Go, Mogo, Go

Warning: Planet-sized spoilers for Green Lantern Corps #60

(as well as a little shameless self-promotion)...

 

 

 

 

Mogo, everybody's favorite sentinent planet and Green Lantern, met his final end in this week's Green Lantern Corps #60--appropriately, at the hands of DC's resident world-killer, John Stewart:

 

I hope Mogo got a chance to socialize at least once... maybe he can hang out with Xanshi in the great beyond. (Thanks, John.)

Leonard Finkelman's chapter "All for One and One for All: Mogo, the Collective, and Biological Unity," in Green Lantern and Philosophy: No Evil Shall Escape this Book, discusses Mogo and other Green Lanterns which may not fall into our normal categories of "life-forms." After all, "in addition to Mogo we find Hal Jordan, a human of space sector 2814; Leezle Pon, a smallpox virus in sector 119; the Collective, a species of living puffballs from sector 1287; and Dkrtzy RRR, a mathematical equation first derived in sector 188" (p. 202). Finkelman spends a good deal of time on Aristotle and Mogo, asking whether Mogo possesses enough unity to be considered an individual and whether he possesses what Aristotle called a "soul."

And in his chapter "Green Mind: The Book of Oa, the Lantern Corps, and Peirce's Theory of Communal Mind," Paul Jaissle also writes about the astonishing diversity of beings in the Green Lantern Corps, but this time from the other direction: how the rings, with their access to the Book of Oa, help link the GLs into what American pragmatist philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce called the "communal mind." So rather than investigating what makes a being an individual, as Finkelman does, Jaissle looks into what makes us parts of a greater whole.

Regarding how Mogo was portrayed in Green Lantern Corps #60 specifically, I was disappointed to see Mogo's "brain" depicted as an amorphous "thing" at his core--I had always thought of the flora on his surface serving as neurons, implying that his entire ecosystem was his brain, similar to how some think of Earth's ecosystem as one living thing (possibly with a sentience of which we're unaware). Oh well--if Mogo had ever come to office parties, I could have asked him, but you know Mogo...