As I said in my previous post, Kant Wouldn’t Call Him a Monster; He’d Call Him Enlightened, Frankenstein’s creation is, according to Kant’s standards, enlightened.  However, it was brought to my attention in class that, according to John Locke, the creation is never able to be 100% enlightened.  This is because Locke’s definition of enlightenment includes experience.  One must learn from actually experiencing that which he or she is acquiring knowledge about.  Therefore, the creation’s enlightenment through a secondhand education is not true enlightenment.  That is, until he begins to experiment with the human vices he has learned about.  This, one could argue from a Lockean perspective, is when the creature begins to truly become enlightened.  Shortly after he kills two of the people Frankenstein cares for, the creature realizes that he needs to experience love and sympathy to become happy, complete.  Again, experience.  So, he gets the courage to approach Frankenstein and implore him to create a female companion to experience the giving and reciprocation of those feelings.  From this, we see that the creature, although not wholly enlightened, is actively maturing in both the Kantian and Lockean enlightenment philosophies.  This can also be seen in Volume III, Chapter II (on pages 120-121 of A Norton Critical Edition, Second Edition).

After Frankenstein destroys the creature’s companion in-progress, the creature angrily approaches Frankenstein.  He says, “I had feelings of affection, and they were requited by detestation and scorn … Your hours will pass in dread and misery, and soon the bolt will fall which must ravish from you your happiness for ever.  Are you to be happy, while I grovel in the intensity of my wretchedness?  You can blast my other passions; but revenge remains –revenge, henceforth dearer than light or food!  I may die; but first you, my tyrant and tormenter, shall curse the sun that gazes on your misery ….”

In this, Frankensteins creation tells him that, because he will not create another being that will allow him to experience love and sympathy, he will exact a revenge that will make it impossible for Frankenstein to experience it as well.  He will kill all those dear to him.  This is Lockean in the sense that the creation is admitting that experience is important to becoming mature, enlightened, and fully human.  It is also Lockean because the creation begins to rely on and value the only knowledge he has experience with:  revenge.  On the other hand, it is also Kantian.  In his “An Answer to the Question:  What Is Enlightenment,”  Kant says, “What is particularly noteworthy here is that the public that had previously been placed under this yoke [of immaturity] may compel its guardians themselves to remain under this yoke ….”  Frankenstein’s creation, by taking love out of his creator’s life, is doing just that.  For, if in the Lockean philosophy, experience is a key component of becoming enlightened, then taking away experience is the reversal of enlightenment.  That is to say, the creation is forcing Frankenstein to “remain under” the “yoke,” or be unenlightened.

However, Kant says that an enlightened person is the one who would be able to do this to those in charge of him.  This would mean that the creation is mature.  But, Locke says that without experience, one cannot be enlightened.  Since the creation will never be able to experience love (thanks to Frankenstein), he can never be completely enlightened.  Therefore, the “monster” is in a perpetual state of maturation in which he will never be 100% enlightened.