Philip K. Dick and Philosophy

by D. E. Wittkower

  Lacan called these three categories “the Real,” “the Imaginary,” and “the Symbolic,” and the first of these is closest to Dick’s own concept of the real. The most important thing to know about Lacan’s category of “the Real,” in particular, is that it does not correspond to ordinary reality as we experience it and speak about it, or even to any possible imaginable “alternative” reality. Rather, “the Real” is “the Real” because it is distinct from any of the “realities” that we can think or talk about. This is because it is completely distinct from either the “Symbolic” order of words and language, or the “Imaginary” order of ideas and images.

  In particular, for Lacan, “the Symbolic” is the place of the everyday “reality” that we ordinarily understand ourselves to live in and talk about, using language. Our systems of language designate the social roles that we can occupy, the expectations that are placed upon us as members of society, and what we understand as the very “meaning” of our lives. For instance, if I understand myself to be a competent, ordinary citizen, going dutifully to work in a “respectable” job, say as an accountant, this is because my identity is constituted symbolically by the network of language and society in which I find myself. Even the value of the money that I account for is a “symbolic” function, since money is just a symbol for value.

  If, on the other hand, I dream of leaving my workaday job to be a famous movie star, this dreaming is a matter of what Lacan terms the “Imaginary.” This, by contrast with the symbolic, is the realm of our ideal visions of ourselves and our imagined ideas of what should be. Both of these orders, however—the “Symbolic” order of everyday social norms and roles, as much as the “Imaginary” order of ideal images of how we should appear and be—are completely different from the “third” order of “the Real” which precedes and underlies both of the other two. It follows that, as Lacan puts it in a famous and paradoxical-sounding slogan: “reality is not Real.” That is, what we understand, talk about, and normally experience as “reality”—the everyday social and conventional reality in which we, for the most part, live our lives—is purely a matter of the Symbolic and the Imaginary, and contains nothing of the Real that underlies it.

  Since, for Lacan, the Real is distinct from the Symbolic, there is no way to use ordinary language to speak about it, no way to designate it using the words and symbols that characterize our ordinary, lived experience. Moreover, since it is just as much distinct from the Imaginary, we cannot form any image or idea of the Real either. Nevertheless, there is, for Lacan, a kind of “experience of the Real,” and we can understand this experience by contrast with this ordinary, non-Real “reality.” In fact, for Lacan the experience of the Real occurs precisely when the orders of the Symbolic and the Imaginary suddenly break down, when the stable and regular order of “reality” that they ordinarily produce suddenly and disconcertingly falls apart. This happens, for instance, at the onset of certain kinds of mental illness, especially forms of psychosis. Following such a breakdown, a therapist may try to help the patient to re-establish a relationship between this experienced Real and a stable symbolic and imaginary system in which the patient can live and function.

  Procession of Dummies

  In a talk given in 1978, “How to Build a Universe that Doesn’t Fall Apart Two Days Later,” Dick describes how for decades he attempted to answer the question: “What is reality?”, but to no avail. Finally, he says, one day in 1972,

  a girl college student in Canada asked me to define reality for her, for a paper she was writing for her philosophy class. She wanted a onesentence answer. I thought about it and finally said, “Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn’t go away.” That’s all I could come up with.

  As Dick emphasizes here, this question of the real, difficult as it may be, is massively important: all around us in contemporary life are powers and forces that would like to convince us that their image of the real, their presentation of shadows (such as television programs and media presentations) on the wall of our collective experience, is the only true one. This is how such forces attempt to gain power and control over our lives. But although Dick’s definition fits, to a certain extent, Plato’s picture of the Real as what remains when we look away from the fleeting images on the cave wall, it fits much better with Lacan’s different notion of the Real: that which survives the breakdown of all of the socially and linguistically constructed systems of consensual belief that we ordinarily understand as “reality.” In “Man, Android, and Machine,” Dick confirmed this: “For absolute reality to reveal itself, our categories of space-time experiences, our basic matrix through which we encounter the universe, must break down and then utterly collapse.”

  As one of today’s leading post-Lacanian philosophers, Slavoj Žižek, pointed out in “The Matrix, or, The Two Sides of Perversion,” this “breakdown” happens as soon as the stable, symbolically constituted reality is revealed as the symbolic reality that it is, as soon as it is revealed that there is nothing but words and symbols behind the identities of familiar objects. Sometimes, as for instance in Time out of Joint, this happens quite literally: the breakdown of ordinary reality begins for Ragle Gumm when everyday objects begin to be replaced by the symbolic representations that stand for them, the soft-drink stand being replaced by the words “SOFT-DRINK STAND” and so forth. Somewhat paradoxically, in this “realization” of the actual character of ordinary reality as a symbolic artifact, the traumatic, actual truth of the Real first begins to appear. What happens in Blade Runner is, as Zizek argued in “I or He or It (The Thing) Which Thinks,” essentially similar. Here, when Deckard comes to recognize his “true” identity as an android, Žižek says this recognition amounts to the “total loss of the hero’s symbolic identity;” Deckard can no longer rely on anything that he “knows” or has ever “experienced” about who he himself is. In this loss of the symbolically constituted identity of name and memory, however, Deckard comes to see his former reality, as well as all symbolically constituted realities, as mere “logical constructions,” symbolically constructed fakes. Thus, according to Zizek, the experience of this breakdown of symbolic reality leads to the first possible discernment of the Lacanian Real, which can actually be defined as this “gap” between the “I” that I am “supposed” to be and the “I” that I experience from within.

  If, then, the Real can actually only be experienced through the disorienting shifting of ordinary “realities,” does this mean that there is no hope of discovering a single, orienting sense of the Real that underlies them all? And what sense can we make of this seemingly endless procession of fakes and copies without apparent foundation or end?

  Remembrance of Being, Passed

  In Dick’s classic novel Ubik, several characters experience a strange kind of regression in the objects and artifacts around them. Automobiles, airplanes and other objects are suddenly and successively replaced by technologically earlier versions of themselves. Thus, for instance, a rocket ship is suddenly replaced with a jet plane, and then with an older biplane; gradually, the entire reality begins to resemble not the reality of 1992, in which the novel is otherwise set, but that of 1939. This development presents the same “loss of reality” that occurs in Time out of Joint, but this time in temporal reverse, proceeding anti-chronologically from “later” to earlier versions of the “same” things, things that share an essence or a “form” in Plato’s sense. In a way, this procession of appearances or seeming realities succeeds in manifesting the Platonic form, but never, as Plato himself would have it, as the underlying reality behind all of the shifting appearances. Instead, the “true reality” of the form is really manifest as what is in fact the symbolic unity of the word—the unity that legitimates the use of one and the same word to describe each of the successive versions of, say, an airplane using the single term “airplane” at all.

  In “Man, Android, and Machine,” Dick explained the “temporal regression” in Ubik as revealing another dimens
ion of time, “orthogonal” or at right angles to the ordinary direction:

  What the characters in Ubik see may be orthogonal time moving along its normal axis; if we ourselves somehow see the universe reversed, then the ‘reversions’ of form that objects in Ubik undergo may be momentum toward perfection. This would imply that our world is like an onion, an almost infinite number of successive layers. If lineal time seems to add layers, then perhaps orthogonal time peels these off, exposing layers of progressively greater Being. One is reminded here of Plotinus’s view of the universe as consisting of concentric rings of emanations, each one possessing more Being—or reality—than the next.

  For the characters in Ubik, Dick suggests, the bizarre retrogression of objects into their technologically earlier forms is really just an indication of the “orthogonal” dimension of time that, unlike normal “lineal” time, goes toward the greater perfection and higher Being of the objects themselves. Dick mentions the neo-Platonist philosopher Plotinus. In late antiquity, Plotinus resurrected Plato’s idea that ordinary, experienced sensory reality is in fact insubstantial and illusory, ultimately to be cast aside in the quest for a deeper, more substantial level.

  There are, however, differences between Plotinus’s conception and Plato’s own. One difference is the one that Dick mentions: while for Plato, the two “levels” or types of reality were simply related as copy is to original, Plotinus replaces this twolevel picture with a more complex picture of all reality as layered, like an onion, with one ultimate source of reality from which all other levels emerge or “emanate.” And Plotinus has another idea that helps us make sense of what Dick has in mind: it is that, because this absolute source (what Plotinus often called “the One”) is the source of all of the “realities” that we can understand, think about, or talk about, it is itself beyond any possibility of human comprehension or language. Even though we might indeed be able to “turn toward” the One in exceptional moments of mystical insight or clarity, we can never hope to express its meaning in terms of the ordinary symbolic structures that we share with others and that define our ordinary, mundane lives.

  In 1974, in his vision of pink light, Dick himself experienced what he later described as a profound insight into the nature of reality, becoming convinced that he had rediscovered memories of his own existence in a parallel time-stream, one in which fascist and totalitarian powers had come to hold the world in a terrible and pervasive grip. The term he repeatedly used to describe this experience was Plato’s own term for describing the recovery of the lost memory of the forms, anamnesis (or literally, non-forgetting). Dick’s views of the actual existence of alternate worlds, and the truth of a level of Being that transcends all of them, led him to views that are close, as he himself acknowledged, to another classical system of thought, the system of Gnosticism. Gnostics were people of various faiths and religions who held that the material universe in which we live was created by an imperfect God; hence the universe as we experience it is fatally flawed, as are many of the other universes that exist in parallel. It is thus possible to attain insight into the ultimate nature of reality—the true Godhead who transcends all the imperfect universes—only through a revelation that transcends the character of this material world and its limitations.

  Whatever sense we may make of the strange speculations of Dick’s last years—and even if we see them, as he recognized most people would, as nothing more than the delusions of a science-fiction writer who took some of his own fanciful ideas too much to heart—we can nevertheless recognize here once again an eloquent testament to the profound sense of the Real that orients Dick’s fiction from beginning to end. This is not exactly the Platonic vision of a fixed, timeless, stable reality of forms that stands to our world as original stands to copy. In the complex and shifting networks of images that define the worlds of Dick’s characters, and that indeed increasingly define our lives today, there is probably no hope of locating such a single, substantial level of ultimate reality. On the other hand, though, for Dick as for Lacan, there is a profound sense of the Real that emerges most of all when ordinary, consensual and symbolic realities begin to break down. It is this enigmatic Real, beyond social convention and its ordinary roles and values, that, Dick ventures to suggest, may ultimately be best able to direct us toward the true and the good. And because of this, it is also this sense of the Real that we may, amid today’s pervasiveness of multiple, powerful and convincing but ultimately false images of “reality,” need most of all.

  15

  Lies, Incorporated

  DON FALLIS

  The fictional worlds of Philip K. Dick are riddled with deception.

  In Total Recall, fake memories are implanted into the brain of Douglas Quaid, and his wife and his friends are not who they appear to be. As a Blade Runner, Rick Deckard tracks down replicants who pretend to be human, and in both Blade Runner and Impostor some of the replicants themselves are deceived into thinking that they really are human. In the novel Lies, Inc., we get misleading reports about the wonders of the “off-world colonies.” In Minority Report, John Anderton is framed with manipulated evidence for a murder that he would not actually have committed. In A Scanner Darkly, Bob Arctor deceives his housemates into thinking that he is a drug addict and not an undercover cop. In the novel Time Out of Joint (a major inspiration for The Truman Show), Ragle Gumm lives in a quiet little town that has been created solely to keep him in the dark about what is really going on in the world. Subtle changes to reality are constantly being made behind all of our backs by The Adjustment Bureau.

  These deceptions are often so thoroughgoing that it is suggestive of “some malicious demon of the utmost power and cunning who has employed all his energies in order to deceive me.” However, unlike the skeptical scenario that René Descartes envisioned in his Meditations on First Philosophy, or the one that is depicted in The Matrix, the deceptions that Dick describes are not just hypothetical possibilities that we have no real reason to believe are actual. (Remember that Neo has absolutely no clue about what is really going on until Morpheus offers him the red pill.) Instead, these are the sorts of deceptions that take place in the world that we actually inhabit. Just like Quaid, we know that corporations, political parties, and even the government regularly try to deceive us. Much as in Blade Runner and Imposter, we want to be able to identify terrorists that we know are in our midst. Moreover, like many of Dick’s characters, we are often complicit in our own deception.

  Like Freddie Mercury, Dick’s characters are sometimes unsure whether they are experiencing “real life or just fantasy.” For instance, Dr. Edgemar from Rekall tells Quaid that he has suffered a “schizoid embolism” and that he is experiencing a “free-form delusion.” As a result, Quaid starts to think that his eventful trip to Mars may just be a dream after all. However, the dilemmas that these characters face are not simply science-fiction fantasies. Dick is grappling with the sort of epistemological problems that we face in real life.

  The Epistemology of Deception

  Most philosophers have been concerned with the ethics of deception. For instance, Immanuel Kant famously argued that it is always wrong to lie, and that it is almost always wrong to deceive. By contrast, Plato thought that it is morally justified for a government to lie to its citizens for the good of society.

  However, some philosophers have shared an interest with Dick in the epistemology of deception. David Hume wondered whether we should ever believe someone who claims to have witnessed a miracle. In An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, he relates that “when any one tells me, that he saw a dead man restored to life, I immediately consider with myself, whether it be more probable, that this person should either deceive or be deceived, or that the fact, which he relates, should really have happened.” Since deception is clearly a much more plausible explanation, Hume concludes that he should not believe in miracles.

  But what is deception, exactly? According to most philosophers, one person deceives another person when the
first person intentionally causes the second person to have a false belief. For instance, Vilos Cohaagen deceives Douglas Quaid because he intentionally causes Quaid to have the false belief that he (Quaid) is a mild-mannered construction worker on Earth. In reality, Quaid is Cohaagen’s loyal associate Hauser who has agreed to have his memories replaced so that he can infiltrate the mutant resistance on Mars.

  By contrast, when Quaid goes to Rekall, he asks for a “memory” trip to Mars as a secret agent. Although the technicians intend to deceive Quaid, at his own request, they cannot, since Quaid really is a secret agent. The belief that a deceiver causes must actually be false.

  In addition, a deceiver must cause this false belief intentionally. For instance, while he is on the run (accused of being a replicant designed by the Centauri to blow up the Chancellor), Spencer Olham meets a “Zoner” named Cale, whose appearance leads Olham to assume that he is a drug addict or a drug dealer. But Cale did not intend to give this impression and, in fact, is offended by Olham’s assumption about him. In this case, Olham is accidentally misled, but Cale does not deliberately deceive him.

  How Do We Get Deceived?

  Our senses (sight, hearing, touch, taste, and smell) are our primary sources of information about the world. But sometimes, these senses deceive us. When we look up at Mars through a telescope, the surface appears to be covered with a network of canals. Indeed, the “Grand Canals” are one of the major sights on Rekall’s “memory” trip to Mars. But there are no such features on the red planet. It’s only an optical illusion. Thus, Descartes warns us that “the senses deceive, and it is prudent never to trust completely those who have deceived us even once.”