Levinas’s philosophical project is an attempt to work out how we can achieve an authentic being in relation to others, in a world where we cannot trust our senses and where there appears to be existing without existents. Levinas suggests a thought experiment which sounds rather like sensory deprivation: imagine everything goes away, disbelieve in everything, wrap yourself in darkness and silence. You don’t need to be floating in a tank of salty water to do this; you just need to turn the lights off in the middle of the night. It’s dark. Out there is nothing, but—and this is one of those moments where Levinas might make you shiver—just as being is, nothingness . . . nothings.
Something comes to you in the darkness. You are in a howling void. Levinas refers to these eldritch phenomena as the There is. The visions Rachmael ben Applebaum has on Whale’s Mouth in Lies, Inc or the dreams Herb Asher has in cryonic suspension in The Divine Invasion; all of these come as if from outside, rather than from inside. There is this existing, this isness (and that’s a horrible word), without an existent. Levinas invites us to consider the sentence, “It is raining,” and decide what the “it” is referring to. Certainly nothing solid. So, there can be existing without existents.
Levinas’s thought experiment is a nod to René Descartes’s “I think, therefore I am.” For Descartes, it doesn’t matter what you doubt the existence of—the color blue, black swans, the far side of the moon, boy bands—what matters is that someone doubts, therefore that doubting person is. Rick Deckard, within Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, exists, having experiences, even if the Mood Organ means that his emotions might be simulated rather than real (or, real, although stimulated by a machine). But Descartes sneaks in another idea, which Levinas also uses, and which also becomes important to Dick, especially after those weird mystical experiences of spring 1974: the idea of God. Or, if not God, then the idea of something greater, more perfect, more different, more infinite; in fact the idea of infinity. But we start with an individual, a subject, alone in the void, capable of sensing—although for Levinas it’s not so much “I think, therefore I am,” as, “I think, therefore what should I do?”
Because out there is another, in fact, the Other.
He Ain’t Heavy, He’s My Other
In much philosophy, the Other is feared—it’s a monster, our dark side, people we label mad, criminal, ill, or perverted. And we dismiss them as our inferiors. Not so Levinas. The Other is our responsibility. Levinas puts a huge ethical demand onto us—we must have regard and responsibility for the Other. The fact of our eating, drinking, sheltering, breathing, indeed being—in a word, existing—takes up resources that could be used by the Other. But this concern for the Other costs the self. A good example of this would be in Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, where J.R. Isidore cares for the various androids despite the fact that they clearly do not care for him, and clearly do not care for animals, dismembering a rare spider. The androids in the novel are defined as lacking empathy, not caring for others, and the moment someone stops caring, they risk being inhumane and thus being inhuman. In a 1972 speech, “The Android and the Human,” Dick said:
Becoming what I call, for lack of a better term, an android, means as I said, to allow oneself to become a means, or to be pounded down, manipulated, made into a means without one’s knowledge or consent—the results are the same. Androidization requires obedience. And, most of all, predictability. It is precisely when a given person’s response to any given situation can be predicted with scientific accuracy that the gates are open for the wholesale production of the android life form.
It is empathy rather than DNA or breeding that distinguishes humans from machines or objects. The treatment of animals is a litmus test of humanity—from the animal who refuses to be eaten in “Beyond Lies the Wub” and the intelligence of the dog in “Roog,” to the astronaut, who, having killed a cat, is condemned to eat cat food for decades in “The Alien Mind.”
This is a one-way relationship of care, rather than reciprocal. I remember standing by a car park, and noticing a cage protecting a security camera from vandalism or theft. Another camera, I thought, could film those crimes—only that camera would then be at risk. I thought of three possible solutions: an infinite sequence of cameras, each protecting another one; two (or more) cameras filming each other, but not protecting the car park; or a single camera trained on the cars, but itself at risk. (That’s actually what they had.) Compare this to “Fred” looking at Bob Arctor in A Scanner Darkly, and how Fred is himself also under surveillance; Arctor/Fred undergoes a breakdown because he is spying on himself.
There is a danger of an ethical feedback loop: the other suffers, the self shows concern for the suffering, the other shows pain for the self’s concern for the other’s suffering, the self is uncomfortable at the pain for the self’s concern for the other’s suffering. At some point responsibility—and risk—has to be assumed.
In Heidegger’s version, the Other is another distraction that we tend to use to ward off our fear of Death, and if there is any ulterior motive in our concern, we’re treating the Other as a tool rather than another human beings with their own feelings and fears. Tools are extensions of the self, rather than things separate from the self, and we define the boundaries of the self by deciding what is not part of the self. Levinas insists that the encounter of a self with an Other who requires help is the moment when the self becomes an existent taking part in existent—located in space and time. This is when the self becomes “real.” The taxi at the end of Now Wait for Last Year tells Sweetscent that he has to go back to his wife because “‘life is composed of reality configurations so constituted. To abandon her would be to say, I can’t endure reality as such.’” There is no escape from the commitment. At the risk of creating a tongue twister, the self becomes a self through a selfless action performed for the non-self. Dick’s protagonists who act to help others, despite the cost to themselves—like Mr. Tagomi in The Man in the High Castle, who saves a man he has not met, but with whom he is closely if unknowingly associated—are authentic human beings.
In discussing the separation of self from not-self, Levinas argues that the Other is separated from the self by the dimension of height, a height that can never be shrunk. This dimension of height comes from Descartes’s philosophy, as mentioned a couple of pages back—it is the idea of infinity which keeps the self and Other distinct, and so the encounter with the other is like an encounter with—well, if not God then the idea of God. At the start of Radio Free Albemuth, a young boy encounters a beggar—and this later transpires to be his first encounter with God. In The Adjustment Bureau, we are told that we may have met the Chairman (the safely nonspecific version of God) in the face of a random stranger. For Levinas, the encounter with the Other—in the shape of the poor, the widow, the orphan, and the alien—was an encounter with the idea of God. He was always careful to keep his ethical and Talmudic scholarship distinct, but the notion that God’s face can only be seen indirectly feels very Old Testament in nature.
In the extraordinary complexity of VALIS—which dramatizes the “liar’s paradox,” where we ask whether someone who says “I am lying right now” is lying—we get a divine biography of some kind of higher being who has been damaged, and who has been out of action since the fall of the temple in 70 C.E. The intervening time between then and about 1974, the year of the revelation of Horselover Fat (who is also Philip K. Dick, kind of), has simply been an illusion. Now, perhaps, there can be renewed concern—concern for the other, which metaphorically is a concern for God. But equally there is a sense of being seized by God—God as a manifestation of the ‘There is’, who takes us over without our consent. In VALIS we see a man, Fat, who shows concern for God, as well as various women with serious medical conditions. Can he care for all of them? How can he choose between them? It is clear that Phil Dick, an avatar for the author Philip K. Dick within the novel, shows concern for his “friend,” Fat. And perhaps we, as Philip K. Dick fans, need to show concern fo
r a favorite author, who seems to be telling us that God is an alien who has spoken to him and usurped President Nixon, and who, if he really believes any of this, shows every sign of having lost the plot.
Fifty Ways to Love Your Other
Emmanuel Levinas argues that not only should the self take care of the Other, but the self should also experience the Other’s suffering instead of the Other. This is a literal extension of the idea of empathy: not just showing concern for the Other but putting oneself in the Other’s place. We get this at various points of Dick’s work. For a start, his frequent use of a shifting third-person point of view—in Time Out of Joint, The Man in the High Castle, Martian Time-Slip, and Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said, among many others—means that it is hard to divide his characters into heroes and villains, as we are made to understand the feelings of a range of characters.
For much of Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said we are following the experiences of Jason Taverner, adrift in a world where he apparently doesn’t exist, and his attempts to keep a step ahead of the law, but we are also invited to empathize with a representative of that law, Felix Buckman, whose tears are the ones in the novel’s title. He takes responsibility.
In Now Wait for Last Year, the Earth leader Molinari takes so much responsibility for his people that he develops their symptoms—a heart attack, a failed kidney—and even dying is no escape, as another Molinari is brought in to take his place. Not even death gives him an alibi for his responsibility. Similarly, the empathy boxes in Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, which are available for humans but do not work for androids, require that humans empathize with the plight of Wilbur Mercer as he eternally climbs a hill whilst unseen forces throw rocks at him. The bonded humans feel his pain. The fact that Mercer turns out to be a drunken bit-part actor on a sound stage is neither here nor there—the real thing is the concern for the Christ-like figure, and the self’s sacrifice.
In Next, Cris Johnson is eventually persuaded to help in the search for a nuclear bomb, rather than focusing on his own desires; this is the opposite to The Adjustment Bureau where the Earth faces a new Dark Ages so that David Norris can get his woman. The most villainous characters in Dick’s fiction are those precisely who do not care for others—some of these are bad father figures, such as bosses, or the CEOs of multinational corporations and some of these are bad mother figures, such as Kathy Sweetscent, in Now Wait For Last Year, and Roni Fulgate in The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch.
Dick’s fictions demand that we recognize and demonstrate our own humanity, by showing our concern for the other. In Levinasian terms, this is the point at which the self becomes solid, an existent in space and time, in relation to the Other—”real,” for want of a better word, or “authentic.” The responsibility lies as much in the little things—the, “no, after you”—as the big.
Imagine we’re chatting in a bar, and I buy you a drink. I’ve been generous, but I’m not expecting anything in return. I don’t have an ulterior motive. It’s a gift. If you then buy me a drink, you’ve made us equal, and you’ve turned a gift into an economic transaction. The point is not that I want you to be in my debt, but that I owe you a pint, irrespective of whether you’ll buy me one back. For Levinas, such gifts demonstrate our humanity: if we do not buy that stranger a pint because might not buy us one in return—then we cannot claim to be authentically human. At the same time, we shouldn’t point fingers, and say that the other is an animal, an android, a machine, or an object—or at least we must care for them even if we don’t think that they are human.
Calling someone else an object is, well, bad form. We need to invoke the Golden Rule, which is the key to the Torah, the first five books of the Bible: “That which is hateful to you, do not do to your fellow.” If the universe isn’t real, how should we treat other people? Well, with care, concern, and love. In a sense, Melina in Total Recall is right—it doesn’t matter if they’re in a dream. They should kiss each other, anyway, before they wake up.
Puppets and Precogs
21
Knowing Tomorrow While Choosing Today
SARA WORLEY
Do we control what happens to us, or are we the puppets of unseen forces? There have been worries about this throughout much of western history, from the ancient Greeks who thought that the fates controlled their destiny to the Calvinists who believed that God had fixed in advance everything that was going to happen. Even today people still worry about this: How much do our genes, or our environment, influence what we will do?
Just because I’m influenced by something, though, doesn’t mean that I’m not free.
A sunny day might influence me to quit work early, or I might be influenced by a friend to see a movie that I would not otherwise have chosen. But as long as I could have done otherwise, I’m still free. Compare people’s response to the sun with the response of phototropic plants. People go outside and enjoy the sun; a sunflower grows towards it. The difference, though, is that we have a choice about how to respond and plants do not. We can do otherwise; they can’t. Our freedom consists in the fact that we can do otherwise. Or can we?
Philip K. Dick explores free will in his stories “The Minority Report” and “Adjustment Team.” People called “precogs” see crimes before they happen, thus allowing the police to make arrests before any crime is actually committed, and the agents of the Adjustment Team use their knowledge of what’s going to happen to adjust circumstances and personalities to make things come out the way they want. But foresight seems incompatible with the ability to do otherwise: if the precogs know that I’m going to commit a crime before I actually commit it, then it must already be true, at the time of the precognition, that I’m going to commit it! But then I don’t have the option, at the time of the crime, of not going through with it. If my actions can be foreseen, then it seems as if there’s really only one thing I can do, just as there’s only one thing a sunflower can do.
This problem is not new. The Judeo-Christian God is traditionally thought of as being omniscient, knowing everything that will happen, including every action that anyone will perform. But it’s also part of the traditional conception of God that he gave people free will, and this already get us into a logical quandary: if God already knows what we’re going to do, then what we’re going to do must already be settled, and then how could we really have free will? The sense we have that there are multiple options open to us must really be illusion: there’s just one thing we can do, at any one time, whether we know it or not.
Freedom and Prediction
But there’s more to these issues than appears at first glance.
There are at least two different models for how we might understand foreknowledge—knowing in advance what’s going to happen—and they have different implications.
The first model involves prediction. Suppose that you have a friend, Jill, who loves science fiction but hates westerns. She’s given the choice between seeing The Adjustment Bureau and a retrospective of John Wayne movies. You can be pretty confident in your predictions about what she’s going to do. But this doesn’t mean that she’s not free. All it means is that people are reasonably consistent in their preferences, their likes and dislikes, and that this consistency manifests itself in their behavior. Freedom doesn’t require that Jill be completely random or inconsistent in her behavior. It just requires that she be able to do otherwise.
This is a bit like the solution to the problem of God’s foreknowledge given by Molina, a sixteenth-century Spanish Jesuit. His idea was that God has what he called “middle knowledge,” which is knowledge of how each of us will respond to various circumstances. Since God knows how we will respond to varied circumstances, and God knows which circumstances we will actually encounter, he knows what we will do. But that God knows what we will do does not mean that we do not have free will, any more than the fact that you know that Jill will choose the science-fiction movie means that Jill isn’t free.
Unfortunately, this model doesn’t
really resolve the tension between free will and foreknowledge. To see the problem, consider a simple astronomical example. Astronomers can say, now, where in the sky Mars will be visible next spring. They can say this because they know the relevant facts and the laws of nature, and these facts and laws together determine where Mars will be visible. We can have just about complete confidence that their prediction will be right. This is because the facts and laws together guarantee where in the sky Mars will be visible next spring. They don’t leave any options. If they did leave options, if two different possible locations for Mars were each consistent with the current laws plus the facts, then we couldn’t now say that Mars is going to be visible in one location rather than the other. At best we could say that it might be visible one place rather than another, or perhaps that it’s likely that it will be visible one place rather than the other. But we couldn’t say that it will be visible one place rather than another.
Likewise, if we make a prediction about someone’s behavior based on her character and the circumstances she encounters, this prediction can be certain only if her character and circumstances guarantee that she will behave in that way. If Jill’s character and circumstances guarantee that she will choose The Adjustment Bureau, then we can be certain about our prediction. But then of course she wouldn’t have free will, since she wouldn’t be able to do otherwise. If, on the other hand, she does have free will, then her character and circumstances cannot guarantee that she’ll behave in one way rather than another. She’d always have the option of doing otherwise. But then our prediction could not be certain.
Philip K. Dick and Philosophy Page 25