Iron Man and Philosophy

Facing the Stark Reality

Mark D. White, William Irwin, Mark D. White

• Publisher: Wiley
• Year: 2010
• ISBN:
  9780470583104
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophie
• Subtopic: Geschichte & Theorie der Philosophie

The first look at the philosophy behind the Iron Man comics and movies, timed for the release of Iron Man 2 in March 2010

On the surface, Iron Man appears to be a straightforward superhero, another rich guy fighting crime with fancy gadgets. But beneath the shiny armor and flashy technology lies Tony Stark, brilliant inventor and eccentric playboy, struggling to balance his desires, addictions, and relationships with his duties as the Armored Avenger. Iron Man and Philosophy explores the many philosophical issues that emerge from the essential conflicts found in the decades of Iron Man stories in comics and movies. What kind of moral compass does Tony Stark have? Is Iron Man responsible for the death of Captain America after the Marvel Universe "Civil War"? Should people like Stark run the world? How does Tony's alcoholism impact his performance as Iron Man, and what does it say about moral character? Ultimately, what can Iron Man teach us about the role of technology in society?

As absorbing as Iron Man comic books and movies, Iron Man and Philosophy:

• Gives you a new perspective on Iron Man characters, story lines, and themes

• Shows what philosophical heavy hitters such as Aristotle, Locke, and Heidegger can teach us about Tony Stark/Iron Man

• Considers issues such as addiction, personal responsibility, the use of technology, and the role of government

Whether you've been reading the comic books for years or have gotten into Iron Man through the movies, Iron Man and Philosophy is a must-have companion for every fan.

PART ONE

THE NUTS AND BOLTS OF TONY STARK

1

THE STARK MADNESS OF TECHNOLOGY

George A. Dunn

For me, it was the jet boots.

Not that I didn ’t also covet that incredible array of weapons built into Tony Stark’s armor—the repulsor rays, missile launchers, pulse beams, and flamethrowers—but it was those jet boots that really got me salivating. To my preadolescent mind, it was Tony’s marvelous ability to lift himself off the ground and soar through the clouds that made him a bona fide superhero and not just some hotshot engineer outfitted with an admittedly awesome arsenal of weapons. After all, the prefix “super” comes from a Latin word meaning “above,” so to watch a real superhero in action you should need to crane your neck and look up in the sky.

But the jet boots were also emblematic of what to my mind was the most glorious thing about Tony’s way of being a superhero. Unlike, say, Reed Richards of the Fantastic Four, Tony wasn’t simply someone who happened to be a superhero in addition to being a hotshot engineer. He was a superhero because of those jet boots and the enviable power they gave him, which is to say that it was his extraordinary engineering prowess that allowed him to make himself super, without having to wait around for gamma rays or a radioactive spider bite. Consequently—and best of all, to my way of thinking—you didn’t even need to be Tony to wield his remarkable superpowers (at least until recently, when Extremis transformed him into a full-fledged technological artifact in his own right). All you needed was access to Stark technology. In principle, anyone could become the Iron Man. Of course, as the memorable “Armor Wars” story line drove home with a vengeance—and by “vengeance,” I mean Tony Stark in a murderous rage—you would be ill-advised to use that technology without the permission of its creator.¹ On the other hand, you might get to be one of the lucky few, like James “Rhodey” Rhodes, “Happy” Hogan, or, more recently, Pepper Potts, all of whom Tony has authorized at one time to don some version of his Iron Man armor and take flight.

And the upshot to all this was that while I might have missed my chance to be born on Krypton, the prospect of flying with those gleaming red jet boots wasn ’t entirely beyond the reach of my juvenile imagination and its superheroic aspirations.

“A Heart of Gold and an Appearance to Match”

The enduring appeal of Iron Man owes a great deal to how Tony Stark personifies the spectacular promise of technology to turn our dreams into reality, a promise that has stoked a fire in the bellies of countless men and women in the modern era, not only in preadolescent boys with airborne imaginations. Occasionally, the promised marvels fail to materialize. While my youthful hopes shone brightly for the day when ads for genuine jet boots appeared in the comic book pages right next to the ones pitching Amazing Live Sea-Monkeys and X-Ray Specs, I’ve learned that this isn’t likely to happen any time soon. Decades of trials with jet-powered apparatuses have established that the human body isn’t aerodynamically suited for this type of flight, except in the zero-gravity conditions of outer space. (The Sea-Monkeys were a big disappointment, too.)

But in all probability, the appeal of Iron Man owes just as much to the way his gleaming golden armor bathes him in the glory of a mythical past, a romantic world of medieval knights-errant, often graced with superhuman abilities, invincible in battle against an endless succession of menaces that threaten the peace of their kingdoms. Consider Stan Lee’s account of how he first came up with the inspiration for Iron Man:

I thought, Well, what if a guy had a suit of armor, but it was a modern suit of armor—not like years ago in the days of King Arthur—and what if that suit of armor made him as strong as any Super Hero? I wasn’t thinking robot at all; I was thinking armor, a man wearing twentieth century armor that would give him great power.²

Medieval knights often ruled over a kingdom of their own or were pledged to the service of some honorable and righteous lord who commissioned their noble exploits and invested them with the authority to act on his behalf. Tony Stark certainly fits that bill, as does Iron Man in his guise as Tony’s most recognizable “employee.” Like a feudal knight, Tony reigns over a powerful kingdom—an industrial kingdom, in his case—that owes its prosperity to his wisdom and foresight. Most important, as one of Tony’s female companions once described his Iron Man alter ego, “he has a heart of gold and an appearance to match his golden deeds.”³ He is the very essence of chivalry—noble, generous, and courageous; a perfect gentleman; skilled in the arts of war; and a formidable fighter for justice.

In short, Tony epitomizes not only the dream of technology enhancing human powers far beyond the limits of our natural endowments but also the possibility of the noble chivalric ideal surviving into the technological era, despite all of the other transformations the human condition is bound to undergo, transformations perhaps more profound than we can currently foresee. He’s a sublime anachronism, an inspired amalgam of past and future at their best. And, to the extent we can persuade ourselves that this hybrid really is a portent of things to come, the future looks as bright as the fire spitting from the heels of Iron Man’s jet boots.

These days, however, when I think about knights, I often recall the words of a seventeenth-century philosopher named René Descartes (1596-1650). In his Discourse on Method, Descartes offered an assessment of the education he received at one of the top schools in Europe, judging almost the entire curriculum to have been a colossal waste of his time. His appraisal of the value of the literature he was required to read concludes with his remark that “fables make us imagine many things as possible that are not” and even the authors of “histories” are guilty on occasion of “altering or exaggerating the importance of matters in order to make them more worthy of being read” and “at any rate, will almost always omit the baser and less notable events.” Consequently, “those who regulate their conduct by the examples they draw from these works are liable to fall into the excesses of the knights-errant of our tales of chivalry, and to conceive plans beyond their powers.”⁴ Could Tony Stark, a character in a modern-day fable, mislead us into thinking that impossible things are really possible? (I’m not just talking about the jet boots, by the way.)

“Masters of Nature”

No doubt, you’ve heard the old wisecrack about the philosopher’s boots being firmly planted in the clouds. Clearly, this droll image of thinkers traipsing around the stratosphere is meant to belittle philosophy as a lot of rarefied nonsense with little or no relevance for life as it is lived by the rest of us here on the ground. But couldn’t we interpret it instead as an acknowledgment that philosophers—some of them, at least—might have something in common with high-flying superheroes like Iron Man?

Descartes was the sort of philosopher who enjoyed pondering the perennial questions of what was then known as “first philosophy”—the existence of God, the nature of the soul, and other lofty matters—whenever he could squeeze in a short break from his main preoccupations, such as inventing analytical geometry, working out the law of refraction in optics, and offering some of the first mathematical descriptions of the behavior of light.⁵ While these may seem like fairly modest accomplishments compared to the invention of a lightweight exoskeleton that doubles as a high-tech weapons arsenal, the truth is that neither Stark Industries nor the Iron Man armor could have gotten off the ground without Descartes’ pioneering contributions to science and mathematics. But Descartes was a forerunner of Iron Man in another, even more important, respect. In addition to helping shepherd into being the experimental, mathematics-based methods that launched the scientific revolution, he was among the first to promote the idea of using these new scientific methods to equip human beings with wonderful new abilities, in addition to significantly enhancing our existing ones.

Consider his research in optics, undertaken for the expressed purpose of enhancing the power of the human eye. “All the management of our lives depends on the senses,” he wrote in the opening line of his essay the Optics, “and since sight is the noblest and most comprehensive of our senses, inventions that serve to increase its power are undoubtedly among the most useful there can be.”⁶ To tackle the problem of designing superior optical instruments, he offered a definition of light, analyses of the human eye and the phenomenon of vision, a formulation of the law of refraction, a discussion of lenses for “perfecting vision” and correcting the “faults of the eye,” and, finally, directions for constructing a machine that could manufacture those lenses. By contemporary standards, the results may not be all that impressive, paling in comparison to the fantastic sensory enhancement Tony Stark enjoys due to his Iron Man armor. But it’s a start and, most important, an indispensable foundation for greater inventions to come.

It’s Not All in the Hardware

Still, from another perspective, Descartes was an even more stupendous inventor than even the illustrious Tony Stark, despite the fact that the most earth-shattering products of his ingenuity, his new methods in mathematics and natural science, didn’t contain a speck of “hardware.” As a number of recent philosophers have argued, we would be hugely mistaken to think that the essence of technology consists of hardware. The “most obvious, massive, and impressive example” of technology may be the machine, argued the French philosopher and social theorist Jacques Ellul (1912-1994), but the essence of technology (or technique, as he called it) is something less tangible, “the totality of methods rationally arrived at and having absolute efficiency (for a given state of development) in every field of human activity.”⁷ Wrapped in that thicket of words is a simple and cogent insight: what makes our technological civilization possible is not our tools but rather the rules that tell us how to construct and use them. In the “starkest” terms, the essence of technology lies not in the Iron Man armor and arsenal but in the know-how that created and that operates them. At bottom, argued Ellul, technology is a set of proven methods to get the job done—whatever it may be—in the most efficient way possible. Machine technology is simply an external embodiment of those methods, kind of like their “exoskeleton.”

Descartes was a vigorous proponent of yoking science to a tried-and-true method. Patterned after “the procedures in the mechanical crafts,” the rules of his method required every scientific question to be framed as a search for some unknown quantity in a mathematical equation. Because mathematics was, in his opinion, what made the procedures of first-rate craftsmen so reliable, translating scientific problems that weren’t ostensibly about numbers and figures into ones that were seemed like a surefire way to find solutions that would be not only rigorous but, just as important, useful for the invention of new devices to expand human powers. One measure of Descartes’ success is that three centuries later, when young Tony Stark was enrolled at MIT, the curriculum he studied was imbued from top to bottom with Cartesian zeal for mathematics. Although Descartes’ private use of his method produced little technological hardware, it wouldn’t be at all off the mark to call him one of the chief engineers of the “software”—the intangible directives and protocols—that has directed the assembly of our modern technological civilization.

Descartes’ vision of what a technologically oriented science could accomplish extended far beyond the manufacture of machines to make better lenses. He expected nothing short of marvels from the triumphant parade of top-notch scientists and engineers who would follow in his footsteps—or maybe even, as in the case of Tony Stark, blaze a trail up above his footsteps in the sky. Consider Descartes ’ stunning prediction of how, through his method,

we could know the power and action of fire, water, air, the stars, the heavens and all the other bodies in our environment, as distinctly as we know the different crafts of our artisans; and we could use this knowledge—as the artisans use theirs—for all the purposes for which it is appropriate, and thus make ourselves, as it were, the lords and masters of nature.⁸

When we understand how nature works, we’re in a position to put nature to work for us. Then we can, as people often say, “master nature.” But when Descartes used the term “master” (maître) in the passage we just quoted, he was thinking of something much more specific than simply elevating us to a position of dominion over the rest of nature. To be a master in his century was to be a highly accomplished artisan, someone possessing the knowledge and skill to craft the right raw materials into beautiful and functional artifacts. Using science to become masters of nature suggests that we can eventually turn all of nature into a store of raw materials to be refashioned however we like.

If you’ re thinking that Descartes is beginning to sound like Tony Stark’s own personal publicist, heralding his technological prowess centuries in advance, then just wait until you hear this. Descartes believed that we could eventually come to understand the natural world every bit as well as an artisan understands his machines because nature is in fact nothing other than an incredibly intricate machine. The only real difference is that the operations of artifacts are for the most part performed by mechanisms that are large enough to be easily perceivable by the senses—as indeed must be the case if they are capable of being manufactured by human beings. The effects produced by nature, in contrast, almost always depend on structures that are so minute that they completely elude our senses.⁹

This simply means that as our machines come to be composed of more intricate and miniaturized parts, they increasingly approximate the designs used by nature itself. And that’s exactly where Stark technology has been heading from the beginning. It was microtransistors that made the Iron Man armor possible when the character was first introduced in March 1963 in the pages of Tales of Suspense #39. Ever since, Tony’s passion has been miniaturization, with every upgrade of his armor requiring circuitry of progressiv...