Moral Philosophy in Madoka Magica: The Five Forms of Love and the Tragic Flaws of the Mahou Shoujo
Kyuubey - The Loveless Horror of Selfless Utility
Kyuubey may be seen a paradigmatic example of the utilitarian moral philosopher, in which all decisions calculated in terms of the overall maximization of pleasure and reduction of pain in the universe, from an emotionally- detached perspective from which all conception of individual interest (either in one’s own case, or in the case of others as well) has been erased except insofar as it aligns with the utilitarian conception of the greater good. Recognizing that human beings are capable of higher qualities of pleasure and greater sensitivity to pain as sentient creatures (per John Stuart Mill’s interpretation of utilitarianism), Kyuubey sees that making girls become Mahou Shoujo by open force as therefore beyond the constraints of their moral philosophy.
Instead, they resort to indirection to achieve their goals, manipulating adolescent girls by offering to fulfill the desire of the girl’s hearts at their moments of greatest need in return for their becoming Mahou Shoujo in order to fulfill the apparently-glamorous role of fighting the wicked forces (Witches and their familiars) that prey upon innocent people. In doing so, Kyuubey fails to disclose the full terms of the contract to the individuals most susceptible to misreading their intentions, justifying their actions in their version of utilitarian moral philosophy as necessary for the greater good of the universe and as easily decipherable to anyone with the requisite level of “super-sentience” to understand its goal – which is to say, members of those species which have evolved to the point that the majority primarily desire the non-emotional, intellectual pleasures universal to all conscious beings, and who correspondingly disregard particular emotional ties (like Kyuubey’s own species), or exceptional individuals within the lower sentient species who have developed themselves to achieve the same. Holding human beings beneath their contempt (basically considering the people they contract on the level of the mentally ill in their own species), Kyuubey acts in accordance with the understanding that the girls would not percieve their goals properly if openly stated, and thus makes use of the irrationality of the partial notions of justice common to humanity by leading people into releasing such excess emotional energy in the most efficient way possible (attainable by those at Kyuubey’s species’s state of advancement, anyways).
Unlike Kyoko Sakura, Sayaka Miki, and Homura Akemi after her, Mami Tomoe was under no illusions as to the selflessness of her wish when she asked Kyuubey to enable her to retain her ties to existence. Wavering on the verge of death from a car accident when it showed up, the most pressing issue on her mind was quite naturally the desire to stay alive at all costs. In doing so, Mami shows that her mind was clouded by ego-love, unable to see the web of human relations beyond the sphere of her own immediate self-concern. Because my own concerns are the most important to me, therefore they outweigh the consideration of the needs and rights of others – such was Mami’s implicit logic in making her wish. Mami’s tragic flaw is her farcical altruism, which may be traced to this source; attached above all to her own continued existence, she came to believe that she must disguise her own self-concern with a flamboyant show of heroism in order to not be perceived (by others, but especially by herself) as vicious and receive (and still feel worthy of receiving) what she needs from other people.
The casual impact that her innocent inability to see the reality of the web of human relations beyond her own immediate self-concern having been accentuated by the unnatural circumstance of Kyuubey’s wish-granting, Mami quickly found that she had lost a family due to her inability to retain a concern for them under the conditions it used to manipulate her into a contract. Perceiving herself as guilty for their deaths, Mami tried to justify her continued existence in the world through her compensatory acts of heroism, but could never remove the stain of egoism she felt perpetually laid upon her. (As much can be confirmed from the timeline ofThe Different Story, in how her mentoring relationship with Kyoko eventually fell to pieces; when Kyoko casually stated that she didn’t really consider Mami as a friend, the elder Mahou Shoujo instantly took her words as a blow to her ego, as implying that Kyoko had somehow grasped her underlying selfishness and thought that she was not worth being friends with – when in reality, Kyoko had actually intended to imply that she had come to regard Mami as an older sister, but was too embarrassed to actually say it outright.)
It was for this reason that Mami was so emphatic about Sayaka and Madoka becoming Mahou Shoujo after Kyuubey first contacted them; above all else, she needed them to be around her to act as mirrors for her narcissistic self-concern with altruistic appearances, as only under those conditions did she feel capable of receiving the human companionship she desperately needed (similar reasons motivated her mentorship of Kyoko in The Different Story). It was therefore Madoka’s declaration of her desire to risk her life to be of help to Mami that proved the expert Mahou Shoujo’s undoing; finally offered the prospect of the committed affection of another human being in spite of her admission of her flaws, in her happiness she could not help but begin reflexively showboating to unconsciously prove that it was worth the risk of remaining in contact, and as such took the unnecessary risks which lead to her demise. (Likewise, her tragic flaw of farcical heroism leads her fragile ego to destroy the Soul Gems of her friends without consideration of their own positions on the situation when the true destiny of the Mahou Shoujo was revealed in one of Homura’s alternate timelines, which again lead to her death at a friend’s hands.)
Having raised an ego-centric notion of justice to the level of absolute jurisdiction, the centrifugal force of Mami’s wish inevitably leads to her fall; however, it is important to realize that ego-love is not unimportant or unnecessary to a proper conception of morality, though Kyuubey and their ilk would certainly have us believe so. While of course one ought to be thoroughly self-critical in the analysis of the boundaries of the relevance of ego-love to a comprehensive conception of morality, this emphatically does not mean that one should abandon all thought of immediate self-concern for some more universal principle; though Kyuubey themselves would have us believe that the individual ties of consciousness to existence are bereft of meaning (which, not co-incidentally, qualifies a hive-mind consciousness as intrinsically more valuable than our more individualistic model) and thus Mami’s wish as fundamentally irrational, it is nevertheless the case that ego-love forms the immediate grounds for all other forms of love - something which every Mahou Shoujo other than Madoka fails to realize, causing each to eventually befall some form of tragedy due to their naive ignorance of this fact.
Kyoko Sakura – Storge Love
Like Sayaka Miki after her, Kyoko Sakura thought she was making a selfless wish when she asked Kyuubey to cause anyone who listened to her father’s sermons to believe his words. Herself believing in the justness of his words and his desire to make the world a happier place at the time, she obviously thought all she was doing was providing a counter-force to an antiquated church establishment. In doing so, Kyoko shows that her mind was clouded by storge love of the needing and affective variety, and failed to see the web of human relations beyond the sphere of her natural associates as it really was. Because my family’s needs and right to be respected are the most immediately pressing upon my mind, therefore they outweigh the consideration of the needs and rights of others – such was Kyoko’s implicit logic in making her wish. Kyoko’s tragic flaw of excessive ambition may be traced to this source; believing in her father’s idealistic attempts to change the world due their natural association, she came to believe that even the most fantastical and improbable results were within her power to achieve, if she only had a strong enough desire to achieve said end in the face of great personal sacrifice.
The casual impact that her innocent inability to see the reality of the web of human relations beyond the sphere of her natural associates would have upon the rest of the world having been accentuated by the unnatural circumstance of Kyuubey’s wish-granting, Kyoko became estranged as “a witch” from the father who thought the coerced belief of his followers was of daemonic influence and therefore worthless and lost her family in a combined suicide-murder as the ultimate ramification of his discovery of her wish. Thinking herself to be indeed no better than a witch due to the effect her wish had upon her family, Kyoko’s original illusion magic became repressed as a result of this traumatic event, and Kyoko became repressed as a result of this traumatic event, and Kyoko became disillusioned with her father’s fantastical notions of justice (though the bitterness at it being respected remained long afterwards), but retained the excessive ambition it had cultivated in her self-centered pursuit of greater power as a Mahou Shoujo by collecting as a many Grief Seeds as possible.
After bullying Sayaka in order to teach her to abandon the selfless notions of justice she (Sayaka) was trying to pursue (on the basis of the effects of Kyoko’s own perceived selflessness) , she eventually came to see much of herself in the novice Mahou Shoujo and tried to pursue a closer friendship with her. As she gradually moved out of her protective self-centeredness, Kyoko correspondingly began to trust again in the former notion of justice by which she orientated herself in the world; this movement proved to be ill-fated, pushing her to read Kyuubey’s misleadingly-framed words about the probability of saving Sayaka (the focal point of this new genesis of empathy to other human beings) from her En-Witched state at face value and therefore in the most favorable light. In this manner, Kyoko’s excessive ambition came back to haunt her, as her loyalty to the fantastical notions of justice she inherited from her father lead her to her death at Sayaka’s hands, retaining her faith in them even as she realized they would never come to fruition in her life. Having raised a partial notion of justice to the level of absolute jurisdiction, the centrifugal force of Kyoko’s wish inevitably lead to her fall; this is not to say that storge love is unimportant or unnecessary, but rather one must be thoroughly self-critical in the analysis of the bounds of its relevance to a more universal conception of morality. This is the “innocent guilt” which led to Kyoko’s tragic end; as all heroines must be in truly dramatic (as opposed to melodramatic) tragedies, she was guilty in the sense of not being as self-critical in her moral interpretation of the world as she could have been under the circumstances, but innocent in the sense that she was maneuvered by others such that she could not have foreseen that her uncritical principles would lead her where they ultimately did.
Similar to Kyoko Sakura before her, Sayaka Miki was under the impression she was making a selfless wish when she asked Kyuubey to heal Kyosuke’s hands so that he would be able to play the violin again. Idealistically believing that one should naturally abandon all thought of self-concern when one is in love, Sayaka followed her passions for the violin-playing prodigy into making a desperate contract with the creature, hoping to make up for her (perceived) selfish desire to be loved by Kyosuke by risking her own life for such a selfless wish. In doing so, Sayaka allowed her mind to be clouded by eros love of the needing variety, and deliberately blinded herself to the reality of the web of human relations beyond the sphere of the passions she had devoted her very sense of self to. If I purge myself of self-centeredness by sacrificing my life for Kyosuke’s sake, then I will become an ideal which he may rightly love in return - such her implicit logic in making the wish. Sayaka’s tragic flaw of moral perfectionism is closely tied to this source: stimulated from the depths of her young soul by Kyosuke’s overwhelming musical talent and thereby struck with a sense of her own insignificance, she was unable to see any worth in her own existence if she failed to hold to (what she perceived as) the absolute pinnacle of righteousness at all times, and thus pursued life as a Mahou Shoujo with a grim determination to never compromise on her idealistic sense of justice even at the cost of the well-being of herself and those surrounding her.
The causal impact of her naive inability to see beyond the sphere of the passions she had devoted herself accentuated by the unnatural circumstance of Kyuubey’s wish-granting, it was soon revealed to Sayaka that her body as a Mahou Shoujo had became that of “a zombie”, her self-consciousness having been cut off from the organic continuity of the rest of humanity and quite literally contained within her Soul Gem. Her inhumanely-rigid expectations of selflessness in the giving and accepting of romantic love thus coming back to haunt her in the most literal way possible, Sayaka now ironically felt herself to be even less worthy of Kyosuke’s love as an inhuman being who couldn’t possibly offer him the romantic affection she felt he deserved, while simultaneously wishing she hadn’t saved a romantic rival in the form of Hitomi and hating herself for the contradiction. Feeling that her continued existence was simply one in which she must do penance for the selfish motivations behind her wish, she proceeds to cling even tighter to her idealistic notions of justice, ultimately spurning the harsh nature of reality in the form of Kyoko due to the belief that the sterile, other-worldly ideals of the knights that she so wished to emulate had absolute jurisdiction over any situation she might find herself in and which she therefore must stick to at any expense.
Sayaka’s self-lacerating tendencies then begin to emerge, when she is severely injured in a Witch-fight; refusing to defer to the “morally-besmirched” Kyoko (as she must have seen the other girl to be), she instead chooses to completely ignore the physical pain sustained from her injuries, as Kyuubey had explained was possible due tothe relocation of a Mahou Shoujo’s self-consciousness within a Soul Gem. In so doing, she attempted to repress any sense of emotional self-concern so that she might be a perfect icon for her abstract ideals; as an unconscious over-compensation for the implication that she therefore still fights for selfish reasons, she completely rejects the collection of Grief Seeds out of the apparent belief that this risk must be taken for her idealistic passions to really hold any value.
Her passions finally run away with her completely when she is confronted with a scene where two misogynistic men mock the romantic expression of love and dedication on the part of their girlfriends; faced with the dark underbelly of the male psyche in all its bleakness, Sayaka found herself unable to forgive the world she swore to protect because she could no longer see her strict, other-worldly ideals as having any place among such filth. Realizing that Kyosuke may never have returned the eros love expressed in her selfless act in the first place, she therefore plummeted into utter despair upon understanding the apparent hopelessness of her situation and at long last transformed into a Witch. In this way, Sayaka’s moral perfectionism proved to be her undoing, as her erotic attachment to her other-worldly ideals turned into a self-destructive orgy, having renounced all real restraint on her passions when the world proved “too small” for her ideals. Having raised a partial notion of justice to the level of absolute jurisdiction, the centrifugal force of Sayaka’s wish inevitably lead to her fall; this is not to say that eros love is unimportant or unnecessary, but rather one must be thoroughly self-critical in the analysis of the boundaries of its relevance to a larger conception of morality - this is the “innocent guilt” which led to Sayaka to curse the world and die to any possibility of attaining to a more comprehensive and fertile sense of moral virtue.
Homura Akemi – Philia Love
“I wish I could meet Ms. Kaname all over again. But this time, instead of her protecting me, I want to be strong enough to protect her!” - Like Kyoko and Sayaka after her, Homura Akemi was under the impression she was making a selfless wish when she asked Kyuubey to enable her to protect her friend from harm. A self-depreciating individual believing she lacked any qualities or potential worth freely associating with (to the point she once wished to die to free herself from her own association with them), Homura could not endure the thought of Madoka dying just to save such an insignificant, unworthy individual as herself, and was willing to stake her very life upon rectifying this situation to the person who had so freely thrown away her life for someone who had nothing to offer her in return. In doing so, Homura shows that her mind was clouded by philia love of the needing variety, and failed to see the web of human relations beyond the affectionate regard freely formed between her and Madoka as it really was. Madoka was killed because she irrationally committed her affections to someone unable to supply anything of worth to her in return; therefore, I must become a person worthy of the affection she once freely showed me, so that her affection will have a rational basis in me and thus will not be lost to me forever – such was Homura’s implicit logic in making her wish. Homura’s tragic flaw of excessive introversion may be directly linked to this source; believing that she has no human potential worth associating with if she is not able to become a person worthy of the affection Madoka freely gave her, Homura increasingly cuts herself off from personal attachments with the rest of the world except insofar as they might be used toward her (perceived) dispassionate service of Madoka’s well-being and thus for making her worthy of the original Madoka’s interpretation of her potential,so that the other girl’s perceptions of her person would no longer be inaccurate.
The causal impact of her naive inability to see beyond the affectionate regard freely formed between her and Madoka accentuated by the unnatural circumstance of Kyuubey’s wish-granting, Homura soon found that the aberrant freedom of her wish from the casual force of entropy only served to detach her from the natural association of the destiny of all Mahou Shoujo with this force without providing her with any means of actually altering it in any way (a negative, rather than positive, liberty). Her (unconscious) belief that she must attempt to arrest the casual chain by first actualizing the potential perceived by Madoka before she could rightfully receive the affection freely-given to support this very need thus came back to haunt her, as her aberrant nature ultimately provided the conditions even for her failure to become a Witch alongside Madoka and instead forced her hand into mercy-killing her only real friend. Caught in the endless maze constructed out of her negative freedom from the natural association of the Mahou Shoujo’s destiny with entropy, Homura found herself increasingly disassociated from fellow victims of Kyuubey’s deceptive contracts, rendering herself less and less capable of receiving Madoka’s affection as she fell prone to the excesses of introversion more and more.
While Homura found the negative freedom of her wish from the law of entropy was incapable of changing the natural destiny of the Mahou Shoujo, this does not mean her wish was without any effect; by wresting the temporal freedom to cause Homura to realize her own potential by means of the affection Madoka from the other girl’s hands and thus arresting the natural give-and-take of friendship, the time-traveler inadvertently diminished Madoka’s own sense of self-worth with every advance she made towards actualizing the potential she had originally been befriended for. The more Homura attempted to fix the temporal sequence after the date of her original meeting with Madoka to suit with her own ends, the more she sowed the seeds of her own grief across the timelines; though the hope which generated each alternate timeline would be balanced out by the grief causing its eventual collapse, this only served to distort the space around Madoka’s person as compensation, such that she became an increasingly aggrieved locus of consciousness the more complicated the sequence became with every additional time loop Homura made. In this way, Homura’s excessive introversion proved to be her undoing, as her desire to actualize her potential before receiving the freely-given affection needed for this development to take place maneuvered her one-time friend Madoka into a position where she would have to transcend all emotional attachments in order to continue to promote consciousness as an end-in-itself, thus loosing the only real friend she ever had. Having raised a partial notion of justice to the level of absolute jurisdiction, the centrifugal force of Homura’s wish inevitably lead her into increasing despair; this is not to say that philia love is unimportant or unnecessary, but rather one must be thoroughly self-critical in the analysis of the boundaries of its relevance to a larger conception of morality. Homura’s naively excessive promotion of philia love is intrinsically tied to her irrational rebellion against the causal force of entropy, because in doing so she excessively promotes the negative liberty from prior determination expressed by consciousness in the giving of mental affection to another sentient being based on one’s interpretation of their potential, to the exclusion of any positive liberty consciousness may have to effect change in the world - the “innocent guilt” which lead her time-looping journey to its bittersweet end (if indeed we actually seen its destined, final close).
Madoka Kaname – Agape Love
Why does the sense of justice exemplified in Madoka’s wish prevail when that of all the others (Mami, Kyoko, Sayaka, and Homura) failed? Because, it seems, throughout the course of the series Madoka had developed a more mature and impartial sense of justice than all the others, even more so than Kyuubey themselves. Kyuubey failed to be sufficiently critical of their own moral philosophy, going so far as to arrogantly explain their method to Madoka without the slightest doubt that she would end up catering towards their conception of the greater good in one way or another, and thus failed to see the nihilism inherent in their utilitarian moral philosophy and the corresponding loophole in the contracts they made until after the fact.
If Mami’s wish represents ego love, Kyoko’s storge love, Sayaka’s eros love, and Homura’s philia love, then Madoka’s wish represents agape love, the form with the least self-regard and so necessarily the most deliberate form of love. What exactly is agape love? Agape love is nothing other than the cosmopolitan benevolence of thought and action due to and by every conscious inquirer for no reason beyond the fact that they are fellow inquirers in the ongoing quest to determine how to best live life. Agape love may be considered the theoretical basis of all moral thinking, in the form of the following analytical rule: in the formulation and application of every interpretation of how to best live life in the universe, the development of the capacity to contribute to this ongoing quest through practical inquiry must be consistently promoted as an end-in-itself, insofar as one may consciously bind oneself to this principle (even in spite of prudential mere self-regard). The critical mind inherently tasks itself with the role of determining whether one is acting in accordance with this rule at the present, and then re-organizing the pursuit of our natural appetites and adjusting our goals in order to avoid being perpetually frustrated in all our desires – lest it ultimately fail to arrive at true knowledge about how to live the good life in its current circumstances by accepting self-contradiction. In this way, one may obtain an enduring foundation for one’s principles of action in the actual world, forming a realistic (as opposed to Kyoko’s idealistic or Sayaka’s dualistic) basis for the common human concept of moral fortitude.
By observing the previously discussed Mahou Shoujo from the sidelines as she deliberates the potential content of her wish, Madoka learns to practically distinguish agape from the other forms of love and fortifies herself in the course of action she would choose with the belief that justice sought on the basis of this form of love would not succumb to the evils of Kyuubey’s utilitarianism. Kyuubey’s utilitarian philosophy refuses to admit the development of the capacity to contribute to practical inquiry as its practical foundation, and instead allows the intellectual pleasures and pains which merely aid this development to usurp its place. Because of this, they utterly failed to see that even their species’ concentration on the maximization of the intellectual pleasures and minimization of intellectual pains by staving off the universe’s heat death might be criticized from a more impartial perspective, especially not by a lower-level sentience like Madoka. Due to this fact, Kyuubey is out-maneuvered by Madoka’s wish (“I wish to erase all witches from existence before they’re even born. Every witch in the universe, from the past and the future, with my own hands.”), as a direct result of the fact that they were insufficiently impartial and objective in their formulation of the greater good. By prudently focusing on promoting their “qualitatively superior” understanding of the good as achieved through their “super-sentience”, they failed to take the time to realize that their actions were inconsistently self-regarding insofar as they did not consider the role that any imposing any moral interpretation upon the universe plays in pushing the universe toward heat death through its deliberate creation of a closed circle of deliberation (as opposed to the open-ended deliberation promoted by the form of agape love).
Unlike Kyuubey, Madoka was willing to bear the harsh practical implications of pursuing the greater good, and thus was able to overcome even the grief she took upon herself for the selfish desires of others, so that Kyuubey’s system for staving off the heat death of the universe was overturned and re-established on grounds which gave the partial moral interpretations of other Mahou Shoujo their due. In doing so, Madoka evinces the positive freedom of consciousness to alter the world through the enactment of one’s duty, accepting the universality of the empirical necessity of entropy as a limitation on fruitful action in order to determine how to interpret this limitation anew. And while Kyuubey will most likely never see the error of their ways, having been a hive-mind society for too long to break out of their elitist belief in the qualitative superiority of “super-sentience” which primarily seeks intellectual pleasure and avoids intellectual pain to lower forms of sentience, it is nevertheless the case that Madoka had even weighed their philosophy in the balance and provide it with its due place. This is evidenced by the fact that she did not wish to erase Kyuubey’s contractual system itself from the world (as an idealistic attempt to promote practical inquiry at the expense of the experiential world which it must operate in), but rather rebuilt its system on a basis more effective for their common goal, even if it is not as efficient as a means for reach Kyuubey’s own self-regarding ends (for which it was perfectly willing to allow an entire planet of lower forms of sentience to be destroyed as collateral to their fulfillment).
Unlike Kyuubey, Madoka does not submit herself to the grueling process of eliminating all sense of self in favor of a principle demanding that individual particles of consciousness be treated as a mechanism for some extrinsic sphere of value. Instead, she learns throughout the course of the show to transcend the transient attachments and the natural partiality of ego, storge, eros, and philia love (each freer of prior determination by nature and more subject to practical inquiry than the last), until she is finally able to turn her own natural self-concern into a foundation for promoting self-consciousness impartially – even in the horrific, loveless, and inconsistently self-denying form it takes on for utilitarian hive-minds like Kyuubey. Simultaneously, her willingness to do so provided for a more stable basis for expression of the lower forms of love by limiting them within boundaries which rendered their intrinsic self-regard harmless to the promotion of practical inquiry, in the end far superior to Kyuubey’s attempts to simply extract themselves from such desires. In doing so, Madoka shows remarkable maturity to an extent unmatched by many an adult sentient, let alone other teenagers around her age, and moral fortitude unparalleled by any other character in the series (however much Kyuubey may be apt to deny that this applies to them). Love indeed conquers all, seems to be the ultimate message of Madoka Magica; we just need to become more tragically realistic concerning the form of love we are talking about than Magical Girl shows tend to be.
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