Philip K. Dick and Philosophy

by D. E. Wittkower

  Aristotle (384–322 B.C.E.) considered it natural, healthy, and appropriate to have certain abilities as humans. Certain abnormalities are contrary to natural human development. There’s something unfortunate and deficient about growing only one arm to full length or having only one working eye. For Aristotle, there are purposes in nature that are part of what it is to be human. It’s in our best interests to develop within certain parameters, and things normally do develop within those parameters. Anything below that zone of normal, healthy development is therefore a deficiency. Anything above it would be superhuman.

  Lucretius (99–55 B.C.E.) disagreed. He didn’t think it made sense to speak of having a purpose unless a conscious being designs it or puts it to a purpose. He didn’t believe in a divine creator, so he concluded that any element of human makeup is neither natural nor unnatural in itself. There are no purposes in nature apart from the purposes we put ourselves to. Some people have two arms. Some have only one. There’s nothing bad about that except that there are some things someone with two arms can do that someone with one arm can’t do.

  If Lucretius is right, then it’s impossible to speak of deficiencies or superhuman capabilities unless you just mean that someone’s level of ability is atypical. The autism community has largely adopted this view in contrasting people on the autistic spectrum with “typical” kids. There’s strong resistance to speaking of dysfunction, malformation, abnormality, or deficiency, because such notions presume a negative attitude toward someone. Aristotle, however, conceives of normal development as typical development that suits what’s objectively good for a human being, and it follows that conditions like autism involve aspects that are sub-normal or deficient and some that are super-normal.

  If Lucretius is right, we shouldn’t think of autism as unfortunate except that some people can’t do certain things others can do (and can do other things most people can’t). But if Aristotle is right, it makes perfect sense to classify autism as a disorder involving cognitive delays and deficiencies, even if it also involves traits that he would see as atypical in the opposite direction. It’s important to accept people with disabilities for who they are, but that’s compatible with identifying unfortunate disorders as deficiencies falling short of normal and healthy development.

  Baines and others in “The Golden Man” initially approach the question from the other end. Cris’s heightened ability creates optimal reproductive conditions. A species of beings like Cris would overwhelm and replace humanity. We wouldn’t stand a chance. But when they discover the deficiency, their attitude changes from fear to horror. Humans will be replaced by creatures with almost no higher-level cognitive functioning except reflex-based evaluations of possible outcomes. Mere animals will eliminate humanity by impregnating human women and spreading their mutation to the next generation. It’s hard to explain the horror without the idea that this new species isn’t just different. Something is missing that’s natural and healthy for human offspring to have, and something is present that’s in one sense better, but in another sense no longer human.

  31

  “Piper in the Woods”

  DAVID SVOLBA

  The “essential ingredient” of the science-fiction story, according to Philip K. Dick’s preface to Paycheck and Other Classic Stories, is a “distinct new idea.” So what is the distinct new idea behind “Piper in the Woods,” a science-fiction story Dick published in 1953?

  This question is not easily answered. Superficially, the story is about an asteroid garrison at which able young men are disburdening themselves of all occupational responsibilities on the grounds that they have become plants, and no longer care to do anything but sit in the sun. The story is also about the official reaction to this bizarre turn of events, and in particular the psychiatrist who is dispatched by the powers-that-be to diagnose and find a solution to the problem. And a problem it most definitely is, for when able young men decide they no longer care to play their role in maintaining the machine, the machine breaks down. As one harried official puts it, “This garrison is one vast machine. The men are parts, and each has his job. When one person steps away from his job, everything else begins to creak.”

  But of course the distinct new idea behind Dick’s story is not the unusual lifestyle adopted by some of its characters. It’s better to read Dick’s story as communicating an idea about why people might be led to make such a peculiar lifestyle choice. Dick’s plant-people have become aware of the fact that their entire lives have been devoted to meaningless endeavors, or that their lives have been driven by ambitions that they no longer identify with. They’ve done their part to maintain a particular kind of society, but cannot answer the question about why this society is worthy of being maintained. Indeed, ‘ambition’ itself is something these disaffected young men are keen to divest themselves of, which is why they come to prefer a vegetative form of life. Plants have no plans, and no goals; to flourish they need only the nutrients of sun and soil. For people who feel as if they have become mere cogs in a complex machine, a machine directed towards ends that are not their own, becoming a plant is a radical but understandable response.

  Of course there’s rarely just one idea in Dick’s fiction, and “Piper” is no exception. In addition to describing the possible implications of alienated labor, Dick’s story is also about the potential despotism of our rational natures. As the world becomes increasingly pervaded by technology, we become “tools of our tools,” as Henry David Thoreau put it in Walden—and so we become increasingly out of touch with the non-rational part of our natures; that part of us that wants nothing more than to sit in the sun and feel a cooling breeze on our flesh. In the techno-industrial world, there’s little time for such indulgences. On those rare occasions Homo technologicus ventures into nature at all, it’s usually in order to rejuvenate himself so that he may be more fit for work upon his return.

  Dick worried about this arc of human development, an arc on which human beings move away from the earth and their bodily natures towards, at the limits, a world in which the earth and human beings have been replaced by androids inhabiting an alien planet. For this reason one cannot help but sense, when reading “Piper,” Dick’s tacit approval of those who buck this trend and choose instead to do, well, nothing, except sit on flat rocks by running streams and bask in the sun, dozing with their mouths open and their eyes closed. And as Dick surely knew, it is difficult for his readers, so firmly rooted in their non-natural worlds, not to feel a tinge of envy for these drop-outs, who seem so perfectly and simply happy.

  Interpreted this way, at the heart of “Piper” is an idea not unlike the one Timothy Leary would notoriously spread a decade or so after the publication of Dick’s story: “Turn on, tune in, and drop out.” I suspect Leary would have approved of Dick’s plant-people. Rather than faithfully fulfilling the duties of whatever station had been allotted to them, and so doing their share to keep the machine humming, these are people who abandon the drab and deadening form of life in which they find themselves in favor of a radically different form of life in which higher consciousness is the reward for a lower status. It’s notable, if not surprising, that Leary and his followers were subject to the same criticism as Dick’s defectors. In both cases the Establishment couldn’t help but see them in one way and one way only: as lazy—and hence, in a world that needs workers and consumers above all else, dangerous.

  So “Piper,” like so much of Dick’s work, is social criticism in the form of science fiction. And Dick was a trenchant social critic, one whose concerns about the pitfalls facing “modern man” seem even more valid now than during his own lifetime.

  But if spending one’s life as a cog in a machine, no matter how vital or valued a cog one may be, is something less than a good human life, one might sensibly worry whether becoming a plant-person is in the end any more desirable. The worry is this: although the lives the defectors led may not have been good human lives, the vegetative lives they opt for instead look like something
less than human lives, good or bad. Having jettisoned all ambitions, goals, and desires for either self- or world-improvement, the defectors seemed to have stripped themselves of precisely those characteristics which seem to distinguish them from non-human life forms.

  Returning to the Timothy Leary comparison, we might ask: is there any reason to regard the reaction of the young men on Asteroid Y-3 as less regrettable than the reaction of those young people who, disenchanted with the modern world and the expectations it places on them, turn to drugs as a means of escape? Is there a relevant difference between these two reactions, or is Dick’s story—perhaps we’ve finally hit upon the distinct new idea—actually a parable of that preferred form of escapism so prevalent and problematic in our own society?

  This question suggests an even deeper critique of this society in which the “men are parts,” and “each has his job”—namely, that not only is it a dehumanizing form of life, but it’s a dehumanizing form of life which seems strangely difficult to resist, since those who oppose it are drawn too easily into forms of “resistance” which amount to little more than different, selfimposed forms of dehumanization.

  32

  “The Exit Door Leads In”

  ERIC BECK

  Philip K. Dick’s “The Exit Door Leads In” reads like one of Plato’s dialogues, with just enough dramatic action so that it can properly be called a story. But it’s not just the form that refers to the ancient Greeks: the main character in the story studies pre-Socratic cosmogony, and one of his friends opines that the Delphic maxim, Know Thyself, “sums up half of Greek philosophy.”

  As minimal as it might be, Dick’s addition of dramatic form is a difference that does make a difference. He doesn’t simply repeat the Socratic dialogue. He twists and tweaks both its form and its content, complicating and modernizing it. In the process, he revises Plato’s views on what it means to Know Oneself.

  Plato himself never seemed that enamored with the Delphic oracle. In Charmides, when one of the participants appeals to its authority, Plato’s Socrates claims that he himself lacks healthy self-knowledge, and then redirects the conversation to more favored ground. In Gorgias, Socrates confirms that the oracle does sum up only half of Greek philosophy:

  SOCRATES: I mean that each one himself rules himself. Or is there no need of this, that he rule himself?

  CALLICLES: What do you mean, ruling over himself?

  SOCRATES: Nothing complicated, but just what the many mean: being moderate and in control of oneself, ruling the passions and desires that are in oneself.

  Knowing oneself is not enough; one must also have a mastery of oneself.

  This isn’t to say that Plato is completely preoccupied with the self. He’s concerned with the knowledge of other things as well as of the self. As he says in Charmides, “Is not the discovery of things as they truly are a good common to all mankind?”

  But still, the dialogue form Plato employs—men of great leisure idly sitting around discussing problems and forming syntheses—suggests that knowing thyself is the most important thing: Self-clarification is the goal of philosophy. Coming from full citizens who had servants aplenty and an economy based on slave labor, Plato’s characters’ explications on justice and happiness and mastery have an abstract, and ironic, ring to modern ears.

  Dick, on the other hand, sets his dialogues in motion; his characters act out situations. His short works often have an almost laughably bare dramatic façade, with stories more likely to resolve conceptual confusions through action than through discussion, but even this little difference creates a different kind of self—one less concerned with self-knowledge and self-mastery than with discerning what outside forces expect and how to meet (or rebel against) those expectations. Instead of abstractly discussing problems, Dick’s characters often are the problem.

  This is certainly the case for the main character in “The Exit Door Leads In.” The thoroughly average and nearly anonymous salesman Bob Bibleman is accepted into a prestigious university because he (like Oedipus before the Sphinx) correctly answers a riddle posed by a computerized waiter at a fast-food restaurant. Attendance at the university is mandatory: The alternative is prison. Once at the school, Bibleman and his fellow students are informed that disseminating classified information is punishable under the law, then told not to worry because they won’t have access to classified information. A school administrator offers as an example an efficient engine, the schematics for which have been expunged from the school’s database.

  In the course of Bibleman’s studies, his computer-terminal study partner inadvertently spits out the plans for the engine. Bibleman has a dilemma: should he reveal the plans in the interest of benefiting society, or should he notify the university that he has accidently received a copy of them? For Bibleman, it’s not a moral or ethical conflict. He bases his decision not on a universal principle of right but on what he thinks the authorities want him to do.

  Before he has time to decide, university security intervenes, forcing him to hand over the schematics. When the administration asks him what he had planned to do with them, he says he would have handed them over anyway. To his surprise, his answer causes the university to expel him. He was being tested, they say, and he failed to do what would benefit all of humanity. But for the reader, as for Bibleman, it’s just as easy to imagine that he would have been imprisoned, or worse, for publicizing the plans and betraying the institution and the law.

  The double bind Dick dramatizes here is the contingent, situational nature of what we call self-knowledge. The truth of the self, for Dick, is not just in here—but, with apologies to Fox Mulder, it’s not just out there either. It’s between there and here, open to negotiation, change, and interpretation. It’s more like a process of calculation than a voyage of discovery.

  So while Plato’s mastering oneself is an act of self-knowledge and self-regulation, Dick’s self is both generic and empty, awaiting the direction of the exterior state and the subject’s decision. The ‘knowing’ Dick has in mind is not getting in tune with one’s essence. Instead, it’s a decision made in the light (or shadow) of what we can discern of the state’s expectations.

  In Dick’s philosophy, the lesson of mastery has to be taught and enforced. That’s the point of Bibleman’s attending the prestigious university: to learn conditions for membership in society, to learn when obedience means resistance. His education is successful, in the end: When he returns to the restaurant after he’s kicked out of school, he initially decides not to pay for his food. When the computer gently reminds him of his obligation, he hands over the money. He has learned which situations accommodate rebellion and which do not.

  At least for now. Despite his obvious pessimism, Dick never completely closes off the possibility that in the future Bob Bibleman will decide to ignore the state’s expectations. At some point, he may have to be re-educated.

  33

  “The Gun”

  BENJAMIN STEVENS

  “The Gun” imagines an encounter between human explorers of space and a machine intelligence in the form of the gun of the title, a mindlessly planet-defending weapon. The central idea of the gun defending a now-dead community—an image of violence only seemingly in the service of human society—lets Dick raise questions about the relationship between technologies of various kinds and human thought and action.

  By depicting a mindlessly or thoughtlessly active machine intelligence, the story raises the question of whether human agency or humanity itself is becoming a ‘machine’ of sorts as society, culture, and individual choice are subjected to increasingly pervasive mechanizations. How are our capacities to think and to act affected by our relationships to technologies, especially one like the automated gun, one that is both inhuman and, in its total violence, dehumanizing?

  Considered as a document of its time, during the first technological flush of the Cold War, “The Gun” asks how our relationship to technology is inflected in particular by what has been called the �
��military-industrial complex’. First referred to as such by American President Dwight D. Eisenhower in his Farewell Address to the Nation, 17th January 1961, and anticipated by thinkers including C. Wright Mills, The Power Elite (1956) and F.A. Hayek, The Road to Serfdom (1944), the military-industrial complex and—according to Dick—its chilling consequences for individual thought and action are clearly in mind in the story. A crucial example is this paragraph:

  They must have been used to the sight, guns, weapons, uniforms. Probably they accepted it as a natural thing, part of their lives, like eating and sleeping. An institution, like the church and the state. Men trained to fight, to lead armies, a regular profession. Honored, respected.

  The paragraph depicts a character’s thought-process as he tries to understand the military-technological situation of this world as it seems to be so different from his own. At another point, a character describes their ship being shot down by the unmanned gun as a “paradox”—the term suggests that, as Dick sees it, the characteristically human response to such mechanization is precisely alienation, the feeling that the world has somehow gotten away from us.

  That feeling of alienation runs especially deep, and Dick’s criticism hits especially close to home, when the ‘world’ in question is of our own design: the world of technology. Already at this very early point in his career, then, Dick’s speculative imagination focuses on artificial objects as a way to symbolize—and so to think critically about—our own objectification by technologies: our status not so much, any more, as human beings or even, as Aristotle defines us, political beings but as ‘products’ of societies and cultures whose processes are increasingly mechanized.