Philosophy Spotlight: Sierra, Queen of Antarctica
“Society imposes its customs and values on each of us, telling us who we are and how we should live. It is all irrelevant noise. I need no one’s permission to choose my own path.”
Inspiration: Constructivism, Christine Korsgaard, Nietzsche
Sierra’s philosophy demonstrates the self-assurance needed to exercise your own free will. Freedom entails that we choose our own actions, but at a deeper level we must also choose the values that motivate those actions. Constructivism is a family of ethical views that affirms our individual will’s authority to judge and determine what is valuable to us.
While this freedom is accepted on an applied level - we each naturally choose our own career paths, hobbies, personal priorities, and relationships - it is more controversial on a meta level. If we can freely choose our own values, what stops us from choosing malice, sadism, or indifference? If society demands self-sacrifice for the sake of others, is it morally wrong for us to be selfish or cruel instead? Especially in extreme cases, most people believe that there is at least some minimal value we must place in each other before we have the freedom to choose our own values.
The most poignant depiction of the audacity of free will comes from Nietzsche’s Metamorphosis. After growing resilient from a life of hard work, the individual is confronted by the Dragon of Thou Shalt, the imposing metaphorical embodiment of society’s values and culture, created from the sum of history, that we are expected to adopt. The Dragon declares that the question of value has been answered, and there is no room left for the individual to create their own. To reject the Dragon, denying the values that society compels us to absorb, the will must have the strength of a lion and boldly declare its own authority.
Philosphy Spotlight: Sir Thomas
“Only power commands respect. People want what they do not have, and they will kill you to get it. My dragon grants me power to suppress the ravenous masses and keep human nature in line. The weak may hate the gods who rule them, but they survive only under our protection.”
Inspiration: Hobbes’ political philosophy
Hobbes argued for the necessity of government to save people from the horrors of anarchy. In Hobbes’ view, anarchy is a constant state of war where each person has good reason to fear everyone else, because anyone stands to gain from using violence for their own ends.
The government’s power to enforce laws is a deterrent against the potential profit of violence. Peace can only be possible when people fear the punishments for theft and murder, and this peace is worth sacrificing the freedoms that a government limits.
Sir Thomas embodies Hobbes’ philosophy from the perspective of the monarch. Thomas recognizes the danger created by human self-interest and justifies the total power of his own rule as a necessity for maintaining peace and order.
Hobbes’ philosophy was particularly groundbreaking because it was the first influential argument for a monarchy that appealed to each individual’s self-interest rather than a divine right to rule. This reasoning developed over time and became the idea of a social contract, which imagines that we would all agree it is worth restricting some freedom for the safety of a governed society. Sir Thomas connects this ethical theory with his own aspiration for power, highlighting the tension in the role of government and the self-interested people who want to rule.
Philosophy Spotlight: Kodame
“Our behavior defines our character. If desires rule our actions, we are the subjects of nature's whim, and we have as little control of our actions as we have of our desires. To experience true freedom, you cannot allow your unfiltered instincts to dictate what you do; instead, you must carefully reflect on each decision to ensure that it aligns with your better judgment.”
“Our behavior defines our character. If desires rule our actions, we are the subjects of nature’s whim, and we have as little control of our actions as we have of our desires. To experience true freedom, you cannot allow your unfiltered instincts to dictate what you do; instead, you must carefully reflect on each decision to ensure that it aligns with your better judgment.”
Inspiration: Kant’s Ethics
Kodame’s philosophy is an application of Kant’s ethics, particularly inspired from a seminar taught by Ermanno Bencivenga. Kodame is one of the oldest characters in our game, responsible for creating the forest that spread across Africa, so I wanted her quote to demonstrate a big picture mindset that Kant suits perfectly.
Kant’s ethical system is incredibly ambitious. He wants to explain how ethics apply universally while respecting each individual’s free will. In order to be universal, ethical laws cannot depend on what we desire. However, to respect our individual freedom, we must each be able to set our own values and priorities, and we must have the free will to causally determine our own actions.
The key challenge for Kant is the unpredictable influence of our desires. We do not choose our desires, and if we simply act on whatever desires we feel, we are passive subjects merely reacting to our given nature.
Kant believes our true identity is defined by our ability to reason. We have the unique ability to reflect on our desires and think through what we should do. Although reason does not tell us what we should want, it can help determine what limits we have to respect in order for our desires not to conflict with each other. This ability is what makes ethics possible. We mutually acknowledge our individual freedom to choose our own values and limit ourselves to actions that do not compromise our ability to live together peacefully.
The second requirement for freedom is satisfied by the same approach. Kant, agreeing with his predecessor David Hume, believes that causation is simply universal correlation. Our reasoning causes our behavior if and only if our actions always follow the limits imposed by it. Even a single instance of failure would prove that our decisions do not determine our actions and we are not ultimately free. But if our actions never stray from our best judgment, then we can truthfully say that our actions are directly attributable to our will.
Philosophy Spotlight: Maluhia, Bristlecone Pine
“Reality is filtered through our eyes. Space and time, color and shape, beauty and meaning - we see only what our minds can construct. What could lie beyond the reach of our minds? Some confuse what they see with what is, others deceive themselves because they do not trust their own sight. The truth is not so simple. Observer and object are like two sides of a coin - neither can be represented without depending on the other.”
“Reality is filtered through our eyes. Space and time, color and shape, beauty and meaning - we see only what our minds can construct. What could lie beyond the reach of our minds? Some confuse what they see with what is, others deceive themselves because they do not trust their own sight. The truth is not so simple. Observer and object are like two sides of a coin - neither can be represented without depending on the other.”
Inspiration: Nagarjuna’s Buddhism
Maluhia’s philosophy is an interpretation of sunyata, the Buddhist concept of emptiness and the origin of our game’s name. An object is empty if it has no traits without depending on external conditions such as an interaction with another object or a reaction from our senses. Nagarjuna argues that all things are empty, and the key to learning Buddhism is to understand what sunyata means for different schools of thought.
Colors are the easiest category to understand emptiness. The colors we see are not traits of the objects themselves. They are representations our minds use when reacting to the limited range of wavelengths we can see. If we imagine what each color would look like independently of our perception of them, we are left with an empty, indescribable concept.
Shapes are a more difficult category. The shape of objects we see matches what we feel with our hands, so shape does not initially seem to depend on the interpretation of either sense. However, consider the role our size plays in our perception - we can only see objects that are relatively large enough to be relevant to us, and we feel objects as solid when the gaps in them are not wide enough for us to pass through. But at an atomic level, neither shape is retained. The object’s surface is not the smooth layer it looks to be, and the gaps of empty space in each atom make up the majority of the object. The solid surface we can touch is a representation our senses use that matches our inability to pick through the tiny pockets of empty space.
Emptiness applies to ethics and personal values as well. Values are empty because there is no objective fact independent of us about what should matter. This view is a type of moral anti-realism, and as a result it can be confused with the nihilistic view that nothing matters. However, this reduction to nihilism would be a failure in applying sunyata to anti-realism. There is no objective truth that nothing matters, as the nihilistic claim is itself empty, and so nihilism is at most a personal view like any other moral framework.
From Nagarjuna’s view, moral questions become incredibly difficult to answer. How do we determine what we should do if there are no objective moral truths we can appeal to? Some philosophers, such as Plato and Derek Parfit, think this approach inevitably fails and devolves into tyranny or apathy. Nietzsche, one of the few philosophers to attempt an answer, likens it to a child-like state of free play that can enjoy and value anything the world has to offer. Buddha himself did not worry about this problem and instead gave practical advice to help people find peace and meaning through simple tasks such as spending more time outside or eating a moderate diet.
These arguments are just a sampling of how the philosophy of sunyata approaches different fields. Emptiness applies equally to thoughts about aesthetics, causation, personal identity, and Buddhism itself. In both ethics and metaphysics, emptiness is an alternative to realist and nihilist philosophies. Contrary to traditional realism, we cannot know or conceive of anything about the world that does not depend on our limited representations of it. But this does not imply the nihilistic conclusion that the world we interact with exists only in our minds. Instead, the world, as we perceive it, is the result of a mutually dependent reaction of our senses to our surroundings.