Inpsychation and Chains of Will
One of the unusual things about humans is that they don’t just move themselves—they use tools, and not just tools they move with their own power, as you might drive a nail with a hammer, or move a stick with your hand, to move a rock. Humans dig a ditch so water will flow down it; we irrigate a field so plants will grow in it; we grow crops to make money to buy a car, and instead of our legs, we use internal combustion engines to move us down the road.
Humans arrange the natural motions of other things to carry out our intentions, and so their actions become our own. When the water flows, we are irrigating. When the plants grow, we are producing and earning. When Quaid grabs the joystick of the Johnny Cab, he is no longer riding passively; he is driving. Causing things to serve our intentions, it is as though we infuse our souls into them, or in Friedrich Nietzsche’s words, inpsychate them. We identify with our capable instruments. Other forces can be threats to our goals and our freedom, or the means of realizing them. As Ralph Emerson puts it in his essay, “Fate,”
Every jet of chaos which threatens to exterminate us is convertible by intellect into wholesome force. Fate is unpenetrated causes. The water drowns ship and sailor like a grain of dust. But learn to swim, trim your bark, and the wave which drowned it will be cloven by it and carry it like its own foam, a plume and a power. Man moves in all modes, by legs of horses, by wings of wind, by steam, by gas of balloon, by electricity, and stands on tiptoe threatening to hunt the eagle in his own element. There’s nothing he will not make his carrier.
When we understand the natural motions of things, we penetrate them with our thought, harness them to our desires, and they become extensions of ourselves. We act through them, just as we act through our hands and feet.
We even act through the actions of other people. Hitler didn’t have to go to Poland to invade it; when his soldiers invaded on his orders, Hitler was invading Poland. Cohaagen doesn’t have to watch Quaid with his own eyes; he has Lori and Harry do it for him. Tony says, “Cohaagen’s shut off the air to Venusville,” but not because Cohaagen’s hand pulled the switch; he’s the one who gave the order.
In the case of ourselves, of course, we normally don’t have to give orders—we decide, and we remember what we decided as we are carrying it out. So, in the absence of major disruptions of memory, Locke’s view might be almost right. Normally we carry out our actions by our memories. But our memories don’t define our identities—they are just one of our most common tools.
In the right situation, even a false memory could be a tool for action. Suppose you’re a construction worker, but you decide to have someone make you think you are a secret agent on a mission to Mars. Then in acting as a secret agent, you are free. Presumably, though, you also meant to be brought back to reality at the end—you didn’t decide to permanently stop being you. It’s a problem if the secret-agent-you decides he wants to keep on being a secret agent longer than you intended. As Dr. Edgemar explains to Quaid at the Hilton, if you go AWOL and refuse to come back, that isn’t freedom; that’s psychosis. Based on the video in the suitcase, though, and the bead of sweat on Dr. Edgemar’s forehead, the truth is the other way around: Quaid is not a construction worker, and didn’t decide to be; he really is a secret agent, or he was, before he became a rebel, and to be free, he needs to pick up where he left off.
To arrange this, Hauser has to be creative. As Nietzsche observes in Genealogy of Morals, II.1:
Between the original ‘I will’, ‘I shall do this’ and the actual discharge of the will, its act, a world of strange new things, circumstances, even acts of will may be interposed without breaking this long chain of will. But how many things this presupposes! To ordain the future in advance in this way, man must first have learned to distinguish necessary events from chance ones, to think causally, to see and anticipate distant eventualities as if they belonged to the present, to decide with certainty what is the goal and what the means to it . . . Man himself must first of all have become calculable . . .
Freedom doesn’t just require understanding and controlling things around us, it requires understanding and controlling ourselves . In Hauser’s case, he has to plan around becoming Quaid.
With the help of a friend from the Agency, Hauser provides himself some essential equipment. With the video (and some unexpected encouragement from Richter), he persuades himself to go to Mars. Picking up the chain of causes and following through on his decision, maybe Quaid is Hauser again. Hauser has re-inpsychated himself. He finds his way to Kuato, and remembers the alien reactor that the rebellion needs to break Cohaagen’s grip on Mars. Hauser did what he set out to do, so perhaps the rest of his memory is beside the point.
Quaid’s Problem—Mucky Origins
From here things really get complicated, though. As Kuato is helping Quaid remember, the walls cave in, Cohaagen’s troops arrive, Benny shoots Kuato, and Richter takes them all to see Cohaagen. “Well, my boy—you’re a hero,” Cohaagen reassures him, “Don’t be modest! Kuato is dead; the resistance has been completely wiped out, and you were the key to the whole thing.” What exactly did Quaid just do? Whose plan did he carry out? Was Quaid acting for Hauser the rebel, or Hauser, Cohaagen’s “bosom buddy”?
Hauser is on tape, saying that with Cohaagen he was “playing for the wrong team,” and now he wants to make up for it. But Hauser is also on tape, backing up Cohaagen’s story that they invented Quaid together, to lead them to Kuato. Did Cohaagen make up agency-Hauser so he could convince rebel-Hauser, with his bulging muscles and dead-eye aim, to work for his side? Or did agency-Hauser make up rebel-Hauser to fool Quaid? Even if he did, what made agency-Hauser such a slimeball in the first place?
There is no way for Quaid to really be sure how this all started. He can’t rely on his origins to decide who he is, or what he should do now. He needs another strategy.
According to the traditional view of free will, a person is free when he is the causal origin of his actions. As the scientific worldview developed, though, this picture came into question, requiring us to rethink our ideas of free will. The law of gravity explains all of the distinctive motions of Aristotle’s elements as results of one universal force. Water comes to rest below air and earth below water because they are pulled down more strongly. The planets move in their orbits because their momentum balances gravity; they free-fall in ellipses. Animal behaviors are explained as biochemical processes, triggered by events in their environment. Nature is a continuous system of causes and effects, all flowing by scientific law from earlier causes, with no origins, no beginning or end.
In the systematic view of nature, our actions are simply ripples in the cosmic flow of mass-energy. Our thoughts are triggered by external stimuli like photons and vibrations in the air. Stimuli cause neurons to fire, neurons are encoded in our DNA, and our DNA is passed down through chimps and sea squirts from the Earth’s original organic muck. In this context, a human being can no more originate an action than a pile of sand. Humans are just a bit more complicated, and more gooey. Everything we do, then, is a result of alien causes. Even if our actions derive from our thoughts, and our thoughts from our identities, our identities are produced by causes beyond ourselves that bear no relation to our goals. We are all in the same boat as Doug Quaid.
Does this mean that it is impossible to be free? It does, if freedom is originating action, beginning a causal chain. Philosophers like Baron d’Holbach accepted this conclusion:
Man’s life is a line that Nature commands him to describe upon the surface of the earth, without his ever being able to swerve from it even for an instant. He is born without his own consent; his organization does in no wise depend upon himself; he is unceasingly modified by causes, whether visible or concealed, over which he has no control. It is the great complication of motion in man that persuades him he is a free agent: if all his motions were simple, he would perceive that all his actions were necessary. (The System of Nature, I.xi)
Giving up the idea of freedom seems realistic, in a way, for thinking about people in general. For a person like Quaid, though, living his own life, he still has to make decisions, and Nature isn’t sitting on his shoulder, telling him what to do. We feel our freedom, and the weight of our choices falls on us.
Freedom Without Origins
So, is freedom being an origin of actions? It rather looks as if there aren’t any original causes, only nodes in the chain of cause and effect. More recently, quantum mechanics suggests there may be some flex in the chains of causation—that subatomic particles follow probabilities in their behavior, rather than precise laws—but to suggest that our freedom comes down to the random movement of an electron here or there is no more helpful than appealing to the ancient Greek idea, from Epicurus, that the tiny bits of matter that make up things occasionally “swerve” for no specifiable reason and break the chain of cause and effect. Well, actually, that’s pretty much the same claim. But anyway, if my actions trace to the random swervings of subatomic particles, they don’t seem to be mine any more than if they trace to immutable laws of nature. How is underdetermination freedom?
Just as importantly, Quaid’s predicament shows there are not just scientific or practical problems with the idea of freedom as being an absolute origin of action—there are ethical problems with it.
Suppose Cohaagen could show Quaid conclusively that he is Hauser—Hauser is not just his evil twin—and Hauser volunteered to become Quaid, as a strategy for taking down the rebellion. As Hauser put it, “I was here first!” Does that mean Quaid did what he wanted to do, and now he should become Hauser again?
It does look as though Hauser and Cohaagen conspired to use Quaid to get Kuato—otherwise why would Cohaagen have kept him alive? Quaid could just accept that freedom means following through on the decision he made before, as Hauser. As Quaid, he’s a just a dupe who led Cohaagen straight to Kuato and got most of the rebel leaders killed—maybe the whole rebellion, and anyway everyone in Sector G. Melina survived, but she will loathe and despise him for the rest of their short lives. As Quaid, he may be innocent, but that’s small comfort for being Cohaagen’s unwilling tool, manipulated into doing exactly the opposite of what he intended. To stay Quaid would be humiliating and, well, psychotic. As Hauser, though, he is a hero (or villain, depending) who has just completed a brilliant plan, with Quaid’s earnest but innocent help, assuring Cohaagen and himself nearly limitless wealth and prestige. The whole ordeal will have ended perfectly, all the more so for the unexpected twists along the way. To see himself as free, perhaps he has to embrace his origin. Besides, he’ll have a Mercedes!
Faced with these origins, though, Quaid realizes he needs a new strategy. He puts the problem with Hauser succinctly: “The guy’s a fucking asshole!” Freedom may usually mean acting from decision, but when you realize your decision was wrong, freedom is changing to do what is right. A man is not defined by his memory, but by his action, and a man’s authentic actions are not defined by what he may have decided in the past, but by what matters most to him. As Lowe says in “We Can Remember It for You Wholesale,” what defines Quail, Quaid, or any of us is “not a memory but a desire.”
Whether he was Hauser before or not, now Quaid is Quaid, and embracing his desire for justice turns him away from his past and toward his future. Whether Melina convinced him to side with the rebellion before or not, she has now, with extra help from Richter and the bloody tactics on display on Mars. Hauser’s Mercedes somehow has limited appeal, and the idea of going to a party with Richter, Cohaagen, and a reprogrammed Melina is just revolting.
Sometimes our plans, our chains of will, go awry. Helm tries to track Quaid using the bug, but finds out he is tracking a nougat-stuffed rat. When Richter shoots at Quaid inside the spaceport, the bullet doesn’t hit Quaid; it hits the window, and, well, we know what happens when you shoot out a window on Mars. Among other things, it triggers the blast doors, assuring Quaid’s escape. Things are especially dicey when we use people as tools. Cohaagen uses Richter to watch Quaid, but Richter thinks he is supposed to think, and so when Quaid goes to Rekall, Richter tries to kill him, almost ruining Cohaagen’s plan. If Hauser and Cohaagen invented Quaid to destroy the rebellion, they made him a little too honorable.
What Kuato reveals to Quaid doesn’t have much to do with his individual past, but it has everything to do with his future, and the future of the rebellion. Quaid doesn’t have to be defined by Hauser’s actions; he can be defined by his own: he and Melina can start the reactor. As far as Hauser and Cohaagen are concerned, when Quaid escapes from his reprogramming, he has sunk into psychosis. But it’s precisely in rejecting Hauser and breaking with his past that Quaid decisively becomes free.
23
Lonely Wolves
TRAVIS PATERSON
Driven by paranoia, loneliness, drugs, and an overpowering nausea for a world that disappoints and alienates, A Scanner Darkly is one of Philip K. Dick’s most autobiographical stories. Through its protagonist Bob Arctor, Dick explores his own past and ventures into California’s dystopic future where both writer and character are captivated by the counterculture and a tortured pursuit of the American dream. A portrayal of men living in the margins and of minds on the edge of insanity, a mixture of anguish, suffering, and fantasy makes A Scanner Darkly one of Dick’s most personal, powerful and political stories.
Start with the speech Arctor the druggie disguised as Fred the narc masked as “Everyman” while wearing a scramble suit (still following?) gave to the 709th Chapter of the Brown Bear Lodge. He’s disgusted with what he sees. Just looking at the overweight man introducing him to the equally overweight and over-happy audience nauseates him.
These aren’t tummy cramps from eating an undercooked In-N-Out burger. This is the sick-in-the-gut sensation that Jean-Paul Sartre described in his novel Nausea. Sartre’s protagonist Roquentin is gripped by feelings of despair and disgust with the world around him. He is simultaneously alienated from and sickened by others as they go ignorantly about their contented lives. Roquentin, like Arctor, is experiencing nausea.
Nausea is existence revealing itself—and existence is ugly. From Roquentin’s most profound encounter with the source of his nausea he remarks,
We were a heap of living creatures, irritated, embarrassed at ourselves, we hadn’t the slightest reason to be there, none of us, each one, confused, vaguely alarmed, felt in the way in relation to the others. In the way: it was the only relationship I could establish between these trees, these gates, these stones.
Roquentin discovers that existence is absurd, that it’s futile to try to find anything necessary about it, or us. He concludes with the essential thing, which is contingency: “I mean that one cannot define existence as necessity. To exist is simply to be there.” Luckily for Roquentin, he catches sight of a slim chance of accepting existence as it is and overcoming his nausea. But for those unfortunate souls to whom the essence of life remains concealed, Sartre writes, “They cannot succeed in not feeling superfluous. And in themselves, secretly, they are superfluous, that is to say, amorphous, vague, and sad.”
Bob Arctor is one such soul. He never overcomes the nausea. Instead he falls off the rails of a ravenous drug habit and ultimately loses touch with reality, his friends, and finally himself.
Why does such a horrible fate await Arctor? Why are he and his friends destined to live in the margins of society, to be left brain-dead in a New Path centre? An almost comatose Arctor recites a parable about a magnificent wolf that was shot and killed in order to protect the farmer’s meager, unimpressive animals that would be slaughtered later anyhow. They preserved the beast’s beautiful hide so that those who came later could marvel in its strength and size and weep for its passing.
The wolf, Arctor reflects to himself, never complained, took joy in his skill and hunting abilities and lived the only way that was natural to him. And they shot him. Why, like the wolf to protect the meager animals, must Arctor be sacrificed f
or the benefit of the overweight and over-happy members of the Brown Bear Lodge? Arctor is intelligent, sensitive and idealistic. He sees that there’s something wrong about the world and he is justifiably sick and tired of it. His values and choices are reasonable. Why, then, must the lone wolf be hunted? The answer has something to do with that nagging nauseous feeling.
Society’s a Bad Hit (If You’re Banging Up, Cranking, or Popping)
The Substance D users are not mere victims. They have chosen to live in the margins and provoke society. In their game, they never fully reject or accept the America that surrounds them. Instead they play as if the could live by different rules. But they learn that this sort of game can be deadly. In A Scanner Darkly, and in Dick’s own life, those who chose to play paid a horrible cost including: jail, psychosis, neurosis, and death.
Dick’s primary philosophical contribution in A Scanner Darkly is that he recognized what happened to him and his friends in the 1960s and 1970s American drug culture as symptomatic of something bigger. The fate of Arctor and the list of names that scrawls down the screen before the closing credits are evidence of social violence committed against those who did not fit in. Dick and his friends, Arctor and his friends, are selfaware outsiders. Their tragic deaths and deformations are no coincidence. Nor is how a frightened and callous suburban California public accused, ostracized, and persecuted them.
Philip K. Dick and Philosophy Page 27