Philip K. Dick and Philosophy

by D. E. Wittkower

  Of Blob

  During February and March of 1974, a pink beam of light entered Philip K. Dick’s head, supposedly revealing to him the nature of reality and consciousness. For the next eight years, Dick struggled to determine whether the visions encountered during the “2-3-74” experience contained genuine insights or were rather a sign of mental deterioration. Dick toiled daily over this question, eventually producing what came to be an eight-thousand-page manuscript of recollections, theories, and doubts about the beam. He called this work the Exegesis.

  To date only scant amounts have been published. Luckily for us, the Tractatus: Cryptica Scriptura, as Fat calls his musings, gives us a streamlined version of the Exegesis. Even more fortunate, the Tractatus is laid out in full as an appendix to VALIS. To see how the philosophy of the Tractatus—and in turn Spinoza’s philosophy—can help save Fat, we must first discuss blobs.

  Imagine a blob. This blob is the only genuinely independent object in existence. Let’s suppose too that this blob contains everything we run across in our everyday lives. In other words, instead of thinking of reality as blob-free, we must think of it as blob-contained.

  So, what significant differences are there for life in the blob as opposed to life outside it? For the answer, we can turn to the most famous blobist in history: Spinoza. The Ethics, Spinoza’s most studied work, explains blobism in terms of substance and mode. Substance is defined as “that which is in itself and conceived through itself” (1d3).10 To say that the blob is “in itself” means that it has properties, but is not a property of anything else. To help articulate this notion, imagine green, bubbling goo. Neither green nor bubbling exist without goo. So the goo is like a substance with bubbly greenness as its property. Now for Spinoza, we are like bubbly greenness in cosmic goo. We—the bubbly greenness of goo—inhere in a substance—the goo or blob—as “modes,” or rather “the affections of substance, or that which is in another thing through also which it is conceived” (1d5). So if you take the goo away, the green bubbles go along with it. Likewise, take the blob away and its “affections”—particular things like you and me—go away as well.

  Now, can we think of the goo as a different color or placid? We sure can. But can we think of the goo as not being viscous liquid? No; that’s exactly what makes it goo. To think of goo without its bubbly greenness, or its modes, is to think of it “through itself.” On the other hand, when thinking about the bubbly greenness, we must think of it as “conceived” through something else, namely, goo. For Spinoza, when we think about substance or blobs we are thinking about reality despite the fact that our senses seem to tell us that we are blob-free creatures. In other words, what we should take as true derives from our concepts, not our senses. So, if we think about what is implied by substance and modes, we will discover the nature of reality. If we think hard enough, we will see that for better or worse we are all part of the blob.

  The Nature and Origin of the “Mind”

  Well, . . .for Fat it may be for the worse. Fat’s blob—his concept of what we are all part of—comes with serious emotional baggage, for his version of ‘the blob’, what he calls the “Mind,” created the “Brain,” an independent entity existing within the Mind in order to keep the memory of its deceased sister alive. Or, as the thirty-second entry of the Tractatus informs us, “All the information processed by the Brain—experienced by us as the arranging and rearranging of physical objects—is an attempt at this preservation of her; stones and rocks and sticks and amoebae are traces of her.” Reality as we know it is no more than the Mind’s fond memories of a lost sibling.

  Like anyone else, the Mind grieves over the death of its sister. Unlike most cases of grief, this has driven the Mind mad, which is bad for us:

  33. This loneliness, this anguish of the bereaved Mind, is felt by every constituent of the universe. All its constituents are alive.

  38. From loss and grief the Mind has become deranged. Therefore, we, as parts of the universe, the Brain, are partly deranged.

  As a metaphysical consequence of being within the Mind, we must all suffer. For us this may seem quite a strange claim, but for Fat this belief is essential to balancing his precarious psychological states since he can blame his madness and melancholy on the Mind. He can say, with however shaky justification, that it ain’t his fault.

  And Spinoza agrees. Although it’s not the Mind’s fault—it’s God’s. The reason for this is simple: Spinoza calls the blob “God.” For Spinoza, reality is God revealing himself to us, or, as Dick writes in VALIS, “as Spinoza supposed, the universe may be one theophany.” But why is the blob God? First, remember that substance has properties but is not the property of anything else. Thus there is only one substance, since in order to think about two substances we must think about the substances’ properties, which is precisely not to think of two substances “through themselves.” There is only one substance since we can’t legitimately conceive of two.

  Further, substance can’t be caused by another substance since this would require us to think of substance “through” or dependent on something else, which is again not to think of a substance. Finally, substance is infinite, for if it were finite its existence could only be explained by its being limited by another substance, which, you guessed it, is not to think of a substance. Therefore, there is one blob—uncaused and infinite—that contains everything. By definition this is God, or “Being absolutely infinite” (1d6). Thus the grand conclusion: “What ever is, is in God, and nothing can be or be conceived without God” (1p15). For Spinoza, we’re dependent on God in the deepest sense. We are part of Him.

  And the depths of our dependency go even deeper. As part of God, our actions, thoughts—our entire lives!—are determined down to the smallest detail. In Spinoza’s world, you are not free to have chosen not to have read this sentence, for “the will cannot be called a free cause, but can only be necessary” (1p32). Moreover, the world’s entire history was necessarily determined when the first particle of matter came into existence. In other words, the only metaphysically possible time-line is the actual time-line. According to this aptly named necessitarianism , it’s metaphysically impossible for Dick not to have experienced “2-3-74.” By necessity, “Things could have been produced by God in no other manner and in no other order than that which they have been produced” (1p33). For Spinoza, we’re victims of circumstance in the truest sense.

  But, then again, so is God. As Spinoza unequivocally states, “God does not act from freedom of the will” (1p32c1). Spinoza’s God, contrary to many longstanding religious and philosophical traditions, didn’t create the world as a free act of love—for He didn’t even have the choice not to create the world. Perhaps even more out of sync with standard views, Spinoza’s God is incapable of caring for humans: “There are those who imagine God to be like a man, composed of body and soul and subject to the passions; but it is clear how far off men who believe this are from the true knowledge of God” (1p15s). Literally, Spinoza’s God could not care less about us. Fortunately, in case you’re not happy with calling this substance God, you’re just as welcome to call it, along with Spinoza, “Nature.”

  Now if the Ethics is meant to be a practical guide to life, and if Spinoza didn’t fail in making his monism (what philosophers traditionally call blobism) practical, then there should be something useful in all this. In order to figure out what that is, we’re going to first look at the causes of depression in light of Spinoza’s theory of emotions, and then we may just come to see that life in the blob has its perks.

  The Origin and Nature of Affective Disorder

  The opening sentences of VALIS tell us that “Fat’s nervous breakdown began the day he got the phone call from Gloria asking if he had any Nembutals. He asked her why she wanted them and she said she intended to kill herself.” After the phone call, Gloria drove three hours to visit Fat. He didn’t give her the sleeping pills. Instead, they walked along the Point Reyes shoreline, discussing the reasons she wan
ted to die. Gloria’s reasoning was eerily uncomplicated: “everyone hated her, was out to get her, and she was worthless in every respect.” She returned home the next day, leaving Fat unsure that he was of any help. Ten days later Gloria threw herself from a tenth story window. Her suicide surprised no one.

  One way to understand Gloria’s suicide is to think of it as a response to undue hatred. Gloria believed that “they,” the personification of a hateful reality, plotted against her day and night, doing such maleficent things as seizing her bank account. As any good Spinozist would realize, Gloria was headed for trouble, for “If we imagine that we are hated by another without giving him cause for it, we shall hate him in return” (3p40). Moreover, if she had hated anything else besides reality as a whole, perhaps Gloria could have been saved. She could have just avoided or destroyed the source. As common-sense as this sounds, it’s not always immediately obvious that “We endeavor to bring into existence everything which we imagine conduces to joy, and to remove or destroy everything opposed to it, or which conduces sorrow” (3p28). But Gloria hated reality and, sadly, there seems to be only one way to remove that sort of pain.

  Spinoza’s only mention of suicide gives us yet another way of looking at Gloria’s death. Spinoza says that “all persons who kill themselves are impotent in mind, and have been thoroughly overcome by external causes opposed to their nature” (4p18s).

  Spinoza does not intend to be derogatory when describing suicides as “impotent in mind.” He means instead that the suicidal don’t properly understand reality. Gloria, and later Fat, are in part suicidal because they don’t realize that we are a part of Nature, that all events are necessitated, and that our emotional responses to suffering can be overcome by applying these metaphysical principles to our life. But more on this later.

  We should focus our attention for now on Spinoza’s claim that suicides are “overcome by external causes opposed to their nature.” According to Spinoza, we preserve our life because it’s our nature or essence to do so. Part of Fat’s essence, then, is eating a sandwich or taking a walk. In addition, since our essence is constituted by those acts and things keeping us alive, Spinoza claims that “The effort by which each thing endeavors to preserve in its own being is nothing but the actual essence of the thing itself” (3p7). So we can’t help but partake of life-preserving activities. Suicide “opposes” our nature, then, because we do the one thing that is its exact opposite: we stop preserving ourselves.

  In what sense, though, are suicides “overcome by external causes”? We can get some clarification here by looking at the three tragedies causing Fat’s mental decline. First tragedy: Gloria killed herself. Second tragedy: Fat’s wife divorced him. Third tragedy: Fat’s wife took their son along with her. The tragedy of Fat’s life: prolonged guilt over Gloria’s suicide intensified by familial loss. Fat’s onset of severe depression is the effect of a one-two punch, which, as Spinoza notes, only makes things worse, for “The greater the number of the causes that simultaneously concur to excite any affect, the greater it will be” (5p8). The more causes of suffering we encounter, the worse the suffering.

  Such causes are contrary to Fat’s nature since they counteract those causes keeping him alive. They are considered external causes precisely for this reason. Fat’s divorce, for example, is an external cause because it sure as hell didn’t help him get up in the morning. Now external causes bring suffering since, by definition, suffering occurs “when anything is done within us, or follows from our nature, of which we are not the cause excepting partially” (3d1).

  In one sense, Fat’s a partial cause of his divorce since his emotional problems caused his wife to leave. In an even more removed sense, Fat’s visit to Gloria is a partial cause of her death since his visit involved life-preserving activities. Nonetheless, the divorce and suicide are external causes merely because they aren’t effects of Fat’s nature, although he is a partial cause of them. Suicides are “overcome by external causes” because they are overwhelmed by those causes counteracting the natural tendency to continue living. And being overwhelmed by the divorce and Gloria’s death is exactly why Fat attempted suicide.

  Fat’s fate, though, isn’t as dramatic as Gloria’s. Fat didn’t die. He instead wound up in the county mental hospital and eventually put under the care of Maurice, a crass, toughskinned, and even threatening therapist, who gives Fat some quite Spinozan advice, “You feel guilty because Gloria died. Take responsibility for your own life for a change. It’s your job to protect yourself.” In other words, Maurice appeals to Fat’s nature by suggesting that Fat take up the responsibility of freeing himself from mental anguish.

  But how is Fat to do this? One answer comes in the form of a smiling, soft spoken, black-haired two-year-old. This one we know works . . . for a while.

  Of Plasmatic Bondage

  VALIS is an acronym for Vast Active Living Intelligence System. It fires beams into a select few, such as Fat, so that they can remember humankind’s alien origins. It is also a two-year-old girl named Sophia, who happens to also be what Fat calls a plasmate, or the critical information in the Brain informing the chosen few that reality as we perceive it is the result of an alien species’s twisted form of entertainment.

  In our world, the plasmate often takes form as the “Immortal One,” a series of reincarnations cross-bonded with humans, appropriately deemed homoplasmates by Fat. Homoplasmates have come in the persons of Elijah, Dionysos, and Christ, to name but a few. Sophia, though, is not a homoplasmate. She is plasmate in pure form. There is nothing human about her (although it remains a mystery how she can also be a two-year old human!).

  As the plasmate, Sophia knows everything there is to know and can do anything there is to do, and accordingly does what no therapist or drug could. She cures Fat, causing him to realize that he is an alternate personality of Philip K. Dick! By merely being in the presence of Sophia, Dick (the character) was freed of “Eight long fucking goddam years of occlusion and pain and searching and roaming about.”

  But Fat’s and Dick’s suffering aren’t gone for good. Sophia dies by an accidental radiation overdose shortly after meeting Fat. In the wake of this tragedy, Dick (the character) once again channels his sorrow into the artificial personality of Fat, this time indulging in more far-fetched machinations. So much for the plasmatic route to emotional freedom.

  What about Spinoza’s route? Remember that Fat and Spinoza are both metaphysical monists, albeit Spinoza has much more to say and less to believe about free will. But necessitarianism ain’t necessarily bad. Take this proposition for example: “In so far as the mind understands all things as necessary, so far has it greater power over the affects, or suffers less from them” (5p6). If Fat could just realize that Gloria’s suicide was unavoidable, then he could temper his self-blame. He could process the suffering related to her death stoically, conceiving of it as nothing more than a necessary consequence of prior events. Since Gloria in a literal sense had to die, Fat couldn’t have saved her no matter how hard he tried and thus he ought not to suffer such guilt over her death.

  The Power of the Intellect, or of Fat’s Emotional Liberation

  These emotional lessons are fine and dandy for necessitarianism. But Fat doesn’t live in Spinoza’s ‘Nature’. He lives in ‘the Mind’, a world allowing free will and metaphysical determinism to co-exist. So Fat can’t quite yet throw up his hands in celebration of a newly found necessitarian freedom. However, Fat’s psychological well-being can benefit from paying close attention to the Spinoza-like implications of his theory.

  First, Fat realizes that reality screws some people over. In Fat’s words, “The universe makes certain decisions and on the basis of these decisions some people live and some people die. This is a harsh law. But every creature yields to it out of necessity.” This is not to say that Fat is a necessitarian, but that there are nonetheless some elements of fate at play. He can think of Gloria’s death as one of those sad consequences of this fatalistic “harsh l
aw,” and then reason along Spinozan lines.

  But let’s assume that Fat can’t do this and that he still feels partly responsible for Gloria’s death. Even in this case, Fat has an out according to his Tractatus:

  29. We did not fall because of a moral error; we fell because of an intellectual error: that of taking the phenomenal world as real. Therefore we are morally innocent. It is the Empire in its various disguised polyforms that tells us we have sinned.

  According to Entry 29, Fat’s making a cognitive mistake. Gloria really didn’t die and his wife really didn’t leave him. These events are illusions. Fat’s thus unburdened from the responsibility that he feels for Gloria’s suicide and the divorce. In the same vein as Spinoza’s view of suicide, Fat should realize that he’s suffering from a mistaken understanding of reality. He’s not realizing that the metaphysical nature of reality absolves him.

  But if we’re going to allow Fat to reap the benefits of his theory, we must also consider its detriments. Remember that one cause of Fat’s sorrow is the Mind’s sorrow. Spinoza actually believes something similar: “We suffer in so far as we are part of nature which part cannot be conceived by itself nor without the other parts” (4p2). Thus for both Fat and Spinoza we can never absolutely rid ourselves of suffering.