Philip K. Dick and Philosophy

by D. E. Wittkower

  The Ugly

  Why do we teach our children these things if they’re not true? We teach them because it’s good for the kids to think them. The child that’s told she has secret talents waiting to be found is much more likely to find them if they’re there, and to maximize what she has if they’re not. The child that’s told he’s a limitless human being of infinite potential is much less likely to give up before he reaches his limits and is more likely to push them as far as he can. It’s good for society to be based upon ideals that place value on individual life without spending too much time weighing the worth of each one. The cost of society undervaluing an individual is much greater than the cost of society overvaluing them, and we all know governments and people make mistakes—after all, we’re only human. Limited, mistake-prone human beings. For now, at least.

  Eugenics demands we make value judgments about people. If we want to improve the species, we need to dismiss the noble lie of egalitarian democracy and make some tough decisions. What effect might this have on society?

  Jason Taverner knows about eugenics from the inside out, and it has affected how he views the world. He looks down on regular people who don’t possess his genetic advantages, as does his fellow six, Heather:

  “They’re ordinaries,” Jason said, “and they’re morons. Because”—he nipped the lobe of her ear—“because that’s what it means to be an ordinary. Right?”

  She sighed. “Oh, God, to be in the flyship cruising through the void. That’s what I long for: an infinite void. With no human voices, no human smells, no human jaws masticating plastic chewing gum in nine iridescent colors.”

  “You really do hate them,” he said.

  “Yes.” She nodded briskly. “And so do you.”

  Jason and Heather see themselves as apart from the human race. They know that they’re exceptional, and look down on those who are not. Heather objects to Jason’s derogatory use of the word “ordinaries,” but her own disdain for them—for us—is obvious.

  Phil Dick highlights a serious issue. Even if we’re able to negotiate the rock-strewn moral waters of choosing genuinely and objectively valuable traits, ensuring wide access to eugenic technologies and balancing the competing concerns of personal freedom and public good, what will the next generation think of us? And what effect will the practice of eugenics have on a democratic society?

  Phil Dick seems to think that competition is inevitable. In the story, Jason thinks that the competition has been resolved, and he and his fellows have won. He already sits at the top of the heap, a position he considers his birthright. The police general Felix Buckman is hostile to Jason and his kind, and worries about the possibility of conspiracy on the part of the sixes. The conspiracy doesn’t exist: there are too few sixes around and they do not work well together. Nevertheless, just as Felix fears the sixes, Jason and his kind worry about the probablymythical sevens. Felix considers the sixes’ fear of the sevens their “bête noire,” their personal bugbear and a weakness he can exploit. If it happened to the ordinaries, Jason must worry, it could happen to us.

  Another useful analogy from popular culture might be Marvel’s X-Men comic book series. The X-Men universe is divided into two groups: mutants and non-mutants. Some, perhaps most, of the mutants possess beneficial mutations. However, rather than being an unabashed good with both mutants and non-mutants bringing in the future together, the series explores the fragmentation and conflict the existence of a next generation of human beings might produce. The possibility of their being welcomed with acceptance and open arms seems a distant and unlikely one in the X-Men universe, just as it is for Jason in Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said.

  Phil Dick also explores the personal costs of eugenic values. Jason is, perhaps as a result of his upbringing and his status as a six, a narcissist. He is obsessed with aging. Throughout the novel he returns again and again to his appearance and how old he looks. He mentions his age several times, usually to reaffirm that he is still good-looking and in possession of his genetic heritage. When a nineteen-year-old girl guesses his age as “about fifty” he feels fury and misery. His obsession is probably part and parcel of his eugenic heritage. He values himself and others according to looks and talent, and when these begin to erode with age he reacts with panic. Jason’s “aristocratic values” mean he is unable to see beyond these qualities. His elitism also leaves him with little public feeling—even to his fellow six Heather, who he has no qualms condemning to a forced labor-camp.

  The lack of empathy Jason shows for his fellow six and lover Heather, speculates Felix, is the real reason the sixes have not succeeded in propagating the elitist values they represent. Their elitism means they have no loyalty to each other and place themselves above everything else. Felix, in contrast, is willing to sacrifice himself for the public good. We learn that he was demoted to police general from police marshal because he showed compassion to the people in the forced-labor camps under his control. At the end of the novel we find out he was later assassinated for criticizing the totalitarian regime he was a part of. Felix’s values are the democratic values we are familiar with, and Phil Dick contrasts them directly with Jason’s elitist ones.

  And the Next Step

  The question of where the human race is heading is an enduring concern in science fiction, just as it is in philosophy. The general consensus in science fiction is that change is inevitable. There’s no consensus about whether it is desirable. H.G. Wells in The Time Machine imagined change caused by evolution leading to a genetic stratification of society. Olaf Stapledon in his mind-bending Last and First Men throws his imagination into the distant future, envisaging a vast succession of human forms and re-imagining what it means to be human. In many science-fiction works since these early writers there has been a larger sense of humanity as a developing idea, aiming toward something greater, with some writers portraying the development of humanity as the main purpose of existence.

  Dick is somewhat unusual in the wider field of science fiction. He treats the next generation of human beings with caution and carefully considers some of the wider social ramifications of eugenics. He provides a counter-point to much of the popular science fiction at the time which, heavily influenced by editor John W. Campbell, focused on embracing what Campbell saw as the inevitable and glorious future of humanity.

  Philosophy, science, and popular culture have cross-pollinated on the issue of eugenics and the development of humanity. In recent times there has been a resurgence of interest in redefining what it means to be human. Theorists of “posthumanism” have argued that we need to reconsider the narrow, essentialist definition of humanity and widen our horizons to recognize that “human” is rapidly becoming an obsolete notion. Donna Haraway is one such theorist, arguing that concepts like “human”, “natural,” and “gender” should be fluidly defined and embrace the realities of the modern world.

  Phil Dick provides a voice of caution in the wider dialogue—he want to expand our definition of what human means, but not at the cost of our humanity. To be truly human, Dick argues, the next generation needs to be compassionate and empathetic. The question is, can this generation behave that way to the next?

  The World Is Fake

  13

  Things Are Seldom What They Seem

  GERARD CASEY

  David Norris, the hero of The Adjustment Bureau, is a young, good-looking, popular Congressman who unexpectedly loses the Senate election he seemed certain, almost predestined, to win. As if by way of consolation, while rehearsing his concession speech in the men’s room at the Waldorf, he meets the beautiful and free-spirited Elise. Despite their mutual attraction, it seems that David and Elise are not destined to be together. The men of the mysterious Bureau, whose job it is to ‘adjust’ human affairs and keep them ‘on plan’, are determined to separate them and keep them separated. Through an accident—or maybe it’s not an accident—David becomes aware of the existence of the Bureau. Now he is faced with a choice. Will he bow to the
Bureau’s dictates and fulfil his predestined fate; or will he defy fate and risk all for love?

  How Are Things in Glocca Morra—or Anywhere Else, for That Matter?

  The question running through The Adjustment Bureau is this: are we really free, or are our lives governed by some kind of external agency? The answer to this question depends on what we think is ultimately real. We believe we are free and we act accordingly. Surely nothing could be more obvious than that? We also believe the world in which we live is pretty well known to us. If the tree that you can see from your window looks green it’s because it is green. If you hear the sound of a trumpet, it’s because your neighbour who plays in the College Marching Band is rehearsing for the opening day of the football season. But what if the world of our ordinary experience isn’t how things really are? And what if we aren’t really free?

  The world is a much odder place than it seems at first glance. Take a straight stick and push it halfway down into a fish tank, holding on to both ends as you do so. The stick now looks bent at the point where it enters the water but we don’t actually believe that it’s bent, we think it just looks that way. But if we stop to think about it for a moment, all we know for sure is that our eyes and our hands are telling us different things. Why do we believe our hands rather than our eyes? Why do we think “It looks bent but it’s really straight” rather than “It feels straight but it’s really bent?”

  Or consider this. It’s a sunny day in early spring. After a sudden, brief scattered shower of rain, the sun sneaks out from behind a cloud. You look up and see, arcing across the sky, a spectacular rainbow. Nothing unusual about that except, of course, that there is no rainbow arcing across the sky. You don’t have to have engaged in a futile search for a pot of gold to figure out that you can never get to the end of a rainbow. No matter how much you move towards it, the rainbow maintains its standoffish attitude to you. It recedes from you at exactly the same rate at which you approach it until, eventually, it disappears, much like the leprechaun gold that you won’t find at its end, whatever the characters in Finian’s Rainbow may have you believe.

  The experience of seeing a semicircular spectrum of colors in the sky occurs only when you have sunlight, raindrops in the air and an observer in the right place. No sunlight, no rainbow. No raindrops, no rainbow. No observer, no rainbow. Unlike your super-widescreen TV set which you don’t really suspect of disappearing when you leave the room to get a snack, a rainbow is there to be seen only because you are there to see it.

  Apart from optical oddities like rainbows, don’t we generally see and hear what’s actually there? And isn’t whatever we see and hear just there whether we actually see it or hear it? Well—yes and no. Our eyes and ears are sensitive only to a limited range of energy. Above and below that range, we see and hear nothing, though bees and dogs and other sentient creatures can and do. Apart from the built-in limitations of our senses, what we experience also depends on a whole host of factors such as our position in space, our expectations, our desires and our emotional states. And if all this isn’t enough, remember that our language and cultural assumptions make their own unique contribution to what we see and hear. The world which we seem to see and hear isn’t there in any simple way; it’s a complicated construct to which various factors contribute, some of them being supplied by us and not by the world outside us.

  So what! Even if the world of our perceptual experience turns out to be a little more complicated than we first think, once we discount for our emotional engagement and our sensory limitations, isn’t what’s left real? Mmmm—maybe not. Many thinkers, including Philip K. Dick, have wondered if it’s not just a matter of some aspects of our experience being illusory but, much more radically, whether everything in our experience is in some way an illusion!

  Maor Machine?

  ‘What’s really real and what’s merely illusion’ is a theme, some might say the theme, woven into the fabric of almost all of Dick’s forty-plus novels and hundred-plus (published) short stories. The fate versus freedom theme of The Adjustment Bureau is a particular local version of this larger theme. Questions of reality and illusion might seem to be the province of a philosopher rather than a novelist and, indeed, Dick says of himself in his Exegesis:

  I am a fictionalizing philosopher, not a novelist; my novel & story-writing ability is employed as a means to formulate my perception. The core of my writing is not art but truth.

  Whether as philosopher or novelist or both, the two basic topics that fascinated Dick, as he wrote in “How to Build a Universe That Doesn’t Fall Apart Two Days Later,” were

  ‘What’s ultimately real?’ and ‘What constitutes the authentic human being? What are we? What is it that surrounds us, that we call the not-me, or the empirical or phenomenal world?’

  Watching The Adjustment Bureau, we begin to wonder whether we’re really anything more than glorified machines. Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (filmed as Blade Runner) has large numbers of fake animals and a smaller, but significant, number of fake human beings and the short stories “Second Variety” and “Impostor” (filmed as Screamers and Impostor) are positively infested with human simulacra. How are you supposed to tell a real human being from an android, a replicant, or an automaton?

  For Dick, what makes the difference between the real human being and the fake is that real human beings are capable of showing empathy towards others; fake human beings aren’t. Empathy is the ability to enter into the interior life of another human being, to realize that those annoying customers or those not-so-clever students are, cynical suspicions to the contrary, persons just like you.

  Real human beings, then, are empathetic; fake human beings are not: as Dick puts it in “Man, Android, and Machine,” “their handshake is the grip of death, and their smile has the coldness of the grave.” In “Adjustment Team,” the short story on which The Adjustment Bureau is based, the Bureau Chief speaks in a kind of empathy-challenged bureaucratese, “The natural process must be supplemented—adjusted here and there. Corrections must be made. We are fully licensed to make such corrections.” In much the same way, the agents of The Adjustment Bureau are not the kind of people you could see yourself going to a ballgame with or inviting around for a barbecue. Their emotional detachment is repellent and inhuman.

  The difference between being really human and being a fake is not primarily a matter of being made of the appropriate organic materials—after all, Dick thinks of the whole universe as a sort of gigantic laboratory—it’s a matter of the way one lives in the world. In Dick’s short story “Human Is,” Jill’s inhumane (but genetically human) husband Lester departs on a mission for Rexor IV and returns a different man. Literally. His body has been colonised by a genetically non-human Rexorian whose behavior is more truly humane than ever Lester’s was. The appalling Lester exhibited a marked deficiency of empathy in his relationships with others—always a deadly sin in Dick’s eyes—whereas the appealing Rexorian behaves just as Dick thinks a human being should.

  What’s Really Real?

  The idea of discovering truth as lifting a veil that concealed reality from us is one that goes back a long way in both philosophy and in religion. Dick speaks of Parmenides as “the first person in the West systematically to work out proof that the world cannot be as we see it, that dokos, the veil, exists.” For Christianity, while the world we live in is not unreal, it’s not as real as its Creator. Now we see “through a glass, darkly” but, in the fullness of time, we shall see “face to face” (1 Corinthians, 13:12). For Indian thinkers, both Buddhist and Hindu, our ordinary experience is the realm of maya or illusion.

  In “Adjustment Team,” our hero Ed Fletcher (who is nowhere near as dashing as his cinematic counterpart David Norris) accidentally stumbles upon a segment of the world that’s undergoing adjustment by the men from the Bureau. He should have been part of the scene undergoing adjustment but his dog, who is really a Bureau operative, didn’t bark at the right time. (Don’t ask!) When the worl
d is being adjusted it is, Ed says, as if

  The sun had winked off. One moment it was beaming down. Then it was gone. Gray clouds swirled above him. Huge, formless clouds. Nothing more. An ominous thick haze that made everything waver and dim.

  Later, describing his experience to his wife, Ed says: “I saw the fabric of reality split open. I saw—behind. Underneath. I saw what was really there.”

  In Dick’s story “Jon’s World,” Jon has visions of other worlds that persuade those around him that he must be crazy. He says of what he sees that it is “More real than anything else! Like looking through a window. A window into another world. A real world. Much more real than this. It makes all this just a shadow world. Only dim shadows. Shapes. Images.” And in “The World She Wanted,” Alison, who lives in what is, for her, the best of all possible worlds says: “we start out with an unjustified assumption—that this is the only world. But suppose we try a different approach: we assume a Creator of infinite power; surely such a being would be capable of creating infinite worlds . . . or at least, so large a number of them to seem infinite to us.”

  Dick is notorious for having once said that “Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn’t go away.” Whether he ever regretted making this statement we shall never know, but what we do know is that he also said, perhaps not quite so notoriously, that “as soon as you begin to ask what is ultimately real, you right away begin to talk nonsense.” It would be foolish to think that we could find some single, coherent definitive Dick doctrine. As Lawrence Sutin remarked,