Now that the New York Times has discovered science fiction --
and The Atlantic has gone full-time into the David Brooks/Sunday Morning deconstruction trade, I suppose its time for me to finally get cracking on my CDL :-)
Philip K. Dick, Sci-Fi Philosopher, Part 1
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 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.
— Philip K. Dick
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.
The fish pendant, on Dick’s account, began to emit a golden ray of light, and Dick suddenly experienced what he called, with a nod to Plato, anamnesis: the recollection or total recall of the entire sum of knowledge. Dick claimed to have access to what philosophers call the faculty of “intellectual intuition”: the direct perception by the mind of a metaphysical reality behind screens of appearance. Many philosophers since Kant have insisted that such intellectual intuition is available only to human beings in the guise of fraudulent obscurantism, usually as religious or mystical experience, like Emmanuel Swedenborg’s visions of the angelic multitude. This is what Kant called, in a lovely German word, “die Schwärmerei,” a kind of swarming enthusiasm, where the self is literally en-thused with the God, o theos. Brusquely sweeping aside the careful limitations and strictures that Kant placed on the different domains of pure and practical reason, the phenomenal and the noumenal, Dick claimed direct intuition of the ultimate nature of what he called “true reality.”
Yet the golden fish episode was just the beginning...
7 comments:
that truck driving dollar is a GOOD dollar!
seeing as that operation driftglass has succeeded all eectations, now is the time to shift gears and point the rig in a new direction.
how to become an ideological constructor in the ruins of rampant ideological destruction?
if you can make this shift, I figure youll find work as a full time driver, or maybe designing new roads
Truck driving is a horrible gig. I suggest you apprentice yourself to a union trade.
One salient point that's left out of Prof. Critchley's argument; Gnosticism is a solution to the problem of evil. Catholicism solved the problem with free will and original sin essentially making people (well, women really) the source of evil. This had the fortunate side effect of justifying the need for the Catholic church.
Gnosticism solved the problem by making the world evil. This had the unfortunate side effect of getting all of it's adherents murdered by the Catholic church; though it perhaps proved their point.
I guess it's good they've finally discovered "How to Build a Universe That Doesn't Fall Apart Two Days Later."
Harlan Ellison has to sue over similarities between 'In Time' and 'Repent, Harlequin' but Dick gets full credit for even the most casual acquaintance betwixt his works and their own screen-treatments? What gives? The short story for Total Recall didn't even have Mars in it!
It seems so obvious to those who have read nearly all his books,that Dick's interest in religion or religious experience,didn't begin with "Radio Free Albemuth" or "Valis".This still doesn't seem to be understood.
In the 1950s he wrote the excellent short story "Upon the Dull Earth",about resurrection and the afterlife,while in the same decade,a varnished interest in the subject was shown in the brilliant "Eye in the Sky".With the maturing of his work in the next decade,"Martian Time-Slip" featured a young Manfred,with apparent divine powers,that seems to bear comparison with Emmanuel in "The Divine Invasion".
Ten years before his 1970s experiences,he had a powerful vision,that bore "The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch",that plunged headlong into theological reality.This was soon followed by "Counter-Clock World",the maverick novelette,"Faith of Our Fathers","Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep","Ubik" and "A Maze of Death",all of which contained a strong themes of God as organic truth.
There was far deeper roots beneath his 1974 experiences and later novels.
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