Human, All Too Human: Man of Steel

“Meditating on things human, all too human . . . is one of the means by which man can ease life's burden.” --Friedrich Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human

 

To my mind, if director Zack Snyder has a film that approaches the elegance of Watchmen, it is Man of Steel (trailer), his reboot of the Superman movies. Watching it recently, I started thinking about the nature of Superman, human nature and freewill.

Man of Steel begins on the planet Krypton at the time of Kal-el’s birth. His parents send him to Earth to save him from the planet’s impending doom due to overharvesting of the planet core. Later, we are treated to a portrait of the superhero as a young man named Clark Kent working odd jobs and trying to keep his powers secret. When prison escapee and surviving Kryptonian General Zod shows up and threatens to destroy Earth unless Kal-el turn himself over, Clark must decide where his loyalties lie: Krypton or Earth?

This is the quintessential Superman dilemma. Like most superheroes, he is a walking identity crisis, but unlike other superheroes, he is not merely torn between two personal identities, but between two races light years apart. The movie points out through Jonathan Kent, Clark’s father on Earth, that Kal-el/Clark is both Kryptonian and human. That’s fine, but it seems more appropriate to me to say that he is neither. After all, Superman is defined by his super powers, which neither humans on Earth nor Kryptonians on Krypton have. Either way, his situation is an unsettled one.

And in this, he is essentially human in the broader existential, as opposed to racial, sense. He finds himself in an exaggerated form of the human situation, asking all those questions we humans must: Who am I? Where am I going? Why am I here? German philosopher Martin Heidegger would have said that he--like all Dasein, the only being that questions itself--is uncanny, never finding himself quite at home in the world.

Like the rest of us, Superman must exercise his free will in determining his place. At least as best he can.

For the most part, that isn’t particularly new or insightful, but it occurred to me while watching the film that Zod, while he is Superman’s enemy, is merely the other side of the human coin. Whereas Superman is able to choose who he will be and what he will do (and has been blessed with two sets of parents who went to great lengths to save that privilege for him), Zod possesses no free will. Like all other Kryptonians save Supes, Zod was genetically engineered and grown for a specific purpose in life. In the words of the general himself:

“We could have rebuilt Krypton on this planet, but you chose the humans over us. I exist only to protect Krypton. That is the sole purpose for which I was born. And every action I take, no matter how violent or how cruel, is for the greater good of my people. And now, I have no people. My soul, that is what you have taken from me!”

This, too, is the human situation. Far from being free, we are limited by current circumstances, our background, our genes, and much, much more. The history of science and ideas since the Industrial Revolution has introduced a string of determinisms that have steadily chipped at free will until there is little room left for it at all. The curtain has been drawn back to reveal not a man working a machine, but just a machine carrying out its functions.

It isn’t a very flattering way to think of ourselves, but it is part of who we are as human beings.

If there is an inhuman character in Man of Steel, it isn’t Zod but his steely sidekick Faora. Zod elicits some sympathy because he is, after all, trying to save his people, but not so Faora. She is less intent on saving the Kryptonian race than she is on destroying the human one:

“You are weak, Son of El, unsure of yourself. The fact that you possess a sense of morality, and we do not, gives us an evolutionary advantage. And if history has proven anything, it is that evolution always wins.”

This is another kind of determinism, but an evil one. Her philosophy has less to do with biological evolution than social Darwinism and the eugenics of Nazi Germany. These are, admittedly, human philosophies, but ones that we can only describe as inhuman.

Just as we are all Batman (blog), so are we all, by virtue of our human quandary, Superman. And that should come as no surprise, because they were created by us to express our human, all too human concerns.