Trials of Faith: ‘Dragon Age: Inquisition’ and Crises of Meaning

“Cast the Chantry aside, and new problems replace old ones. We will learn nothing from history.”

We blink our eyes, unsure as to where we are. Inky fog has enclosed all about, and a great nothingness seems to extend in all directions. We are then brought to our senses with a rush of panic. Finding ourselves all at once in the Fade, the realm of spirits and demons, pursued by the scuttling creatures we later come to recognise as ‘fearlings’. But within the space of this opening scene, there is no sense to be had — only the overwhelming sense of the need to flee. In media res, Dragon Age: Inquisition begins with a literal flight from fear.[i] Though we are not quite yet abandoned, there is a luminous figure calling out to us in warning. Her voice gives us direction — delivers us from this incongruous realm of shifting dust and shadows. We reach out to one we can only see as a saviour, though never do our hands quite meet. Then there is only rubble as we collapse back into reality, into the aftermath of a great cataclysm.

Through the deliberate construction of its narrative, Inquisition does not fully contextualise its opening scene until midway through the game. Our character is defined by a personal discontinuity, a rupture in their memory and their connection to the past. As far as others know, we have fallen out of the Fade, guided by the luminous hands of Andraste (Dragon Age’s messianic figure) herself. Though we know not how we came to be there, we are at once thrown into a world faced with a crisis of meaning, a crisis of which our character forms a singular locus.

The Inquisitor Tarot Cards — Dragon Age: Inquisition

Following our flight from fear, we awaken in a cell, our hands bound and a curious light intermittently emanating from our left palm. It is within this cell that we meet Seeker Cassandra Pentaghast and Sister Leliana, the respective right and left hands of the Divine. No greeting is offered, only the words “Tell me why we shouldn’t kill you know”. At once, an account is demanded, and the price of failure is the loss of one’s life. Yet we have be severed from our past, left with fragments of our passage through a realm of dreams and spirits. We have no answers to give.

Continue reading here on my Medium account.

Sartre and Self: Abolition or Expansion?

Jean-Paul Sartre defines consciousness as nothingness.[i] This is fundamental to his framework of human agency as resting on, or erupting from a metaphysics of absolute freedom. As nothingness, human consciousness cannot be thought of as a substance or an object and can thus have no determinate qualities that can then be regarded as the causes or source of one’s actions. To think such is to be in mauvaise foi, or bad faith[ii] – which is as close to the concept of sin as one can find in Sartre’s philosophical framework/theology.[iii] In this sense, Sartre’s consciousness is entirely ‘for-itself’, wholly distinguished from the objects of the world, the ‘in-itself’.

Likewise, for Sartre action is structurally framed entirely as a modality of nihilation, of negatité.[iv] The world exists as a set of circumstances external to the self. These conditions are positive and substantive – meaning that they are something, they are there. When consciousness acts it injects its own negativity into the world such that it destroys the world as it was when consciousness found it. Action reaches out for something that is not in the world – a nothingness – and negates the world in which such a nothingness exists, bringing it into being.[v] As such, even acts we might consider to be wholly creative or productive prove, at least on Sartre’s account, to be wholly negative.

As nothingness, Sartre’s account seems – at least to me – unable to maintain the presence of a coherent notion of individuality. Assuredly, Sartre’s philosophical outlook is wholly individualistic, premised entirely on the nothingness of an individual consciousness being fundamentally transcendent from the world, and the others it finds within it. Though Sartre makes an attempt at justifying the primacy of the individual, attempting to ground individuation in his picture of our phenomenological experience, I find this wholly unsatisfying. To me, it seems that Sartre repeats (almost entirely without criticism) a naturalised picture of individuation, whereby we find a whole host of assumptions taken as given. The claim that we experience the world as individuals is transposed into a metaphysical picture whereby the world exists as a lump of stuff (a plenum of being) and in which we are by our innate nature a transcendent nothingness that slips itself into the world in order to change it.

Jean-Paul Sartre

I do not take issue with Sartre’s notion of the self as nothingness per se, but find that many of its implications seem to be at odds with his own conclusions. If there is to be no positive content to consciousness, then there seems to be no grounds for differentiation between individuals. As such, the notion that an individual is – by their very nature – utterly distinct both from the world and from each other appears to become untenable. Given that Sartre’s account rests upon the absolute insolubility of individual choice, it seems altogether impossible (if not exceptionally difficult) to defend him from the charges of individualism. One is an absolute agent, totally and completely responsible for one’s own choices, there is no real space within Sartre’s framework to consider the conditions or contexts of one’s own action. These contexts, the facticity of the world, exists only to be nihilated or falsely accused of determining our actions – and thus we return to bad faith.

Bad faith is a multifaceted concept for Sartre, illustrated with a broad array of examples.[vi] Underlying these is the notion that one is in bad faith whenever one abdicates from their own freedom. As such, to refuse to recognise your absolute power to choose is to be in bad faith. We can thereby consider bad faith as consciousness turning its negativity upon itself – attempting to paradoxically nullify its own possibilities.[vii] Bad faith is a form of cannibalism, in which consciousness attempts to falsely limit its own potential, to narrow itself or bind itself to a fixed notion of self.[viii]

If we are to thus think of bad faith – the closest thing to sin in Sartre’s eyes – as a form of reducing the self in light of preconceived notions, then a tension arises with his own account of individuation. Is it not perhaps a pertinent question to ask: isn’t the very notion of individuation itself a form of bad faith?

There seems to me to be little distinction between framing the individual as nothing and framing the individual as everything. The result of such a move would be to rest on a picture of fundamental unity, rather than fundamental division. If we follow this line, does it not become plausible to say that Sartre’s distinction of the individual and world rests entirely upon a pre-conceived notion of the individual?

To collapse so radically the distinction between the self and the world is to say that the self is the world. Not that the self is part of the world, but that self is everything. The notion of self as an isolated entity becomes merely an ideological habit. Just as Sartre critiques a positive notion of the self that sacrifices individual freedom in exchange for a clearly demarcated and absolute individuality, could we not – in the very same spirit of critique – turn back on Sartre’s configuration of the self as an isolated void? There seems no reason to cling to this notion of individuality, no justification to take this total solitude and distinction as the ground of one’s being (or, more accurately, nothingness).[ix]

We thus end up with a position similar to that advocated by Alan Watts in his numerous musings (both textual and aural) on spirituality, religion, and modern life. His position is perhaps best summarised in his text The Book, a title which is avowedly tongue in cheek and appropriately highlights his self-styled image as a self-professed trickster and philosophical entertainer. Within The Book, Watts references the Upanishads, lifting the quote: “That is the Self. That is the real. That art thou!”[x] By this, Watts is specifically referring to collapsing, or at the very least renegotiating, the distinction between self and other, between the individual and the world. With this particular quote, Watts is elucidating a picture of the world wherein there can be no absolute distinction between it and the individual. The ‘that’ is everything, it is every element of existence.

Alan Watts

Now, if we follow this picture and expand the self concept to be completely inclusionary the result is that Sartre’s framework comes to refute itself. As mentioned earlier, Sartre’s account of action is fundamentally premised upon the negation of the world. The self comes to nihilate the state of things as it finds it in order to actualise something else – something that does not yet exist. Sartre is clear that in order to do this, the individual must “posit the actual situation as nothingness”,[xi] he must see the state of things as something that can be transcended or overcome by one’s action. Though Sartre may not maintain this, we could read this need to view the world as nothing as a parallel to the need to recognise one’s own consciousness as nothingness. The structure of the world equally becomes nothing. As such, action becomes a negation of the nothingness of the world, the production of an actuality which can then in turn be negated. As we have seen above, bad faith can – at least partially – be conceived in terms of the attempt to negate one’s own nothingness. If we maintain this parallel between consciousness and the world, it appears that human action itself becomes a form of bad faith. The result is either to abandon bad faith or to abandon Sartre’s account, and perhaps these two conclusions are inseparable.

Sartre may maintain that the nothingness of the world is only thus through the positing activity of consciousness – a point which is meant to establish that the world is only nothing when consciousness acts on it. This in itself raises a further question about the notion of being within Sartre, with how he fundamentally conceives of the world as an actuality, rather than a negativity.

It seems to me that the abolition of the self as a positive entity, an abolition that is made all the more convincing in light of our phenomenological experience, should also prompt further reflection on our notion of individuation. Sartre’s account certain succeeds in the former,[xii] but fails to adequately justify the retention of an individuated self. It seems that we are prompted to ask whether or not we need to abolish the self or expand it? This in itself prompts the further question: are these notions distinct? If so, what is the distinction?

Works Cited

Kirkpatrick, Kate, ‘Is Shame an Emotion?’, The Oxford Philosopher, 2017 <https://theoxfordphilosopher.com/category/theology/> [accessed 9 December 2017]

———, Sartre and Theology (London: Bloomsbury Publishing PLC, 2017)

Sartre, Jean-Paul, Being and Nothingness, trans. by Hazel E. Barnes (UK: Routledge, 2003)

Watts, Alan, The Book: On the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are (UK: Souvenir Press Ltd, 1966)

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[i] Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness, trans. by Hazel E. Barnes (UK: Routledge, 2003), chap. The Origin of Negation.

[ii] Sartre, chap. Bad Faith.

[iii] I chose the term ‘theology’ quite specifically here as, despite his avowed atheism, Sartre’s language and approach are steeped in theological language and concepts. This is noted by Kate Kirkpatrick in her work, see: Kate Kirkpatrick, ‘Is Shame an Emotion?’, The Oxford Philosopher, 2017 <https://theoxfordphilosopher.com/category/theology/> [accessed 9 December 2017]; Kate Kirkpatrick, Sartre and Theology (London: Bloomsbury Publishing PLC, 2017).

[iv] Sartre, p. 433.

[v] Sartre, pp. 433–37.

[vi] Sartre, chap. Bad Faith.

[vii] Sartre, p. 48.

[viii] In particular, we see this in his dual example of the homosexual and the champion of sincerity. Homophobic connotations aside (as difficult as that may be given their prevalence in this example), Sartre’s broader point is that there is no fixed self upon which we can pin our choices and behaviours. See: Sartre, pp. 63–67.

[ix] Pun intended.

[x] Alan Watts, The Book: On the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are (UK: Souvenir Press Ltd, 1966), p. 150.

[xi] Sartre, p. 435.

[xii] One interesting observation of this is the way in which in mirrors the abolition or reorientation of the concept of self as notable across various mystical traditions – regardless of their ‘religious affiliation’.

'Dishonored', The Void, and Existential Nothingness

My interest in this entry is to articulate an existentialist reading of the Dishonored video game series, with particular reference to the philosophical work of Jean-Paul Sartre’s Being and Nothingness.

This entry will likely include heavy spoilers for this series.

Dishonored is a video game series developed by Arkane Studios and currently consists of three main instalments (Dishonored,[i] Dishonored 2,[ii] and Dishonored: Death of the Outsider),[iii] the first of which has two DLC components (The Knife of Dunwall and The Brigmore Witches). 

The narrative unfolds within the empire of Gristol, a setting largely based on 19^th century Britain. As we experience it, Gristol is a city of decadence and corruption, with swarms of lethal rats haunting the streets, weepers spreading a deadly disease and with most of the citizenry living in abject poverty whilst the wealthy nobility grow fat in their palace.[iv] Within the gamespace, the player takes up the role of an assassin[v] whose mission is to amend or avenge a wrong that has been dealt to them. The first instalment has us become Corvo Attano, the Royal Protector of Empress Jessamine Kaldwin who is killed mere minutes into the game. Wrongly accused of her murder, Corvo then joins with a loyalist conspiracy to avenge the death of his Empress (and lover) – rescuing their daughter Emily along the way. The second game follows much the same format – though this time one can either continue playing as Corvo or instead take up the role of Emily, now an adult – with the role of the villain being none other than Delilah,[vi] the Empress’s estranged sister, who has returned to claim her throne, at Emily’s expense.

A portrayal of the Outsider by Tumblr User wroniec

The narratives of the series’ various instalments are all influenced by the ephemeral figure of the Outsider. Towards the beginning of each story, the protagonist will find themselves awakening only to immediately be beset by the feeling that something is not quite as it should be. Upon venturing from their room, they will find themselves in an infinite expanse of darkness, littered with motes of earth suspended in the black. Then, the black-eyed Outsider will appear from nothing, welcoming them to the Void. Through the course of this meeting, the protagonist will receive the Outsider’s mark, a symbol on the back of their left hand, which allows them to channel the power of the void into the world. This unlocks a host of supernatural powers[vii] that the player can then use the navigate the game world, circumvent enemies, or which can simply serve as tools of destruction.

Each game then proceeds as a series of missions, wherein each mission tends to follow the same general formula. You must navigate an area that is largely filled with guardsmen (or other enemies that are out to get you) in order to locate and either ‘kill’ or ‘neutralise’ a single ‘target’. No level can be completed if the target is not dealt with but ultimately the game takes a ‘play your way’ strategy. You are given the tools but ultimately you must decide how to use them. Players can choose to simply charge in, cutting down the guards and wielding their magical abilities to wreak mayhem or they could opt for a quieter approach. Indeed, the game rewards the player with an achievement/trophy (depending on your console) if they can complete the entire game without killing anyone, and an additional trophy if they can complete the game without being seen. The game operates on a high/low chaos system, whereby the more death and confusion the player causes, the worse of a state the world will be in by the conclusion of the story.

It is my contention that Dishonored creates a game space which is attending to questions of choice, meaning and individuality as raised within existential philosophy. In particular, I see this in how the series treats the concept of nothingness.

The cosmology of the Dishonored universe is built upon the Void. The Void underlies the world and serves as a foundation to all existence. The Heart (an artefact capable of whispering secrets to the protagonist throughout the game) says of the Void that it "is the end of all things. And the beginning". Human beings are thought to arise from the Void and to return to it upon death. Though there is no clear eschatology, the peaceful dead are spoken of as fading away into the oblivion of the Void, whereas the tumultuous souls seem to remain very much themselves within the infinite expanse of nothingness.

Within the narrative, the Void is attributed many qualities, but in particular is thought to be in some sense conscious. Indeed, the Outsider himself serves the role of being the mythological ambassador or avatar of the Void, fundamentally a part of its structure. As we see in missions such as ‘A Crack in the Slab’, the Void is usually separate from the world, though anomalies may occur wherein the Void slips in, overcoming the strict boundaries of time and place.

The philosophy of French existentialist Jean-Paul Sartre uses nothingness as a central concept within his framework. For Sartre the individual subject is fundamentally negative because this subject is conscious and consciousness for Sartre is nothing.[viii] A consciousness is not an entity or a substance, nor is it an object, but is instead nothingness. Of course, consciousness can have content – but this does not mean that the consciousness itself is a positive being in any meaningful way. The only content possessed by consciousness are its experiences, which are understood as intentional – here meaning that they pertain to things or entities that are outside of the consciousness itself. For Sartre, consciousness is a hole in the world[ix] – much like a void that slips into the world in order to overcome or transcend it in some way – which is to say, to negate the world.

The French Existentialist Philosopher, Jean-Paul Sartre

For Sartre, the nothingness of consciousness is its fundamental structure, as well as the foundation of individual human freedom. For Sartre, freedom is absolute. We are always free, absolutely and completely free, in every circumstance. This is to say that our behaviour cannot be meaningfully said to be determined, for the individual consciousness is not an object but an absence[x] and as such cannot be part of traditional causal picture. The only limit upon this freedom is an internal one, wherein we are condemned to be free such that we are unable to get beyond our own freedom.

Importantly, freedom for Sartre is not to be confused with instrumental power.[xi] In this sense, to be free is not to be able to do anything that one wants,[xii] but is instead an existential freedom concerned with the kinds of projects one can commit oneself to. One is always able to devote oneself to whatever project with whatever ends/outcomes one may wish, and though this does not guarantee one’s success, the ability to achieve one’s projects does not impact that these projects are necessarily free. To this end, the projects that one pursues are always freely chosen and there is not necessity for one to pursue anything in particular. This would amount to attempting to abdicate from one’s own freedom, to live in bad faith[xiii] – which for Sartre can never succeed. As such, Corvo is free to devote himself to a project of revenge or to a project of reconciliation – to become a deadly assassin and thus to leave the streets of Dunwall running red with blood or to instead stay his hand and take not a single life.[xiv]

For Sartre, projects are fundamentally to be understood through the structure of action – which is (perhaps unsurprisingly, given the theme of this piece) to be understood as a form of nothingness.[xv] This is not to say that actions are themselves nothing, or that actions cannot produce positive results, but that actions are fundamentally attending to negativities (négatités). When one acts, one is responding to a lack within the world – to something that the world is not yet that the individual wishes it to be. By recognising that what they want is a negativity in so far as it does not exist[xvi] and by then recognising that the state of the world is also a negativity in so far as it can be transcended or overcome[xvii] in such a way as to amend this lack, the individual is able to commit an action to this effect. Even action that is fundamentally concerned with creating something new is, at least according to Sartre, concerned with overcoming the state of the world as one that lacks the object that is to be created.  

Dishonored seems to play upon this distinction between one’s absolute freedom and the instrumental power to bring about the ends of one’s chosen projects through the figure of the Outsider. Though the dominant religion within the Empire, The Abbey of the Everyman,[xviii] preach that the Outsider is a devilish figure, the Outsider does not exist to torment or to tempt individuals into committing sinful/evil acts. Though he is portrayed as a Luciferian character, the Outsider could be better compared to the Norse trickster God Loki.[xix] But even this comparison implies a malicious intent or even a connotation as simple as deception. The Outsider is neither of these, he never misdirects and seems to only ever speak the truth, though appears to want to reveal uncomfortable truths more readily than others. Central to the games’ narratives is that the Outsider bestows you with supernatural powers and abilities, many of which are fundamentally violent in nature, but he never forces your hand to use them.[xx]

Thus we can see that when, in Death of the Outsider, Daud attempts to blame the Outsider for all the horrors plaguing Gristol,[xxi] he is fundamentally trying to ignore not only his own responsibility as a user of the mark, but also the foundational freedom of every individual who possesses such power. Through so ignoring the free agency of all involved, Daud is living in a state of bad faith, attempting to posit the Outsider as a determining cause for all the terrible things that happen across the course of the series. But the truth is that the Outsider cannot solely be to blame. All he provides it greater power which is to say nothing, and he does not do so at the expense of anyone’s existential freedom as this is absolute, regardless of the situation in which the agent finds themselves.  

An edit of the assassin Daud by Tumblr user Winterswake

We can clearly see how the mark of the Outsider (and the powers that it grants) play into this structure of action as negativity when we consider the fundamental cosmology of Dishonored’s universe. When the protagonist uses the power of the mark, their powers are manifestations of the Void within the world. The power of the Void, which is nothing, is thus to be summarised as negativity. As such, the supernatural powers granted by the Outsider’s mark constitute novel ways in which its user is able to negate the world around them. Powers such as ‘blink’ negate space, allowing the protagonist to partially overcome it, just as ‘Bend Time’ reorients the character’s relationship with temporality.[xxii] This increases their individual power to fulfil or realise their projects, through an increased ability to transcend or negate the state in which they find the world. Importantly, this does not increase their freedom – as on a Sartre’s view freedom is always absolute and cannot be increased or diminished. This is the case even when the protagonist uses powers such as ‘possession’, which allows them to control their foes for a brief period of time. Though it greatly reduces the power of the target, and possibly interrupts their consciousness, it cannot be said to limit their freedom.  

The Mark of the Outsider as it appears on Emily's hand.

Though Dishonored’s game space is limited in terms of what can be realised within it (though one might ask if the same could not be said of life itself), its gameplay and narrative proceed in a manner that can clearly speak to Sartrian notions of consciousness and action – in so far as these are linked through the concept of nothingness. Dishonored presents us with a fundamentally existentialist narrative not only in so far as the player/protagonist alone must bear the burden of their own freedom, but also in so far as every single ‘target’ they are called on to either assassinate or spare must bear theirs. In most cases, the assassination targets have committed or been complicit within terrible acts – such as murdering the empress and overthrowing her daughter (in the case of most of the targets in the first instalment) – and sure enough they may have their reasons. But fundamentally – they have chosen to be who they are. Whether they know it or not, whether they want to face it or not, each of them has committed themselves to a fundamental project of becoming who they are.

But the question then becomes – what fate does the protagonist think they deserve and, following whatever course of action they take, what kind of person has the player chosen to be?

I’ll leave you with the words of Billie Lurk, who inadvertently summarises the existential choice when she says:

“Then you’re alone, living with your choices.”[xxiii]

Also, this image is simply too good not to include. Posted by Tumblr user boyokiddo

Works Cited

Colantonio, Raphael, and Harvey Smith, Dishonored (Arkane Studios, 2012)

Sartre, Jean-Paul, Being and Nothingness, trans. by Hazel E. Barnes (UK: Routledge, 2003)

Smith, Harvey, Dishonored 2 (Arkane Studios, 2016)

———, Dishonored: Death of the Outsider (Arkane Studios, 2017)

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[i] Raphael Colantonio and Harvey Smith, Dishonored (Arkane Studios, 2012).

[ii] Harvey Smith, Dishonored 2 (Arkane Studios, 2016).

[iii] Harvey Smith, Dishonored: Death of the Outsider (Arkane Studios, 2017).

[iv] I am further interest in how Dishonored constitutes (or fails to constitute) a reading of historical imperialism, but this is not my concern within this entry.

[v] Though for reasons we shall see, this is perhaps too violent a term.

[vi] Originally, Delilah’s character was introduced in The Knife of Dunwall DLC, and she serves as the main antagonist of The Brigmore Witches. In neither case is the story directly concerned with the experiences of Corvo or Emily, with the assassin Daud taking up the protagonistic position.

[vii] These are show-cased in this video.

[viii] Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness, trans. by Hazel E. Barnes (UK: Routledge, 2003), chap. The Origin of Negation.

[ix] “The For-itself, in fact, is nothing but the pure nihilation of the In-itself; it is like a hole of being at the heart of Being” see: Sartre, chap. Conclusion.

[x] Sartre, p. 434.

[xi] Sartre, pp. 469–88.

[xii] Sartre, p. 453.

[xiii] See: Sartre, chap. Bad Faith.

[xiv] Indeed, existentially speaking Corvo is free to devote himself to whatever project he wishes. The game space is limited in that ultimately only one of two projects (or a combination of these two projects) can be realised. Though this point does not weaken the game as an example of existentialism so much as it highlights that there are limits upon one’s ability to fulfil one’s projects.

[xv] Sartre, pp. 433–34.

[xvi] Sartre, p. 435.

[xvii] Sartre, p. 435.

[xviii] There is a sense in which, if we take the Outsider as in some sense an agent of the existential project, that the Abbey and its Overseers serve as representatives of bad faith within the narrative. Their religion is centred around strictures and limits, which are often exalted as being beyond our ability to choose against – thus their beliefs actively appear to endorse a bad faith avoidance of existential choice. This is further supported by the idea that the Overseers are enemies of the Void, which on this reading is the structure of existential being.

[xix] A comparison made in this video.

[xx] The Outsider does occasionally nudge and play games with his marked, such as when he encourages Daud to seek out Delilah, but his interventions in no way undermine another’s agency.

[xxi] Smith, Dishonored: Death of the Outsider.

[xxii] In Death of the Outsider, Billie Lurk’s ‘Foresight’ ability enables her to negate both time and space at once.

[xxiii] Introductory cinematic, Smith, Dishonored: Death of the Outsider.