This Day in Philosophy — 30 August: the birth of Mary Shelley

Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin was born in London on 30 August 1797. Her mother died ten days later.

Those two sentences set the frame of a life.

Her parents#

Her mother, Mary Wollstonecraft, wrote A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792), the founding text of modern feminist political philosophy. Her father, William Godwin, wrote An Enquiry Concerning Political Justice (1793) and was the first systematic exponent of anarchist political thought.

Mary Shelley was born the child of the two most radical political philosophers of the late eighteenth century. She is said to have learned to read at her mother's graveside.

That inheritance makes it hard to read Frankenstein as a horror story.

1816: Lake Geneva#

The story of the book's birth has been told many times, but one detail is usually skipped.

1816 is known as the year without a summer. The eruption of Mount Tambora in Indonesia the year before had disturbed the global climate, and in Europe summer never arrived. The party stranded in Byron's villa on the shore of Lake Geneva — Byron, Percy Shelley, Mary Godwin, John Polidori — decided to pass the time by writing ghost stories.

The text written by the eighteen-year-old Mary would be published two years later without her name on it: Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus.

What was being talked about in that circle was not the supernatural but science: Galvani's experiments forcing the legs of dead frogs to twitch with electricity, galvanism, and the question whether a material explanation of life was possible.

The book's real question#

Frankenstein is commonly summarised as a story about the arrogance of the scientist: man played God and was punished for it.

The text itself does not say this.

Victor Frankenstein's mistake is not that he creates. His mistake is that he abandons what he has created. The moment the creature opens its eyes, Victor runs out of the room. He never afterwards assumes responsibility for it.

The creature is not born a monster; it is made one. The long narrative section at the centre of the book — the creature's story in its own words — is a novel of education. It learns language, reads Plutarch and Milton, comes to know tenderness by watching a family in secret. And at every encounter it is rejected because of how it looks.

Its turn to violence is the consequence of those rejections.

The thesis here comes from the political philosophy of her mother and her father: character is not an essence given at birth but a product of circumstance. The whole of Godwin's political optimism rested on that principle.

Mary Shelley took the same principle and showed its dark side.

Why it is read today#

Over the past decade Frankenstein has become the most cited literary text in the literature on the ethics of artificial intelligence. The reason is plain.

The questions at the centre of that debate are the questions the book set up: what do we owe to the thing we have made? Does responsibility end at the moment of creation, or does it continue?

Victor's mistake was not a technical one. In deciding to create he sought no social scrutiny, gave no thought to the consequences, and fled from the being he had produced as soon as he found it unpredictable.

The debate on the moral status of artificial intelligence and the MatrAIx simulation project, both reported here this month, turn on similar questions: does the fact that what we make resembles us create an obligation towards it?

The book's subtitle carries a warning of its own: The Modern Prometheus. Prometheus is a tragic figure not because he stole fire but because he bore the consequences.

Not only Frankenstein#

Reducing Mary Shelley to a single book is a common injustice.

The Last Man, of 1826, is among the first modern apocalyptic novels, an account of an epidemic destroying humanity. The book was long forgotten; it was rediscovered at the end of the twentieth century and read again during the pandemic years.

After Percy Shelley's death in 1822, it was she who collected and edited her husband's poems for publication. Percy Shelley's standing as a poet today is in large part the product of that editorial labour.

1871: Ernest Rutherford#

On the same day, in 1871, Ernest Rutherford was born in New Zealand.

He was the physicist who discovered the atomic nucleus, explained radioactive decay and carried out the first artificial transmutation of an element. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1908.

His importance for philosophy runs in two directions.

The first is epistemological. Rutherford's gold foil experiment of 1911 is the textbook case of how a structure that cannot be observed directly — the nucleus of the atom — may be established by indirect evidence. Debates in the philosophy of science about the reality of unobservables proceed by way of examples of this kind.

The second is moral. Rutherford did not think it practically possible to draw energy from the atomic nucleus; he is reported to have used a word meaning folly for those who argued otherwise. Eight years after his death in 1937, the bomb fell on Hiroshima.

A scientist unable to foresee the consequences of his own discovery — and Mary Shelley born on the same day: one of the meaningful coincidences the calendar produces.

In Turkish#

Frankenstein has been translated into Turkish many times, and The Last Man is available in Turkish as well. Her mother's A Vindication of the Rights of Woman and her father Godwin's writings have also been brought into the language.