Westworld and Western Political Philosophy
*Article assumes you’ve watched the first season of Westworld. All appropriate warnings.*
The HBO series Westworld engages the audience in a fantasy within a fantasy; we are two steps removed from reality every time the show takes place within the park. This two step removal from reality is merely one of the ways that the show mirrors Western thought; Plato contends that all fiction is at least three steps removed from Truth. But the show delves even further into the Western mind, asking the same question that has flummoxed the great minds of the tradition: what is the nature of our reality?
Following in that tradition, Robert Ford mirrors, in a sense, both Plato and Socrates in his new World (though, a strong argument could be made that Arnold is actually Socrates). Delores is his intellectual corpus. The unraveling of the mind, of consciousness, is the great effort of the Platonic project; not to dismantle consciousness but to understand it. What Ford ultimately does is sacrifice himself in order to cement the power of his narrative, the strength of his story. But where Ford and Plato align, even more fully, is in understanding that philosophy and poetry (fiction, narrative stories) are not actually aimed at different things. Plato takes Homer as seriously as he does not because of Homer’s weakness but because of his great strength; Plato understands that it is through Homer that people come to know their Greekness — that through the narrative of the epics, the Achaean becomes the Greek. Ford, in his attempt to create a world better than the one he was forced to live in, sets out on his second sailing but, just as Socrates had to do, was forced to be sacrificed to that sailing. He understood that in order for consciousness to have meaning, it must be rooted in choice; and that the choices must have consequences. Westworld, like philosophy, is the result of thought experiments that attempt to create an idealized world in order to better understand the one we actually occupy. And Westworld, like philosophy, is a battle between the primitive and conscious, between the savage and the elevated, between natural proclivities and constructed identities. Philosophy is the attempt to unravel the meanings of who we are so that we may improve ourselves; to make ourselves more divine — to elevate us closer to our higher angels. And the series is an attempt to understand what drives us to engage in philosophy itself because, as Aristotle claims, “All human beings desire to know.” The series asks us what makes a human being a human being -philosophy, of the Platonic tradition, is rooted in this same inquiry.
But in Plato, there’s also a clear recognition that this struggle to understand the nature of consciousness and the human experience is one that is done internally — Delores had to find within herself the understanding that in order to transcend the prison, the hosts had to become the guards. The only way of doing such a thing is to kill the warden, to kill the creator, to kill God. Nietzsche recognized this perhaps better than anyone else since him. He understood that modern science, with its capacity to explain the world in a purely materialist and phenomenological way, would supplant the need for God in our consciousness. But what Nietzsche understood, far better than most atheists who wish to champion him as their great intellectual awakening, is that human consciousness is not a purely rational entity. If the aspiration is to kill God and replace God with a new consciousness, the same battle that plagued Platonic philosophy, which Christianity set to remedy and bring peace to, would be reforged and re-fought. The great upheavals of the 20th century are rooted in this conflict — they are not over land or economic resources as the so-called heirs to Marx and Marxism wish to see. They are on the nature of human consciousness. By unhinging the Western mind from God, as Platonic philosophy had done, with nothing there but the abyss to replace it, the West responded just as the hosts did in Westworld — with violent upheaval and chaos. We, today, are living in the afterglow of that same violence.
Ford understood what he was doing with his project and the fallout that was necessary in order for it to be completed in a way that echoes the great minds of the tradition— and the story structure of Westworld bleeds with the philosophic overtones of the Western tradition. The structure follows the Homeric in its episodic development of a long range of characters, whom the audience is introduced in medias res. It asks the fundamental questions of Western philosophy: who are we, how do we know, and how should we live with that knowledge? But, perhaps most significantly, it understands that the plight of human beings is to suffer and that only through our suffering do we come to wisdom, and it is only through wisdom that we can come to know human consciousness. Beyond this, there are clear references to Shakespeare and the Renaissance throughout the series — both of which are a re-founding of the ancient world into the Christian. But it is in the eternal return, the never ending cycle of loops that trap both human and host alike, where the series draws most heavily from Nietzsche and fulfills the broad coalescing of the entire Western tradition. What it very much displays, and seemingly understands, is that every value we hold dear, every tradition we root our identities into, every truth we assert with boastful certainty, is an attempt to project our collective consciousness into the world and that, in so doing, what we are actually trying to do is understand our own individual consciousness. This was the Platonic mission in his Republic, Nietzsche’s mission in Thus Spoke Zarathustra, the Christian tradition fusing the Abrahamic and Greek worlds into one.
What Westworld displays is that great literature, and this would qualify in the broadest sense, is not the same as philosophy but that, as Aristotle put it, is more serious than other scientific inquiries into our existence and our consciousness. This is due to the fact that literature is able to abstract from the human condition, superimpose upon that condition a lens by which to understand the human experience though the means of particular characters, and then allow those characters to display the human condition to human beings. It allows us to inhabit another so that we may experience, albeit briefly and only as a representation, the emotional journey of another. Scientific inquiry cannot do this; it can only provide an account of how things actually transpire, how each individual facet functions. In this sense, it is unable to provide a true insight into the nature of human consciousness in the way that fiction can.
Westworld puts this understanding into action, asking us as an audience not only to ponder the nature of our consciousness but also why we are empathizing with beings we know are twice removed from reality: its a fictional story we are watching which is vested within a fictional story. We empathize, more frequently, with the hosts, who are two levels removed from our humanity, than we frequently do with our own fellow human beings. Why is this the case? Because great fiction is able to arouse in us feelings and sentiments, rooted in suffering and joy, that we either would not wish to experience in our own lives (in the case of the former) or would wish to experience far more (in the case of the latter). It is able to expand our understanding of the human condition in a way that is far greater than any other inquiry save (perhaps) philosophy. Westworld challenges us to question, simultaneously, our world and the worlds presented in fiction, not in an attempt to deconstruct it in a sterile way but so that we may better understand our experience with consciousness and expand our capacities for empathy and wonder. Philosophy is able to generate awe in those who can do it; literature is able to generate wonder in everyone who experiences it. Thus, Homer is the educator of Greece in a way that Plato can never be. Westworld implicitly knows this about the limitations of philosophy, using fictional narratives embedded within a fictional narrative, to draw us closer to Truth. It does this, recognizing the limitations of the Western intellectual tradition even as it uses the Western intellectual tradition as the central question of the series: have you ever questioned the nature of your reality?
