From Western Philosophy to Science Fiction: a brief history of thought

Science Fiction is dead, has been the resounding call from Golden-Age Sci-Fi/Fantasy fans and scholars for the past fifty years. Some have attributed this to the alleged 1969 moon landing, in the which fact and fiction became muddled and those who once would have been Science-Fiction fans were now NASA fans instead.

I propose a different reason; that Golden-Age Science Fiction once filled an important role in exposing us and our children to metaphysical philosophy in a fun and exciting narrative way, and that the subsequent rise in atheism over the past several decades, particularly in the Science Fiction writing community (and Hollywood), has led to a dearth of philosophical literacy.

Best-selling 21st-century political philosopher (and Sci-Fi/Fantasy author), Vox Day, states that, “Western civilization is a consequence of three things: The European nations, Christianity, and the Graeco-Roman legacy of philosophy and law” (2017).[1]

By all accounts, the mode of thought central to all of Western culture and tradition (especially everything that has come to be known as Western Philosophy) began in ancient Greece. In their History of Western Philosophy, Boersema and Middleton (2012, x) state that, “Western Philosophy is more than 2,500 years old. It is usually said to have begun in what is now Greece and Turkey, roughly around 600 B.C.”

Others, however, have been less effete on the subject: “A consideration of different intellectual emphases that continually surface in the history of thought, starting with the Greeks, led to the insight, namely, that a number of axiomatic and interrelated orientations towards knowledge of the world and of human beings underlie and shape the human intellect in its endeavours.” (Pietersen, 2015, p.1)

Greek philosophy developed over an approximately one-thousand-year span (600BC to AD400, with some scholars even quoting AD521) encompassing three distinct, smaller development periods; the Pre-Socratic, Athenian and Hellenistic periods.

Pre-Socratic philosophy focused predominantly on simple, apparent binaries whose distinction was important for navigating the complexities of life, such as appearance vs. reality and change vs. permanence, and was an important precursor for the Athenian school of Socrates, Plato and Aristotle.

The Athenian School developed the four main branches of philosophy we recognise today, metaphysics, epistemology, ethics and aesthetics, and began to be spread abroad by Aristotle’s pupil, Alexander the Great.

So impactful was the spread of Greek thought and culture, in fact, that Greek was the dominant international language (much like English is today) all around the Mediterranean at the time of Jesus of Nazareth. As historical evidence suggests that Jesus himself spoke Greek (Gleaves, 2015), it is likely that his teachings[2], so foundational now to Western philosophy and culture, were in turn influenced by some mixture of Greek thought and Mosaic law.

The Hellenistic school (approx. AD300–400) was a rather mixed bag of philosophies — Stoicism, Epicureanism, Scepticism and Neoplatonism — all practical extensions of thought based on earlier ideas from the Pre-Socratic, Athenian and (growing) Christian traditions.

Then with Constantine’s adoption of Christianity, the Councils of Nicaea, the establishment of the Roman Catholic church, and the advent of a number of prominent Roman philosophers, such as Augustine and Boethius, began the Medieval period in Philosophy.

According to Boersema and Middleton: “Probably the most fundamental way in which medieval philosophy was different from earlier classical philosophy was that the former was influenced heavily by Christianity… …For instance, new virtues (sometimes called theological virtues), such as faith, hope and charity, became basic to medieval ethics, as opposed to classical virtues of courage, temperance, and reason.” (p.87)

This shift away from the so-called classical virtues of “courage, temperance and reason” is clearly not a shift based on any sort of biblical (even New Testament) teachings. With established roots in both Old Testament scripture and classical (Greek) philosophy, the teachings of Jesus and his apostles do certainly not preclude such classical virtues; indeed, examples of each are found in the New Testament as well (Johnson, 2009).

This shift is better explained in the actions of the Roman Catholic institution, which spent centuries controlling all scripture (in Latin instead of the original Greek and Hebrew), keeping it out of the hands of the public at large. A focus towards selflessness and self-sacrifice in the masses as opposed to self-control (a form of strength), reason (logic, rationality) and courage (bravery, martyrdom, a willingness to fight) is exactly the type of virtue-framing an established institutional power would promote to maintain its authority.

This they did with very few internal threats for centuries, eventually prompting some great church philosophers, such as Thomas Aquinas, William of Ockham and Anselm of Canterbury, in the 11th to 14th centuries to add the first new material to Western philosophy in centuries. Most notably, Aquinas made a number of prolific arguments for the existence of God through logic and reason, which to this day have not been successfully refuted[3] by atheist philosophers, simply ignored.

The philosophical Renaissance period (roughly 1450 to 1650), with the exception of Rene Descartes (who built upon the philosophy of Aristotle and Aquinas, proving God through reason), was less a time of great new philosophy and more a time of social upheaval.

With the discovery of the Americas, exploration and colonisation, the Inquisition, the Protestant Reformation, Martin Luther’s Ninety-Five Theses, the formation of the church of England, legends of figures like Robin Hood challenging corrupt authority, the founding of the Jesuit order, Galileo, Kepler, Copernicus, the printing press, the King James Bible, etc., the general public were finally free to read the Bible and “virtues” for themselves, and to once more question authority, both political and religious, and choose to say ‘no’, effectively removing the head of the Catholic church’s power and leading into the Modern philosophical period.

Reformation Christianity held the foundations of Western philosophy rooted in the Christian tradition as, building on the work of Descartes, notable philosophers such as Voltaire, Rousseau, Kierkegaard, and Hegel, built steadily on the two millennia of philosophy preceding them and the momentum of the Enlightenment around them.

Immanuel Kant, however, though still religious himself, presented the first new wave of philosophy in a long time, Existentialism, and argued for a sort of separation of church and philosophy, in which philosophy, logic and reason should be only concerned with the obviously material, apparent to the senses, and focused on the essence of life and living, thus removing “the God question” entirely.

Within a few decades, Darwin, Marx, Nietzsche, Huxley, Jung and Freud (to name a few), had moved beyond “God”/”the shackles of organised religion” (and consequently most of Christian scripture/teachings and Western philosophy with it) to a new conception of the human condition in which we are evolved pond scum with inherent animalistic tendencies whose place in the universe is both temporary and absolutely meaningless.

It comes as no surprise to the open-minded scholar then, to find that the philosophies of Darwin, Marx and Nietzsche were all heavily influential, even predominant, in the philosophies of Hitler, Lenin, Stalin, Mao and the Khmer Rouge in the Contemporary era, and thus bear some responsibility for over two-hundred-million deaths during the twentieth century alone.

However, not all nineteenth-century philosophers blindly followed the new atheistic philosophies that now predominate the history books. In fact, according to some sources, far more prevalent among a supermajority Christian West at the time were the works of Christian thinkers and philosophers such as Shaftesbury, König, Hutcheson, Reid, Diderot and Cousin, who, drawing upon the wealth of Western philosophy, present as a paradigm the triadic virtues of the Good, the Beautiful and the True as a fundamentally Christian ethic with Platonist roots (Martin, 2017).

This paradigm was said to encompass the entire Christian philosophy pertaining to life, art, music, literature, architecture, aesthetics, etc. What was Good and Beautiful and True was a spark of the divine (perfection) in a fallen world. In this light, the Modernism and Postmodernism movements in art, literature, music, etc., can be see clearly for what they are, atheistic rejections of the divine (the Good, the Beautiful and the True), or, in other words, celebrations of the Bad, the Ugly, and the Falsehood/Deception.

It is in this milieu that we find the development of Science Fiction as a literary genre; the natural bifurcation between theists who seek to find a spark of the divine in their art, and atheists who seek to celebrate the ugliness of the world in theirs.

For instance, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818) is widely considered by scholars and fans alike to be the first Science Fiction novel (Hrotic, 2016, p.43; McGrath, 2011, p.6). It is also the manifestation of the mind of a young atheist, a celebration of the macabre, the ugly and the unnatural, placing a deranged man in league with the divine as being capable of creating or resurrecting life, something modern science is nowhere closer to achieving today over two hundred years later. Urizar even hypothesizes, “the actions of Victor Frankenstein suggest that the monster is in fact Victor himself… …a paranoid schizophrenic who is battling his alternate personality whom he believes is the monster of the story” (Urizar, 2016).

Similarly, classic Science Fiction novels such as Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World (1932) and George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949) are the products of atheistic minds, painting bleak pictures of the future and offering no hope of freedom, morality or redemption. Indeed, the protagonists of both novels die in the end. One could even go so far as to hypothesize that, had Orwell been a believing Christian, Winston Smith would have actually overcome the government in some capacity; overthrown it or escaped its clutches altogether.

Many might argue that such an alteration might utterly ruin the effect of the novel upon the reader, but one must ask, just what effect is being had?

According to Rooney: “the depiction of power in the text is quite extreme, moving well beyond any realistic political context and into the territory of nightmare, producing a darker, more psychologically-oriented study of individual frailty in the face of absolute evil” (2002, p.70).

Notably theistic Science Fiction authors, however, have a tendency to imbue their works with hope and strength of character.

C. S. Lewis’ Out of the Silent Planet (1938) is a tale about a man, Ransom, who after a minor act of meddlesome heroism/integrity/bravery, is drugged and kidnapped away in a space-ship to a planet called Malacandra (aka Mars) in which he is to be offered as a sacrificial bartering chip to one of the three indigenous sentient species. He escapes, befriends a native group, learns their language, but eventually, most nobly turn himself in to protect his new friends, at which point, the deific ruler of the planet catches them all and decidedly banishes his kidnappers, and Ransom opts to return home to earth with them. Ransom is not even religious in character, simply a man with some intelligence, integrity and kindness, and open-minded enough to consider some of the metaphysical implications of the events of the novel in a real way.

Frank Herbert’s Dune (1965), considered in 2003 to be the best-selling Science Fiction novel of all time, is about Paul Atreides, son of an exiled Duke on the desert planet Arrakis, who, after a deadly family betrayal, escapes into the deep desert with his mother and joins the Fremen (desert people), and eventually, owing to some overdeveloped presence of mind, becoming their prophesied Messiah figure, taking on the Baron and the Galactic Emperor and restoring rule of Arrakis once more to both his house and the Fremen simultaneously. While predominantly political in nature, the novel is rich with broad religious themes and fine religious detail from several different cultural, historical and philosophical angles.

To say nothing of the treatment of religion specifically in Science Fiction novels by atheists, the authors’ worldviews are generally apparent by the air of hopelessness and rejection of the Good, the Beautiful and the True, and whatever philosophy that therefore can be derived from their exploratory oeuvre, is generally in the vein of aforementioned Kantian-Nietzschien-Marxist-Darwinian thought that, historically speaking, almost inevitably leads to some form of genocide.

However, where once Science Fiction authorship was evenly matched between the theistic and atheistic, ever since the “death” of Golden Age Science Fiction (Stableford, 2010; Sanford, 2013; Luckhurst, 1994), there has been a complete dearth of prominent religiously-inspired authorship in the particular literary genre, which, when viewed in light of the role Science Fiction has played in inspiring technological advancement across the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, does not bode well for an inspiring vision of the future.

Unless, that is, those of us with the philosophical and historical foundations to make a difference as thought-leaders and influencers actually stand up, create and publish.

Reference List

Boersema, D & Middleton, K. (2012) The Facts On File Guide to Philosophy: History of Western Philosophy. Facts On File: New York.

Day, V. (2017) “Restoring the Deconstructed West”. Vox Popoli. Web. Accessed 6th October 2019. http://voxday.blogspot.com/2017/04/restoring-deconstructed-west.html

Gleaves, G. S. (2015) Did Jesus Speak Greek? — The Emerging Evidence of Greek Dominance in First-Century Palestine. Pickwick Publishing: Eugene.

Herbert, F. (1965) Dune. Chilton Books. Philadelphia: New York.

Hrotic, S. (2016) Religion in Science Fiction. Bloomsbury: New York.

Huxley, A. (1932) Brave New World. Chatto & Windus: London.

Johnson, L. T. (2009) “The Jesus of the Gospels and Philosophy”. In Moser, P. K. (2009) Jesus and Philosophy: New Essays. Cambridge University Press: Cambridge.

Lewis, C. S. (1938) Out of the Silent Planet. John Lane: The Bodley Head.

Luckhurst, R. (1994) “The Many Deaths of Science Fiction: A Polemic”. Science Fiction Studies. 21(1) pp. 35–50.

Martin, J. L. (2017) “The Birth of the True, the Good, and the Beautiful: Towards an Investigation of the Structures of Social Thought” in Reconstructing Social Theory, History and Practice. Current Perspectives in Social Theory. 35(1) pp. 3–56.

McGrath, J. F. (2011) Religion and Science Fiction. Lutterworth: Cambridge.

Orwell, G. (1949) Nineteen Eighty-Four. Secker & Warburg: London.

Pietersen, H. J. (2015) The Four Types of Western Philosophy. KR Publishing: Randburg.

Rooney, B. (2002) “Narrative Viewpoint and the Representation of Power in George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four.” Sydney Studies in English. 28(1) pp. 69–86.

Sanford, J. (2013) “Science Fiction Doesn’t Predict the Future; it Creates the Future.” Medium. Medium.com. Web. Accessed 23rd September 2019.

Shelley, M. (1818) Frankenstein. Hughes, Harding, Mavor, & Jones: London.

Stableford, B. (2010) Creators of Science Fiction: Essays on Authors, Editors and Publishers Who Shaped Science Fiction. Borgo Press: San Bernardino.

Urizar, D. O. (2016) “The Real “Monster in Frankenstein.” Arsenal: The undergraduate research journal of Augusta University. 1(1), pp. 20–27.

[1] In recent years, attempts have been made to attribute Western culture to a mixture of Judaism, Christianity and Greek thought. However, further research into the history of the West doesn’t bear this out. Although Christianity may have begun in Jerusalem, it is itself a rejection of Judaism, and arguable only became the power that it is after its adoption by Greece and the Roman empire. Furthermore, Talmudic Judaism especially is a fundamentally Middle-Eastern philosophy, propagating a much lower-trust culture than developed in the high-trust West (Christendom). In fact, historical prejudices in Europe/the West against Jewish and Romani populations can, in light of new data on internal trust levels by ethnic group, be almost entirely explained as the inevitable result of introducing low-trust group foreigners into a high-trust domestic population.

[2] This newer historical understanding of the degree of Greek influence in First Century Jerusalem and the surrounding areas lends additional credence to the New Testament, particularly the gospels, as genuine first- and second-hand accounts of the teachings and untranslated words of Jesus of Nazareth. In fact, given the wealth, breadth and impact of his teachings, backed by more credible historical documentation than any other philosopher before or since, the fact that Jesus is not universally acknowledged as the premier figure in the history of Western philosophy may very well be the greatest injustice in recorded history.

[3] Nietzsche’s assertion that “God is dead” is not one of philosophical success or triumph in disproving the existence of God, but rather of having reasoned and made assumptions and justified one’s way to a conception of reality that doesn’t necessarily need a God to be possible, and therefore rejects God outright on that basis.