Twilight and Philosophy

Vampires, Vegetarians, and the Pursuit of Immortality

Rebecca Housel, J. Jeremy Wisnewski, William Irwin

• Publisher: Wiley
• Year: 2009
• ISBN:
  9780470554142
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

twilight and Philosophy

What can vampires tell us about the meaning of life?
Is Edward a romantic hero or a dangerous stalker?
Is Bella a feminist? Is Stephenie Meyer?
How does Stephenie Meyer's Mormonism fit into the fantastical world of Twilight?
Is Jacob "better" for Bella than Edward?

The answers to these philosophical questions and more can be found inside Twilight and Philosophy: Vampires, Vegetarians, and the Pursuit of Immortality. With everything from Taoism to mind reading to the place of God in a world of vampires, this book offers some very tasty philosophy for both the living and the undead to sink their teeth into. Whether you're on Team Edward or Team Jacob, whether you loved or hated Breaking Dawn, this book is for you!

To learn more about the Blackwell Philosophy and Pop Culture series, visit www.andphilosophy.com

PART ONE

TWILIGHT

one

YOU LOOK GOOD ENOUGH TO EAT: LOVE, MADNESS, AND THE FOOD ANALOGY

George A. Dunn

There is always a bit of madness in loving. But there is also always a bit of reason in madness.

—Friedrich Nietzsche¹

Edward Cullen is doomed. The new girl sitting next to him in biology class looks and—to make matters even worse—smells good enough to eat. In fact, in the century or so he’s been stalking the Earth, Edward has never before inhaled a fragrance quite so intoxicating. His nostrils have in their delirium taken the rest of his brain hostage. His sanity is on its way to becoming a dim memory, along with all that gentlemanly self-restraint he’s worked so long and hard to cultivate. All he can think about is what he’d like to do with this girl once he gets her alone—and how he can make that happen. Blinded and blindsided by this sudden upsurge of appetite, he’s able to regain control of himself just long enough to bolt out the door and drive to Alaska, where a couple of days of cool mountain air does the work of a long, cold shower, sobering him up and chilling him out.

Philosophy requires a fearless dedication to the truth, so let’s be completely honest with each other right here at the outset: Who among us can’t relate to this experience? Not that your designs on that scrumptious cupcake seated next to you in biology class (or whatever class it was) were exactly the same as Edward’s. Heaven forbid! But there’s not a soul among us who doesn’t have at least some appreciation of what this poor guy is going through. Who hasn’t been ambushed by a desire that strikes with such abrupt force that it becomes nearly impossible to hide its presence, let alone to resist being yanked in whatever direction it wants us to go? Protest all you like, but I think you know exactly what I’m talking about. But if you insist on denying that you’ve ever been slapped silly by a sudden rush of desire, then the kindest thing I can say is that you’re probably not a very promising candidate for the study of philosophy—at least not according to the ancient Greek philosopher Plato (428-348 BCE), whom we shall be meeting shortly.

“Sorry about the Food Analogy”—What’s Your Pleasure?

On first glance, Edward’s experience seems to be something entirely unique to members of his species, since it’s the smell of Bella Swan’s blood that arouses him and there’s nothing figurative about his desire to consume her. “Sorry about the food analogy,” he says to Bella when, in his clumsy attempt to explain his boorish behavior toward her on the day they meet, he ends up comparing her to ice cream.² Of course, for most of us this really would be no more than an analogy. The delectable eye candy sitting next to you in class wasn’t really a cupcake, and you probably didn’t literally want to take a bite out of the apple of your eye. But there’s something a bit disingenuous about Edward calling his food reference an “analogy,” since he really did want to make a meal of Bella.

Edward’s experience isn’t entirely strange to us, because erotic and romantic longings really do seem to share something in common with physical hunger. And who can doubt that this food analogy—the way that a vampire feeding on his victim can serve as a metaphor for an amorous conquest—accounts for a considerable part of the eroticism of vampire fiction? What else could it be? There’s nothing inherently sexy about being hundreds of years old (or even Edward’s more tender age of only one hundred and eighteen) and always maintaining the temperature of a corpse. But there is something undeniably erotic and intimate about the way a vampire feeds, not to mention the seductive animal magnetism he exudes, through which he effortlessly charms his victims into surrendering their wills and baring their throats. Of course, in the Twilight saga, it’s Bella who’s incessantly trying to wear down Edward’s rock-ribbed resistance. But the Cullen boy is a peculiarly honorable bloodsucker.

In any case, it can’t be an accident that the language of food offers such a rich and felicitous store of metaphors for describing our experience in the seemingly very different domain of sex and romance. No doubt this fact is in part because eating is one of life’s most intensely sensual pleasures. We delight in the appearance, aroma, and taste of our food. Our muscles engage in the agreeably sensuous activities of biting, chewing, and swallowing each tasty morsel. Once we’ve reduced our food to a pulp and pushed it down the esophagus, our contented stomach repays us for the boon via brain boost, radiating a feeling of profound satisfaction to the rest of the body. Each step of the process brings its own distinctive form of pleasure, so it’s with good reason that eating, along with drinking, is closely associated with being merry. For newborns, both human and vampire, the sensual pleasure of feeding offers us our earliest experience of gratification, securing a place for eating as one of our principle paradigms of deep carnal joy. And by a happy coincidence, eating is also the principal activity through which the joyful pulse of life’s vitality is sustained. We eat in obedience to the commands of nature, and nature rewards our obedience by making eating a genuine pleasure. Our sexual appetite is like this, too—nature’s need is our delight. In both hunger and erotic desire, the force of biology finds a powerful ally in the lure of pleasure.

Of course, the analogy isn’t perfect. The activity of eating ends up destroying the object of our enjoyment—or at least putting an end to its existence as an independently existing entity by transforming it into part of our own flesh. Lovers, on the other hand, never literally become one flesh, however tightly they cling to each other. Nonetheless, the world is full of predatory amorists who exploit others in much the same way the rest of us gobble down our meals, showing as little regard for the welfare of their partners as the lion shows for the lamb.

But even if we follow the chivalrous example of Edward—the lion who fell in love with the lamb—and recognize that our beloved has needs and interests of her own that set a limit to how far we can go in indulging our desires, it remains true that every form of sensual enjoyment resembles somewhat the pleasures of eating.³ Enjoyment is always a matter of “imbibing” or being “filled” with sensations that are essentially private or solitary in nature, even when the source of enjoyment is a shared activity like lovemaking. Moreover, we can get so swept up in a flood of pleasure that nothing beyond our present enjoyment seems to matter. Even gentlemanly Edward has to admit that his craving for Bella’s company is essentially selfish, motivated by a desire to feast on her beauty and fragrance, a voluptuous banquet for the sake of which he’s willing to put his beloved at mortal risk.⁴

“What I Knew Was Right . . . and What I Wanted”

The cover of the first book of the Twilight saga depicts outstretched hands cupping a bright red apple, bringing to mind another famous connection between the alimentary and the amorous that’s deeply embedded in Western consciousness. Most of us are familiar with the story of the Fall of Humanity found in Genesis, the first book of the Bible, which narrates how the first man and woman lost their original childlike innocence and were expelled from paradise as a result of disobeying God’s command not to eat the fruit of “the tree of the knowledge of good and evil” (Genesis 2:17). The Bible, of course, never explicitly identifies the “forbidden fruit” as an apple. But perhaps because apples figured so prominently in Greek mythology as catalysts of desire and discord, someone must have assumed that an apple also was the most likely culprit in the Genesis story, and the idea stuck.⁵ The Bible also never directly implicates lust as a factor in the Fall. But that didn’t deter many early Christian theologians from insisting that the “knowledge of good and evil” imparted by the forbidden fruit had something to do with carnal knowledge , an interpretation supported by Adam and Eve’s sudden discovery of their nakedness upon partaking of the fruit.⁶ Consequently, forbidden desire has been associated ever since with taking a big juicy bite out of an apple.

When medieval Christian theologians such as Thomas Aquinas (1224-1274) contemplated that apple, they believed it was alerting us to the dangers of what they called concupiscentia , or “concupiscence.” That was their word for the perfectly natural and spontaneous movement of desire toward pleasurable things, like food and sex. Of course, there’s nothing inherently bad about these objects of desire. In fact, Aquinas insisted they were necessary and good, but—and this is a crucial qualification—only as long as we seek them not solely for pleasure but rather for the sake of the purposes for which he believed God intended them, such as nourishing our bodies and reproducing the species. Allowed to operate outside the constraints of conscience and reason, concupiscent desires become tinder for sins like lust and gluttony. Aquinas classified concupiscence as a form of love, but distinguished it from friendly affection in that the object of concupiscence “is loved, not that any good may come to it, but that it may be possessed.”⁷ Our desire to eat is concupiscent since we are interested in only the nutrients and enjoyment we can take for ourselves. Erotic desires are concupiscent too, since they aim at our own pleasure.

Concupiscent desires are powerful, pleasurable, and—in the opinion of Aquinas and other Christian moralists—nothing but trouble when they come to dominate the personality. Not only do they incline us toward immoderate and harmful forms of self-indulgence, but when we start to view other people exclusively through the distorting lens of concupiscence, we end up reducing them to mere objects to be consumed or enjoyed. And that’s pretty much how we’re viewed by most vampires outside the Cullen clan. “Happy Meals on legs” is the description of human beings favored by Spike from Buffy the Vampire Slayer—another vampire partial to food analogies. ⁸ For a frightening picture of how Aquinas might have imagined pure, unbridled “concupiscence on legs,” we need only consider the newborn vampires depicted in Eclipse. They are, as Edward puts it, “[b]loodthirsty, wild, out of control.”⁹ If these frenzied, amoral appetites run amok are what desire tends to become when left unsupervised by our better rational nature, then let’s man those embattled ramparts of reason.

Edward found himself teetering atop those ramparts one night in Bella’s bedroom. Earlier that day he had discovered he had a potential rival in Mike Newton, and the resultant feelings of jealousy inflamed his desire for Bella to the point that breaking and entering seemed a reasonably good idea. That night he made his first of what were to become his nightly forays into Bella’s bedroom to spy on his beloved while she slept. He later explained to Bella what was going through his head that first night: “I wrestled all night, while watching you sleep, with the chasm between what I knew was right, moral, ethical, and what I wanted. I knew that if I continued to ignore you as I should, or if I left for a few years, till you were gone, that someday you would say yes to Mike, or someone like him.”¹⁰

We all know that it isn’t Mike Newton—or even someone very much like him—who would have claimed Bella’s heart if Edward hadn’t come along. But however mistaken Edward may have been about his competition, his wrenching internal struggle was very real. Aquinas undoubtedly would have described it as a battle between concupiscence (“what I wanted”) and conscience (“what I knew was right”). The tremendous power of concupiscence is demonstrated by the fact that hearing his name muttered by Bella in her sleep was all it took to persuade him to chuck conscience aside and go for the apple.

The Vampire Socrates

After all this talk about wanton appetites inducing us to do things that are stupid and wrong, we’re ready at last to make the acquaintance of Plato, one of the greatest philosophers of all time, to ponder the problem of desire. One of the big recurring themes of Plato’s philosophy was the phenomenon the Greeks knew as erôs, a word with a meaning that overlaps to some extent with the Latin concupiscentia but carries an even stronger connotation of irrationality. Erôs is the Greek word for passionate desire, typically, but not necessarily, sexual in nature and frequently associated with madness. For example, when the ancient Greek historian Thucydides (460-395 BCE) described the lust for the overseas empire that gripped the citizens of Athens when they set their sights on conquering the island of Sicily, he referred to it as their erôs, suggesting that this excessive passion crippled their judgment and led directly to their disastrous defeat at the hands of the Spartans in the Peloponnesian war.¹¹

We might compare the Athenian’s foolhardy expedition to another—and particularly foul—expression of erôs that we encounter in the Twilight saga: James’s single-minded obsession with tracking and killing Bella, which also tempts him to engage in reckless behavior through which he courts his own ruin. Most often, erôs referred to the passion of being in love or to intense carnal lust. But as we learn from the examples of Edward, Bella, Jacob Black, Leah Clearwater, and other frequently unhappy residents of Forks and La Push, even the seemingly more benign forms of erôs can addle the mind and wreak havoc on the emotions.

No wonder, then, that some Greek ...

Table of contents

• The Blackwell Philosophy and Pop Culture Series
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• PART ONE - TWILIGHT
• PART TWO - NEW MOON
• PART THREE - ECLIPSE
• PART FOUR - BREAKING DAWN
• CONTRIBUTORS
• INDEX