Science Fiction and Reality
I will start this post with one of my favorite quotes from one of the best sci-fi writers ever, Ursula K. Le Guin: "We read books to find out who we are. What other people, real or
imaginary, do and think and feel...is an essential guide to our
understanding of what we ourselves are and may become." This is very true for the science fiction genre, whether it's movies, books, comics or any form in which the stories are told by writers and artists everywhere; some might say that the fantastic imagery of an alien landscape described in a book can even be considered as a form of understanding of who we are, but the fact is that it expresses our own human nature and one of the most precious and amazing gifts we are given with reasoning and understanding, a gift we know as imagination.
It's not the first time I have written about imagination, I learned an interesting definition from Hannah Arendt and it got etched in my mind and still believe is one of the best definitions ever: Imagination is the ability to make appear to the mind that which is absent to the senses. An example might help to understand better the definition: if I ask any of the readers to imagine a blue sky covered with clouds most of them (I can't say all) will see it as clear as if they were watching out the window at the sky, even while sitting reading this blog post. Therefore, imagination is something that allows us to understand human nature in all of its extension, as it allows us to place ourselves in the position of a character in a book, to understand the costumes of aliens living in another planets, basically because these characters are nothing but projections of our own understanding of reality, men and women, the universe and all the it contains.
When we open a science fiction book about demons, aliens, elves, goblins, fairies, super heroes and other fantastic creatures, they are all facets of our own humanity, whether the lack of a super power we wish we could have or the extraordinary evolution of humanity into something better through accidents or genetic mutations. Superman is the man some want to be, he has the power of flying, defying one of the most difficult laws of nature to break, he has super strength that allows him to perform miraculous acts and help those who are defenseless against evil. I'm stating the obvious here, as this analysis has been made before a thousand times or more, but what lies behind those super powers is a nice, kind and understanding being with desire more than anything else being truly human; Superman wouldn't be a super hero if he didn't have that element of humanity within his soul, because even though he has super powers, his behavior is that of one person who is sympathetic and wants to help, in which case, any of us could be a super man or super woman, because we don't need super powers to help, we just need to have the will to do so.
There are plenty of post apocalyptic books portraying a future in which humanity is in the verge of extinction, in times when all hope is lost and the survival of the fittest seems to be the law that nature imposes on the humans that remain; these books are exploring the most basic of human instincts: survival. We can read gruesome stories and watch heart-wrenching scenes in which this instinct drives us to perform acts of pure evil even against our will, cruelty seems to be the norm and everyone just walks around like it is okay to be in such a world. What I personally believe is that these situations explain the fear we feel of being pushed to such limit situations, in which we have to chose between ourselves and others, in which we have to do the worst to get through another day even when all hope is gone. This is the eternal struggle between self love (the most natural of all forms of love) and the love for others, which shows us that we actually love others not for who they are or what they represent, but for what they make us feel and provide us with. Missing someone we loved dearly is missing all those things that made our existence better and that are gone after some passes away, revealing that we are selfish and selfless acts are rare.
Some of these elements prove to be deeply connected with human nature and laws of nature, as they seem to be a heavy burden we can't lift of our backs, because we see existence in this particular reality as a punishment: survival of the fittest is always shocking, we see it on the Discovery Channel and we suffer for the poor animal that is being devoured by a pack of hungry wolves, we feel empathy for this beasts because we are able to put ourselves in the place of the animal, and this can't be done without imagination. The horror we experience comes from our own experience of reality and we move it into magic realms in which fantastic beings have to endure pain and suffering, touching the fibers of our most primal fears. And in this same way we find answers to our questions, even if sometimes we fail to see what the answer truly is or we refuse to see it as such.
It is considered science fiction because it has to draw elements from real science to make believe the stories told, but even though it's fiction, most of it's elements are not that fictional, precisely because the relationship between science and human nature is one that can't be broken: science was born with the use of reason and its limit lies within the same boundaries, reason has limits, so does science, but we stretch it out beyond our capacities through imagination.
Many philosophers have tried to understand the relationship between imagination, science and reality and how it helps us understand our humanity a little bit more. It starts with the mythical explanation, moves to the scientific explanation and then how they can be intertwined to explain even more, in something that feels like a regression, but it's not so, it's actually a progression, because through the use of imagination we can create possible worlds in which different scenarios can occur to explain a particular situation: science fiction are mental experiments in which we explore and delve into reality.
In the end, what we are trying to find is the best of ourselves.
(Image obtained from: http://www.monsterbashnews.com/pics/metropolis-robotrix.jpg)
It's not the first time I have written about imagination, I learned an interesting definition from Hannah Arendt and it got etched in my mind and still believe is one of the best definitions ever: Imagination is the ability to make appear to the mind that which is absent to the senses. An example might help to understand better the definition: if I ask any of the readers to imagine a blue sky covered with clouds most of them (I can't say all) will see it as clear as if they were watching out the window at the sky, even while sitting reading this blog post. Therefore, imagination is something that allows us to understand human nature in all of its extension, as it allows us to place ourselves in the position of a character in a book, to understand the costumes of aliens living in another planets, basically because these characters are nothing but projections of our own understanding of reality, men and women, the universe and all the it contains.
When we open a science fiction book about demons, aliens, elves, goblins, fairies, super heroes and other fantastic creatures, they are all facets of our own humanity, whether the lack of a super power we wish we could have or the extraordinary evolution of humanity into something better through accidents or genetic mutations. Superman is the man some want to be, he has the power of flying, defying one of the most difficult laws of nature to break, he has super strength that allows him to perform miraculous acts and help those who are defenseless against evil. I'm stating the obvious here, as this analysis has been made before a thousand times or more, but what lies behind those super powers is a nice, kind and understanding being with desire more than anything else being truly human; Superman wouldn't be a super hero if he didn't have that element of humanity within his soul, because even though he has super powers, his behavior is that of one person who is sympathetic and wants to help, in which case, any of us could be a super man or super woman, because we don't need super powers to help, we just need to have the will to do so.
There are plenty of post apocalyptic books portraying a future in which humanity is in the verge of extinction, in times when all hope is lost and the survival of the fittest seems to be the law that nature imposes on the humans that remain; these books are exploring the most basic of human instincts: survival. We can read gruesome stories and watch heart-wrenching scenes in which this instinct drives us to perform acts of pure evil even against our will, cruelty seems to be the norm and everyone just walks around like it is okay to be in such a world. What I personally believe is that these situations explain the fear we feel of being pushed to such limit situations, in which we have to chose between ourselves and others, in which we have to do the worst to get through another day even when all hope is gone. This is the eternal struggle between self love (the most natural of all forms of love) and the love for others, which shows us that we actually love others not for who they are or what they represent, but for what they make us feel and provide us with. Missing someone we loved dearly is missing all those things that made our existence better and that are gone after some passes away, revealing that we are selfish and selfless acts are rare.
Some of these elements prove to be deeply connected with human nature and laws of nature, as they seem to be a heavy burden we can't lift of our backs, because we see existence in this particular reality as a punishment: survival of the fittest is always shocking, we see it on the Discovery Channel and we suffer for the poor animal that is being devoured by a pack of hungry wolves, we feel empathy for this beasts because we are able to put ourselves in the place of the animal, and this can't be done without imagination. The horror we experience comes from our own experience of reality and we move it into magic realms in which fantastic beings have to endure pain and suffering, touching the fibers of our most primal fears. And in this same way we find answers to our questions, even if sometimes we fail to see what the answer truly is or we refuse to see it as such.
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| The Robotrix of Fritz Lang's "Metropolis" is one fine example of creative thinking and imagination. |
Many philosophers have tried to understand the relationship between imagination, science and reality and how it helps us understand our humanity a little bit more. It starts with the mythical explanation, moves to the scientific explanation and then how they can be intertwined to explain even more, in something that feels like a regression, but it's not so, it's actually a progression, because through the use of imagination we can create possible worlds in which different scenarios can occur to explain a particular situation: science fiction are mental experiments in which we explore and delve into reality.
In the end, what we are trying to find is the best of ourselves.
(Image obtained from: http://www.monsterbashnews.com/pics/metropolis-robotrix.jpg)
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