Bit of Both: Motivation in the ‘Verse

[maggie2]

Too many words in defense of the claim that people who say Spike never did any good deed  for good reasons are really stupid.

 

A few days ago,shapinglight offered up a (completely on the money) rant about people “slagging Spike off”. (I love the way the British language works). Anyway, she begins by pointing to the anti-Spike folks who basically say that Spike never did anything good because all of his apparently good deeds were done for selfish purposes. There are a couple of ways to respond to the charge. One could point out how much these people have to stretch the facts to make the charge stick. How could Spike’s choice to keep fighting the fight in Sunnydale after Buffy was dead have anything to do with wanting to get into her pants? Alternatively, one can argue that the standard of judgment is just wrong. People just don’t have pure motivations. Most of our choices are “overdetermined”, by which I mean that you can explain them in multiple ways, any one of which would have been sufficient to result in the choice, but all of which might well have been in play when the choice was made.  Am I writing this post because I have something to say, because I am hoping to get the strokes one gets when people respond to posts, or because I’d rather do this than work on the stuff I’m supposed to be working on? Well, truth be told, all of it is in play. Some of the motives might be perfectly good; others might be self-serving in a benign way; others might be downright ignoble, indefensible even. In a complex world that’s just how things are. 
 

One of the things I love about the ‘verse is that it frequently calls attention to the ambiguity of what motivates us. So Spike’s critics aren’t just wrong because they stretch the facts to fit their case; they’re wrong because they use a standard that the ‘verse itself calls into question. Here are two examples to illustrate the basic point.

At the end of The Gift, Buffy takes a beautiful swan dive into a mystical portal, saving the world at the expense of her own life. We get moving music, a long slow-motion view of her flight, and a final epitaph for the fallen hero who saved the world a lot. People have written insightful meta about how Buffy’s noble sacrifice pulls together so many of the threads of her life into one final triumphant act. But it really isn’t that simple. A big theme of the season was that slayers die when they get a death wish, which was developed not just by Spike’s assertions on the subject, but by the fact that Buffy is visibly worn down by the tragedies that befall her and the burden she bears. She loses her boyfriend, and her mother. She is confronted by an enemy who is substantially stronger than she is, and by the possibility that the price of saving the world might be sacrificing her sister. Buffy’s response to all this is to give up – she becomes catatonic for an entire episode. Pulled out of her catatonia, Buffy goes back into the battle, but she declares to Giles that she doesn’t want to live in a world that forces such hard choices. Although she seemingly finds a way around the harsh choice between sacrificing her sister and saving the world by sacrificing herself, her final inspiring words to her sister are that “the hardest thing in this world is to live in it.” Inspiring music and visuals might let us gloss over this statement but it’s quite subversive of the moment. If the brave and heroic thing is living in the world, just what kind of sacrifice is Buffy making by choosing to not live in it? That might just be a discordant note in a satisfying conclusion to the hero’s journey, but Whedon and company devoted all of season six to exploring just how dark Buffy’s ‘inspiring’ words really were.

 So was Buffy sacrificing her life to save the world? Or was she committing suicide leaving others braver than herself to cope with the real challenge which is living in this world? People argue about this as though it had to be one or the other. But really, isn’t it both? And isn’t the both-ness of it what makes it so great, so arresting?

Which takes me to my second example, where the question is made explicit in a scene involving Spike. In Destiny, Spike and Angel battle for the cup of torment, which is a battle about many things including who is the vampire of destiny. We could kill a forest talking about all the motives in play for both of them during that fight. It’s a great scene. But at the very end, right before Spike drinks from the cup, a defeated Angel tries to stop him:

“Spike, wait. Wait. That's not a prize you're holding. It's not a trophy. It's a burden. It's a cross. One you're gonna have to bear till it burns you to ashes. Believe me. I know. So ask yourself: Is this really the destiny that was meant for you? Do you even really want it? Or is it that you just want to take something away from me?”

And Spike pauses and then responds with a shrug:  “Bit of both”. 

Noble motives and ignoble motives. Not one or the other. Both. And not just both. A bit of both. There’s even more in the stew of motivation than those two motives. Language just never is adequate to what’s really going on with us.

::pauses to sigh at another great Spike moment, and to remind self to not write pages of side commentary on how it’s just perfect that it’s Spike who says this::

The show isn’t about heroes and villains. Not about good guys and bad guys. It’s about people who have some good motivations and some bad motivations and who are usually operating from both sets of motivations at the same time. Which set of motivations we focus on are overwhelmingly determined by our affection or lack thereof for the character. Do you love Spike? His good deeds are reflective of his noble motivations, of course. Do you insist on seeing him as a villain? Pull up every lesser motivation you can find and pretend that Spike, and Spike alone, is motivated by such motivations.   Such debates are pretty stupid. And annoying, of course, for those of us who really love the character who comes under such attacks. And really very much beside the point of the show itself.

Comments

[2maggie2.livejournal.com]

Some day I might reveal (even more than I do already) my total inner nerdiness by talking about how a lot of these conversations never converge because people are using very different paradigms for their moral reflections. In this case, you are a Kantian and I'm a Thomist. (BTW, if it means anything to you, I'm ALWAYS a Thomist).

I think my basic point is that a lot of the board discussions (which admittedly are not meant to be lofty) are mired by the false notion that there is one and only one motivation for a given act. That's not true to the story. It's not true to real life. Like Rahirah, I find it very cool that both the story and life are like that.

That said, as a Thomist I deny that there's any sharp distinction between altruistic and non-altruistic acts. We all act in pursuit of the good we perceive. We just have better or worse understandings of what that good is. I agree that Spike's soul helps him have better understandings of what the good is. But even without the soul he's identified his well-being with the well-being of others (I couldn't stand it to see her in so much pain). That's a move up the ladder of love that lots of people with souls fail to make. I think the soul strengthens the higher motivations and makes it more likelythat he'll withstand various temptations to swing back down and pursue lower loves.

I do think you have to work hard to deny that Spike wasn't behaving nobly from the Glory torture incident through Buffy's return. You describe that to anyone outside the verse and they're not going to say "well, it's obvious that that guy has a glass ceiling he's never going to get through if he can't stop being so inherently selfish." Even if you give it the characterization Eowyn gives it above, most people would think that was good or noble behavior. Good or noble loves.

Where the soul comes to matter is that when Buffy comes back, it's revealed that his possession of her is a stronger love than some of the loves that are actually more noble (honoring promises, wanting to be the sort of person who could be treated as a man). His loves are ranked improperly. His good loves are there, and are really good. But he wants a lesser good more than the higher good. But it's still a mistake to say that he wasn't operating out of good motivations earlier. They just aren't the whole truth about him. As he learns. And seeks to remedy with the getting of the soul.

If we were to do this as Kantians we'd say that we NEVER know if someone has good motives, because what matters is what they do when they face a test where they are tempted to privilege their own good (happiness, well-being) over what's right. You can pass a hundred such tests, but still not know if there's not one big temptation out there specific to you that would cause you to fail. In this case, Spike's looking pretty good until he hits the test he fails (he has a shot at possessing Buffy and all the rest takes a distant back seat). But on Kant's view, pretty much all of us have a test out there that we're going to fail. Or at least none of us has any reason to think that there's NOT a test out there that we'd fail. Angel fails when his son is at risk, or when he despairs of achieving "redemption". Buffy temporarily failed when she didn't kill Angel in the middle of season 2. But I think the rest of Buffy's story is a pretty good meditation on just how dessicating it is to actually try to live life as a Kantian hero. Which is why I'm a Thomist. Buffy didn't need to learn how to be strong enough to privilege the right over the good or others over herself. She needed to learn how to love life enough that she could find some unity between the good and the right, where she could identify her own well-being with higher causes than just herself, but in a way that's life-giving and not life-draining.

And that was my inner nerd. Shutting it up now.

Of course you're not a Spike hater! And you know the sorts of folks I'm talking about!!

[next_to_normal]

Where the soul comes to matter is that when Buffy comes back, it's revealed that his possession of her is a stronger love than some of the loves that are actually more noble (honoring promises, wanting to be the sort of person who could be treated as a man). His loves are ranked improperly. His good loves are there, and are really good. But he wants a lesser good more than the higher good. But it's still a mistake to say that he wasn't operating out of good motivations earlier. They just aren't the whole truth about him. As he learns. And seeks to remedy with the getting of the soul.

That right there. I've tried explaining many times, and in many different ways, how I can think season 5 Spike didn't really need a soul but season 6 Spike did. And I think you just did it. :)

[owenthurman.livejournal.com]

In this case, you are a Kantian and I'm a Thomist.

Funny, I always thought of it as a Behaviorist versus Freudian issue more than Kant and Aquinas, but you do have a point.

[2maggie2.livejournal.com]

ha ha. We all divide the world in a way that's advantageous to our POV. And I'm never fair to the other half.

[stormwreath.livejournal.com]

if it means anything to you

I'm afraid I've only studied Aquinas for his influence on political thought, not pure philosophy or ethics, and I know nothing about Kant. So your post was fascinating but using unfamiliar concepts for me...

And my usual first port-of-call in such cases - Wikipedia's pages on Thomism and Kant - were worse than useless because instead of giving a nice, clear layman's summary of their theories they launchesd into the most abstruse and long-winded details imaginable, using terminology and concepts that only a philosophy graduate could understand. It was much the same when I tried to get my head round Existentialism after Joss wrote 'The Chain'.

But anyway...

That's a move up the ladder of love that lots of people with souls fail to make

I think my problem here is that your argument depends on the soul not really mattering. That it helps Spike to be good, by letting him get his priorities straight, but it's not essential. Now, in real life, I think that's a perfectly good philosophy and if it weren't for the fact that I don't believe in the soul I'd agree with you 100%. :-)

But in the Buffyverse, souls have an objective reality - we actually see Angel's disembodied soul on screen a few times - and I simply think it would be bad storytelling if it had no significant effect on the owner after all. My preferred reading of Spike's soulquest in S6 and his self-sacrifice in S7 are that they were a triumphant and heroic part of his character arc, not an ironic irrelevance...

[2maggie2.livejournal.com]

Suffice it to say that the presumption that the measure of moral goodness is the altruism/selfishness ratio is due to the widespread influence of one moral philosopher (Kant), but there are other possible understandings of moral life which would deny that sort of dichotomy. It might have been inadvertent, but Buffy's trajectory really is a pretty good critique of Kant. Spike's moral progress really does fit this alternative paradigm (some mix of Plato and Aristotle, which is quite compatible with Thomas). And the third major paradigm, consequentialism, is represented by Giles. So either intuitively or deliberately, Joss has set up a pretty good laboratory for thinking about the competing paradigms.

I don't think I argued that the soul doesn't matter. My complaint is that to say the soul matters because without it good is not possible is to really really stretch our credulity about what Spike was up to from Intervention through, say, Flooded. So there has to be a more complex reason for why the soul matters. Preferably one that does not make it an "ironic irrelevance" because like you, I think the getting of the soul is a triumphant and heroic part of Spike's arc.

I just deleted a long reflection on all of this. It didn't fit the space. But the upshot is that I'm not sure you can reconcile the way the soul works in Angel's story with the way the soul work's in Spike's story without doing violence to at least one of their stories. That's either just a reflection of how two moral paradigms play out in a way that is at odds with one another. Spike follows this path that I'm labelling Thomistic; Angel is more neatly explained in a Kantian paradigm. The paradigms are incompatible so the way the soul works is incompatible. Or it's a reflection of the fact that what really matters to Joss is not the details of how Angel and Spike's story can be reconciled, but how their stories mesh with Buffy's.

The big story I think that's being told is pretty simple. Buffy needs to reconcile with her shadow self, the source of her power and exuberance in life, but also quite dangerous. The souled vampire represents a mirror of the hybrid of goodness and strength that the slayer has naturally, but still needs to reconcile. So her internal reconiliation is traced out in her two affairs with vampires and their status vis a vis that "soul". In her first relationship she attempted a union with that darker self by sleeping with Angel, which had the unhappy effect of costing Angel his soul, and rendering him an unfit companion for her. Also quite traumatic. Buffy pulls back from her darker self and tries to fit in with the human world (Riley), but that ultimately doesn't address the deep issues she needs to work with. So in Into the Woods, she begins her necessary journey into the dark which points her straight at Spike. Spike is at that point quite dark, but he's got that weird love thing going plus the chip and that makes it possible for her to enter into a relationship with her. It goes badly, of course, because without a soul he's not a fit companion cause (again) you need a souled vampire to mirror the light/dark of the slayer. Ah -- but this time Buffy's sexual affair with a vampire does not cost him his soul. On the contrary the result of the sexual affair is that the vampire goes out to get a soul. Buffy and her newly ensouled vampire spend a year working on trust, forgiveness, and reconciliation (so that the badness in Spuffy prior to season 7 becomes a vehicle for really working out all the angst of Bangel) and voila -- we have a slayer who is at peace with the shadow self which is the source of her power and also necessary to her if she is to be fully alive. Now she has something worth sharing with others, and onto the slayer empowerment spell, using the scythe that she explicitly says she would not have had were it not for Spike. That's the poetry of it. And for Joss I think poetry trumps everything else.

[stormwreath.livejournal.com]

You should maybe try and get this published somewhere. :-)

Your idea of Spike&Angel versus Buffy as a mirror was an "oh yes, of course!" moment for me, since I'd never really realised the utter parallelism of "vampire with a soul" :: "human with a demon" before. Quite blind of me, I know...

A missing observation

[2maggie2.livejournal.com]

The deleted section had the explanation about why the soul matters for Spike's journey within the context of his own paradigm. I think of it as conscience -- faculty by which we can see what's objectively good and evil. Without the soul, Spike has an inchoate (and unusual for a vampire) desire for the good that goes from latent to active when he meets Buffy. He does pretty well in late season 5 because he's got Buffy as a role model, and an internal desire to win her respect (or to be the sort of person who would deserve her respect if she were around to give it). And also a few good motives of his own (attaching his well-being to her well-being). But when the role model goes south, as she does after her resurrection, he falls into the gutter with her. (A fall that is amped by his choice to prefer the possession of Buffy over the desire to be respected by Buffy). I think the bathroom scene forces Spike to see that having Buffy as a role model is not enough, and that he's also failing in his desire to secure his well-being (which again, is an important part of his well-being) presumably because he's just clueless about how to do that. If we think of the soul as delivering some extra sense for discerning good and evil, he's right that it's essential if he wants to have a shot at getting where he wants to go -- which would be to be someone with full agency, or ability to discern for himself what's right and wrong rather than trying to blindly follow a wildly gyrating compass. He probably doesn't understand it that way. More just the gut reaction that it's all fallen apart, and he's not who he wants to be, and maybe even that they are pulling each other down in a way that is totally quashing the effulgence that was the source of the attraction in the first place. So he goes off to get the soul without fully knowing why it's necessary. But that's actually exactly how moral progress works in this paradigm. We learn about where we are going as we go there, in a journey launched by an inchoate desire for something, but a real sense of adventure in that we are going to be changed into something and we are going to be in possession of something that we could not have defined or understood when we started. That Spike is all about the self-surrender to something more is part of why he fits this paradigm so well.

Re: A missing observation

[ms-scarletibis.livejournal.com]

You know, I almost missed the Buffy/Angel and Buffy/Spike mirror thing. I think that deserves a post all of its own. Brava.

You mentioned "effulgent" here, and I was wondering...Do you think William's poem (though shown in its entirety at the end of both series) was a self-fulfilling prophecy? Am I crazy?


"My soul is wrapped in harsh repose;
Midnight descends in raven-colored clothes.
But soft...behold!
A sunlight beam
Cutting a swath of glimmering gleam.
My heart expands,
'Tis grown a bulge in it
Inspired by your beauty--
Effulgent."

I'd write about it myself but one, no one cares what I have to say really, and two, you're insanely fantastic at making points.

Re: A missing observation

[2maggie2.livejournal.com]

Thanks -- and I expect I'll put up a post on the mirror thing in the next day or two.

Not crazy at all, I don't think. For sure, "effulgent" is the key word to Spike's whole story. If he wrote that whole poem in FFL, then yes it's at least foreshadowing. But I actually think that the poem in NFA is mostly new except for the last four lines. The first five lines are better than the last four and better than the stuff we heard in LMPTM. And I like the idea that having actually experienced his journey to effulgence, Spike was in a better position to write about it movingly. And retaining the last four lines is a poetic statement about his life as a whole, because without those four lines, he'd not have lived the life that delived the five first lines.

You should write about it though! It could totally go either way. And there's no way that too much can be said about "effulgent".

Re: A missing observation

[ms-scarletibis.livejournal.com]

Okay, you convinced me--I did :D

Re: A missing observation

[2maggie2.livejournal.com]

Yay!!!