CONTINUATION OF: Games and the Philosophy of Love - Part 1
IV.
Upon reaching the temple in the center of the forbidden lands, the Wanderer in Wanda and the Colossus places his dead loved one on the altar. With the sword he has stolen and the horse that has served him faithfully, he has but one thought in his mind: the near-impossible promise that his loved one may live again. It sounds like an impossibility, but he is willing to strive for what may sound impossible. To achieve this, he is faced with yet another impossible task: slaying 16 monstrous colossi that live in these lands. To add insult to injury, the "god" that is supposed to grant his wish goes so far as to tell him that it "may" be possible to revive her. Even if he manages to slay the colossi, reviving her is not assured. Despite the god's announcement, he ventured into the lands with his bow, sword and horse, ready to bring down the 16 colossi that stand between him and his loved one.
If love is indeed a defiance of the state of things, it is required of one to possess the ability to go beyond himself to achieve it. The Wanderer is faced with almost insurmountable odds, like Ryu and Tidus, yet he faces them with utmost conviction and trust in his goal. The colossi are indeed gigantic as the name suggests, but despite the puny size of the Wanderer with only a sword and bow to slay these creatures, he attempts to take them down one by one. In other situations one would cower or question their motives, but here his conviction pushes him to possess bravery and ingenuity beyond what he would have possessed were he not completely convinced of his will to act. He finds the strength to act in his convictions.
His love is his strength. Specifically, it is his love for her that is the fountain of his strength that allows him to go beyond himself, to achieve things previously impossible to him, to succeed where success is needed the most. Emmanuel Levinas mentions how love, and eros in particular, is a "Going beyond the possible" (Totality and Infinity 261). He becomes different from his usual self. He becomes something other than himself. And yet in spite of being other than himself, he manages to maintain the identity of himself. It is as if by loving, he becomes endowed with powers he would never otherwise have. He is himself, yet somehow alien from himself. How is this so?
As James enters the town of Silent Hill in Silent Hill 2, he keeps a single thought in his own mind: the thought of his wife. His wife died years before, and he has never really gone past this tragedy, yet just days before coming to Silent Hill he receives a letter from his wife telling him to meet her in Silent Hill. He obviously knows his wife is dead, but he can't shake the idea out of his mind, and decides to venture into Silent Hill. And in Silent Hill, he encounters and fights various demonic creatures like the legendary Pyramid Head, but despite it all, manages to keep his sanity and plough through the bloodied streets of Silent Hill in search of his wife.
It is clear that love forces you to go beyond yourself, to become different from yourself, and ultimately end up doing and experiencing things you normally would never have. But, like James, how does one survive and keep the sanity of the self in check? The answer will be found later in this essay.
V.
At this point it is clear that love would entail a rejection of the present. It is a rejection of the present state of things in favor of the beloved and a transcendent world for the beloved. Despite everything positive one would hear about love, it doesn't mean then that love will always lead you to follow the established framework of "good and evil." At the same time that love enables the lover and the loved to become greater beings, it can also clearly cause them to, at the same time, be murderous, jealous, war-like etc. Nietzsche observed how "that to the lover himself the whole world appears indifferent, pale, and worthless, and he is prepared to make any sacrifice, to disturb any order, to subordinate all other interests" (Gay Science aph. 14). It is entirely possible to go to the negative extremes for the sake of love.
In a rather twisted form of love, Sephiroth and his apparent Oedipus complex attempts to recreate the world of Final Fantasy VII for the sake of his "mother" Jenova with him at the helm of the planet. For the sake of his love for his "mother", he gleefully destroys towns, kills one of the lead characters and summons a meteor to do away with the world. If we could state that his actions were based on love for Jenova, then we must also say that love has turned him into a monster.
Also consider Kato from Shadow Hearts Covenant. After the events of the first game it is clear that the death of the Colonel he loved has not faded, and has conspired with Sapientes Gladios. He manages to obtain the Emigre Manuscript and begins testing on hundreds of people in order to find the key to restoring his beloved. All this at the risk of altering the world and, upon realizing that his plan could not succeed, deciding to fight Yuri and remake the world.
Villains have shown that the presence of love has also pushed them to the other side of the spectrum. If love could cause you to save lives, it could also cause you to take them.
And is it not ironic that while heroes with love claim to be good, they end up killing people as well? In games nowadays with any form of violoence you end up pitting yourself against a human character and killing them. At the same time that love wishes you to protect the ones you love, it also makes you take the lives of others. Levinas states that:
"The state of war suspends morality; it divests the eternal institutions and obligations of their eternity and rescinds ad interim the unconditional imperatives. In advance its shadow falls over the actions of men. War is not only one of the ordeals - the greatest - of which morality lives; it renders morality derisory.... But violence does not consist so much in injuring and annihilating persons as in interrupting their continuity, making them play roles in which they no longer recognize themselves, making them betray not only commitments but their own substance, making them carry out actions that will destroy every possibility for action. Not only modern war but every war employs arms that turn against those who wield them. It establishes an order from which no one can keep his distance; nothing henceforth is exterior. War does not manifest exteriority... it destroys the identity of the same." (Totality and Infinity, 21)
The answer becomes glaringly obvious: Be a hero or a villain, love is violence, love is to cause harm. Love can somehow cause one to go beyond established modes of ethics, turning one into a being solely engrossed with love and satisfying love's needs. What is more unnerving about this arrival is that the extremes of protecting loved ones and killing due to love are not simply opposite poles, but are the same extremes at the same time. Love as protector and love as destroyer are not mutually exclusive; it is entirely possible for a person to be both.
And when you see gaming in this way, it becomes sort of a tragedy. The gamer realizes that although the hero wields a sword for protection, he also wields it for destruction. The line between hero and villain is blurred.
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