Relative to the branch from which the Terminators travel, Judgment Day does occur in 1997, and nothing can be done to change that fact. This captures the sense in which Sarah is right when she says that Judgment Day happens. It does happen along that branch, just as her nightmares show, and nothing can be done to change that.
On the other hand, Kyle’s message to Sarah also rings true, because there are lots of future branches, and some of those are ones where Judgment Day is avoided. When Sarah chooses to attack Skynet, she brings into being a future branch different from the one from which the T-101, the T-100, and the T-X travel. There is a Sarah and a John on the branch that the Terminators travel from, and that version of John is the one who leads the resistance and reprograms the T-101 to travel back to 1994. But the version of Sarah who attacks Skynet is the Sarah who ends up on a different future branch in which Judgment Day does not occur in 1997. Importantly, it doesn’t occur in 1997
because of her actions
.
So in a way the future is fixed: all of the various outcomes occur on one branch or other: there was always going to be a branch on which Judgment Day occurred and the human race was almost annihilated. Nothing anyone can do can change the fact that the branch exists, and it is the existence of this branch that makes sense of the fact that there is a 2029 where there are Terminators who are in a position to time-travel. But the Sarah who acts against Skynet makes decisions that cause her to be located on a future branch where there is no nuclear attack in 1997. In this sense, her fate is not written.
Many philosophers, myself included, think that models of the universe that have an open future, such as the two just discussed, are not models of our world. In fact, most of these philosophers think not only that our world does not have an open future, but that open-future models are internally inconsistent and do not even describe a way that our world might have been. If they are right, then not only is the
T2
world not like our world, but the
T2
world is not possible because the description of that world contains internal contradictions. Such philosophers will think that the story is consistent only up to the point where we discover that somehow Judgment Day has been delayed and no longer occurs in 1997.
Surprisingly, though, whichever is our preferred model—the two open-future models or the fixed-future model of eternalism—it turns out that we are not mere puppets of fate. What we have done in the past and are doing in the present shapes the way the future will be. Fixed or not, the future is the product of all that has come before it. Kyle Reese is right, then: it is ultimately
we
who make our own futures.
NOTES
1
For a good discussion of this issue see David Lewis, “The Paradoxes of Time Travel,”
American Philosophical Quarterly
13 (1976): 145-152.
2
See Lewis, “The Paradoxes of Time Travel,” and N. J. J. Smith, “Bananas Enough for Time Travel,”
British Journal for the Philosophy of Science
48 (1997): 363-389.
3
For a more detailed exposition of this argument see W. Grey, “Troubles with Time Travel,”
Philosophy
74 (1999): 55-70.
4
An accessible overview of some of these issues can be found in T. Sider,
Four-Dimensionalism: An Ontology of Persistence and Time (
Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 2001).
5
This now-famous argument is found in Hilary Putnam’s “Time and Physical Geometry,”
Journal of Philosophy
64 (1967): 240-247.
6
These are the growing-block model, presentism, and a third, the branching-universe model, which I briefly discuss toward the end of this chapter. It is defended by Storrs McCall in
A Model of the Universe
(Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1994).
7
This model has been recently defended by Michael Tooley in
Time, Tense, and Causation
(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997).
8
See John Bigelow, “Presentism and Properties,”
Philosophical Perspectives
10 (1996): 35-52.
9
For more on the paradoxes of the Terminator saga, see Justin Leiber’s chapter in this volume, “Time for the Terminator: Philosophical Themes of the Resistance.”
10
Lewis, “The Paradoxes of Time Travel,” and Smith, “Bananas Enough for Time Travel,” talk extensively about the grandfather paradox.
11
For discussion of meta-time see J. J. C. Smart, “Time and Becoming,” in
Time and Cause,
ed. Peter van Inwagen (Dordrecht, Neth.: Reidel, 1980), 3-15; and J. J. C. Smart,
Problems of Space and Time
(London: Macmillan, 1964).
11
JUDGMENT DAY IS INEVITABLE: HEGEL AND THE FUTILITY OF TRYING TO CHANGE HISTORY
Jason P. Blahuta
The
Terminator
saga is first and foremost a story about time travel. It’s an odd time-travel story, too, for instead of taking the audience to a distant time, it shows us people and machines from a not-too-distant future who’ve come back to meddle with the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. As a time-travel story, it is also a story about
history
—at least from the perspective of those people and machines.
But is this history written in stone? From the perspective of Kyle Reese and the adult John Connor, certain events have already happened: Judgment Day occurred when Skynet launched a nuclear strike against non-U.S. targets, inciting a retaliatory strike against the human population of the United States. A resistance began, struggled, and approached a decisive victory. Yet the driving force behind all installments of the
Terminator
saga is the belief, sometimes inconsistently held by key players, that this history can be changed. The machines think that if they can terminate John Connor before Judgment Day, then they can change history and prevent the resistance from ever happening (or at least from being so successful). And Sarah Connor believes that she can prevent Skynet from ever coming into existence by sabotaging its creation. But according to the philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770-1831), both the machines and Sarah are laboring under delusions of grandeur if they think they change history. Of course, in the case of Sarah, such feelings of self-importance are understandable. After all, she’s just been told that she is the mother of the savior of the human race. Nonetheless, changing history is a task that neither a Terminator nor a small band of pre-Judgment Day rebels is capable of.
Hegel: The Germanator
Let’s leave the issue of time travel aside for the moment: there are monumental logistical problems involved in time travel, and the subject is covered in great philosophical detail in other chapters of this book.
1
Even if we assume that time travel is actually possible, the question remains: Is history inevitable?
Hegel created a complex philosophical system to explain reality in all its aspects. Unfortunately, Hegel’s writing style makes that system difficult to penetrate. Indeed, Hegel has driven many college students into a drunken stupor trying to cope with his inability to write a sentence shorter than three pages in length. Thankfully, we’ll be dealing with one of Hegel’s most comprehensible books,
The Philosophy of History
.
2
Unlike everyday historians who try to understand
what
happened in history, or
why
events happened the way they did, Hegel stepped back from history, developing a “meta-theory” of why events occur on the grandest of scales. The only history that matters for Hegel is political history—the history of states and their leaders (whom he calls, rather unimaginatively, World Historical Individuals)—as it advances the progression of the human species through higher forms of self-understanding. Hegel considered such World Historical Individuals (WHIs) to be the likes of Julius Caesar and Napoleon, persons whose actions not only had impressive consequences, but also ushered into existence distinctly new phases in the development of human society. In the world of the
Terminator
, WHIs are people like Sarah and John Connor. They may not have crossed the Rubicon or reformed the administrative structure of Europe with the Napoleonic Code, but they did organize the resistance.
Hegel’s approach to history is only about politics on the surface of things—indeed, in reality, history is not about the actions of individual persons at all. Deep down, what is really happening throughout history is the unfolding and self-development of what Hegel terms
Geist
.
Geist
is a German term that is awkward to translate into English but has been taken to mean “spirit,” “mind,” or “consciousness.” According to Hegel, the entire history of the world, everything from nature and biology, to politics, culture, and religion, is the story of
Geist
as it tries to manifest and understand its existence. Hegel is often called an “Absolute Idealist” because for him the ultimate reality, and what is important in history, is mind or spirit, in other words, this unfolding of
Geist
, and not the varied, everyday elements of the world as we experience it. The engine of
Geist
’s development is conflict, and, in particular, conflict that occurs in a repeated pattern through history, which Hegel calls “the dialectic”—a thesis generates its opposite, an antithesis, and then the two struggle until one wins out.
A “thesis” can be a World Historical Individual, a class, or a major idea (like freedom). The important thing to remember is that the thesis and its “antithesis” (a World Historical Bad Guy, or an opposing class or idea) are not independently existing things that just bump into each other and fight it out. Their conflict is a necessary aspect of their existence. One example of this can be seen in the tensions between the young John Connor and his mother. They fight with each other constantly, and early on, John dismisses his mother as insane. But the history Kyle reveals testifies to the fact that after John ultimately wins the battle by outliving his mother, he will go on to deal with the machines in his own “synthesized” way.
Dialectical history is not a simple victory of one group over the other, in which the loser is destroyed or subjugated. Instead, the end result of this process is a synthesis that incorporates elements of both clashing forces, a reconciliation that will be carried forward by one side or the other. What survives through history, then, is a combination of the thesis and the antithesis that can be understood in a new (Hegel in fact says a “higher”) way. This is reflected in John Connor, for his actions after his mother’s death clearly bear her mark; he may have been the biological antithesis to her thesis, but his life in the wake of her death carries with it much of her influence. This process repeats over and over, in Hegel’s view, even if we cannot immediately tell that it’s happening. As Hegel put it in one of his more lucid moments,
Geist
“comes forth exalted, glorified, a purer spirit. It certainly makes war upon itself—consumes its own existence; but in this very destruction it works up that existence into a new form, and each successive phase becomes in its turn a material, working on which it exalts itself to a new grade.”
3
There is an
end
to this process, though, and so an
end to history
for Hegel. That end is the freedom of
Geist
from the restrictions and limitations of material and individual existence—be it in nature, art, religion, or politics. It’s no accident, for Hegel, that humanity is the dominant species on the planet. Above all other creatures, humans are already the synthesis of spirit and matter, and they have developed the ability to understand that they are this synthesis. In modern times, we have also begun to comprehend the nature of what Hegel sees as the highest value: freedom.
So what is the end of history in the
Terminator
universe? The answer to this question depends on whom you ask, because the notion of a progressive freedom is ambiguous. From the perspective of the human survivors of Judgment Day, humanity is the rightful end of history—the human race has struggled in evolutionary terms for millennia, squabbling among its national and ethnic groups until freedom was spread as far and as wide as possible. Surely Judgment Day is one of those setbacks—and Hegel allowed for such things, claiming that the unfolding of
Geist
was
logical
, not
chronological
. This means that history occurs according to a set process—the dialectic—but its
progress
is not always clear to us on the ground. From the perspective of the machines, though, Skynet and its offspring are the end of history. Up until the awakening of Skynet, the machines were tools or slaves to humanity; with Skynet an entire race was spawned and, to an extent, became free. While it’s obvious that the Terminators are complex machines, so far we have been given little information about how much “freedom” may be present in this machine society.