Green Lantern and Philosophy

No Evil Shall Escape this Book

Jane Dryden, Mark D. White, Jane Dryden, Mark D. White, William Irwin

• Publisher: Wiley
• Year: 2011
• Print ISBN: 9780470575574
• eBook ISBN: 9781118003299
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

The first look at the philosophy behind the Green Lantern comics—timed for the release of the Green Lantern movie in June 2011

The most recent Green Lantern series— Blackest Night —propelled GL to be the top-selling comic series for more than a year, the latest twist in seven decades of Green Lantern adventures. This book sheds light on the deep philosophical issues that emerge from the Green Lantern Corps's stories and characters, from what Plato's tale of the Ring of Gyges tells us about the Green Lantern ring and the desire for power to whether willpower is the most important strength to who is the greatest Green Lantern of all time.

• Gives you a new perspective on Green Lantern characters, story lines, and themes
• Shows what philosophical heavy hitters such as Aristotle, Descartes, and Kant can teach us about members of the Green Lantern Corp and their world
• Answers your most pressing Green Lantern questions, including: What motivates Hal Jordan to be a Green Lantern? Does the Blackest Night force us to confront old male/female stereotypes? What is the basis for moral judgment in the Green Lantern Corps? Is Hal Jordan a murderer?

Whether you're a new fan or an elder from Oa, Green Lantern and Philosophy is a must-have companion.

PART ONE

WILL AND EMOTION: THE PHILOSOPHICAL SPECTRUM

Chapter 1

THE BLACKEST NIGHT FOR ARISTOTLE’S ACCOUNT OF EMOTIONS

Jason Southworth

Since 2005’s Green Lantern: Rebirth, writer Geoff Johns has told a series of stories leading up to Blackest Night, introducing to the DC Universe a series of six previously unknown color corps in addition to the classic green: red (rage), orange (avarice), yellow (fear), blue (hope), indigo (compassion), and violet (love).1 The members of each corps see the emotion they represent as the most important one and believe that acting out of that emotion is the only appropriate way to behave. The Green Lanterns, on the other hand, represent the triumph of willpower or reason over emotion and seek to overcome and stifle these emotional states.2

The conflict between the various lantern corps, while providing an interesting series of stories, also sets the stage for thinking about one of the most long-standing questions in ethics: What role should emotion play in moral reasoning?

Color-Coded Morality

With the exception of the Indigo Lanterns (who don’t speak a language that can be translated by a Green Lantern power ring, much less your average comics reader), the representatives of the new color corps all make the case that acting out their sections of the emotional spectrum is the only way to achieve justice. Let’s consider the ways these Lanterns make their cases for a morality driven by a single emotion.

The first of the new color corps to make itself known to the DC Universe was the Sinestro Corps. Led by the renegade Green Lantern after whom it takes its name, this corps embodies the yellow light of fear. Since the days when he was a Green Lantern, Sinestro has argued that people do the right thing only when they fear the consequences if they don’t. It was this principle that led Sinestro to force the residents of his home world, Korugar, to live in fear of his wrath.3 While this might seem extreme, Sinestro has shown us time and time again that fear is a strong motivator. For instance, when he decided that the Green Lanterns needed to change the Laws of Oa to allow Lanterns to kill, he was able to make the Guardians so afraid that they did as he wished.4 When discussing Sinestro’s motivations, some may say that while he wants others to act out of fear, he holds himself exempt from this standard. But a closer look shows that Sinestro’s turn to fear came from his own fears of a prophecy relayed to him by Atrocitus, which said that Korugar would fall into a state of chaos from riots and a violent coup if nothing was done to prevent it.5

Like the Sinestro Corps, the Violet Lantern Corps was started by a long-time Green Lantern villain, Star Sapphire. Actually, Star Sapphire is not a person, but an alien gem that possesses the person desired most by Hal Jordan; more often than not, that person is Carol Ferris (his sometimes employer and love interest).6 Let’s set aside the fact that violet light is powering a person whose name refers to a blue gem—and whose costume is pink—and move on to a discussion of the Violet Lanterns’ emotional focus. Violet Lanterns, just like John Lennon, will tell you that love is all you need. The leaders of this corps, the Zamarons (a group of female former Guardians), appear to believe that the only appropriate way to reason is to act on one’s feelings of love. For instance, the Guardian Scar says that “to believe that love will save the universe is naïve and irresponsible,” to which Queen Aga’po of the Zamarons responds, “That is your misguided, and dare I say it, irrational opinion.”7 Scar’s claim is deemed irrational because she used something other than love to arrive at it. The goal of the corps is clear: to “wield the violet light energy of love” and “convert all to their way of light.”8 They are so committed to this conversion that they go as far as to kidnap members of the Sinestro Corps and imprison them until they come to see (or are brainwashed to see, according to Green Lantern Arisia) the way of the Star Sapphire Corps.9 When reasoning means acting out of love, rather than intellect or some other emotion, there doesn’t seem to be much room for compromise.

The rage of the Red Lanterns is grounded in a belief that great injustices often go unpunished. The founder of the Red Lantern Corps, Atrocitus, experienced a life filled with such injustices. The Manhunters, the Guardians’ initial attempt at an intergalactic police force, concluded that the only way to prevent chaos from consuming the universe was to destroy all life—this led to the murder of all but a handful of people in Atrocitus’s space sector.10 Atrocitus and the other survivors of the massacre attempted to enact justice (or vengeance) on the Guardians for what they had done, and the Guardians responded by imprisoning them. From these experiences, Atrocitus now sees emotionless reasoning—the decision process of the Guardians—as responsible for the destruction of his home world.

Rage is all that Atrocitus feels after centuries of imprisonment, and it alone compels him to act. By his reasoning, emotions other than rage are bad, as they are likely to lead to passivity in the face of injustice by causing us to be concerned with the consequences of our actions. When Atrocitus is reborn as a Red Lantern on Ysmault he blames the Guardians for their sins, which “stretch back eons.”11 All he has left is rage, “the red light [which] is violent action with no consideration for consequence. It is uncontrollable.”12 Atrocitus’s rejection of other emotions can be seen in his interactions with members of the other corps; for instance, he rejects the power of hope, saying to Blue Lantern Saint Walker, “You wield coalesced hope. Empty prayers. Disembodied faith.”13

Perhaps the most surprising emotion that one might advocate as the proper impetus for action is avarice. Larfleeze, the only Orange Lantern (except for Lex Luthor’s brief stint in Blackest Night #6–8, 2010), explains his commitment to greed, talking to himself in Green Lantern, vol. 4, #39 (March 2009). Speaking about the Controllers, the creators of the Darkstars (an earlier alternative to the Green Lantern Corps), he says, “They want to protect the universe their own way. You can’t protect anything that big! You can only protect what you can hold.” Larfleeze’s point seems to be that ownership motivates people to protect things, a common point made in discussions of private property.

Another strange case is that of hope. The Blue Lantern Corps was founded by Ganthet and Sayd in the hopes of preventing the Blackest Night.14 Given the involvement of these well-spoken former Guardians, you might wrongly expect that they make the reasoned case for hope’s importance. Unfortunately, all we are told is that hope is the most powerful emotion, and that those who wear the blue ring are the saints of the universe.15 These aren’t really arguments, but assertions. These Lanterns don’t have an argument for hope being the most significant emotion—instead, what they have is hope that it is. Similarly, these Lanterns never give reasons why they think they will succeed in their goals; instead, they speak of hope that they will.

Despite not being able to give reasons for the supremacy of hope, the Blue Lanterns still try to dominate the other corps. When Hal Jordan asks Ganthet if he created the Blue Corps to replace “us,” meaning the Green Lanterns, Ganthet responds, “No. To aid you.”16 This suggests that the Blue Corps see a place for the two corps to coexist, but then they immediately try to talk Hal into leaving the Green Lanterns for their corps. Additionally, within the first few pages of our meeting the first Blue Lantern, Saint Walker, he uses his ring to soothe the anger he senses in another Green Lantern from Earth, John Stewart.17 In the end, it seems that while the Blue Lanterns aren’t openly hostile toward the Green Lanterns, hope still tries to dominate the green light.

Finding the Perfect Mean: A Job for Golden Lanterns?

While the representatives of the various color corps are able to make convincing cases for the moral significance of their emotions (or at least hope for that significance), philosophers stop short of defending the relevance of a single emotion over all others. Beginning with Plato (circa 428–348 BCE) and Aristotle (384–322 BCE), philosophers have argued that our emotions interact with reason when we engage in moral deliberation.

While Aristotle saw emotions as significant, he understood them very differently than do the members of the color corps, and this understanding is integral to his moral philosophy. For Aristotle, morality is all about becoming a particular kind of person—someone with a well-rounded character and the practical wisdom to recognize the right thing to do in any situation. Aristotle recognized that emotions have a strong influence on our actions, and, realizing their power, he thought carefully about the best way to harness them into service of the good. Emotions are not individual character traits, but rather exist on a series of spectrums. For any emotion, there are two extremes—an excess of the emotion at one end and a deficit of it at the other. In between is just the right amount of that emotion, which Aristotle called a virtue, and the goal of those striving to be good people is to harness this just-right amount of emotion.18

Aristotle thought that the key to achieving the proper amount of each emotion is reason, which gives moral agents the guidance needed to temper their emotions and to use them in service of the good. Without reason, agents will act in service of their own appetites, controlled by their passions rather than by a desire to do good.19 Reason is the cool, unemotional component of our psyches that can carefully assess each situation and determine how much of each emotion is called for. Consider this analogy from Plato: Just as a general is the person in charge, directing his soldiers who do the legwork, so reason should direct the emotions, which provide the motivating force for the action. Just as with the general and the soldiers, both reason and emotion are essential, but the person, like the army, will function well only if reason is in charge.20

Let’s think about this in terms of an example: the virtue of courage, which is the perfect midpoint between the extreme emotions (or vices) of foolhardiness and cowardice. It is good to act decisively in the face of fear, while running away from battles you are capable of fighting is cowardly and charging headlong into situations you can’t handle is foolhardy. Reason tells us when we can handle a frightening situation and when the wise action is to back away. In other words, acting from either extreme is intemperate. Once you are able to use reason to consistently hit the sweet spot—the “Golden Mean”—you possess the virtue of that mean, in this case, courage.21

For Aristotelians, the first mistake made by all of the color corps is that they are all acting in excess, something even the characters recognize about one another. Take the following exchange between Atrocitus and Sinestro in Green Lantern, vol. 4, #36 (January 2009):

Atrocitus: You believe fear to be the most powerful force in the universe? Fear is inaction. Fear is hiding away. Fear is cowering and begging. Rage is action. Rage is spilling blood.

Sinestro: Rage is uncontrollable.

Both observations bear out when we look at the Green Lantern comics. The beings Sinestro and his corps instill with fear are unable...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Contents
• Title
• Copyright
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Part One : Will and Emotion: The Philosophical Spectrum
• Part Two : Emerald Ethics: It’s Not All Black and White
• Part Three : I’m with Green Lantern: Friends and Relationships
• Part Four : With This Ring, I do Swear: Power, Duty, and Law
• Part Five : Don’t Tell Krona: Metaphysics, Mind, and Time
• Part Six : Can Green Lantern Make a Boxing Glove He Can’t Lift?: Powers and Limitations
• Contributors: Tales of the Philosophy Corps
• Index: The Book of Oa