Lovers of Sophia
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source of evil. That is something which, if you are virtuous, you
do not want to be. Otherworldly evils are neither here nor there.
They aren’t your evils. Your virtuous desire to do good and not
evil... depends causal y on what you do.15
These passages are subject to internal contradictions. Note Lewis’s
usage of these phrases: “you may have it or not” unless “you make
the wrong decision”, because only if “what you do” is to “actualize evils” will they be “your evils”, ones that depend on your being
“a causal source of evil”. For Lewis, we are causal “sources” only in the sense that already existing parts of logical space are made
(indexical y) “actual” through us. I do not see how this non-
primitive notion of agent causation does not lead to the same
infinite regress of empirical causes that forced Hume to abandon
causality and Kant to seek a noumenal basis for personal agency. In
that case, Lewis does not allow for ‘making’ any real ‘decision’. Our
‘choices’ col apse into being merely the discursive “effects” of other empirical causes.
We see this again in Lewis’s response to an objection raised by
Mark Johnston to the effect that Lewis’s “egocentric” view of moral
action is compromised by Lewis having argued (elsewhere) that we
14 Ibid., 124-125.
15 Ibid., 127.
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are not strictly unified in our persistence through time, but are each divisible into temporal parts or stages:
My present stage wants the book to be finished in the fulfillment
of its present intentions – there’s the egocentric part – and that will happen only if the proper sort of causal continuity binds
together my present stage with the one that finishes the book.
The continuity thus desired is part of the continuity that unifies
mereological sums of person-stages into persisting people.16
Lewis is saying that even if your personal intentions to “do” x and y are somehow communicated from person-stage to person-stage,
“you” (as defined by the sum of your communicated intentions)
are still the “causal source” of x and y. This is just the kind of intellectual y abstracted notion of causality that James believed to
have been responsible for Hume’s rejection of causality and Kant’s
artificial imposition of it as a category of pure reason. Interestingly, Lewis explicitly claims to have “taken a Humean view about laws
and causation”17 and “used it instead as a thesis about possibility”, though he does not seem to realize the implications of this for agent
causality. Such a Humean view requires either rejecting causal agency
altogether, or positing a Kantian noumenon. By contrast, William
James’s insistence on a phenomenological y primitive notion of
causation, where agency means the power to effect novel outcomes, the power of individuals to real y create things and events, leads him towards an ontology wherein there is profound contingency and no
complete logical space:
The melioristic universe is... a pluralism of independent powers...
Its destiny thus hangs on an if, or on a lot of ifs – which amounts to saying (in the technical language of logic) that, the world
being as yet unfinished, its total character can be expressed only
by hypothetical and not by categorical propositions. (Empiricism, believing in possibilities, is willing to formulate its universe
16 Ibid., 126.
17 Ibid., 91.
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in hypothetical propositions. Rationalism, believing only in
impossibilities and necessities, insists on the contrary on their
being categorical.)18
Lewis’s whole thesis of the plurality of worlds is spun out of the
premise that philosophical examples involving possibilia ultimately require us to assume that when we speak of what is necessarily true
we are referring to what already obtains at all possible worlds, that what we say is contingently true refers to what already obtains at some of them and not others, and what is said to be necessarily false
is false because it has no referent at any possible world. On this view, philosophical inquiries that make use of counterfactuals assume
the existence of worlds sufficiently similar to our own so as to be
different in only the ways relevant to the given example. All of this
involves a false notion of “possibility”. No possibility that already exists in every essential aspect of how it is conceived is any real
possibility at al . To speak of possibilities in any coherent sense is to allow, as James does, for universal contingency.
An ontology of universal contingency is not possible if Logic is
taken to be a real limiting condition on worldhood, as opposed to
an intellectual abstraction that is useful for coordinating complex projects in the empirical world of experience. In his “Confidences
of a Psychical Researcher”, James speculated that the paranormal
phenomena that he spent 25 years researching as a founding member
of the American Society for Psychical Research, might turn out to be
empirical evidence for an irreducibly illogical aspect of existence.19
This “bosh” would be the residue of a primordial ontological chaos
out of which cosmic order arises only through a long process of
evolutionary struggle between willing beings with varying degrees
of emergent consciousness. ‘Laws’ might have evolved in fits and
starts, as a draw between battling psychical forces, with some of
them being selected against and others of them being assimilated
– so that the fabric of the cosmos is as adhoc a patchwork as our
18 James,
Writings: 1902–1910, 1099.
19 Ibid., 1258-1259.
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DNA (most of which is evolutionary ‘junk’). In Lewis’s terms, this
would be a battle of story-tellers’ imaginations over how the “book
of the world” should be written. One would never know what the
characters will do next, because there is still no single author whose will has prevailed absolutely over the others.
The persistence of this “bosh” factor, together with emergent
order, provides just the kind of razor’s edge that is required for
free will – a tense balance between law-like determinism and real indeterminism. Those of Lewis’s possible worlds that are supposed
to allow for choosing agents, only feature a rationalist pseudo
‘indeterminism’ defined by propensity-profiles of finite entities that demarcate a completed logical space of ‘predetermined possibilities’.
It is beyond the scope of this essay to argue against Lewis’s ontology and in favor of something like James’s pluralistic universe (where
“uni verse” properly means the one and only reality). All I have been concerned to suggest is that whatever other merits it may have, the
Lewisian ontology does not allow for the kind of free will that defeats an indifference objection. Fundamental and comprehensive logical
determination, on the one hand, and allowance for a creativity that
makes for meaningful y active engagement in life, on the other, are
contradictory demands to make of one and the same ontology.
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REWRITING GOD’S PLAN
George Nolfi’s 2011 cinematic adaptation of the 1954 short
story “Adjustment Team” by Philip K
. Dick explores
the concept of human freedom in a way that seamlessly
intertwines the metaphysical and the metapolitical. The
Adjustment Bureau is essential y a retelling of Jacob’s wrestling match with the unsportsmanlike angel. Not since Franz Kafka penned The
Trial has there been a more poignant allegory about the struggle between Man and God.
The members of the Adjustment Bureau are angels and their
chairman is the Lord. This is made fairly clear at several points in the film. From the very first meeting that David Norris (Matt Damon)
has with a member of the Bureau, namely Richardson, it is impressed
upon him that the Bureau is there to make sure that everything goes
according to plan. This leaves us asking who’s plan it is that they are enforcing. Richardson also tel s him that he has just seen behind
a curtain that he was not even supposed to know existed and that
very few humans have ever looked behind. This sets up the author
of The Plan as some kind of Wizard of Oz figure – the man behind
the curtain, as it were – but even more than that, since the remark
about “very few humans” suggests that the Bureau’s members are
not as “human” as they appear. Then, in the bar, Harry explains to
David that they cannot reset people without authorization from “the
chairman” whereupon David, appalled and exasperated, asks: “The
chairman?” Harry elaborates in these revealing terms: “That’s just a
name we use. You use many other names.”
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What other names is he al uding to? Zeus. Jupiter. Jehovah.
Al ah. Indra. This becomes clearer on the boat ride that they take
together. David asks Harry point blank, “Are you an angel?” Harry,
somewhat flattered, replies: “We’ve been called that. We’re more
like case officers, who live a lot longer than humans.” Thompson
leaves us with no doubt. He explains to David how these ‘angels’
have controlled human civilizations throughout history on behalf
of the chairman, stepping back during two periods wherein they
attempted to allow humans to exercise their free will with what he
claims were disastrous consequences: the dark ages and then the
epoch from World War I to the near destruction of the earth in the
Cuban Missile Crisis. Thompson equates the Bureau’s enforcement
of The Plan with the power of Fate.
Taking this key revelation as our point of departure, what is most
fascinating about the film is the way in which it depicts the very finite and fallible character of the divine bureaucracy. Just as the Bible
and religious texts of other traditions present us with a hierarchy of angels or gods in service of the highest god or Lord of the gods, in the Adjustment Bureau there is a clear hierarchy – a word, by the way,
whose literal meaning is “holy order.” The lower echelons have very
limited knowledge. David discovers that Richardson cannot tell him
why he is not supposed to be with Elise Sel as (Emily Blunt) because
neither Richardson nor his assistants are privy to that information.
They have to compensate for their lack of knowledge by resorting to
bul ying tactics and to outright deception.
Harry explains to David that Richardson was “just trying to scare”
him when he said that the Bureau members can read everything in
his mind, and that he was exaggerating about the effects of a “reset.”
To read minds, they have to setup thought processes that weigh
options and can be mapped out as clear decision trees. Water –
whether in the form of rain or bodies of water – limits their abilities to “adjust” people and events. Harry even admits that Thompson lied
to David when he claimed that the reason he cannot be with Elise is
that she brings out his reckless side. When Richardson goes in to see
Donaldson, a point is made of the fact that Richardson has never
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been in the Archive Room that they enter together: “Have you been
in here before. No, of course not.” After learning that The Plan is an il usion and that there have actual y been multiple plans rewritten
a dozen times or more, leaving messy fragments from older plans
in place, he confesses to Harry that he has no idea how The Plan
can “just change like that” because, as he puts it: “It’s above my pay grade.” At the end, we see that “Even Thompson”, the “hammer” to
whom the case is kicked up, “has a boss.”
The ‘angel’ in whom we see the finitude and fallibility of the Lord’s
entire bureaucracy most clearly reflected is Harry. When Richardson
causes a car accident in which a cabbie and another driver are
injured, we see that they are willing to hurt people pretty seriously
to accomplish their ends. Of course, they also cause Elise to sprain
her ankle. But it is in the case of Harry that we learn that outright
murder is also part of their modus operandi. He is responsible for the death of David’s father and brother. Both of them had the potential
to become great men, but The Plan did not call for it. Together with
the death of his mother in the 6th grade – which Harry claims was
“just chance” – David is famous for having overcome these losses on
his way to becoming the youngest congressman elected to the House
of Representatives. Harry feels guilt over these murders that he
presided over (one of which was made to look like a drug overdose)
even though he is not supposed to, and he feels as if he owes David.
He admits to David that Bureau members do have emotions, and
David realizes that some have them more than others. Richardson,
Harry’s partner, also knows about his guilt over the Norris family
deaths. In one scene, Richardson walks up to Harry as he stands in
a tall window of the Bureau building with a view of the cityscape
at night crowned by the Empire State Building, to tell him that
Thompson has finished the job. Richardson says: “You can’t let it get
to you. Like it did with his family. This is the job.” Then Harry asks:
“You ever wonder if it’s right, I mean, if it’s always right?” Richardson replies: “Not like I used to. Look,” and he looks upwards into the
night sky as he says this, “chairman has The Plan. We only see part of it.” Richardson took the same attitude when David told him that he
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must be misreading the Plan or, if not, then the Plan must be wrong.
“Do you know who wrote it?” “I don’t care.” “No, you should! You
should real y show a little respect.” Respect for god.
Instead of showing unquestioning respect for god – or, as it were,
“the chairman” – David earns the respect not only of Harry but
ultimately of the chairman himself by trying to force his way past
the enforcers of the divine bureaucracy to seek a direct hearing with
the Lord. As he tries to make it to the Ceder Lake dance rehearsal he
taunts Richardson that his increasingly outrageous use of obstacles
must be causing endless ripples, something the Bureau is supposed
to avoid, and he yel s: “I don’t care what you put in my way. I’m not
giving up.” Later Thompson confronts David with the rhetorical
questio
n: “Why do you refuse to accept what should be completely
obvious by now. You’ve seen what we can do. You can’t doubt we are
who we say we are… You can’t outrun your fate, David.” He means to
remind David that he is dealing with the angels of the Lord. David’s
response gives Thompson pause. He stops in his tracks and thinks to
himself, wincing slightly, when David says: “Look, it’s not about who
you are. It’s about who I am…. I just disagree with you about what
my fate is.”
When David leaves Elise in the hospital we should not take
this as his giving up with respect to the Bureau, but his putting her
lifelong ambitions and hopes before his own interests. Thompson
has, perhaps deceptively, convinced him that if he stays with her she
will wind up teaching dance to 6-year-olds instead of becoming one
of the best dancers in the country and, eventual y, one of the world’s greatest choreographers.
Even this does not deter him in the end. He is determined to
do “whatever it takes” to get her back. When Harry teaches David
how to use the doors this is a metaphor for what Aldous Huxley
called The Doors of Perception in a book by that name, after which the band The Doors was named. It turns out that he will be able to navigate these “doors” even better than the Bureau because they
have a problem with improvisation. Some humans are better at
risky creative thinking than they are. This limitation on the power
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of angels has a long precedent in traditional religious literature. It is his creative vision, together with his determination, that eventual y
inspires not only Harry but also moves the chairman himself.
This was David’s intention. Before he takes Elise through the
door at the Statue of Liberty, obviously a profound symbol of the
question of metaphysical freedom at the core of the film, he explains
to Elise that the Bureau’s book says that their relationship is wrong
“but what if I can find who wrote it?” On top of Rockefeller Center,
in what they think might be their last moment together, David and
Elise are confronted by Thompson with these words: “Did you real y
think you could reach the chairman and change your fate if you
did? Or write your own? It doesn’t work like that, and I told you