Final Fantasy and Philosophy: The Ultimate Walkthrough (6 page)

In the 1970s and 1980s, the atmospherologist Dr. James Lovelock and the microbiologist Dr. Lynn Margulis framed what is now called “the Gaia hypothesis.” The hypothesis, which was entirely unlike the concept proposed by Dr. Cid, did not suggest that the planet Earth was a living creature, that the Earth has a spirit, or that the Earth is a goddess. Rather, it argued that the Earth’s biosphere, including both biota and the physical environment, could be understood as a self-regulating system able to maintain both the climate and the chemical composition of the atmosphere in a state favorable to life. Lovelock defined the Gaia hypothesis as follows: “Gaia is . . . a complex entity involving the Earth’s biosphere, atmosphere, oceans, and soil; the totality constituting a feedback or cybernetic system which seeks an optimal physical and chemical environment for life on this planet. The maintenance of relatively constant conditions by active control may be conveniently described by the term homeostasis.”
²
In other words, the Gaia hypothesis suggests that there are a number of physical and chemical processes that work together to regulate the chemical content of the biosphere, and through various systems of negative feedback, biospheric conditions favorable for life are maintained.

This view of Gaia is entirely different from Dr. Cid’s radical holism. But in what precise way is it different? At first glance, the Gaia hypothesis offered by Lovelock and Margulis appears to be mechanistic. They seem to be arguing that Gaia is made up of physical, chemical, and biological feedback mechanisms. But recall that earlier we defined
mechanism
as the position that the properties of wholes are caused by the parts that make them up. Note that Lovelock and Margulis are
not
simply giving the name Gaia to the combination of mechanisms that regulate environmental conditions. They are making a much larger claim than this! They are claiming that Gaia—the planet Earth—is a
homeostatic
system. Homeostatic systems actively create and maintain stable environments through the interaction of physical and chemical processes. The cells in your body, for example, are parts of a homeostatic system. In your body, each cell releases chemical messengers that give information to other cells about what is needed in order to maintain a stable environment for the efficient functioning of the cell. Other cells respond to that information, while sending out chemical information of their own.

Lovelock argued that the Earth has similar homeostatic properties. He told us that Gaia is “a cybernetic system which seeks an optimal physical and chemical environment for life on this planet.” The upshot of this remark is that the mechanisms that make up Gaia are
not
simply causal mechanisms that interact like the parts of a car engine. Rather, Lovelock is claiming that Gaia’s mechanisms work together to actively seek or look for optimum environmental conditions for life. That is, on Earth, physical and chemical processes interoperate to maintain and promote the conditions for life on the planet. This is much like saying that the various parts of your car’s engine tune themselves automatically for best performance and that the parts of your car repair themselves. The car example highlights the fact that the Gaia concept being proposed by Lovelock is organicist, not purely mechanistic. Recall that organicism is the position that parts cannot exist independently of a whole. Lovelock’s Gaia hypothesis is an organicist concept because it suggests that every individual living thing is a part of the whole Earth system and cannot exist apart from that system.

Are the Bad Guys Bad but Right?

In
The Spirits Within
, the hard-nosed General Hein skeptically asks Dr. Cid, “Did you come here to talk about some Gaia theory? To tell us that the planet is alive? That it has a spirit? That’s a fairy tale.” Hein is right. Dr. Cid does seem to think that the planet has a living spirit, and in the absence of clear evidence, we probably should share General Hein’s skepticism. But should we extend that skepticism to the Gaia hypothesis proposed by Lovelock and Margulis? Perhaps not. It isn’t clear that the Gaia hypothesis is anything like Dr. Cid’s conception of Gaia. Unlike Dr. Cid, Lovelock and Margulis don’t suggest either that the Earth has a spirit or that it is alive. They certainly never argue that the Earth has a spirit, and the hypothesis of planetary homeostasis need not commit them to the idea that the Earth is alive. Lovelock and Margulis might remind us that just because living things are good examples of homeostasis, this does not imply that every instance of homeostasis is a living thing.

So despite first appearances, Lovelock and Margulis have a little more in common with Professor Hojo than with Dr. Cid. I am sure that neither has Hojo’s appetite for diabolical schemes and twisted experiments, but like Hojo, Lovelock and Margulis are attempting to understand the physical and chemical processes that maintain planetary homeostasis. Likewise, in his research on Materia, Jenova, and the Cetra, Hojo is attempting to identify underlying physical and chemical causal mechanisms and processes. Admittedly, Hojo does not seem to share Lovelock and Margulis’s organicist approach, but, at the same time, neither is engaged in research that proposes anything like Dr. Cid’s radical holism. Hojo’s approach to science is like that of most real-world scientists. He takes an approach that is mechanistic and reductionistic. Most scientists find reductionism and mechanism attractive because they have been remarkably successful approaches to understanding the natural world.

Yet despite these successes, there have always been philosophers and scientists who have reservations about reductionism and mechanism. In
Final Fantasy VII
, we see this reservation expressed in the radical holistic conception of the Lifestream as an actual living thing with a soul. But in the sciences and philosophy, reservations, about reductionism and mechanism are
not
typically expressed with general arguments for the existence of souls or spirits within. It is more common to make the narrow, simpler argument that living processes and cognition are not straightforwardly mechanistic or reducible. That is, to argue that after mechanistic and reductionist explanations are exhausted, there remains something still to explain. For example, in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, some argued that living biological processes could not be fully explained by physical or chemical mechanisms. Life, it was argued, could be explained only by appealing to the existence of an immaterial “vital principle” or “animal soul.” This argument was accepted, to some degree, even by famous advocates of mechanism such as René Descartes (1596-1650). In his
Treatise of Man
(c. 1637), he claimed that the physiological functions of man—circulation, digestion, nourishment, and growth—could all be adequately understood as mechanical processes. Yet elsewhere he held that cognitive capacities, such as thinking, judging, and deciding, were not the outcome of mechanical processes but were properties possessed only by human minds.

The problem with arguments that appeal to vital principles, souls, and Lifestreams is that they have been so often defeated. Dr. Cid may seem convincing when he says that there is a vital, living Gaia that is above and beyond physical and chemical principles. But when concepts like this have been proposed and examined empirically, they usually have been found lacking. The ongoing success of mechanism and reductionism, and the ongoing failure to show that there is anything unique or distinctive about living processes, has made most modern scientists suspicious of theories that appeal to anything except reductionist and mechanistic concepts. This suggests that we have good reasons to be suspicious of theories that appeal to holistic concepts. The account of Gaia developed in
The Spirits Within
and
Advent’s Children
clearly relies on a dubious holistic concept of the Lifestream. So, General Hein is right to be skeptical of Dr. Cid’s theories, and Professor Hojo has some justification (methodological, if not moral) to be pursuing explanations that rely on mechanism and reductionism. But should our skepticism extend to theories that appeal to organicist concepts? Lovelock and Margulis’s account of Gaia proposes that living organisms interact to maintain environmental conditions favorable to life through a system of interlocking physical and chemical feedback mechanisms. Should we also be suspicious of the Gaia hypothesis?

The fact that Lovelock and Margulis’s Gaia hypothesis is an organicist concept and not purely reductionist or mechanistic has made it enormously controversial in the scientific community. Some scientists dispute the efficacy of specific feedback mechanisms that make up the Gaia system. Others argue that the hypothesis is too sweeping and unspecific to be testable. Still others claim that large-scale homeostasis in ecological systems could not be an outcome of evolution by natural selection. Some, all, or none of these criticisms may turn out, in the long run, to be correct. But aside from these specific empirical criticisms of Gaia, it is worth making the following philosophical observation. In most scientific disciplines, from physics to genetics, hypotheses and explanations employ only reductionist and mechanistic concepts. Ecology and the environmental sciences are noteworthy exceptions. In these disciplines, one is much more likely to encounter hypotheses, such as the Gaia hypothesis, that invoke organicist concepts.
³

In the closing, climactic scenes of
The Spirits Within
, General Hein is proved utterly wrong and Dr. Cid’s hypothesis that the planet has a living spirit called Gaia is vindicated. Aki, the young beautiful protégée of Dr. Cid, desperately tries to persuade Hein that the earth is not under attack by a phantom alien menace. Aki reveals that the mysterious Phantoms are the “confused, lost, and angry” spirits of an alien planet that became stranded when a meteor fragment from their world hit the Earth. The Phantoms are not an alien aggressor but “the living spirit of an alien’s home world.” Hein ignores Aki and (repeatedly) fires the Zeus Cannon, with devastating consequences. Will Lovelock and Margulis eventually be proved right, just like Dr. Cid is? The answer to this question is unclear. At present, there is little consensus among practicing environmental and ecological scientists about whether organicist concepts are needed to make effective descriptions of the natural world, or whether organicist concepts can be eliminated in favor of reductionist and mechanistic concepts.
⁴
In the future, Lovelock and Margulis’s organicist conception of Gaia may or may not be vindicated. But will Dr. Cid’s holistic conception of Gaia ever have a place in the science of our world? No. As we have seen, it contains too many dubious notions that cannot be reconciled with the reductionist and mechanistic features of science. Dr. Cid’s Gaia belongs entirely in the world of
Final Fantasy.

NOTES

1
For further discussion of the concepts of holism, organicism, mechanism, and reductionism, see David Blitz,
Emergent Evolution: Qualitative Novelty and the Levels of Reality
(Boston: Kluwer, 1992).

2
James E. Lovelock,
Gaia: A New Look at Life on Earth
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979, 1989), p. 11.

3
Important examples include Eugene P. Odum,
Ecology: The Link between the Natural and the Social Sciences
, 2nd ed. (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1963, 1975); and Richard Levins and Richard C. Lewontin, “Dialectics and Reductionism in Ecology,” in
The Dialectical Biologist
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1985).

4
For more on whether a particular conception of nature really matters to environmental ethics, see chapter 5 in this volume, “Gaia and Environmental Ethics in
The Spirits Within
,
”
by Jason P. Blahuta.

5

GAIA AND ENVIRONMENTAL ETHICS IN
THE SPIRITS WITHIN

Jason P. Blahuta

The Spirits Within
, the first movie born of the
Final Fantasy
video game series, presents a bleak vision of humanity’s future. An alien meteor has crashed to Earth, bringing with it Phantoms, an ephemeral ensemble of alien creatures that can kill humans with a single touch. Attempts at fighting the alien invaders have been largely ineffective, and the few human beings who remain are fighting a rearguard action, living in fortified cities, with a shield of bio-etheric energy the only thing standing between them and extinction. Among the survivors, General Hein and Doctors Cid and Aki Ross vie for the ruling council’s blessing to pursue very different ways of dealing with the aliens.

The general wants to fire the Zeus Cannon—a high-powered laser that allegedly will kill all of the aliens in their nest, the Leonid Meteor. Aki and Dr. Cid want to fight the aliens with a theoretical weapon that Dr. Cid maintains would mirror the bio-etheric energy of the Phantoms, in effect canceling them out. Dr. Cid’s weapon is based on a conception of the world that involves the idea of Gaia—that the world possesses a life force—and thus the weapon must be “Gaia-friendly.”
¹

A Tale of Two Gaias

The Spirits Within
explores a series of debates that are currently raging in our own reality. Most prominent of these is the so-called Gaia hypothesis, advocated by James Lovelock and Lynn Margulis.
²
The Gaia hypothesis is closely related to the concept of Gaia in
The Spirits Within
, but there is a key difference that has to be noted to avoid confusion. Whereas the Gaia of
The Spirits Within
is a substance, literally “the spirit of the Earth,” Lovelock’s Gaia is more a metaphor that captures the interconnectedness and self-regulating character of Earth: “I call Gaia a physiological system because it appears to have the unconscious goal of regulating the climate and the chemistry at a comfortable state for life. Its goals are not set points but adjustable for whatever is the current environment and adaptable to whatever forms of life it carries,” Lovelock stated.
³
But he was quick to qualify his claim with “do not assume that I am thinking of the Earth as alive in a sentient way, or even alive like an animal or bacterium. I think it is time we enlarged the somewhat dogmatic and limited definition of life.”
⁴

So unlike the
Final Fantasy
Gaia, Earthly Gaia is not the planet’s soul, but its ability to self-regulate its environment such that a variety of life forms can flourish. Beyond this key conceptual difference, though, there are a number of important similarities that allow for the exploration of our own environmental crisis. First, both Gaias are the preconditions for all life on their planets. No Gaia, no life, it’s that simple. Second, each Gaia supports a multitude of life forms—biodiversity—and appears to be indifferent to which of them thrives or becomes extinct. Consider the attempt to discern a pattern in the Phantoms made by Ryan and Neil, two soldiers who, along with their commanding officer Captain Gray, have extensive experience with Phantoms. Neil comments that it’s like “a crazy Noah’s ark. . . . You got your human-sized Phantoms, creepy caterpillary Phantoms, and flying Phantoms, and my favorite the big, fat, giant Phantoms. . . . Why would an invading army bring whales and elephants along?” In contrast, Aki’s perspective reveals the truth that the Phantoms aren’t an invading army but the ghosts of an alien planet’s ecosystem. Third, both Gaias can be harmed by the life forms they make possible. The Leonid Meteor is a shard of the alien planet, which was completely destroyed by an apocalyptic war the aliens waged against one another in their pre-Phantom existence.

The Zeus Cannon: A Hein-ous Idea

Alien Gaia, Earth Gaia. Doctor, even if I believed in such nonsense, the fact remains that the Earth is under attack from an aggressor who must be destroyed at all costs.

—General Hein

The two major approaches to human interaction with the environment that are dominant in our own society are captured by the views of nature and strategies for dealing with the Phantoms advocated by General Hein and Aki. The general espouses a view that is often criticized as a short-sighted, male conception of nature. Hein views nature at best as a collection of inanimate objects subject to humanity’s desires and, at worst, something hostile to the human species that needs to be dominated and made to conform to humanity’s will. This conception of nature has been traced back to the roots of the Judeo-Christian tradition in the story of Adam’s punishment (in Genesis, it is said that after being kicked out of the Garden of Eden, man is condemned to the toilsome task of winning his sustenance from a soil that on his account has been cursed with barrenness) and has been encouraged by philosophers such as Francis Bacon (1561-1626) and René Descartes (1596-1650). Underlying this view of nature is an analytic approach that views aspects of nature in isolation from one another and an assumption that nature is not alive in a meaningful way. It’s no surprise that General Hein assumes the Phantoms are an invading army; it’s merely an extension of his anthropocentric and militarily trained mind-set.

Aki, by contrast, is representative of both the Gaia hypothesis and some forms of ecofeminism. She views nature not in isolated snapshots that by definition are taken out of context, but holistically and in the context of their dynamic processes.
⁵
Thus, she echoes the Gaia hypothesis and many contemporary environmentalists in her claims that the planet is, in some sense, alive. Not surprisingly, Aki believes that the best approach to ridding humanity of the Phantoms is to make peace with them, not hit them with things.

General Hein’s approach to the Phantoms is doubly flawed. In his quest to persuade the council to give him permission to fire the Zeus Cannon, he creates a breach in the bio-etheric field that protects what is left of New York. The strategy is simple: create a manageable crisis in order to convince the council how dangerous the situation really is. Unfortunately, his lack of understanding of the Phantoms, as well as his arrogance regarding his own intelligence and technological abilities, becomes apparent when the Phantoms travel through the pipes containing bio-etheric energy, something no living entity can do. Unprepared for such a possibility, General Hein watches as his troops are slaughtered, the barrier control station is destroyed, and the city becomes a Phantom playground when the bio-etheric field collapses.

“What have I done?” Hein laments. And for a moment, he seems truly remorseful, because after fleeing from the chaos he created, he contemplates suicide. But for Hein, suicide is not an act of atonement but of self-loathing, and once the possibility of striking at the aliens a second time presents itself, he tries the same stupid strategy again. Hein appeals to the loss of New York to make his case, and the council acquiesces without argument. This time, however, the general’s solution is truly heinous—kill the Phantoms by hitting them with the biggest technological stick he can find, the Zeus Cannon.

Hein should know better by this point. Aside from the disaster that he caused in New York, the reasoning was plainly spelled out for him during his initial confrontation with Dr. Cid in front of the council. Dr. Cid told us about what commonly occurs during surgery on patients infected with Phantom particles. The bio-etheric lasers sometimes injure Phantom particles instead of killing them, and these particles just go deeper into the patient’s body; when laser power is increased to reach these deeper particles, the patient often incurs further injury and sometimes dies. By analogy, Dr. Cid argues that the Zeus Cannon is likely to have the same effect on a planetary scale. So, while the Zeus Cannon may in fact destroy all of the Phantoms in the Leonid Meteor, it may also leave many injured Phantoms that will merely burrow deeper into the Earth and cause further damage to the planet.

In case the general is forgetful, Aki reminds him that this approach won’t work, and the consequences may be the loss not only of a city, but of the entire planet. “Firing on the alien Gaia will only make it stronger,” she warns Hein. But the general dismisses her reasoning, blindly committed to his own conception of nature and unwilling to entertain any other ideas. After hitting the Phantoms with several blasts from the Zeus Cannon, his own soldiers tell him they cannot be “sure if it’s having any effect.” Still, Hein refuses to consider other options and gives the order to fire again. Ultimately, General Hein does get to kill something—himself and all of his soldiers, when he overloads the Zeus Cannon with repeated firings.

The Spirits Within
nicely depicts what happens when we disrespect Gaia.
⁶
Life has a tendency to adapt, and Gaia has a tendency to self-regulate. So when humans meddle extensively with the natural environment, it is not surprising that the nonhuman world adapts to our interventions and, as it were, strikes back. Failure to acknowledge this results from the myopic attitude of General Hein, who insists the problem is mechanical in nature: alien creatures come from the Meteor Crater, so he should attack the crater with the Zeus Cannon. Ironically, Newtonian laws of physics (which are purely mechanistic) call for reactions. So people like General Hein, who think they can interfere with the workings of a complex machine without instigating some form of reaction, possess a very shallow understanding of the machine they are playing with. One doesn’t have to accept the Gaia hypothesis to realize that intervention invites blowback.

Aki’s approach to the Phantoms is very different. Dr. Cid’s bio-etheric wave is a Gaia-friendly weapon that will cancel the Phantoms out, but Aki’s language sheds light on a very different strategy from Hein’s. In her last reasoned plea to the general, she argues that the Phantoms are ghosts, “spirits that are confused, lost, and angry.” The solution that she and Dr. Cid offer is not so much about killing them as it is putting them to rest. Spiritual imagery aside, the point is clear: her strategy for dealing with environmental problems involves a sense of equilibrium with other entities in the environment. In the case of the Phantoms, this means understanding them and what they need. As suffering ghosts, they need to rest. The bio-etheric wave will allow them to do this, whereas the Zeus Cannon will not.

Aki represents open-mindedness to nature. When the first blast of the Zeus Cannon kills the eighth spirit, Captain Gray, Dr. Cid, and Aki all lose hope. The eighth spirit was necessary to complete the energy wave, and if the spirit has been killed, then there is no way to stop the Phantoms. But while Dr. Cid despairs and Gray resorts to tactical thinking in an utterly hopeless situation, Aki manages to complete the energy wave. She succeeds not by aggressively looking for the eighth spirit or by trying to find a technological fix for the weapon’s incompleteness, but by simply being open to it. In the end, the final spirit finds Aki; all she has to do is be open to recognizing its presence.

Gaia’s Revenge and the Fate of Humanity

Doctor, there is a war going on. No one’s young anymore.

—Aki

The major monotheistic religions of the West have highly anthropocentric worldviews, greatly privileging humanity. The entire universe (and not merely the tiny speck of it called Earth) was supposedly created for humans, and our species is allegedly superior to all others, therefore playing a commanding role in the world. Humanity isn’t simply the reason for creation, it is creation’s temporal master. The Gaia hypothesis threatens this puffed-up self-importance in a radical way. Not only are we not the reason for the Earth’s existence, but we are no more special than any other species on the planet. The Gaia hypothesis maintains that humans (and not only lawyers and politicians) have no more moral worth than does any other member of the biotic community, maggots included.

Environmentalists generally aren’t suggesting that we should drastically change our lives to accommodate maggots. With the possible exception of the most radical of their group, environmentalists still privilege the human species above all other species whenever conflicts of interest pop up between humanity and other species. Environmentalists, however, do protest the nature of these conflicts of interest and how they are adjudicated. Traditionally, nonhuman entities—be they animals, plants, or even entire ecosystems—lose whenever a conflict with human interests arises. Environmentalists of all stripes have been insisting for decades that this practice has to change, that we need to understand the nonhuman world in a way that acknowledges its value. Once the nonhuman world has value, then it is possible for it to stand its ground when human interests want to impinge on it.

The question, though, is how do we assess the value of the nonhuman world? Environmentalist approaches to value and the natural world fall into two broad categories. The first argues that nature possesses intrinsic or inherent worth (that is to say, an animal has value in and of itself, regardless of what use it has to humans or other species). So any use of the planet or other life forms that is based in self-interest is anthropocentric (human centered) and unethical. The second category is unconcerned with why we value something, so long as we do value it. What matters, people on this side will argue, are the consequences of our actions. It is irrelevant whether we refrain from buying shampoos tested on baby bunny rabbits because we respect nature, merely find baby bunnies cute, or somehow see the fate of humanity tied to a biodiversity that includes baby bunnies—all that matters is that we don’t buy the bunny-tested shampoo. For this group, if anthropocentrism and enlightened, long-term self-interest lead to the same environmentally friendly practices that viewing nature as intrinsically valuable do, why get side tracked about the details?