Who Decides If He Be Worthy?: Reflections on Philosophical Thoreology

 

            Philosophy—let’s admit it, folks—has a bit of a bad reputation today.  But why?  What is philosophy, really, besides thinking rigorously and clearly?  And perhaps some people hate thinking rigorously, as some people hate thinking altogether; but clear thinking—no one can argue with that, now can they?  In reality, it is not philosophy that people tend to hate, but bad philosophy, of which we have an unfortunate abundance.  When it is good, philosophy can be as cleansing as a strong, stiff breeze blowing through a dusty old attic on a spring day.  It can make our thinking clearer, even about things where we never had any idea that we were thinking unclearly in the first place.

            For example, consider the question: what is “worth”?  How do you get it?  Who doesn’t have it?  And who decides who doesn’t have it?[1]  What if, for example, you had a tool that could only be used by someone who was sufficiently “worthy”?  It is not an idle question, because we find such a tool in the universe of Marvel Comics, where Thor, Asgardian god of thunder[2] wields an enchanted hammer named Mjolnir.  One of the enchantments upon Mjolnir makes it impossible to lift by someone who is not “worthy.”

            This leads us to a very important question:

“Who decides who’s worthy?  Does the hammer decide?”

This was Dr. Bernadette Marianne Rostenkowski-Wolowitz (Ph.D., microbiology) in an episode of The Big Bang Theory.[3]  The ladies, wishing to understand the fascination comics held for their men, had read a comic book together (an issue of Thor because as Penny commented, “He’s hot.”).  Amy Farrah Fowler (Ph.D. neurobiology) had just finished reading out loud the spell that prevented Mjolnir from being wielded by the unworthy: “Whoever holds this hammer, if he be worthy, shall possess the power of Thor”—and, Bernadette’s reaction was immediate.  This led to Penny and Amy responding simultaneously to her question with divergent answers, and the following conversation:

 

Bernadette: “Hold on.  Who decides who’s worthy?  Does the hammer decide?”

[Simultaneously] Amy: “No!”  Penny: “Yes!”

A: “It can’t decide, it’s a hammer.”

P: “You said it’s a magic hammer!”

A: “Yeah, but it can’t make decisions.”

P: [scoffingly] “If Harry Potter’s wand can make decisions, why can’t Thor’s hammer?”

A: “Okay, if you’re gonna start comparing wands and hammers, I can’t even take you seriously.”

            Looking at this exchange through the eyes of philosophy and seeking clarity of thought, we can see how rich it is in meaning, and perhaps even discover what the right answer is to Bernadette’s burning question.  The first thing that strikes us here—it is a sitcom, after all—is the humor of the scene, which is predicated at least partially on the irony that these ladies, who had earlier so harshly ridiculed their men because “they spend hours arguing about things that don’t even exist,” now find themselves doing the very same thing: arguing about the logic of wands and hammers and their magic spells. 

            And yet, what this scene proves is precisely that: such things, in spite of being fictional, do have a certain logic, and as the ladies begin to argue about the question: “Who decides?”, they begin to deploy exactly the kind of strategies we find deployed by comics fans, science fiction fans, and other philosophers, everywhere.  To begin, Bernadette asks a very pertinent question, and Amy and Penny give very different answers.  Penny assumes, in a rather common sense way, that of course it would be the hammer that assessed the worthiness of its potential wielder, much as your smartphone verifies your identity by your thumbprint.  Amy, however, takes a different, more reductionist perspective; one shaped, no doubt, by her experience, not just as a scientist, but as a neurobiologist specifically, a field with a reputation for being rather reductionist.  She insists that a hammer, being (only) a hammer, cannot make decisions—even if it is magic (a sufficient explanation for Penny).

            Penny, however, has an excellent comeback, in the form of an existence proof, a fancy name for a simple but powerful idea: the simplest way to prove that something can be done is to do it, and the simplest way to show that something can exist is to demonstrate that it does exist.  Penny cites the example of Harry Potter, and the wand that chooses him (as all wands choose their users in that world), asking why a hammer that likewise makes decisions  cannot also exist.  Without missing a beat, Amy rejects this idea as ridiculous, because: you can’t compare wands and hammers!

            Amy counters Penny’s existence proof by deploying another philosophical principle, which is really just a basic principle of thought and language: to compare two things, you must somehow be able to put them in the same category.  If they are different enough, then any attempt to compare them falls apart.  My favorite example of this is from C.S. Lewis, who said that it is nonsensical to ask: How far is it from Londonderry to next Tuesday?  One is a place, while the other is a time; two different categories, with no common meaning of “far” between them.  

            Again, in our case, the humor lies in the way Amy, who just a few minutes earlier in the show had responded to the mere suggestion that she even read a comic book with a disbelieving “Really?”, is now haggling over interpretation with such practiced ease that she can simply accept it as an unspoken truth that wands and hammers are too different for Penny’s argument (If a decision-making wand is possible, then so is a decision-making hammer) to work.

            But now, a new question arises: how can Penny use an existence proof to prove the possibility of something that technically doesn’t exist?  To answer that, let us look at another time this show invoked the logic of the existence proof, this time in an exchange between Penny and Sheldon Cooper (“B.S., M.S., MA, Ph.D., & Sc.D.”[4]).  One again,[5] Sheldon has exasperated Penny with his eccentric behavior—namely, his insistence on refusing the French toast she has made for breakfast because “It’s oatmeal day”—leading her to exclaim, “You know what?  I give up.  He’s impossible!”  To which he replies, “I can’t be impossible, I exist.  I believe what you meant to say is, ‘I give up.  He’s improbable.’”

            Of course, the joke is that Penny is merely using an idiom where “He’s impossible” means “He’s impossible to deal with.”  Sheldon, however, as he often does, engages in an act of willfully literal misreading and takes “He’s impossible” to mean “His existence is impossible.”[6]  This allows him to “correct” Penny by A. invoking an existence proof,  pointing out that his existence proves that he is indeed—to say the least—possible, while also B. admitting that the existence of one such as he (“Yes, that’s how we say it.”[7]) is indeed an improbable or unlikely event.  Sheldon makes a very similar mistake of reading an idiom as a scientific and even quantifiable statement in a very early episode.[8]  There, when Leonard his roommate requests some privacy for his upcoming date, he tells Sheldon, “I’d appreciate it if you would, you know, make yourself scarce”—to which Sheldon responds, “Leonard, I am a published theoretical physicist with two doctorates and an IQ that can’t be measured by normal tests.  How much scarcer could I be?”  Wisely, Leonard avoids being drawn into verbal games by saying, “You know what I mean.”

            We see here not only Sheldon’s use of the existence proof, but his unnecessary use of it.  This is due to his tendency to insist on reading simple, straightforward statements in idiomatic English as if they were statements of mathematics or physics.  This failure to communicate is precisely the sort of thing which so often repels people from philosophy, the tendency to impose uncomfortable or even impossible patterns upon a natural language born of normal social discourse, and then to mistake the resulting obscurity for profundity.  Instead, we must always keep our eyes focused on the goal of clarity in thought and language, and when we find ourselves or others wandering off like Sheldon into needless confusion, we must shock them back to reality with, “You know what I mean.”  An alternative approach, applied to Sheldon more than once—most notably by his twin sister, Missy—is to clobber him, or as Howard Wolowitz once suggested, “haul off and whoop the crazy out of him.”[9]  It is something we must often do, at least figuratively, to ourselves.

            So, once again, clarity is our goal, and as both Penny and Sheldon show us, the existence proof  is so powerful precisely because it is so clear and simple.  Yet, as we saw in the first example from Sheldon, sometimes we must resort to more indirect ways of knowing things.  If we don’t have enough information to tell us whether something is actual, we can perhaps make a guess as to how probable, or likely, it is—always bearing in mind that the highly improbable occasionally does happen.  Closely related to probability is the idea of plausibility, or believability.  What is for us plausible is often closely aligned with our estimate of what is probable.  In fact, there is a scene involving Sheldon which illustrates precisely this.[10]  Penny and Leonard have had a late night hook-up, despite their being officially broken up.  Sheldon catches Leonard as he is sneaking back into the apartment, so Leonard claims that he was using the restroom at the gas station across the street.  Sheldon asks: “In your pajamas?...Without shoes?...On a cold winter’s night?”—to each of which Leonard replies, “Yes.”  Sheldon says “That seems unlikely.  Did you bring your asthma inhaler?”  When Leonard shows him the old inhaler he just so happens to have brought back from Penny’s, Sheldon responds, “Well, then I guess it’s plausible.”  There you have it:  first Sheldon considers Leonard’s story “unlikely,” but enter the asthma inhaler, and Sheldon reverses himself, accepting Leonard’s claim as “plausible.”  The antithetical parallelism between these two words shows us the connection between the ideas of probability and plausibility that this scene assumes, and that we the audience accept without a second thought—that is, until the philosopher comes along and points it out.

            All this helps us to understand the principle that “truth is stranger than fiction.”  Because whenever I make a fictional story, I must so make it that your imagination accepts it as in some way plausible.  If you cannot believe in my fiction, not even as fiction, a mere story, you will reject it.  However, while fiction is obliged to be plausible—and so, in a sense, probable—real life is full of real events which earlier evidence would have made seem highly improbable, and so implausible.  Thus, while the improbable, and so implausible, can and does sometimes occur in real life, fiction is limited to what it can make us see as in some sense plausible, even if that means magic wands and enchanted hammers.

            And so we finally come to Penny’s existence proof, which is really a plausibility proof.  It says, “If you can accept a story with a decision-making wand, why not also a story with a decision-making hammer?”  Whether one is capable of accepting either of these is a personal thing, but one who cannot accept such things, even in fiction, may be judged a bit deficient in imagination; for to paraphrase Alfred Hitchcock in defense of his own work: “It’s only a [story].”     

            So Penny’s argument for possibility turns out to be an argument for plausibility.  For that is the real point here: plausibility.  Mjolnir and Harry Potter’s wand are both fictional[11] (as are Amy, Bernadette, and Penny, but never you mind that).  They exist only in fictional realms, and fictional realms are, in  one sense, unreal.  And yet, in another sense, they are real.  If it were not so, then I could not claim that the following is a misquotation of Darth Vader:

“Luke, I am your father”—

But the following is not:

“Luke…I am your father.”[12]

This very famous quote from a very famous film was indeed spoken by the character in question—but only if you punctuate it correctly.  Otherwise, to claim that Darth Vader spoke this line is false, and in a very different way from the way we can say that the whole story is “not real.”  Fictional worlds have their own sort of imaginative realness, a realness we believe in, and our belief in this reality depends, perhaps among other things, upon plausibility, or believability.  All discussions of stories, of what they say and mean and what happens in them, depends on our granting them this secondary sort of imaginative reality.

            Now we can finally return to Bernadette’s original question, which began all this.  Who decides who is worthy?  First, however, we must make an observation.  Careful attention to detail and the making of sometimes fine distinctions are essential elements of clear thinking, and so of philosophy.  And we will notice, if we look carefully, that Bernadette actually asks two separate questions.  The first is an open question: “Who decides who’s worthy?”  The second is a Yes/No question: “Does the hammer decide [who’s worthy]?”  The second question allows only two possible answers, and between them, Amy and Penny give both.  Amy’s only argument for her answer is the dogmatic, reductive claim that a hammer—even a magic hammer—can’t make decisions.  But is this true?  And if so, how would she answer Bernadette’s first question?  If the hammer does not decide who’s worthy, then who does?

            To judge between Amy’s answer and Penny’s, we must inquire, not just about the nature of hammers, but, as Penny insists, the nature of magic hammers, and so of magic itself—in this case, magic as it occurs in the Marvel Universe.  What do the sources say?  Well, it would be too difficult to wade through the mythology of Marvel in all its varied forms, but fortunately, we have a shortcut: the Marvel Cinematic Universe.  The spell quoted by Amy, who is supposedly reading from an actual, current issue of Thor, also occurs in exactly the same word-for-word form in the MCU film Thor, where Odin places the spell upon Mjolnir just after banishing Thor for his foolish acts, and just before throwing the hammer after him.  So, let us look at the MCU films and ask what they tell us about magic.  We can quickly make the following observations.  First, Dr. Jane Foster paraphrases Arthur C. Clarke’s Third Law (“Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic”) as “Magic is just science we don’t understand.”  She persists in that perspective in Thor: the Dark World, when she perceives the function of what the Asgardians call a “soul forge” and labels it a “quantum field generator.”  Second, Thor gives her the Asgardian perspective when he says, “Your ancestors called it magic, and you call it science.  Well, I come from a place where they’re one and the same thing.”[13]  Third, the Ancient One, Sorcerer Supreme of Earth for centuries, described magic this way:

The language of the mystic arts is as old as civilization.  The sorcerers of antiquity called the use of this language “spells.”  But if that word offends your modern sensibilities [Mr. Strange,] you can call it a “program.”  [It is] The source code that shapes reality.  We harness energy drawn from other dimensions of the multiverse to cast spells, to conjure shields, and weapons, to make magic. 

The Ancient One here suggests that a spell, such as the one Odin places upon Mjolnir, is a sort of ontological program, operating upon “The source code…[of] reality.”  Such a program could easily cause a hammer to bond to a specific person, and return to him when summoned, much as only I can open my locked cell phone with my thumbprint.  It might also be able to assess a quality in a person seeking to wield it, much like those devices a judge may order installed in a car, which allow the engine to start only if the driver’s breath shows them to be sufficiently sober.  But the question still remains: could a program, even a spell, truly decide someone’s worthiness?  Would that not be a terribly difficult determination, even for one as wise as Odin One-Eye?

            Perhaps.  Perhaps not.  Consider this: every question a person asks comes from somewhere, from a certain set of assumptions, a certain perspective.  Northrop Frye once warned his readers that, “to answer a question is to consolidate the level of thinking upon which the question is asked.”  To answer a question confirms its underlying assumptions, reinforces its perspective—and yes, consolidates the level of thinking it is based on.  That is why so many of the best teachers answer questions put to them so evasively.  Jesus, when asked how many would be saved in the end, answered with the command, “Strive to enter in!”  When a man prefaced a question by addressing him as “Good teacher,” he asked, “Why do you call me ‘good’?  No one is good but God.”  Good teachers teach us to look at things in new ways, getting us to ask new questions, rather than answering our old ones.

            Let’s apply this to Bernadette’s questions.  Both of them are based a prior assumption, so basic she doesn’t even realize she is making it: she assumes that worth is a subjective quality, which must be judged and decided.  These are actions properly taken by persons, preferably wise ones.  How could a hammer possibly decide such things?

            However, let us ask another question: who decides who is strong enough to lift a fifty-pound weight—or any other weight, for that matter?  Answer: No one.  Lifting a weight depends on strength, and strength is an objective reality.  What if the worth that Odin’s spell refers to is not some vague abstract quality to be judged and decided on, but a precise, concrete, objective quality, like physical strength?  Then, it would require only a simple spell to grant the hammer a certain moral “weight,” so that only a person with the proper moral character—in the form of moral worthiness—could overcome that weight and wield Mjolnir.

            I know it seems strange: moral worth as an objective quality?  Yes!  Why, in our modern world, do we assume that only material properties can be objective?  Why do we confuse the words “solid” and “real”?  Because we have so accepted the same sort of physicalist reductionism Amy has swallowed, that we can’t recognize a metaphor when we see one (“solidity is reality” is.  A.  Metaphor, people!).  And since we don’t take metaphor seriously, we end up taking this particular metaphor literally.  And so we make the mistake of thinking, that, in the words of Will Wheaton, A.K.A. Professor Proton, “atoms…make up everything.”[14]

            No.  They.  Do.  Not.

            What I am arguing for here is some form of ethical realism (as opposed to nominalism), maybe even Platonism.  Qualities like justice, beauty, goodness, truth…worthiness—what if they are all objectively real, and not, as nominalism would have it, just words?  In that case, being “worthy” is as objective a quality as being strong, and trying to move the enchanted Mjolnir with more and more force is as wrong-headed as trying to life an object by making it hotter and hotter: you are attacking the wrong problem.

            Does this not explain everything?  If the moral and the spiritual are as real as the physical?  After all, if the theologians are right—and I, for one, think they are—then God, who is spirit, is the ultimate reality, far more real than some chakra wand made of quartz.[15]  And so, maybe the answer to both of Bernadette’s questions is “no.”  The hammer doesn’t decide who is worthy because no one decides—because worthiness is an objective spiritual quality which does not have to be judged or decided at all.  Which brings me to an interesting point.

            At the end of the movie Thor, when our hero finally becomes worthy (for to be worthy means to act worthily, just as to be courageous is to act with courage), he does not then lift Mjolnir.  Instead, the hammer leaps from its place in the desert and flies to Thor’s hand, which reaches up to receive it (her?  him?).  This is because the hammer was already bound to him by certain spells, so that when he threw it, it would return to him—so we saw early in the film, when he fights the Frost Giants.  We later see that he can call Mjolnir to him with just an outstretched hand, and we hear him say in Thor: Ragnarok that nothing will stop Mjolnir from returning to his hand—not even someone else’s face being in the way.  Apparently, that link is still there, even with his power taken from him, so that when Thor proves himself worthy by risking himself, Mjolnir comes to him (and the fact that Thor reaches for Mjolnir as it approaches suggests that the link is a mutual one, so that Thor senses the hammer’s approach).

Finally, we see in Avengers: Endgame that if anyone else should prove worthy to wield Mjolnir—say, Steve Rogers—they too, in accord with Odin’s spell, possess the power of Thor, and when thrown, Mjolnir will return to them.  All of this can be so, without anyone having to “decide” anything, for it is all as objective as any other program.  In effect, the ladies’ error is the error of one word: they confuse the objective and even deterministic “shall” with “may.”  The spell placed by Odin does not say that whoever is worthy “may” wield Mjolnir, as if someone had decided to permit it; it says “Whoever holds this hammer, if he be worthy, shall possess the power of Thor.”

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[1] If you find this an obscure set of questions, substitute for “worth,” the word “cool,” and you have questions pondered by many a young person, as Xander Harris did in an episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer (“The Zeppo” 3.13)

[2] Not, as his father Odin reminds him, “Thor, the god of hammers”—and not, as the Grandmaster mishears him, “the lord of thunder,” from “Ass-guard.” 

[3] “The Bakersfield Expedition” (6.13).

[4] Sheldon, “The Love Car Displacement” (4.13).

[5] This is the opening scene of “The Gothowitz Deviation” (3.3).

[6] A further irony occurs just a few moments later when Sheldon violates the terms of his argument by allowing for a figurative (i.e. hyperbolic) use of “impossible.”  In defense of his behavior, he says to his roommate Leonard, “What am I supposed to do?  Eat French toast on a Monday?  Now, that would be impossible.”

[7] “The Intimacy Acceleration” (8.16).

[8] “The Codpiece Topology” (2.2).

[9] “The Dependence Transcendence” (10.3).

[10] “The Recombination Hypothesis” (5.13).

[11] Another fine example of a sentient or semi-sentient item of habiliment—this one also from Marvel—is the Cloak of Levitation worn by Doctor Stephen Strange (M.D., Ph.D.) in Doctor Strange.

[12] All you real Star Wars fans: you know what I mean.

[13] We might note here what C.S. Lewis said in the real world on the same topic.  He notes that magic and science both flourished in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries (Isaac Newton, after all, was 49 years old at the time the witch trials happened in Salem, MA).  However, only one survived, because what we now call “science” was the magic that worked, while the science that did not work we now call “magic.”

[14] “The Novelization Correlation” (BBT 11.15).

[15] “The Wedding Gift Wormhole” (BBT 12.2).