Pygmalion with a Twist: Villiers de l'Isle-Adam's The Future Eve

In 1886, the French symbolist Auguste Villiers de l’Isle-Adam published The Future Eve (L’Ève Future), which gives a new twist to the story of Pygmalion and the artificial woman that he creates for himself out of disgust for the impurity of all real women.

The Future Eve tells the story of the inventor Thomas Edison (a fictionalised version of the real Edison), who has been experimenting with the creation of a female android for some time when an English friend of his, Lord Ewald, asks him for help. Ewald has fallen in love with an exceedingly beautiful woman, an aspiring actress called Alicia Clary, who is in fact the exact likeness of the Venus de Milo exhibited in the Louvre. In other words, she looks as if that statue had come alive. Unfortunately, however, Ewald finds to his dismay that Alicia’s beautiful, goddess-like appearance is not matched by her character. Outside and inside are at odds. What her body promises, her soul cannot fulfil: “her inner self was in absolute contradiction to her beautiful form. Her beauty was quite foreign to her words, her conversation appeared out of place in such a voice.” It is almost as if “this woman has strayed by accident into the form of the goddess – that this body does not belong to her”.

So what exactly makes Alicia so unworthy of her beautiful exterior? There are various things that Ewald dislikes about her: she doesn’t sufficiently appreciate her own beauty and makes no attempt to live up to it. She has no “lofty aspirations” or “high ideals”. She sings to make a living, rather than for the sheer beauty of it. She eats heartily (i.e. not at all like a lady). She is interested in money. She has no principles. She tells him without embarrassment about an unhappy love affair that she has gone through, unaware that such openness is likely to “destroy all the sympathy and admiration” the high-minded Lord might have had for her. She is not exactly foolish, but she is silly. She has talent, but no genius, is a virtuoso, but no true artist. She doesn’t like Wagner (whose music, admired by Villiers de l’Isle-Adam, is “just a lot of bangs, just noise” to her) and when her admirer takes her to the Louvre and alerts her to her likeness with a particular marble statue, she exclaims: “Yes, that’s me, except that I have not lost my arms, and I am much more aristocratic-looking.” I’m sure most people would agree that there is nothing really repulsive about her character. She is just an average woman, not too bright, certainly no intellectual, a bit selfish or self-absorbed perhaps, but her flaws are nothing out of the ordinary, nothing that she does not have in common with millions of other people. For Ewald, however, this is exactly the problem: she is too common. The contrast between her divine features and her all-too-human character is unbearable. A woman who looks like that should not have any flaws. She should be perfect, ethereal, and the fact that she is not constitutes a moral outrage, a sacrilege, a violation of nature and reason. She is a living contradiction, a monster really: “Imagine a commonplace goddess! I have come to the conclusion that all physiological laws were overthrown in this living, hybrid phenomenon.” Ewald concludes his damning assessment of Alicia’s character by proclaiming that he “cannot love a woman who has no soul.” So Alicia, because she is disappointingly average and has no lofty aspirations (and also because she does not seem to be inclined to be as devoted to Ewald as he is to her and as he imagines he deserves it), is denied a soul. In Ewald’s eyes, she is merely a beautiful, but essentially hollow, form, which makes him cry out in desperation: “Oh, who could put a Soul into that body!”

Fortunately, Ewald couldn’t have come to a better place to ask that question: “’I can!’ exclaimed Edison. ‘I shall put a wonderful soul into that beautiful body!’” The irony here, probably not intended by the author, is of course that it is not, as we would expect, the statue (or the android that is eventually going to replace Alicia) that is said to be without a soul, but the living, breathing woman who has the temerity of deciding for herself what is important to her, what kind of life she wants to live, and whom she wants to love and whom she does not. That real and very much alive woman can only be denied a soul because the word “soul” is here just the name for an allegedly ideal condition, a mode of existence that has transcended all the apparent pettiness and coarseness of our common human concerns and that is entirely devoted to the higher realms, whatever that means exactly. Conveniently this mode of existence coincides with a complete submission under the wishes and desires of the man who wants to see her thus transformed. And it this kind of “soul” that the professor promises to provide: “Twenty-one days from now, at this same hour, Alicia Clary will stand before you, not only transformed, not merely a delightful companion, with a mind of the highest intellectual type, but reclothed in a phase of immortality.” She will no longer be a woman, but “an angel”, “not the cold Reality, but the Ideal.”

Edison then sets out to work and gradually transforms the prototype android that he had already created (an entity or rather “an electro-magnetic thing”, “a being of limbo”) into a perfect duplicate of Alicia (with soft, caressable flesh and skin), except that the new Alicia (or Hadaly, as Edison calls her), the “future Eve” of the story’s title, has a “soul”, meaning that she meets all the expectations that a male member of genteel society might have when looking for a suitable female companion. Tellingly, the creation of a soul for Alicia is described as an eliminative process. It is in reality the creation of an absence: her “selfish frivolity” is ‘annihilated’, her “insipid animality” ‘destroyed’. The new Alicia may even be “less conscious of herself”, perhaps not conscious at all, but “what does that matter” if her behaviour is “suggestive of impressions a thousand times more beautiful, more noble, more elevated”? I take this to mean that it is not even necessary for the new Alicia to actually feel or think anything at all, as long as she (or her creator) manages to make people believe that she does. Thus the desired “soul” is located exclusively in her appearance, in what the new Alicia says and does. What she feels or not feels is entirely irrelevant – she might just as well not feel anything at all. It is only the expression of certain sentiments (love, devotion, tenderness) that her lover needs, and that expression of a sentiment is to all intents and purposes the sentiment itself. That is why Ewald, as the professor assures him, will actually feel less alone with the new, artificial Alicia (even if she should turn out to be “less conscious”), than he does presently with the real one (who quite naturally is not focussed entirely on her lover and does not live for him only). “I do not think that it will be a very great loss if Hadaly is lacking the kind of a conscience that her model has – do you? It will be to her advantage not to have it, at least, in your eyes, since Miss Clary’s conscience seems to be deplorable, a blot on the masterpiece. The conscience of a worldly woman – bah!”

However, occasionally it is suggested in the text that the new Alicia most likely will have feelings of some sort. Thus Edison warns Lord Ewald that when he and she are going to take the ship back to England, it is best if she spends the journey in a coffin-like box (just like Count Dracula in Bram Stoker’s novel, which was to be published 11 years later, in 1897). Why? Because her “serenity should not be ruffled; she should not be humiliated by the sight of the defective organisms of her human companions.” So she is expected to be capable of feeling humiliated, though it is unclear why she should feel humiliated (instead of proud) by the fact that she is more perfect than ordinary, “defective” human beings – unless, on that occasion, she identifies with humanity. What is suggested here seems to be a curious reversal of Gunther Anders’s Promethean Shame: instead of us humans feeling ashamed about our own inferiority when we compare ourselves to the wonderful machines that we have created, it is here the machine that feels humiliated (perhaps on behalf of us humans, who don’t know yet how inferior we actually are?).

In any case the new Alicia will be a creature that is completely under the control of her lover, who can activate and deactivate her and direct her movements and speech by pushing certain buttons cleverly hidden on her anatomy. “She is loyal to only one person, she will recognize one only – her master.” So her newly gained “soul” shows itself primarily in a loss of freedom and autonomy. She is no longer her own master, which is just as it should be. And she will not only be exactly what it says on the tin, but she will also stay that way. Deplorably, every real woman ultimately proves illusive. She can never live up to what her beauty promises. What we see in her is just an illusion, facilitated by “cosmetics, creams, powders, and beauty patches”. Strip her of this, and what remains is an “old witch”, a grotesque imitation of the ideal that she pretended to be. In any case, she will soon lose all her charms to middle age. So “why not build a woman who should be just the thing that we wanted her to be”, one who is always beautiful by her very nature, and beautiful forever? This would definitely solve the problem that the over-curious young man in Swift’s “The Lady’s Dressing Room” after his look behind the scenes struggles with, namely how to live with the fact that no woman is a goddess. The answer suggested by Villiers de l’Isle-Adam is simple: don’t live with it. Make your very own Goddess instead. And why not? Every man, it is suggested, has in fact a natural right to his own goddess. If the plan succeeds, then Man’s “lost paradise” will be restored to him, life will be as it should have been all along, and he will once again be master of the situation, or in short, “the dominator”. The new Alicia, who is the real Alicia, that is Alicia as she was meant to be, will always say what her lover wants to hear. “Her conscious utterance will no longer be the negation of yours, but will become the semblance of the soul that responds to your melancholy. You will be able to evoke in her the radiant reality of your exclusive love, without fearing, this time, lest she repudiate your dream. Her words will never disappoint your hopes. They will always be sublime (...). Here, at least, you will have no fear of being misunderstood, as with the living woman”.

In the end, Edison delivers what he has promised, and it turns out that he has not promised too much. Lord Ewald is entirely satisfied with the outcome: “The false Alicia was more perfect, more natural, than the living personage.” What a strange thing to say: that the android, an artificial thing, is not only more perfect, but more natural than the woman on which it was modelled. But then again, for Villiers de l’Isle-Adam, it is only the perfect that is natural, only the ideal that is (completely) real. What we commonly take for real is just a bad, defective copy of the ideal, which is, in a Platonic sense, the really real. The machine allows us to introduce the world of ideas into the world of appearance, to merge the two worlds into one, to bring heaven onto earth. Thus the (dead) machine is more real than the living human who is nothing but a “phantom” in comparison.

The new Alicia knows no sickness or death, and she never changes, which also means that she will never stop loving Ewald as he wishes to be loved (and don’t we all wish to be loved unconditionally and eternally on some level?). She will always stay devoted to him, and to him only: “I shall be the woman of your dreams – all that you would have me be.” The author seems to fully endorse this idea. Yet towards the end of the novel, Villiers de l’Isle-Adam, almost despite himself, nonetheless gives voice to a certain unease that sheds doubt on the whole project of replacing admittedly flawed, annoyingly wilful, and constitutionally unpredictable human beings with flawless, completely reliable and always obliging machines. “Her heart”, we learn, “will never change, because she has no heart.” Can we really want that? Isn’t that too high a price to pay for the illusion of eternal love? L’Isle Adam seems to sense this himself when he lets his Edison reflect on the greatness of his achievement after Ewald and his future Eve have left him to live happily ever after in England (only for her to perish in a fire soon afterwards): “This is the first time that science has been able to prove that she can cure man – of love.”

So love is seen as a problem, or more precisely a disease, and technology provides the cure, not by facilitating the fulfilment of love, but instead by getting rid of it altogether. If that is what truly happens here, then that would also explain a remark that Edison made earlier in the novel and which, at the time, seems rather out of character. When Ewald has to decide whether he really wants the professor to go ahead and create a new, purified Alicia for him, he is initially undecided and asks Edison what he would do, and he replies: “I would blow out my brains first”, which is a very odd thing to say really, given that it was his idea in the first place and that at all other times he seems absolutely committed to the project.

Günther Anders on Promethean Shame (Part 2)

We used to think that we humans were free and the machines we constructed determined and unfree. But this is no longer so. Today, in a curious contortion, we are the ones who appear unfree, and the machines enjoy the freedom that we lack. Increasingly, we think of ourselves as being shackled by our own nature, which, we believe, has not changed very much, if at all, since the stone age. (And aren’t we indeed constantly being told by proponents of human enhancement that the forces of evolution have shaped us for a world that no longer exists and that in order to catch up with the world we have created we need to recreate ourselves?) It is our physical body that, in our own perception, makes us unfree, that ties us to the past and makes us unfit for the future (and indeed the present). From the perspective of the machines, human nature is nothing but a nuisance: “conservative, unprogressive, antiquated, irrevisable, a dead weight in the rise of the machines”. We could achieve so much more if it weren’t for us and our defective nature. We see ourselves, as Anders puts it, as the saboteurs of our own achievements, and we are no longer willing to put up with this. So something needs to be done: we have to find a way to become more machine-like, to mould ourselves as we now mould things to assimilate them to our needs and wants. Our Promethean shame makes us embrace and promote the idea of “human engineering”, which now appears as something that we owe both to our machines and to ourselves. After all, we wouldn’t want to be judged a disappointment by our betters. In relation to our machines we are like children, and growing up, in this new interpretation of Schiller’s “education of humankind”, means leaving behind our being human. (Compare Nick Bostrom’s “Why I Want to be Posthuman When I Grow Up”).

Machines are our heroes. We yearn to be like them. We see ourselves as “scandalous non-machines”. Yet machines always have a certain purpose. They are highly specialised. Human engineering aims at making the human more specialised, at perfecting a particular ability or capacity to which the human is a mere appendix, at best tolerated, but no longer of central importance. Thus the superhuman that human engineering is meant to create is at the same time a subhuman.

This sounds familiar. Similar concerns have been raised by Leon Kass. Yet Anders denies that he is what today we are used to call a bioconservative (he uses the term “metaphysical conservative”). The point is not that everything that is, is good simply because it is (or that human nature is good and should remain what it is simply because it is our nature) – which would be an untenable position –, but rather that we are willing to change ourselves for the sake of our machines, that we measure ourselves by their standards, instead of our own, and that, in doing this, we limit or even relinquish our own freedom. The aspiring human engineer may well suffer from hubris (as a common objection has it), but he also suffers from misplaced humility, which is not a contradiction. “The ‘human engineer is in fact both: arrogant and self-deprecating, hubristic and humble. His attitude is arrogated self-abasement and hubristic humility.”

So when we compare ourselves to machines, in what way exactly do we find ourselves wanting? One of the gravest defects seems to be our perishability. We grow old, we die. In comparison, the things that we create seem to be immortal, at least potentially so, because very often when they are not it is because we want them to stop working after a certain period of time (so that more products can be sold). But even those things are immortal in the sense that they can always be duplicated and replaced. Our products partake in a new version of immortality: “industrial re-incarnation”. They have a serial existence. This light bulb or washing machine may give up its ghost after a few years, but then we can easily get a new one that is exactly like the old one, or at least one that does exactly the same job, if not a better one. Their very reproducibility and replaceability guarantees their immortality. How lucky they are! We on the other hand, their creators, go bad very quickly and we cannot be replaced. How shameful that is, how unbearable! Again, something needs to be done. We feel that it cannot, it should not stay like this. (And indeed, isn’t that what some life extension enthusiasts imagine we will achieve in the future? Mind-uploading, for instance, to a computer or to a new body, is the achievement of immortality by making the body replaceable. Others envisage a periodical cleansing of the mind of all memories to prevent mental ageing and the boredom of an overly prolonged existence, which creates a different kind of serial existence.)

Anders’s great insight is that the human enhancement project is motivated by shame. We are ashamed of our body, our physical nature, our mere-humanness, our vulnerability and perishability, and not despite the fact that none of this is our fault, but precisely because it is (or has been for a long time) beyond our control and not the result of a conscious decision. It is the very givenness of our nature that we resent (which explains why Michael Sandel’s argument from giftedness is so often ridiculed and received with so much hostility by proponents of radical human enhancement.) It is the fact that we cannot do anything about it that we are ashamed of. It belies our claims of autonomy, freedom and control. That is also the reason why we tend to be ashamed of our sexuality. Sex is a “pudendum” precisely because it makes us lose control and voices our dependency. It shows us in the grip of nature, of that which lies beyond and before us, and reminds us that the “I” (the individual in control of herself) is a rather fragile construction on the back of a powerful “It” (the nature that controls the doings of the self). And we don’t like that one bit. So what we are trying to do is regain control over ourselves, and that means to gain control also, and perhaps even primarily, over our sexuality, without realising that the only thing we can hope to achieve by this is that we manage to replace one It by another: the natural It of the body by the artificial It of the machine.

Günther Anders on Promethean Shame (Part 1)

The first volume of Günther Anders’s Die Antiquiertheit des Menschen (The Obsolescence of Man) was published more than fifty years ago, in 1956, and, strangely, has never been translated into English. The book is essentially about what machines, and our increasing reliance on them, do to us, or more precisely what they do to what Anders chooses to call our “soul”. Hence the book’s subtitle “On the Soul in the Age of the Second Industrial Revolution” - although Anders remarks that it would have been more accurate to call it “on the transformations of the soul in the age of the second industrial revolution”. Thus the question is how we are being changed by the machines we create and use, and the analysis that Anders provides in order to answer it, especially in the first part, entitled “On Promethean Shame”, strikes me as just as relevant today as it was half a century ago. In fact, I think that, given that we have now all but entered the age of human enhancement, it is today more relevant than ever.

The book starts with the observation that we have created a world in which we increasingly look like relics of an era that has long passed. We lounge around among our various appliances and machines like bewildered dinosaurs in a world that is no longer ours, that has moved on without us. We lag behind, without any real hope of catching up, and we know it. The machines that we produce are already so much more advanced and capable than we can ever hope to be. And they allow us to do things that go far beyond what we can imagine and emotionally cope with: “We can bomb to shreds hundreds of thousands, but we cannot mourn or regret them.” Anders calls this “the Promethean gap”, which is ultimately a gap between the human body (in which all the limitations of our imagination and emotions are rooted) and the machine (and the power that it bestows on us). Naturally we would want to close this gap to get rid of the feeling of disjointedness, and I think that is what we are witnessing today. Isn’t the human enhancement project that we currently engage in best understood as a concerted attempt to close this Promethean gap, to make us, as Persson and Savulescu put it, “fit for the future”, to bring us up to the advanced (or what is perceived as such) level of the machine? Perhaps today this no longer looks as impossible or unlikely to accomplish as it did fifty years ago.

The gap between the apparent perfection of the machines that we create and the apparent imperfection and deficiency of our own vulnerable, mortal and messy bodies (and accordingly, since we cannot detach ourselves from our bodies, of ourselves) is hard to accept. In fact, it is a permanent source of a particular kind of shame, which Anders calls “Promethean shame” and which he defines as the “shame for the embarrassingly high quality of the things we make”. It is the frustrating and humiliating recognition of our inferiority when compared to our products, and the fact that more than anything else seems to make us inferior is the fact that we have been born rather than made. We are ashamed that we owe our existence not to art and design, not to a conscious, deliberate and well-considered act of human creation, but rather to the accident of birth and the random sexual act that preceded it, neither of which can be seen as particularly dignified and both of which serve as a constant reminder that, ultimately, we are and remain mere animals. (Imagine a dialogue between a machine and a human, the machine boasting about all the forethought and the complex calculations that have given rise to its existence and then asking the human “And who made you?”, might we feel ashamed of having to admit that, alas, we weren’t made at all, but were simply born?)  

The perceived perfection of the machine makes us wish that we had been made too (and in order to spare our children the embarrassment of having to grow up in the knowledge that they were not designed and not made fit for purpose - that nobody really cared enough to make sure that they are as perfect as they could possibly be - we have now started to modernise our reproduction processes and become much more “selective” and “pro-active” when it comes to the making of children). Although we are the makers, that is no longer a reason to be proud, because the made is for some reason perceived as ontologically superior. We have started to look at ourselves as we imagine we must appear to one of our products. Looking at ourselves, we have adopted the perspective of the machine, and as the machine would despise us if it were conscious and could make the comparison, we are now ready to despise ourselves. So the maker, in order to keep up with his product and make himself less despicable, needs to find a way to become made himself. A sort of self-reification is required, a transformation of the human into a machine. The naked body that we are ashamed of is no longer the unclothed body, but instead the body that has not been worked on, not embellished or transformed in any way, unmodified and unenhanced. It is, as a product of a presumably blind and unthinking nature, a “faulty construction”, which as such is in urgent need of correction and amendment. But, as Anders rightly points out, “we can only conceive of the human as a construction, especially a faulty one, when we adopt the perspective of the machine. Only if this category is accepted as being both universally applicable and exhaustive can such a reinterpretation take place and can the unconstructed appear as the badly constructed.” (An excellent example of how pro-enhancement arguments can be driven by this kind of Promethean shame is Allen Buchanan’s book Beyond Humanity? Oxford University Press 2011. Buchanan basically argues that we are badly constructed machines and for this reason urgently need to enhance ourselves because, given our many defects, if we don’t give ourselves a better nature we will not be able to survive much longer.)

(to be continued)