The Legend of Zelda and Philosophy_ I Link Therefore I Am - Luke Cuddy [91]
Whether or not he followed his master’s philosophical method, Schopenhauer pushed Kant’s ideas to their limit, and after having rationalized all of the world as a conscious representation, he found the abrupt dark side of man. Schopenhauer taught us that the unknowable, the raw will, has a massive role in life. We can’t understand ourselves only as rational cognizers; we have an obscure nature that shows up at our rational consciousness.
But what can we know about will then? At least that it is free from any possible cause, because causality is part of the problem (the experienced world) and not of the solution (the ‘real reality’). What we cannot know is free because it’s not known. Apart from this, we feel its urge, and we can do nothing about it.
Schopenhauer wrote:
This freedom, however, is transcendental … it does not emerge in the appearance but is present only insofar as we abstract from the appearance and all its forms in order to arrive at that which, outside all time, is to be thought of as the inner essence of the human being in himself. (Prize Essay on the Freedom of the Will, p. 86)
I am my will, and this will is free because it cannot really be known. So I don’t know myself. But we cannot have everything. I am free as long as we mean the right thing with this expression: I want what I want, and not something else; I’m free to act conforming to my will. The only thing I am not free to do is to will what I don’t will. But carefully looking, that would be a bit uncomfortable.
A Link to the Present
Let’s go back to Hyrule and try to understand what would happen in loading an episode of The Legend of Zelda into a Schopenhauerian Console. We have seen that Schopenhauer split consciousness and will. There is the consciously experienced (‘immanent’) world, the ‘really real’ world (‘transcendent’), and the subject that is somehow in between (‘transcendental’).
In playing The Legend of Zelda we can identify all these three aspects. First, Link is a character in Hyrule (immanent to it). He lives at the same level of the game’s other characters, and can be seen as a virtual body of the player. Second, there’s a transcendent will outside Hyrule, the real person’s will playing the game.
Last, there is a bond, a transcendental subject. It is the point of view from which Hyrule exists, the conditions for a real person to enter Hyrule. It’s not a virtual body (Link), but a perspective, a competence the real player has to grasp. The real person is unknown to Hyrule’s characters. He or she accesses the game’s world only squeezing inside Link, becoming Link’s player. In this way his or her will, the will that the player truly is, can have an effect on the game through Link’s actions.
It would be incomplete to talk about Link only as a character, saying that the sentence “I finally defeated Ganon” applies just to Hyrule. It would be also incomplete to say that the player defeated Ganon without any mediator in Hyrule (you can’t beat Ganon without Link doing so too). The representation of Hyrule is connected with the true will of the player. I really manifest my will in the game. Whenever I play, I am Link because my will is Link’s will, and Link is my consciously perceived body in Hyrule.
‘I’ is a link that allows communication between two worlds: the will of the speaker and an expressed intention. And all the kids must learn how to use this word properly. In Zelda there’s something permitting a similar communication. There is an ‘I’ of the game, a role the game requires to approaching ‘the borders’ of Hyrule.
To become Link’s player, the gamer has to respect some constraints, some rules. For example, any gamer has to grasp the alternation of side-scrolling and top-down perspective in The Adventure of