True Blood and Philosophy

In a 1918 lecture at Munich University, the sociologist Max Weber (1864—1920) declared that “the fate of our times is characterized by rationalization and intellectualization and, above all, by the ‘disenchantment of the world.’”¹ There are many ways to characterize the transition from an enchanted, premodern outlook to our contemporary worldview. We could describe it as the movement from superstition to justified belief. Or maybe as a shift from ascribing a personality to natural beings and forces, as when people might talk of willful trees and treasonous winds, to a more impersonal view of nature.² We might also describe the transition to the modern worldview as a reduction of the ways we think natural phenomena may be legitimately explained: supernatural causation and ascribing purpose to natural phenomena have been dropped in favor of blind, boring, physical causation. Finally, we might speak of the disenchantment of the world in terms of an inward turn, where the experiences of spirits, demons, gods, and moral forces are recast as psychological or even psychopathological conditions.³ In short, nearly every account of the world’s disenchantment construes it as a kind of intellectual pruning or subtraction. Gods are reduced to heavenly bodies mechanically tracing elliptical orbits. Visions of Athena or the archangel Michael are reconceived as hallucinations or tricks of the light.

Weber is making a point about cultural shifts, but individuals can also make the transition from enchantment to disenchantment, as we see in the case of Tara Thornton. Tara’s mother, Lettie Mae, has apparently been cured of her alcoholism after receiving an exorcism from the fake witch doctor, Miss Jeanette, who tells Tara that she’s possessed by a demon even more powerful and dangerous than her mother’s.⁴ After some hesitation, Tara pays Miss Jeanette to perform an exorcism on her. So far we’re squarely in the realm of the enchanted—witch doctors, demons, and soul possession. But shortly after the ceremony Tara discovers that Miss Jeanette is a charlatan who induced visions of a demon by feeding her peyote. Witch doctors and demons are found to be nothing but frauds and hallucinations.

Nearly every theorist of modernity, including Weber, cites science as the chief engine of disenchantment: scientific explanations eclipse supernatural and nonnatural modes of explanation. Shamans, demonic possession, astrology, alchemy, divine intervention, and signs—what C. S. Lewis (1898—1963) called “the discarded image”—are replaced with blind, physical causes in coordination with ironclad or probabilistic laws.⁵ Science can even tell us how hallucinogenic drugs might lead someone to think she’s seeing demons.

Yet before there was science there was philosophy. The Greek philosopher Thales (ca. 624—546 B.C.E.) offered the first rational explanation of how the universe and its many features came to be. While his explanation isn’t satisfying—he claims that the Earth and the heavens arose out of water—he at least attempted to give an account of how things came into being without invoking the gods, the way the ancient Greek poets Homer and Hesiod did (both of whom may have lived around the eighth century B.C.E.). Science and philosophy share the belief that we can gain knowledge of the world through our own efforts, using reason rather than relying on revelations vouchsafed by some supernatural being.

In fact, many philosophers endorse “Scientific Naturalism,” the belief that the universe consists entirely of objects that can be adequately described by the natural sciences. Since physics investigates only objective, nonmental, impersonal, mechanistic facts, some philosophers consider everything that can’t be described in those terms as, in the words of the philosopher Frank Jackson, “putative” or conjectural.⁶ Some of these philosophers believe that the aim of philosophy should be to explain or redescribe the world of our experience in terms derived from the natural sciences. Terms like ethics, consciousness, free will, or reference do not belong to the world investigated by natural science, so many Scientific Naturalists would like to redescribe these phenomena in terms that are more amenable to scientific investigation, such as cause or force.

While many of us aren’t ready to embrace every part of Scientific Naturalism’s agenda, we do tend to act like scientific naturalists when confronted with claims about certain kinds of phenomena. For example, if a friend tells you she’s seen a ghost, you’ll probably think she’s lying or you’ll try to explain away her experience as some sort of neurophysiological or environmental anomaly. In a similar way, Tara discovered that her alleged demon was merely a hallucination.

Perhaps the belief in vampires can be explained away in naturalistic terms. In 1998 Juan Gomez-Alonso published an article in the academic journal Neurology arguing that so-called vampires share many properties exhibited by people with rabies.⁷ Those who are infected can be violent, suffer insomnia and muscle spasms, and even spit up blood. Their paroxysms can be triggered by strong sensory stimuli, including—you guessed it—exposure to bright lights and the smell of garlic. Gomez-Alonso’s research even correlates the historical resurgence of vampire myths with communities experiencing outbreaks of rabies.

Sookie seems to accept a version of Scientific Naturalism when early in their relationship she asks Bill,

Sookie: What does animate you, then? Blood? How do you digest it if nothing works?

Bill: Magic.

Sookie: Come on, Bill. I may look naive, but I’m not.

Bill: You think that it is not magic that keeps you alive? Just because you understand the mechanics of how something works doesn’t make it any less of a miracle—which is just another word for magic. We are all kept alive by magic, Sookie. My magic is just a little different from yours, that’s all.

Sookie: I think we need to stop seeing each other.⁹

Is Bill’s appeal to magic a reasonable response to Sookie’s question? Obviously the appeal to magic is laughable to the Scientific Naturalist; that’s precisely the sort of talk with which our culture has become gradually disenchanted. For Scientific Naturalists, appeals to “magic” or “miracles” are tantamount to a failure to offer any explanation at all. Yet before we consider the Scientific Naturalist’s case, let’s attempt to come up with a generous interpretation of Bill’s remarks.

Bill might be suggesting that science lacks the resources to explain something like life. In particular, his claim could be that science would fail to explain the phenomenon of life even if it had a full grasp of life’s underlying mechanics, so that even a complete scientific understanding of how Sookie’s physiology works would still leave some vital remainder unexplained. If so, there would then be a sense in which “magic”—that is, some remainder that eludes scientific explanation—might be said to keep her alive. But what sort of remainder might Bill have in mind? Perhaps something like consciousness.

Beginning in the eighteenth century and continuing through the first third of the twentieth century, a debate raged between two opposing views of the phenomenon of life. One camp consisted of the mechanists who, in line with the goals of Scientific Naturalism, attempted to define life exclusively in terms of biomechanical organization, the physiological “machinery” of the living being. The vitalists, on the other hand, argued against the reduction of life to its underlying physical mechanisms. They believed that consciousness—or some other magical, holistic, “vital force”—animates otherwise dead matter and distinguishes living things from nonliving things. Bill sounds like he could be a vitalist. If so, his commitment to vitalism might be explained by the fact that he was vampirized in the 1860s, during one of the heydays of this intellectual movements.¹⁰

Many philosophers have doubted whether science could ever adequately explain conscious experience. Perhaps the most vocal contemporary advocate of the irreducibility of consciousness is the contemporary philosopher John Searle. Searle grants that the Scientific Naturalist has succeeded in accounting for some phenomena, like heat and color, in terms of underlying, scientifically accessible mechanisms. Heat is nothing but the kinetic energy of molecular movements, and color is nothing but a range on the wavelength spectrum that happens to be accessible to animal light receptors. On the other hand, he argues that no similar redescription of the phenomenon of consciousness is available to the Scientific Naturalist. Searle claims that “a perfect science of the brain would still not lead to an ontological reduction of consciousness in the way that our present science can reduce heat, solidity, color, or sound.”¹¹ In other words, while heat may be nothing more than kinetic energy, consciousness is not the same thing as its underlying neurobiology. Why does Searle think this?

In a paper titled “What Is It Like to Be a Bat?” the philosopher Thomas Nagel argues that science will always fail to explain consciousness.¹² Science explains phenomena by locating them within a causal web, relating them as effects to causes that precede them. Yet any such explanation will miss the essential what-it-feels-like, qualitative, subjective aspect of consciousness. Nagel imagines that one day science might have a perfect grasp of bat neurophysiology or the workings of a bat’s brain. Yet even if the brain is the seat of consciousness, a mechanical description of its workings will still miss the subjective experience of what it feels like to be a bat, let’s say a vampire bat. We can figure out how bat sonar works, but that doesn’t tell us what it feels like to navigate a forest by means of it. If we can’t give an account of consciousness in scientific terms, then perhaps Bill is right to argue that just because “you understand the mechanics of how something works doesn’t make it”—in this case, life or consciousness—“any less of a miracle.” To the extent that life is bound up with consciousness, it’s a miracle because science is unable to explain how it works, how we can feel anything at all.

But if Bill is skeptical about reducing consciousness to neurophysiology, his skepticism is far more radical than either Searle’s or Nagel’s. Searle still thinks that consciousness has a biological basis (no brain, no consciousness) and that it depends on the underlying neurophysiology. He would strongly object to Bill’s characterization of consciousness as “magical” or “miraculous.” In addition, Bill seems to imagine consciousness as borne by some nonphysical life force that animates the brain and the body. His description of this life-enabling force recalls the dualism of René Descartes (1596—1650), an early modern philosopher who argued that mind and body were separate, self—sufficient substances. In our disenchanted age, many philosophers, including Searle, have come to regard theories that imply the existence of nonphysical substances as extremely implausible and frankly, to use Sookie’s term, “naive.”

In any case, it seems that Bill unfairly changes the subject on Sookie. Even if we grant that consciousness is mysterious, Sookie wasn’t asking about that when she posed the question “What does animate you, then? Blood? How do you digest it if nothing works?” Science’s inability to explain consciousness really doesn’t have much in common with Bill’s inability to explain vampire physiology: digestion isn’t as exotic as consciousness. Vampires seem structurally similar to us—they can talk, walk, and have sex. But they do so without electrical neural impulses, blood circulation, or respiration. Shouldn’t science be able to explain that? Consciousness may be a mystery, maybe for some even a miracle, but the bare facts of metabolism or digestion aren’t.

Imagine you go to an auto mechanic and are astonished to discover that he or she doesn’t know how an engine works. The mechanic then retorts that you shouldn’t be that surprised because, after all, physicists don’t really understand how to reconcile all of the fundamental forces within string theory. What an unacceptable response! Bill pulls a similar intellectual bait-and-switch on Sookie. She wants a window into the basics of vampire physiology—after all, the Japanese managed to create synthetic blood, a feat that implies some understanding of such matters—and she gets a lecture on the mind-body problem.

Sookie is afraid that she doesn’t understand how Bill’s heart works. Yet this is not the Scientific Naturalist’s point about anatomy. Sookie isn’t worried about disentangling the mysterious phenomena of life or vampire digestion. Sookie’s concerns about the mechanics of Bill’s body flag a whole different set of worries about the kind of person he is, about the kinds of activities vampires engage in, and about what these activities reveal about who or what they are. These are existential questions, not scientific ones.

In the aftermath of World War II, the philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre (1905—1980) popularized existentialism with his declarations that “existence precedes essence” and that “man is nothing more than the sum of his actions.”¹⁴ What he meant was that there is no given human nature or essence that defines who and what we are. Nor did he believe there was any God to determine that for us. Without a task given to us in advance by a Creator, Sartre believed we are “condemned to be free.”¹⁵ The only meaning our lives can have will come through the kind of person we freely choose to be, along with our freely chosen values and obligations. One might choose to be a lover, a firefighter, a hedonist, an artist, a civil rights activist, or any number of other possibilities that in Sartre’s terminology would be called our “project.” For Sartre your project determines the kind of person you become, the nature that you create for yourself.

Only we ourselves can freely define ourselves by our choices. We are only what we will ourselves to be. We can, however, flee our freedom in a couple of ways. First, we can pretend that we’re governed by external constraints, such as some purpose we believe has been assigned to us by our Creator. Second, and more important, even if we deny that we have a God-given essence, we might still see ourselves as governed by a set of internal constraints—desires, passions, or feelings. But Sartre’s conception of freedom is radical, for it implies that we’re free from both internal and external constraints. “I can neither seek within myself the true condition which will impel me to act,” he wrote, “nor apply to a system of ethics for concepts which will permit me to act.”¹⁶ Passions, desires, and feelings have no power to move us without our consent and so can never be offered as an excuse, according to Sartre. “The existentialist does not believe in the power of passion.”¹⁷

Those who pretend they’re not really free are acting in “bad faith.” Tara exhibits bad faith when she prefers to believe that magic cured her anger issues and gets enraged when she discovers that she was tricked. But it was her choice to believe the scam. More important, whether she chooses to acknowledge it or not, she actually changed her attitude on her own. She should now accept full responsibility for her current choice to return to her old ways. She alone is ultimately responsible for her behavior and feelings. In Sartre’s language, she’s still condemned to be free.

So why does Sookie threaten to leave Bill? Vampires superficially resemble human beings, but they work differently. They don’t breathe: it is not oxygen that sustains them, but human blood. And the need to drink human blood equips them with fangs, capable of piercing and subduing human flesh. But the vampires of Harris’s world work differently in another sense. Before meeting Sookie, Bill seemed to spend most of his time playing the Nintendo Wii. Other vampires are depicted spending an inordinate amount of time playing Yahtzee. Yet these leisurely activities are not rich enough to define a life or make it meaningful. Some vampires, including Bill’s friends, live for the momentary satisfaction that comes from feeding. But a meaningful life can’t be built out of merely haphazard accretions of pleasure.

As the series unfolds, however, we discover more substantial vampire activities: the vampires have a complex hierarchy of sheriffs and their underlings, magistrates, public relations managers, queens, kings, and council members. Yet it is not clear that these roles are freely entered into. The vampires appear to act not so much out of obligations they freely embrace, but because they are compelled to act—perhaps out of fear or the inescapable demands of loyalty to their makers. If Sartre is correct, human beings are different. Even if we act out of desire and feeling, we could have freely chosen not to do so.

When Sookie wonders whether Bill works like she does, she’s probably not really worried about the details of vampire digestion. More likely, she’s fretting about the kinds of motivations from which vampire Bill is capable of acting and what that says about him as a person. Had she read her Sartre, she might have asked: Can he act from obligations freely chosen? Is he condemned to be free like me?

After discovering in Definitely Dead, the sixth book of the Southern Vampire Mysteries, that Bill seduced her on orders from the queen of Louisiana, Sookie forever after distrusts his proclamations of true love. She suspects that the seemingly limited range of vampire motivations renders Bill incapable of loving as humans do. If passions and feelings drive vampires without their choosing to embrace those passions as a part of a project, they’re not existentially free in the way that human beings are, notwithstanding their mysterious physiology. More urgently, this implies that Bill is not free to choose Sookie.

Not only can vampires decide to live alone, but they can also choose whether to engage in vicious projects like torture, bloodletting, or violent sex. After all, labels like “evil” and “cruel” are not appropriately applied to unfree beings: moral condemnation implies that the wrongdoer could have done otherwise.

Second, in From Dead to Worse, the eighth book of the Southern Vampire Mysteries, Sookie herself attempts to deny her freedom by pretending that she has acted under compulsion. Sookie and Eric Northman have established a blood tie, causing her to second-guess her reasons for wanting to help him. She responds to his gratitude for saving his life during the explosion at the vampire summit by trying to evade responsibility for her own choices.

Eric implicitly suggests that in denying her freedom Sookie is acting in bad faith, lying both to herself and to him. Yet that shows that vampires themselves distinguish between acts made under a compulsion and those made by free choice, in which case freedom must be a genuine possibility for vampires as well.

Sometimes characters really do appear to have fallen under a spell that deprives them of freedom and agency: vampires can glamour most human beings, and Maryann the maenad can bring human beings under her control. But a blood tie between a vampire and a human being seems different, more like a desire that can be resisted. Indeed, both Bill and Eric become fascinated with Sookie in part because of her unique ability to resist the powers of vampire compulsion. They are attracted to her freedom.

Finally, even the hierarchy of vampiric occupations appears open to choice. When in Dead as a Doornail, the fifth book of the Southern Vampire Mysteries, Eric initially regains his memories of his tender courtship of Sookie, he struggles to reconcile his past deeds with his current project of being a ruthless independent sheriff. In Dead and Gone, the ninth book of the Southern Vampire Mysteries, his initial shock that he offered to give up all his power as sheriff to make a life with her disappears when he remembers how happy they had been together. Sookie frets that she can’t trust her feelings because—again—she doesn’t understand the possible sway of their blood tie on her emotions. In contrast, Eric’s actions to shore up his power base and to woo her reveal his new project of bringing together Eric the lover and Eric the mighty. He refuses to be limited by his past, and he projects himself toward a new future with Sookie. Eric’s literal pulse may be silent, but his freely chosen actions are the measure and expression of his heart.

Ultimately, Sookie discovers that vampires are free and responsible just like human beings. What will re-enchant her universe and allow her to find the sublime in the ordinary is the magic of meeting a heart like her own, whether that heart beats or not. In the end, it’s the ordinary moments of courtship that re-enchant Sookie’s world, as she comments to herself after reuniting with Eric, “This was the real treat, or at least one of the real treats—having someone with whom to share the day’s events. Eric was a good listener, at least in his postcoital relaxed state.”²⁰ The real flaw in Sookie’s relationship with Bill wasn’t his different physiology, or the fact that he was unfree. Rather, his freely chosen secretiveness and ulterior motivations doomed their relationship. He wasn’t the kind of person with whom she could re-enchant the universe, the kind of person moved by reasons that escape scientific explanation—those of the heart.²¹

12 Thomas Nagel, “What Is It Like to Be a Bat?” Philosophical Review 83 (1974): 435. For more on Nagel and his relevance to True Blood and the Southern Vampire Mysteries, see William M. Curtis’s chapter in this volume, ‘“Honey, If We Can’t Kill People, What’s the Point of Being a Vampire?’: Can Vampires Be Good Citizens?”

21 The authors would like to thank Ronald Hall for discussions that greatly influenced the overall shape of this chapter. They would also like to thank the editors for their helpful comments. And last but not least, Susan and Josh wish to thank their respective spouses for their patience during the duration of this project.

Disenchanted Vampires

Animating the Dead

The Heart of the Matter

Blood Ties and Freedom

NOTES