By SIMON CRITCHLEY
Part 1: Meditations on a Radiant Fish
When I believe, I am crazy. When I don’t believe,I suffer psychotic depression.
— Philip K. Dick
Philip K. Dick is arguably the most influential writer of science fiction in the past half century. In his short and meteoric career, he wrote 121 short stories and 45 novels. His work was successful during his lifetime but has grown exponentially in influence since his death in 1982. Dick’s work will probably be best known through the dizzyingly successful Hollywood adaptations of his work, in movies like “Blade Runner” (based on “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?”), “Total Recall,” “Minority Report,” “A Scanner Darkly” and, most recently, “The Adjustment Bureau.” Yet few people might consider Dick a thinker. This would be a mistake.Dick’s life has long passed into legend, peppered with florid tales of madness and intoxication. There are some who consider such legend something of a diversion from the character of Dick’s literary brilliance. Jonathan Lethem writes — rightly in my view — “Dick wasn’t a legend and he wasn’t mad. He lived among us and was a genius.” Yet Dick’s life continues to obtrude massively into any assessment of his work.
Everything turns here on an event that “Dickheads” refer to with the shorthand “the golden fish.” On Feb. 20, 1974, Dick was hit with the force of an extraordinary revelation after a visit to the dentist for an impacted wisdom tooth for which he had received a dose of sodium pentothal. A young woman delivered a bottle of Darvon tablets to his apartment in Fullerton, Calif. She was wearing a necklace with the pendant of a golden fish, an ancient Christian symbol that had been adopted by the Jesus counterculture movement of the late 1960s.
Leif ParsonsYet the golden fish episode was just the beginning. In the following days and weeks, Dick experienced and indeed enjoyed a couple of nightlong psychedelic visions with phantasmagoric visual light shows. These hypnagogic episodes continued off and on, together with hearing voices and prophetic dreams, until his death eight years later at age 53. Many very weird things happened — too many to list here — including a clay pot that Dick called “Ho On” or “Oh Ho,” which spoke to him about various deep spiritual issues in a brash and irritable voice.
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Courtesy of Laura Leslie, Christopher Dick and Isa HackettA manuscript page from “The Exegesis.” CLICK TO ENLARGEThe fact is that after Dick experienced the events of what he came to call “2-3-74” (the events of February and March of that year), he devoted the rest of his life to trying to understand what had happened to him. For Dick, understanding meant writing. Suffering from what we might call “chronic hypergraphia,” between 2-3-74 and his death, Dick wrote more than 8,000 pages about his experience. He often wrote all night, producing 20 single-spaced, narrow-margined pages at a go, largely handwritten and littered with extraordinary diagrams and cryptic sketches.
The unfinished mountain of paper, assembled posthumously into some 91 folders, was called “Exegesis.” The fragments were assembled by Dick’s friend Paul Williams and then sat in his garage in Glen Ellen, Calif., for the next several years. A beautifully edited selection of these texts, with a golden fish on the cover, was finally published at the end of 2011, weighing in at a mighty 950 pages. But this is still just a fraction of the whole.
Dick writes, “My exegesis, then, is an attempt to understand my own understanding.” The book is the most extraordinary and extended act of self-interpretation, a seemingly endless thinking on the event of 2-3-74 that always seems to begin anew. Often dull, repetitive and given to bouts of massive paranoia, “Exegesis” also possesses many passages of genuine brilliance and is marked by an utter and utterly disarming sincerity. At times, as in the epigraph above, Dick falls into melancholic dejection and despair. But at other moments, like some latter day Simon Magus, he is possessed of a manic swelling-up of the ego to unify with the divine: “I was in the mind of God.”
In order to understand what happened to him on 2-3-74, Dick used the resources that he had at hand and that he liked best. These were a complete set of the 15th edition of Encyclopedia Britannica that Dick purchased late in 1974 and Paul Edwards’s arguably unsurpassed “Encyclopedia of Philosophy,” published in eight handsome volumes in 1967, one of the richest and most capacious philosophical documents ever produced. Dick’s reading was haphazard and eclectic. Encyclopedias permitted an admittedly untutored rapidity of association that lent a certain formal and systematic coherence to his wide-ranging obsessions.
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Skimming through and across multiple encyclopedia entries, Dick found links and correspondences of ideas everywhere. He also stumbled into the primary texts of a number of philosophers and theologians — notably the pre-Socratics, Plato, Meister Eckhart, Spinoza, Hegel, Schopenhauer, Marx, Whitehead, Heidegger and Hans Jonas. His interpretations are sometimes quite bizarre but often compelling.This leads me to an important point. Dick was a consummate autodidact. He survived for less than one semester at college, at the University of California, Berkeley, in 1949, taking and quitting Philosophy 10A in the space of a few weeks. Dick left the class in disgust at the ignorance and intolerance of his instructor when he asked his professor about the plausibility of Plato’s metaphysical theory of the forms — the truth of which was later proven for Dick by the experience of 2-3-74. Dick was evidently not trained as a philosopher or theologian — although I abhor that verb “trained,” which makes academics sound like domestic pets. Dick was an amateur philosopher or, to borrow a phrase from one of the editors of “Exegesis,” Erik Davis, he was that most splendid of things: a garage philosopher.
What Dick lacks in academic and scholarly rigor, he more than makes up for in powers of imagination and rich lateral, cumulative association. If he had known more, it might have led him to produce less interesting chains of ideas. In a later remark in “Exegesis,” Dick writes, “I am a fictionalizing philosopher, not a novelist.” He interestingly goes on to add, “The core of my writing is not art but truth.” We seem to be facing an apparent paradox, where the concern with truth, the classical goal of the philosopher, is not judged to be in opposition to fiction, but itself a work a fiction. Dick saw his fiction writing as the creative attempt to describe what he discerned as the true reality. He adds, “I am basically analytical, not creative; my writing is simply a creative way of handling analysis.”
Next, Part 2: “Future Gnostic.”
This post has been revised to reflect the following correction:
Correction: May 21, 2012
An earlier version of this article misspelled the name of the tablets delivered to Philip K. Dick's apartment in 1974. They are called Darvon, not Davron.
Part 2: Future Gnostic
In the previous post, we looked at the consequences and possible philosophic import of the events of February and March of 1974 (also known as 2-3-74) in the life and work of Philip K. Dick, a period in which a dose of sodium pentathol, a light-emitting fish pendant and decades of fiction writing and quasi-philosophic activity came together in revelation that led to Dick’s 8,000-page “Exegesis.”So, what is the nature of the true reality that Dick claims to have intuited during psychedelic visions of 2-3-74? Does it unwind into mere structureless ranting and raving or does it suggest some tradition of thought or belief? I would argue the latter. This is where things admittedly get a little weirder in an already weird universe, so hold on tight.
Dick posited that orthogonal time contains, ‘Everything which was, just as grooves on an LP contain that part of the music which has already been played.’
But the core of Dick’s vision is not quite Christian in the traditional sense; it is Gnostical: it is the mystical intellection, at its highest moment a fusion with a transmundane or alien God who is identified with logos and who can communicate with human beings in the form of a ray of light or, in Dick’s case, hallucinatory visions.
Leif ParsonsChristianity, lest it be forgotten, is a metaphysical monism where it is the obligation of every Christian to love every aspect of creation – even the foulest and smelliest – because it is the work of God. Evil is nothing substantial because if it were it would have to be caused by God, who is by definition good. Against this, Gnosticism declares a radical dualism between the false God who created this world – who is usually called the “demiurge” – and the true God who is unknown and alien to this world. But for the Gnostic, evil is substantial and its evidence is the world. There is a story of a radical Gnostic of who used to wash himself in his own saliva in order to have as little contact as possible with creation. Gnosticism is the worship of an alien God by those alienated from the world.
The novelty of Dick’s Gnosticism is that the divine is alleged to communicate with us through information. This is a persistent theme in Dick, and he refers to the universe as information and even Christ as information. Such information has a kind of electrostatic life connected to the theory of what he calls orthogonal time. The latter is rich and strange idea of time that is completely at odds with the standard, linear conception, which goes back to Aristotle, as a sequence of now-points extending from the future through the present and into the past. Dick explains orthogonal time as a circle that contains everything rather than a line both of whose ends disappear in infinity. In an arresting image, Dick claims that orthogonal time contains, “Everything which was, just as grooves on an LP contain that part of the music which has already been played; they don’t disappear after the stylus tracks them.”
It is like that seemingly endless final chord in the Beatles’ “A Day in the Life” that gathers more and more momentum and musical complexity as it decays. In other words, orthogonal time permits total recall.
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Courtesy of Laura Leslie, Christopher Dick and Isa HackettA manuscript page from “The Exegesis.” CLICK TO ENLARGEToward the end of “Exegesis,” Dick begins to borrow and quote liberally from “The Gnostic Religion” by Hans Jonas, a wonderful book that first appeared in English in 1958. It is not difficult to see why Jonas’s book spoke to Dick somewhat like the aforementioned clay pot. Jonas shows the force and persistence — both historical and conceptual — of the idea of enlightenment by the ray of divine light, the mystical gnosis theou (knowledge of God, a Gnostic doctrine), the direct beholding of the divine reality. The core of Gnosticism is this direct contact with the divine, which itself divinizes the soul and allows it to see the vile world for what it is: nothing. At the core of Gnosticism, for Jonas, is an experience of nihilism, namely that the phenomenal world is nothing and the true world is nothing to be seen phenomenally but requires the divine illumination that is reserved for the few, for the secretive elect.
Dick’s “Exegesis” is a peculiarly powerful and poignant restatement of a Gnostical worldview. Right or wrong — and, to be clear, I am not a Gnostic — Gnosticism still represents, in my view, a powerful temptation that needs to be understood before being criticized. Dick writes, and one can find passages like this all over “Exegesis”:
“So there is a secret within a secret. The Empire is a secret (its existence and its power; that it rules) and secondly the secret illegal Christians pitted against it. So the discovery of the secret illegal Christians instantly causes one to grasp that, if they exist illegally, something evil that is stronger is in power, right here!”
This is a succinct and revealing statement of the politics of Dick’s Gnosticism. The logic here is close to forms of mystical heresy from the various gnostic sects of the early Christian period, like the Valentinians and the Manicheans, through to the Cathars and the much-feared “Heresy of the Free Spirit” that some historians have claimed was like an invisible empire across Europe in the 13th and 14th centuries.
The core of the heresy consists in the denial of original sin: sin does not lie within us but within the world, which is not the creation of the true God but of the malevolent demiurge, whom St. Paul calls in one quasi-gnostical moment “the God of this world.” Therefore, we must see through the evil illusion of this world to the true world of the alien God. The phenomenal world is the creation of a bad God and governed over by those agents of the demiurge that the gnostics called the “archons,” the rulers or governors, those whom Dick ominously calls “Empire.” Today we might call them major corporations.
When we learn to identify the true worldly source of sin, the gnostics instruct, then we can begin the process of unifying with the divine by divorcing ourselves from the phenomenal world. At the end of this process, we become divine ourselves and can throw off the rule of the evil empire that governs the world. This link between mystical experience and political insurgency is constantly suggested throughout “Exegesis.” This is the idea that we are slaves to Empire, and the world is a prison from which we need to free ourselves, what the gnostics called “the puny cell of the creator God.” It is what Dick calls the BIP, the Black Iron Prison, which is opposed to the spiritual redemption of the PTG, the Palm Tree Garden.
Note the emphasis on secrecy. The first secret is that the world is governed by malevolent imperial or governmental elites that form together a kind of a covert coven. The world itself is a college of corporations linked together by money and serving only the interests of their business leaders and shareholders. The second secret — “a secret within a secret” — belongs to those few who have swallowed the red pill, torn through the veil of Maya. In other words, they’ve seen the “matrix” — a pop culture allusion that may lead us to some surprising, even alarming, contemporary implications of the gnostical worldview, if you will follow us along to the next part.
Next, Part 3: “Adventures in the Dream Factory.”
Simon Critchley is Hans Jonas professor of philosophy at the New School for Social Research in New York. He is the author of many books, most recently, “Faith of the Faithless: Experiments in Political Theology,” and is the moderator of this series.
When we learn to identify the true worldly source of sin, the gnostics instruct, then we can begin the process of unifying with the divine by divorcing ourselves from the phenomenal world. At the end of this process, we become divine ourselves and can throw off the rule of the evil empire that governs the world. This link between mystical experience and political insurgency is constantly suggested throughout “Exegesis.” This is the idea that we are slaves to Empire, and the world is a prison from which we need to free ourselves, what the gnostics called “the puny cell of the creator God.” It is what Dick calls the BIP, the Black Iron Prison, which is opposed to the spiritual redemption of the PTG, the Palm Tree Garden.
Note the emphasis on secrecy. The first secret is that the world is governed by malevolent imperial or governmental elites that form together a kind of a covert coven. The world itself is a college of corporations linked together by money and serving only the interests of their business leaders and shareholders. The second secret — “a secret within a secret” — belongs to those few who have swallowed the red pill, torn through the veil of Maya. In other words, they’ve seen the “matrix” — a pop culture allusion that may lead us to some surprising, even alarming, contemporary implications of the gnostical worldview, if you will follow us along to the next part.
Next, Part 3: “Adventures in the Dream Factory.”
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Part 3: Adventures in the Dream Factory
In the previous post, we looked at Philip K. Dick’s intellectual and philosophical ties to the early Gnostics. Now, culturally and politically at least, its time to look at the Gnostic in the mirror. Please read on.Philip K. Dick’s admittedly peculiar but passionately held worldview and the gnosticism it embodies does more than explain what some call the dystopian turn in science fiction from the 1960s onward, it also gives us what has arguably become the dominant mode of understanding of fiction in our time, whether literary, artistic or cinematic. This is the idea that reality is a pernicious illusion, a repressive and authoritarian matrix generated in a dream factory we need to tear down in order to see things aright and have access to the truth. And let’s be honest: it is simply immensely pleasurable to give oneself over to the idea that one has torn aside the veil of illusion and seen the truth — “I am one of the elect, one of the few in the know, in the gnosis.”
Leif ParsonsOn the gnostical view, once we see the wicked world for what it is, we can step back and rediscover our essential goodness, the divine spark within us, our purity, our authenticity. It is this very desire for purity and authenticity that drives the whole wretched industry of New Age obscurantism and its multiple techniques of spiritual and material “detox,” its quasi-cultic, multimillion-dollar grossing insistence on the Secret. Against this toxic view of the world, I think we need to emphasize what splendidly impure and inauthentic creatures we are. Whatever spark is within us is not divine, but all-too-human.
Aside from “The Matrix” trilogy and the direct movie adaptations of Dick’s fiction, there are strong gnostical themes in the two most recent movies of the Danish film writer and director Lars von Trier. For our purposes here, they may be embodied in a few brief lines.
Dick’s gnosticism can enable us to understand the paranoid style of American politics.
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Courtesy of Laura Leslie, Christopher Dick and Isa HackettA manuscript page from “The Exegesis.” CLICK TO ENLARGEDick’s gnosticism also enables us to understand something of the paranoid style of American politics — and perhaps not just American politics. For example, Dick constantly comes back to the theme of Watergate and the rather odd idea that the removal of President Nixon is the reassertion of the true deity over the false idols of the cave. Namely, that the phenomenal world is a prison governed by corrupt, secretive and malevolent elites. There are too many political analogues to this view to list here. For example, think about the relentless rise of conspiracy theories, which has gone hand in hand with the vast, rhizomatic flourishing of the Internet. Think about the widespread idea — on the right and the left — that the United States is governed by secretive, all-powerful elites. These used to be identified as Ivy League educated WASPS or Freemasons or Jews and are now usually identified as former senior employees of Goldman Sachs.
If you think that there is a secret that can be known that they are hiding from us and that requires the formation of a small, secret sect to work against them, then you have entered into an essentially gnostical way of thinking. Politics here becomes the defense of purity against impure, inauthentic forces and the true leader has to be an authentic hero who can combat the forces of evil with an almost superhuman resolve: Mitt Romney, step this way.
The morality of gnosticism is also oddly relevant to our current situation. As Hans Jonas points out, possessors of gnosis set themselves apart from the great, soiled mass of humankind. The hatred of the world was also a contempt for worldly morality, and this leads to two equal, but opposed, ethical responses: asceticism and libertinage.
The ascetic infers from access to gnosis that the world is a toxic, contaminating machine with which one should have as little contact as possible. This is arguably consistent with the whole contemporary culture and cult of “detox,” which insists on purifying the body and soul against environmental, nutritional and sexual contact in order to find and safeguard the divine spark within. The awful truth of contemporary asceticism is powerfully played out in another film, Todd Haynes’s brilliant “Safe” (1995), in which the character played by Julianne Moore develops a total allergy to life. What is termed “environmental illness” leads her eventually into a self-help cult in the California desert, living alone in a hypoallergenic pod muttering to her image in the mirror, “I love myself,” and other mantras.
The flip side of the ascetic is the libertine: that is, the person whose access to gnosis implies both absolute freedom and absolute protection. One thinks of the “Do what thou wilt!” hermetic charlatanism of Aleister Crowley. But one also thinks — I have heard this story on countless occasions, often late at night — of the New York urban myth of the hugely wealthy finance guy who deliberately wanders drunk or stoned into oncoming traffic. He knows that he will be safe from harm. Because fate is on his side, he is therefore free to do whatever he “wilt.” Once you have access to the Secret, the forces of the universe align with your desires.
In the face of an alienating and poisonous world, one can either withdraw to a safe, allergic distance or plunge headlong into the viral whirlpool of humanity. Either way, I know I will be O.K.
Crazy as it doubtless must sound, I think that Dick’s gnosticism responds to a deep and essential anxiety of our late modern times. The irrepressible rise of a deterministic scientific worldview threatens to invade and overtake all those areas of human activity that we associate with literature, culture, history, religion and the rest.
Ask yourself: what does one do in the face of a monistic all-consuming naturalism? We can embrace it, hoping to wrest whatever shards of wonder and meaning we can from inquiries into the brain or the cosmos sold as brightly colored trade hardbacks, written by reputable, often prize-winning, scientists. Or we can reject scientific determinism by falling back into some version of dualism. That could mean embracing a spiritual or religious metaphysics of whatever confection, or — if one is still nostalgic for the disappointed midcentury modernism of, say, Kafka or Beckett — by falling back upon a lonely, alienated self in a heartless world of anomie.
But perhaps another way is open, one that is neither entirely naturalistic nor religious nor some redux of modernist miserabilism. If so, to quote Jonas, then “philosophy must find it out.” But that’s another story for another occasion.
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