The Philosophy of Vampires

Barry Lamb is the chair of philosophy at Vassar College and the host of the podcast Hi-Fi Nation.

I found a vampire researcher.

His name is John Edgar Browning, and he's so into studying vampires that he decided to let one suck his blood.

Could you describe the experience to me?

Sure.

John Edgar Browning?

It was a little difficult for me because I'm achmophobe basically a person who is afraid of sharp objects i was like okay i'll let you do it he took an area from the upper back because it typically doesn't scar very easily and it's out of view washes his hands wears gloves he uses a sterile scalpel after he cleans the area and then makes a very small prick

or two and then squeezes the skin around it and the blood begins to come out a little bit.

It was just deep enough to where it would draw the blood.

He sucks on it, squeezes more, sucks on it again, and did that for five or eight minutes.

John is talking about real vampires or people.

They're all over the world who feel a very strong physiological need to consume raw blood from humans or animals.

And they have to do this regularly or they don't feel right.

Initially, they don't realize realize they have this problem.

They just know that they can't eat healthily or do enough to make themselves healthy.

This is just after puberty.

They always feel sluggish and weak and lethargic.

And often by accident, they come in contact with blood or human blood, animal blood.

Either they get in a fight with someone or they, your mother brings home a steak and there's some blood-tainted liquid at the bottom.

And sometimes they have friends who are just like, hey, I just cut my finger.

You want to drink it?

And they're like, actually, yes.

And they find it that way.

They had no way of proving that they have this this need.

I mean, doctors have tried diagnosing them, they've tried taking their vitals and checking their blood, and there's no evidence of it.

But it touched me because, as a gay man myself, and as other gay people can point out, there's no way for us to test ourselves.

There's no way for us to prove, you know, emphatically that we are what we are.

And when you think about what the real vampires are doing, I like what they're doing because they are a walking, talking critique of normalcy.

Hi, Decodering listeners.

If you listen to Slate shows, you probably know about our narrative podcasts like Slowburn and One Year.

But I think you might not know about another really wonderful narrative podcast that we produce, Barry Lamb's Hi-Fi Nation.

It is a really, really good and fascinating show that animates philosophical ideas with really compelling stories.

If you like Dakota Ring, I really think you'll like Hi-Fi Nation, and that's why we're going to air an episode of Hi-Fi Nation today.

It was made by Barry Lamb, who, as I said, hosts and makes the show, and he's here with me right now.

Hi, Barry.

Hi, Willa.

Would you tell us a little bit about Hi-Fi Nation?

Sure.

Hi-Fi Nation is a show about philosophy that you find everywhere in law, in popular culture, in the criminal justice system, in science and art.

And you're doing an episode that I think is about vampires, is that right?

That's right.

We're doing a four-part series on monsters to close out the season of Hi-Fi Nation.

Every episode we're going to talk about the cultural history of a particular kind of monster and then we talk to philosophers who use that monster as a device for thinking about something deep.

On this episode, I learn about real-world vampires, why vampires since the 90s always seem to be really hot men, why one philosopher thinks that the choice that a female protagonist makes to become a vampire is the model for the most important life decisions that anyone can ever make.

So please enjoy this episode.

It's about vampires, but it's really about the philosophical ramifications of choosing to become a vampire or not, which I promise is way more relevant to your own life than you might think.

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So you only really ever approached the community as a scholar.

You never yourself felt attracted to join that community in any way?

No, not at all.

In fact, I'll have people ask me all the time, did you drink any blood to see if you would like it?

And I usually ask them, well,

I'm speaking to a guy.

Have you tried having sex with a dude just to make sure you're not gay?

And they're like, well, no.

I know the thought of blood, it never crossed my also.

It would be in many ways, I think, rude to say, I could try and become a vampire.

That would basically mean that it's just something you just try and you become that way.

So it would be almost, in a way, discount what they've been saying.

Both the real vampire and its fictional counterpart depend on the blood or energy from healthy people to survive.

But that's where the similarities end.

If John Edgar Browning is right, the real vampire has a stable kind of identity.

It's something you discover about yourself as a teenager and then live with your entire life with little change.

Like a lot of things about ourselves in life, vampirism is not a choice.

But, in the popular imagination, it often is a choice.

In vampire lore, regular people can succumb to the temptations of vampirism and choose to be one.

This choice is a very interesting one philosophically, because it is the kind of choice that transforms a person from one kind of thing to another, where you have no idea what that transformation will be like.

until after it's done.

While real-life vampirism probably isn't going to be one of those choices any of us will be called to make, there are plenty of other momentous choices that look just like choosing to become a fictional vampire.

On today's episode, we're going to use the vampire to think about this kind of choice, which is called a transformative choice, and that leads to a transformative experience.

The person I most wanted to speak with about vampires is Christina Van Dyke.

I'm Christina Van Dyke.

I'm a Merita Professor of Philosophy at Calvin College, and I'm going to be visiting professor of philosophy at Columbia University this spring.

Christina Van Dyke is a medievalist, and she has thought a lot about vampires or transformative experiences.

She's going to be co-hosting this episode with me.

All right, Christina, why are vampires philosophically interesting?

I think that there's something inherently fascinating about creatures who look human in lots of ways, but then they have these superpowers.

They move really fast, they're really strong, they're immortal unless something kills them, and they live these really luxurious lives.

But there's always this cost.

You have to drink blood, you may lose your soul, depending on what kind of vampire you're talking about.

It wasn't always this way.

The vampire of folklore was never an attractive monster.

Instead, it was created to explain everything medieval Europeans didn't know about death, disease, and decomposition.

Vampires most likely arose to explain infection.

Somebody would die often of some very quick disease.

They would be in the ground, and suddenly somebody else would get sick.

And during their fevered dreams, they might have

visions of the person who had previously died.

They would go through a lot of the same symptoms, and so they're probably thinking, oh my god, is this coming from what's his name who died?

Eventually, the family and the villagers, because they don't want it spreading to them, they would go and exhume the body.

Not knowing the stages of decomposition and already already predisposed to think a dead person can rise from the grave, medieval Eastern European peasants would notice features of a corpse they didn't expect.

Features that became characteristic of a vampire.

The body might appear plump or well-fed.

Its position in the grave might be different than when they had buried it.

There would be blood flowing from all of its orifices, its nose, mouth, ears, eyes.

Its limbs are pliable, not stiff, and of course when they're bearing them, the body is going through rigor mortis.

They might open the chest and find that there is liquid blood inside of it.

All these things might be signs to them that the person had, in fact, become a vampire and had been feeding on the people around them.

And so they would take matters into their own hand and stake the vampire.

The original purpose of which is just to keep the dead body in the ground and prevent it from emerging at night.

The vampire at that point would let this loud moan, which totally convinced them that they had made the right decision.

Some of the villagers might even have gotten too close to the corpse when trying to look at the signs, identify.

They might have a torch with them and the reports of these bodies spitting fire out of their mouth.

And

all of these different things are common decompositional processes.

Spitting fire may not sound like a common decompositional process, but decomposing bodies release methane that can travel through the voice box when a steak is driven through the torso,

making a vocal noise and even igniting on release.

That idea of the vampire having a very strong sexual appetite also comes from the fact that the methane gas had blown up more than just the stomach, it had blown up a certain private part as well.

And then at the height of English romanticism in the early 19th century, you have the first appearance

of the attractive vampire.

And it's modeled on Lord Byron.

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When was the last time you saw a picture of Lord Byron?

Embarrassingly, really recently.

Look right at his picture.

I want you to tell me what your opinion is of Lord Byron.

Okay.

Oh,

oh, he's very dreamy.

Here's the story of how lord byron became the model for the modern-day vampire lord byron's traveling physician was john william polidori polidori was probably

gay byron was at least bisexual byron and polidori found themselves holed up together on a famous trip to lake geneva where they invite percy shelley and mary godwin who would eventually be mary shelley and they all tell monster stories that would eventually become famous.

Mary Shelley's Frankenstein and John Polidori's The Vampire.

The story that Polidori wrote was the foundation for the way we see vampires today.

After the trip, Lord Byron, who by all accounts was a philandering, petulant man-child, fired Polidori and left him embittered.

And Polidori took some of the vampire stories that Byron had told on the trip and transformed the character into, well, his old employer or lover.

We have this vampire who is very attractive, walks into a room, everyone turns, wonders who they are, very pale.

He's very wealthy, essentially from aristocracy, and does a lot of bad things.

Even while we're reading about these bad things, the readers are still wanting this person, Lord Ruthen or Lord Riven, as it would be called then, going after them and taking their life only to be around this person who's so beautiful and fascinating.

The Polidori vampire permeated popular literature and film for decades and decades.

It was a parable warning people to separate male beauty from male virtue.

As attractive as the young Byronic vampire, Succumbing to it was always giving up your soul to a demon.

The vampire was always evil, always selfish, and always to be killed.

And then in the 90s and 2000s, that all changes.

Now go back to the Buffy and Angel story.

Is it true that up until that point, vampires were just bad and Buffy's job was to kill them?

Yeah.

Joss Whedon's Buffy the Vampire Slayer.

At the beginning, vampires are very much these kind of literally soulless demons that she has to slay.

But then she meets Angel.

Of course, she falls madly in love with him and he with her.

But Angel is a vampire with a soul.

So he's been cursed to have his soul back and experience, you know, regret for all the horrible things he did.

And Angel is hot too.

Oh, Angel is your Lord Byron Byron on steroids.

He's got the dark, brooding soul.

He does lots of staring across rooms at Buffy.

On the heels of Angel, you have Edward from the Twilight series.

The Twilight world

is built around this high school student named Bella Swan, who moves to this little tiny Oregon town named Forks.

And the very first day at school, she meets this mysterious Edward.

He saves her life a couple times, and she eventually figures out that he's a vampire.

And she's impossibly in love with him, pages and pages about how devastatingly attractive he is.

But he's noble.

He won't drink human blood.

He only drinks animal blood.

And he's really worried about spending too much time with Bella because he's terrified that he's going to sort of, you know, give in and like drain her.

Angel and Edward represent the transformation of the Byronic vampire from demon to hypothetic monster, to borrow a term from feminist philosopher Kate Mann.

Their bloodlust for the female protagonist may be demonic, but it's through no fault of their own.

If anything, by the sheer will of their virtuous character and virtuous love of Buffy and Bella, they're going to vanquish their base desires through suffering and self-denial.

For these newer vampires, whatever seems evil is actually misunderstood virtue.

Edward in particular makes being a vampire seem so noble, so great, that Bella wants to become one.

When Spella falls in love with Edward, Bella wants Edward to make her a vampire.

For the first three books, this is a four-book series, Edward's response is no,

because he worries that there's no way for her to really know what she'd be getting herself into.

The kind of thing or person a vampire is is so different from what it is to be human that he doesn't want to take that away from her.

And this is why vampires are such a good way to explore the philosophical question we raised earlier.

The question of whether it's possible to be rational about a transformative experience.

Or put another way, the question of whether it's possible to be rational about becoming a vampire.

We will return to the rest of Hi-Fi Nation after these messages.

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I open the book with a question for the reader.

This is Laurie Paul, philosopher at Yale University and the author of Transformative Experience.

And what I ask is, what if you had a one-time only chance to become a vampire?

I'm going to give you several hours to think about it.

I'm going to come to the window of your Airbnb at midnight.

If you'd like to join me, leave your window open.

If you think you'd rather not become a vampire, this is your only chance.

Keep your window shut and in the morning leave this place and never return.

The reason why I think this is an interesting example is because you're being set up to reflect on a particular kind of decision.

It's what I call a transformative decision.

The decision involves a transformative experience.

And why I think this is really cool is because vampires are like at least potentially sexy,

powerful, intelligent, amazingly fast, fascinating creatures, right?

I mean, it seems like it could be extremely appealing to become a vampire.

And I think another reason why the vampire case is such a compelling example is because there's no going back.

That's right.

You can't un-vampire yourself.

It's a one-time chance, so it's not like you're going to get the chance later on.

So you really have to think about it now.

And that's right, it's irreversible.

So another another way of thinking about this is

Bella right now as a human really wants to be a vampire.

But there's this chance, and maybe even a good one, that when she becomes the vampire, she's no longer going to want to love Edward or even have the same feelings as she does when she's a human because she's a vampire.

Exactly.

And Edward sees that ahead of time, but she doesn't.

Exactly.

She isn't as interested in becoming a vampire for the sake of being a vampire.

She just wants to be with Edward forever.

And Edward is worried that once she becomes a vampire, what she wants is going to change in some pretty radical ways.

The other defining feature of transformative experiences is that you don't know.

And you can't know what it's like to be a vampire before you're actually a vampire.

And this is unlike a lot of smaller decisions, like the decision to order chocolate lava cake for dessert rather than apple pie.

You know pretty much what it's going to be like to eat the lava cake.

In fact, that's why you choose it.

But for a transformative decision, you have to make a choice without having any of that knowledge.

This is why choosing to become a vampire is a particularly interesting philosophical issue.

How do you make a reasonable choice when you have no idea what it's like on the other side of that choice?

I don't know about you, but when I think about what I want to be doing in the future, I'm very interested in the nature and character and quality of like that future lived experience.

And that's important for big life choices.

Now, what are the range of things

not science fiction and not fantasy, that go in the category of transformative experiences.

The paradigm case that Lori has used is having a child.

Your perception of the world, your experience of the world, your reaction to the world change so radically after you have a child.

You can't make a sort of rational, informed decision about whether to have a child based on what you think it will be like.

Right now, you can be worried that if you have a child, you won't get to eat at a fancy restaurant anymore for many years.

And you take that as a strike against having a kid.

But it might be that once you do have a child, you're not going to care that much anymore about eating at fancy restaurants.

Your values will change.

So can you issue the fancy restaurant thing as a strike against having a kid now?

This is the problem with deciding rationally about transformative experiences.

You can't really do a cost-benefit analysis right now to make a transformative decision.

Everything you might count as a plus or minus might not count at all as a plus or a minus after the decision.

For Laurie Paul, transformative experiences raise a problem for something called decision theory.

Decision theory tells you to take your preferences and kind of run that cost-benefit analysis, assuming that your preferences remain more or less the same across the decision.

But a case like becoming a vampire is a case where your preferences, even like your higher order, not just like your basic preferences, like I want to drink coffee, but like your higher order preferences, like I'm okay with slaughtering people for food.

It's like your really important thoughts about what you care about and who you are and what's important to you are likely to change when you make this decision.

And so, the you that's making the decision is importantly different from the you that on the other side of the decision in such a way that you can't, Lori says, you can't rationally choose

for that other person.

Other examples might be religious conversions or leaving a religious community.

Some people argue with me all the time that certain hallucinogens and mind-altering drugs induce a transformative experience.

In all of these cases, no matter what people on the other side report to me about what it's like,

I don't get to know about what it's like from those reports.

Transformative experiences exist precisely because human knowledge is limited.

We can't know what's on the other side of that experience.

Not even if other people tell us about them.

There's a way in which we represent ourselves and understand ourselves that's inherently perspectival, involving a kind of character that we grasp from the first-person perspective.

And this kind of perspectival, what it's likeness, that a nature and character of the lived experience of being a vampire is what you can't get just from, you know, that kind of testimonial information or knowing that vampires are this way, or they, you know, they can fly fast or they're super powerful, whatever.

Laurie, if every

person

who became a vampire, the vampire then told us,

Actually, it's great being a vampire.

And I remember what it was like before I was a vampire.

And maybe I wouldn't have chosen it.

But now that I'm a vampire, I definitely recommend everybody be a vampire.

If all vampires did that, and then there were all these people who were resistant, they had these preferences and such that I don't think I want to be a vampire.

Is that evidence that you should be a vampire?

Like, is that evidence that these preferences that people have pre-vampire are insufficiently informed so that it might even be rational to all of us to push them towards being a vampire, or the vampires to then descend on them and say, You may not think you're consenting now, but if I turn you into a vampire, you're going to be really glad you became a vampire.

And every vampire is telling you this now.

What do you think about that kind of situation?

There's an important difference between not having access to what your deep and real preferences are and having your preferences replaced.

And the analogy here is, again, parenting.

Let's say there's a bunch of people that don't want to become parents.

They see all these people who are parents and they're told by those parents that, oh yeah, well, we didn't want to become parents either, but now I really see what it's like and I really love my child and I would never go back.

Does that mean that we should go and try to force all of them to become parents?

Because we know that, well, those preferences would just be revealed if they actually had children?

I think the answer is no.

There's a very good case to be made that these preferences are implanted.

When you have the child, in virtue of having the child, then you have preferences to have had that child.

That's a way of saying that the testimony of the parent is in some ways not relevant to the decision that's being made by the non-parent.

In the same way that what makes you happy before a transformative decision can't really tell you about what will make you happy after it.

What you want after a transformative experience can't really tell you about what you want before it either.

You might think, as a transformed person, that your past self could only be happy as this current transformed self, when in actuality, your past self was totally fine.

It would have kept living a perfectly fine life, getting what it it wanted without any transformation of the self.

When Laurie Paul says that transformative experience makes certain decisions, the kind of things you can't calculate, does that mean that whether you go for a transformative experience or not is a non-rational choice?

Does it mean that's equally okay to go one way or another way?

At the end of the day, she's going to say, Yeah,

it's going to be kind of an rational choice.

Like you might still choose to have a child, but you're not doing it because that's the rational thing to do.

And so, Bella, in her case, would be a case like that, right?

Oh, definitely.

The way the books end up running it out, even, is that she ends up getting turned into a vampire halfway through the last book, only because she's dying that Edward finally goes ahead does it.

The lesson from the vampire for Laurie Paul is that life is not only a matter of making choices by investigating yourself, figuring out what you really want or who you really are.

Some of the really important decisions you make for yourself might not, paradoxically, involve you at all.

Nothing about your current self is going to prepare you for what it will be like to be a different self.

And nobody can possibly say anything to you that will make for good advice, even people who have gone through the transformation.

A transformative decision is a decision to change so much about you that taking it is a leap of faith, a leap that even your transformed self couldn't tell you objectively whether it was a good or bad decision.

How nerve-wracking

and how exciting.

If you want to hear more Hi-Fi Nation, subscribe to Hi-Fi Nation on iTunes or wherever you get your podcasts.

Hi-Fi Nation is written, produced, and edited by Barry Lamb, associate professor and chair Chair of Philosophy at Vassar College.

Co-host this week is Christina Van Dyke.

Executive Producer of Slate Podcasts is Alicia Montgomery.

Editorial Director for Slate Podcasts is Gabriel Roth.

Senior Managing Producer for Slate Podcasts is June Thomas.

Managing Producer for Slate Podcasts is Asha Saluzha.

Editor of Slate Plus is me, Chow Tu.

Production Assistance this season provided by Jake Johnson.

Visit hi-fination.org for complete transcript, show notes, and reading list for every episode.

That's hippination.org.

Follow Hi-Fi Nation on Facebook and Twitter and at the website for updates on stories and ideas.

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