The Philosopher-King Isn't What You Expected | The Philosophy of Dune

Dune Read-Along Companion Essay 6

Jul 14, 2025

The Battle of Arrakeen. Oil painting by John Schoenherr

[This post is too long for email, so just follow the prompts and it should guide you to the website to read the full thing]

Welcome to the Parker’s Ponderings Dune in June (and some of July) Read-Along. This is the sixth of six companion essays that I’m writing for those reading through the novel with me. I’m helping you think more deeply about Dune.

I’m looking forward to hearing from you all, so make sure to leave your own thoughts and favorite quotes from the sections in view down in the comments.

Here’s the rest of the reading schedule:

Zoom Book Club – Wednesday July 16th at 7pm central

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Paul Muad’Dib is the Kwisatz Haderach and Lisan al-Gaib

Okay, so Paul finally drank the Water of Life to see if he really is the prophesied Kwisatz Haderach, the one who can be many places at once, the shortening of the way that will guide humanity into a better future because he can access all of the past, and see the present and future with a trinocular vision. Paul survived and is in fact the Messiah.

Now the Water of Life has got to be an illusion to the Water of Life mentioned in the Bible.

In Revelation 21:5-6 , we see God the Father speaking from the Throne of Heaven about the Water of Life:

And he who was seated on the throne said, “Behold, I am making all things new.” Also he said, “Write this down, for these words are trustworthy and true.” And he said to me, “It is done! I am the Alpha and the Omega, the beginning and the end. To the thirsty I will give from the spring of the water of life without payment.

And we also see the Son of God, Jesus Christ, tell to the women at the well in John 4:10-26 that he will give her the same living water:

If you knew the gift of God, and who it is that is saying to you, ‘Give me a drink,’ you would have asked him, and he would have given you living water… Everyone who drinks of this [well] water will be thirsty again, but whoever drinks of the water that I will give him will never be thirsty again. The water that I will give him will become in him a spring of water welling up to eternal life…But the hour is coming, and is now here, when the true worshipers will worship the Father in spirit and truth, for the Father is seeking such people to worship him. God is spirit, and those who worship him must worship in spirit and truth. The woman said to him, “I know that Messiah is coming (he who is called Christ). When he comes, he will tell us all things.” Jesus said to her, “I who speak to you am he.”

So we see the biblical water of life is a gift of God and it’s associated with truth. Christians believe the water of life is a metaphor for the third person of the Trinity, The Holy Spirit, who just happens to be called the Spirit of Truth who will lead God’s people into all truth (John 16:13).

Herbert’s Water of Life is a gift from Shai Hulud, “thing of eternity” (شيء خلود šayʾ khulūd in Arabic), whom the Fremen see as a physical embodiment of the one god. It is given up (as a gift) by the little makers when they are drown in water. It comes out blue like the eyes of those addicted to spice, the Eyes of Ibad (ibad being an Arabic term that means servants of worshippers). Herbert’s Water of Life is spice essence; it’s the most potent and addictive of the truthsayer drugs which can catalyze the transformation of a Bene Gesserit lady into a Reverend Mother, allowing her to access the feminine side of Jung’s collective unconscious.

The Fremen prophesies may have started as Bene Gesserit propaganda through the Missionaria Protectiva, but through the Fremen’s natural proclivity towards spice awareness and through their constant exposure to the ever-present spice on Arrakis, what started as propaganda blossomed into full-blown prophecy. The propoganda blossomed into genuine prescient revelation. The Lisan al-Gaib is the Kwisatz Haderach—and he is Paul Muad’Dib.

a really cool piece I found in a Dune Facebook group the other day and am using with permission from the artist, Skye Mush. Check her instagram tattoo art page here

So I think the name “Water of Life” was an intentional allusion to the biblical water of life or living water. Additionally, it seems to be a reference to blue magic mushroom tea which Frank Herbert drank with Paul Stamets and proceeded to trip out and envision his sand worms. Yes, the psychedelics in Dune are a reference to actual psychedelics lol but that goes to show the genius of Frank Herbert. He was a master of layering meanings and themes! Check out this clip of Paul Stamets on JRE talking about the blue mushroom tea of life:

The following epigraph on page 552 is pretty integral for the fullfilment of Paul as the über-übermensch, the overman/strongman/messiah/prophet/philosopher-king come to his own:

And it came to pass in the third year of the Desert War that Paul-Muad’Dib lay alone in the Cave of Birds beneath the kiswa hangings of an inner cell. And he lay as one dead, caught up in the revelation of the Water of Life, his being translated beyond the boundaries of time by the poison that gives life. Thus was the prophecy made true that the Lisan al-Gaib might be both dead and alive. (552)

So, from the epigraph, by Princess Irulan, we see that Paul drank the Water of Life in the Cave of Birds, which might be a reference to Plato’s Allegory of the Cave, which represents the world of sense experience and illusions and is meant to be transcended to for the real world, the intelligible world of the forms or ideas, the ideal realm, Plato’s Heaven.

In drinking just a drop of the Water of Life Paul was translated beyond the boundaries of time by the poison that gives life—at the cross of Christ we see the poison of death giving life to all through the sacrifice of Jesus. Paul goes to the Alam al-mithal, or imaginal realm in Islam, between the physical world and the world of spirits (I’m not sure on this!)? On pg. 482, Herbert calls it “the world of similitudes, that metaphysical realm where all physical limitations were removed.” This looks like an Arabic term for Plato’s Heaven, the realm of ideal objects like the perfect square or goodness—the place where we come to have real knowledge, which again fits with my hunch that Herbert wrote Dune as a response to Plato’s Republic. Paul is the philosopher-king who transcends the cave and wonders Plato’s heaven in his “ruh-spirit” (482) while under the influence of the Water of Life.

Paul does this platonic philosopher-king transcending and Christ-like rising from the dead all under the kiswa, which is the sacred cloth that covers the Kaaba, the sacred stone building at the center of the great mosque in Mecca. So, again, Herbert is doing some profound blending of sacred imagery from Greek philosophy to Christianity to Islam and probably others I haven’t caught.

Oh and this kiswa hangs over “an inner cell”, and Paul says, in Jungian fashion, that the collective unconscious is within each of our cells, like a memory encoded in every part of us, our cell-stamped ancestry (613). So, Paul is unconscious, exploring the inner cell, the collective unconscious in his cells. Perhaps I’m reading too much into it, but this was in an epigraph and I think Frank really thought those through, so I’m inclined to think I’m probably missing something rather than reading too much off of these.

Wait, there’s also a nod to Schrödinger’s Cat—“that the Lisan al-Gaib might be both dead and alive.” I know Herbert is making a reference to the cat because he brings of Schröder somewhere else in the novel, can’t remember where right now, [but if you’re in acquisitions, I will find it for the official Philosophy of Dune book, so come holler at me!] but Herbert also makes reference to Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle too, so he has a little a small penchant for those kinds of physics ideas.

Paul then scoops a palms worth of the water of life and goes on a massive spice trip. He forces Jessica to take him to the shadow place of the collective unconscious where he sees all truth, he’s able to see all that is able to be seen of the past, present, and future. Paul sees it and occupies it himself—he is at the fulcrum, surfing the razors edge between yin and yang, between anima and animas, aka the two primary anthropomorphic archetypes of the unconscious mind. Paul cannot give without taking nor take without giving (see 561-562 for the giving and taking forces and compare it with this entry on Anima and Animas in Jungian psychology).

anima and animas by Shreenoor Lal Rajbhandari

He is the Lisan al-Gaib, the voice from the outer world, like Christ who came from heaven to speak on behalf of God the Father and the prophet who’s seen the past, present, and future, who can lead the way to prosperity for humanity—the fact out of the Bene Gesserit Dream (561).

There’s even an explicit signaling that Paul is “unconscious” which might be there to hint us in on what’s going, but he appears dead. Paul then raises from the dead and resumes authority over his people and consolidates even more until he is the king of all the Fremen as well.

Paul has changed

Paul comes out of the Cave of Birds a different man. He has Jessica change a quantity of the Water so he can plant it above a pre-spice mass and threaten to make the Water of Death which will cause a chain reaction killing all little makers and worms on Arrakis and putting an end to the spice, and in turn stranding everyone on every planet they’re currently occupying. No Guild travel without spice. Paul is cool with holding the entire universe hostage as he adopts a new mantra: “He who can destroy a thing has the real control of it” (563). Control and power at all cost. Threats of destruction. Paul is lost in the sauce.

Gurney starts noticing that Paul is more like his Grandfather, The Old Duke, than his Father Duke Leto, as he shows more concern for things than for the loss of human lives (520, 589). Paul is perfectly fine sending out the city people of Arrakis—who are not great warriors like the Fremen—against the Sardaukar as “shock troops” but really as canon fodder (570). Jessica likewise notes that Paul is like the Old Duke and not her Leto on several occasions (perhaps most explicitly on pg. 606). Her heart seems to be hardening towards him at an increasing rate by the end of the novel.

Paul calls for a massive storm to shake the planet, not caring how many lives it takes so long as it helps him achieve victory over the emperor.

Paul accepts that his friends are becoming worshipers. He seems saddened by these transformations but he does nothing to stop them and perhaps he’s not even able to stop them. (592)

Paul is singularly focused on revenge. He must defeat the emperor, the Harkonnens, and the guild. He must regain his rightly duchy on Arrakis and maybe even supplant the emperor while he’s at it.

Paul stands triumphant over Feyd. Art by John Schoenherr for the Illustrated Dune

Paul Encounters His Shadow

How often it is that the angry man rages denial of what his inner self is telling him. (536)

As I showed in the last companion essay, Frank Herbert intentionally injected Jungian psychology into Dune. I made the case that Feyd-Rautha Harkonnen is Paul’s shadow self (or just ‘shadow’, I don’t think Jungians include the ‘self’ addendum), Paul’s unconscious, the darkness where perverse desires are hidden from the light of one’s own awareness and self-consciousness. That would make Paul the ego.

We saw Paul face the collective shadow in the collective unconscious, but now, if Paul is to be individuated from that collective unconscious, he must face his own shadow: Feyd-Rautha Harkonnen.

Feyd is the designated heir of his uncle, Baron Harkonnen, when in reality, Paul, the grandson of the Baron is the rightful heir. Feyd is being groomed to lead the Harkonnens and potentially wrest the thrown from the emperor. He’s surrounded by four vices personified. Paul likewise has set his eyes on the imperial thrown and he was surrounded by the four cardinal virtues personified:

Nefud, the timid drug addict = weakness and cowardice, the opposite of Gurney Halleck the courageous who shows fortitude.
The Beast Rabban = foolishness, the “muscle-minded tank brain” (298), which is the the opposite of Thufir Hawat, the wise.
Piter De Vries the twisted Mentat, who sought his own duchy beyond his station, and is a torturous monster = imprudence/evil, the opposite of Duncan Idaho, the moral and prudent.
The Baron = injustice, for his twisting of a healer into a murdering traitor; the twisting of a Mentat into a conniving butcher; for his plot to wipe out the entire Atreides family line; for breaking the rules of the convention and covering it up; for hiding pertinent information from his co-conspirator, the Emperor; for his pedophilia and gluttony; for emphasizing power and fear as his tools of statecraft, and on and on. The Baron is even compared to the blasphemous beast of Revelation 13:1 by Gurney on pg. 231 in case you didn’t get how bad the Baron is. He is the obvious polar opposite to Duke Leto, the just.

So we have a mirror image between Paul and Feyd, between the ego and the shadow, between love and hate, as Jessica reminds us in her reassurance to Gurney after he threatened to kill her,

Didn’t you learn that Atreides loyalty is bouth with love while the Harkonnen coin is hate? Couldn’t you see through to the very nature of this betrayal? (546)

Alia stands over the Baron after scratching him with her gom jabbar. By John Schoenherr for the Illustrated Dune.

We finally get the showdown between Paul and Feyd, the encounter between the ego and the shadow. We likewise see the return of the animal vs. human motif here at the end of the novel—both in the confrontation between Alia and the Baron, where the Baron falls victim to Alia’s gom jabbar, perhaps indicating that he was indeed an animal—and in the battle between Paul and Feyd:

“This is a Harkonnen animal!” Gurney rasped. Paul hesitated on the point of revealing his own Harkonnen ancestry, stopped at a sharp look from his mother, said merely: “But this being has human shape, Gruney, and deserves human doubt.” (606)

To which Jessica says “He’s like his grandfather in this mood.” which brings the bull-matador motif back to the foreground (the Old duke was bludgeoned to death by a bull and they hung the bulls head up in the cafeteria with the blood of the Old Duke epoxied to the horns. The Baron Harkonned took these from Arrakis to Geidi Prime as his own ghanima, or spoils of war/amulets).

The bull is the shadow and the ego is the matador. This confrontation happens in each person as they seek to individuate their personality from the collective unconscious—or so a Jungian (like Frank Herbert!) might argue.

Paul lets reckless abandon take over his emotions and he agrees to fight Feyd under the rules of kanly (605). Feyd is exceedingly crafty and treacherous, he is a cheat! Remember he uttered the word that stalled the Atreides fighting-man in the colosseum in his birthday fight on Geidi Prime: “Scum!” and he deceptively switched the poisoned blades around in that fight as well. This fight with Paul is no different.

Feyd hides and stacks treachery within treachery within treachery, and tricks within tricks within tricks (611)—the shadow often reveals itself in archetypes like the trickster!—as he pretends to favor his left side because of the muscle memory of fighting with a shield but then makes Paul think actually it’s because of a hidden poison flip-dart there in his girdle, but really the flip-dart is on his right him. He has a soporific on the blade that the emperor gave him to use against Paul, which isn’t poison so it didn’t set off the poison snooper machines but it would have slowed Paul down like the neuro-conditioning word “scum” did to the last Atreides that Feyd fought. Paul transforms the soporific and is unharmed but feigns slowness—learning some of Feyd’s treachery through his encounter with him.

Paul evades the flip dart—which might be seen as another form of the gom jabbar test—I mean it’s yet another needle of death coming for Paul! He knows that Feyd has likewise been conditioned with his own word that would stop him: uroshnor, which might be a reference to the slavic name Urosh meaning dignified lord or heroic man, and nor being the negation of that, so not a heroic or not a dignified lord, which definitely fits Feyd, but I may be overreaching again.

Paul, unlike Feyd, refuses to utter the word. He wants to win fair and square. Which is noble. But Paul screams, “I will not say it” (613) which has the same effect of stunning Feyd for a moment, which Paul takes advantage of and jams his own gom jabbar, in the form of a crysknife, into Feyd’s neck and up into his brainstem.

Paul incorporates some of Feyd into his own personality but resists other parts. Thus, Paul has successfully confronted his shadow and incorporated aspects of it into his own personality but he has not merged with his shadow and has emerged from his confrontation as a unified personality.

Paul, who showed a shockingly little amount of compassion for Chani prior to the fight when he told her that Leto II cannot be replaced but that “there will be other sons” is then saved after his fight with Feyd by showing compassion for Count Fenring, who apparently could have killed him but refused as he saw in a Paul, and Paul in him, a kindred spirit for the first time ever. Thus, it appears that Paul has been transformed yet again!

However, all the transformations that Paul underwent still could not stop the Jihad, which turned out to be the terrible purpose that kept impending on Paul. It’s the race consciousness which is predicated on process philosophy: stagnation = the greatest evil when you supposed that everything is in process, everything is in flux like Heraclitus of old argued and Alfred North Whitehead of new argued. The Jihad was somehow inevitable and necessary for the human race to continue growing and mingling their genes together—progressing forward into something else (596, 608). The Bene Gesserits had no idea what they were calling up out of the depths, but the sleeper is awakened and he kicked off a universe wide jihad!

The emperor looking down on Alia after she killed the Baron with her gom jabbar. Art by John Schoenherr for the original serialization of Dune in Analog magazine.

So What is Dune Really About?

I started this read-along of Dune with the question “what is Dune really about?”. I think I have a better grip on an answer after reading through it this last time because I was forced to attend to all the little details that Frank Herbert weaves into the story. And now that we’ve read through the entire novel, I can finally share my overall thoughts with you!

I think I’m still close to where I started, Dune is a mythopoeic science fiction story. Herbert hits on key myths (or archetypes?) that live deep in our psyche(s) while subtlety creating his own mythos based on Jungian psychology, Platonic and Process philosophy, and based on his own commentary on and amalgamizing of Muslim and Christian theology. Dune is philosophical mythopoesis (or mythopoeia)—philosophical myth-making in the form of a science fiction novel.

All throughout this read-along I’ve been arguing that Frank Herbert is subtly responding to Plato’s Republic, wherein Plato describes his vision of a well-ordered city and soul, with the philosopher-king as ruler of the city and the rational part of one’s soul ruling over one’s spirited and appetitive parts. Plato’s Republic deals with philosophical psychology, psychology coming from the Greek word transliterated as psukhe, which means soul. Plato gave us a philosophy of the soul. Herbert responded to Plato’s philosophical psychology with Jungian/Analytic Psychology and process philosophy which emphasizes becoming over being and which was put forward by Alfre North Whitehead—the guy who famously said all of Western philosophy is a series of footnotes to Plato!

Herbert responds to the Republic by personifying Plato’s four cardinal virtues and by making Paul the would-be philosopher-ruler or philosopher-king who ought to be growing in each if he is to rule well. He then has each personified-virtue fall short and act viciously in various ways and then takes them from Paul one by one until only fortitude or bravery is left, aka Gurney Halleck. Herbert does this to show that courage ungoverned by the other virtues becomes bravura. Bravura is dangerous and those who seek power by way of bravura are corrupt and dangerous.

Paul may have begun with good intentions, but he ends up making peace with a universal jihad after he comes to power. Instead of ruling over the will and the affections as the rational aspect of the soul, Paul unifies them all into himself, collapsing the three branches of the imperial government down to his sole rule.

The philosopher-king, if he were to actually play that role well, would have to be at least functionally omniscient if he were to play that role of God over the people, but omniscience for a mortal man would be hell as all that wisdom and knowledge would temper love and cause you to live billions and billions of lives (594).

Paul begins with the noble lessons of Duke Leto and ends with the übermensch mantra that “The power to destroy a thing is the absolute control over it.” (601). Paul ends up lusting for power. He must have it at all costs, which includes the life of his first born son.

So the philosopher-king may not be such a good thing, it may not be something we should be striving for after all, contra Plato. These kinds of rulers aren’t good, neither for the people ruled over, nor for the philosopher-king himself. You may think that’s what you want, like the Bene Gesserit thought, but when he shows up, he’s going to be much different than you thought and you won’t be able to control him once you give him the chariot reigns.

Be careful when worshipping heroes, those who seek power are corrupt already.

That’s what I think Dune is actually about.