My boss referred to me and my colleagues at work as Star Trek characters. One gentleman is Spock, one is Scotty, and I am McCoy.
I take this as an enormous compliment.
For me, the primary characters in Star Trek have always represented the parts of a whole, ideal person.
- Spock: The mind, on the nose as an analogy. Pure intellect, even with later additions to try and lend him emotion.
- Scotty: The body. Perhaps less obvious until you hear it.
- McCoy: The soul. Questioning the ethics, morality, and justification of action.
- Kirk: The will.
Casting Kirk as Will was, I thought, a rather unique viewpoint, but as it turns out, this analogy has been made before, and that recently; Psychology Today wrote about it in Star Trek and the Psyche, however Abigail Fagan tends to go a bit more secular in her explanation than I do.
I, however, tend towards Aquinas.
I'm not surprised. Every single time I think deeply about anything long enough, I end up treading the same ground that Aquinas did.
I came to this before reading Fagan, and I'm pleased to share her opinion of Scotty as having been left out. But, once you see the allegory, you cannot unsee it. The body has limits, and Scotty acts as the sensory mechanism calling those limits out, however the will can and does override the body.
Spock is the reasoning apparatus, connecting the dots, arriving at calculation. Kirk can override that, but is careful to listen first.
And me? I mean, McCoy? The soul. Ethics, values. The one to count the human cost, to both others, and to self.
Any analogy must withstand testing to be accurate, and this is where Fagan and I diverge. Fagan follows Plato's idea of the auto politeia, as reason working between appetite and spirit, But I don't think that this holds. Aquinas places will as a seperate mechanism, and I agree.
So we test through failures.
- When Spock (reason) fails, and misreads information, then it's McCoy's emotional response, Scotty's stewardship of the vessel, that can offset the mistake, but it's Kirk (the will) deciding that matters most.
- When McCoy (spirit) fails, and avoids the cost of a decision that must be made, it's Kirk that does this.
- When Scotty claims that the vessel can't handle the risk, Kirk overrides.
And so what happens when Kirk fails? This happens when he refuses to listen to the other three. To override the judgement of the other three isn't failure; it's necessary, and it's why Kirk, or the will, must be considered as a seperate faculty.
All tripod structures are unstable when any one leg fails. The four part structure is far more stable for Star Trek, and for us.