Michael J. Muniz
Beauty may be beyond mere human understanding, whether or not we have ADAM. But what better way to help us understand beauty than our notorious plastic surgeon Dr. J.S. Steinman? Through a series of provocative recordings left throughout the Medical Pavilion, Steinman enlightens the player with his philosophy on beauty and morality. Beginning with his ever so humble approach to his own value system, Steinman says:
I am beautiful, yes. Look at me, what could I do to make my features finer? With ADAM and my scalpel, I have been transformed. But is there not something better? What if now it is not my skill that fails me… but my imagination?
Steinman indicates that his ability to understand beauty is limited by his imagination. So, let us imagine instead, and see if we can understand it.
Beauty, as it has been traditionally defined, is an ultimate value, an ideal on the same level as truth and goodness. These three values, according to Plato (c. 428–347 bce), guide our rational desires. Plato writes in his Symposium:
Beauty, then, is the destiny or goddess of parturition who presides at birth, and therefore, when approaching beauty, the conceiving power is propitious, and diffusive, and benign, and begets and bears fruit: at the sight of ugliness she frowns and contracts and has a sense of pain, and turns away, and shrivels up, and not without a pang refrains from conception.1
Beauty connects our attraction to truth and our desire for goodness. It might seem contradictory, or a bit off balance, but when you apply this connection, beauty is the completion to everything we know. Now I’m sounding a bit like Steinman.
Perhaps Steinman is on to something when he says the following in a recording found near the Surgery Foyer:
Today I had lunch with the Goddess. “Steinman,” she said… “I’m here to free you from the tyranny of the commonplace. I’m here to show you a new kind of beauty.” I asked her, “What do you mean, Goddess?” “Symmetry, dear Steinman. It’s time we did something about symmetry…”
Perhaps Steinman’s “Goddess” is Plato’s “goddess.” And yet, Steinman’s mention of the symmetrical is also an ancient property of beauty that Aristotle (c. 384–322 bce) discusses. In fact, Aristotle says, “The chief forms of beauty are order and symmetry and definiteness.”2 Many of the ancient Greeks believed that symmetry represented order, and order was beautiful because it revealed a type of cosmic justice and truth that no person could deny. So, when Steinman’s application of beauty comes into play, he is definitely emphasizing the order and justice that beauty provides.
We’ll connect beauty and justice shortly, but for the moment let’s consider how beauty and truth relate. The great romantic poet John Keats (1795–1821) wrote in his famous poem “Ode on a Grecian Urn”:
When old age shall this generation waste,
Thou shalt remain, in midst of other woe
Than ours, a friend to man, to whom thou say’st,
“Beauty is truth, truth beauty, — that is all
Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.”
This may be the very poem that provided Steinman the motivation to play with ADAM and perfect the appearance of age as much as he could. Perhaps the best evidence of his ADAM-based obsession and how his fascination with beauty has altered his view of the world—of truth—can be found in another recording of his near the Gatherer’s Garden. He says:
Not only are those little girls veritable ADAM factories, they’re nearly indestructible. They regenerate any wounded flesh with stem versions of the dead cells. But their relationship with the implanted slugs is symbiotic… if you harvest the slug, the host will die. “So you see, it’s not like killing,” Tenenbaum said. “It’s more like removing a terminal patient from life support.”
Even though it may seem to be coming from Tenenbaum, it is actually Steinman’s acceptance of this thought that fulfills his desire. So, truth and beauty do belong together. And, unfortunately for Steinman, his ideal form of beauty overpowered his judgment and his ability to perceive truth. Ultimately, this convolution of beauty and truth even interfered with symmetry, the only hope left for Steinman. Evidence of his attempt to reason his way out of symmetry can be heard in his own words, in his own voice (not recorded): “Why do we have two eyes? Is there some law that says we must? Two arms, two legs, two ears, two breasts…”
The player of BioShock is introduced to a world quite familiar to ours, not necessarily in the sense of Rapture, underwater cities, or vintage décor, but rather in the form of worldview. Does beauty somehow dictate what is right or wrong? Most people would instantly respond with a “no.” But the connection actually goes back to Aristotle, who says, “beauty depends on magnitude and order.”3 Actually, the order Aristotle refers to in this quote is not the same as the order of justice, but people tend to mix them up.
I live in Miami, Florida (actually Hialeah, but that’s not the point), and so-called beautiful people constantly surround me. Now, there is no spoken rule or doctrine that I know of regarding beauty and morality down here in Miami, but there seems to exist a silent understanding that you need to be beautiful in order to succeed. The fashion industry, beachfront tourism, and the plastic surgery market are the big moneymakers in Miami. So, when it comes to young people entering this world for the first time, beauty becomes a mandatory value that dictates their life. Usually, it’s so obvious that even Dr. Steinman would be proud.
I think this concept applies beyond Miami. There seems to be a whole world of justice that is aligned with beauty. People are required to dress “appropriately” when interviewing for a job or attending a funeral. But style and taste have become so subjective that it is hard to determine a right or wrong sense of beauty. Steinman’s blurring desire to make people beautiful would either drive him into further madness or make him the prime example of sanity if he walked along the boardwalk of South Beach. I can hear him now, just like he would say in the game when Jack enters the room:
What can I do with this one, Aphrodite? She—won’t—stay—still! I want to make them beautiful, but they always turn out wrong! That one, too fat! This one, too tall! This one, too symmetrical! And now… What’s this, Goddess? An intruder?! He’s ugly! Ugly! Ugly! UGLYYYYYYYY!
I sometimes ask my students to consider a disturbing scenario: Suppose a sick and twisted millionaire (someone like Fontaine) offered you $1 million if you threw a sack filled with six of the cutest and cuddliest puppies you’ve ever seen into a fire pit and you have to watch them burn to death before receiving the money. Would you do it? A large percentage of students say “no.” Then, in a second scenario I ask those students who said “no” if it would make a difference if the bag had been filled with rats of the same size who would feel the same pain from the fire. Almost instantly, many respond “yes.” When asked why, the most common answer is because rats are ugly. That’s it! Simply put, because X is ugly, X should be tortured to death by fire, and I should be rewarded for watching it.
In his book Art as Experience, American philosopher and educator John Dewey (1859–1952) discusses the way children are easily manipulated and influenced by their perceptions of beauty and how it affects their development of moral judgments. Ultimately, Dewey suggests that the mindset of the young is such that whatever is beautiful and attractive should manage human behavior. My favorite BioShock villain would agree with the children:
With genetic modifications, beauty is no longer a goal or even a virtue, it is a moral obligation. Do we force the healthy to live with the contagious? Do we mix the criminal with the law-abiding? Then why are the plain allowed to mingle with the fair?!
Just think about every time you watch an episode of COPS on TV, or primetime local news, and see how criminals are often portrayed. They’re never pretty, are they? Psychologists and sociologists have field days about how media depictions of criminals affect moral judgments, especially those based on race, gender, and ethnicity. So, therein lies the dilemma: Do we perceive something as beautiful because it is morally good, or do we perceive something as morally good because it is beautiful? Likewise, do we perceive something as ugly because it is morally wrong, or do we perceive something as morally wrong because it is ugly?
There are two kinds of value. The first type of value in this circus of thought is intrinsic value. To have intrinsic value is for something to be important in and of itself. Happiness and love are examples of intrinsic values. Think, again, of a Little Sister and your decision to harvest or not to harvest her ADAM. If you decide to save her, it could mean that you believe she has intrinsic value and the amount of ADAM she yields is of little to no importance. However, if you decide to harvest a Little Sister it could mean that you believe she has only extrinsic value, the kind of value that can be attached to something or someone by something or someone else. The vending machines are not coincidentally called the Circus of Values. As players, we have value in surviving (intrinsic) so we’ll do whatever we can to survive, including buying or hacking vending machines with supplies (extrinsic value). Now, to value beauty and morality as either intrinsic or extrinsic is a matter of choice. To choose one is to decide the fate of the other. Let me explain.
Gamers and game designers value BioShock. The “shock” is the reality of the mantra that fate is determined at birth. There are some philosophers, like Lady Gaga (who might succeed as a character in the BioShock universe), who preach the following platitude: biology is destiny (a.k.a. “I was born this way”). As a voice of reason, I most respectfully disagree. If I was born with a deformity that made me appear ugly to others, that does not mean that I am morally obligated to remain deformed for the rest of my life, and that I should never seek some sort of cure for my deformity. Please don’t think of me as a type of Fontaine who has used his voice of reason to trick you into believing that ADAM is good, and that Steinman was mostly right when he says the following in an audio diary found on the desk in Emergency Access:
Ryan and ADAM, ADAM and Ryan… all those years of study, and was I ever truly a surgeon before I met them? How we plinked away with our scalpels and toy morality. Yes, we could lop a boil here, and shave down a beak there, but… but could we really change anything? No. But ADAM gives us the means to do it. And Ryan frees us from the phony ethics that held us back. Change your look, change your sex, change your race. It’s yours to change, nobody else’s.
As the world of BioShock continues to grow, how else would I get your attention if not to shock you into using your Plasmid-reduced minds? Because I value choice, I choose to be who I am, not to conform to who I was supposed to be when I was born. So, values (like beauty and goodness) may be related somehow to what we believe. Like a level map in BioShock, my beliefs are an atlas (pun intended) to my reality. My beliefs are like the deep shaft beneath the Lighthouse from which my actions flow. One might even say—a philosopher certainly would—that believing in the things I do is the most important thing about me. Our understanding of values such as beauty and goodness can lead to either our success or our downfall. Just think of Steinman’s portrait in BioShock 2, which depicts him as some sort of religious leader praising his failures in the form of a crucifixion.
Do beauty and morality depend on one another like a Little Sister depends on a Big Daddy? The BioShock series seems to answer “yes,” depicting the ugly, distorted, and deformed as evil, and the beautiful and delicate as good. But just because we are players does not mean that we need to be played by such depictions. Ultimately, it is our choice and our responsibility to disentangle beauty and goodness and choose values for ourselves.