The Man in the High Castle and Philosophy

by Bruce Krajewski

  The Way Out

  Regardless of any doubts of its existence, we behave as if we do have free will. We set goals, take chances, learn from our mistakes, and remember both the good and the bad that we experience. Given options, we even have the ability to do otherwise than we have ever done before.

  So, maybe the best thing to do is simply to acknowledge that free will is very important to us, and view the world as built to guarantee this. We do not live in a deterministic, billiard ball-type world. To some degree, we do have control over our lives. We should act as though we are awash in free will, and that we can’t escape being the authors of our own futures.

  In the novel, Robert Childan rejected the path that Paul Kasoura had expected him to take regarding the mass production of Edfrank Custom Jewelry pieces. Faced with a situation that “did not fit any model he had ever experienced,” he made a novel choice, one at odds with his previous behavior. Thus, he created “an entire new world” for himself. When Captain Wegener returned to Germany, he was immediately taken into custody. He reflected on his situation. “We go on, as we always have. From day to day . . . It is a sequence. An unfolding process. We can only control the end by making a choice at each step.” In the TV series, after VA dinner, Mrs. Smith counsels Joe Blake. “You know, John believes that a man determines his own worth.”

  In the final episode of Season One, Frank and Juliana talk about their future, right before she is to go to the Nazi Embassy to find Joe Blake and lure him into a trap. Juliana is anxious and despondent, full of regret at the path she chose. “I got on that bus, with Trudy’s film, because I thought it meant hope for the future . . . There is no hope. There is no future,” she laments. Seeing her dismay, Frank points out to Juliana the only possible choice they have.

  “But we have to go on. What else is there?”

  9

  Could the Axis Have Won the War?

  MIGUEL PALEY

  In one of the most harrowing scenes of the very first episode of The Man in the High Castle, Joe Blake finds himself by the side of the road talking to a cop who fought in the war. Casually eating an egg sandwich as the ashes of “cripples and the terminally ill” rain down on them, the two men briefly talk about the war. “We lost the war didn’t we?” says the cop with a chuckle, “Now I can’t even remember what we were fighting for.”

  Of the many shocking things going on in this scene, the officer’s resignation to his fate stands out. How could he, “a soldier so fierce he’d kill a rose,” have become such a carefree Nazi officer? How could he possibly act like this, as if everything was okay?

  In asking ourselves these kinds of questions, a fundamental presupposition of our everyday thought comes to light. The cop’s attitude may bother us because we believe that things could be different from how they are. The disabled don’t have to be burned, the man didn’t have to become a Nazi officer. We usually think that our actions matter and that our world is whatever we make of it. If there’s something we don’t like about our world, we are free to try and change it. But what if that’s not the case? What if the cop realizes something we don’t? What if the entire history of the world is already written in stone and there’s nothing we can do to change it? What if, in the end, we are not free at all?

  Questions such as these have been asked by Western philosophy for hundreds of years and the resulting debates have led to three main theories about freedom and the nature of our reality. Some think freedom is just a weird illusion, while others hold that it exists and is maybe the most important feature of human life. In the dystopic world of The Man in the High Castle, these questions and issues can be seen everywhere: In the actions of Frank and Juliana, in the wise words of Tagomi, and even in the brutal actions of Obergruppenführer Smith. It’s as if the very theme of the show were this debate itself!

  We’re talking about “freedom” here, but the freedom we’re talking about is metaphysical freedom, not political freedom. The Man in the High Castle takes place in a world where the Axis powers severely limit the kinds of things people can do and where they can go, and that curtails their political freedom, such things as “freedom of religion,” or “freedom of speech.” But here we’re looking at freedom in the metaphysical sense.

  As philosophers use the word, metaphysics doesn’t mean things like clairvoyance or poltergeists. The word simply refers to those things which are the most fundamental aspects of reality. Metaphysically then, the question of “freedom” is whether or not human beings really have the power to choose anything at all.

  When asking if the Nazi cop is free, metaphysically speaking, the question is about whether, given his circumstances, he had the power to do something other than become a cop in the Reich. Perhaps he could’ve joined the resistance or maybe he could have run away to South America. If human beings are not metaphysically free though, then we would say that the former soldier had no choice in the matter and that he simply had to become a cop.

  How Is a Nazi Like an Apple?

  I’m going to kill you now, and there’s nothing you can say or do about it.

  —MARSHALL

  It’s probably not a coincidence that one of the most intense discussions of freedom in The Man in the High Castle happens behind bars. Sitting in his cold, dark prison cell, Frank talks to Randall, who is in a cell next to him. “Who are you?” Frank asks. “I am a man who wants to breathe freedom . . .” Randall responds. Immediately cutting him off, however, Frank interrupts, “Spare me the propaganda bullshit! I don’t want your type of freedom! I don’t want anything!”

  Frank’s answers are those of an old fashioned determinist, he seems to act as if we humans were not ultimately free. Instead, Frank seems to believe that the only principle behind our actions is survival. “I’m all for keeping my head down and my mouth shut.” Frank says, speaking like a classic determinist.

  This theory has several variants, but the most basic one is called “causal determinism.” It says that our sense of freedom is an illusion. Causal determinism comes from the scientific observation that all things in nature behave according to the laws of cause and effect. As Newton famously observed, our world is governed by certain principles like the law of gravity. These things are called “laws” because there’s simply no way of getting around them. Just as the apple fell on Newton’s head, so did Connolly, the man Obergruppenführer Smith pushed off a building, fall to his death. This is cause and effect. This law is so basic that it would be crazy to doubt it. Obergruppenführer Smith doesn’t need to look over the ledge to see if the body floats instead of hitting the pavement. Unfortunately for Connolly, that’s just how matter works!

  Perhaps the most basic of these laws however is Newton’s famous third law, which says that for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. Since the world is made up of bits of matter, and since matter strictly follows these laws, then in order to know where any piece of matter is at any moment, we would just have to know where it was the moment before and how it was moving. If I tell you Smith pushes Connolly off a building, you would know that he would then fall to the ground. Again, this is cause and effect.

  From this basic fact however some scary conclusions follow. Imagine now that we had the ability to know where every single piece of matter was and how it was moving at any instant. If we knew this, then by simply following the law of cause and effect we would know everything that ever has happened and everything that ever will happen! This idea of a superintelligence that could know everything was first described by a philosopher called Pierre-Simon Laplace in his essay A Philosophical Essay on Probabilities. Philosophers today call this “Laplace’s Demon.”

  We may regard the present state of the universe as the effect of its past and the cause of its future. An intellect which at a certain moment would know all forces that set nature in motion, and all positions of all items of which nature is composed, if this intellect were also vast enough to submit these data to analysis, it would embrace in a single formula the move
ments of the greatest bodies of the universe and those of the tiniest atom; for such an intellect nothing would be uncertain and the future, just like the past, would be present before its eyes.

  If the world does behave like this, then we shouldn’t say that we have free will! Everything that will happen is just determined by what happened before.

  “Okay, well that’s an interesting idea,” you may say, “but we aren’t just apples or Nazis falling off buildings. We human beings have souls, or at least minds, we have something that escapes these simple physical laws!” This is a great point, and one determinists have to deal with if we’re to find their theory convincing.

  A French thinker, Baron d’Holbach, in The System of Nature, understands this and argues that although we might think our minds or souls might escape the physical laws of cause and effect, they in fact do not. The mind, d’Holbach argues, is tied to the physical world just as much as poor Captain Connolly’s body was.

  Think back to The Man in the High Castle. In trying to figure out who betrayed them, the Nazis arrest several resistance members and subject them to torture and interrogation. One prisoner is given LSD in hopes that he will feel relaxed enough to not care about betraying his co-conspirators. Although the ploy doesn’t work, the whole experiment is very telling. The prisoner is given LSD and suffers a radical change in perception and ways of thinking. Much to Obergruppenführer’s dismay, the prisoner undergoes an “oceanic experience.” As this shows, the mind is not really free from the influences of the physical world. Like everything else, mind or soul are themselves subject to the unrelenting Reich of causality. This is the idea behind d’Holbach’s definition of determinism.

  Man is unceasingly modified by causes over which he has no control, which necessarily regulate his mode of existence, give the hue to his way of thinking, and determine his manner of acting . . . In all this he always acts according to necessary laws, from which he has no means of emancipating himself.

  But what are these laws? What is the formula that determines all our action? According to d’Holbach, the simple law that determines all human behavior is the desire for conservation. Just as a Nazi will always fall of a building when pushed, so a human being will always “choose” based on a desire to survive.

  In The Man in the High Castle, Frank often plays the role of determinist, illustrating these ideas through his actions and attitudes. When Juliana first shows him the Grasshopper newsreel for instance, he immediately tells her to get rid of it, to go and deliver it to the Kempeitai. Having Jewish ancestry, Frank is scared for their survival. This is what he was saying to Randall in jail. Plus, he doesn’t seem to believe in what the reels show, as a good determinist he thinks the world is what it is and couldn’t be different.

  If the determinists are right, though, then why do we feel like we’re free? We have this feeling, they say, because unlike the simplicity of the falling apple or Nazi examples, the mechanisms of our day to day lives are just too complicated for us to fully understand them. This is why Laplace’s hypothetical being is called a Demon, because understanding all of the things that contribute to our actions would require superhuman intelligence. Since we cannot understand the complexity of what’s going on, we come up with the illusion that we’re free. In the end however, that’s all freedom is, a pure illusion.

  I Am Not an Apple! Freedom Is Real!

  You ever think of how different the world could be if you could change just one thing?

  —JULIANA

  Determinism isn’t the only game in town. In spite of the pretty strong arguments we just saw, many argue that it’s ultimately wrong and that we do have free will. This theory is called libertarianism (not to be confused with political libertarianism, which means something different) and can also be illustrated by looking at The Man in the High Castle.

  If Frank embodies determinism, then his partner Juliana is the perfect example of the opposing theory, libertarianism. Unlike Frank, Juliana’s acts don’t seem to follow the law of preservation. In fact, she constantly places herself in great danger because she believes that the world could be different. This is a core belief of libertarians like Juliana, they think that we are actually free and that our actions can and do shape the world. Some of the best arguments for this theory were summarized by the American philosopher Corlis Lamont in a short piece called “Freedom of the Will and Human Responsibility.”

  Freedom, says Lamont, is much more than just some curious philosophical problem. We feel we are free. This intuition is what motivates Juliana to say in the third episode that, “things don’t have to be this way, maybe the world can change!” Now, of course just because we feel free doesn’t mean that we necessarily are free. What this feeling does mean however is that when it comes to arguments about metaphysical freedom, the burden of proof lies with the determinists. Deciding who has the burden of proof matters because this is what allows us to be confident in the truth and, more importantly, tells us what to believe and how to act whenever the truth is up for discussion.

  Think of the situation of Inspector Kido at the end of Season One. He knows it was a German officer that shot the prince but he’s also aware that this fact might cause a war. He would like to arrest Frank for the shooting instead but, since the burden of proof lies with him, he can’t just arrest Frank without evidence. If Kido is to prevent a war, he must find a pistol and frame Frank. This is a basic principle of most modern justice systems, where people are “innocent until proven guilty.”

  In the same way, Corliss Lamont argues that since we feel free, then we should think of ourselves as “free until proven determined.” And here, the determinist argument that says that this feeling is an illusion resulting from too much complexity is just not convincing. Why would we have this illusion? According to Lamont, d’Holbach’s argument is just a desperate frame job. We know we’re free and, until proven otherwise, we remain unconvinced by the determinists.

  More importantly though, libertarians argue that they actually have convincing arguments that prove we are free. One of these comes from the fact that we constantly find ourselves deliberating over some choice. Think of Colonel Wegener here on the day the Japanese prince was shot. Wegener was supposed to secretly pass along a microfilm to a Japanese minister but a last-second change in seating arrangement made his task very risky. Noticing this, Wegener doesn’t just stretch his arm to give the microfilm away anyways. He hesitates. He deliberates, not sure of whether or not to go for it. He looks at Tagomi, unsure of what to do. Tagomi shakes his head. The whole scene is tense and filled with uncertainty.

  If everything was already determined however, then this whole episode would be nothing but some kind of useless play-acting. What would be the point of this fake deliberation? Why would there be feelings of hesitation? Why would he sense danger or nervousness? If everything was determined then Wegener would simply pass the microfilm along or he wouldn’t, there would be no point in this play-acting as if he were deliberating. As Lamont points out, there is just too much left unexplained by the determinist theory.

  Perhaps the best argument in favor of free will however, and one beautifully demonstrated by The Man in the High Castle, is about the nature of the past itself. The “past,” says Lamont, doesn’t really exist in any meaningful way except as being part of the present.

  This may sound weird but the idea is quite simple. The determinists say that cause and effect rule the world, so, the present is the result of the past and the future is the result of the present. They speak of time and of causality as if it were a moving arrow, where the direction of the tip of the arrow results from the direction of line leading up to it. If that’s how time and history worked, then, of course, the past would determine the present like the line segment determines where the arrow is pointing. But that’s just not how life works according to the libertarians!

  As we go about our day, we don’t experience all of our past, we just experience the present. The “past” exists only as whatever is
in this moment. In experience, there is no line segment; there is only a point which is the present. This means that the past doesn’t determine our actions; it just provides the present conditions from which we freely act. Whatever we do with the present, is up to us.

  Consider again Colonel Wegener and his old friend Obergruppenführer Smith. As they reveal in Smith’s living room, they both lived the same past. They both did horrible things for the Reich. In spite of their shared history however, they turned out very different men. Smith is the highest ranking Nazi officer in the American states and fiercely loyal to Hitler. Wegener on the other hand is a traitor to the Nazis and is trying to undermine their expansion.

  This kind of possible difference is what the libertarian argument is hinting at. The past only exists as the present. Of course the past does present a specific situation from which we can act, but it does not decisively determine what we can do. This is what Wegener’s character points out. At any given moment, because we have free will, even a Nazi can change his ways.

  What if, however, we didn’t actually have to choose between these theories? What if there was a way for both of them to be true at the same time?

  What’s with All the Fuss? Both are Right!

  Fate is fluid, destiny is in the hands of men.