolves and zombies. They are also human-like. Therefore, classical philosophy would have handled them as the realization of divine and supernatural. While Plato would have accepted the belief, the fascination with these creatures would not have been agreed on by either of the philosophers, as it does not represent the values of “virtue.”

The preceding line of reasoning may appear to be difficult to follow, but it is, in fact, quite easy to understand once Plato’s position on the difference between truth and poetry is made clear. For Plato, philosophy stood as humanity’s search fortruth whereas poetry and all fiction stood as a way to persuade. As Julia Annas points out in Plato: A Very Short Introduction (2003), Plato saw the relationship between truth and poetry as being antagonistic: “There has always been hostility, he says at the end of the Republic, between philosophy and poetry … Philosophy aims only at the truth, not at mere persuasion regardless of truth, which is a dubious enterprise in both its intentions and its methods.” (Annas 25). It is the purpose of fiction to persuade the reader that they are seeing truth when they are, in reality, seeing only an illusion.

However, virtue arises only from rationality. In Plato’s estimation, “virtue brings about goodness in other things with no goodness of their own, by bringing the right kind of direction and order to one’s life where those things are concerned.” (Russell 153). The key words in that statement are “right” and “order.” The seemingly simple statement masks an entire ontology and set of ethical principles. what Plato is saying is that virtue arises from understanding the way that things work in the real world according to human rationality and that behavior follows through on what can be rationally determined to be morally and ethically right. The influence of the undead meme in popular culture can therefore only be regarded as a distraction from understanding the real world and as a way of avoiding rationality in favor of escapist fantasy.

The preceding discussion has shown that both Aristotle and Plato would view the modern preoccupation with werewolves, vampires, and zombies as a vice. For Aristotle the longing for escapism is an indication of a weak moral character and for Plato, the proliferation of the undead meme shows fiction’s inherent threat to truth. In either case, the defenders of the popular meme in the twenty-first century would have little rebuttal to these claims. instead, they acknowledge that the meme is an escapist fantasy but argue that such a fantasy is a cultural catharsis that in the long run exerts a positive influence over society.

Works Cited

Annas, Julia. Plato: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford, England: Oxford UP, 2003.

Brickhouse, Thomas C. “Does Aristotle Have a Consistent Account of Vice?” The Review of Metaphysics 57.1 (2003): 3+.

Greene, Richard, and K. Silem Mohammad, eds. The Undead and Philosophy: Chicken Soup for the Soulless. Chicago: Open Court, 2006. Popular Culture and Philosophy.

Russell, Daniel. Plato on Pleasure and the Good Life. Oxford, England: Oxford UP, 2005.