Philip K. Dick and Philosophy

by D. E. Wittkower

  Hopefully some of this is obvious enough, but I know that, even if you’re following me on the “vast conspiracy” part of this claim, the “sinister” part is probably something you’re pretty skeptical about at this point. We’ll get there, and I think you’ll agree with me once I explain it a bit more. Let’s let David Norris take the lead here:

  You know, 1998, I did a cover for GQ, the title was ‘Youngest Congressmen Ever’, and since then every story tried to explain how I got here so fast. And the word that people kept uh . . . using was “authentic” and . . . But here’s the problem, this isn’t even my tie. This tie was selected for me by a group of specialists, in Tenafly, New Jersey, who chose it over fifty-six other ties we tested. In fact, our data suggests that I have to stick to either a tie that is red or a tie that is blue. A yellow tie made it look as if I was taking my situation lightly and I may in fact pull my pants down at any moment. A silver tie meant that I’d forgotten my roots. My shoes—you know, shiny shoes we associate with high-priced lawyers and bankers. If you want to get a working man’s vote, you need to scuff up your shoes a little bit, but you can’t scuff ’em so much that you alienate the lawyers and the bankers, cause you need them to pay for the specialist back in Tenafly.

  Authenticity, image, and meaning are manufactured goods, designed, produced, and marketed like any other sports drink, toilet paper, sandwich cookie, politician, or whatever. And just as corn-syrup-sweet and sat-fat-rich confectionaries make our children find apples and grapes to be dull and unappetizing by comparison, we find real people to be so awfully uninteresting and unimportant compared to those who are industrially-manufactured. And what else would we call a celebrity than an industrially-manufactured person-slash-marketing tool? I guess some of the actual people who our economy casts in the role of celebrity do have some kind of actual merit—acting, singing, being funny or nice or whatever—but this has basically nothing to do with their roles as celebrities. And there are those free-floating signifiers like Snooki and the Kardashians, among many others, who are famous for nothing other than their own fame.

  Celeb gossip rags sit alongside candy bars, both literally and conceptually. Both take advantage of inborn instincts and desires that presumably once served a healthy purpose (seeking out nutritious and sustaining foods; determining who in the tribe can be trusted and how to organize our hunter-gatherer pack) but that are now exploited to make us addicts, regularly buying and consuming things that are wholly unnecessary to our lives and that, if anything, make us worse. Nobody actually cares about The Bachelor, but we’ll buy magazines and sit through ads to find out about him anyway. Learning about Lindsay Lohan’s behavior this week does not contribute to anyone’s real interests, desires, or life-plans.

  Matt Damon is an industrially-manufactured person too. Matt Damon has been built up by his personal brand management, but much more so by casting directors, marketers, talk shows, celebrity magazines, and everyone else trying to use his face and name to get you to give them money. And that gets us to the point here: Phil Dick’s paranoid fantasies are true.

  There are fake manufactured people among us—as Tyrell put Norris’s point about “authenticity” in Blade Runner: “More human than human is our motto.” As in The Simulacra, these fake people are consolidations of power and tools of distraction and control. Like Time Out of Joint, this fake reality is there to keep us docile, occupied, and productive. And, as in The Adjustment Bureau, we’re constantly being ‘nudged’ to make one choice rather than another, so that we all play our little part in someone else’s big plan.

  It’s all part of a vast, sinister conspiracy to hide the true nature of reality and of human life; to keep us so distracted by gossip and entertainment and buying one thing after another (and working so that we can maintain this life) so that we never notice, as in Dick’s “The Piper in the Woods,” that we’d probably be happier if we spent less time working or being ‘entertained’ and more time laying quietly on a rock in the warm sun.

  A Variety of Free Will Worth Having

  Philip K. Dick claimed he was a “fictionalizing philosopher, not a novelist,” but he didn’t tell us what kind of philosopher he was. As I see it, despite his many concerns with epistemology and metaphysics, and his turn to philosophy of religion in his later work, he was most constantly and consistently concerned with ethics, existentialism, and social and political philosophy; with questions of how we should live, how we ought to treat others, and how, practically, to respond to an alienating society and an absurd universe. And this is something that The Adjustment Bureau really understood correctly about Dick’s original short story, “Adjustment Team”: the real point is not about knowledge and reality; the real point is about how to live.

  “Adjustment Team” is an abstract and absurdist story, starting with a secret-agent dog and ending with the adjusters helping the main character lie to his wife about the nature of reality. When Ed Fletcher, the real-estate office drone who is Dick’s main character, goes to the office during the “adjustment,” ash fills the air, and everything (and everybody) is made of grey dust. The underlying truth of his workaday world, revealed to him accidentally, is that it is dead, animated and directed only by some external hidden force. What if he had been in that office? Would he have been nothing but dust as well?

  Here we have a kind of determinism that is lived everyday, not an abstract thought experiment about metaphysical freedom and the soul. Here, the claim is that—in the workplace and the marketplace perhaps most distinctively—we do not bring about our own actions. We are not present, as humans, at work: we do what we have to to succeed, and we may or may not enjoy our work, but we are directed by goals and considerations that we have not chosen or decided to value.

  Our working lives are animated by mysterious forces and goals we do not choose: the visions of success and self-worth that are peddled to us in movies and advertising, the misplaced pride of wealth, and the idea that if we earn enough money we can buy our way into having a meaningful or enjoyable life. We seldom ask whether the “better” life we are able to afford is worth everything we sacrifice to get there—most of us just follow the plan. As Thompson (Terence Stamp) puts it in the film, we have the freedom to choose what kind of toothpaste we wish to use, but not to make any real choices. We must add to this: it’s not just in consumption and “entertainment” that we allow ourselves to be determined, but also in production and the very conceptualization of what our life is “about” or “for.”

  This alienation from our own values and our own working and striving is determinism as we experience it, concretely. Freedom, similarly, is not treated here as the abstract idea of a break in the chain of cause and effect. Freedom, concretely, is accepting responsibility and choice—contrary to the determinism of working towards goals that we didn’t come up with in jobs where we do things we would never have chosen as the content of our lives. Freedom in our concrete day-to-day lives is the ability to do what you actually value and choose, and to act on the basis of your own creative vision of the life you wish to lead.

  This is why, in my view, the love story here is not just added on to Dick’s story in order to make the movie commercially viable (although that can’t be ignored either). The love story gives us the counterpoint to this vision of the gray, ashen office. Of course in the film, the image of the work involved changes quite a bit—politics and dance don’t involve the same uncommitted drudgery as Ed Fletcher’s office job—but the movie does retain some of the Man in the Gray Flannel Suit aesthetic, and the motivating tension here is that of personal commitments set against one’s role in society. Norris does not want to do what’s expected of him, or even to pursue his own best interests (as defined by everyone but him). He won’t stick with the plan, and puts his emotional commitments ahead of his career—an inspiring sacrifice which women make every day, but which somehow only counts as heroism worthy of an action film when a man does it.

  To choose love over career is exactly the k
ind of thing that we’re told not to do as well. Not just in the literal sense of sacrificing success for a relationship, but love in the broadest sense: choosing to pursue your passions and values, even when they are impractical, unlikely, or crazy. And this is the ultimate solution in the movie: when we refuse to follow the plan, and do what we will, sometimes we find out that the plan wasn’t the only way to do things.

  Terrible Freedom

  It’s very dangerous to choose not to follow the plan, and Dick knew this as well as anyone. Those who reject the whole deal, who drop out of the rat race—they live on the fringes, often without feeling that they’re even a part of society. To some extent, this is because that feeling of being in a society was an illusion to begin with. (This is another function of celebrities: they give us a bunch of people we all can pretend to know in common, which helps us feel like we actually live as part of a group; as if we had a society instead of just an economy.) But to some extent, this is because it’s so hard to tell which parts of the plan are good and which parts are bad, and in our desire to be free, we too often throw away prudence and thoughtfulness as if they were just the same as these other ways we are controlled and occluded.

  Consider, for example, these comments from Dick’s “Author’s Note” in A Scanner Darkly:

  This has been a novel about some people who were punished entirely too much for what they did. They wanted to have a good time, but they were like children playing in the street; they could see one after another of them being killed—run over, maimed, destroyed—but they continued to play anyhow. We really all were very happy for a while, sitting around not toiling but just bullshitting and playing, but it was for such a terrible brief time, and then the punishment was beyond belief: even when we could see it, we could not believe it.

  Drug misuse is not a disease, it is a decision, like the decision to step out in front of a moving car. You would call that not a disease but an error in judgment. When a bunch of people begin to do it, it is a social error, a life-style. In this particular life-style the motto is “Be happy now because tomorrow you are dying,” but the dying begins almost at once, and the happiness is a memory. It is, then, only a speeding up, an intensifying, of the ordinary human existence. It is not different from your life-style, it is only faster.

  The desire to be free and to be self-determining is not to be blamed here. This is the desire that made so many question the plan in the 1960s. It moved us beyond the healthy rejection of the stifling conformity of the 1950s (or “the man-in-the-grayflannel-suit problem,” as Dick called it in his comments on “The Mold of Yancy”), and moved into great and dangerous experiments in how to live. Why not question war? Why not question segregation? Why not question monogamy? Why not question my body’s “normal” chemistry?

  Through his claim, here, that the druggie life-style is “no different from your life-style,” he’s trying to make clear that druggies are not deviants and weirdoes who can’t be understood; druggies are just those who, in striving for freedom and happiness, threw out some of the good parts of “the plan” along with the bad parts.

  Dick went on to say, “There is no moral in this novel; it is not bourgeois; it does not say they were wrong to play when they should have toiled; it just tells what the consequences were.” The ‘bourgeois moralizing’ that he doesn’t want to do would have told us that they were punished because they were wrong to no longer be part of our endless cycle of making crap and buying crap and doing all the crap we’re expected to do. He refused to say that, because he thought it was bullshit. That bourgeois moralizing is just part of this vast, sinister conspiracy to control you; part of this system of social determinism. But there’s another kind of determinism here too: natural determinism, “morally neutral,” “impartial cause-and-effect.” That’s what brought down the druggies, and that’s why, in our struggle to be free, we have to not just reject control, but also take control.

  Pre-Crime and Pre-Punishment

  All this has been about freedom and determinism as concrete concerns that we live with (and through) on a daily basis. Here, it is not so surprising that Dick would turn out to be a socialpolitical philosopher rather than an epistemologist or metaphysician. But even when he takes on classic topics of epistemology and metaphysics, his questions are still about value and about how we should live. Among other places, we see this clearly when Dick actually takes on the classic debate about free will in its metaphysical form. This tendency to approach what looks like a purely abstract and logical question and to ask, “What’s at stake here?”; to seek out the psychological and political motivation of asking or of resolving the question—this approach, sometimes called “the hermeneutics of suspicion,” is something that Dick has in common with Nietzsche.

  Friedrich Nietzsche claimed that the free will-determinism debate was important to the history of European thought because, if we didn’t believe in a radically metaphysically free will, we could not be threatened with just punishment for our supposed sins, and then the priests would lose their power over us. “Men,” Nietzsche wrote in Twilight of the Idols, “were considered ‘free’ only so that they might be considered guilty—could be judged and punished: consequently, every act had to be considered as lying within the consciousness.”

  It is characteristic of Nietzsche that, when his gaze settles upon one of the great metaphysical debates of the European tradition, his question is what’s at stake in terms of power and control. While Dick is more interested than Nietzsche in playing around with the details and logic of the debate, he too does not fail to note the role of politics even in metaphysics.

  This is why, among the many fascinating discussions of free will and determinism, I think the right framework to understand “Minority Report” is St. Anselm’s De Concordia Praescientiae et Praedestinationis et Gratiae Dei cum Libero Arbitrio. It’s not that I think Dick had Anselm in mind, but rather that they were both concerned not only with the logic of foreknowledge, but its relationship to guilt and, by implication at least, the justice or injustice of punishment.

  Anselm’s question is how foreknowledge can be compatible with free will. If God is all-knowing, then he must know the future, including what we will choose to do. But if he knows what we choose, that means that what we choose must be knowable—it must be one thing rather than another. But, if what we will choose is already one thing rather than another, how can we be said to freely choose, since the future is already this future rather than that one?

  The solution, for Anselm, is a simple one, although not less conceptually difficult for its simplicity: God is outside of time. The future, for God, is kind of like the past for us—since God is eternal, the future is kind of like something that already happened. So, Anselm reasons, God can know the future without the future being determined—without, in fact, its even being determinable.

  This particular solution is important for Anselm for all the reasons Nietzsche identified, and every other solution seems to have troublingly heretical implications. If we are not completely and absolutely free in our choice, we cannot be completely and absolutely responsible for our choice. And our responsibility must be absolute indeed if a God is to be justified in condemning us to infinite torment. Even so, the image of the abusive father is hard to banish—”Now look what you’ve made me do,” God seems to say. Wouldn’t a loving God change things so that we would choose something else instead, like the paternalistic God of The Adjustment Bureau? Perhaps God cares more about us following orders than he does about the right thing actually getting done.

  Through “Minority Report,” Dick brings up all the same questions as Anselm. Why use foreknowledge to punish instead of to preclude? As with Anselm’s solution, it must be because the pre-criminal is already guilty of having (not-yet) freely decided to commit a crime. To be guilty, now, of a crime not yet committed, we must be absolutely free to choose to do otherwise, and yet our future choice must already be known with absolute certainty. After Pre-Crime figures this out—wel
l, the possibility of telling someone about their future and giving them a chance to do otherwise, in the light of this prediction, is irrelevant. The pre-criminal is already guilty of a future-crime, and deserving of punishment. And so too with God: preventing the sin might be nice, but that prevention wouldn’t remove the guilt of the presinner. And so it comes down to predestination and grace.

  “Minority Report” was published at the end of 1954. Joseph McCarthy was head of the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations. The House Un-American Activities Committee had been a standing committee for ten years and the Red Scare still raged. State-department-run libraries burned books by authors whose anti-Communist commitments were in question. The FBI, under J. Edgar Hoover, anonymously sent out documents accusing teachers and lawyers of Communist association. Eisenhower had just signed the Communist Control Act of 1954 into law, which outlawed the American Communist Party as a “clear, present, and continuing danger to the security of the United States,” making membership a criminal act.

  Even peaceful and democratic criticism of capitalism had become legally equated with contributing to future violence and evil. Those blacklisted and suspected were punished not for what they did, nor even what they said, nor even what they believed—they were punished for their present guilt of support for that future crime that must be prevented: the violent Communist overthrow of the United States.

  Freedom and Madness